Democracy and Socialism

This goes out to my homie, Zack. I asked him "why you think I despise social democrats"?, and he replied:

You use socialism as a slur for any government program you don’t like regardless of whether that can be classified as socialist or not.

For another, witness your case for colonialism in India. You seem to believe that Indians would have had more liberty under British rule because there would have been less socialism. It sure sounds like you don’t consider the right to decide your own government to be part of liberty.

Let's define some terms, shall we? M-W has Socialism: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. Now, it is a given that essentially all real world socialism involves a state as the "government". Saying "government" is thus obfuscatory; all societies imaginable will "govern" at least some people (criminals, insane, incompetent). Saying "the state" makes it clear what is meant: that people will not be allowed to opt out of the communal ownership scheme. Thus, socialism is "the state ownership of the means of production".

I reserve the word "communism" for non-state collective ownership theories. Note that in the real world, another meaning of "communism" is: a form of socialism where only one political party is permitted (along with the ramifications of that, such as mass murder).

Also note that I class as "means of production" people. In pure socialism, everyone is owned by the state; if the state decides to sacrifice you for the greater good, so be it, you die. To the extent that the state can determine how you are used, they are asserting ownership of you. Thus, state invasions of personal liberty are a form of socialism.

Note that again I am talking about how *I* use the term, not necessarily how you do. I once got a conservative very mad going in these lines, since I lumped all sorts of his sacred cows (i.e., the draft) in with "socialism". He took very poorly to the idea that drafted soldiers are a species of slave. I offered to use "l-socialism" for the things we didn't agree on, but that didn't mollify him. He virtually stomped off in a rage.

Now, let's return to your statement:

You use socialism as a slur for any government program you don’t like regardless of whether that can be classified as socialist or not.

I don't like all state programs - I am an anarchist; the state should be abolished. And yes, they are all socialist, in the sense that they are being paid for by a defacto state ownership of my income. With no taxation, I would not object to many things the US government does. However, with no taxation, it would not be doing them.

We can imagine, though, a government that is completely voluntary. Not a state, then. It runs on money it is freely given, and provides various services using that money. For instance, it might give out money to poor people. This is just fine with me.

So, it is certainly possible to distinguish between various things a state does, in terms of are they necessarily rights-violating (hence, socialist), or are they 'only' rights-violating in the sense of paying for them? Clearly the latter things are "better" in some sense than the former. For example, rent controls are necessarily rights violating. They are, prima facie, an expropriation of the landlord. Doesn't matter how you pay for their enforcement. By contrast, welfare (handing out money that you happen to have) violates no right necessarily.

As for a being slur - yes, indeed. I view violating people's rights negatively. Therefore, a political theory that holds that people have no rights, I view as wrong, and put into practice, hurtful. Stalin's millions of victims cry out. Yes, it is definitely a slur to call something socialism. Socialism has earned it. Not only that, the rights violations continue to this day, and may yet destroy us all.

Now, regarding "the right to decide your own government"...

Sure, the right to determine your own government is a part of liberty. However I mean that "your" as individual, not collective. You, personally, have the right to determine how you, personally, are governed. So do I. So does every individual who has not aggressed against another.

But this is unrelated to elections. Collectives have no right to rule anyone who has not explicitly agreed to be ruled by them. Democracy and liberty are two entirely different things. What is "democracy"? M-W.com again: "government by the people; especially: rule of the majority". Liberty? Well, it's not well defined at m-w for what we're talking about here (here's the link anyway). But I am taking liberty to mean, the state of being uncoerced by other people.

Now, what does it mean to be ruled "by the majority"? Well, the details of that vary with the voting system. What is clear, though, is that unless the majority never votes to violate any individual's rights, democracy will necessarily violate liberty. In fact, democracy in a state is a specific form of socialism wherein it is theorized that voters collectively own everything, via the state, and should vote on the uses of said property.

To the extent that democracy does effectively withhold people's rights from the voting mechanism, it is undemocratic. For example, the Bill of Rights is an undemocratic limitation on the Congress.

But as for despising social democrats... no, I just think they are wrong. But they are not obviously wrong (or else there would be few or none of them). Nazis and "communists" (both of them, species of socialists who believe only a single political party should be permitted) -- they are despicable. History, well attested and well accepted, shows they are wrong.

History has not spoken clearly on "social democracy", so it is unfair to despise its advocates. Yet.

Evil in the Welfare State

"Theodore Dalrymple" in an
interesting article from last fall:

My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among my patients...

The father of her first child had, of course, recognized her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible—sober him up and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him.

The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all about his past before she had his child.

The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have a child—in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever.

... she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her — and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation — proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him.

This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they—and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.

Definitely worth returning to.

Clublife

Clublife is a blog by an elite bouncer, "Rob", in NYC. His writing reminds me a bit of Tim Green, being essentially a jock but still an astute observer of humanity. Fascinating stuff and the guy can write. Example:

Big "Stan" is a bouncer at the club. Stan is a very large and very dark black man. At the beginning of the night, when greeting Stan, I feel as if I'm shaking hands with a catcher's mitt. Everything about the guy is just really, really big and really, really black.

Stan has taken a liking to me over the past few months, most likely because I provide him with a steady stream of Altoids throughout the night -- far be it for him to purchase his own fucking tin once in a while -- but additionally because we share a level of disdain for the customership which, quite possibly, surpasses that of any bouncer on the staff. Theoretically, it could be the intensity of my hatred for the patrons that has fueled my semi-consistent maintenance of this blog over the past year, with most of the posts contained within pertaining to their inexplicably asinine behavior on a nightly basis, but I digress. I wonder if Stan has a blog.

Simply put, Stan wants to be left alone. So do I, but as a big, blockheaded white-guy bouncer, it's easy for me, because I can blend into the woodwork with the twenty other big, blockheaded white guys on the staff. A six-foot-seven, three hundred twenty pound black man isn't going to fly under anyone's radar anywhere, and Stan, therefore, becomes a magnet for every misfit Guido customer who walks past. On Saturday night, I stood nearby as he engaged in an animated conversation with one of these, the customer continually shaking Stan's hand and embracing him as if he'd been reunited with a long-lost relative.

"Who's that?" I asked. "Your retarded stepbrother?"

...

The same thing happens every night. If I'm standing next to Stan, I'll watch as a steady stream of well-wishers forms a line to come up and pay their respects, tangling him in their elaborate 'soul brother' handshakes and hugs, ignoring my existence all the while. If their attention does eventually turn to me, and they offer a handshake, I give them the standard, straightforward white man's grip, pulling my hand away, on principle, before they attempt any sort of digital masturbation.

I'll have more to say about this whole thing some other time. Suffice to say, that the interior of a nightclub is a largely anarchic environment, so, I'm interested.

Wiki: anarchic knowledge organization

There's an interesting article on wired about Wikipedia, the anarchic encyclopedia. It's on online work that anyone can edit. Doesn't that cause problems? Well yes and no. "Vandals" as they are called do try to make a mark. But anybody can place an article on a "watch list"; when it changes, they can find out easily and potentially revert the change if they don't like it.

Wikipedia has an innate capacity to heal itself. As a result, woefully outnumbered vandals often give up and leave. ... making changes is so simple that who prevails often comes down to who cares more. And hardcore Wikipedians care. A lot.

Wool logs on to Wikipedia at 6 each morning and works two hours before leaving for his day job developing education programs for a museum. When he gets back home around 6:30 pm, he hops back on Wikipedia for a few more hours. ... It's tempting to urge people like Wool ... to get a life. But imagine if they instead spent their free time walking through public parks, picking up garbage. We'd call them good citizens.

Many wiki "citizens" defeat most casual defacement by uncoordinated action opposing it. But some defacement is not casual... and so the process of government formation has started.

Still, even committed citizens sometimes aren't muscular enough to fend off determined bad guys. As Wikipedia has grown, Wales has been forced to impose some more centralized, policelike measures - to guard against 'edit warriors,' 'point-of-view warriors,' 'revert warriors,' and all those who have difficulty playing well with others. 'We try to be as open as we can,' Wales says, 'but some of these people are just impossible.' During last year's presidential election, Wikipedia had to lock both the George W. Bush and the John Kerry pages because of incessant vandalism and bickering. The Wikipedia front page, another target of attacks, is also protected.

If that suggests an emerging hierarchy in this bastion of egalitarian knowledge-gathering, so be it. The Wikipedia power pyramid looks like this: At the bottom are anonymous contributors, people who make a few edits and are identified only by their IP addresses. On the next level stand Wikipedia's myriad registered users around the globe, people who have chosen a screen name and make edits under that byline. Some of the most dedicated users try to reach the next level - administrator. Wikipedia's 400 administrators ... can delete articles, protect pages, and block IP addresses. Above this group are bureaucrats, who can crown administrators. The most privileged bureaucrats are stewards. And above stewards are developers, 57 superelites who can make direct changes to the Wikipedia software and database. There's also an arbitration committee that hears disputes and can ban bad users.

At the very top, with powers that range far beyond those of any mere Wikipedian mortal, is Wales, known to everyone in Wiki-world as Jimbo. He can do pretty much anything he wants - from locking pages to banning people to getting rid of developers. So vast are his powers that some began calling him 'the benevolent dictator.' But Wales bristled at that tag. So his minions assigned him a different, though no less imposing, label. 'Jimbo,' says Wikipedia administrator Mark Pellegrini, 'is the God-King.'

The God-King drives a Hyundai.

Chuckle. Good stuff. Order, and government, arises in anarchy. It's only when government turns monopolistic/coercive that it becomes the state and must be opposed by the moral man.

Anarchists have a many good examples these days arising online.

Terri Schiavo is dead

The Schiavo case has been on my mind lately, and since I've tossed off some comments on some of my favorite blogs I thought I'd write a bit more on it.

First off, to my mind the most salient aspect of the thing is that Schiavo's body ought to be hers. Her private property. Not her husband's, not her parents', not the Congress's. Hers. It should be disposed of as she wills, or, in her absence, as she willed. Now this is a liberal society, in the best sense of that word (meaning: libertarian). Liberals believe in self-ownership; it is the one thing still connecting the Left to the term "liberal". So it is not surprising to find them supporting Schiavo's "right to die", which is really her property right in herself.

It would be nice if Terri Schiavo could be consulted as to what to do with her, but that is not the case. She's not here anymore; she's dead. So the decision must be made by others. It was made by the court, as a finding of fact. Schiavo wanted to be killed in this circumstance. They may or may not be right. But to overturn that finding would be to overturn our entire judicial system. Of course, finding that she wanted to die, and giving people the right to kill themselves are different things. Suicide is illegal in many (most?) states. As a liberal, I'll fight for the right to die. But Florida evidently allows people to will themselves to be unplugged, and I am fine with that both on liberal grounds and on Federalism grounds; I don't care what they do in Florida.

Speaking of which... second thing that needs to be mentioned is how appalling it is to see the Congress trying to involve itself. Federalism, conservatives?

Third: one thing that few are mentioning is cost. Money is talked about, it being the cause of the first rift between Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents. But not the cost of keeping Schiavo alive as a vegetable. Medical care is not cheap. For the price of one Terri Schiavo meat puppet, 100 children could be kept from dying from dehydration during diarhea. Of course, by killing Terri's body we don't magically shunt money to the third world. We do, however, shunt it either to Michael Schiavo, the parents, or to insurance companies (and by extension everyone paying premiums). It helps someone. Or to put it another way: someone is paying for this.

All of that is a long way to get to saying: there are real costs involved on both sides here. It's not just a matter of "life" versus nothing. It's a matter of money, and money buys everything, including life if you're poor enough.

Some have suggested just giving the body over the parents who'd presumably take care of it. Well, see point 1. The issue of cost is more one about the motives of someone contemplating what to tell their friends and family to do with them in this sort of case. Staying alive will be taking money out of the pockets of someone, probably those you love. Do you really want to do that? For a 2% chance that I might wake up and be marginally the person I am not... well, that's worth a lot. But for a .001% chance that I'd wake up as a horribly damaged near-animal? Kill me.

Tabula Rasa Madness

There's been a bit of discussion I've seen recently about an article on newsweek exerpting "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety" by one Judith Warner. Jim Henley has two posts worth reading on it. Start with this one:

[Warner] mistakes "the middle class" for people like her. Warner is an upper-middle class striver and moves in that milieu. What she chronicles and exemplifies is simply American workaholism applied to child-rearing. ... So the ambitious income redistribution that she imagines will solve the problems of women like her and her friends amounts to a bold if imprecisely quantified call for the redistribution of wealth from the upper-class to the upper-middle class. To the barricades, comrades!

True enough, some other good snarking about the article.

There's one point I've not seen anyone bring up, so, I thought I would discuss the article myself.

Warner is among a generation of women raised in feminism, who've accepted the idea that people are "socially constructed": that we are blank slates. Feminist ideology holds that there is no such thing as human nature. The mind may be evolved, but it has no significant natural inclinations. These beliefs are wrong in many ways, but they represents the default ideology of the left, and increasingly (sadly), the right. What are the implications of blank-slatism applied to mothering?

Well, one is, if you love your child, and want that child to succeed, then someone must do something to mold your child into a successful person. It doesn't just happen. There is no such thing as innate tendancy, or even more horrifying, smarts (IQ?!!), drive, etc. These things must be created. And in our private society so decried by Warner, it is clear that the person molding little Johnny Rasa must be the parents, most particularly mom. Warner:

I was a committed mother, eager to do right by my child and well-versed in the child care teachings of the day.

Another thing we are evolved to want is for our kids not just to "succeed", but to "get ahead" - that is, to be more successful than average. Modern women feel that way, naturally (though they don't know why). The desire for your kid to get ahead has an even harsher implication: to the extent that you see other women molding their kids to be a success, you have to mold yours even harder to insure above-averageness. That is, blank slate ideology induces women to enter a competition, one-upping each other on every aspect of "mothering" as they perceive it.

Women from Idaho to Oklahoma City to the suburbs of Boston—in middle and upper middle class enclaves where there was time and money to spend—told me of lives spent shuttling back and forth to more and more absurd-seeming, high-pressured, time-demanding, utterly exhausting kids' activities.

And yes, that is crazy (as Warner perceives, though not why). But I don't see an answer available to her within her ideology. To the extent that people really are blank slates, women are acting rationally when they break themselves making sure their offspring are better than the others.

Well, I suppose I must give her what is due. What you have here is a sort of tragedy of the commons. Even some libertarians accept the idea of using the government to organize "society" to solve problems of externalities. (Though I do not.) Certainly Warner is no libertarian so the idea of using the government to solve her problem is natural to her. If Warner and her co-ideologues could only agree to "not run" the race, they'd probably all be happier. Thus, the nauseating political prescriptions that Jim Henley punctures. As Henley notes, what Warner calls for really wouldn't end the competition:

Warner's desired government subsidies can't solve her real problem, which is ensuring that her children have relatively higher status than the bulk of their generational cohort. You can offer tax-funded ballet classes to every Jacob and Caitlin in the country, but there will still be only one "best" ballet class in a given town. Meritocrat moms will still "need" to get into that class, not the ones for the hoi-polloi.

(my emphasis). People do strive to advance their children; that's an evolved part of us. They did so in ancient Rome, they did so in the Soviet Union, and they do here in America today.

Although it is clear that Warner and her suffering co-affluents do very much want their kids to "get ahead", I think one part of their problem is they don't know why they want this. They see that they are paying a price for it; thus they fear they are irrational. One thing that might help is simply to know that it is natural for them to want to advance their kids. It's an evolved aspect of human nature.

It may also help them to know that in general in primates, females are much social than males. Thus there's a reason why their husbands are not similarly busting their butts molding the kids: hubby just ain't that into it. Knowing this might help these women live more peaceably with their family.

(Indeed, it seems one obvious prescription even from a blank-slate perspective is: just stop wanting little Johnny to get ahead! The fact that you want it means that you were socialized a certain way, and since that is causing you pain, stop it! Take control! And if you can't change yourself, at least you should try not to infest your progeny with the "want success for child" meme. Fight the power!)

But there's another way that the blank-slate ideology is wrong which is much more significant here: that it's flat-out wrong in its understanding of the sources of success. In fact, success in meritocratic free-market America is largely a function of one thing: brains. Heritability of IQ seems to be similar to that of many other human traits (like height) -- high, but nowhere near total. So, the best thing that Warner can do for her kids is to be high-IQ herself - which she probably is; and in any case, she can't change her own intelligence. This was the message of the Bell Curve, the notorious book that was shut out of polite discourse for discussing several such un-PC ideas.

This is the message from science: human beings are animals. Just like other animals, we have inborn desires. Just like other animals we receive a significant proportion of who we are when we are conceived; and much more is determined by the time we are born. Unlike other animals, we can learn and change and move outside our programming. However, worrying about whether your child will succeed is largely irrelevant. He or she will succeed or fail largely on his or her own, regardless of what you do.

Once you know this, you will be freed to be a much "worse" Mom.

The Derb on Homosexuality

John Derbyshire is one of those people I watch. I don't agree with him in many ways, but he is far enough outside of the PC box that it is plain, both to him and to anyone reading him, that he cannot get back in. Thus he is free to write unPC stuff. There's a freedom that only pariahs have.

Anyway, he's got a good review of the scientific understanding of the origins of homosexuality up at NRO. The particular concern is: is it "inborn"? Derb thinks it is. But being him, he hastens to add:

I am, though I say this with all appropriate modesty, something of a hate figure to the more fanatical kind of homosexualist, as you can easily see by Googling my name. One has for several years been running an energetic campaign to get me fired from National Review. That I am in broad agreement with these folk about the inborn nature of their homosexuality therefore puts me in company with people who hate me, and whom I myself generally dislike. There is not much point in being embarrassed about this. That's science for you. Science is 'cold,' and doesn't care what we think or wish for. (This is a point about science that many people simply cannot grasp. The opposite of science is not religion; the opposite of science is wishful thinking.)

Science is cold. Ice, ice, baby!

More on Implicit Assoc Test

There's an article on it in the Wapo:

"... I had as much trouble pairing African American names with pleasant words as I did insect names with pleasant words."

Greenwald sent Banaji the computer test. She quickly discovered that her results were similar to his. Incredulous, she reversed the order of the names in the test. She switched the left and right keys. The answer wouldn't budge.

"I was deeply embarrassed," she recalls. "I was humbled in a way that few experiences in my life have humbled me." ... For years, Banaji had told students that ugly prejudices were not just in other people but inside themselves. As Banaji stared at her results, the cliche felt viscerally true.

Mmm, science.

Battlestar Galactica

I'm not much of a TV watcher, but I do have a DVR and can thus watch pretty much anything if I want to. It's just that most of it seems like a waste of time compared to other idle pursuits. I've not watched any show regularly since I got done going through "Angel" (after Buffy, after Farscape). So that's where I'm from when I say:

This new Battlestar Galactica is good.

That's all you really need to know. Go watch now, me like.

But for those who want a reason... well... I am reminded of the time I got hooked on Farscape. I'm flipping channels, as it happens, midway during the first season. Good looking folks in scifi setting, OK. John (human) and Aeryn (alien) are talking as they're doing other stuff:

John: I am never going to get used to walking around inside a living ship.
Aeryn: You have nothing similar in your culture?
John: Well, Jonah and the whale, but no contemporary parallels. Except maybe the horse and rider.
Aeryn: Rider? The horse is a beast of burden?
John: Yeah. Not as large or sophisticated as Moya here, but kinda similar. Loyal and intelligent.
Aeryn: That you capture and make work for you.
John: Yeah, but we love them, too.
Aeryn: You love what you enslave?
John: We don't enslave them, all right? We ... Fine, we enslave them.

Now, that's sharp writing. The rest of the ep was hard to follow, but this one bit of writing interested me enough that I watched a "Farscape marathon", and that hooked me for good. And FS really was good for the first season, and much of the second, and flashes thereafter.

For BSG, I liked the miniseries enough to set it up to record. I missed "33". I watched "Water" and liked it, but I was not compelled. Then I get to this sequence in "Act of Contrition" that I just adored.

The President is talking to a doctor; she's got breast cancer. He asks her why she didn't get an examination over the last five years - I'm getting preachy modern health-fascism vibes here, yuck - then she comes back with that's not your business. Woohoo! Then he lights up a cigarette. !!! On a TV show made in the last ten-twenty years, and scifi no less, a cigarette! She looks at this somewhat aghast, and asks "do you mind", and he says, "yes I do mind" and keeps right on smoking! National TV! Then they talk about possible treatment, clearly not with a very good prognosis. She wants to explore "alternate treatments", his take (not knowing she has a good reason for this), is "oh you're one of those people". He suggests, "prayer", she says "funny", all very fast. Then they discuss a technobabbled alternate therapy - 'marsala root' or whatever. He agrees to try to help her. He snubs his cigarette and starts to leave, but then tells her with great sympathy: "seriously: you should consider prayer". We get an ambiguous reaction shot from her and end of scene.

Wow. Politically incorrect in three different ways, but very real, and nothing like I'd expect to see on TV, scifi or not.

War Nerd on Elections

Go click that link for the war nerd and revel. The topic this time: America vs Iran. Choice bits:

The suicide car bomb is a good example of why I don't worship hardware like most war fans do. These cars are actually no-tech guided surface-to-surface cruise missiles--and damn effective. ... They're especially deadly in urban warfare, because they're perfectly camouflaged till they actually blow up.

Or this on the Iraqi elections:

Right now, they [Iraqi Shi'ites] are cooperating with us -- not because they like us, but because we're helping them use their majority to take over Iraq.

It's a laugh, the way Bush's people say the Shi'ite enthusiasm for voting proves that "democracy is taking hold" in Iraq. All it proves is that Shi'ites can count. They've got 60% of the vote sewed up, and we're riding shotgun for them, absorbing all the violence the Sunnis can dish out, while the Shia go out and grab power by the ballot box.

Sure enough.

Implicit Association Test

An interesting test: inplicit association tests of race with loaded words. I took it and got a neutral result: "Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for White American relative to Black American".