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The Flood
Why am I not a conservative? Perhaps because I don't buy simple answers to complicated questions with the steely readiness and callous disregard for human life and individual nuances that conservatives so readily muster, or keep on reserve.
I was talking to a lady, a good member of the Grange, this afternoon. Somehow the conversation lurched to crime. She was very much for the death penalty. I'm sympathetic, but the number of innocent men killed or sent to death row by juries, judges, and that common institution, the state, tends to send a chill up my spine. So I made the case for not allowing capital punishment now, until legal reforms made the system more reliable. Not unnaturally, during this dialectic, I began to explain the theory of time horizons, how many criminals have short time horizons, that punishment may not even be effective as a deterrent, and . . .
She cut me short. You are making things too complicated, she said. There's right and there's wrong. No gray. If these supposedly innocent men sent to death row had been behaving rightly, they wouldn't have been been nabbed in the first place. A little guilty, is all guilty, as far as I'm concerned. Kill them even if they didn't do the crime was the explicit gist of her message. And when I suggested that maybe there were some gray areas, she gave an example of why there is black and white. The Flood. God chose eight people to live. The rest deserved to die. That's black and white.
I could've gone several directions at this point. I could've explained that the Flood story was just a very nasty old myth, and never happened. Experts determined well over a century ago that there was no worldwide Flood as recent as the Genesis account told. The reason the theory of evolution came into prominence in the 19th century was the geologic evidence of an Old Earth. There have been numerous small floods, of course, and major ones in the Mesopotamian region, and before that when the Mediterranean was formed. But there was no Flood over all the Earth.
I didn't do that. I asked instead how this was relevant. If it was directly relevant, she had just made the case for genocide. No, she said, God did that. It's not up to us. Well, I responded, the law is what we are talking about. What can we do? We can't judge as your God would judge. We don't have the knowledge or the virtue. And we have to always worry about the power we take on or designate. And so on.
She backtracked, this Republican did, a bit, and later admitted that she wouldn't want any jury determining her fate! But the vindictiveness was astounding.
Why do I hate the Republican Party and conservatism in general? Because it's so easy to scratch the surface and get a true blue conservative to gush forth inhumanities after inhumanities. That's why they are so willing to go to war. So willing to send truckload after truckload of black men to prison on whatever charges. They've no mercy, not a drop, and their idea of justice has no element of proportion. This woman is not in any way uncommon in conservative America. She is the modal Republican. Her religion is not one of love, and neither is it very strict (Hell and damn come quicker to her lips than to mine). It's mainly a good excuse to dump on people unlike herself.
This is a species of evil. There are evils to be found on the Left, too. But I rarely run into cavalier advocacy of mass slaughter and brutal unproportioned vengeance and genocide there. In the heady years of revolutionary socialism you could usually find some red nut willing to line businessmen up against the wall and fire, but those were always rarities. Socialists tend to prefer the bureaucracy grind you down. No genocidal, vindictive maniacs there. But scratch a conservative, and you are apt to find just that.
Designations | March 1, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
Mac OS X at long last
It was its beauty that first impressed me. Over time, it was its practicality and ease of use that settled my opinion. What we now call the classsic Mac OS was the best computer operating system by far.
It did have one obvious drawback, though: it was unstable. Sure, the more memory you stuck in your computer the more stable it tended to become. But applications were apt to freeze, especially the more you set to run at the same time. Since I tend to work with about five or six apps in the same period, switching amongst them, this freezing problem got annoying. And every now and then my system would go down — the whole computer freeze up. Force restart. Rebuild the desktop. The whole nine yards.
So why didn't I leap to OS X, knowing that it was more stable?
Well, for one I'd become enamored of more classic-looking Macintosh computers, the kind that are slower than OS X requires. When the iMac came out, and the Blue and White, I was impressed, in a way, but that didn't mean I leapt to the new color schemes and such. Very good for trendy people, I thought. But the beauty that moved me was the beauty I saw onscreen, and the older Macs's displayed functions were quite beautiful and quite useful. Why upgrade?
Besides, I'm not made of money. One can get used Macs for almost nothing, and run thousands of apps on them, doing countless tasks, all with a great deal of ease.
And besides, with the help of such utilities as Kaleidoscope and StripLaunch, the classic Mac's last OS, No. 9 (repeat that, Beatles' fans), was not only good-looking, snazzier-than-any-Windows-box beautiful, but also practical.
But over the past few weeks my trusty PCI G3 Hybrid Mac became neither trusty nor G3. That is, it began failing so much — at start-up, at restart, in the middle of work — that I had to pull the G3 card and go back down 100MHz to the Mac original 603e daughter card.
That was one switch that caused another.
After working at least a week's worth of work on the thing, I hauled out a G3 AIO (Molar ) I had planned to give to someone else, and began upgrading that. To become my main Mac. And then, after thinking about it some time, I decided it was time to install Mac OS X.
The installation went well. Indeed, hitchless!
The OS is remarkably beautiful. Take the most recent version of Windows. Compare it to Mac OS 9. Mac wins by yard. A long yard.
Take OS X. Compare it to OS 9. The new Mac OS wins by a yard. A long yard. It's just gorgeous.
How? Antialiasing, for one. PC's suffer from jaggy fonts onscreen, as anyone who's used both computers knows. Macs have been far better, from the very beginning. But now, with onscreen antialiasing, the fonts are all breathtaking, not merely easy on the eyes. The colors and the general translucency theme also makes the desktop and its windows quite lovely.
The OS is remarkably stable, too. I've had the Classic Environment (OS 9 running from within OS X) fail in both apps and in toto, but OS X has not failed once — and believe me, I've put it through its paces.
The OS is a bit slow, however. But my Mac is a 266MHz G3; complaining about slowness in this case is like a fat man complaining how his feet ache: sympathy for this should be limited.
OS X is in several ways more Windows-like. The Dock is the best Mac dock I've used (other than the Control Strip with StripLaunch), and I say this despite the fact that its function is remarkably like the bottom bar in Windows. But it looks much better! And the windows themselves have some Windows-reminiscent features. But once again, they look much better! Beauty may be a small thing to most people (after all, most people listen to utter crap on the radio, and are satisfied), but not to me, so the beauty of OS X is nothing I will sneeze at.
The classic Mac OS has one feature that I think other people regard as a bug: it allows you to put things almost anywhere. Windows has always corralled you to put things in special folders, or directories. The desktop is a place for short-cuts, for instance, not the things themselves. But in Mac, if I feel like putting a document on the desktop, or in an app's folder, or even in the system folder, I may. And do. Depending on what I'm up to. Ease of use is key: practicality; practicalikey.
OS X tends to corral one's placement of documents, rather like Windows. That's a pity. At the present moment, so early in my OS X experience, I just don't know how strict this regimentation is. I hope it is not strict.
All in all, I'm excited about OS X. I wish I'd tried it earlier. I will almost certainly stick with it, on at least one Mac in my office. Yes, I miss my Control Strip. And yes, running in the Classic Environment is more familiar to me than using the Dock. But hey, what should I expect? And I suspect, over time, I'll make it run with the efficiency I've made OS 9 work for me.
Final thought: working with a Molar is easy, not at all like pulling teeth!
Designations | March 6, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
Mac OS X at long last
It was its beauty that first impressed me. Over time, it was its practicality and ease of use that settled my opinion. What we now call the classsic Mac OS was the best computer operating system by far.
It did have one obvious drawback, though: it was unstable. Sure, the more memory you stuck in your computer the more stable it tended to become. But applications were apt to freeze, especially the more you set to run at the same time. Since I tend to work with about five or six apps in the same period, switching amongst them, this freezing problem got annoying. And every now and then my system would go down — the whole computer freeze up. Force restart. Rebuild the desktop. The whole nine yards.
So why didn't I leap to OS X, knowing that it was more stable?
Well, for one I'd become enamored of more classic-looking Macintosh computers, the kind that are slower than OS X requires. When the iMac came out, and the Blue and White, I was impressed, in a way, but that didn't mean I leapt to the new color schemes and such. Very good for trendy people, I thought. But the beauty that moved me was the beauty I saw onscreen, and the older Macs's displayed functions were quite beautiful and quite useful. Why upgrade?
Besides, I'm not made of money. One can get used Macs for almost nothing, and run thousands of apps on them, doing countless tasks, all with a great deal of ease.
And besides, with the help of such utilities as Kaleidoscope and StripLaunch, the classic Mac's last OS, No. 9 (repeat that, Beatles' fans), was not only good-looking, snazzier-than-any-Windows-box beautiful, but also practical.
But over the past few weeks my trusty PCI G3 Hybrid Mac became neither trusty nor G3. That is, it began failing so much — at start-up, at restart, in the middle of work — that I had to pull the G3 card and go back down 100MHz to the Mac original 603e daughter card.
That was one switch that caused another.
After working at least a week's worth of work on the thing, I hauled out a G3 AIO (Molar ) I had planned to give to someone else, and began upgrading that. To become my main Mac. And then, after thinking about it some time, I decided it was time to install Mac OS X.
The installation went well. Indeed, hitchless!
The OS is remarkably beautiful. Take the most recent version of Windows. Compare it to Mac OS 9. Mac wins by yard. A long yard.
Take OS X. Compare it to OS 9. The new Mac OS wins by a yard. A long yard. It's just gorgeous.
How? Antialiasing, for one. PC's suffer from jaggy fonts onscreen, as anyone who's used both computers knows. Macs have been far better, from the very beginning. But now, with onscreen antialiasing, the fonts are all breathtaking, not merely easy on the eyes. The colors and the general translucency theme also makes the desktop and its windows quite lovely.
The OS is remarkably stable, too. I've had the Classic Environment (OS 9 running from within OS X) fail in both apps and in toto, but OS X has not failed once — and believe me, I've put it through its paces.
The OS is a bit slow, however. But my Mac is a 266MHz G3; complaining about slowness in this case is like a fat man complaining how his feet ache: sympathy for this should be limited.
OS X is in several ways more Windows-like. The Dock is the best Mac dock I've used (other than the Control Strip with StripLaunch), and I say this despite the fact that its function is remarkably like the bottom bar in Windows. But it looks much better! And the windows themselves have some Windows-reminiscent features. But once again, they look much better! Beauty may be a small thing to most people (after all, most people listen to utter crap on the radio, and are satisfied), but not to me, so the beauty of OS X is nothing I will sneeze at.
The classic Mac OS has one feature that I think other people regard as a bug: it allows you to put things almost anywhere. Windows has always corralled you to put things in special folders, or directories. The desktop is a place for short-cuts, for instance, not the things themselves. But in Mac, if I feel like putting a document on the desktop, or in an app's folder, or even in the system folder, I may. And do. Depending on what I'm up to. Ease of use is key: practicality; practicalikey.
OS X tends to corral one's placement of documents, rather like Windows. That's a pity. At the present moment, so early in my OS X experience, I just don't know how strict this regimentation is. I hope it is not strict.
All in all, I'm excited about OS X. I wish I'd tried it earlier. I will almost certainly stick with it, on at least one Mac in my office. Yes, I miss my Control Strip. And yes, running in the Classic Environment is more familiar to me than using the Dock. But hey, what should I expect? And I suspect, over time, I'll make it run with the efficiency I've made OS 9 work for me.
Final thought: working with a Molar is easy, not at all like pulling teeth!
Designations | March 6, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
No lie left behind
It may be that politics should be defined in terms of deceit. At least, modern government policy is built on deception, and a central feature of every bit of policy legislation is a lie.
"No Child Left Behind" is an obvious case. The idea is to raise educational standards, and hold people to it. The inevitable result of raising standards is that some people will fail. People are not the same. People are different, with differing interests, abilities, desires, fears and revulsions. So, if we raise standards, some children are going to be left behind.
That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't raise standards. But isn't it interesting that raising standards must be supported with dishonesty?
You have to be more than a tad naive or forgiving of language to repeat the title of President Bush's educational bill without snickering. That being said, though raising standards has as an almost necessary consequence that some will fail, it also means that others (perhaps more others) will succeed in what we hope to be practical ways. Over the last thirty or so years, educational standards have eroded, in part through grade inflation and other administrative gambits of letting failures squeak by. We now expect of high school graduates what we once expected of elementary school graduates: basic literacy and numeracy. High school should be a time to expand upon the building blocks learned earlier. That much of it is remedial work, bringing students up to Sixth or Eighth Grade standards, is a great miscarriage of public governance of schools. The raising of standards is a necessary first step. Perhaps some of the elements of Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program does just that. I'm not sure.
But I do know that the title and supposed intent of the bill is an example of (at best) pious fibbing. Since some people are just less bright than others — slower to learn, and in some cases incapable of learning — the result is that some children will be left behind.
One likely result of raising standards is that, ceteris paribus, we will have fewer people graduating from high school. (Actually, since high school will become more meaningful, there may be fewer dropouts; bright and average kids who now quit early will perhaps stick to it. But that's another element I won't get into right now, other than to say that this would be a good consequence of setting the right high standards. )
And that is, in its own way, a good thing.
Some people just will not be able to become engineers or doctors or computer programmers or the like. They will work, instead, in the lower-level jobs that require other skills — such as physical skills, or social skills, or even basic virtues, like patience — and they will have to be happy with that.
If you find this tragic, well, blame God, or blame evolution, or blame whatever causes base-level inequality. But that's just the way it is folks. To demand of schools that they level the bumpy field of humanity is to demand the impossible.
Still, it is amazing what an academic dullard with less-than-average speech skills, dyslexia, a demonstrated bad temper, and a startling poverty of cultured interests can accomplish. Why, in America, it's even possible to become President of the United States!
No lie, folks.
Designations | March 7, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
Check your ballots
Ominous headline: Republican lawmakers propose bill to tighten ballot-counting procedure . . .
Just what we need, more Republicans restricting ballots from being recounted! And yet I think I'm for this bill. If it's a first step. It's time now to thing about that second step.
We're talking about marked ballots, right? You walk into a voting booth, mark your ballots, and then...
...instead of depositing your ballot into a ballot box, you should be able, first, to place your ballot in a scanner that reads your ballot using the same technology as the official counters. Onscreen would appear the people and measures you voted for. You look them over, compare them with the ejected ballot, and if all is well, you hit OK and then deposit the ballot into the ballot box. If something seems wrong, you hit REJECT, and mark up the ballot again. Repeat until satisfied.
This way voters could make sure that the technology used to count votes counts votes correctly, as they intended. No one could complain.
I am actually sympathetic to those people who don't want hand vote counts fiddling with ballots to correct them for the machinery. That's just nuts. Washington's vote recountings last election and Florida's vote recountings in 2000 were idiotic. Too much interpretation by the wrong people.
The people who should interpret the ballots are the voters themselves. Just give them the tools.
And with a pre-ballot box ballot checking system, each precinct would have a good estimate of the actual vote count, against which the official count could be compared.
This system would work even if my preferred ballot system were in place: the 8.5" x 11" standard bond paper ballot system, printed from a PDF supplied by the government. No more officially printed ballots! Let the voters use their own paper, or that of their neighbors' or the Grange or the parties... Computers should be able to read such ballots, and the system's cost would switch from printing to computer maintenance. Every balloting station should have at least one scanner/computer to read and pre-interpret ballots.
What we do not want are elaborate recounts. What we want are accurate pre-checks and pre-counts. Only these will enable voters to have their votes be counted properly.
Designations | March 10, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
Check your receipts
Why must we worry about voter fraud? Because of the secrecy of the ballot. In completely open voting systems, fraud would be easy to check for. In secret systems, with voter anonymity, checking is a lot harder. Hence our enduring worries.
Recently, on this blog but especially in email debates, I've made a number of suggestions that would put checks and balances into electronic voting. A number of expert friends have suggested that some of them are technologically unworkable, or else cumbersome enough to simply demand a return to complete paper voting and hand counting.
The good thing about paper/hand systems is that (as a friend of mine just reminded me) they bring vote fraud down to the precinct level, taking away an element of systemic vote fraud. That'd be better than what some states have now. But I wonder whether that's the right direction.
Then my friend — with whom I'd previously been talking (this fine Sunday morning) about the quest for the historical Jesus — latched onto another element of my proposals: receipts.
As I've written about many times before, every electronic vote needs a receipt. The receipt should give a unique number as well as a print-out of every candidate and plank voted for.
At vote recount time, concerned parties could challenge the vote by taking them to an official and compare the receipt with how the computer counted the vote.
For instance, say I voted against the vile Bufily. My receipt #0194059279 says so. Right on it. I take it to the recount official and we go to a printout. The printout has all my precinct's voters for Bufily in one column, by numeric ordered receipt numbers, and all of his opponents' in another. We go down the list. And I find #0194059279 in Bufily's column, and not that of his nemesis, JFKthePompous. Then we can be certain that the vote has been tampered with.
This would put a check on the ability of knavish Republican vote manipulators with their secret, proprietary software, to engage in mass fraud. One difference would be indicative of something quite dastardly.
I actually believe that the system could and should have more checks involved, as I sketched a few days ago (and elsewhere). I don't really understand my friends' objections to this sort of checking of an electronic system. Of course, now, in some states, there are horrible electronic voting systems, with no real checks, no real security, and all run by Republicans with proprietary software, running on computers too easy to manipulate.
But that doesn't mean that going back to a completely paper system is the only or even the best alternative.
Does it? Here's another friend's thoughts:
Even when a newfangled voting system pretends to have protections against those attempting to vote twice or whatever, it's practically forbidden to even discuss the more important question of how to watch the watchmen — how to protect the public from cheating by those running the election. Isn't it obvious that any kind of secret, proprietary, paperless, unaccountable, network-based, bells-and-whistles, major-in-the-minors, arrange-deck-chairs-on-the-titanic high-tech system — created, operated, and administered by private companies owned by politically-biased ideologues — will only serve to confuse the issue and make it all too easy for those running the election to rig the election?
I actually think that, no, my checked-and-balanced proposals are designed to attack the very thing my friend is attacking: insecure, unaccountable electronic voting schemes. By proposing a checked and balanced electronic voting system, I thought I was proposing a clear alternative (or: several clear alternatives) to what is being put in place in Florida and elsewhere. And my alternatives have an advantage: they provide a check to vote manipulation and fraud at the precinct level, too.
This has to be a good thing, unless one's motto is put vote fraud back where it belongs: in the precincts!
Designations | March 13, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
It's the stupid labor theory of value
Some errors persist. There are still communists, for instance.
A Mr. Plawiuk calls himself a libertarian communist, but the bad stuff in communism is still there. Consider his latest blog post, IT'S THE LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE, STUPID. Nothing in the assertions made, and attempts at argument — replete with mischaracterizations of the Austrian School approach, bringing in Smith to help confuse the issue, for instance — gave me an inkling of how to make any precise sense of the Marxian theory of value, which to this day strikes me as a complex mass of verbiage designed to let dogmatists feel good about casting aspersions on better economists and better analysis. That is its general sense, as far as I can determine.
The Hilferding quotations, quite long, were not apposite; they were, instead, an embarrassing richness of the poverty of the Marxist school. But schools of thought, made hash by Hilferding, get worse treatment at the hands of Plawiuk himself:
In Libertarian Dialectics and in other comments I have made on my
blogs I have challenged what I call the price, distribution,
production economic model of the Austrian School of Economics, Von
Mises and Hayek, and their heirs at the Chicago School of Economics,
Friedman et al. It is also called neo-classical economics, what
could also be called liberal economics.
The Chicago School has a separate origin from Austrian economics. Whereas Austrians started with Menger's marginal utility approach, Chicagoans started with Clark's marginal productivity. Austrians incorporated most of Clark's insights; to what extent Chicagoans have returned favor is open to dispute. Chicagoans tend to admire the Austrians only for a few things, such as support of laissez faire. For discussions of value, capital, and the rest, they are in many ways lightyears apart.
Frank Knight was the Chicagoan closest to the Austrians, in terms of basic method (his approach was a sort of common sense praxeology, while Mises' was a sort convolved Kantian praxeology). But even he spent much of his time disputing with Hayek and Mises on the nature of capital.
Calling the two schools liberal economics is OK, if you understand that dialectically and scientifically, the two schools don't share as much as outsiders seem to think they do.
This is why I refer to the majority of right wing Libertarians, as liberaltarians,
Yeah: what the world needs, another coinage! Liberaltarian, that's what I am? Can't I be an individualist liberal if the term libertarian gets taken away from me? (And by the way, is it thievery for leftists to demand libertarianism as theirs? If property is theft, precisely what are leftists courting when they try to take away a group's self-chosen term?)
those who embrace the supply side economics of these
Calling Austrians supply-siders is just so stupid (hey: I find the word in the title, so I'm going to use it in my commentary) that it almost deserves no comment. Oh, well. The marginal revolution was largely a demand-side revolution, and the theory of value that came out of that revolution — especially amongst the Austrians — has always regarded the demand side as defining of value. That's the chief element of the revolution. Supplies, it was seen, always depended on the evaluations of customers. And in each exchange in barter, both sides simultaneously demanded and supplied, according to the same principles, with the evaluations of human needs and desires having logical priority. When money is used, the seller (with the supply ) is seen to be demanding money. This all makes a great deal of sense, and if it seems as paradoxical as Marx's opaque pronouncements on economic concepts, then it's only because I'm rushing. Read Menger, then read Bohm-Bawerk and Mises, and you'll get the idea. (Some suggest Rothbard, and he's good in places, but terrible in others.) Of course, the basic points about supply and demand can be found in simple, partially analyzed form in the French liberal school, and in Nassau Senior, all of whom Marx dismissed as vulgar economists. The phrase of derision let him dismiss rather than deal with their practical categories.
But the thing you can't say is that Austrians are supply-siders. This is to malign as well as hopelessly miss the point of 150 years of scholarly work. (There is a sense in which pre-marginalist British classical economics is supply-side, and of course, during the Reagan years a number of economists began reviving certain supply-side notions, with varying degrees of clarity.)
schools. These characters are masques of capitalism as Marx once
described their subjective function.
Just more dumb Marxian invective.
Look, I studied utopian socialism and even a bit of Marxism before I read a lick of real economics. I kept bumping up against this idea, the "labor theory of value." And it never made a lick of sense to me. My experience with labor was largely cutting, hauling, and stacking firewood. Tedious labor, yes. But what was its value, I kept asking myself? And was the labor of my father, me, and my sister, the same? No. Obviously not. The true value of our labor, as labor, had to have something to do with productivity, productivity of a useful good in our wood-burning household.
Nothing ever written in favor of the labor theory of value, whether by Adam Smith or David Ricardo, Destutt de Tracy or a whole host of socialists, made any sense to me. Labor, the source of many valuable things and services, was not itself the source of value. Could not be, for labor was not one thing, but many things, each with differing values. And value was best defined as Menger defined it. As the importance of a good for a distinct human need, or want. There can't help but be a subjective component.
And if you think that, starting with this so-called psychological approach you can't understand the complexities of human society (as the quoted Hilferding asserts), then you haven't done much reading, and you likely know little of science. In science, as C.S. Peirce explained, one prescinds complexity out of a problem, analyzes an element or two, and then builds up chains of complexity step by step. It's a logical as well as an empirical enterprise. And that's how economics, when done right, is done. Austrian economics (and various neoclassical theories, too) may start with simple preference scales of isolated individuals, but step by step they build up more complex relationships. That is the strength of the approach.
Marxian theory lumps labor in a pot, and then makes assertions about value here and there in a dogmatic fashion.
Oh, and Marx himself was always careful to call his opponents nasty names (such as that bourgeois cretin, said of Tracy, and something nearly as nasty for the great Nassau Senior).
Someday I'll write an essay entitled Marxian Economics as Vulgar Semiotics, but until that day, I'll just snipe at this nonsense via emails and on the Web.
Oh, I should conclude with a discussion of the clearest bit of Hilferding nonsense:
With Marx, in fact, every individual relationship is excluded from the conception of value-creating labor; labor is regarded, not as something which arouses feelings of pleasure or its opposite, but as an objective magnitude, inherent in the commodities, and determined by the degree of development of social productivity.
Labor is not inherent in commodities, a nonsensical statement. Labor is human activity engaged in for a productive end. (We could whittle it down a little more precisely, but let it go at that for this presentation.) Menger and Mises clearly defined it as this. Its productivity is key. If it ain't productive, it's a failure as labor, or else was intended as something else, a leisure activity. (Sitting around reading a novel is not labor unless you are going to review the thing for pay, say.) But look at how Hilferding says Marx defines labor. He ignores actual labor, as an activity of actual individual human beings, and, pulling a switcheroo in the definition department, says labor is an objective magnitude somehow inherent in commodities and somehow determined by the degree of development of social productivity. This convoluted mess allows him to claim all sorts of other nonsense, of course. You know, like the emiseration of the masses, and other falsified nincompoopery.
But of course Marx was interested in classes of people, not real people. He wanted to say something about classes. He didn't give a fig why some people were successes and others failures, not if he couldn't point the finger at a class origin for the difference. The fact that my little sister was a desultory firewood piler, and I a frantically fast one, would have made no difference to our future careers (if we had them) in the firewood business. (Full disclosure demands my addmission that I was sometimes desultory, too. In fact, looking back on the days of firewood making, I can't say I was ever enthusiastic. This may have something to do with my career as an editor of words, rather than a laborer in wood.)
Perhaps the reason socialists stick to the Marxian theory of labor is that it helps absolve laborers from responsibility for their lives. Whereas Austrian and neoclassical theory suggests that what people do does make a difference. Of course, since social economic life is all about cooperation, it becomes clear that our choices that make the biggest difference are often choices about trying to find original ways of meeting others' needs in a marketplace. Just slogging around "laboring" is nowhere near as productive as figuring out new, more highly valued goods and services, hence the higher rewards to smarter laborers and especially to entrepreneurs and those who service inventiveness and efficient, mass-producing business.
As such, Marx and his ilk were mere apostles of envy, obscurantists who, no matter what their benevolence to society at large may be, wind up destroyers on a mass level. It is not a series of accidents that led to Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot and their mass murders. The entelechy is there in plain sight, in the theory itself. In the theory, perhaps, of labor value, which avoids focusing on real labor and real laborers, and how value inheres to individuals' actions. By ignoring real labor and real evaluations, Marx turned his supposedly liberatory approach (libertarian communism — yeah, right) into its very opposite, a very handy method to perpetuate tyranny and blight and destroy the lives and labors of men and women.
I stopped reading Plawiuk's post when he got to Ayn Rand, a woman who wrote almost nothing of interest to economists qua scientists. Who is John Galt? Who Cares! is the subhead to that section. I have to agree, and stopped reading.
Designations | March 15, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
| LeftLibertarian
Soylent Chrome
I've seen a number of movies recently. I've been sick, feeling quite bad, so I've watched more than normal. It's not always easy to read or write while suffering from pains. But watching is comparatively easy.
Among many films watched on DVD, The Day After Tomorrow provided the most low-brow joy. Talk about simplistic plot, unbelievable science, and mind-numblingly idiotic political posturing. Still, the special effects were great, and the acting as good as one can hope for in such a stupid movie. As a bonus, it helped inspire me to write something about global warming on Instead of a Blog.
Among the several films I watched in theaters, Robots was the best, a fun Hollywood movie.
The animation was nicely drawn and the voices performed well enough. There are
some pretty inventive Rube Goldberg scenes, and some funny reference humor.
Not exactly the masterpiece that Ice Age was (the film makers' previous effort), but still, not bad.
Once again, a corporation sets to take control of the very means of life
from a population of endearing misfits. This group of misfits are robots,
this time, not monsters (Monsters, Inc.) or virtual reality beings (Tron). A corporate take-over has occurred, and the grand old tradition of service is being corrupted by a new commitment to profit, profit, profit. The jolly fat robot who was corporate head of the invention corporation has been replaced by a shiny, trim, three-piece suited evil robot.
This time, the nefarious idea is to keep old parts out of the market, forcing robots to take care of themselves by expensive upgrades. The recycling theme
nicely fits the retro look of much of the robots. (The hero, whose name is
Rodney Copperbottom, looks like a 1950s Hoover vacuum cleaner. Perhaps
the film should be shown in double feature with Our Man in Havana.)
Applying the lesson to human society would be nice, with a market in used
organs and body parts, but hey, I doubt if the creators of the film really
want to go that way.
There is no government depicted in the film. Police power, in a sense, is
exercised by the corporation, and by the street cleaners who sweep up
broken body parts. These garbage collectors/street cleaners are run by a
nasty woman robot whose son is the take-over artist of the corporation
set to destroy a whole class of robots for profit's sake.
Standard anti-corporate paranoia, of course, with the instrumentality of
the State nicely forgotten about entirely. As such, this is not a
wholesome message for the kiddies, but then, a more realistic spectacle
would probably be too scary. A Hitlerian Final Solution straightforwardly to destroy old, unshiny robots would be quite the treat, eh? Or a Stalinesque let's kill the old ones to make room for the New Socialist Robot would also have been, perhaps, overkill. Perhaps an environmentalist regime, with forced disposing of dirty, polluting old robots would have been more
politically relevant to present ideological debate. But not welcome.
On a bright note, the one child in the audience I saw it with had to be removed
halfway through. I almost cheered.
Hmmm. Didn't think of cheering at the movie's jubilant and violent (and
rather predictable) end. Nope, it's not a great movie.
Designations | March 18, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
| FilmFlam
Poor man's treat
Just watched Super-Size Me, the anti-McDonald's documentary. I expected to dislike it more than I did. But my basic reaction upon first hearing of the Morgan Spurlock doc holds true.
I like fast food, in moderation. Now, by this, I do not mean that I never super-size my portions. It just means that I don't treat fast-food joints as my primary source of nutrition. Fast-food is a convenience, of course, and sometimes kind of fun. But the idea of having it more than, say, three times a week seems, well, disgusting. I've found myself dining out at Thai places a lot more, recently, simply to avoid American food. I have a hard time imagining anyone wilfully selecting McDonald's more than twice a week.
When I lived in the city I was worse than I am now, stopping by at fast-food places more often. But even then, I chose a diversity of places. Now, when I go to town, I rarely go to McDonald's, and I rarely grab the biggest sizes. Yes, I usually say No to the super-size-it question. Besides, I prefer Jack-in-the-Box's sandwich's, and Jack's curly fries. The only really great fries, though, are at the local greasy spoon's: truly fresh potatoes in oil, deep-fat-fried. Mmmm. But even that meal I try to limit myself to more than once. (And the local greasy spoon makes a meal available for less than $7.00, including tax.)
But still, I'm obese by some standards. The reason for my recent weight gain is simple: not enough exercise. I stopped taking my life in my hands walking to work. Too often cars in these parts have almost run me over. Too often I'm walking down the highway and some nincompoop passes, from behind, and the first I know of him is the breath of his car on my sleeve. Missed by inches.
So I'm now starting an exercise program, to make up for what used to be regular (if dangerous) walks.
But never, even at my worst, dining out at fast food several times per week, would I have thought that taking every meal at one fast-food restaurant would be a good idea. Of course it would be horrible.
But Morgan Sprulock's stunt — suggested to him by a judge in one of those idiotic anti-fast-food suits — will no doubt help to alert many people that their eating habits may be way out of whack.
The real issue is temptation, and listening to one's body all during the day, not just when hungry. For, in truth, when I listen to just my desire for taste, fast-food food rarely fits that desire. I really do prefer Thai food and the like to America's fast food. So why is one's true desires to often mere velleities?
Though my favorite veggie may be broccoli, even now, how rarely I eat it! I mean, only two or three times per week. So obviously I've some re-planning to do. What the world needs, in my opinion, is a light baked snack based on broccoli, served fresh out of the oven, with hummus dip. Mmmmm.
Would it be OK to super-size that?
Listening simply to taste precludes me from the Big Mac, which I do not like. (I do like the Big'n'Tasty, however. The gone-but-not-forgotten MDLT was even better.) And from most of the fare at McDonald's, including those greasy little alleged pies. For many years, all I'd buy at McDonald's would be a one buck McChicken sandwich. It is possible to make a meal just of a simple dollar item. Spurlock's insistence that he Super-Size it every time he was asked was weird and goofy and insane. By the way, McDonald's employees don't ask you to Super-Size just a sandwich off the poor man's menu.
As Spurlock's health deteriorates over his month of McDonald's binging, I wondered, again, at why he didn't alter his plan in mid-course. Keep eating at McDonald's, but avoid most of the items, and walk everywhere he goes. Jared, of Subway fame, is shown early in the movie; Spurlock could've outdone him, perhaps. I don't understand why Spurlock didn't start exercising more. Start taking in less sugar. He parades the items of food without sugar at McDonald's. It's a small list. But there were kings in times past who ate less variety. Perhaps he could have proven that it is possible to eat at McDonald's and lost weight, per Jared. Avoid the Meal Deals. Drink water and tea. Walk to McD's. But he stuck to his guns. Very strange. Very foolish. (It sometimes seems to me that most ideologues have just as much trouble balancing their lives and principles as drug addicts do. This is true of enviro-global warming cassandras as it is of food phobics.) As far as I can tell, Spurlock proves only what we already know: that imbalanced food eating is bad for you, that fast food is dangerous when it dominates your diet.
The biggest surprise in the movie, however, was only tangentially related to food. I was surprised at how much I disliked Spurlock's cute little vegan girlfriend. Her ideology seems to have prevented her from talking him out of the loopiest parts of his plan (maximum eating, minimum exercise). So her concern, late in the film, didn't impress me much. What a sanctimonious little cu...ltist.
Designations | March 19, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
Snafu in Fubar territory
I just clicked in to Townhall.com. Clicked the new Paul Jacob column, entitled John Kerry, inventor, wizard, and got this:
Note: This article was mistakenly attributed to Paul Greenberg who did not write it. We regret any confusion that this might have caused. The correct author is Paul Jacob.
Awfully puzzling, but when you click Paul Jacob's name, you get to this article that Paul Greenberg didn't write. Obviously, conservative websites can be studied examples of incompetence. Peculiar.
Jacob's column makes fun of John Kerry, who has opposed oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic preserve. Many of my friends are against the drilling. Of course, most live in cities and have never touched toe to tundra. Not surprisingly, Kerry has some pretty risible reasons to oppose the drilling.
I'm all for caribou, too. But I remember the stories that Jacob references, of caribou rubbing up against the nice warm oil pipeline that bisects the Last Frontier. It sounds like paradise. Wilderness with rubbing posts. Mmmmm.
It's funny how ballistic environmentalists get about a place they've never been to, and a place they are unlikely to go to, and one with a rather sparse amount of life. It seems to me that concentrating on more biodiverse ecosystems south of the Arctic Circle would make more sense. It also strikes me that it might be pretty easy to not make a mess of things up there. The Alaska Pipeline wasn't exactly a disaster, was it?
But then, nonsense and incompetence are everywhere. As proven by Townhall.com, in fact, in the labored road it takes to get to one column.
Designations | March 20, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
The crappiest music in the world
The Saddest Music in the World is perhaps the worst film I've seen in a long time. As a dream film, it succeeds only in the Soporific Department. It is weird, yes, but uninterestingly so. It was a shame to see a good actress, Isabella Rosselini, in it. She doesn't exactly shine. But even if every bit of work she did had been perfection, none of it could have helped the deadly idiotic story, the only satisfying aspect of which is the very last scene (spoiler!) . . .
yes, the film ends . . .
in hell.
Precisely where Guy Maddin, the auteur, should . . . no, I won't say it. I harbor him no ill will, despite the fact that this film wasted about two hours of my life. Why two hours? I put it on pause several times. In the paused moments I contemplated whether to go on. I didn't have the suicide's realism. I kept hoping something interesting would happen. It's weird enough that I kept thinking it shows promise. After seeing the whole thing, I can say, it broke all promises.
Oh, it was nice to see Maria de Medeiros back on screen. Pity it's in a film where Vaseline is the main cinematic tool.
The music is bad, the story is dumb, and the humor — lots of it, so to speak — barely worth cracking a smile. Worst film of the year, whatever year it came out in. The whole thing stinks of amateur surrealism, the kind of thing a bright nerd in high school might think up after reading about The Andalusian Dog. Somehow fitting, the narrator of the making of documentary, on the DVD, mimics the voice of Orson Welles. Yup. The idea is, if you put up enough jokes on screen, you might think one would stick. Not one does.
Designations | March 20, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
How to celebrate a double birthday
It is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach and Modest Mussorgsky.
To celebrate, construct a fugue on the Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition. Play it on a pipe organ. Throw in a few licks from Bach's magnificent treatment of the hymn Sleepers Awake. Then, after this, spend the rest of the day listening to everything Bach ever composed. Sleep again in a few months.
Designations | March 21, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
Ape cool
Be Cool follows Get Shorty. The previous film was tight, smart, funny. This new sequel is loose, dumb, and embarrassingly bad.
But how bad is it, really? The best thing about it is Uma Thurman in a bikini. John Travolta is a cipher here, careening through this movie on inertia alone, not at all fresh. The gags make one gag, not laugh. The in-jokes and self-referential humor are dry as dust, crumbling like autumn leaves; there is no life here. Behind this film the work of Chevy Chase almost towers at Shakespearian heights.
The focus of the film is not on the movie biz (Get Shorty's target), but the pop music biz. Whereas one can find bad movies lovable in their own way, and the subtle satire against bad taste made Get Shorty just that much better, in this film bad taste is embraced, not satirized. Bad music is held as good. The creative process is shown almost solely as the property of producers. This is not funny.
Be Cool features a lot of trendy entertainment figures acting dumb, while aping cool. And remember: one gets tired of ape humor pretty fast, as the Any Which Way movies of Clint Eastwood should have taught anyone with two neurons to rub together.
On the bright side, it is perhaps the best innoculation imaginable to the very idea of coolness, for not one person, not one bit of music, not one gesture, is worth emulating. Hollywood is the cool factory. This movie makes one want to have nothing to do with Hollywood. As such, this is a deeply moral movie, since its ultimate effect is to undermine the profoundly shallow culture of cool. Of course, the method it does this is not through satire, or blatant moralizing. It's more like the method the super-state of the future used to program poor Alex away from enjoying violence.
And this time, the love of Beethoven does not suffer.
Nope, all in all, a very wholesome effect. I never want to hear rap or pop-soul or Aerosmith again.
Designations | March 23, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
A simple requirement
The growth of government is in no small part tied to legislation that is passed that gets no real discussion. In fact, most laws are passed without the knowledge of the supportng representatives.
All this can be changed with a simple Constitutional Amendment:
No legislation that requires the expenditure of any money by any government within the boundaries of the United States, exacts any tax, or infringes in any way with the freedom of any individual, shall be voted on whose every provision has not been read aloud in assembly with a quorum in attendance.
This requirement shall not extend to bills of repeal.
The Executive or any state may nullify any law passed by Congress if public record shows that said law was enacted in defiance of the above provisions.
With this as a guideline, the number of bills that can be passed would all of a sudden drop like a made man remanded to the fishes with the help of concrete. It would also allow Congress to repeal using current, more lax, rules, thus making bills of repeal more popular.
Designations | March 24, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
The very opposite of misery
The music of Allegri came up on the stereo again this morning. I'm afraid it is so beautiful that it interrupts my work. The Miserere is one of the greatest works to incorporate chant into the music. It's really quite lovely. Profoundly beautiful.
And it reminded me: I actually wrote something some time back while listening to this great work. Something about fine art music. And fashion. I just retrieved it from the archives of the Bohuslav Martinu Discussion group, which got the first version of it, and put it up on Instead of a Blog. With some edits.
Now, back to Allegri.
Designations | March 25, 2005 | Wirkman Virkkala
| BohuslavMartinuDiscussion
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