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libertarianism political philosophy See: My Problems With Libertarianism...
Steven Maloney admits to becoming frustrated by some debates about libertarianism and democracy. Me too. Helpfully, he adds to past debates with a list of his weightiest problems with libertarianism.
The list strike me as so peculiar that, well, it explains by example better than any intentional effort why he finds most debate frustrating. A more frustrating list can hardly be imagined.
Frustrating in what way? Well, several of his points are mighty hard to make out. Take the first:
[L]ibertarianism violates a principle rule of politics that has been observed as far back as Western civilization has cared to observe it: all parties (individuals, groups, nations) will pursue ends that are ruinous by their own standards if they are not checked in some meaningful way.
This sounds like an interesting rule.
I confess: I'd never come across it before, at least not as a trenchant apophthegm. It strikes me as a lesson that he has drawn from reading, say, Thucydides. How libertarianism
violates this alleged rule,
though, I've not a clue. Why? Because libertarianism is about limits, limits on coercion, limits on accumulated power, limits on authority. How is a philosophy about limits somehow criticizable from the position of a rule about limits? Are libertarians' limits the wrong limits? Or is Maloney suggesting that libertarians, in the pursuit of their limits, will always ruin themselves because they are not limited by the limits they themselves advocate?
No. This contention demands a whole treatise, I'd say. Just to clarify. It sounds like the kind of thing one gets from deconstructionists, though. Full of paradoxes and self-subsuming criticisms and infinite circularity and the like. Egads, all to criticize libertarianism!
His second criticism is actually one that libertarians argue about, themselves, quite a lot. It goes to the heart of the anarchism/minarchism debate. If it's a criticism of libertarianism, it's one that libertarians themselves are quite aware of:
[L]ibertarianism carries an assumption that there is some practicable way to create power enough to arbitrate disputes and enforce mutually accepted law, but that somehow a small state ensures that this law and its enforcement is incorruptible. How?
My take is that advocating a small state (or protective agency) assumes nothing about incorruptibility, but only on the limits of the corruptible element. What makes the modern state so corruptible is the seemingly unlimited resources it can acquire. If taxation is nullified, and funds to an agency dependent entirely upon contract and adjudicated recompense, then the amount of corruption is limited by the very limited nature of the resources. Modern state corruption is almost unlimited because there are so few limitations on resource acquisition (taxation, takings), thus giving almost everyone huge incentives to focus in on the source of so much wealth. When that source is dissipated throughout the polity, the incentives for corruption decrease. (But they do not and cannot disappear; after all, there is embezzlement even in small businesses.)
Maloney seems to assume that arguments for a libertarian society are justified only if the libertarian polity's attacks on corruption are 100 percent successful. But he ignores the vast extent of modern corruption, and the degree to which moderns accommodate themselves to this corruption. Indeed, it is now written into their very souls. To decrease this level of accommodation would be difficult. But with different incentives comes different behavior, and less enticement to rent seeking
(living at the expense of others
), thus less corruption. Further, the main source of enforcement is the accommodation and acquiescence of the masses of people to the powerful. No free society can long endure if the people will not themselves defend their freedom and demand justice from their institutions. With this, smaller institutions should be able to succeed. Without it, even larger ones crumble. It's a problem, getting from here to there, I'll admit. But assumptions about incorruptibility seem mostly off-point.
Scott Bieser's summary judgment, on the blog, is quite good:
The common thread of all your [Maloney's] objections to libertarianism seems to boil down to this: humans are imperfect and corruptible, but libertarianism assumes humans who are perfect and incorruptible.
I find this curious because I was led to libertarian thinking by observing that humans are imperfect and corruptible, therefore political power and institutions, which are of necessity composed and derived from imperfect and corruptible humans, must be kept as small and powerless as possible, so that the damage they cause is minimized.
That's my basic reaction, too. Nicely stated by Bieser.
A person calling himself Gregory
takes a different tack, making a cutting remark in support of Maloney, and thus trivializes the debate with a standard attack on libertarianism:
Libertarianism is cute and a little quaint. It's like philosophical Skepticism in political form — which is to say, it's not even vaguely tenable as a practicable philosophy, but it's rhetorically powerful, so fun to argue on the side of at social gatherings. Which, from living in DC, seems to be the primary purpose of most libertarians — other than giving a respectable, conservative face to the desire to smoke pot legally.
The standard attack is the marijuana claim. Since I don't do drugs — and most of the libertarians I know are even cautious of legal drugs like alcohol and caffeine — I judge this little attack to be dismissive and sub-intellectual. The main point is an assertion that libertarianism is impractical. This is demonstrated by the marginal social status of libertarians. But, were libertarian ideas to suddenly make a deep impact on society, libertarians would likely suddenly find themselves promoted out of the social margin and into the center. Gregory's is a mere sociological observation farded up as argument. It may be no substantive kind of argument, but it does suggest a source of objections to libertarianism.
Some of Maloney's problems
with libertarianism may amount to nothing more than hesitances he has with changing the status quo. He knows that the current system somehow works
; libertarians' proposed alternatives haven't been made to work yet, at least in recent memory, at least in any instantiation other than piecemeal. So he finds problems. Perhaps, if and when libertarian ideas are put to the test, he'll be able to abandon those objections as new evidence emerges.
The fact that we do not now live in a libertarian society does not mean libertarian ideas might not work. It merely means that they are not now working. Not much of an observation, but it is decisive for certain types of minds.
Arguing with Brad Spangler, Mr. Maloney clarifies his frustration in debate with libertarianism:
I tend to find exchanges with libertarians frustrating because they tend to refuse to come out of the pardigm [sic] constructions of man, society, state (the ones I talk to tend to anyway) as they appear to them inside of their model, and they argue from a model that is all-encompassing and can never be wrong. It reminds me of the frustrations expressed by Karl Popper about arguing with Marxism that he expressed in Conjectures and Refutations. At which point most arguments with libertarianism have about as much value as two people of different religions arguing about whatthe one, true faithis.
Well, yes. And vice versa. I'm almost dumfounded by his insistence of incorruptibility for a libertarian government while apparently accepting corruption in our current one.
Still, I probably share with him his objections to simple libertarian social models. I've been arguing against them for a long time (libertarians are too self-encumbered with Rand and Rothbard; not enough Spencer and Mises and beyond) . . . while still accepting (as I do) liberty as an ideal standard and condition of compromise among individuals.
Still, merely observing that one's opponents haven't broken out of their paradigm and accepted yours is not a clincher in argumentation. It merely points to why the arguments lead nowhere. Why hasn't the arguer abandoned his own paradigm? The extent to which Mr. Maloney assumes that his frustrations are the libertarians' fault is droll indeed. Dialectic should be a two-way street.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 11, 2006 | permalink
I was looking for the exact meaning of vulgar economics,
as defined by Karl Marx. I briefly consulted numerous Web pages, and came across a number of epithets, terms that you can almost hear the sneer while reading:
This is one reason I've always had trouble reading Marx. The terms he selects are so loaded, so sneering, so disrespectful of others in debate, they can hardly be tolerated. Karl Marx annoys not because he gets to the heart of any matter, and twists the knife, but because the means of his dialectic is the means chosen by so many bloggers: snide disrespect. His knife is twisting with every thrust. For example, to describe German economists he disagrees with, Marx puts quotation marks around thinkers,
a slight worthy of a blog, but not a book.
But I tend not to make too much of this, because, were I to do so, it would rob me of the pleasure of sneering at Marx and his pathetic rhetorical acolytes, the sneering Marxists and other miseducated socialists. And, truly, it is a great deal of fun to reject the one book of his I've tried to read, with much effort, as so much hogwash. The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is simply a bad book. His dismissal of Say's Law is one of those breathless performances one often finds in politics, but are unworthy of scientific debate. He plainly doesn't understand why James Mill insists on an essential identity between supply and demand. Instead of trying to follow the argument, he yammers on and takes a note of sympathy for businessmen who've mistakenly asked too much for their goods — or produced too many goods for sale at a price that would yield them profit — and lets Mill's point go at that:
Using Mill's confusing language one may say that there are times when it is impossible to sell all commodities, for instance in London and Hamburg during certain stages of the commercial crisis of 1857/58 there were indeed more buyers than sellers of one commodity, i.e., money, and more sellers than buyers as regards all other forms of money, i.e, commodities. The metaphysical equilibrium of purchases and sales is confined to the fact that every purchase is a sale and every sale a purchase, but this gives poor comfort to the possessors of commodities who unable to make a sale cannot accordingly make a purchase either.
First, I did not find his quoted bit of Mill's language to be at all confusing. But I did find nearly everything Marx wrote prior to this anti-Say's Law diatribe nearly impenetrable. (The book is quite horrible, really.) Second, I am astounded that Marx can let this subject go without any talk of raising or lowering prices. Of failures of expectations. Of inflation. Instead, he just makes a point of sympathizing for those stuck in business cycle the reason to object to Mill's point. Oh, what wit he demonstrates in his economy of argumentation!
Contrast his argument about the distinction of the separation of sales and purchase
with Carl Menger's less loaded analysis of the origin of money. Then look at the way Marx derides whole classes of merchants — chiefly, financial intermediaries — as parasites,
before a real analysis of the subject has commenced:
The separation of sale and purchase makes possible not only commerce proper, but also numerous pro forma transactions, before the final exchange of commodities between producer and consumer takes place. It thus enables large numbers of parasites to invade the process of production and to take advantage of this separation. But this again means only that money, the universal form of labour in bourgeois society, makes the development of the inherent contradictions possible.
Are financial intermediaries truly parasitic? No. Their function in markets is mutualist. They help various people through cash-flow problems, for example, and thus speed up the process of making some transactions actually happen. The fact that these intermediaries take up time
between transactions does not mean that they are encumberances. Were these intermediaries not to exist, many transactions would go undone, fewer trades made, fewer fortunes made.
What kind of mind can't see that? Well, Marx gave us the term: a vulgar economist. He defined a vulgar economist as one who tracked only the superficial relations of economic processes. A vulgar economist can't see the longer-term effects and more complex relations. And, by quickly characterizing financial intermediaries as parasites,
Marx has proven himself precisely that kind of economist.
If that weren't condemnation enough, from that one little concluding paragraph in a seriously bad book, then there's that final sentence, defining money as the universal form of labour in bourgeois society.
Well, money is not any kind of labor. Money is a commodity (a thing held for its exchange potential) quite distinct from labor. Labor is human action directed towards a productive end. It can, indeed, be commoditized. But much of it never is. Money, when not commoditized, is not money at all, just so much metal or paper.
I have a hard time understanding how anyone can give Marx any credence whatsoever. He's full of hatred and anger and envy, and his definitions and arguments are usually quite loopy, just plain wrong. His whole theory that money somehow is labor is nonsense. Of no value. Money does not even represent labor, except in that loose sense in which we talk of money as representing what it can purchase. But that doesn't make money taffy, either. Yes, money can purchase taffy. But taffy remains itself, a commodity that, in the act of consumption, becomes mere food.
Finally, let's go back to Say's Law. The debates regarding this law and the extent to which it explains the nature of economic crises, is quite complex. But of the point made by Mill, Marx is predictably dismissive:
This ingenious invention has been appropriated by J. B. Say, and used in his polemic against Sismondi and Malthus on the question of commercial crises, and since it was not clear which new idea this comical prince de la science — whose merit consists rather in the impartiality with which he consistently misinterpreted his contemporaries Malthus, Sismondi and Ricardo — has contributed to political economy, continental admirers have proclaimed him as the discoverer of the invaluable proposition about a metaphysical equilibrium of purchases and sales.
That added word metaphysical
makes the whole condemnation of Say rather droll, don't you think? A metaphysician! Let's make fun of 'm! We're doing science, and he's playing with words! This kind of attack is great fun, I know, and sometimes on point. But is the identity of selling and purchasing really all that metaphysical?
No. Marx really should have understood this. In barter, selling and buying are the same. I sell corn to buy (purchase) meat. He sells meat to buy corn. Pretty much the same thing. Each has a supply, and each is said to demand so much of the purchased good with so much of the sold good. The ratio is said, in classical economics, to be the exchange value.
(Böhm-Bawerk called this the objective exchange value.) What happens when you introduce money?
Well, sellers of corn, in order to buy meat (and other items), purchase money. In another transaction. Marx is quite right to see that this introduces new complexities. But these complexities also introduce so many economies (of knowledge and information, for one), that vast new vistas open up.
Mill and Say used the identity to defeat general glut theorists, Sismondi and Malthus, chiefly. They did not deny that there were business cycles, and that, at the bust end of such cycles goods prepared for market often remain unsold. And fortunes go bust. And plans go gang aft agley. They simply deny that this problem is general rather than particular. That is, bundles of errors in expectations of profits occur. Not general glut,
but bundles of commodities glut the market. Lowering the prices of the goods would clear them, but, because of the errors in expectations, would not yield profits. Hence, businesses go bust.
I should probably stop now, since I've imputed to Say a position that I'm not sure he held, but which I know later economists who support Say's Law (Mises, Hayek) did hold. General glut theory tended to be over-productionist or under-consumptionist. Against this, economists such as Mill, Say, and the later Austrians, held that it was malinvestment — often because of inflated money in the banking system — that gave birth to the cycle, not some inherent feature of the exchange system itself.
Marx pooh-poohs such theories as utopian. But the real science of money he is unable to begin, since he's stuck with money as some kind of labor (hah!), and can't see that money can be demanded, too. The theory of the demand for money is something he's ill equipped to handle, since early in his critique of political economy he's denied the very concept that would enable him to begin correctly. The concept? Say's Law, which states not only that supplies in general are demands in general, but that any act of supplying, in the market, is a kind of demanding, too. This was a made clear by Menger and Jevons and Walras, of course — productive critics of classical political economy who also, to a man, admired the sensible, Say's Law-and-utility approach of Say's followers rather than scorned them as Marx was wont to do.
Say's Law according to Marx makes no sense. But Say's Law according to Say's disciples makes good sense indeed. It is almost the beginning of economics proper.
And I just noticed something. Marx's theory of money as labor . . . isn't that oh-so-metaphysical?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 12, 2006 | permalink
sex evolution See: Women's scent can lure or repel
A recent study 
demonstrates that men and women share something with quite a few non-human animals: the use of odors to attract and repel sexual interest.
So, another wall separating man from beast has fallen. Creationists will not be pleased. This kind of information interests, indeed, fascinates evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists. It also bolsters their perspective. Creationists, on the other hand, have every reason to worry and wonder why God is so stuck on the Animal Model of Sex.
The three dominant western religions have tried, now, for thousands of years, to pretend that humanity is a separate creation from animality. One reason for this pretense is the explicit statements in the old scriptures of Judaism. Man was created separate, out of the dust. In the image of God, no less.
Perhaps Adam and Eve's shame of nudity, as related in the book of Genesis — so inexplicable to so many moderns — is a sub rosa acknowledgement of man's animality, his (and her) brotherhood (or sisterhood), with mammals around the world. Their shame at nudity is their shame at their animality, at how ungodlike he (and she) is. It is one of J's ironies, a subtle reminder to the cognoscenti that the text in question, Genesis, is a collection of old tales with newer twists, told for purposes of control.
Or, if we are to take the texts seriously, perhaps the Deity is a sexual being, too. For all through the animal kingdon, sex is the uniting theme. If we are to look upon nature as a sign of a deity's interest, then we must say that God (or the Board of Intelligent Designers) is more sex-obsessed than a modern-day porn addict.
More obsessed, I repeat, since a modern porn addict — or average sexaholic
— is not interested in the complete functioning of sex, which includes reproduction. Nature, contra the obsessions of a degenerate modern
(to quote the title of a polemic against modernism), relies heavily on sexual reproduction. Sexual interest leads to procreation, which keeps the higher life forms in existence. Without powerful incentives to engage in sexual activity, the forms would die out, and — voilá — no beings, godlike or otherwise.
To me, though, every new discovery about sex indicates not a creator, but evolution.
Nevertheless, to impute a fascination with sex to a deity is, I readily admit, not without precedent. Most of the gods of early civilizations were sex-obsessed. It's only the recent, major monotheisms that have repressed the sex interest, pretending that the basic design of life is geared towards more heavenly
aspirations. YHWH's own dear son was immaculately conceived, not messily so, as were Zeus-pater's earthly children.
But the truth of life is sex, sex, sex, with a lot of killing and eating and munching and defecating, too.
And death as well. Let's not forget death. Life is based on death. Killing is built into each animal, an integral part of the design, as it were. We eat by killing plants and other animals. We animals cannot survive without killing — or at least the eating — of dead or dying life forms. Death is bound up with life. This is so obvious. And this is so obviously a pagan, pre-Christian, pre-Judaic truth.
The argument from design thus appears to me to be a very poor argument for God. The design we see in nature, and especially in life in general, is not the kind we wish to see bound up in the intentions of any purposive being.
There is little heavenly succor in a deity so obsessed with death and coitus.
If I were to accept the argument from design, I would have to be a dystheist — though mainly for reasons associated with death and killing, not coition.
On the bright side, when I smell a woman, I'm not thinking about God.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 15, 2006 | permalink
suicide rights See: Supreme Court Upholds Oregon Suicide Law
There are reasons and there are excuses. The Supreme Court is America's final arbiter of public excuses for illiberal behavior. What are its reasons, though?
Indeed, what are we to make of the Supreme Court's strange ruling on Oregon's voter-enacted assisted-suicide law?
Much of the comments on Reason's group blog, Hit and Run entry Assisted Suicide Stays Alive,
today, focus on the inconsistencies of the judges' reasonsings. Including, expecially, that of Judge Thomas.
On Instead of a Blog, I focus on what I think lies behind Scalia's reasoning, particularly as found in his penultimate paragraph:
The Court's decision today is perhaps driven by a feeling that the subject of assisted suicide is none of the Federal Government's business. It is easy to sympathize with that position. The prohibition or deterrence of assisted suicide is certainly not among the enumerated powers conferred on the United States by the Constitution, and it is within the realm of public morality (bonos mores) traditionally addressed by the so-called police power of the States. But then, neither is prohibiting the recreational use of drugs or discouraging drug addiction among the enumerated powers. From an early time in our national history, the Federal Government has used its enumerated powers, such as its power to regulate interstate commerce, for the purpose of protecting public morality—for example, by banning the interstate shipment of lottery tickets, or the interstate transport of women for immoral purposes. See Hoke v. United States, 227 U. S. 308, 321323 (1913); Lottery Case, 188 U. S. 321, 356 (1903). Unless we are to repudiate a long and well-established principle of our jurisprudence, using the federal commerce power to prevent assisted suicide is unquestionably permissible. The question before us is not whether Congress can do this, or even whether Congress should do this; but simply whether Congress has done this in the CSA. I think there is no doubt that it has. If the termlegitimate medical purposehas any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.
Here's my archived page: The Right to Life vs. the Duty to Live
vs. the Weight of Precedent and the Long Tradition of Illiberal Government Interference.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 17, 2006 | permalink
economics regulation See: Myth and Measurement
Except perhaps for three brief jobs held early in my working life, and for one job that I contracted under very strange terms, I've never worked at or below the minimum wage. Even, years ago, as an untrained worker I managed to get slightly-better-than-minimum wage positions. Perhaps this is because I was polite, white, and witty. Who knows?
During that whole time, I did not support raises in the minimum wage regulations, either at the state (I've worked in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington) or federal level. As an above-the-minimum worker, I realized that I might have something to gain by such an increase. After all, even if the minimum were to rise above the rate I was paid, I suspected I'd keep my job. The losers would be some unknown others, either lower-on-the-totem pole co-workers (less desirable than me) or a future position left unfilled (or even unimagined) because of changing employment costs.
It was logical, I reasoned (based on my readings in economics, and on my long-cultivated sense of reality), that you can't simply legislate increased wealth. There's a scarcity of money, time, effort, and regulations simply change the distribution of costs facing workers and employers and would-be workers and would-be employers, so that some would gain at others' expense, differently depending on different regulations. Or the lack thereof.
I could never justify, to myself, a policy that would help me but hurt others. Besides, I seemed to get by in the workplace. Now my hourly rate is so far above minimum wage as to be ridiculous (though the number of hours worked varies, as does my income). So I've never supported increases in the minimum wages. And I've usually argued that they should be abolished.
Now, something I did notice, over the years when working near the minimum wage, is that the most vociferous proponents of minimum wage increases that I knew were not the unemployed, but were young men an awful lot like me: working just above that minimum. And white. Though not quite as polite.
Could it be, I wondered, that they expected to be helped by the minimum wage increase, like I suspected I would? And could it be that they couched their righteous indignation at low wages so they wouldn't have to contemplate the harm that a minimum wage raise would cause others, less fortunate than themselves? This was mere speculation, but it seemed to make sense. Sometimes righteous indignation is merely a defensive technique.
I have long wondered at the popularity of minimum wage laws. Do the masses of its supporters really think that government works magic? Do they have no conception of costs? How much self-interest is embedded in its support, and how much posing sympathy
?
Of course, supporters ignore the vast literature in economics on the subject. They pooh-pooh economic reasoning. But they just lap up those few economists who break ranks and support minimum wages, economists like David Card and Alan B. Krueger.
I confess: I've not studied the work of Card and Krueger. They say they are economists, and they say they have measurements that trump standard economic theory's prediction. I wonder if they have an explanation for why economic predictions about minimum wages are wrong. But I confess to a bigger lack of even-handedness: I am not going to study their work carefully. Others seem to have done the work for me, and their criticisms will have to be good enough. Here's a summary of the Card and Krueger studies' problems:
Card and Krueger interviewed fast-food restaurants on both sides of the Delaware River. They posited that any differences between New Jersey and Pennsylvania could be explained solely by the minimum wage. What they found was that New Jersey restaurants hired more employees over the period of the study than Pennsylvania restaurants.
The results of the study were extraordinary. Card and Krueger seemed to have discovered a refutation of the law of demand. Economists were stunned. Because of these extraordinary results, they debated the results. Many economists argued that the differences between New Jersey and Pennsylvania were more than simply differences of minimum wage rates. Other economists argued that the study design was flawed.
Other economists were able to review the study using better data with devastating results for the Card-Krueger study and the Administration argument. Card and Krueger gained their data by asking one question. "How many full-time and part-time workers are employed in your restaurant, excluding managers and assistant managers?" Depending upon the answer, they interpolated employment trends. It is clear from this question that their report was deeply flawed.
First, the person answering the phone was allowed to interpret this question differently. Did they mean how many people this week, this month, this shift? Who is a part-time worker? Varying interpretations of this question allowed different answers from the same restaurant over the period of the study. The data Card and Krueger collected show incongruous results. For example, a Wendy's restaurant went from 35 employees (zero full-time, 35 part-time) to 65 employees (35 full-time, 30 part-time). Other restaurants show strange results as well.
Second, they simply divided the number of part-time employees by two and added them to the number of full-time employees. This method of estimating employment effects cannot accurately estimate the effects of higher minimum wages. Restaurant managers simply could have responded to a higher minimum by forcing employees to accept fewer hours.
The best data Card and Krueger could have obtained from these restaurants were hours worked. However, they did not obtain that data. Another set of economists, Dr. David Neumark and Dr. William Wascher, obtained the payroll data from the restaurants Card and Krueger surveyed. When Neumark and Wascher calculated the numbers, using the identical statistical methodology of Card and Krueger, they found the exact opposite of Card and Krueger. Card and Krueger found that restaurant employment in New Jersey rose, while restaurant employment in Pennsylvania fell. Neumark and Wascher found that employment in Pennsylvania rose more rapidly than employment in New Jersey. A Presidential Commission found in 1980 that teenage employment fell one to three percent for every ten percent hike in the minimum wage. The difference between Pennsylvania and New Jersey was exactly within that range.
The Card and Krueger study has collapsed. The foundation of the [Clinton] Administration's argument for higher wages has fallen apart. Raising the minimum wage destroys jobs. Only by doing sloppy research can economists arrive at another answer. The Card and Krueger fiasco is an example when inadequate research is used to buttress unwise policy.
This is wholly convincing to me. It backs up what I know of economics. And if supporters of the minimum wage look at my lack of interest in making a personal thorough study of the Card/Krueger case for minimum wages as a bias, so be it. You'd have to pay me to go through what seems to me balderdash on the face of it.
And a lot more than the minimum wage, too.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 18, 2006 | permalink
The previews to the film Enduring Love interested me, so I rented the DVD. The story starts out fine, and then goes in rather unexpected directions — unless one has seen the previews.
The tale begins with an odd, tragic event involving a hot-air baloon. And then it follows the main characters as they deal with the enormity of that event. One of the characters becomes a stalker.
We've seen stalker films before . . . though for the life of me I can't think of any titles right now. This one is peculiar, in part that it's of a homosexual stalker, and the stalked is a philosopher . . . or some similar academic.
The intellectual heart of the film is the contrast between the stalked and the stalker. The former sees too little meaning in the world, the latter, too much. In a sense, the film's meta-plot follows the stalked philosopher as he deals with the all-too-real meanings of the situation he's found himself in. Though he does not explicitly repudiate his early-espoused philosophy that the meaning of love is a mere illusion, the viewer understands that, in the end, he has done so.
We'll have to call it understatement, this lack of an explicit repudiation of an explicitly stated axiological nihilism. Or, it could just be that the author of this tale had no real philosophical argument. He merely introduced a philosophy only to knock it down in the course of a story.
It's a peculiar film. Well-written, well-acted, well-conceived . . . though not exactly a paragon of its genre, the philosophical potboiler. Interesting, but it pales besides others of its kind, such as The Rapture, Changing Lanes or Gattaca.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 22, 2006 | permalink
film terrorism See: J. Neil Schulman on Munich
My best hat, a black leather cattleman's hat, lost its hatband when a friend threw it to me at the end of Munich. I had walked away from the seat without the hat. The throw was a favor. The missing hatband an unintended consequence.
I'm afraid that's what I'm going to remember the movie for, most. Though quite good, Munich was not great. It may be the most over-rated film of last year.
My main complaint? I'm tired of what's euphemistically called the documentary style.
Herky-jerky camera motions, stop-and-start jerky pans, blurred lights, gritty stock, these do not impress me. This is the ugliest film, as motion-picture photography, that Spielberg has so far made.
The story, on the other hand, is quite good, though perhaps too long at the end. Unlike my friend, I was not horribly annoyed with the descent-into-paranoia ending. Spielberg just doesn't know how to end a movie anymore,
my friend proclaimed. I, on the other hand, was annoyed by just one scene, when our retired assassin is making love to his wife and seeing
the original murders at the Olympics. This combination of sex and violence is such a cliché, and hardly necessary. It was also in bad taste. We had already taken in the idea that our assassin, who had killed a number of men in the course of his secret mission, had become riddled with guilt and doubt and distrust.
It's a very bloody movie, and not for the squeamish.
I didn't notice the music until the end credits rolled. That's probably a good sign. Amistad was ruined by inane music intruding into too much dialogue and monologue. At least this is a historical Spielberg effort that Spielberg can't shift some blame onto John Williams.
The film is a few minutes too long, and badly shot. Otherwise, it's very good story-telling. The story limns the dangers of violence, an old artistic theme. And as J. Neil Schulman rightly notes, Like Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg refuses to make his villains cardboard cut outs. Every character in Munich — Israeli, Palestinian, mercenary — is fleshed out.
One could suggest that any indication of commonly ascribed Jewish
characteristics shows a streak of anti-Semitism. I want receipts!
one Isreali-in-charge insists. I'm not one of those people who suggest such things. I didn't find the movie particularly anti-Semitic. To whom is money not an issue? Demanding a receipt for a killing is a fine thing, if the killing is itself a fine thing.
So what about all the killing? Munich is a tale, allegedly true, of a series of assassins secretly commissioned by the state of Israel, against those who had some connection with the Munich massacre by Black September.
I say allegedly true
because, like most viewers, I've no knowledge of the history; but I do know that Hollywood inevitably distorts history for some dramatic point or other. The dramatic point of this movie is that the way of violence leads to more violence. This is sometimes true. Michael Medved demurs; he's a fan of violence if the bad guys get it.
So am I, in film. In real life, it gets a bit messier however, and I'm by no means convinced by Medved's recent column, Munich distorts history.
Just as Spielberg is a known liar in the service of fiction and ideology, Medved is a known blockhead in the service of his very different ideologies and fictions. The difference between them is not just of left and right, but in that Medved is a low-brow critic and Spielberg actually makes a great film now and then.
Still, I can't really evaluate properly many of Medved's charges. But I can say that, unlike The Passion of the Christ, which Medved brings up as having previously suffered from charges of anti-Semitism, Munich is not even close to a great movie. Its fatal flaws are cinematic. It's merely a pretty good movie. It's quite a spectacle, despite the ugliness of the cinematography. And it gives viewers something to think about. But should you change your mind after viewing it? Or gain further resolve? No. Like any film with an allegedly moral point, the issues demand more careful, less biased presentation and investigation.
It's been two days since I've seen the film, and I'm afraid that what I really miss is my hatband. Great hat, but now it's flawed, aesthetically marred. Like Munich, my hat.
This may not be the most important matter of context the film conjures up, but I'm afraid that this context is the most personal one for me, at present. Such are the hazards of moviegoing. The little things can spoil an experience, such as a screaming infant, a gabber, a cougher, a sneezer, a nearby ice-muncher. My hat's missing hatband now gets added to my list of trivial trumps to art. But at least it didn't trump great art. Just a very interesting if flawed film.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 23, 2006 | permalink
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold . . .(Yeats). Within society, Loompanics favors more entropy, i.e., less government laws and other social restrictions — increased anarchy. Within our own bodies, Loompanics favors less entropy, i.e, less degeneration and death. So the Second Law of Thermodynamics is at once a friend indeed, and a worthy adversary. America needs to loosen up.
Bushisms urban legends See: Muddle of the Road
Does the president need help to look foolish?
Here's a passage from a year ago, discussing the Bush administration's proposed Social Security reforms, the so-called notch
issue, and the costs of transition:
Q -- . . . how is it the new plan is going to fix that problem?
THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
This is mostly incomprehensible gibberish, the incompetent mumblings of a person who can't comprehend what the brighter minds in his employ are up to when they concoct various reform schemes.
But it is clear, from the context of the White House page it's taken from, what it's about: Social Security.
Yet when I got it, in email form, it was billed as an example of Bush's inability to explain the new Medicare Drug bill (subject line: Bush Explains Medicare Drug Bill — Verbatim Quote
). Different thing, really. But for some reason, the Urban Legends Page marks this as TRUE, not FALSE. But the context of Medicare, as it was forwarded to me (and as it exists on the Urban Legends Page), is quite FALSE.
My point is this: the president doesn't need any help looking foolish. Someone on the Internet decided that this passage was preciously loopy, and wanted to sell it
with a current concern (Medicare Drug Bill, Plan D) and not a vaporware reform proposal (Social Security privatization).
So, what do we have here? Bush is a doofus and a horrible explainer, yes. Someone on the Internet is a bit of a liar, and lied by mis-designating the sample of Bushspeak as about Medicare rather than Social Security. And the Urban Legends Page errs, not catching the error (lie) in the email.
Now, to put this mini-controversy in another context, consider my favorite exchange from the same Q & A:
MR. HUERTAS: [...] When you are older, like I'm getting, I will put less money on those risky -- (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I wish I was your old. (Laughter.)
It remains the case that our president is a nincompoop. He doesn't really need help in demonstrating it.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 24, 2006 | permalink
I live in an obscure corner of the Pacific Northwest, one Finnish-American among many other Finns. So, in thinking of a homeland . . .
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 24, 2006 | permalink
hymnody harmony See: All the best tunes
Modern Protestant hymnody is going through a period of spectacular decay. My sister complained, yesterday, about the use of choruses
in the family church. They sang several songs (not hymns) with which she was unfamiliar. But the church did not provide a hymnal or songbook. Instead, the words were placed on a plastic sheet to be displayed on a screen by an overhead projector. No music. It's a slap in the face to musically literate visitors to the church,
she complained. So she didn't sing those tunes. I made a joke about how this was nothing new. Why, in the old days, a Christian from Asia Minor visiting Rome wouldn't know the songs.
But my sister wisely noted that we now have the means to encourage cooperation: musical notation.
What's with this Gregorian chant? Ambrosian chant is good enough for us in Ephesus!
But the churches — at least the evangelical churches — are abandoning it for rote learning.
Pop/folk song stylings now are the new chants. A sad decay since the time of J.S. Bach.
I went through my list of favorite Sunday School hymns — a short list at best, but the best is so good, why complain? — and When He Cometh
struck me, once again, with its simple beauty. The way I harmonize it (which is not too different from the site I link to, above) progresses like this: I iii vi I, I iii I V7 I, IV iii vi I V(iii), IV iii I V7 I.
I like the minor-key harmonies sprinkled throughout. The ending, though, is close to cliche — as if to remind us, This is a kids' song!
But leading up to it are some gloriously lovely harmonies. And the words, surely, present the central Christian message in its best possible childishness. This one song redeems a lot of the dreck that the Sunday School movement unleashed upon civilization.
Of course, when I play the little hymn, my keyboard touch is lighter than the CyberHymnal site's MIDI-produced presentation, with its Sunday-School clunky non-pianism. Oh, well. Even in the CyberHymnal form it's almost heart-breakingly beautiful. I wonder how often this little Sunday School hymn is sung in today's evangelical churches?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 2, 2006 | permalink
Sir Humphreyon Yes, Prime Minister
So here I am (several hours before posting this), writing as I watch a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's an episode my memory had erased. Picard has just wryly commented on the sources of ancient conflict: God concepts
and if you can believe it, economic systems.
It's been over 18 years since I first watched this episode; it has not worn well. It is badly acted, goofily conceived. Ooh, the Lizard People can't stand the smell of their mustachioed enemies! Well, there are creatures whose stink I wouldn't want near me. No great shock. Oh, well. Blame it on a God concept
— or an economic system that encourages the Lonely Among Us.
The humor of the episode is very basic. Simple reversals. The mustachioed extra-terrestrials call barbaric
the Federation's inorganic creation of foods, and its consequent non-enslavement of animals. Reiker raises an eyebrow. Oh, how droll! Oh, how witty the writers!
I have trouble believing how much I enjoyed the show on its first run. (If memory serves — and now I've no reason to believe it does — the show did improve.)
Earlier, I had been watching C-SPAN BookTV, featuring A.N. Wilson talking about his book After the Victorians. His conclusion was very sensible: no one can be trusted with holding power, and when we speak of self-determination
what we really want is the self-determination of actual living human beings. Individuals.
This wisdom fits uncomfortably with the ruling ethic of ST:TNG, which proved amazingly corporatist and ultra-Wilsonian. The ideal of an all-powerful entity, benevolently organizing backwards peoples for their betterment, will take a long time to banish.
Call it a god-concept. Or just modern neo-imp politics.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 9, 2006 | permalink
Sturgeon's Revelation)
dissent media See: With OšReilly as Guest, Letterman Denounces Iraq War, etc.
I just read the transcript and watched the interchange (see link above). Neither Bill nor Dave came off very well, in my opinion. Letterman doesn't know the issues. Bill O. thinks he does, but ignores whole mountains of data and ranges of perspective.
Unlike Dave, I don't consider Cindy Sheehan to be above reproach. There's something ugly about a woman taking her mourning public and mixing up argument with emotion so helter-skelter, as she does. Unlike Bill, I don't believe the feelings of other people who've lost soldiers in the war count against her attacks. The right question is: have they been betrayed, like she says? If the honor of men and women, professional soldiers, has been betrayed by the lying and subterfuge of their leaders, then the hurt feelings of other mourners is of no moment. The real issue is: is she right?
Mourners who don't want to hear
such things do dishonor to the principles upon which the country is allegedly run.
Oh, Bill O. referred to MI-6 as M1(one)-6. Very odd. He also used the occasion of demonstrated bad intelligence
as a reason to, as he put it, revamp the CIA.
He obviously means with money. Here he proves himself yet another Beltway Fool. The problem was a chain-of-command/groupthink rut, with good information being ignored and bad information promoted because it met expectations — the expectations of a whole bunch of people, especially those at the top. To miss this is to not understand the nature of knowledge and decisions in the most important political process in recent times.
Letterman spit-balling
his Sixty percent of everything you say is crap
contention was funny, but not in any way an honest debating technique.
Besides, I prefer the ratio of Sturgeon's Revelation, anyway.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 10, 2006 | permalink
Sturgeon's Law)
The joke known as The Aristocrats
is a mere skeleton of a joke, to be fleshed out by the teller (though not the Teller of Penn and Teller) in excruciatingly disgusting detail. The punchline is barely funny at all. Roger Ebert is right to remark that it works, as a joke, only (or at least best) with a large audience where there's something on the line, a social transgression is possible.
Roger Ebert is not right, however, to slight the movie made by Paul Provenza and Penn Gillette and friends, called The Aristocrats. It is one of the best films of 2005, not merely the funniest but also one of the most thoughtful. It is a good documentary film, in its way itself a document, a document of the state of stage-act comedy and the general culture, c. 2001. Post-9/11 culture, you might say. It might even be an important movie.
But the joke, itself, is not that funny, especially in America. We don't have any aristocrats, as such, in America. Ever since I first heard the joke, I've thought the punchline should be changed. Several in the movie suggest The Sophisticates,
and I agree. I might suggest something a bit more pointed, like The Poughkeepsie Chapter of the Promisekeepers. Or, The Tipper Gore Fan Club, or, the George W. Bush Family Singers. (Did you say swingers?
No, that's too risqué.
)
Several improved versions of the joke are told in the movie, including:
The N***er C***s(an inversion of the joke)
My friend Monteith (with whom I just saw the movie) does not care for Silverman's take, but agrees that Mull's was the best joke qua joke. Still, he insists that the consensus of comics in the film itself is correct: it is Gilbert Gottfried's rendition, at the Fryars' Roast for Hugh Hefner, that is the funniest version of standard version of the joke. For the reception of that telling, the cutting away from it by the filmmakers doesn't help. But those cuts are important for the context of the joke, and the style of the movie, and I've no complaints. Actually, I think Emery Emery should be nominated for an Oscar for editing.
The box of the DVD quotes someone saying laugh till it hurts.
This gets the joke backward, though. The joke is such that you hurt until you laugh.
The movie itself provides chuckles throughout. As well as food (or perhaps excreta) for thought.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | January 26, 2006 | permalink
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