Born to Identify

Pragmatism and the Patent-Troll Problem

2011-06-12T12:54:00.000-07:00

A patentable invention must be novel, not obvious, and reduced to practice.

A "patent-troll" is a pseudo-inventor who obtains a patent on an obvious (to practitioners, if not to patent examiners or to judges) application of a known concept in a new context, and then just waits for engineers, programmers or business managers to do... the obvious: apply the same known concept in the "patented" context. At this point the patent troll will sue for infringement of the "patent."

Back when "non-obvious" first became a criterion for patentability, its meaning was objective and clear. "Obvious" means "not requiring the induction of a new concept." "Non-obvious" means "requiring the induction of a new concept." The applicability of an existing concept to new contexts is part of the concept of "concept," going back to Aristotle or before. A patentable, non-obvious invention was one that required the induction of a new concept.

When Pragmatism took over American law, this changed. The existential import of Pragmatism is the denial of the applicability of concepts to existence. The objective definition of obviousness was replaced by a vague sort of "I know it when I see it" ("it doesn't seem obvious to me") non-objective intuition on the part of patent examiners and judges. Hence "patent trolls."

Why is this important? Because the existence of patent-trolls is being used as an argument against intellectual property as property. And it is NOT a valid argument against intellectual property. It is, however, a valid argument against Pragmatism, and especially against Pragmatism as a "Philosophy of Law."

Ayn Rand, Illegal Immigrant

2011-02-02T12:30:00.000-08:00

Ayn Rand's 106th birthday is being celebrated today by people all over the world, including many who would (if they only could) escape the various tyrannies under which they happened to be born, people whose most burning desire is to become Americans. Her birthday is also being celebrated, incoherently, by many Americans actively engaged in keeping those would-be Americans out.

Ayn Rand was an "Illegal Immigrant." Scare quotes because, in the moral sense, it is the laws that deny, to some persons, the enjoyment of their natural individual rights solely because of the happenstance of where they were born (and that deny to American citizens our undeniable individual right to employ, and to trade with, the peaceable persons of our choice) - it is America's current immigration laws that are illegitimate.

To obtain a visa to America, Alisa Rozenbaum went through great effort to convince American consular officials, and falsely swore, that she intended to return to Soviet Russia to marry a fellow Soviet citizen to whom she was engaged. Under American law, this constituted (1)perjury, (2)making false statements to a government official, (3)falsification of official documents; and a string of lesser felonies. Her visa, being the fruit of these deliberately committed felonies, was never legally valid. Fortunately, back in the 1920s most Americans understood (as Rand herself understood) that principles are not intrinsicist rules, but guidelines for contextually chosen action. Immigrants from Soviet Russia (and later from Nazi Germany) were not, as a rule, prosecuted for whatever felonies they had committed in order to escape their previous rulers and migrate to America.

Ayn Rand became what today would be formally an "illegal immigrant" when her tourist visa expired, and she stayed. She did not become "legal" again until her marriage to an American citizen, which at the time entitled her to become a legal resident (this is no longer the case today.) Overstaying the expiration of a US visa is not a felony, but it is a serious misdemeanor - one for which even mothers of young American citizens have been deported in recent years. Of course, back when most Americans could still think in concepts, such minor technical violations of immigration law were not a problem for any American. Today this is no longer the case. Pragmatist control of American "education" has produced a generation of Americans bereft of normal human conceptual faculties. The have learned that it is racism, to deny a person the enjoyment of her natural rights because of where her ancestors happened to be born - but they are OK with denying a person the enjoyment of her natural rights, because of where she herself happened to be born.

The mantra of today's conservatives is law enforcement first, immigration reform only "after the borders have been secured." American consular officials are under no obligation to respect the individual rights of foreign nationals abroad, and, like all bureaucrats, enjoy the exercise of arbitrary authority over their helpless legal inferiors. The current legal immigration process typically subjects the immigrant to years of waiting in a legal limbo, punctuated by periodic rituals of humiliating subjection to the arbitrary whims of petty consular bureaucrats. The gauntlet of waiting through years of arbitrary obstacles and humiliations, functions as a filter, letting through only those who, once they have arrived in America, will obey our emerging tyrants. The message of our immigration laws to independent-minded people, including those who today celebrate the birthday of American illegal immigrant Alisa Rozenbaum, is simple: we don't want you here.

First Grade With Concepts: How I Learned to Multiply Without Memorizing Tables.

2011-01-17T19:06:00.000-08:00

This post will ground a discussion of the existential implications of the differences between an education proper to humans - a conceptual education - and the pseudo-education foisted upon Americans by Pragmatist "educators," and increasingly spread by them to the rest of the world. When Ayn Rand discussed the issue in The Comprachicos, the Pragmatists were still in the initial stages of taking over. Today, many adult Americans don't even know that there is any workable alternative, to the Pragmatist dogma that education consists of (1) learning skills and facts by practice and rote, without conceptual understanding; and (2) of testing "educational achievement" by examinations during which the student has no time to think and no time to apply concepts - and the teacher has no choice but to "teach to the test" by imposing rote memorization on the student, and prohibiting conceptual thought lest the student think, and "waste time," on the eventual test.

A properly human, conceptual education has only the most limited contact with memorization. Most things that can be memorized, can be as fluently learned by repeated reasoning from first principles. I can multiply as fast as, and probably faster than, an adult who did memorize the multiplication tables in first grade. After reasoning out some specific result from first principles two or three times, the result will be remembered and retrieved faster, than if it had been memorized. And, having been understood, that result will be usable in solving problems beyond the grasp of the memorizer. (There are contexts where memorization is necessary - a surgeon cannot take the time to think about evolutionary anatomy while operating - but such contexts are rare.)

I had the enormous good fortune to have learned first grade arithmetic with the Łukasiewicz curriculum. Jan Łukasiewicz, an Aristotelian philosopher of mathematics best known for Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic, had been, in 1919, independent Poland's first Minister of Education, and created its distinctly Aristotelian K-12 mathematics curriculum. This is what I remember of the sequence of ideas in first-grade Arithmetic:

1. Digital (finger) counting; cardinal and ordinal numbers; addition.

2. Doubling; odd and even numbers; halving of even numbers.

3. (Single digit) subtraction; zero and negative numbers; equations.

4. (Single digit) multiplication (beyond doubling) as repeated addition.

5. Exponentiation as repeated multiplication; powers of 10.

6. Number bases; place-order (Arabic) notation; the carry; multi-digit operations.

7. Multiplication shortcuts.

8. Modular (Clock) Arithmetic; telling time; clock arithmetic (time) operations.

Multiplication shortcuts took the place of memorized multiplication tables. All the shortcuts had a derivation from previously integrated concepts, so that I had a conceptual understanding of what I was doing:

x 2, AKA "doubling:" Add the starting number to itself.

x 10. Move the digits one place (base 10!) to the left and put a zero at the end (in the ones' place - the number of ones, after multiplication by the base, is zero.)

x 5. 5 is half of 10, so first multiply by 10, and then halve the result.

x 9. Multiply by 10 and subtract the original number from the result.

x 4. 4 is the second power of 2, so double twice.

x 3. 3 is (2 + 1,) so double and then add the original number again.

x 6. Multiply by 5 and add another instance of the original number.

x 8. Double thrice.

x 7. Multiply by 5 and add twice the original.

In a comparative test after the first grade, we (unlike a class of memorizers) would have understood what we were doing, although we would have been slower, than memorizers just recalling what they learned by rote. By the end of the second grade, we would have had enough accumulated practice to be equally fast - and incomparably superior in understanding what was going on, and in being able to figure out new calculation methods for new contexts.

The essential advantage of learning conceptually is that what one learns makes sense. And that makes multiplication, and all of Arithmetic, and all that comes after, natural and easy. There wasn't a single pupil in my first-grade class who could have thought, "I am not good at math."

Hard Atheism: Why a "God" is Impossible

2011-01-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

Philosophers distinguish between "Soft Atheism" and "Hard Atheism."

"Soft Atheism" is the position that, as long as there is no evidence for the existence of a God, there is no more reason to believe in a God than to believe in gremlins or unicorns. In the absence of evidence, a reasonable human holds that gremlins, unicorns and gods are fictions that don't exist in reality.

"Hard Atheism" is the position that a belief in the existence of a God would contradict known facts of reality. Historically, "hard" Atheism was typically associated with the position that the properties attributed to the God or Gods of some specific religion were mutually contradictory, or stood in contradiction to known facts. This is not difficult to establish with respect to, for example, the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence traditionally ascribed to God in Abrahamic monotheisms. But the attributes ascribed to God differ from religion to religion; a Hindu or a Deist need not ascribe to her God any of the traditional attributes from this list. Until the last half-century, hard Atheism was always associated with preclusion of some specific religious conception of God, rather than of God/Gods in general.

A "hard Atheism" independent of any specific religious conception of God can only be based on a contradiction between reality and those attributes that are shared by every conceivable God of any conceivable religion. There are two such attributes: consciousness and non-measurability. A measurable entity cannot be "transcendent," and an entity incapable of awareness cannot be "spiritual" in any religious sense of those terms. Thus, a demonstration that the same entity cannot be simultaneously non-measurable and aware would be a foundation of a Hard Atheism independent of any specific religion's list of the attributes of its God. It would be the foundation of a simultaneously "hard" and universal Atheism.

The steps in demonstrating the contradiction are as follows:

(1) Mass and energy are measurable. To be non-measurable, a God cannot be physical in the sense of being composed of, or containing, matter or energy. A God is non-physical.

(2) To be aware is to be aware of the identity of something. To be aware, an aware God must have information about the identity of whatever it is ware of. A God must have information.

(3) The quantity of information in an entity, is given by Shannon's Law applied to the range of possible states of its physical attributes. For that quantity to be non-zero, the entity must have physical attributes with measurable properties. But only physical entities composed of matter and energy can have measurable properties and states. Therefore only physical entities composed of matter and energy can contain or carry information. (For more detail on this, an explanation of the need in every data network protocol stack, for a physical layer to carry the information, can be found in any standard textbook on data networks.)

(4) Therefore only a physical entity can be aware.

(5) Therefore a God, being non-physical, cannot be aware. QED.

Thus Shannon's Law precludes the possibility of there being a God who is simultaneously non-measurable and aware. If one understands Shannon's Law, and the evidence on which it stands, one must be a Hard Atheist - or incoherent.

The Supposed Atheisms of Hitler and Stalin

2010-11-30T08:29:00.000-08:00

One of the last century's most persistent urban legends is the supposed Atheism of two of its largest-scale mass murderers. Interestingly, this myth never took root in Poland, a country that suffered deeply under both Hitler and Stalin, perhaps because many Poles read Russian and German, and the older ones remember the two dictators' policies.

Hitler

Hitler consistently identified himself in his writings as a Christian, and a life-long Catholic. Before the Nazi party came into power, a faction led by Ernst Roehm successfully campaigned for the votes of German secularists, neo-Pagans and homosexuals. Hitler exterminated the top 61 leaders of this secularist faction in The Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Non-religious heterosexual Aryans were allowed to remain in the Nazi Party, but after 1934 the remaining Atheists had no political influence.

Germany's Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, and Catholic and Protestant religious parties, overwhelmingly supported Hitler, giving him special praise for his anti-abortion and anti-homosexual policies and for his "War Against Judeo-Bolshevism." Hitler repaid the favor, re-establishing state religions in previously secular conquered countries in Europe. Hitler created two new countries, Slovakia and Croatia, as Nazi satellites; both were established as Roman Catholic theocracies with Roman Catholic clergy at the head of their governments.

Purported "evidence" for Hitler's alleged Atheism comes mainly from "Hitler's Table Talk," a compendium "edited" by notorious pathological liar Martin Bormann. None of the supposed "documents" of Hitler's supposed "Atheism" has been reliably authenticated; most are demonstrably forgeries, fabricated long after their alleged dates.

Stalin

Joseph Stalin ("Party Name" of Yosip Dzhougashvili) had been a child prodigy whose religious poetry was celebrated by critics and widely published while he was still in his teens. Receiving a scholarship at 16, he chose to attend a seminary for future Orthodox Christian priests rather than a secular university. Shortly before his final exams, Dzhougashvili decided that the emerging Communist movement embodied Christian altruism more perfectly than the established Orthodox Christian Church, and became a Communist activist.

Arguments for Stalin's supposed Atheism hinge on the fact that he remained in the Communist Party during Lenin's brief anticlerical campaign (after the Orthodox Christian Church, which as an established church had played in Tzarist Russia a role analogous to that of the Communist Party in the subsequent Soviet regime, was dis-established and the Soviet State was made secular.) Stalin's one authenticated "Atheist" statement, from an extemporaneous speech ("You know, they are fooling us, there is no God...all this talk about God is sheer nonsense") dates from that period.

Once Lenin was dead, Stalin resumed his prior habit of making frequent mention of "God" and "God's will" in his speeches. Stalin consistently refused to include Atheist books in his library, calling them "antireligious waste-paper" ("Stalin's Secret Life," B. S. Ilizarov 2004.) While Stalin deported many priests to the Gulag during the Great Purge, the priests were mostly permitted to live - in contrast to (usually Atheist) "Old Bolsheviks," most of whom were tortured and killed.

According to pro-Stalin activists in the Russian Orthodox Church today, Stalin had a "born again" Christian spiritual experience in 1941, and remained a devout Christian, and was a devotee of the folk mystic St. Matryona of Moscow until his death. Convinced that the German invasion was divine punishment for the dis-establishment of the Orthodox Church and the imprisonment of its priests, Stalin not only released the few priests still imprisoned by 1941, but also re-established the Russian Orthodox Church as the official Church of the State; priests, monks, patriarchs and bishops were placed on Soviet state payroll and given privileges comparable to the privileges of members of the Communist Party.

In Soviet satellite states, such as Poland, local churches (such as the Roman Catholic Church in Poland) were given considerable political authority. For the first time in Polish history, attendance at lessons in the Catholic Catechism, taught by Catholic priests, was made mandatory in all government schools. (Before Stalin, these classes were optional, although in some schools dissenting students were kept in unheated hallways, even in the notorious cold of Polish winters, and many attended the catechism classes just to keep warm.) In the Soviet Union itself, persecution of believers and clergy was limited to sects and churches considered heretical by the Patriarchs of the Established Orthodox Church.

Post-Stalin, questions of religion and Atheism were delegated to the leaders of local Communist Parties, with extreme differences from country to country.

On Disagreement As A Tool Of Reason

2010-10-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

The use of disagreement as a tool of reason appears to have been pervasive in Hellenistic culture (I leave the identification of its first discovery to historians.) It reached its highest refinement in Talmudic discussions of "disagreement for a higher purpose" ("machloket l'shem shamayim," lit. "disagreement in the name of the sky.") The "higher purpose" was to get closer to truth - in contrast to ordinary, polemical disagreement. The purpose of polemical disagreement is other-directed: to convert another to what one already believes to be true. The purpose of "high-minded" disagreement is inner-directed: what Ayn Rand would call "selfish," and her less frank contemporaries would describe as serving one's own "self-actualization" or "self-realization." The purpose of "higher" (that is, selfish) disagreement is to get one's own views into closer alignment with reality external to consciousness - that is, into closer agreement with what actually exists.

The reason for the selfish utility of intellectual disagreement is simple, and rather obvious. When two sane, intelligent, honest and knowledgeable persons disagree, it must be, that at least one of them knows something that the other does not know, or, that at least one of them has made an error of reasoning, or some combination of these. Because I know that I am neither omniscient nor infallible, and I because I want the content of my awareness to be aligned as closely as possible with what actually exists in the world, every disagreement with one of my intellectual peers presents me with what could be an opportunity to extend my knowledge, or to correct an error in my understanding of the world. Such a disagreement is a selfish opportunity that I, as a rational man, am not minded to waste.

It is unfortunate that we live in a Christian-Moslem-Altruist culture in which disagreement is viewed, mainly, as an other-directed opportunity to improve the other person by converting her to one's own, presumed-to-be-truer viewpoint. Intellectual disagreement is a useful tool of selfish reason, and deserves to be used for this, its eminently higher and more moral function.

Configuring a Virtual Printer Using RedMon 1.7 on Windows 7

2010-09-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

The RedMon 1.7 Redirection Port Monitor is an open source product of GhostGum Software, frequently used to configure virtual printers on Microsoft operating systems based on Microsoft Windows NT technology. Among other uses, RedMon is often used to configure a virtual PostScript printer to bypass bugs in printer drivers provided by printer manufacturers (e.g. the current PrintStik driver from PlanOn) or to provide a network print server for clients that don't have native drivers for the shared printer.

RedMon 1.7 was released in 2001, and its design did not anticipate the new security features that Microsoft would add to Windows Vista and Windows 7 (as well as Windows Server 2008 and later.) RedMon extends explorer.exe, which in Windows 7 is started, by default, without the Administrator privileges needed to configure a virtual printer port. Running explorer.exe as an Administrator is deliberately made difficult in post-XP versions of Microsoft Windows, so as to deter the severe security vulnerabilities that may result. The following instructions assume that you are a skilled system administrator with a thorough knowledge of security considerations, and of system administration technologies such as the CygWin toolkit. If you are not in this category, please do not try, and do not blame me if you try and your system becomes compromised and useless because you did.

1. Make sure that you have, and know how to use, a shell tool capable of launching a background process on the Microsoft Windows distribution of your choice. I use XTerm, which runs under XWin from CygWin.com. You will need to have XWin running on your system in advance before you launch a privileged XTerm as described below.

2. Install all the software that you will need. For example, in order to configure a virtual PostScript printer, you will have installed GhostScript, gsprint and RedMon in advance.

3. Back up the system, so that you will be able to restore it if it becomes compromised while explorer.exe is running in privileged mode.

4. Before you run explorer.exe as Administrator, cut off all potential vectors through which a privileged instance of explorer.exe can be exploited (and through it, your system.) Shut down all applications that can act as web or e-mail clients, and do not start any such applications again until you have finished configuring the virtual printer. Physically unplug the network from your computer if you can. If you can't, disable all external network interfaces. If you are administering remotely, make sure that the network you are using for remote administration is physically isolated from non-secure networks, and disable all external network interfaces other than the one you are using.

5. Start a privileged instance of your shell tool. For example, right-click XTerm in the Start->Programs menu and select "Run as Administrator." Then change directory in this shell tool to /cygdrive/c/Windows or equivalent.

6. Use the Task Manager to kill the default instance of explorer.exe.

7. Background a privileged instance of explorer.exe with your shell tool. For example, in the above privileged instance of XTerm give the command "./explorer.exe &".

8. Configure your virtual printer.

9. Use the Task Manager to kill the privileged explorer.exe and to start a new default instance.

10. Restore network connections.

Most administrator tasks that worked in Windows XP but don't work in Windows 7 can be made to work with a work-around similar to the above.

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part IV

2010-06-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

(Please read Part I, Part II, and Part III first.)

7. Insulin and Low-Carbohydrate Diets

The revival of Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution in recent years was sparked by increasing popularity of low-carbohydrate diets (Atkins etc.) These diets have a principled, scientific basis derived from the study of the role of insulin in the human body.

Insulin is secreted into the blood stream in response to high levels of glucose in the blood. Insulin promotes the conversion of excess glucose into triglycerides, and eventually body fat: this is how energy is stored in times of abundance for use in times of famine.

The first function of insulin is to protect the body from excess levels of glucose. Diabetes, a group of diseases marked by the lack of normal release of insulin in response to an excess of glucose, leaves the body exposed to severe damage from excess glucose.

The second function of insulin is to convert the overly abundant glucose into triglycerides, and eventually into body fat for energy storage. The absence of insulin causes the reverse: conversion of stored fat to usable energy.

The third is to increase hunger. Until the last half-century, most human populations were plagued by famines, often exacerbated by tyranny and war. A human who had stored enough fat in times of plenty could survive a famine more often; insulin hunger encouraged more eating, and the formation of more stored fat, in those rare times when there was more than enough to eat. More fat also meant more cardiovascular disease and a shorter lifespan, but in most cultures, what happened to the individual after the age of reproduction and child-rearing had little evolutionary impact. In most local environments human evolution favored fat for surviving a famine, and a lifespan of 30-40 years.

In recent decades modern agricultural technology changed this picture. With the threat of famine removed, first in the West and then elsewhere, humans started to aim for a longer individual lifespan. In the context of changed goals, such as achieving lifespans of eight decades or longer, fat became an obstacle instead of an advantage. The logical solution, in view of the scientific identification of the three roles of insulin, was to fight fat and its consequences by limiting the intake of carbohydrates, and thus limiting blood glucose levels to below the threshold for the release of insulin. Hence the advice, from Atkins 1972 onward, to limit one's intake of bulk carbohydrates to less than one gram per two kilograms of body weight per day.

This advice was not unopposed. Before the three roles of insulin had been identified, diets were based on a well-understood principle: the law of conservation of energy. Every calorie of energy eaten must be either excreted, expended, or stored. To store less energy in the form of body fat, one must eat fewer calories. The advice to stop counting calories, even if only to count grams of carbohydrates instead, seemed unprincipled. The advocates of low-carb diets were telling patients to stop acting on principle and to act on a gimmick instead. The trouble was that for many, albeit not for everyone, the gimmick worked.

Of course the low-carb diets did not repeal the law of conservation of energy. They worked because, in the absence of insulin, the low-carb dieter was not hungry and ate fewer calories. (The Atkins diet also encouraged the consumption of high-fiber greens, facilitating the elimination of excess food from the digestive tract.) In contrast, the traditional calorie-counting dieter often consumed most of her closely watched calories in the form of bulk carbohydrates - and her insulin spiked, causing hunger. And so the calorie-counter was discouraged, stressed, tempted to cheat. The difference was, and is, a fascinating illustration of the importance of tracking the context when one is following a principle.

8. CoEvolution Becomes "Paleo."

Stewart Brand renounced the doctrine of CoEvolution when phyletic gradualism, on which the doctrine was based, had been disconfirmed and replaced by punctuated equilibrium. But, just like dietitians attached to the principle of calories, the now disconfirmed principle of CoEvolution had adherents who evaded, ignored, or simply did not understand the principle of punctuated equilibrium.

One anthropological observation sometimes cited in favor of low-carbohydrate diets was that pre-European-contact Eskimos lived on what was practically the highest-fat, lowest-carbohydrate diet on the planet, yet were physically fit enough to thrive in the world's most adverse environment. To the remaining believers in CoEvolution this made sense: the Eskimos lived without agriculture or industry, much as Paleolithic men had lived ten thousand years ago. Similarly, pre-agricultural tribes inhabiting tropical islands where there had never been famines, did not exhibit the cardiovascular pathologies observed in environments where fat accumulation had evolved as an adaptation to periodic famine. In the context of punctuated equilibrium, these would be viewed as examples of rapid (and possibly recent) evolutionary adaptation to local conditions. Believers in CoEvolution, however, saw in those selected anthropological observations a validation of their belief that a return to a Paleolithic lifestyle was a recipe for the achievement of optimal health - optimal health that humans had been designed for by slow (Co)Evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. Thus was CoEvolution re-born as "Modern Paleo." Unlike punctuated equilibrium, it was a principle that one did not need measure theory to understand. Thus one could do a low-carbohydrate diet not as a "gimmick" using the peculiar relation of hunger to insulin, but as part of the application of "The Principle of Evolution." It was no longer the principle of how evolution was understood to work, by those who cared to understand how it worked. But it did correspond to how evolution had been formerly thought to work, and how it was still thought to work by nearly everyone else. And for the popular self-help culture that was good enough.

Unfortunately for adherents, the Modern Paleo Principle leads to something quite different from optimal health - unless modified by altogether non-paleolithic, industrial-strength food supplements. The most telling example is iodine. No one really knows why, but a low-carbohydrate diet, when it does not include plenty of seafood and kelp, sometimes causes an iodine deficiency severe enough to end in hypothyroidism. And so "Modern Paleo" adherents are the world's best consumers of un-paleolithic, industrially purified, high-potency Iodine/Potassium Iodide tablets.

It happens that all "contemporary Paleo" cultures that have been found by anthropologists to enjoy relatively good health, live on islands or on seashores, where they get plenty of iodine in their diet from seafood and from kelp and other marine vegetation. Somehow even the most non-Paleolithic islanders, such as the modern Japanese, are also very healthy, as long as they get enough iodine from seafood and kelp. Even if, as in the case of the Japanese, the bulk of their diet is rice and other modern grains.

One explanation of the iodine link is that iodine is needed to live without bulk carbohydrates. So how did inland primitives live and reproduce without industrial iodine? It turns out that they ate bulk carbohydrates. Wild sugar cane is a favorite of inland primitives in New Guinea. Wild rice (Zizania) was a staple in the diet of pre-Columbian inland North Americans. Low-carb might not be, for at least some of us, a return to the diet of our stone-age ancestors.

Another potential explanation is that some of us may have had more recent ancestors who lived on islands or by the shore. The very rapid evolution to local optima - an aspect of punctuated equilibrium - would have moved the relevant ancestral genomes in the direction of dependence on abundant iodine in the diet. Some people today may need industrial iodine supplements, because some of their specific ancestors had evolved to depend on high levels of this specific nutrient.

Evolution does not do design. We are not "designed by evolution" to eat the food or live the lives of our Paleolithic ancestors. What evolution is known to have done, is to quickly if imperfectly adapt one's specific ancestors, who lived in hundreds of different environments, to be fit to survive and reproduce in those specific environments - and not in the ancestral environments of other humans. The daily food of one may be pain or death to another. The real universal principle is to use one's mind to create for oneself, by systematic self-knowledge and by the artifice of one's mind, a diet and an environment that will compensate for evolution's lack of design.

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part III

2010-06-15T19:09:00.000-07:00

(Please read Part I and Part II before this part.)

5. Why Punctuated Equilibrium Matters

So far, this discussion dealt mainly with an issue that, at first glance, might not seem important to anyone outside a narrow circle of systematic and theoretical biologists. Hardly anyone outside this narrow circle has even heard of "phyletic gradualism" or of "punctuated equilibrium." Yet this first glance is deceiving. Up to about 1990, even knowledgeable biologists often conflated what we now call "phyletic gradualism" with evolution as such (much as the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum physics is often conflated, even in the minds of the less knowledgeable physicists, with just quantum physics.) Even today, there are many professors of biology, not to mention biology teachers in middle schools and high schools, who are out of their intellectual comfort zone in measure theory and genetic algorithms - and therefore, who still think of phyletic gradualism as simply "Evolution." And therefore, so do almost all non-biologists. Most people today, if they have any ideas having to do with evolution at all, have ideas based on a false picture of how evolution works.

And thus we come to the most important reason why punctuated equilibrium matters. An important aspect of rationality is the use of principles as a guide to everyday life. One of the most useful principles is that the human body is a product of evolution. A false idea of how evolution works can sabotage the application of this principle to one's life. At worst, a false idea of how evolution works can trap the user into activities and habits that worsen, rather than improve, one's health and one's performance at life.

Unfortunately, there are many diet, exercise, and other self-help regimens that claim to be principled applications of the principle of evolution - and are actually applications of the (disconfirmed) phyletic gradualism model. Most of these regimens are based on a specific embodiment of the phyletic gradualism model: Stewart Brand's once popular doctrine of "CoEvolution."

6. "Co-Evolution" and Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand's work has affected more people who don't know his name than the work of any other near-anonymous intellectual on the planet. An early associate of Ken Kesey and his "performance art" collective the "Merry Pranksters," he had unblemished Hippie credentials, combined with (unusual for a Hippie) a genuine love of science and technology. The mainspring of the hippies' movement was opposition to anything that might be a part of "the system:" not merely against the political system, but against everything from systematic thought to industrial production to intelligible art. This took many of the early hippies into lives of applied nihilism that often led to the mental hospital or to the grave. Brand, with his love of history and technology, was a rebel among rebels.

By 1968, many of Brand's hippie friends were dead from rejection of science and, especially, from rejection of technology. In 1969, Brand began publishing The Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of technologies (books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, electrical gear and so on) that might be useful for survival in various degrees of isolation from "the System." It became an instant best-seller, reaching a million and a half copies in 1972. The Whole Earth Catalog was not only a survival manual for hippies, but also for a wide range of "survivalists" preparing for eventualities that ranged from nuclear war and a Communist invasion, to an immediate collapse of civilization (as in "Atlas Shrugged" read by a literalist.) The Whole Earth Catalog was also used by millions who were neither hippies nor survivalists, but who found many of the technologies in the book simply useful for living better lives.

In the meantime, Brand developed something that the early hippies had disdained: an ideology that grounded their anti-industrial attitude and lifestyle in the evolutionary science of his time; that is, in what today is called the phyletic gradualism model. Brand's "ideology of the Hippies" came to be known as the doctrine of CoEvolution, after one of its key ideas. Brand propagated his ideas in a periodical, founded in 1974, that he called "Co-Evolution Quarterly."

According to Stewart Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution, for the first several millions of years of hominid evolution our ancestors, and the life-forms in their environment, had co-evolved into a state of optimal human health in an environment optimally suited for human life. This optimal co-existence came to an end at the breakpoint between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic periods of human prehistory. It ended when humans stopped waiting for the life in their environment to co-evolve with them, slowly, into a harmonious state optimal for the well-being of all life. Instead, humans started to change their environment by means of agriculture, engineering, and eventually the building of cities and industries. These changes resulted in an environment that was no longer suited to optimal human health and life.

The other prong of the doctrine was that, given how slow evolution appeared to be under the phyletic gradualism model, human biology today was essentially unchanged since paleolithic times. Therefore the existential counsel of Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution was that, to achieve optimal well-being, one should try to live today as closely as possible to how our paleolithic ancestors lived ten thousand years ago; while trying to live in an environment approximating, as closely as possible, their environment - and working to bring the global physical environment back to what it was then. It was not a coincidence that the result also resembled how many of the Hippies already lived, as a result of trying to live apart from "the System."

The specific recommendations were, first, to avoid eating foods created or processed by industrial or artificial methods such as milling, canning, or chemical reactions or adding artificial preservatives or flavors. Then, to avoid the products of industrial agriculture, and to grow one's own, or to barter or trade with small-scale, home-based farmers, and then only those who did not use any artificial chemicals or other artificial methods. Eating, if possible, only those breeds of animals and plants that were closest to what existed before the beginning of agriculture. Avoiding foods that could not have been hunted or gathered by pre-agricultural humans.

The CoEvolution lifestyle went beyond diet. Footwear was to be avoided in favor of going barefoot; at most, it was to be limited to protecting the bottom of the sole. Lift, lateral support and arch support footwear was out. Exercise was to be limited to the natural motions of running, climbing, and hefting - no artificial positions or exercise machines. No shaving; no artificial cosmetics, shampoo, soap, or deodorant. No furniture for sleeping or sitting off the floor (but mats and pillows, in place of paleolithic animal pelts on the floor, were OK.) Any work that could not be done on the floor was to be done standing.

Elements of the CoEvolution lifestyle caught on with many people who would never have thought of themselves as hippies, often for good reasons. Many men stopped shaving, both to save time and to avoid the inevitable nicks and cuts. Some found it easier to work standing than sitting; many slept better on futons than on beds. Most of all, Americans began to re-learn how much better authentic, unprocessed food tasted than the processed, industrial kind. Stewart Brand changed how we lived, and how we thought about living.

Yet within a few years, the phyletic gradualism model at the foundation of the CoEvolution doctrine began to be disconfirmed by increasing evidence for punctuated equilibrium. Brand, who had been a biology major at Stanford, was among the first to abandon the doctrine to which he had given life. In 1985, "CoEvolution Quarterly" became "Whole Earth Review," and CoEvolution was not heard from again. Brand re-invented himself as a corporate futurist, in 1988 co-founding the Global Business Network and working for, among others, Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. But Brand's doctrine of CoEvolution would not die with its founder's change of mind. Few non-specialists understood the evidence that had disconfirmed phyletic gradualism and put punctuated equilibrium in its place. And two decades later, CoEvolution re-entered the marketplace of self-help ideas under other names.

(Continued in Part IV.)

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part II

2010-05-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

(please read Part I first.)

3. The Evidence

The first factor in the overthrow of phyletic gradualism was the identification of the actual mechanism by which the information carried by the DNA is expressed. A sequence of DNA codes is nothing like a blueprint for some specific trait. Instead, each DNA code identifies a specific amino acid in one of thousands of strings of amino acids. These strings are called peptides. Each peptide, in turn, may have one or more functions that it performs in the organism: as part of the structure of a protein, or as an enzyme, or a hormone, or a neurotransmitter, or as a part of the molecular "skeleton" that determines the structure of tissues and organs. These, in turn, participate in biochemical pathways and physiological and anatomical structures responsible for the observed traits of the organism. Thus, the correspondences between the codes and the traits are manifold, multivariate, non-linear and often discontinuous. They result in complicated probability-of-reproductive-success surfaces that have many small local optima, most of them low hills whose peaks are far below the high peak of a global optimum.

The second was discovered (see MODPAC: A modular package of programs for fitting model parameters to data and plotting fitted curves. Reed, Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 1976) by mathematicians and computer scientists working on the problem of finding the optimal values of the parameters of a quantitative model to fit a body of data. All the methods, including not only algebraic approximations but also "genetic programming" methods that simulate the mechanisms of genetic evolution (Koza, Genetic Programming, MIT Press 1992) when invoked on a problem with multiple local optima, converge rapidly on some happenstance local optimum near the starting point. Once at this happenstance local optimum, the parameter-fitting mechanisms are at equilibrium. The values of the parameters stay permanently frozen, with a fit often far below the global optimum, unless dislodged by additional computational techniques (exploration, explosion, simulated annealing) that have no equivalent in natural evolution.

The third came from paleontology. In the fossil record, new traits and species appear in the course of only a few dozen generations, only to continue practically unchanged for tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands, or millions of generations thereafter. It was this observation that first led to the label "punctuated equilibrium."

The fourth came from engineering. Until the 1970s, it was generally assumed that evolved organs, particularly those that remained unchanged over many millions of generations, and passed unchanged from very ancient classes of organisms to new ones, had evolved to a structure that was optimal for their biological function. Even when the evolved structures were not what an engineer would have designed, it was assumed that the result of evolution was optimal under some set of as yet unidentified constraints. In the 1970s, mechanical and electrical engineers began to look at evolved systems in the hope of identifying designs that might work better than those they already knew. They found only a few rare cases where the results of evolution were anything close to objectively optimal. They were confronted, instead, with all manner of clumsy contraptions just barely good enough for organisms to survive. The vertebrate eye, for example, has not changed in its basic structure from fishes to humans. Yet if an engineer were to design an array of light sensors - as for a digital camera - she would attach the outputs to cabling on the back or the side of the sensors, so that nothing would disperse, or block the path, of light coming into the front of the sensors from the lens. In the vertebrate eye, on the other hand, the optic nerve, which carries the output of retinal sensors from the eye to the brain, comes from the brain into the inside of each eyeball through a hole in the retina. This hole in the array of retinal sensors is why we have a blind spot in each eye (which digital cameras don't have.) The neurons of the optic nerve then pass in front of the light sensors, in the path of incoming light, and connect to the light-sensing rods and cones from the front (where the light comes in.) This is just one of thousands of examples of globally sub-optimal, clumsy structures; just-good-enough-to-survive local optima frozen by evolution.

The fifth was the discovery of recent, ongoing evolutionary changes in human traits whose relevance to reproductive success was affected by recent changes in the human cultural environment. One such change was the introduction of military conscription in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the introduction of footwear with stiff lateral support at around the same time. Before mass production of boots and shoes most humans went barefoot. When most travel was by foot, and most work was done walking or standing, anatomical abnormalities of the feet were severely disabling. The effect of flat feet and other inherited abnormalities was so adverse, and the abnormalities so rare, that men with these abnormalities were (and, in countries with conscription, still are) exempt from conscription. This exemption had two effects. Men with anatomical abnormalities of the foot were much less likely to be killed or maimed in war. More importantly, they stayed and reproduced, while conscripts were away from their neighborhoods and families for a large part of the duration of their prime reproductive years.

Switch to the 1990s. The Achilles Project (Burzykowski et al 2003) measured the incidence of foot disease, including the prevalence of inherited anatomical abnormalities of the feet, in a sample of 1085 randomly selected subjects in 16 European countries. The incidence of anatomical abnormalities of the foot varied between 20.4% (one in five subjects) and 24.8% (one in four.) This in a mere 8 generations after a changed cultural environment moved the local optimum for reproductive success to a different place.

4. Punctuated Equilibrium

Two thousand years ago, Archimedes' formulation and derivation of Archimedes' Principle demonstrated that the laws of nature can be not merely observed and measured, but grounded and understood through the application of reason - of logic and mathematics - to more fundamental and evident laws and facts. The principle of derivation set what is still the highest standard in scientific understanding of how nature works. Punctuated Equilibrium is the fact that when a change in the environment changes the locations of local optima for reproductive success, the traits and species affected by this change are efficiently and quickly moved by natural selection to new local optima - where they may stay, without further modification, until the location of the local optima changes again. The local optima of evolutionary equilibrium do not correspond to "design," in the sense of some global optimum of fitness or health. They are, rather, the product of a random process, which converges on some local optimum without regard to its optimality in any global sense. And this fact can be mathematically derived, in the best tradition of Archimedes, from the application of mathematical measure theory to genetic programming.

(continued in Part III.)

Why Evolution Doesn't Do Design: Part I

2010-05-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

1. Introduction

This blog post is about how the Phyletic Gradualism model of evolution is disconfirmed and false, and why the Punctuated Equilibrium model is right. Who cares? If you use (or try to use) the conclusions of evolutionary science to improve your health and your life, you ought to care.

Most people (even scientists) who believe in a God or Gods, and also "believe in evolution," even if they deny the explicit interventionist versions of "intelligent design" still think of evolution as design by other means. In other words, they believe that God's creation is perfect; that God set up and used the laws of nature to result in organisms capable of optimal life and optimal health. The reason for this blog post is to make it easier for my fellow Atheists to separate the science from the beliefs of scientists.

2. The Intellectual Origin of Phyletic Gradualism

It is not the custom of scientists to challenge cultural preconceptions without first having confronted and assembled overwhelming evidence. The religious belief in the perfection of God's creation was not seen by Darwin and his contemporaries as challenged by the theory of evolution. In their day, to contradict, from evidence, the scriptural account of creation, in favor the operation of natural laws that might or might not have been created by a God, was challenge enough. As late as 1970, the phyletic gradualism model was generally accepted by evolutionary biologists, in part because it did not contradict the notion of evolution leading to, or at least moving in the direction of, organs and organisms optimally suited to an optimally healthy existence in their natural environment.

Since the course of evolution is set by a random process of mutations followed by natural selection through differences in reproductive success, its Archimedean derivation is necessarily based on measure theory, probability theory, and mathematical and computational statistics. (Reader, do not be intimidated. You do not need to be a mathematician to understand the essence of the derivation; I will give pictorial hints so that you can let your visual imagination do most of the work.) In measure-theoretic representations of evolution, the probability of reproductive success can be visualized as the height of a variable surface, above the multi-dimensional space representing the state of the genome. A peak at which this probability is higher than it is at all points around it, is called a local optimum. The global optimum, corresponding to the highest possible likelihood of reproductive success, is the highest peak.

Up until the identification, in 1953, of DNA as the genetic material of life, biologists thought of "genes" as direct blueprints for all the tissues, organs and structures of the organism. Assuming this correspondence between the genes, and the traits of the organism, led the scientists of the time to think of the probability-of-reproductive-success surface as having a single optimum only: the location at which the genetic "blueprint" corresponds to the optimal, rational design for the given structure, organ or tissue. Then natural selection selects those mutations that move up the upward slope, rather than down the downward slope, from the present spot on this surface. Gradual evolution to the single, global optimum: this is the mathematical expression of the "Phyletic Gradualism" model.

It took two decades, roughly from 1971 to 1992, for this model to be overturned.

(continued in Part II)

No, I do not "publish in JARS."

2010-05-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

I have heard from a friend that someone is circulating, in media to which I don't have access, the rumor that I publish - note the use of the present tense - in Chris Sciabarra's "Journal of Ayn Rand Studies." In reference to peer-reviewed media, "publish" would mean that I'm still submitting original articles for publication in JARS. (I understand, from comments, that some may be tempted to replace this meaning of "publish" by other meanings that this word has in other contexts; and then twist the result into a contradiction - and accuse me of dishonesty or incoherence, on the basis of equivocations thus manufactured. In this note, I am using "publish" in the one specific sense stated above, where "He publishes in Journal X" means "He submits his original articles for publication in Journal X.") I have not submitted an original article to JARS for years, and I have no intention of doing so, ever. The rumor is false.

In my early, pre-tenure years at my university, beginning in the 2000-2001 academic year, I did some research on the origin of the parallels between the schemata of knowledge representation in Ayn Rand's Objectivist epistemology and in object-oriented programming languages. JARS was a new journal that had just published its first volume, and its charter - to document Ayn Rand's influence on the history of ideas and culture - fit my research. I submitted my article on the origin of the parallels, and it was published. I noticed the poor quality of Sciabarra's editorial process, but I ascribed this to the "teething pains" of a new publication. I communicated my concerns about editorial laxness to Sciabarra, and I expected the quality of his editorial policy to improve.

Sciabarra's editorial policy did not improve. By 2006 he had published several articles of such low quality that they were clearly counterproductive to his stated goal, of getting Ayn Rand's intellectual and artistic influence to be taken seriously in academia. I communicated with Sciabarra at length, and I suggested changes that, had they been made, would have turned JARS into what, according to its published charter, it should have been. Sciabarra discussed the changes that I had suggested to him with his editorial board, but no changes were made. JARS continued to publish articles that were, in my judgment, unscholarly, intellectually disreputable rubbish. It was at that point that I decided never again to submit an original article for publication in JARS.

About a year later, JARS published a couple of articles on Objectivism and religion. My notes on those articles evolved into commentary that, in my judgment, needed to be aired. When I publish an article that may invite commentary, I expect that commentary to appear in the same journal, where I will see it and where I can reply. This is standard academic practice, with which I agree. While I would not submit an original article to JARS, it was and remains my judgment that my commentary was productive and useful. Therefore I followed normal practice, and sent my commentary to the journal that had published the articles that I was commenting on.

There was also an article that I submitted to JARS back in May 2005, and which was accepted for publication after being reviewed, by a peer reviewer whose work with me was unusually productive and well-informed (especially for JARS!) and continued well after the article was accepted. Peer review work is unpaid and anonymous; the reviewer's only payment is in the quality of work published in the journal to which the reviewer contributes her otherwise un-renumerated work. I participate in the peer-review process of a broad range of meetings, journals, and granting agencies. If a paper I had worked on were withdrawn after acceptance, for any reason short of its author repudiating the content, I would judge this as a breach of trust, the work I had worked having been wasted and unpaid-for. Therefore, I would not consider withdrawing an already accepted article, whose content I still stand by, as an ethically justifiable option. This last article was recently printed, bringing all association that I've ever had with JARS to a final close. (I have been told that the person who started the rumor - that I still submit articles to JARS - had prior access to the full text of the article, and should have read in the top footnote that it was submitted in May 2005, but only mentioned that the article was printed recently - not that it was originally submitted 5 years ago.)

I agree, after long scrutiny, with everything Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff have written about the principle of moral sanction. I find nothing in this principle, or in Ayn Rand's own actions on this principle, that would mandate more than I have already decided and done. I have no proof that the failure to disclose the May 2005 submission date of the article, which I deduce is what started the rumor, was deliberate; and therefore I am not ready to judge its moral import.

The quality of JARS has continued to fall, so I'm not likely to find another of its articles worthy of comment in the future. I've let my subscription expire years ago (although, as is standard for refereed journals, I did receive an author's copy of the recent issue.) In the present, the rumor that I publish in JARS is false.

Kenyan, Nigerian, all the same...

2010-05-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

From the morning's e-mail:

Dear Friend, This letter is not intended to cause any embarrassment in whatever form, rather is compelled to contact your esteemed self, following the knowledge of your high repute and trustworthiness. I am David Garfield, Chief Campaign Officer of the PRINCIPAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE OF DEMOCRATS: OBAMA 2014 INC ID: C00411934. I write to seek your sincere assistance in transferring the sum of 10M GBP 10 million Pounds sterling. I discovered my office has some excess funds amounting too 10 million Pounds recovered from donations and grants from democrats around the world during our election campaign and pleas for support for our incumbent president Barack Hussein Obama, According to plans, The excess funds was to used in clearing debts owed by Mrs Hillary Clinton during her campaign programs,I taught there is a better way of expending this funds.I want this money to be used to alleviate the poverty and sufferings of children in Iraq and Africa and donate to Charity organizations around the world. My plea to you is that you assist me get this funds out of the United Kingdom where it is presently lodged safe and for your assistance ,you will have a fair percentage of the total money and all investments shall be under your supervision. This simple transfer process could be arranged in less than 3 working days. I await your sincere response, David .A. Garfield. Chief Campaign Officer, Barack Obama Campaign Office. Phone: +447035969385. E-MAIL:davidgarfieldsr@gmail.com garfield.david@krovatka.su

".SU" is the country code of the former Soviet Union. "Krovatka" is Belorussian for "where we make cows."

My Premise-Checking Habit

2010-05-11T16:09:00.000-07:00

What is the difference between a philosopher and a scientist? When the philosopher comes to a contradiction, she checks her premises. The scientist does not wait for a contradiction.

Maybe. My own premise-checking habit predates my career choice. When I first realized that some grownups believed, and told me, things that were false, I decided that I would rather doubt a hundred truths than believe one falsehood. Later, on encountering the derivation of Archimedes' Principle, I was so taken with the realization that the facts of reality not only could be observed, but could be understood by reason, that I decided to make this my future job. It helped me to know that as a scientist, I would never need to pretend that I knew, when I doubted.

Later, when I began to read the work of Ayn Rand, I was struck by the similarity between her approach to knowledge and that of the scientists I had met. The scientists knew that certain assumptions had to be made for scientific investigation of nature to be possible; Ayn Rand pointed out that these "assumptions" were really axioms that could not be contradicted without self-exclusion, which made them certain. I already knew that in science the results of replicated measurements comparing an observed value with an external standard were "practically certain;" from Ayn Rand I learned the principles that make them contextually certain. Laws that exactly describe some set of contextually certain measurements are also contextually certain, in the context of the precision and range of the measurements that such laws describe. Logically necessary deductions from already certain premises are contextually certain in the intersection of the contexts of their premises. As long as one tracks context in one's deductions and derivations, one can be certain about what one knows with contextual certainty; and one can know in what contexts that which one knows is certain. Everything outside those contexts is rightly open to doubt, regardless of how many people think it true or wish it were true.

Later, as a student of cognitive psychology, I learned about confirmation bias: the universal human tendency to notice and think about evidence that confirms one's prior beliefs and hypotheses, and to ignore and evade evidence to the contrary. I trained myself, as rigorously as I could, in the habit of going against my own confirmation bias; of looking for experiments and observations that would produce, if such evidence existed, evidence against the hypotheses that I myself advanced and wanted to be true. And, like many in the human sciences, I worked on methods for guarding the process of science against confirmation bias and other biases common to all men, including scientists such as myself.

One of my PhD mentors was Ray Hyman. Ray studied physical scientists who had become interested in "psychical" (later called "paranormal") phenomena. Physical scientists, like Objectivists, pride themselves on thinking conceptually, yet grounding even their most abstract ideas in observable and measurable fact. Yet physical scientists, ignorant of their own confirmation bias, were always the first to be fooled by "evidence" that invariably disappeared under the lens of bias-proof methods worked out by cognitive psychologists. More recently, those of us who look at the work of physical scientists through the lens of cognitive psychology were treated to "climategate:" the ultimate spectacle of physical scientists intoxicated with confirmation bias, and keeping their data secret lest their hypotheses be debunked, as alleged "paranormal phenomena" have been, if subjected to the methods of bias-proof analysis that have become standard in the human sciences.

In Objectivist circles, it is customary to give to ideas held by fellow Objectivists the benefit of the doubt. Surely, the reasoning goes, one's fellow Objectivists have sound epistemology, and therefore are less likely to be mistaken than non-Objectivists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Ayn Rand knew what we now know about confirmation bias. My guess is that she didn't, because she would have advised Objectivists to guard against it, if only she had known. And so some Objectivists, as I recently found out, regard my own attitude - that I would rather doubt a hundred truths than believe one falsehood - as a flaw of character. As one put it in a letter, 'it indicates a juvenile "iconoclastic" mentality rather than a strive (maybe "a striving?") for knowledge.'

The iconoclasts were early Christian fanatics who defaced artwork, lest statues and paintings receive admiration that the iconoclasts reserved for God. How one gets from an observation of habitual premise-checking to a diagnosis of "iconoclasm" I don't know. What I do know, is that no idea should be exempt from doubt because of who holds it. Even if that person is an Objectivist. Even if it is an idea held by many Objectivists. If this be "iconoclasm," make the most of it.

Healthy Weight

2010-03-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

If one were to ask someone who is not familiar with the history of "Public Health" about the meaning of "ideal" ("acceptable," "normal," "healthy") human weight, she would probably guess, that it is the weight range at which the risk of death is, other things being equal, at minimum. What, then, is one to make of these statements in the abstract of a recently published study (Orpana HM, Berthelot JM, Kaplan MS, Feeny DH, McFarland B, Ross NA. 2010: BMI and mortality: results from a national longitudinal study of Canadian adults:)

A significant increased risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow-up was observed for underweight (BMI 18.5-35; RR = 1.36, P l.t. 0.05) and obesity class II+ (BMI to 35; RR = 1.36, P l.t. 0.05). Overweight (BMI 25 to 30) was associated with a significantly decreased risk of death (RR = 0.83, P l.t. 0.05). The RR was close to one for obesity class I (BMI 30-35; RR = 0.95, P l.t. 0.05). Our results are similar to those from other recent studies, confirming that underweight and obesity class II+ are clear risk factors for mortality, and showing that when compared to the acceptable BMI category, overweight appears to be protective against mortality.

"Overweight appears to be protective against mortality." Then why is it called "overweight?"

"Public health," like "public education," was imported to America from Prussia. The Prussian state was founded by a military order of armed monks, who imposed on the people they conquered an order of Christian discipline similar to their own. Their ideal subject was a man optimally suited for military service. Their ideal soldier was a dragoon, that is, a mounted infantryman: Dragons could be used either as highly mobile infantry or as light cavalry. This meant that the ideal soldier, and therefore the ideal Prussian subject, had to be light enough to ride all day without exhausting the horse. The acceptable weight for conscripting a Prussian dragoon is still with us as the range of "acceptable weight" used in public health studies. Adapted to America's greater variation of human height by substituting height-adjusted BMI for weight, the old Prussian standard of "acceptable weight" remains in world-wide "public health" use to this day.

An objective science of human health would set ideal weight to the weight at which the likelihoods of disease and death from disease are minimized. The corresponding measurement is the relative risk of death: the ideal weight is the weight at which the long term (say 12 year) risk of death is at its local minimum. In other words, the real, objective ideal weight has nothing to do with the desiderata of the Prussian General Staff. It ought to be set by measuring the facts of reality. And, from the facts measured to date, it is clear that the objectively optimal weight is nothing like the "acceptable weight" found in "public health" directives. It is almost certainly somewhere in the range that "public health" professionals call "overweight:" BMI between 25.1 and 29.9.

From the perspective of objective scientific methodology there is much wrong with BMI as the independent variable in health research. Optimal weight should be measured by plotting long-term (e.g. 12-year) mortality versus actual weight in the context of sex/gender, age and height. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the raw data that I would need to set an objective target range for my own weight. In the absence of such data, I use a target of BMI 27.5, the midpoint of the BMI range with the lowest observed mortality risk in nearly all quantitative studies to date.

The continuing use of the Prussian "acceptable weight" ranges, objectively known to be sub-optimal for human life and health, should be an epistemic scandal. It is a public folly with political uses. It permits "public health" authoritarians to claim that individual choice must be restricted to save us from the supposed epidemic of fat. Because if one accepts the Prussian pseudo-standard, 68% of Americans are overweight or obese. And this Prussian pseudo-standard is seldom challenged, because Americans "educated" in Prussian-standard public schools are so concept-deprived that they will believe anything, as long as it comes with a number and a percent sign somewhere - and will submit to the authority of the hoax.

Leonard Peikoff recommends Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day"

2010-01-25T02:13:00.000-08:00

(I am posting this from Blogger because it was blocked from being posted directly on Facebook - someone reported the link as "abusive." Blast the coward's veto!)

Leonard Peikoff writes: ... it is rare to find anyone who understands the basic identity of Christianity and Communism. In this context, therefore, I want to plug an old dystopian novel, This Perfect Day, by a good writer, Ira Levin, whose works and ideas are mixed — at different points of his life he was an admirer and then an enemy of Objectivism. Despite its philosophic inconsistencies, however, I found the book compelling for a number of reasons, but the relevant one here is indicated by
this example: the children in the book’s future totalitarian state learned to skip rope while reciting a paean to four heroes on whom their way of life is based. Two of the four are fictional. The other two are Marx and Christ.

(Full text: Impact, newsletter of the Ayn Rand Institute - PDF)

A practical guideline for Objectivist activism on political issues

2010-01-20T15:15:00.000-08:00

This practical guideline is a follow-up on "A Radical Strategy for Objectivists."

The only proper function of government, and therefore the only principled foundation for Objectivist activism on any political issue, is the protection of individual human rights. Rights merit my activism because they are the pre-requisite conditions for living a life appropriate to a human qua human. Because the species-specific evolved means of human survival is the judgment of one's mind, all individual rights are sub-categories of just one fundamental right: the right to live by the judgment of one's own mind. Therefore the essential guideline for Objectivist political activism is to relate the target issue to living by the judgment of one's own mind.

Corrolaries:

1. If I don't understand how the political issue at hand relates to living by the judgment of one's own mind, then I don't understand it well enough to engage in principled activism on the issue.

2. If, in the context of writing for the purpose of Objectivist political activism, I fail to link the political issue that I'm writing about to living by the judgment of one's own mind, then what I have written is not a contribution to principled Objectivist activism.

Under the Influence of Confirmation Bias

2010-01-19T17:54:00.000-08:00

Quantitative and computer-based methods and models can help - or hinder - the transformation of data into knowledge. Whether they help or hinder depends on how well their designers and users know the strengths and weaknesses not only of computers, but of their own minds. The "Climategate" files, the working documents and correspondence of the East Anglia climate modelers, show what happens when the perils of confirmation bias, and of other defects of intuition, are ignored by those whose job it is to build knowledge from data.

Confirmation bias should not be new to scientists. In the 1970s and 1980s, many reputable physical scientists processed experimental data in ways that suggested, and claimed to demonstrate, the reality of telepathy and telekinesis. When the measurements used to support paranormal claims were examined by human and social scientists familiar with the operation of cognitive bias, those claims turned out to be undemonstrable. The East Anglia climate files suggest that some of the physical scientists involved in climate research are still ignorant of the hazards of cognitive bias, and are mired in methodological errors that replicate the errors of historical parapsychologists.

Confirmation bias is likely to be involved when some data points in a dataset are suspected of mismeasurement and are "corrected." The correction procedure, when selected or written under the influence of confirmation bias, will tend to confirm the model favored by those doing the "correction." The only defense against confirmation bias in such cases is to compare "corrected" data with the original raw data, to check that the corrections are neutral with respect to departures from the favored model. Not only was this not done by the East Anglia climate team, but the original record may have been destroyed.

Confirmation bias may enter when numbers not available from records are extrapolated from other data. Such extrapolation is valid - when the extrapolated relationship is uniform across all contexts in which it has been measured. Many long-term climate studies (not only those of the East Anglia team) rely on extrapolations of temperature from tree rings. Those extrapolations depend on a relation between tree rings and temperatures that held between the mid-1700s to around 1960, but that relation has not been observed since about 1961. No one has given any physical reason for supposing that the relation between tree rings and temperature hundreds or thousands of years ago was more like the relation observed in the nineteenth century, than like that measured between 1961 and today. Experience with the extrapolations of parapsychologists in the 1970s and 1980s suggests that an extrapolation may be chosen because its result fits the model that the extrapolator wishes to confirm.

The final playground of confirmation bias is in the causes considered to explain the data. The spectacular rise in global temperatures near the end of the 1990s corresponded to, among other things, highs of the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and of the Solar irradiance and Solar flux cycle. Models that test the anthropogenic warming hypothesis only against the null hypothesis are biased in their implicit assumption that nothing else could have contributed to the observed warming. When there may be several causes, the analyses should include a multivariate assessment of their relative contribution to the observed results.

The study of climate change has become as complicated, and as fraught with social implications, as any issue in the social and human sciences. Fortunately, the methods developed in the social and human sciences to produce valid knowledge about complicated issues, even in the presence of inevitable human bias, stand ready to be used in climate science as well. It may well be that the current conclusions of climate scientists will be confirmed when re-evaluated by methods that are equal to the task. We cannot know, unless all their data and all their methods are held open to inquiry.

(This was a draft for some OpEd submissions I sent to popular science media. It was not published - they had their hands full with submissions from scientists much more directly involved with the climate sciences.)

A Radical Strategy for Objectivists

2010-01-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

Most people's New Year resolutions have to do with a new commitment to act in accordance with one's values. Little thought is given to the identification of the course of action that will lead to the realization of those values. Most non-Objectivists, especially those of the Pragmatist kind, consider the relation between values and actions intuitively obvious. Given what we now know, from advances in cognitive science, about the fallibility of intuition, an Objectivist will start the New Year with a principled, conceptual analysis of the actions needed to actualize one's values. The most general principles relating action to values constitute a strategy for the achievement of those values.

Why do Objectivists need a radical new strategy? Since Objectivism is the system of philosophical principles identified by Ayn Rand, is it not enough to follow Ayn Rand's own strategy from, say, 1964, as many Objectivists have been doing for much of the year 2009? Well, no, it isn't. Ayn Rand's 1964 strategy, in the Goldwater campaign, was so counterproductive to the achievement of Objectivist values that she never again collaborated with a Conservative (or "Libertarian") campaign or organization. The main result of 1964 was that by the end of the year, Ayn Rand's name was on the lips of multitudes of Libertarians and Conservatives, millions of whom would have called themselves Objectivists if Ayn Rand had not been alive to stop them. The subsequent drift of Conservatives in the direction of advocating a Christian Theocracy for America, and the drift of Libertarians toward advocating Anarchism - and the political empowerment derived by both from ripping off Ayn Rand's sound bites for use as slogans, in causes fundamentally opposed to her values of individual rights and of individuals using their minds in the service of their own lives and their happiness on Earth - have demonstrated Ayn Rand's wisdom in dissociating her philosophy from such followers. Rand herself followed a new strategy after 1964. By July 1966, she was ready to start publishing, in The Objectivist, her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

In 2009, the same mindless multitudes of Libertarians and Conservatives found themselves again in need of slogans, and once again drafted Ayn Rand (who, being dead, could no longer object) into their service. In the intervening years, American Conservatives had became outright Christianists. As I documented in October (Three Democides by False Morality: Part III, The Ban On Cloning) the Conservative/Christianist movement eventually allied itself with the worst elements of the anti-technology Left to produce a de-facto (and increasingly de-jure) ban on medical research into cloning-based technologies to reverse organ failure. (And NO, this is not about stem cells: read my essay.) Man's natural lifespan is the lifespan that humans would enjoy by the natural use of Man's natural organ of survival: our minds. For every year of delay in the development of cloning-based cures for organ failure, around 3.8 million individual humans will die (more accurately, will have been murdered by the ban on cloning) short of their natural lifespan. We are now in the 12th year of the de-facto ban: a rough estimate of the number of individuals already murdered by our Christianists ("Conservatives") is 45 million and counting. Other things being equal, a human living today is ten million times more likely to die of Christianist democide than of Islamist terrorism. Yet while in 2009 many Objectivists spoke and wrote about the Islamist threat, the ongoing Christianist democide remains largely unmentioned, even among Objectivists, possibly from fear of alienating potential "allies" (of Objectivism?) in the Conservative movement.

Exposure of Ayn Rand and Objectivism in Conservative media has the direct negative consequence of energizing Conservative activism and bringing more Conservative politicians to power. This can only perpetuate the ongoing democidal restraints on medical cloning research, as well as conservative strangling of individual rights in the areas of freedom of speech, abortion, immigration, sexuality, medical relief of pain; and promote the ongoing subjectivization of "criminal justice," and, more generally, government-enforced adherence to Christian "moral standards." The supposed benefit is greater exposure of Objectivism. In the case of the more naive sections of the public, especially those indoctrinated into an anti-conceptual mentality by the Pragmatist comprachicos who run America's schools, this will mean greater use among the public of Ayn Rand quotes, not as principles but as slogans. More will self-identify as "Objectivists" and thus associate Objectivism, in the minds of their friends, contacts and neighbors, with whatever nonsense those self-identified "Objectivists" happen to favor. At the top, eventually we will find self-identified "Objectivists" in positions of political power. Given the enormous harm done to the reputation of Ayn Rand and Objectivism by just one Objectivism-plated Pragmatist, Alan Greenspan, the harm that could be done by future herds of Objectivism-plated Libertarians and Objectivism-plated Conservatives is best left to the imagination.

In "It Is Earlier Than You Think," published in December 1964, Ayn Rand demonstrates a method for formulating a new strategy. But to use her method in 2010, one must first account for what has changed.

In 1964, Marxism was the only significant ideology of academics around the world. Its only secular competitor in America was Pragmatism, an anti-intellectual anti-ideology relegated mainly to Schools of Education. Supernaturalism was on its last legs, leaving even theologians in a desperate quest for religion without God. Rand's strategy, in "It Is Earlier Than You Think," was to prepare Objectivists to do battle with the Marxists - and to fill the vacuum when Marxism collapsed.

Marxism collapsed much earlier than anticipated: it disconfirmed itself with the implosion of Communism in the late 1980s, long before there were enough Objectivist academics to step in its place. The vacuum was filled by a resurgence (more by bloating from gaseous putrefaction than from intellectual revival) of supernaturalism and Pragmatism. Both supernaturalism and Pragmatism interpreted the disconfirmation of Marxism as showing that it was futile for the human mind to attempt a principled, and applicable, understanding of human existence on Earth. With Marxism deflated,and Objectivists still waiting for tenure, supernaturalism and Pragmatism - each complementing the other, with the effect of a Hegelian "synthesis in praxis" -took over the academy and the culture.

One effect of the supernaturalist-Pragmatist takeover of American education and culture is that the typical American of 2010 lives in a state not merely of value-deprivation, as was already the case in 1964, but of concept-deprivation. Americans no longer hold what had been, from the re-discovery of Aristotle and Archimedes in the Renaissance to the collapse of Marxism in the 1980s, the central idea of Western Civilization: that reality can be made sense of by the human mind. The function of Pragmatist schooling is to keep the student's mind from ever reaching what Piaget calls the stage of "abstract operations." This means that exposure to Ayn Rand and Objectivism in the public arena does not function as exposure to Objectivist ideas, which would undermine and displace the results of supernaturalist and Pragmatist indoctrinations in the mind of the listener. All that happens is that statements of Objectivist ideas are added (as slogans, not as ideas) to the existing inchoate slurry of supernatural-Pragmatist notions in the listener's head. Working for mere exposure of Objectivist ideas in the public arena today is futility in action.

Before it again becomes possible for the bulk of Americans to understand Objectivism, one must restore their ability to think in concepts and principles, and give them confidence that reality can be made sense of by the human mind.

How can this be most effectively done?

I expect every Objectivist to defend his or her values against existential threats, including threats from the realm of politics and culture. It is right for health care professionals to fight their prospective enslavement, for businessmen to fight against non-objective laws and arbitrary regulations, for teachers to fight for the rights of their students, and for everyone to fight for the right to speak and act according to the judgment of his or her individual mind. It is possible, and desirable, to use every argument not only to defend the specific values at stake, but to demonstrate, implicitly or explicitly, the power of Objectivist epistemology. To break a culture that associates principles with un-Earthly supernaturalism, and facts with anti-intellectual Pragmatism, the Objectivist's arguments should insist on, and exploit, the Objectivist linkage between ideas and the facts of reality. (I offer this Op-Ed of mine as an example of how the two can be and ought to be linked.) For many of us, including this linkage in our everyday activism can be the easiest way to infiltrate Objectivist epistemology into the minds of our fellows.

For Objectivist academics and teachers, the deliverable is to replace Pragmatist curricula, Pragmatist textbooks and Pragmatist assessments of knowledge with conceptual, principled curricula, books and tests in the fields, disciplines and schools in which we teach. (As a kind of "demonstration project," I am now in the process of writing, together with John Drake, a radically new, conceptual, principled introductory text in Information Systems.) Nearly any field of study, at just about any level, can be used to introduce students to the art of conceptual thought. I plan to write more about this in the near future.

And, for just about every Objectivist in America, there is the option of running for, and serving on, the local school board, where even one Objectivist may be able to replace at least some Pragmatist syllabi with principled texts that teach the application of abstract conceptual thinking to the solution of real-world problems. In some fields such schoolbooks already exist, in English - but only abroad, from Ireland or India or South Africa or Singapore. As a former elected member of a local school board, this is another topic about which I plan to write at some length.

As Ayn Rand often reminds us, the advocacy of Objectivism is primarily - before anything else - the advocacy of reason. We now live in a culture in which hardly anyone knows what reason is. This will make effective advocacy of Objectivism in the coming decades a demanding - and rewarding - project for every Objectivist.

Reading Justice at the Thanksgiving Table

2009-11-24T15:30:00.000-08:00

It could be my Jewish heritage, but I think that it is better to start a celebration with a reading than with a mere saying. I plan to read the following:

Let us read justice to the men and women whom we thank this evening. In the words of Ayn Rand: "Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. ... Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. ... Throughout centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road was new, the vision unborrowed. ... The creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered, and they paid. But they won." We celebrate their victories, and of our own.

The Prosecutors and the Astrologer

2009-11-04T20:39:00.000-08:00

I have not had much time to post, but this is so outlandish that I'll just do with less sleep later.

The Associated Press reports,

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed worried that allowing people to sue prosecutors who fabricate evidence to win convictions might chill other prosecutions... The case in front of the high court involves two former Pottawattamie County, Iowa, prosecutors, Attorney Dave Richter and his assistant Joseph Hrvol. They are being sued by Curtis W. McGhee Jr., and Terry Harrington, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1978 for the death of retired police officer John Schweer. The men were released from prison after 25 years.

Evidence showed the prosecutors had failed to share evidence that pointed to another man, Charles Gates, as a possible suspect in Schweer's slaying.

They later on denied that Gates was even a suspect, even though witnesses placed him near the scene of the crime and his name appeared in several police reports. He also was administered and failed a polygraph test and the prosecutors themselves even consulted an astrologer about their suspicions of Gates.

McGhee and Harrington filed lawsuits against the former prosecutors, saying as prosecutors Richter and Hrvol had them arrested without probable cause, coerced and coached witnesses, fabricated evidence against them and concealed evidence that could have cleared them.

Or, in short: All the evidence pointed to Charles Gates as the murderer. The prosecutors consulted an astrologer, who told them that CG was innocent. The prosecutors believed that what the astrologer told them was supernaturally true, trumping over any actual evidence. So they hid the real evidence, and used fabricated, fake "evidence" to deprive two innocent men of nearly the entire span of those innocent men's adult lives. But the two prosecutors have a fireproof defense from any criminal charge: they acted "in good faith," sincerely believing in Astrology and its truth. And now the victims of those two publicly employed swindlers may be deprived of even the right to sue those malefactors for civil justice - out of fear that holding future prosecutors accountable will hold them back from doing "their job" in judicial combat against future defendants.

And this is the payback of Kantian philosophy: reality is not knowable; the best that Justice can do is trial by combat, and in combat nothing counts except the result. Other countries, such as Switzerland, do have justice systems based on the Enlightenment notion of objective fact. We Americans have trial by combat, as was done in the Dark Ages, guided by supernatural forces, only hacking at each other with lawyers instead of halberds. And when the stars or the Gods have spoken, innocent men who have had the better part of their lives taken from them may have no recourse at all.

Life on the Edge of Implosion of Democracy

2009-11-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

Back when I left Bell Labs, and decided to switch coasts to live with Yoon, I made a risky choice. Tenure-track jobs at universities where I would be able to teach advanced courses were few, and fewer within a comfortable commuting distance from Yoon's home. I took the job at Cal State LA with full knowledge of its moral and existential hazards. But damn it, I didn't expect the implosion of California Democracy to hit just 9 years after I took the job.

I'm posting this because the sudden silence from my end of the wire may have made some readers of this blog uncomfortable, and I don't want anyone to think that I have a problem beyond serious overwork. With a 12-unit per quarter teaching load, overwork was a given from the start. That would have been true even in classics, or in medieval history, where the content of courses in unlikely to change much from decade to decade. Teaching 12 units of advanced technical courses in Information Systems, with a 3-year technology half-life and 20% of everything in the typical course becoming obsolete each year, was always Serious Overwork. With research, and with enough hands-on experimentation with new technologies to keeps ahead of the graduate students (some of them already CIOs) in my evening classes, the better part of my waking hours were accounted for. And then, this year, came the (financial) crisis of California Democracy.

How does a busy urban school deal with a 16-million-dollar hole in its budget? First, it does not renew the contracts of part-time adjunct faculty. Simultaneously, there is a flow of incoming students whose 529s shrank enough that they can no longer afford private universities, or even the UC. The remaining faculty's advanced courses are cut, and we are assigned to teach the Business School's required Intro to IS and the like. Since there are fewer courses and fewer sections and more students, class sizes tripled, from an average of 12 to an average of 33. I spend most of my class time dealing with e-mailed questions from students; just reading and organizing and preparing to answer those questions, without which I can have no assurance that I'm doing a responsible job, takes three times as long as it used to.

Two of my three 4-unit courses this term (4 units because they cover the content of a 3-unit semester course in one academic quarter) are Intros. And there are NO adequate textbooks for Intros out there. So, following John Drake, I'm teaching my Intro sections with books that were never meant to be textbooks. I have nothing that otherwise would have come from the textbook's Instructor Site: no prepared homework assignments, no presentation PowerPoints, no test question pools (I had no idea how much time such conveniences saved.) And this on top of getting the Intro students (two-thirds of them coming from Pragmatist schools where they never had to do this before) to think in concepts instead of shopping lists.

My one remaining combined Senior-Graduate advanced technical course is up to the same numbers, because so many other courses were canceled. From 100% students who were taking a difficult technical course because they were burning with enthusiasm for its content, I'm down to 33%, the rest there because they had to take something; some of them signed up without the lower-division prerequisites. And the old textbook was 4 years old and obsolete; I switched to a brand new one for which I'm receiving the still-rough supporting materials by e-mail, sometimes in the morning before the evening's class.

The budget for graduate assistants and graders also is gone. I'm typing this as an otherwise-I-would-go-insane break from grading 100 midterm exams.

And we were just advised of an even larger hole next year. So I am lucky, in that I still have a job...

Is Christianity More Benign Than Islam?

2009-10-18T23:53:00.000-07:00

We really need a site about Christianity to parallel Little Green Footballs. Just think what LGF would say if Moslems did what the Christian Churches have been documented doing ("Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches") by the LA Times - click the title for details.

In other news

2009-10-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

Faf (Fafner?) of fafblog.blogspot.com seems a bit of a Libertarian flako, but this is brilliant:

".... In other news, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to a man who set fire to a library and then promised to write a book about it."

(H.T.: Natailya Petrova on Facebook.)

Three Democides by False Morality: Part III, The Ban On Cloning

2009-10-04T15:16:00.000-07:00

(This is the third part of a three-part article. Part I is here; Part II is here.)

The third democide by false morality differs from the Stalin and Carson democides in that, unlike its precursors, it was not a simple consequence of a false morality held my millions. Stalin headed a totalitarian regime whose main claim to popular legitimacy was enforcement of the traditional, originally Christian altruist false morality of Russia and Europe. Carson spawned a new, equally anti-human ideology and false morality that did not begin its toll of democide until after it had gained millions of adherents.

The third of the modern democides by false morality started out without a constituency and without anything resembling ideological conviction. It was - and is - mass murder of tens of millions of individuals, originating not from enforcement of false principles but from a false embrace of pseudo-principles, driven not by conviction, but by simple (and simple-minded) opportunism in the service of political power-seeking.

Dick Armey's world-wide de-facto prohibition against medical research into cloning-based organ replacement technology is not a case of political power in the service of false morality, but of false morality in the service of one politician's otherwise unprincipled pursuit of political power.

The first successful organ transplant, a kidney transplant between identical twins, was performed in 1954. It was successful because there is no immune rejection between genetically identical twins. Transplants between individuals who are not genetically identical always relied, and still rely, on chemical suppression of the recipient's immune system, leaving the patient at severe risk of premature death from diseases that someone with a healthy immune would have been protected against.

Genetically compatible replacement organs can be grown artificially, in a decorticated fetus created by replacing the nucleus of a newly fertilized human egg with the nucleus of a somatic cell from the patient. Once the first mammal, a mouse, was cloned in 1986, the combination of somatic cell nuclear transfer with subsequent organ transplantation has been the obvious least-effort technology whose development would essentially end the threat of organ failure as a cause of death in the developed world. Fetal transplantation technology has been routinely used, since at least 2004, in replacement of small organs such as the retina of the eye. All that remains for the complete organ replacement technology to become practical, is experience with growing an actual decorticated fetus cloned from a prospective patient. There are no objective ethical or scientific obstacles to the development of this technology - only political ones.

The moral aspects of cloning have been sufficiently addressed in several articles by Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, especially his "Cloning is Moral," which specifically addressed the characterization of this technology as "growing human beings for spare body parts." To supplement the moral perspective, here is a rough estimate of the number of avoidable deaths that result from each year of delay in the development of cloning-based organ replacement technology:

In 2002 - the most recent year for which government statistics were available when I first wrote on this topic - 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths.

Given its obvious usefulness for saving millions of lives, the prospect of cloning-based organ replacement technology was something that Americans who understood its potential, including American Christians, generally favored, from the first mouse cloning of 1986 onward. Cloning is an important - and generally benevolent - part of the projected technological context of the future society envisioned by J. Neil Schulman, a recent convert to Christianity, in "The Rainbow Cadenza," his 1986 futuristic novel on the theme of Original Sin. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist is trying to have her mother, in stasis as a result of organ failure, revived by cloning. It is the protagonist's sister, Judge Vera, the most cruel and generally evil character in the book, who then voices the book's only objection to cloning: "I was supposed to cut out a baby's brain to bring her back?" Tellingly, the perversely anti-technology Judge Vera is a Wiccan. The book's Christians, the author's proxies, have no problem with restoring failed and amputated organs with cloning-based technology. Indeed, until Dick Armey's anti-cloning campaign in the late 1990s, no American would have associated opposition to cloning-based technologies with anyone other than the American Left's marginal anti-technology, anti-Western-Civilization fringe.

Dick Armey, an economics professor at North Texas State University, was elected to Congress in 1984, eventually becoming the leader of so-called "Economic Conservatives" in the Republican Party. In 1994 he collaborated with Newt Gingrich, the leader of the "Social Conservative" faction, in drafting the "Contract with America," which was credited with bringing about the Republican victory in that year's elections. In 1995 Gingrich became Speaker and Armey Majority Leader in the House of Representatives.

After the election, the Social Conservative faction expected the Republican majority in Congress to "deliver" on its key issues: immigration, abortion, and homosexuals. Until that time, Armey, himself a Bible Christian and a congregant of a Bible Church, had counted on, and had received, the support of Social Conservatives in his district. But that district also had many voters with friends and relatives among legal and illegal immigrants, and a university town with predictably libertarian attitudes on abortion and on the rights of Gays and Lesbians. Moreover, as an empirical social scientist of some competence, Armey understood that the three top issues of the Social Conservatives had no traction with the electorate. A genuine effort on those issues would cost him his seat, and could well lead to the loss of a Republican majority in Congress.

This left Armey in search of issues on which he could "deliver" to the Social Conservatives and the Religious right, without alienating his district's voters from his own candidacy, or the national electorate from the Republican party. Back in 1989, Armey thought that he had found one such issue in National Endowment for the Arts grants to Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, but the NEA backed down without a fight. In 1995 Armey was at a loss. And then came 1996, the year of Dolly the sheep.

Dolly was the first large mammal - not a mere mouse - cloned by somatic cell nuclear transfer. The path to a cloned human fetus was clear. The anti-technology left, including some among Armey's university town constituents, were on fire. Interestingly, now that medical cloning had come closer to imminent reality, its compatibility with Christian morals started to be debated. A part of that debate was an editorial by one Gino Concetti in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, calling for a ban on human cloning: "A person has the right to be born in a human way and not in the laboratory." Concetti was a working journalist and an ordinary priest, not a philosopher or a theologian or a member of the Curia, and a newspaper editorial was far from an authoritative statement of Catholic Doctrine. But the Washington Post, noting the "semiofficial" reputation of the paper that Concetti's editorial appeared in, headlined a story in its February 27, 1997 edition "Vatican Calls For Ban on Human Cloning."

Dick Armey had his issue.

Contemporary Religious Right Protestants in America are mostly Pragmatist and anti-intellectual. When they need doctrine, they turn to the Catholic Church; the Religious Right's men on the Supreme Court are, to a man, Catholics. Concetti's editorial gave Armey a cause on which, through collaboration with the anti-technology Left in Congress and in both district and national electorates, he had a pragmatic chance to win ("deliver") on an issue that, he may have thought, the Religious Right would care about.

From his position as House Majority Leader, Armey led the formation of a formidable anti-cloning lobby. It was the first lasting political coalition between the theocratic "Right" of James Dobson and the anti-technology Left of Jeremy Rifkin, whose followers and allies came to dominate Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission. By March 1997, political pressure from this unprecedented coalition led President Clinton to sign an executive order banning research on medical cloning in any institution receiving US federal funds, or any organization or enterprise working under contracts with the US government. Clinton's ban effectively terminated any possibility of cloning research at any formal institution, from colleges that enroll students with government-guaranteed education loans, to medical practices treating Medicaid or Medicare patients, to medical drug and technology companies with Medicare contracts. This effectively outflanked Armey, who was left to legislate a more formal legal ban against something that in practice could not take place in America any more.

Armey went ahead, and in January 1998 submitted to the House a permanent ban on cloning humans in the United States. Armey's bill was announced at a news conference with representatives of the Christian Coalition, Dobson's Family Research Council and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Jeremy Rifkin simultaneously announced a symmetrical anti-cloning initiative from the Left, at first informal but eventually, when Armey's initiative stalled, producing a statement signed by "64 of the nation's leading progressive policy leaders, academics and activists" in support of Armey's legislation. Under the Senate version of Armey's bill, introduced by Senator Bill Frist, a scientist convicted of human cloning would face up to 10 years in prison.

And then things began to fall apart for Armey. Congressional Democrats, seeing Armey's legislation as a blatant attempt to wrest credit for a cloning ban away from President Clinton, whose executive order had already produced an effective ban, did not go along. Armey, on the strength of Jeremy Rifkin's support, had counted on the support of Congressional "progressives." He didn't get it. And in the Senate, Senator McCain, who saw in biotechnology, including medical cloning, a hope for reversing the disabilities he had suffered from North Vietnamese torture, organized enough resistance to stop Frist's bill. And thus Armey's hope of "delivering" a legislative result to Dobson and the Theocratic Right, a hope for which he was willing to kill millions - some 3.8 million per year of delay in the development of medical cloning - came to naught.

Armey continued to re-introduce his legislation banning all human cloning after each congressional election. After 2001, when Jeremy Rifkin's Foundation on Economic Trends published a statement from 64 prominent anti-technology Leftists in support of Armey's legislation, anti-technology congressional leftists rallied to Armey's bill, which passed twice in the House of Representatives, only to be blocked by McCain's efforts in the Senate. Given the threat that such legislation could pass at any time, thus wiping out all previous investment in cloning-based technologies, private investment predictably stopped. Some work on cloning was included in State-level stem cell initiatives, but the State-level legislation authorizing these initiatives mandated that any cloned embryos be used only to extract stem cells, and in any case destroyed within 10 days, thus eliminating the possibility of developing organ-replacement procedures.

With the election of a Republican president in 2000, Armey's effort acquired a world-wide dimension. George W. Bush aligned his presidency with the theocratic wing of the Republican Party, and while the Constitution limited how far his theocratic agenda could be taken inside the country, as President he felt entitled to conduct the foreign policy of the United States pretty much as he pleased. The legislatures of countries striving to maintain friendly relations with the United States found themselves under pressure to enact their versions of Armey's bill domestically, and to join Bush's push for an international treaty to ban cloning worldwide, even while in the United States a formal ban of this kind was replaced with comprehensive funding restrictions, regulatory directives, and, to back it up and intimidate potential private investors, the threat of Armey's legislation.

The reader is invited to refer to a lengthy scholarly article by Thomas Banchoff for a detailed study of the great theocratic power grab for a global ban on medical cloning. In brief, there was no consensus among the various Christian and Islamic sects about the morality of cloning; Jewish religious authorities were unanimously, even among the most Orthodox, supportive of cloning, declaring it to be no less than a religious obligation when done to save a fully developed human life (while also mandating early decortication of fetuses cloned for medical applications, "ensuring that the embryos used in this research are not brought to a point which constitutes human-hood.")

Countries with tax-supported, politically influential Catholic and Evangelical churches (such as Costa Rica and Germany) were, as would be expected, among the first to ban all human cloning in their national legislation, and to advocate a global ban through a UN-sponsored international treaty. Such countries, however, represented only a small fraction of the population of the world, and they would not have stepped forward to urge such a global treaty without the initiative of a trio of unusual allies: The United States (actually the administration of President George W. Bush,) the Vatican, and Saudi Arabia.

For the Vatican cloning was always a minor issue, minuscule in comparison with abortion, or with equal marriage for same-sex couples. But was also, as it was for Dick Armey, an issue with which they hoped to score deliverables. If a global treaty to ban cloning were successful, it would also establish a global precedent for an international regime based on religious rules rather than purported concern for the national interests of participating countries. Such a precedent would open the door to global bans on other supposedly "immoral" human action; abortion or equal marriage could then be next.

As for Saudi Arabia, its advocacy for a cloning ban was expected to be particularly effective in the Islamic world, as Saudi Arabia was both the site of Islam's two most holy pilgrimage destinations, and the model of strict enforcement of Islamic religious law. Saudi Arabia was an absolute monarchy, its royal family having close business, political and personal ties with President Bush, and more-or-less completely dependent on the United States commercially, politically and militarily. Kuwait, politically and militarily dependent on the United States for defense against Iraq, joined Saudi Arabia on Bush's side.

The Bush administration deployed every instrument of pressure it could to create an anti-cloning majority at the UN. That majority was largely composed of small countries that depended for their existence on military, political or economic support of the United States. This majority also included those Islamic countries that depended on Saudi Arabia or Kuwait for cheap oil and handouts. It also included Israel. Israelis, whether religious or secular, held (and still hold) an unusually positive view of science, technology, and especially of medical technologies, such as cloning, that promise to be useful in the defense of human life. In medical research and invention Israel was already a world leader, on par with the United States and Switzerland. But Israel's political leaders were (and still are) in the grasp of an expensive national-collectivist ideology that made them abjectly dependent on American appropriations, which could only originate in the US House of Representatives, which was firmly under the control of Dick Armey. And so Israel passed domestic anti-cloning legislation, and joined the US-Vatican-Saudi-led anti-cloning side at the United Nations.

On the opposite side was an equally ad hoc alliance of independent countries with secular majorities or secular constitutions, such as Great Britain, Turkey, and South Korea; the more secular countries of Europe; and countries determined to spite President Bush: China, Russia, and of course Iran. It was the ultimate inversion of sense: United States and Israel on the side of theocratic mass murder; Iran on the side of technology and of the freedom of science.

Ultimately, the world was saved from the prospect of a global ban on cloning by the fact that even the most abject of diplomats is not without some concern for the continuation of his own life. And so the ban was changed into a non-binding resolution that called on member states "to prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life." They agreed to disagree, of course, on the exact meaning of "inasmuch" in that declaration. But the chilling effects of Bush's and Armey's efforts on investment in cloning technologies continues, and so do the regulatory barriers that stand in the way of research on medical cloning in the United States, and legislated barriers abroad.

As of 2009, medical research into cloning-based organ-replacement technologies has been at a standstill since 1998. With 3.8 million avoidable deaths for every year of delay in the development of these technologies, the death toll to date is close to 42 million, rivaling the number of victims of Rachel Carson, and close to the number murdered by Stalin and Hitler together. And what good did this exercise in mass murder do for Dick Armey?

James Dobson, who sponsored the press conference that announced Armey's legislation to the world, wanted a visible triumph of Faith. With both a legislative ban in the United States having no hope of becoming law, and a global anti-cloning treaty demoted to a non-binding declaration, a mere chilling effect was not the triumph of Faith that Dobson wanted, even if it was still killing 3.8 million people a year. And with only peripheral action in Congress on Dobson's big issues - on abortion and on equal marriage for Gays - the public perception of Dobson having enough Washington pull to be worth paying off was vanishing. As Armey was to write later, "As Majority Leader, I remember vividly a meeting with the House leadership where Dobson scolded us for having failed to 'deliver' for Christian conservatives, that we owed our majority to him, and that he had the power to take our jobs back. This offended me, and I told him so."

Offended or not, Armey practically conceded that Dobson had the power to "take Armey's job back" by resigning from Congress in 2002. Having sat on the fence between Republican Theocrats and Republican Pragmatists through his tenure in Congress, in retirement Armey began to identify explicitly with the Pragmatists. The name of Armey's political organization, "FreedomWorks," is an explicit riff on the Pragmatist anti-principle, "whatever works." Armed with the anti-principle of having no principles of his own, Armey has been known to talk about "separation of Church and State" as though he had not been theocracy's standard bearer when he advocated his cloning ban, and murdered some 40 million people by the threat of this ban, only a few years before.

A Personal Postscript

As recently as 1997, I had a reasonable hope of living long enough for cloning-based organ-replacement technology to become available - and then of going on tolive practically forever. After 11 years of delay, and the prospect of more delay to come, that hope is no longer reasonable. Like the millions of Ukrainians who lost their lives because Stalin's false morality prohibited trade in food, and like the millions of Africans who lost their lives because Rachel Carson's false morality prohibited spraying mosquito swamps with DDT, I am one of millions who are losing our lives because Dick Armey's false morality barred the imminent development of cloning-based organ replacement technologies.

Of course Dick Armey, like Joe Stalin and Rachel Carson, didn't do it alone. Dick Armey's unique contribution was to yoke together an unprecedented (and unlikely) coalition of anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-technology activists spanning the spectrum from James Dobson to Jeremy Rifkin. Armey eventually lost the support of some of his former collaborators, but he is still in the coalition business. Armey's new coalition - the Tea Party movement, sponsored and organized by Armey's FreedomWorks - embraces everyone who despises the Obama program. It is of course preposterous to think that Objectivists, who oppose ObamaCare because it would enslave the providers of health care, and Theocrats, who oppose it because insurance companies that provide coverage for abortion would not be excluded from selling policies under the proposed Federal mandate, have something (or anything) in common. Dick Armey is counting on his new coalition to take him to the White House in 2012. The good news is that by 2012 Armey will be older than any first-time presidential candidate in history. And by then, he may well be dead of organ failure. Or, more accurately, of suicide by false morality - and by lack of principle.

The Opposite of Science

2009-09-13T16:16:00.000-07:00

If you have a strong (and preferably empty) stomach, click on the title (above.)

Lord May, the president of the British Science Association, said religion may have helped protect human society from itself in the past and it may be needed again.

Speaking on the eve of the association’s annual conference, the committed atheist said he was worried the world was on a “calamitous trajectory” brought on by its failure to co-ordinate measures against global warming.

He said that no country was prepared to take the lead and a “punisher” was needed to make sure the rules of co-operation were not broken.

The former Government chief scientific advisor said in the past that was God and it might be time again for religion to fill the gap.

Republicans Surrender

2009-09-10T16:48:00.000-07:00

After everything that Republicans and Democrats agreed on before the last presidential election, there was only one real issue in President Obama's proposal to extend government control of health care financing in the United States, from nearly total to fully totalitarian: whether the transfer (at gunpoint) of the money used to pay for the care of those who did not obtain insurance before they got sick, will be done openly through the tax system, or covertly, by forcing health insurance companies (1) to "insure" those with pre-existing conditions, and (2) to tax their other customers for the cost. Once the alleged opponents of Obama's plan agree to hide the tax for "universal health care" in premiums paid for genuine health insurance, we know that they are scumbags peddling their alleged principles for pull, and that for them, any remaining "opposition" is just a matter of haggling over price.

And now, the official Republican response to Obama's proposal: "Here are four areas -- four important areas where we can agree, right now: One, all individuals should have access to coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions. ..."

John David Lewis, in an article about Obama's plan in The Objective Standard (published the day after, but presumably written long before) put it like this: "If the Republicans compromise, (then) they will have once again capitulated to their opponents, abandoned liberty, and ruined the opportunity to redirect this nation toward its founding moral principle: individual rights, protected under a constitution in a free republic."

As of the previous evening this is no longer an "If..." The Republican Party has capitulated, much as I figured it would, but far more explicitly ("important areas where we can agree, right now") than I thought. After this, those former advocates of freedom who are still willing to pretend otherwise, and participate in "Tea Parties" and other Republican-sponsored events, can read what they are collaborating with - in black-on-white electronic ink. It remains to be seen how many will act the role of self-blinded stooges, of "useful idiots" playing mirror-image to "single payer" advocates at Obama rallies, even after having been explicitly told, by the Republicans themselves, what they are bearding for.

(retrieved original) PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama’s Address to Students

2009-09-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

The original totalitarian version of the Department of Education guidance for President Obama's planned speech to primary school students has been systematically replaced - in every readily found repository on the Web, and of course on the Department of Education site linked to my previous blog post - with a new version in which the more totalitarian parts have been bowdlerized out of the text. Finally, an occasion to show that I can actually do what I teach: I located an html copy of the original in the Google indexer cache and copied it to my archive. The title, above, of THIS blog posting will take you to a true copy of the original - just in case you are one of the millions who have been left to wonder what the big fuss was about.

Of course, not only have the traces of the original official guidance document disappeared from the scene of the crime, but El Presidente now plans to deliver (a revised version, no doubt, of) his education speech on Monday before the start of school, for advance parental approval. To whomever is tempted to find out what Our Dear Leader originally planned to say to the kids, I remind you that breaking into the recycle folder of the President's computer is a Federal Felony. So please don't. I'm certain that The Onion will publish a reasonable facsimile.

Johnny Can't Think

2009-09-02T12:46:00.000-07:00

Leonard Peikoff's 1984 Ford Hall Forum lecture "Why Johnny Can't Think" was considered, by every non-Objectivist I ever discussed it with, an extreme exaggeration. Fast-forward to 2009.

The New York Times favors Obama's proposal for making government-managed health care mandatory for everyone, so it can hardly be accused of being uncharitable in describing a rally of supporters. Here is a not untypical excerpt (the rest is much the same, but I'm keeping the quote to a length permitted by fair use:)

Danielle Butler, for example, a graphic designer from Phoenix, said she received an e-mail message from Organizing for America inviting her to attend the rally, and came there to support the president even though health insurance has never been a big issue for her.

“I volunteered at his campaign and just really want to stand behind Obama’s initiatives,” said Ms. Butler, 29. “I support the changes that he wants to bring to our country,” she added. Ms. Butler said that when the rally was over, she felt charged up, but had not learned much new about health care.

Individual motives for attending were also diverse. At a rally at North High School in Denver that drew about 1,500 people, Martha Sullivan was struggling, and failing, to attach a sign that read “Single Payer,” to a chain-link fence in the parking lot. Ms. Sullivan said she was motivated by faith — the United Church of Christ where she worships has urged its members to support health care for all.

“I think people who have Christian beliefs should stand up and say, ‘This is what Jesus would have wanted,’ ” said Ms. Sullivan, 59.

Other people were stoked by personal causes that seemed in some cases only peripheral to a broader societal debate.

“I’m out here if it will help one more kid get medication,” said Johari Ade-Green, 58, of Denver, who was holding a sign with a picture of her grandson, Zumante Lucero, who died in July at age 9 from complications of asthma. Her grandson had insurance under Medicaid and Social Security, she said, but through a mix-up was denied medication.

The article reads like a museum of epistemic pathologies. The last instance is especially telling. The woman's grandson was killed by government health care - and she thinks that she will "help" other kids by making it mandatory for all Americans. Ayn Rand's diagnosis of this kind of pseudo-cognition - "Poison as food, poison as antidote" - was never more directly observable.

PreK-6 Menu of Classroom Activities: President Obama's Address to Students

2009-09-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

Click the title for official instructions from the US Department of Education. Those parallels are getting more parallel every day....

Update: The document at the link above, on the official US Department of Education site, has been replaced with new version, with the totalitarian parts bowdlerized out of it. For the original version, please see my new blog posting, farther above.

"Don't you ever question my reality!" (Part 2)

2009-09-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

Hope you didn't miss Part 1, posted August 21 (the funniest epistemological spectacle of the year. No, it is not from The Onion.) The theater continues:

Lauren Stratford said of the decision to become a holocaust survivor without having actually suffered the holocaust, “I think only the individual can decide if he/she is a survivor.” .... Nobody shows a hint of doubt when a speaker by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stands before us (in 2009) to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Ain't America No More

2009-08-30T15:16:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, the ordinary people of America framed their Constitution on a principled, if still incomplete, understanding of individual rights.

Welcome to 2009.

Last month, a Harvard University professor was arrested for "disturbing the peace" with public criticism of a government official. Conservatives on the Web cheered for the arresting officer. The idea, that under the First Amendment it is unconstitutional to arrest a person, just because that person's public speech, criticizing a government official, irritates a police officer, never crossed the Conservatives' alleged minds.

Now, a month later, another police officer threatened to arrest - but did not actually arrest, making the incident somewhat less outrageous - another critic whose take on a government official irritated the police officer. And now, everyone who was on the side of the arresting officer in the Gates-Crowley case is outraged, outraged, that a demonstrator can be threatened by a police officer with arrest, merely for public criticism that outrages the officer.

Unfortunately, as the police officer in the linked video says, this "ain't America no more." The America where people - never mind police officers - had principles in their brains, rather than merely on their tongues and then only when pragmatically convenient, has been deliquescing for half a century now. After decades of "education" by the Comprachicos running the schools, ordinary Americans - the full range from Socialists to Conservatives - are no longer capable of inducing a principle, even when the concretes from which to induce the principle are staring them in the face. In the form of high-profile news stories.

Ominous Parallels, anyone?

"Don't you ever question my reality!"

2009-08-21T21:18:00.000-07:00

Click on the title (above) for the funniest epistemological spectacle of the year. No, it is not from The Onion. It is a reporter's account of a real event. I'd be rolling on the floor (laughing) if I'd only vacuumed my floor first....

Academic Freedom Abridged at Yale Press

2009-08-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

An open letter from Cary Nelson, AAUP President, about Yale University Press' decision that "eliminated all visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s new book The Cartoons That Shook the World." Nelson writes,

"We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press...

Click on the title, above, to see the letter.

Insider Tips as Currency for Political Extortion

2009-08-09T22:05:00.000-07:00

I would not trade on an exchange that allows insider trading: I have no wish to sell a stock that's known (to the buyer but not to me) to be about to go up; or to buy one that is known, to the seller but not to me, to be about to go down. It turns out that I've been a chump: the US Congress legislated its members, and their cronies in the Executive branch, out of all provisions, legal and contractual, against insider trading.

Many of our federal legislators and officials supplement their already juicy salaries and benefits by extorting bribes. But there is the technicality that bribes in cash or equivalent are illegal, and a provision exempting legislators from laws against getting paid off in cash wouldn't fly with the voters. So instead, they gave themselves a loophole: they legislated that the insider trading laws that apply to businessmen, and other non-members of the aristocracy of pull, do NOT apply to members of Congress, congressional staffers, and appointed officials of the executive branch. Thus, members of the US Congress have made themselves legally free to extort at will, provided the payoffs are not in cash or stock or other valuables, but rather in the form of insider information that the Congresscritters, etc., can use to steal value (legally - they made it so) directly from the retirement funds and other investments of the rest of us.

The link comes, ironically, from an organization dedicated to radical expansion of government power - and thus, of government-as-an-extortion-racket in general - a position its members justify, in part, by a naive belief that everything would be all right if only such loopholes were closed. Their opponents, on the other hand, insist that there is nothing morally wrong in insider trading - even when insider information is being used as the currency in which bribes are extorted from American business by our political rulers. "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain..."

Yes, there should be a legitimate market in organs for transplantation

2009-07-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

Click on the title, above, for a comment in the New York Times "Freakonomics" column by Stephen J. Dubner:

Another man in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, was accused of enticing vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 and then selling the organ for $160,000. Mr. Dwek pretended to be soliciting a kidney on behalf of someone and Mr. Rosenbaum said that he had been in business of buying organs for years, according to the complaint.

Remember this story the next time someone brings up the need for a legitimate, regulated market for human organs, as we’ve discussed here many times in the past. Many people’s objection to such a market is that poor people would suffer because a) they won’t be able to afford to buy organs; and b) they may be coerced into selling them. But with the current black market, poor people are already being excluded from getting organs (because there’s a scarcity of donated organs) and being lured into selling them - although in this case, it appears that a middleman got to pocket $150,000 while the “donors” got only $10,000.

And please, fellow Objectivists, hold back on knee-jerk reactions to "regulated." I doubt that in this context it means anything beyond objectively necessary requirements for fully informed consent, and safeguards against fraud.

Free Speech and "Disorderly Conduct"

2009-07-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

I'm amazed at the paucity of principled comment about the recent (and unfortunate) arrest of African-American literateur (and Harvard professor) Gates, by Cambridge police officer Crawley, on charges of "disorderly conduct." Gates' "disorderly conduct" is described, on the charge sheet, as "loud and tumultuous behavior in a public place" - the "public place" being the porch of Gates' home, and the "behavior" being loud verbal criticism, probably inaccurate, of a police officer.

Before the essentials, though, I need to say why I tend to think that Gates' criticism of the police officer as a "racist" was inaccurate. I once knew a Jewish gentleman from a country in Central Europe that back in the 1930s practiced its own kind of "Jim Crow" against Jews; anyone who so much as "looked Jewish" was excluded from the "better" places of commerce in that country well into the 1980s. Like many American immigrants from Central Europe, my friend favored shorts in the summer. And, looking for a good place to eat lunch, was often stopped at the door, and told that shorts were not considered acceptable attire in the restaurant that had caught his fancy. On those occasions he was certain that he had been stopped at the door because he "looked Jewish" - even though the same restaurant would welcome him with a smile in winter, when he wore slacks.

When dealing with people who had faced racism in the past, a competent police officer will take the context and effects of their experience into account. Gates, unfortunately, permitted his experience - his first faculty job was in a part of America where racism was common and assumed - to bias his judgment. He probably owes Officer Crowley an apology for inaccurate criticism - or would owe Officer Crowley an apology if Officer Crowley had not taken Gates' error as cause for arrest.

Of course there are, even by the most stringent standard of individual rights, contexts in which loud speech can be objectively criminal. But, outside the context of fraud, or of violations of intellectual property, any legitimate regulation of non-governmental speech must be strictly content-neutral. In a free society, there is only a small set of contexts in which non-governmental speech can be a cause for arrest:

1. The speaker uses a private platform belonging to someone else without the owner's consent. Gates spoke from the porch of his own home, so this is not relevant here.

2. The expression interferes with the process of justice. Gates was not in a courtroom during a trial, and in any case a policeman is not a judge. A policeman is a specialized emergency worker, trained to keep a cool head even in contingencies far more disturbing than loud and inaccurate verbal criticism from an unarmed and otherwise innocuous citizen. So this is not the case here either.

3. The expression invades the property of others and interferes with their other rights. For example, shouting loudly at night, when the noise would disturb the sleep of one's neighbors, might be criminal. But it was daytime, and no one (other than the arresting officer) was irritated by the noise. So again, no cause for arrest.

4. The delivery of a credible threat. Not the case here, and not even alleged.

5. The proverbial "shouting fire:" speech that, in context, can cause a crowd to panic and stampede; or perhaps the incitement of an unruly crowd to a lynching or a riot. But there was no crowd; the handful of non-police onlookers at the scene were outnumbered by uniformed police.

So what was it, about Gates' conduct, that could possibly have crossed the line into "disorderly," meaning "criminal," action? Objectively, nothing. Subjectively, the arresting officer may have perceived Gates' speech as repulsive and insulting. But this is hardly enough reason for a professional public servant, sworn to defend the rights of the people, including the free speech rights of Professor Gates, to arrest Professor Gates for nothing beyond loud and insulting verbal criticism of a government employee, even when that criticism was publicly delivered, on Professor Gates' porch, in that employee's face.

One mark of a Police State, is that one may not speak ill of a police officer without risking arrest. Where is the First Amendment when we need it?

2009-07-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

Economics as it can be and ought to be

2009-07-18T16:10:00.000-07:00

What would Economics be like without the grossly false, yet somehow widely accepted, belief in the automatic and universal rationality of economic actors? MIT finance professor Andrew W. Lo, and Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson, are making progress in that direction. The title above this blog post is a link to a Niall Ferguson lecture about the complicated relationships between the application of genetic algorithms - "evolution" - in biology and in economics. Ferguson induces his concepts from the facts of reality that he studies as a business historian. Finally, an economist with an epistemology that an Objectivist can applaud. Having once read Ayn Rand's marginalia comments about how lousy the epistemology of Ludwig von Mises had been, economics was the last place where I'd have expected scientific work - with a sound, inductive, contextual epistemology - to emerge.

Conservatives criticize official for opposing reproductive choice. Yes. Really.

2009-07-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

The conservative blogosphere has exploded with condemnation of a federal official for expressing opposition to reproductive rights. Yes, you did not accidentally inhale: the same people who would forcibly stop a woman from aborting an unwanted pregnancy, and force her to give birth against her will - including thousands of officials who once held jobs in the Bush administration on the strength of this position - are now a-blather because 32 years ago a Dr. John Holdren, now director of the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, better known as the "science czar" (barf) expressed support for a Chinese-style "one child policy" with "population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion."

Consider my experience, with what those two variants of opposition to reproductive choice mean in practice. Back in the 1980s, my then-wife and I wanted a child - but we were faced with a significant risk of genetic defects. The prospective results of having a genetically defective child were so catastrophic that for many years we did not dare to take this risk, and nearly resigned ourselves to never having a child. And then amniocentesis for genetic testing became available, together with safe and legal second-semester abortion, eliminating the risk: now we would be able to try again if our first fetus happened to be defective. Fortunately our first fetus turned out to be OK, and eventually became a healthy child. Thanks to the availability of safe and legal abortion we became parents. Without the availability of abortion we would have continued to face an unacceptable risk, and we would have been forced to remain childless.

And then consider the position of the Conservatives. They, under the previous administration, happily endorsed the appointment of officials whose anti-abortion position, if enacted into law, would have forced me to remain childless. But now they turn all hysterical at the appointment of their fellow scumbag whose policy, while despicable, would have been less devastating to my happiness, than their own policy would have been.

Oh well. One more fact in evidence that the bulk Conservative is cognitively crippled, unable to think conceptually about either life, or morality, or politics. But then, they do not even pretend that what they have, instead of ideas, is the result of anything beyond intuition, "common sense," and supernatural revelation. Their usual opponents, on the other hand, are beset by delusions of cognitive adequacy. Creepy and loathsome, the slime on both sides of the sewer.

Three Democides by False Morality - Part II, The Ban on DDT

2009-07-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

(This part follows Three Democides by False Morality - Part I, Holodomor.)

If there is a single idea at the foundation of all contemporary collectivisms, it is that the individual human is merely an organ or a cell of some supra-individual social superorganism. Collectivisms differ as to the identity of this alleged superorganism - family, clan, tribe, state, nation, religion, race, even all of humanity - but they all agree that the only "moral" action for an individual, is action that benefits the designated social "superorganism," even if it harms or kills individual humans, often including the individual for whom that action is alleged to be "moral."

Just as the root of altruism in Western cultures is the Christian doctrine of "Imitatio Dei," applied to Jesus' total self-sacrifice for the sake of sinners, so too the core doctrine of modern collectivisms - the notion that human individuals are mere organs or cells of the body of a collective superorganism - derives from Christian doctrine. It comes from Saint Augustine, who wrote (in Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, 21[8]) "We have become Christ. For, if he is the Head, we, the members; he and we together are the whole organism." It is on the basis of this doctrine that the Church justifies the extermination of heretics, as no less moral than the amputation of a gangrenous limb for the salvation of the "whole body of the Church." And even as some still healthy flesh may need to be cut off in such amputations, so the faithful Christian must not hesitate to sacrifice, in a crusade against heresy, some lives of the possibly innocent: "Kill them all - God will know his own." This conception of the collective "body of the faithful" as a superorganism was later copied by Islam, and by every collectivist ideology since. In every collectivist "morality," the individual is no more than dispensable flesh (or sacrificial meat) to the collective Superorganism.

Until Rachel Carson and the advent of Environmentalism, appeals to the collective as a "superorganism" always included in that superorganism the biological relatives, and especially the children and grandchildren, of the human individuals comprising the collective in question. Because one's progeny are a genuine value to the individual, this allowed the false morality, of sacrifice to the collective, to be cast as a matter not so much of consent to one's own self-destruction, as one of working for the life and happiness of one's children and grandchildren. The children, and the future, were the central theme in the propaganda of the collectivisms of old. Invariably the "members," or "cells" of the corresponding "superorganisms" were themselves individual human persons. It is this aspect of traditional collectivisms that was transcended by the first American to perpetrate a world-scale democide of her own.

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and science writer fascinated by the unfolding scientific understanding of the complex web of interrelationships among the many organisms in natural ecosystems. Her fascination with the emerging understanding of biological ecosystems led her into a Platonic reification of the global ecosystem as the ultimate social Superorganism, one that included not only the humans, but every organism on Earth, and their environments as well. This made her particularly aghast at the use of chemical pesticides with the potential to eliminate entire non-human species, such as the insect vectors of malaria parasites and other deadly microorganisms, to save the lives of humans. In Carson's view, this amounted to one kind of cell harming the Superorganism for its own benefit - the equivalent of a global cancer.

Carson set out her view of the global ecosystem as a Superorganism, of which the individual human was at most a disposable cell, in her best-selling book "Silent Spring." The title "Silent Spring" is a masterpiece of bait-and-switch propaganda. It is sane and good for people to enjoy birdsong, and to value a healthy and abundant natural environment for human life. But in the course of the book Carson gradually shifts the viewpoint, so that by its end an intellectually careless reader has been persuaded that the global ecosystem constitutes a Superorganism with an intrinsic moral value far greater than that of individual humans, or indeed of the entire species of Homo Sapiens. Once this viewpoint is assimilated, it becomes a "moral crime" to view the global biosphere as merely a value for human existence, a value that can be technologically improved, by human action, for human benefit. The reader is persuaded, instead, to view the global ecosystem as a single living Superorganism - and that morality consists of subordinating not only one's interests as an individual human, but even the persistence of the human species, to this Superorganism's welfare. Rachel Carson's book gave rise to a new kind of Collectivism, and to a new false morality of unequaled virulence.

Malaria, a disease caused by mosquito-borne parasites, was on the verge of eradication in 1948, the year Swiss chemist Paul Mueller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 "for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods." "Silent Spring" was a best-seller that spawned a mass movement whose first target was the use of DDT against malaria-carrying mosquito populations. The new "ecological" collectivism first grew in the United States, and within 10 years became influential enough to push through a federal ban on spraying DDT (in 1972,) and by 1985 also on manufacturing DDT, even for export. Because malaria was most widespread in countries that lacked the industrial infrastructure to manufacture DDT, the spraying of mosquito populations stopped, and deaths from malaria surged back to between 1 and 3 million per year - between 24 and 72 million to date.

In 2001, demand from countries where malaria was widespread led to a slight relaxation of the anti-DDT regime. In the Stockholm Convention of that year, the use of DDT was authorized - but only for applications that did not threaten the "integrity of the global ecosystem." This means that DDT is only available for indoor use, which can only protect those who live and work in houses with solid walls. The latter include the politicians and diplomats who negotiated the Stockholm Convention. People who live or work outside those walls continue to die.

Three Democides by False Morality continues: Part III, The Ban On Cloning

Death by Conservatism

2009-07-06T21:56:00.000-07:00

" .... The Strongin-Goldbergs, in turn, had nine unsuccessful invitro attempts, and finally had to use marrow from an imperfectly matched unrelated donor to treat their son Henry, who was running out of time. He died of graft vs. host disease at the age of seven. .... One of the reasons that the Strongin-Goldberg family lost Henry was because research on PGD was stalled for a year and a half in the middle of their attempts to use it — stalled by government officials who called it stem cell research, and who feared a slippery slope, and designer babies, and parents who use their children for spare parts. Had this family not lost those 18 months of research time, their real life story might have had a different ending."

Read the whole story (click on the title, above.) Everyone dies, sooner or later, but how much sooner depends on whether the politicians in power are on the side of Man, the animal that lives by his mind - or on the side of faith, of ghosts, and of living and dying in fear of their stupid and arbitrary God. And, depending on which medical technology your life will eventually depend on, consider how many months or years of research time they already took away from your life.

Sunk With The Tea

2009-06-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

(No, I'm still posting the "three Democides" series - but I am not allocating a great deal of my time to blogging this year, and I decided to give temporary precedence to a current, real-time topic.)

The decision of some Objectivists to support, and to participate in, the "Tea Party Movement" has come to exactly the end that Ayn Rand predicted for such efforts. As Robert LeChevalier writes in the OActivists mailing list,

Evidence is growing that many Tea Parties around the country are being subverted by those who neither share our values or the values on which this country is founded, and that they are paying lip service to them while manipulating the Tea Parties to dilute their effect (Democratic hacks, Libertarian dupes, Republican opportunists, or even very likely the police, by the way), or simply using them as a cash cow for any end you can imagine.

Or, as one organizer of a "Tea Party" wrote to another OActivist,

I'm sure you're aware the focus of the Tea Parties is limited government, fiscal responsibility and free markets. Individual rights certainly doesn't contradict any of those key points but I don't feel it fits ....

One of those slogans (none is specific or well-defined enough to call it a goal) is "fiscal responsibility." "Fiscal responsibility" is also the main slogan of ongoing proposals and campaigns, in several US states (and also at the federal level) to raise taxes (yes, I know that "fiscal responsibility" may also mean "cut spending," but Christian Republicans are not about to give up on the Christian principle that "we all have a responsibility to help the less fortunate.") And the claim that a campaign to raise taxes "does not contradict individual rights" could only be made by someone who has no idea of what rights are.

Those who advocate collaboration with the "Tea Party" movement sometimes cite Ayn Rand's one narrow exception to her caution against "unprincipled alliances:" "The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree." But in its original context (The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 7 January 3, 1972, "What Can One Do?") what Ayn Rand wrote was:

Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to "do something." ... It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies... The only groups one may properly join today are ad hoc committees, i.e., groups organized to achieve a single, specific, clearly defined goal, on which men of differing views can agree.

Far from having "a single goal," the organizers of "Tea Parties" seldom list fewer than three or four. And even fewer of these are either specific or well-defined (the ambiguity of appeals to "fiscal responsibility" is just the last case-in-point.) The "Tea Party" movement is - in all respects - the paradigmatic embodiment of "we've got to do something." This means, you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies. If only Ayn Rand were alive today to say, "I told you so."

Three Democides by False Morality - Part I, Holodomor

2009-06-10T18:49:00.000-07:00

The function of objective morality is to enlarge the quality and the span of human life. The result of false morality, and of its enforcement by law, is death. Prior to the last century, this death was meted out primarily to individuals who were believed, whether falsely or accurately, to have broken the many laws that enforced the false moralities of their age. The last century, beginning in the 1930s, added democide - mass death of millions, many of them visibly innocent of any individual breach of the proclaimed moral law - to false moralities' toll.

The author of the first democide by enforcement of a false morality was Joseph Stalin. Marx, Engels, and most of their Russian followers were consistent materialists, and had no use for the concept or the language of "morality." Stalin, who became the de facto dictator of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, largely on the strength of his genuine proletarian origins was not, as far as anyone knows, either a systematic materialist or an Atheist. Stalin had been educated for priesthood in the Orthodox Christian Church, and there is controversy about whether or not he was duly ordained as an Orthodox priest. Two successive Patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church vouched for Stalin as an Orthodox Christian believer in good standing with the Church - and while their endorsement may have been made under duress, Stalin's understanding that he needed this endorsement was a radical turn away from the explicitly materialist stance of his predecessors. Stalin frequently appealed to "God's Will," both in his official speeches and in his everyday conversation. More than any other dictator in history, Stalin engineered popular assent to his power by appeal to (a false) "morality." It helped that Stalin's "Socialist Morality" was largely identical to the traditional Altruist "morality" of Orthodox Christianity.

Stalin was the first tyrant to use, possibly without any overt understanding, the fact that it was possible to eliminate humans by the million with relatively little direct use of gallows, gas chambers, or firing squads. It was enough to make it impossible for men to use their minds to support and extend their lives. The human is the animal that lives by its mind, and dies when denied its use.

By 1930 Stalin had achieved nearly complete totalitarian control of every aspect of life in the Soviet Union, including its economy. The only significant exception was agriculture. For a thousand years, what was now the Western quarter of the Soviet Union, and especially Ukraine, was the "Breadbasket of Europe," growing much of the Old Continent's harvest of wheat. Its productive, prosperous independent farmers (in Ukrainian "kulaks") were the Soviet Union's last men outside the economic power of the State. It was against them that Stalin deployed the first exercise of enforced "morality" as a means of democide.

Stalin drew on two religious notions. The first, whose roots go back to the pre-history of religion, is that food is not created by human agriculture, but is a holy gift of God or Gods, to be treated as sacred, and consumed only as part of a religious ritual. The second, peculiar to Christianity and going back to the New Testament episode of Jesus driving the money changers out of the Temple, is the notion that it is immoral, and sacrilegious, to trade, for selfish commercial profit, in the stuff of sacred religious ritual. Stalin's fusion of these notions was that food, the sacred stuff of life, belonged to all people, and for individuals to trade it for selfish profit was contrary to Socialist Morality. Therefore commercial trade in food was banned. Farms were systematically searched for grain that had not been turned over to the Soviet State. Farmers convicted of trading or hoarding grain were shot. The resulting famine, the Holodomor, killed between 7 and 15 million people, including 5 to 10 million Ukrainians. The Holodomor was also remarkable for the lack of any resistance. Because they were being murdered in the name of a "morality" that they also shared, Stalin's first democide enjoyed a unanimous sanction, and even a kind of endorsement, from its victims.

Next Part: Three Democides by False Morality - Part II, The Ban on DDT.

GHF Climate-Disasters Report: Worse Than Fiction - A Lie

2009-06-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

Roger Pielke writes: "A new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum ... is a methodological embarrassment and poster child for how to lie with statistics. ... The report is worse than fiction, it is a lie." (click on header above for the rest)

Exactly Why Late-Term Abortion IS Pro-Human-Life

2009-06-05T16:26:00.000-07:00

The facts of reality that make the freedom to abort one's pregnancy, up to the moment of birth, a pre-requisite for living a life appropriate to Homo Sapiens (click on header.)

The Ayn Rand Center still needs quality control

2009-06-01T00:25:00.000-07:00

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is the first Objectivist political action organization in history, and a learning curve is to be expected. Ayn Rand distinguished collaboration with those who share the same basic premises - which is to the advantage of the more consistent, in this case, to the advantage of the Objectivist - from collaboration with those whose basic premises are different, in which case collaboration advantages the more evil and irrational, who benefit from the sanction that collaboration gives them. Enlightenment-based Classical Liberals (Reason Magazine contributors such as Radley Balko, Virginia Postrel and Cathy Young, for example) are good potential allies. Supernaturalist Conservatives and populist/localist Libertarians, on the other hand, hold delusional premises - and giving them ideological credibility (and tainting our own) by collaborating with them can only be counterproductive. While individual Objectivists may well collaborate productively with non-Objectivist organizations on specific projects without appearing to endorse their ideologies, the Ayn Rand Center effectively lends Ayn Rand's name to organizations with whom it is seen to collaborate. But the task of distinguishing between those two categories of potential allies is hampered by America's current Pragmatist culture, which discourages even ideological organizations from openly stating their principles. Checking out the websites of potential allies, and identifying the premises underlying their political positions, is an essential component of ideological quality control - and an indispensable precondition of long-term political effectiveness.

I noticed that the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is listed as a "Co-Sponsor" of the 09.12.09 Protest at the Capitol. Reading the list of sponsors, Ayn Rand's name is the only one that the average American will immediately recognize. The logo of the "Protest at the Capitol" shows, with the US Capitol in the background, three red fists, in the style of the old anti-draft Left Libertarian protests that some Objectivists joined back in the 1960s, prompting Ayn Rand to caution them, in the essay I cite in my April 5th blog post (below) against the hazards of unprincipled alliances. The impulse is understandable: slavery, whether by old means of conscription, or of the new threats of higher taxes, "national service," hyperinflation and so on, is despicable enough that even the most rational individualists will feel the impulse to look for allies. But emotions are not a guide to action. Alliances with nuts and cranks transfer the credibility of rational men to men who do not deserve to be made credible. Who are the other sponsors of this event?

The primary "National Sponsor" and main organizer of this event is, as can be told from the red fist logo, a Left Libertarian organization, one called "FreedomWorks Foundation." (When I wrote this blog entry I didn't know that FreedomWorks is a front for Dick Armey. See my comment #6, below.) Their idea of "Freedom" includes the "freedom" to make "free" permanent copies of rented DVDs to one's hard drive - regardless of copyright. Back before the present plague of Pragmatism, even Conservatives, much less Objectivists, would have had qualms at associating with such an outfit. But under the cover of Pragmatism, with its the rejection of principles qua principles, the Left Libertarian position (with its disregard of individualist principles - such as the principle that a creator rightly owns the product of his creative action - for the sake of some "larger" social or political "freedom") has a certain appeal to the sufficiently Pragmatist Conservative. After all, media producers, directors, entertainers and songwriters are big financial contributors to the "Left." If they can be deprived of a part of their income, the campaign coffers of the "Left" will be that much lighter. And about the principle of the creator's right to the product of his mind - "Principle? What's a 'Principle'? You talk like an Elitist Intellectual! The Enemy!" Yet if this principle is discarded, a protest against taxation is left without a moral foundation - and its participants can only look like objectors, not against taxation per se, but only against some specific ends to which they are being taxed.

So much for the organizers. What about the ARC's fellow co-sponsors? They come in two varieties. Some identify as "Conservatives." For example, here is the mission statement from the FAQ of a double co-sponsor, GrassFire, which also lists its ResistNet affiliate as a separate co-sponsor: Grassfire.org’s leadership team holds a strong and unwavering commitment to conservative, pro-family and pro-faith values. And those are the lesser evil.

The other co-sponsors ("Campaign For Liberty," "Young Americans for Liberty" - formerly "Students for Ron Paul." and so on) are "Ron Paul Libertarians" - anti-abortion, anti-immigration, anti-global-trade, "anti-militarist anti-Imperialists," believers that Iran would be harmless if Americans had not objected when "Iran wanted to control its own oil fields."

Nuts and cranks. And the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

On Crimes Motivated By Collectivisms, And Their Proper Punishment

2009-05-02T22:31:00.000-07:00

The recent expansion of so-called "hate crime" legislation by the US Congress has drawn a storm of condemnation from Conservatives and Libertarians, occasionally echoed by other observers, including some who consider themselves Objectivists. Yet if one is to actually apply Ayn Rand's philosophy to the evaluation of such laws, one needs to strip away the false labels and intrinsicist arguments - and evaluate what is really being legislated independently of either.

"Hate crime" is a bad label, because hate is just as much a part of violence that falls outside the scope of this legislation, as of violence punished by longer prison terms under it. What the legislation actually concerns (and what, unfortunately, only Objectivists can accurately name) is crime motivated by collectivism: by animus, not against the specific individual whom the criminal assaults or kills, but against a collective classification to which the victim happens to belong. How should such motivation affect the punishment?

There are three distinct (albeit closely interwoven) reasons why crimes are punished, and need to be punished. The first is retribution: the criminal has inflicted an injustice on the victim, and justly deserves punishment. The second is retaliation: the prospect of punishment reduces, proactively, the incidence of crime. The third is prevention: the incarceration of the criminal prevents him from committing additional crimes while incarcerated - and, if provided and made use of, rehabilitation services may reduce the criminal's inclination to commit additional crimes after his eventual release.

How is each of these considerations affected when a crime is motivated by collectivism?

In an objective legal system, retribution is proportional to the product of two measurements: the harm done to the victim, and the irrationality of the criminal's action. If it were shown that no non-consensual harm was done to anyone, or that an accused person's action had been rational (for example, to save his own life in an emergency) then no criminal sanctions are objectively called for. To harm another individual not because of anything that individual has chosen or has done, but from bigotry about facts that were outside the victim's choice, such as where the victim was born, or her race, or her sexual orientation and so on - in other words, crime motivated by collectivism - is, outside of some barely imaginable emergency contexts, at the outer extreme of irrationality, and therefore at the outer extremity of injustice that deserves retribution.

Retaliation works indirectly, by enhancing, through the prospect of punishment, the disincentive against irrational (and therefore unjust) action. A greater irrationality - and collectivism is close to the acme of irrationality, exceeded only by such self-sacrifice as attempting to carry out a suicide bombing - needs to be met by the prospect of proportionally greater retaliation.

Similarly for prevention. Someone who strikes a cheating spouse or an abusive boss is acting out, however irrationally, against a specific individual's actions; such a person is not likely to endanger, after his release, anyone other than someone who would then choose to marry him or to hire him in spite of his criminal record. Once the requirements of retribution and retaliation have been met, such a person can be safely released. On the other hand, a collectivist who is out to bash or kill Mexicans or Jews or homosexuals or Blacks cannot be released, when there are many other potential victims against whom he bears the same anti-rational, collective animus, and whom his release would put in harm's way.

So by all means, let us call so-called "hate crimes" by their right name: crimes motivated by collectivism. And punish them accordingly.

Collaboration: Getting Ayn Rand 180-Degrees Wrong

2009-04-05T13:38:00.000-07:00

The economic policies of the Obama administration are an increasingly evil continuation of the evil policies of the Bush years, and need to be opposed. Because of Obama's self-identification as a Liberal, most Christian Conservatives have switched sides, and now are (at least until they again have a Christianist in the White House) the main publicly visible source of opposition. It is predictably tempting for wannabe-Objectivists to collaborate with that opposition. But wait: did not Ayn Rand write something (back in 1964, re-published in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal") about "The Anatomy of Compromise?" Didn't it have something to do with being more consistent than the other side?

Here are some examples of what advocates of collaboration with Christian conservatives have been writing in recent weeks:

"In any competition between people with the same basic principles, the more consistent one wins."

"In opposite principles, the more consistent one wins – due to its consistency. Any collaboration serves to undermine the inconsistent collaborator."

"In any cooperation between two parties, the more consistent one wins."

All of which are the precise opposite of what Rand actually wrote: "In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins." In context, Ayn Rand wrote:

1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.
2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.
3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.

And to put "the more evil or irrational one" into the context of collaboration with Christian Conservatives: all appeals to self-sacrifice in our civilization ultimately derive from the Christian doctrine of "Imitatio Dei," of imitating Jesus' ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, not for the sake of the good and the virtuous, but for the unearned salvation of sinners. Ayn Rand's shrugging Atlas is a vision of the exact opposite of Jesus bearing the Cross: it is the vision of the heroic Spirit - the heroic Mind - refusing to bear the burden of sacrifice. "Going Galt" means nothing if it does not mean refusing - totally and absolutely - to "imitate Christ."

So what is one to make of Randians who give favorable references and Web links to Christianists, to the likes of Michelle Malkin - in the context of "going Galt?" Stupidity? Opportunism? A symptom of minds destroyed, even among wannabe-Objectivists, through the pervasive indoctrination of children into Pragmatism by the Comprachicos who run American schools?

If you want to work against the culture of self-sacrifice, and for the Human's individual human right to pursue his own happiness on Earth, then, and especially in contexts where you find yourself on the same side of the barricade with people of mixed premises who on other issues advocate for evil, the advocate of individual rights must make sure that his own basic principles are clearly and openly defined. The alternative, of hiding principles in the name of collaboration, amounts in the long-term to philosophical and practical suicide. And to those who "cited" the exact opposite of what Ayn Rand wrote: if you venture to cite Ayn Rand, at least try first to grasp what she actually said.

Does this mean (thanks, to Al Brown, for asking in Comments) that Objectivists must refrain from any and all collaborations and alliances in our political activism? No, not at all. When a potential collaborator shares our basic basic principles, the most consistent among the allies - the Objectivist - has the most to win. It is only in collaboration with those, whose basic principles are different from ours, that Objectivists lose. In politics, those basic principles are:

1. Individual human rights, the necessary preconditions for being able to live a life appropriate to a human, are facts of reality, objectively knowable from the evidence of the human senses, and neither arbitrary nor supernatural.

2. These pre-conditions include non-interference by others with one's life, liberty, and the pursuit of one's own happiness on Earth.

3. The only proper function of government is to secure these rights - by bringing the legitimate use of force among individuals under the control of objective law.

To collaborate with someone who differs with any of these basic principles is unavoidably counterproductive. For example, consider someone who believes that rights are only granted to men by the deity of a supernatural religion, and are handed down by revelation in his religion's holy scriptures. Unavoidably, this man's support for my right to pursue my own happiness on Earth will end where the prohibitions of his religious scriptures begin. My collaboration will make him stronger, and thus eventually better able to limit and infringe my rights - better able to undermine my ability to live according to my own basic principles, and eventually my ability to live a life appropriate to my Self as a human being - or to live at all. What good would it do me to slow down the growth of taxes this year, if it strengthened, as my current "allies," those who would stop the development of the cloning-based medical technologies on which my life is likely to depend a decade from now?

It is rational for me, in the political context, to collaborate with people who are not Objectivists in other things - but only with those who agree with me on basic principles of politics. Collaboration with Classical Liberals, for example, is often productive: they share our basic principles, but we are more consistent than they are in the application of those principles - and therefore the collaboration is to our advantage. Collaboration with Christianists, on the other hand - with Michelle Malkin and the like - would be a means, not to the advancement of my life and happiness on Earth, but to their destruction.

My Return, Postponed

2008-12-31T10:23:00.000-08:00

I had major surgery - my second in two years - on December 19. Early results were so good that by this week I got back to standing and sitting most of the day. Big mistake. I am now under orders to spend most of my time, until a month after surgery, in bed. I have lots to blog about, but it all will have to wait until after January 20th (2009) or so.

Free Internet versus Free Internet

2008-12-12T17:58:00.000-08:00

The Ayn Rand Institute has a great comment on The FCC’s Plan to Censor the Internet:

....as the history of radio and television has shown, once the government guarantees ‘free’ access to a communications medium, it will inevitably exercise control over its content--i.e., censorship.

In fact, this plan already comes with censorship strings attached; the FCC has declared that this ‘free’ Internet must filter out pornography and other material deemed unsuitable for children. Not only will this prevent vast numbers of Americans from accessing content the government regards as inappropriate, but it will unavoidably lead to massive self-censorship by websites struggling to avoid government sanitization.

For a concrete example of where this is going, recall the recent incident in which a British QUANGO (quasi-nongovernmental organization,) on the strength of a picture of a supposedly suggestive rock album cover, cut off access not only to the picture of the album cover, but also to the text of the article about the album's history - and also disabled all British access to the editing and content uploading servers of the Wikipedia.

What's a QUANGO? What does "quasi-nongovernmental" mean? It means a government agency set up not to look like a government agency, to give a work-around to those pesky Enlightenment principles that get in the way of a government's ability to do what would surely become "controversial" if that government were to do it directly. For example, most Americans would have taken a dim view of an official US Government agency encouraging mortgage fraud - and so this was done through a pair of QUANGOs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Similarly, neither the British nor the American government wants to look like it has an official bureau of censorship - so it delegates the job of telling the Internet service providers what to ban, to QUANGOs, in the United Kingdom the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF,) and in the United States the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC.)

In the Wikipedia case, the IWF claimed that the cover of the 1976 rock album "Virgin Killer" was obscene because of "erotic posing" by a minor girl. I remember seeing the album in record store windows in the seventies, and thinking that the pose in the picture resembled the pose of the winged girl angels, naked as a symbol of innocence, that flank, on each side, the Virgin Mary on her way to Heaven, in paintings I've seen in North-Central Europe's Roman Catholic cathedrals and churches. But in close-up, the girl's pubic area is hidden behind what looks like cracks in a glass pane covering the picture. I finally remembered that "crack" is a vulgar term for the female genitalia, and figured out that the broken glass could be interpreted as suggesting a broken hymen. So now, a bad taste in puns, or bad taste in rock music, or both, is enough to get you banned from the British Internet. Who could have known?

In the United States, the NCMEC maintains a similar Internet blacklist, but in greater secrecy - and there is no way to find out if you're banned. To date, the NCMEC has avoided tangling with websites as visible as the Wikipedia, perhaps on the theory that a frog never jumps out of the pot if boiled slowly enough. But when the NCMEC gets to censor the government's "free" Internet, it won't be so bashful any more. And, given the choice of tax-funded "free" (but censored) Internet access, and open Internet access that you have to pay for every month, who will ever pay to find out what the NCMEC has seen fit to ban?

With the new administration unlikely to appoint any more Christianists to the Supreme Court, the prospect that the government will be able to impose this kind of berserk Christianist censorship directly on private ISPs in the United States is no longer on the horizon. So George W. Bush's lame-duck FCC found a wedge strategy to impose censorship anyway, figuring that the other party will never turn down a chance to skin the taxpayers for the cost of a "free" Internet (plus a service charge.) Will the suckers fall for it?

You can have either a free Internet with "free" as in "free speech," or a free Internet with "free" as in "free beer." It's one or the other, guys; you can't have both.

Wedge Strategy, Part 4: History and Implications

2008-12-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

(This is the fourth and last part of a preliminary draft of an article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited. Parts I, II, and III are linked to here.)

How effective are wedge strategies in action? The answer depends on what one wishes to accomplish. The Communists' "Popular Front" strategy of the 1930s and 40s was predicated on the Marxist presumption of economic determinism: the idea that it would be enough for a Marxist "vanguard" to change the economic and political situation - and then the minds of the masses would follow. A portfolio of wedge strategies would not change many minds, but to the Marxists, that was irrelevant as long as the "facts on the ground" were bent their way.

Through its various wedge strategies, the Popular Front strategy was indeed effective in bringing about an unprecedented collectivization of Western societies, including the United States. At the crest of this wave of collectivist economic policy in America, between 1951 and 1963, the top marginal US Income Tax rate was at 91-92%. Conscription into "National Service" - then mainly military - was not questioned. Most large industries were organized into fascist-style government-controlled cartels; the average American of that time could not imagine free competition in telephone service, transportation and travel, insurance, radio and television and so on. Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged in the first half of that decade; the America she depicted in her novel was recognizably close to the America in which that novel was written.

Yet the Marxists' belief in economic determinism proved itself false. With Earl Warren as Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, silent for two decades after FDR's court-packing scheme, re-asserted the principle of constitutional review. The dominance of Keynesian doctrines in economics, and of Behaviorism in psychology, were challenged, and in the next decade were overthrown. Classical Liberalism, in America re-branded as "Goldwater Conservatism," became a political current that forced America's "political center" to move away from collectivism. Other countries moved farther and faster away from the collectivism of the 1950s than even the United States; it was now America that found its own still too-mixed economy hard pressed to compete in the world. By 1991 the top income tax rate was down to 31%; the fascist cartels were history, replaced by vigorous competition; and university economics departments found it hard to find even token replacements for their Keynesian and Marxist emeriti.

America's moment of relative freedom did not last. The downfall of collectivism in America and in most of the rest of the world in the last third of the twentieth century was itself accomplished by Classical Liberals, and their Libertarian auxiliaries, by means of wedge strategies consciously copied from the "triumphant" collectivists of the same century's middle third. Wedge elements of Capitalism had been sold to supernaturalists, pragmatists, utilitarians and opportunists by peddling the incidental or illusory overlap between supernaturalism, collectivism, pragmatism, altruism and utilitarianism, and various corrupt versions (especially "Libertarianism") of Enlightenment individualism on the one hand, and Classical Liberalism on the other. The economic and political conditions had changed - but the ideas in the minds of most Americans did not change, or - worse - regressed even farther from anything compatible with reason and individual rights.

Thanks to three decades of technological progress and increasing economic freedom across the world, much of it due to the short-term success of those Classical Liberal wedge strategies (a little freedom goes a long way) many more people, everywhere in the world, are able to participate in open discussions of ideas. Some are changing their minds, but others see that the very freedoms that have opened their eyes, stand in contradiction to their own deepest beliefs, supernaturalist or altruist or collectivist or all three. They know that they've been had. They understand, if they are intelligent enough to grasp those facts, that the recent explosion of individual freedoms will not do what that the wedge strategists sold them. That it will NOT merely help them be more effective and authentic supernaturalists, altruists and collectivists. That it can be used by us, their individualist enemies, to try to take the minds of their children away from the supernaturalist, altruist and collectivist ideologies held by their parents. What the supernaturalists, altruists and collectivists of the world want, is the opposite of enlightenment individualism. What they want is Directive 10-289. And because, like the Communists of the Red Decades, they must keep their agendas hidden, wedge strategies are the only strategies they have. In the last two decades, they have used those strategies to make political and economic trends in America reverse course.

Should Objectivists, still a minuscule minority in America and in the world, try to change the trend back again, by using wedge strategies just like everyone else? Whether or not a wedge strategy will be effective, depends on what one aims to accomplish. A wedge strategy movement can accomplish a few decades of concrete political results. But a wedge strategy does not often change minds. And when old ideologies persist in most human minds, their concrete political embodiments will tend to return.

Ayn Rand wrote, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason..." Activism only becomes Objectivist activism, when it is advocacy that demonstrates the efficacy of reason. Of course, when one demonstrates the efficacy of reason, by using reason effectively in advocating for a cause, one works well for that cause. But it is the demonstration of the efficacy of reason, and not merely advocating well for a good cause, that promotes Objectivism.

This means that the Objectivist must practice the opposite of the wedge strategy: not try to select positions that fit the listener's pre-existing ideology, but rather argue by deriving the objectively true position, by logic, from the facts of reality and from principles - Objectivist principles - grounded in the facts of reality. It means avoiding appeals to intuition, emotion, unintegrated concretes, and especially appeals to popular ideas that can provide alternative support for a concrete political position, but that are ultimately derived, not from objective facts of reality, but from tradition or faith.

The Marxists, and the supernaturalists, tried to change minds by changing the relations of power: with wedge strategies when those were available, with gulags and crusades and jihads when they were not. Our goals, including our political goals, are different. One cannot eliminate political initiation of force from the world, except by changing minds first. Marxists and supernaturalists consider the wedge strategy a useful shortcut. Objectivists identify the wedge strategy as a dead - dead as in "brain dead" - dead end.

American Shaman

2008-12-08T15:16:00.000-08:00

The caption under a photograph at the center of the top of the front page of today's Wall Street Journal:

DIVINE INTERVENTION: Bishop Charles H. Ellis III held a special service Sunday at the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit, calling for people to pray for the U.S. auto makers as Washington negotiators worked to craft a bailout plan.

At 62, I'm a bit old to start from scratch in some other country. Damn.

Censorship Express

2008-12-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

Back when Ayn Rand wrote about "obscenity" laws in "Censorship, Local and Express," prosecutions were already on the wane, part of a general rebirth of freedom in America in the 1970s and 80s. When the Bush administration revived obscenity laws, there had been no prosecutions for nearly three decades. At the same time, the Christianist (ex-"Republican") majority in the US Congress jacked off the minimum penalty for possession of "obscene" drawings to five years without parole in federal prison - exactly the same as for buying photos, of actual children being raped, from the rapists. Now, a manga collector has been indicted for possession of "obscenity" and faces this penalty in a US Federal Court.

Please, no silly stuff that this is not really really Theocracy in action, because in a real Christian theocracy a reader of off-color Japanese comix would be burned at the stake, rather than face a mere five-year minimum prison sentence. Shall we thank the Environmentalists for keeping it that way, albeit only from fear of deforestation, which would surely follow if the US Government had to burn all the readers of politically incorrect books and comix with fires started from kindling? I'm not sure. In what I know of history, every regime that started by burning books got to burn human corpses before it was through.

Wedge Strategy, Part III: Identification

2008-11-29T18:23:00.000-08:00

(This is the third part of a preliminary draft of a four-part article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited. Part I and Part II are linked to here.)

How does one identify a wedge strategy?

In general, the most effective tactic is to look for breaches of coherence, where coherence is expected. Thanks to pervasive pragmatism in American education and in American media culture, few Americans expect coherence, of anyone, in anything. Incoherence is so pervasive that it is no longer noticed even in contexts, such as political arguments, where coherence is essential. To recognize wedge strategies, it helps to have made a habit of using the techniques of what Ayn Rand, in "Philosophy: Who Needs IT," called "Philosophical Detection." Then look for discrepancies, and when the habit of philosophical detection is with you, they will jump out of the page: discrepancies between the message and the messenger; between the principle that is being implicitly or explicitly invoked, and the use that is made of that principle; between language and substance; between what is said and what is left unsaid, between what is said and what is implied. If you find A on on the exposed side of the discrepancy and B on the hidden, then you are dealing with a wedge strategy.

Between Message and Messenger

One of the earliest items in the training of every intellectual concerns the fallacy of ad hominem and related arguments. The intellectual learns to focus on the argument - and to ignore the identity of its source. This may well be why so often intellectuals appear almost eager to be taken in by a wedge argument. Who makes an argument is irrelevant to its validity, but it is not irrelevant to its uses.

When Ayn Rand was asked to help fight against "Social Justice," a totalitarian movement, cause A, she paid attention to the fact that the invitation had come from Dashiell Hammett, one of Hollywood's most notorious sympathizers with Communism - cause B. Then it was just a matter of completing the identification.

Similarly, the recent spate of wedge strategies from advocates of coercive religion was started with a demand to teach creationism, and then "intelligent design," in the schools in the name of "open debate" - the demand coming from the most adamant defenders of censorship, and of extripation from school curricula of any mention of, let alone open debate about, other topics relevant to school students' lives, especially of non-procreational sexualities and of sexual pleasure. This would have been an evident badge of a wedge strategy - even if Phillip E. Johnson had not already identified it overtly as such.

Between Principle and Goal

One of the weirder results of the recent California election was the passage, by referendum, of a prohibition against confining farm animals. The proposition was promoted by "animal rights" groups, and every ad mentioned that California is already the leading state in the production of free-range chickens and eggs. The implied appeal was to knowledge that products from free-range animals are tastier, and probably healthier for humans to eat, than their counterparts from confined animals. Many voters were hoping that, with confinement of farm animals prohibited, the supply of free-range meat and eggs would increase, making them more affordable. The implicit principle was that farm animals should serve as food for humans - yet the goal was to reduce the number of chickens and other farm animals slaughtered for human consumption in California, as a way station toward the total elimination of animals as a source of human food. This measure could have been stopped, by pointing out that free-range chickens were being used as a wedge issue toward the eventual prohibition of all meat farming, including the free-range kind.

Between Language and Substance

Wedge strategies of the "false-A" variant depend on language that seems to refer to a concept of A while referring to something else. Christianist false-A wedge strategies stand out by using common words such as "life," "freedom," "equality," "tolerance," "values," "principles" and so on, in reference to other, often opposite concepts. For example, the "Institute for Justice" has been waging, under the slogan of religious "freedom" and "equal treatment," a campaign to force states to eliminate the requirement, that organizations which act as agents of the state must respect the religious freedom of individuals to whom they provide services on behalf of the state, and provide equal treatment irrespective of those individuals' beliefs and practices, sexual identity and so on. (The IJ website describes this as follows: "the Institute for Justice litigates on behalf of private charities and religious organizations to protect the vital role they play in addressing the myriad social problems confronting America." This litigation is directed primarily against the requirement that, when acting as agents of the government and receiving government funding, such organizations may not discriminate against any clients of government programs on the basis of those clients' religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation and so on.) Thus a campaign to deny religious freedom and equal treatment by agents of the state to individuals - is packaged as a campaign to force respect for the "religious freedom" and "equal treatment" of religious organizations. (This is not meant to disparage the valuable work that the Institute for Justice has done for property rights. Those to whom property rights are at the top of their personal hierarchy of values, may have good reason to associate with that organization - but, like any Objectivist who associates with any non-Objectivist organization, need to be aware of wedge agendas and risks of compromise.)

Between the Said and the Hidden

Every wedge strategy depends on showing wedge issues on which A happens to agree with B - and on keeping issues on which they disagree hidden. Every successful counterattack against a wedge strategy involves bringing the hidden contradictions to light. For example, in my successful campaign against Proposition 4, which would have enabled parents to force a teenage woman to continue a pregnancy against her own judgment and will, in the name of "parental involvement," I wrote:

If read carelessly enough, Prop. 4 seems to bar parental coercion of the young woman "through force (such as forcible confinement,) threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter." But this bar applies only to coercion intended to force the young woman to undergo an abortion. Prop. 4 conspicuously does not bar parents from using forcible confinement, or other "force, threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter" to force their daughter to continue her pregnancy, eventually forcing her to give birth against her will. This asymmetry effectively endorses parental force – against that pregnant young woman who wishes to set her life on a course that does not include giving birth in her teens. Those who hear Prop. 4 defended as a measure for parental involvement, should understand, before they vote, exactly what kind of parental involvement is being endorsed.

It is by recognizing contradictions that one can (1) identify a wedge strategy, before one is induced to compromise one's own rational values; (2) neutralize the wedge strategy; and (3) counteract it.

(Next - Wedge Strategy, Part 4: History and Implications)

Contracts, Crime, and Individual Rights

2008-11-28T11:45:00.000-08:00

Just before Thanksgiving, a federal jury here in LA convicted a Missouri woman of three misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to trick a teenager, who later committed suicide.

Some people think that this case sets a bad precedent - that contractual fraud is different from more direct modalities of crime, and should not be subject to more than civil adjudication, damages, injunctions and so on - not a conviction for a crime. I disagree. Of course, criminal statutes should not be invoked to deal with mere disagreements about the terms of a contract, or with cases in which the injured party can sue and be adequately compensated through a civil verdict. But there are also cases where this is not possible - where the injured party cannot sue (in this case because she is dead,) where the contract clause protects third parties (such as fellow customers of the same service) and thus creates obstacles to recovery through civil damages (can you sue for violation of a contract between two other parties?) - and then criminal law can be and should be invoked.

What about a claim that the defendant did not understand the contract, or maybe did not even read it? In a free market, a contract evaluation service could provide legal advice on the meaning of a contract on a commercial basis. When millions of people sign identical contracts - as is the case with MySpace - the contract would only need to be evaluated once by the provider of the legal evaluation service, and so in a competitive market the cost of the service would be small enough to be worth buying even for users of cheap, or even otherwise free contractual services. I am not a lawyer, but I suppose that even with current regulations such legal evaluation services will emerge if contracts are enforced, and criminal responsibility is assigned when this is contextually appropriate. In the meantime, the jury in the case did the right thing by reducing the charges to misdemeanors instead of felonies.

Service providers, from MySpace to stock exchanges, do the right thing by making the use of their services conditional on compliance with terms that protect their customers from predation by other customers. And the government is right to invoke criminal law against those who deliberately or recklessly disregard those provisions, when third parties, who rely on those provisions of the service provider's contract to protect them, are harmed by the actions of those predators.

America's Turkey

2008-11-27T21:14:00.000-08:00

Yoon's turkey was delicious. Our national turkey, though, was cooked according to a less careful recipe. As told in a New Yorker cartoon, "Thanksgiving recipes from the US Treasury Department," October 13, 2008, p. 12:

Turkey Stuffed with Seven Hundred Billion Dollars

Large Turkey
Seven hundred billion-dollar bills, crumpled

Place the crumpled bills inside the turkey. Roast until all that remains is a pile of ashes. Enjoy!

My Thanksgiving Invocation

2008-11-27T19:15:00.000-08:00

This was my invocation at our (Yoon, Sung Cho, Brian, Emily and me) Thanksgiving Day dinner today:

To the unknown great men who tamed fire and the horse, and invented the written word and the wheel,

To Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes,

To Al Khwarizmi and Galileo and Newton,

To Ada Lovelace and Charles Darwin and Ayn Rand,

To Alan Turing and John von Neumann and Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie,

To Alan Kay, Grady Booch, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin,

Let us give thanks to them and to the Human race, for making this a world fit for the Human race to live on!

So maybe you can tell what I teach. Next year we'll hear what Yoon's list is.

Obama Disappoints the Left - and it's a Good Thing, Too

2008-11-24T10:53:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has comments on its articles, and they tend to be more insightful than is usual in Blogosphere (yes, I know, that's damning with faint praise.) Here is a particularly hopeful (for rational readers) comment on a recent article about Obama's appointments to date:

More former Clinton administration officials (Summers was actually in the REAGAN administration too!), and avowed proponents of globalization and free trade. In other words, these appointments directly contradict every principle Obama ran on and every reason his supporters voted for him. Suckers.

Of course, there are also voters who voted for Obama only because McCain-Palin were serious about carrying out their promises - and Obama was obviously an opportunist, who would need policies that will work in the real world well enough to get him re-elected in 2012. Clinton revisited is not heaven, but astronomically better than Obama the candidate (or an "honorable" McCain-Palin administration) would have been.

Wedge Strategy, Part II: Variants

2008-11-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

(This is the second part of a preliminary draft of a four-part article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited. Part I is linked to here.)

Coercive ideologies can only engage directly a minority of Americans, and therefore their political, cultural and intellectual influence depends entirely on the use of wedge strategies. The Christianists in America, in particular, do not have any other strategy at all. Their temporary political triumphs are in all cases the result of wedge strategies, and can last only as long as those wedge strategies remain unexposed.

America is still individualist enough for wedge strategies to be aimed exclusively at individualist principles as ideology A. Thus opposition to coercive taxation is used to create wedge issues such as tax financing of abortions, or of medical research with embryonic stem cells. Opposition to mandatory attendance in government schools is used for wedge issues such as the teaching of the biological principle of evolution in those schools, or teaching facts about contraception and safety (as opposed to so-called "abstinence education") in sexuality classes. In the recent California elections, the wedge issue of education about homosexual as well as heterosexual sexuality and marriage played a significant part in the passage of Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to abolish equal marriage for homosexuals.

Given that the wedge strategy is the only strategy available to the Christianist side, what about contexts where there is no actual wedge of overlap between the Christianists' goals and the principles of their opposition? In such contexts, the Christianists (or other coercive ideological movements in a largely individualist, Enlightenment-based culture) can only resort to wedge strategy variants that create the false appearance that a wedge does exist. This can be done by creating or reinforcing a misinterpretation of the opposition's (A's) principles, or by creating a misidentification of positions outside of ideology A as wedge issues between A and B, or by doing both simultaneously.

Variant 1: Misrepresenting A ("False-A")

Phillip E. Johnson's first campaign against secular culture, and the campaign with which the term "Wedge Strategy" is most closely associated, dealt not with a political issue but with an intellectual and cultural issue: naturalism as an indispensable foundation of natural science. Johnson's wedge strategy was to misrepresent the intellectual foundations of the scientific process, especially the fact that the scientist's thinking must be critical (so that previously accepted explanations may be replaced, when appropriate, with better-integrated explanations that can more completely account for available observations and measurements) and open to evidence (the scientist's meaning of "open minded.")

The false-A variant of the Wedge Strategy substitutes a false image of A in place of actual A. In the Christianist-Islamist campaign against naturalism, the requisite false-A already existed in the form of Kantian interpretations of the philosophy of science, particularly that of Thomas Kuhn, who argued that scientists' interpretations of their observations and measurements are driven less by what is needed to get to knowledge of reality (which according to Kant and Kuhn is in any case not possible) than by what he called "paradigms," frameworks of interpretation driven by subjective esthetic preferences and by intellectual fashion. While despised by actual scientists (see, for example, "The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn," in physicist Steven Weinberg's "Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries," 2001) Kuhn's view of science became a staple of Pragmatist education "about science" in American schools, and was perfectly suited to the role of false-A for an anti-naturalist wedge strategy in American cultural politics.

Johnson's primary was to single out those scientific theories that most obviously embody the principle of naturalism (of accepting only those explanations grounded in measurement and observation of reality, and excluding those that appeal to processes, events, or concepts for which there is no natural evidence) for wedge statements, such as this one, which a Christianist Board of Education in Georgia ordered posted at the head of biology textbook chapters on evolution: "This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." The implicature is that, per Thomas Kuhn, the same evidence would be interpreted differently if the prevailing fashion in Kuhnian "paradigms" were different. And of course the anti-naturalists also supply the alternative, supernaturalist-friendly, "revolutionary paradigms:" "Creationism," and, for the more squeamish, "Intelligent Design."

The best defense against the false-A variant of the Wedge Strategy is what I will call the Miller Defense, devised by Kenneth R. Miller. Miller is a Roman Catholic, but philosophically a Maimonidean theist (Maimonidean theism insists that because religious scriptures and traditions are received indirectly, through fallible humans, while the natural universe was created directly by God Himself, the study of the natural universe provides a more reliable insight into what God wants Man to believe than any religious scripture or tradition; and that religious scriptures and traditions that contradict the findings of natural science must be reinterpreted as human parables and metaphors) who is not afraid to openly contradict even a Cardinal of his Church when the findings of science are unambiguous enough.

In response to the sticker requirement, Miller started his Biology textbook by writing, "Everything in science must be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." Thus, when the student encounters the same wording, pasted as a sticker at the head of one specific chapter of the textbook, where it would be redundant if it were not meant to mean something quite different from what it means to the scientist, the false-A game is unambiguously exposed for the scam that it is.

Variant 2: The False Wedge

Another variant of the wedge strategy involves the misrepresentation of a non-wedge issue as a wedge issue. This scam depends on a false, usually instrinsicist, pseudo-epistemology: it applies the form, but not the substance, of some principle of A out-of-context, as though it were not a principle derived by reason, to be applied in the context of the knowledge on which it is based, but rather some arbitrary, intrinsicist, quasi-religious mandate.

As one example, consider the recent attempt of the now thankfully terminated Christianist regime of George W. Bush, to prohibit "discrimination" against physicians who would base their choice of treatment of patients, not on the best interest of the patient, but on their own religious beliefs. (Even though the proposed regulation would have applied to private as well as tax-funded and government health-care organizations, that was not the essential issue: Even an Objectivist government would need to employ physicians in its armed forces, its jails, its embassies in countries where local medicine does not meet American standards and so on.)

Opposition to invidious discrimination in tax-funded and government jobs is a clear individualist (ideology A) principle. An employee's race or national origin or gender or sexual preference is so clearly irrelevant to performance in nearly all jobs, that a policy of NOT discriminating on the basis of such factors is an obvious component of the individualist worldview. In view of the ugly history of religion-based discrimination, conflict, and mass murder in much of the world through the ages, and especially in Christendom, a policy of non-discrimination on the basis of religion is also seen as implied by the same principles, and in most contexts it is.

The exceptional contexts are those in which the employee is forbidden by his religion to perform an essential part of his job. And it is an essential part of a physician's job to plan and carry out every patient's treatment, in that patient's own best interest as determined by objective medical science, subject only to the patient's own informed consent. A reasonable contract of employment would specify that, absent the patient's informed consent to be treated according to other criteria, such as the physician's (or perhaps the patient's own) religious beliefs, a physician bound by such beliefs must refer the patient to a colleague whose religious beliefs, if any, will not interfere with carrying out the objectively optimal medical treatment. If the physician's religion does not permit her to do even that, she should quit - and she cannot claim that the "religious discrimination" implicit in her employment contract is unreasonable or invidious.

The hinge of the false-wedge wedge strategy variant in this example is the subjectivists' denial of the fact that the optimal medical treatment, is the treatment that is based exclusively on objective knowledge, and not on non-objective factors such as the physician's religious beliefs. The proper defense is to state the alternatives clearly: treatment designed in the best interest of the patient on the basis of objective knowledge and the patient's own informed consent only, versus treatment with some options pre-eliminated on the basis of the physician's private religious faith - a private faith that some patients may share, but others don't. There is no way to answer this defense without a fatal exposure of ideology B.

Variant 3: The Combination Variant

The last variant of the wedge strategy combines mis-representation of A with a false-wedge issue. Consider wedge strategies based on so-called "parental rights." By creating a new individual with his or her own individual human rights, its parents take on the responsibility to finish the job in the child's own best interest. In a society with a minimal government limited to the protection of individual rights, the government will normally presume that parents act in the best interest of their children, and intervene only when this is clearly not the case. An application of the combination variant of the wedge strategy treats contextual non-interference in family matters not as a procedural principle, but as a "right" (thus misrepresenting the concept of rights in ideology A) and then uses it as an intrinsic, "God-given" unconditional mandate for "parental rights" or "family rights."

This specific false-wedge issue has been used by every anti-individualist ideology B in recent history.

The Communist government of Cuba used the argument from "parental rights" in the case of Elian Gonzales, a Cuban boy whose mother lost her life in bringing him to America. Elian's father, a Cuban Communist official, successfully persuaded an American judge to let him take Elian to Cuba.

Islamist parents claim a "parental right" to take their daughters to Islamic countries, where the girls are married, regardless of their own wishes, to husbands chosen for them by their parents.

In most American states, Christianist parental consent laws (sometimes disguised as "parental notification" laws) authorize parents to force a teenage woman to complete an unwanted pregnancy, against her will, also in the name of so-called "parental rights." (Where the anti-concept of "parental rights" is disguised, for example as mandatory "parental involvement," stripping away this disguise is an essential component of an effective response.)

The correct (if not always immediately effective) defense against the combination variant of the wedge strategy, is to point out that the pseudo-concept of "parental rights" mistakes a procedural principle for a right. That rights are not arbitrary fiats from "society" or from a God, but rather objective pre-conditions for living a life appropriate to a human being. That one of those pre-conditions is the freedom to live according to the judgment of one's own mind. That it is never in any individual's interest to be denied, while still a minor, his future right to live his adult life by his own judgment. And therefore, that it is never in a minor's best interest to be forced to spend the rest of his life under a totalitarian regime, or to be forced to marry a husband chosen for her without her informed consent, or to be forced to complete a pregnancy against her will. This argument will not always work against legislators and judges who praise each other for "Pragmatism," that is, for each other's indifference to principles and concepts. But those of our fellow citizens who may in time recognize the contradiction, may also in time question America's current official anti-ideology of Pragmatism, and its use of "rights," as in "parental rights," as a slogan instead of a concept.

(Next - Wedge Strategy, Part III: Identification)

Environmentalism as Pragmatism Redux: Advocating an "Ignorance-Based Worldview."

2008-11-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

In the just-past elections in California, the two Environmentalist "Propositions" on the ballot went down to overwhelming defeat. The game is up. Strangely enough, the enviruses themselves stopped pretending that their ideas were coherent even before that fact became obvious to California voters. Back in 2004 they already held a conference advocating for - no, this is not satire - an "Ignorance-Based Worldview."

Thanks to Aster, an e-mail friend, for the link above. Leonard Peikoff's point - that fighting the "disintegrationists" is, in relation to fighting the "misintegrationists," a waste of energy and time, because the disintegrationists are doing an eminently adequate job of self-elimination - is demonstrated again.

Wedge Strategy, Part I: Essentials

2008-11-14T20:52:00.000-08:00

(This is the first part of a preliminary draft of a four-part article on the Wedge Strategy of the "Christian Right" and similar ideological-political movements. Your comments, and especially objections, counterexamples, and suggestions for improvement, are strongly invited.)

The Wedge Strategy is a strategy in forensic rhetoric, applied by former UC Berkeley law professor Phillip E. Johnson, and by his disciples in the Christianist movement, to a wide range of Christianist activism on cultural, political and social issues. The Wedge Strategy takes its name from the shape of the intersection of two sets in a Venn diagram:
Before it was applied by Johnson to Christianist activism, the Wedge Strategy was used, under different names, by other intellectually marginal ideological movements. Under the name of "Popular Front," it was widely used, during the Red Decades of the 1930s and 40s, by Communist parties and Communist-controlled "Popular Front" organizations.

In the Venn diagram of the Wedge Strategy, set A is the set of implications of the ideas, principles, worldviews and ideologies held by a targeted individual such as a judge, or by most members of a targeted population or group. For example, set A might be the prior worldview of Americans targeted by Communist activism during the Red Decades. This prior American worldview was strongly individualistic, with an implied antipathy toward all collectivist and totalitarian movements.

Set B is the set of implications of the ideology that is being promoted by means of the given Wedge Strategy. In the case of "Popular Front" activism during the Red Decades, Set B would be the implications of the ideas being advanced by the Communist Party and promoted by its newspaper, The Daily Worker.

The Wedge consists of concrete issues ("Wedge issues") on which A and B, for their different reasons, may agree. For example, individualists ("A") opposed all manifestations of collectivism and totalitarianism. They despised the Communist Party and its "Daily Worker," and equally despised German National Socialism and its American version, Father Charles Coughlin's Social Justice movement and its eponymous periodical, "Social Justice." The Communists also opposed the "Social Justice" movement, their main competitor among people inclined to favor collectivist totalitarianism of either kind. This made opposition to Coughlin's Social Justice movement a useful wedge issue in the Communists' strategy.

The wedge strategy is an efficient political tactic. A wedge issue can give the advocates of marginal ideology B a relatively easy victory. As long as A's remain unaware that a wedge strategy is being used against them, B's will face no opposition from A's on such issues. B's may even find allies and co-workers among adherents of A. They will be able to convince some adherents of A that they are "not as bad" as their common enemy - for example, that Communism is not as objectionable as National Socialism.

In ideological strategy, wedge issues legitimize the consideration of principles drawn from ideology B as a guide to public policy. In the forensic context, a judge who agrees with the conclusion of a wedge-issue argument, but cannot identify the tacit principle on which his agreement with this conclusion is based, may accept the argument of ideology B as the recorded reason for his verdict. In public debate, if A is held by a significant fraction of its adherents tacitly rather than explicitly, the B's' wedge strategy will legitimize the doctrines of B among adherents of A: if we agree with them on issue after issue, then there seems to be no contradiction between their ideals and ours. They might even be the good guys, and their ideas may deserve to be heard, and to be included in the national consensus on legislation and public policy.

The same mechanism may gain adherents for B. Some A's might convert to B. Others will suppress criticism of B in the interest of the common cause. With criticism of B suppressed, B will have an improved shot at gaining adherents among the previously undecided.

Wedge strategies are covert. Even an otherwise consistent, principled advocate of A, who merely fails to recognize that a wedge strategy is being used against him, can be fooled by a wedge issue. To the extent that he uses his time and resources to work for a wedge issue endorsed by B, he will not spend his time and resources working toward those goals of A that conflict with B. Working together with advocates of B toward a common goal on the wedge issue, he becomes less likely to work against them on other issues. Even as he continues to think of himself as an effective worker for A, he actually works for B. He becomes what the Communists of the Red Decades called a "fellow traveler" - and, in private, "a useful idiot."

The principled response to a wedge issue, is to reject all participation in organizations and actions led by advocates of B. Once a wedge issue is in play, rational advocacy, of the principle of A that is being exploited by the wedge issue, must address and include some of the implications of A that are contrary to B, and that activists for B will shy away from and oppose.

In April 1940, Dashiell Hammett invited Ayn Rand to a fund-raising event for a Popular Front organization campaigning against Coughlin's "Social Justice." Rand's reply to Hammett ended like this:

.... I do welcome anyone fighting against Coughlin's "Social Justice." But when you give a party to fight both "Social Justice" and The Daily Worker, count me in and I'll give you $7.00 per ticket, let alone $3.50. Not until then, Comrade, not until then.

I will call this the Ayn Rand defense. How would this defense be applied in 2008?

Wedge strategies are now the chosen instrument of an active Christianist movement. A neighbor is collecting signatures on a petition to the board of our local Public Library District. The petition asks that tax funds, money collected at gunpoint from mostly Christian taxpayers, should not be used to buy books that the Christians object to. The petition seems reasonable. It does not ask that "objectionable" books already on library shelves be removed. It does not ask the library to reject voluntary donations of such books from individuals and private organizations. It only proposes that Christian taxpayers should not be forced, at gunpoint, to pay for the propagation of ideas that they detest. What could possibly be wrong with that?

What is wrong is that it would insert consideration of religious correctness - ideology B - into public policy. So I might take my cue from Ayn Rand and say something like this:

I do welcome anyone who fights against taxes. When you ask me to sign a petition to bar the use of tax funds for buying books that you consider blasphemous or obscene, and equally to bar the use of tax funds for buying additional copies of the Bible, or of the writings of St. Augustine, preferably by setting the libraries free from any tax subsidy whatsoever - then not only will I sign, but I will help you circulate that petition to the rest of the neighborhood and the town.

Not until then, Comrade (or maybe "Brother,") not until then.

(In Wedge Strategy, Part II, I will consider several variants of the wedge strategy and how they can be countered.)

Again, a case for cloning

2008-11-13T23:06:00.000-08:00

The New York Times reports:

Doctors in Berlin are reporting that they cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from a person naturally resistant to the virus. ... the chances of finding a donor who is a good tissue match for the patient and also has the rare genetic mutation that confers resistance to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, are extremely small. Nonetheless, the man has been free of the virus for 20 months even though he is not using antiretroviral drugs, and the success in his case is evidence that a long-dreamed-of therapy for AIDS — injecting stem cells that have been genetically re-engineered with the mutation — might work.
....
Dr. Irvin S. Y. Chen, director of the AIDS Institute at U.C.L.A. , is working on using RNA “hairpin scissors” to cut out the bits of genetic material in blood stem cells that code for the receptors. The concept is working in monkeys, he said. Eventually, he hopes, it will be possible to inject them into humans after wiping out only part of the immune system with drugs.

I posted this comment:

Why not insert the DNA sequence that confers resistance to H.I.V. into the corresponding gene in a nucleus taken from the patient, then clone the stem cells? Unlike monkeying with monkey cells, there would be no need to harm the patient's immune system at all. Of course, the George W. Bush ban on therapeutic cloning will need to be repealed - or those who need the treatment will travel to an Atheist country like the Netherlands or the Czech Republic to be cured. It would be better for America to repeal this idiotic prohibition. Political stupidity is NOT a law of nature.

Adam Reed, Torrrance, California

Objectivist Activism Report: The Defeat of Proposition 4

2008-11-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

When I began my activism for the recent elections, the Christo-Fascists had placed two propositions for constitutional amendments on the ballot. All the pollsters were predicting that Proposition 4 would win, and Proposition 8 would lose. As I wrote at the time ("California Proposition 4 and the Self-Lobotomy of the Pragmatist Left," http://borntoidentify.blogspot.com/2008/10/california-proposition-4-and-self.html - October 8:) "the left have already handed a victory on Proposition 4 to the National-Christianist mob." The pollsters were wrong. I had not yet begun to fight. Or rather I had - I had been circulating OpEds against Proposition 4 to big-city newspapers of record, the Los Angeles Times and its counterparts in San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, and got nowhere. Those papers wanted leaders of organizations, and one thing that I did not commit resources for was to set up official organizations. Such organizations can make a significant difference, and I admire the organizational infrastructure that Diana and Paul Hsieh and Ari Armstrong created in Colorado. But this would have had to be a long-term effort that, in my personal context at the time, was not a realistic option.

So I went on to send my OpEds to county and local papers, and soon after my pessimistic blog post (above) my OpEds began to get published. The papers where my OpEds saw print included the Orange County Register, the largest such newspaper in California. I estimate that my OpEds reached about a million voters. Proposition 4 lost with 223,088 votes from the half-way mark. I consider it likely that my OpEds contributed to that result.

My OpEds were adapted to the context of each paper, but they had 3 things that I always made sure of:

1. A reference to Ayn Rand near the start, for example: 'Proposition 4 is the latest in a decades-long series of attempts to obliterate what the American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called "the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."'

2. A concluding paragraph starting with a sentence grounded in Objectivist principles - for example, "Existing California law protects the young woman's right to set the course of her life by the judgment of her own mind."

3. Like all totalitarian appeals in still-individualist America, Proposition 4 used a wedge strategy on a wedge issue. I exposed the deception, and wrote the OpEd so that it could not be refuted without exposing the real agenda of Propsition 4. (I plan to write an article about wedge strategies and wedge issues shortly. It is needed because effective Objectivist activism requires being able to recognize this strategy and counteract it.)

My OpEds had two other effects. First, the official opposition, "Campaign for Teen Safety," had been running ads that reinforced the stereotype of young people as mindless risk-takers, thus feeding into the wedge strategy. After my OpEd in the Orange County Register, they re-focused on the deceptions in the proposition. My long affiliations with Planned Parenthood, and with the American Civil Liberties Union, may have helped give my approach a level of credibility and influence that I would not have had otherwise.

Second, several credible professional groups started taking off on specific instances of deception that I identified in my OpEd: lawyers about how difficult the phony "judicial bypass" actually was, health professionals about how even a family history of post-partum depression and suicide would not be enough for a medical exception, and so on. The same points started appearing in LTEs, in newspaper editorials against Proposition 4, and in television interviews with random members of the public. Still, the eventual defeat of Proposition 4 came as a pleasant surprise.

In the other case, opponents of Proposition 8, the second Christo-Fascist warhorse, managed to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. There was no effective Objectivist activism on the issue until an ARI/ARC release on October 30, too late to make a difference. The official GBLT leftists' campaign, and the behavior of many GLBT opponents of Proposition 8, fed right into the Christo-Fascists' wedge strategy. Worse, the left's positioning of the issue as a matter of collective "social justice" (where have we heard this before?) to an oppressed minority resulted in a near-war of competitive victimism between the "leaderships" of the GLBT "community" and of many African-American churches, with predictable results.

Compare and contrast.

Language, and the power that comes out of the barrel of a gun

2008-11-04T17:11:00.000-08:00

From BB&T news release "BB&T to participate in U.S. Treasury program:"

We support the Treasury's efforts to stabilize the credit markets and restore confidence in the financial system," said BB&T Chairman and CEO John A. Allison.

What he should have said:

"We intend to comply with every requirement of the Treasury's efforts to stabilize the credit markets and restore confidence in the financial system."

I know: "multilingual" means knows how to use several languages; "product of American education" means doesn't know how to use even one. Too bad.

Counterproductive: A good idea badly argued.

2008-11-03T23:39:00.000-08:00

In my work, I sometimes must give a student a failing grade for a badly argued case, even as that student is arguing for a good idea. I did not expect to see that kind of thing under the imprint of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, but here it is, in a blog entry by Thomas A. Bowden from ARC Media:

Judicial liberals don’t dispute that a judge must bow to the “social will”—they simply divine it differently. As one liberal Justice declared, the Constitution “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

The first sentence of this paragraph is true. The second is false. The justice being quoted was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican who almost single-handedly revived the practice of constitutional review by the Supreme Court, some two decades after the FDR regime had silenced the court by the threat of "packing" its bench with compliant Socialists. Earlier in his article, Bowden writes:

Judges must never bow to social opinion, historical or current, when exercising judicial review. For example, laws that institutionalized government discrimination against blacks in military service and voting deserved to be struck down, even if political majorities in both the Founders’ generation and modern times favored such rights violations.

Yes, they did deserve to be struck down. And who did the striking down? The same Chief Justice Earl Warren, who later in the same article becomes the un-named "liberal Justice" - one among those who "don’t dispute that a judge must bow to the “social will”—they simply divine it differently."

The quoted phrase, "evolving standards of decency," was applied, when written by Warren (in Trop v. Dulles, in 1958) not to the Constitution as a whole - as Bowden misleadingly insinuates - but to the meaning of "cruel and unusual" punishment as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. "Cruel" and "unusual." Both of these concepts are, as Ayn Rand would say, contextual. Their meaning depends unavoidably on the context of, among other things, "evolving standards of decency." Surely an Objectivist, of all people, should know better than to mistake contextuality for social metaphysics.

What would be the effect of such an argument on a literate reader who does not already agree with Bowden's conclusion? The context of Warren's opinion is not particularly obscure (and I happen to be an inventor, scientist, and teacher of Information Systems; I never took so much as one course in law, much less in the history of constitutional law.) It would not be unreasonable to take, whatever was argued for in this manner, less than seriously. When, if ever, did an accurate idea need to be put forward with so bad an argument? In context, a sufficiently bad argument for almost any idea becomes, in its effect on the literate reader, an argument against it.

The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights is a very good idea. I hope that in time its output will improve. But before that happens, it will need to do some heavy lifting in quality control.

And now for some good news: San Francisco Proposition K

2008-11-02T10:26:00.000-08:00

In the midst of the current avalanche of Ayn-Rand-bashing (blaming Rand for Greenspan's paper-money games, Obama's snide sound byte about "making selfishness a virtue") I just came across a quote which shows how far Ayn Rand's ideas have come in penetrating throughout America's culture. Here is the starting point of a political argument for San Francisco Proposition K in the coming elections: "When there is no victim, there is no crime...."

Back when "Atlas Shrugged" first came out in the late 1950s, the idea that governments exists solely and only to protect the individual rights of individuals, struck most Americans as bizarre. Even the "Classical Liberals," who came closest to Ayn Rand's principle of individual rights, advocated a panoply of laws "for the public good," and were among the fiercest advocates of, among other monstrosities, laws enforcing compulsory attendance in government schools. The idea that "when there is no victim, there is no crime" was revolutionary.

And here is how far Ayn Rand's idea has come: it appeared at the head of an argument coming from, of all places, Erika McDonald, San Francisco Green Party Spokesperson. Unfortunately, Ms. McDonald's party is not noted for ideological coherence. They are quite active in advocating for legislation to "protect the environment" and so on. The idea that only violations of individual rights are objectively crimes has gone far, but in the absence of logic, or even of simple conceptual consciousness, its words are merely a slogan and not a guide to right political action. Without an epistemology of reason, neither slogans of individual rights, nor agreement with self-realization as an ethical ideal, can be enough to affect the social praxis. (It may be time for Objectivist activists to balance the advocacy of Objectivist ideas in ethics and politics with more activism on logic and epistemology.)

As for San Francisco Proposition K, it aims to decriminalize prostitution in the city. Not a particularly interesting issue for me personally, since I'm happiest in romantic relationships that last for years or decades. Myself, I'd see no point in visiting San Francisco without my wife. Most customers of prostitutes are temporary refugees from Christian or gender-feminist antisexualism at home; the sex workers, pragmatist or nihilist rebels against the same, or women or gay men in revolt against the tyranny of the Christian patriarchal family order, and the occasional Hindu or Pagan practitioner of prostitution as a religious sacrament. It is, however - even Green Party spokespersons are occasionally right - a matter into which the government has no legitimate business inserting itself. And the enemies of Proposition K, both Christo-Fascists animated by antisexualism and anti-commercialism, and gender-feminist Socialist statists, equally animated by exactly the same antisexualism and anti-commercialism - both factions, as a matter of justice, deserve to lose. If you live in San Francisco, don't let the sheer loathsomeness of the presidential candidates keep you away from the polls. Go, and vote against Proposition 4, and against Proposition 8, and FOR Proposition K.

How I intend to vote

2008-10-31T22:42:00.000-07:00

As I wrote in the previous post, I am likely to be one of the 30 million people to be murdered by the human cloning ban passed in 2001 by the then Christo-Fascist ("Republican") majority in Congress, and signed into law by President George W. Bush. As a matter of principled, personal justice, I will do everything I can to remove the Christo-Fascists and their collaborators from power. If there had been the least doubt about the Presidential result in California, I would not have hesitated to bring a barf bag with me into the voting booth, voted for Obama as a way of voting against McCain, and barfed afterward. Fortunately now it looks like I won't have to. Other than that, I will vote against every Republican on the ballot, and against every Christo-Fascist of any political party that I can vote against, and against their collaborators. I will vote against every Proposition that the Christo-Fascists favor, and for every Proposition that the Christo-Fascists, qua Christo-Fascists, oppose.

I must add that my specific adversaries, in the current political context, are only the Christian and Islamic religious Fascists: those who believe that they have a divine mandate to stifle my exercise of reason - the human means of survival. I consider all supernaturalism and all religious faith to be arbitrary and mistaken, but in the political context, the dividing line is between those who, whatever their religious beliefs, are willing to respect my individual right to act on the judgment of my own mind - and those who don't. In the debate on the cloning ban, some religious organizations - the United Church of Christ (Obama's church,) the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Rabbinical Council, and others - supported therapeutic cloning. I have strong disagreements with all of them, but in the context of the ongoing struggle against Islamo- and Christo- Fascisms, all of them are welcome to shake my hand as allies and friends. The others - those who collaborate with the Islamo- and Christo- Fascists to shackle science and hinder the exercise of reason - are enemies of my life, and of all Human life on Earth, and I will treat them accordingly.

Election 2008: Why cloning still matters

2008-10-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

I originally posted the article below in another forum, more than 3 years ago, in September 2005. Sadly, the democide continues, with 30 million people already murdered by the ongoing delay in the development of cloning-based organ replacement technologies. I am now 3 years older, with just 11 years to go before I'm living on what will be, statistically, borrowed time. And with every year of the on-going ban I become more likely to be one of those already murdered. There is no guarantee that even a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic president will reverse the ban on therapeutic cloning. There is only a certainty that a Christo-Fascist president, or a Christo-Fascist majority in either house of Congress, will continue the democide.

Why Cloning Really Matters (September 18, 2005)

I am about to discuss a topic of intense personal self-interest. I am 59 years old. My father died at 73 from heart failure. I have another 14 years before I start living, by biological prediction, on borrowed time. I follow medical news, of advances in treatment of organ failure, as though my life depended on it. Because it does.

On 28-Oct-2004, the Medical Procedure News section of News-Medical.Net published an article under the title "Fetal tissue restores lost sight from retinitis pigmentosa." It started, "Three years ago Elisabeth Bryant believed she would be blind for the rest of her life." Two and a half years ago she received a transplant of a sheet of retinal cells from an aborted fetus. Her vision has improved from 20:800 to 20:84 since, and she can see well enough to read, play computer games and check emails.

Bryant was the first of six patients in whom the lost function of an important organ was restored with fetal organ transplants. Some people have a problem with this:

One accusation of those opposed to using fetal tissue is that women might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives. "People are going to claim that we are promoting abortion," says Norman Radtke, the surgeon who carried out the transplants at the Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. A few countries, such as the UK, already have clear guidelines to ensure this does not happen. "The guidelines are meant to prevent the deliberate conception and termination for treatment of a particular person," says Stephen Minger, head of the stem cell laboratory at King's College London.

In much of the world therapeutic cloning is banned because of the superstitious belief that embryos and fetuses -- even those without a developed brain -- are possessed of some ghostly version of a brainless, incorporeal consciousness. To the extent that any research on therapeutic cloning is permitted at all, it is permitted only to the point of collecting undifferentiated stem cells from a very early-stage embryo. Yet, as News-Medical notes, "the few attempts to treat degenerative eye diseases with stem cells in animals have failed, as have attempts to transplant unstructured groups of cells into the retina ... no one is anywhere near recreating the complex structure of the retina using stem cells."

Cloning is seldom mentioned in connection with the spectacular success of fetal retina transplants. Yet this proof-of-concept work bears heavily on the ethics of banning therapeutic cloning and the growing of cloned fetuses for transplants. The retina is literally the thinnest important organ in the human body. Because it is only a few cells thick, transplanting a retina from a genetically different fetus does not provoke the massive immune rejection that would greet a transplanted heart or liver or lung. Yet there is a natural way to prevent immune rejection from happening at all: grow a fetus from an embryo that was cloned from the patient for the express purpose of making organs for transplantation. For Homo sapiens, the animal that lives by the mind, there is surely nothing more natural than to use its intelligence to defeat death from organ failure.

We can now understand the perverse fear that free individuals blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, or their mothers or daughters or sisters, "might be tempted to have abortions to provide tissue to restore their own sight or that of relatives." If they were permitted to save their own sight, or the sight of a relative, they might get the idea of gestating a cloned fetus to save their own lives, or the lives of their relatives, from death by heart failure, by liver failure, by lung failure or by kidney failure. Hence therapeutic cloning -- even to save one's own life, or the life of a sibling or parent or child -- must be strictly prohibited by the authorities. If people are permitted to save their own lives, they might think that they individually, and not the state over them, are their own lives' proper owners. People in positions of power -- even if they themselves are free of superstitious beliefs about some ghostly consciousness in a brainless fetus -- cannot allow such a thing.

We do not know, at this point, to what stage of gestation, or post-gestation age, a fetus may need to be grown before a specific organ is harvested. However, unless the fetus becomes a conscious human, there is in objective ethics no conceivable problem with growing one to whatever stage is needed. As long as the fetus is surgically decorticated before its brain develops a capacity for consciousness, the fetus remains an artifact -- created by a free individual for a purpose of her choice -- and, having been decorticated, never becomes a person. So-called "ethical concerns" with therapeutic cloning are the politicians' mask -- an instrument for obtaining "popular assent" to mass murder.

Democide, as we know from history, does not require gas chambers or killing fields. It is enough to prevent the victims from doing what they would have done, if free, to continue their lives. In the great famine, Lenin murdered between 4 million and 9 million Ukrainian peasants by prohibiting, as contrary to Socialist Morality, the practice of trade in food. Through prohibiting what is required for men to keep on living, one can murder millions without the cost of gas or bullets or executioners. A less frequently discussed example is the current worldwide ban on DDT, by which some 50 million people have been murdered when denied the means to protect their lives from malaria. Let us calculate the dimensions of the democide that the ban on cloning amounts to.

In 2002 -- the most recent year for which government statistics are available -- 696,400 Americans died of heart failure, 124,770 of chronic lung failure, 73,247 of diabetes, 40,801 of kidney failure and 27,247 of liver failure. The total for these five is 762,465 deaths per year in the United States, out of a population of about 300 million. Half of the world's population, about 3 billion -- ten times the population of the United States -- live in countries advanced enough to use therapeutic cloning and fetal organ transplant technology if it were legal. The proportional estimate of death from failure of one of the above 5 major organs -- in advanced countries only -- is about 7.6 million. If only half of those deaths could be eventually prevented by application of cloning and fetal organ transplant technologies, then every year of delay in the development of those technologies results in 3.8 million preventable deaths. Therapeutic cloning was banned in the United States in July 2001. Shortly thereafter, under pressure from the Bush Administration, it was banned nearly everywhere around the world.

President Bush has promised to veto any repeal of the cloning ban as long as he remains in office. By the end of his presidency, the total number of people killed by the ban that delays medical research into human cloning will exceed 30 million. We are witnessing the third-largest democide in history.

Darkness made visible in Michigan

2008-10-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

Every time I think that I have seen the outer limit of America's ongoing headlong rush to the dark ages, I soon find that what I had hoped was the outer limit is seen by promoters of the new theocracy as a mere provocation:

The Kovacses want to give their embryos to science, but they cannot donate them in Michigan because a 1978 state law prohibits the destruction of embryos for research. Michigan voters on Nov. 4 will decide on a constitutional amendment that would allow researchers to create new stem cell lines using embryos that would otherwise be discarded.

The effort faces stiff opposition from Michigan Citizens Against Unrestricted Science & Experimentation, a coalition of interest groups that say Proposal 2's language is overly broad and that passage could lead to unregulated research and even human cloning.

Unregulated research. In America. Can you imagine that? What would Benjamin Franklin think?

Greenspan, Philosophy, and Homo Economicus

2008-10-23T19:09:00.000-07:00

I am braking my pre-election-political-activism hiatus from this blog because something happened today that merits blogging about.

Former US central banker Alan Greenspan, the public figure most closely - and falsely - associated in the minds of many Americans with the intellectual legacy of Ayn Rand, admitted his - and nearly the entire economic profession's - error in assuming that economic actors will act, automatically and intuitively, without any need for principled thought or for philosophy, in their actual self-interest. This has been the most fundamental assumption of economics for centuries: that Man is Homo Economicus, given to automatic optimization of his actions, in any context, for his own interest. According to the thesis of Homo Economicus, the economist need not concern himself with questions of cognition, conceptual skill, principles, epistemology. The Central Banker needs only to create a catallactic context in which economic actors can maximize their returns by acting as the Central Banker wishes them to act, and they will automatically do so.

What is wrong with this picture?

Ayn Rand's most profound insight is that Homo Sapiens does not have any kind of inborm "ethical intuition" or "economic instinct" that would enable humans to maintain and enhance our lives automatically. To act in the best interest of one's life requires cognition: focus, measurement, concepts, principles, logic. To do cognition right, requires philosophy: ontology, epistemology, ethics. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing in philosophy and cognition applicable to life on Earth is inborn, intuitive, or automatic.

The thesis of "Homo Economicus," the idea that right, self-interested action requires neither cognitive skill nor philosophical knowledge, was not truly tested until recent times. Between the birth of the science of economics, a child of the Enlightenment, and the last quarter of the twentieth century, few people were wealthy enough to influence economic calculations who did not have some education in conceptual thought. It was only the generation of what Randian philosopher Leonard Peikoff calls "Johnny can't think" that brought about the tragedy of a country whose citizens, bankers and business leaders would test the thesis of "Homo Economicus" upon themselves. Now that experiment is over. And we know the result: Rational self-interest is not automatic. It requires reason. It requires focus. It requires principles. And it requires philosophy.

Apart from "educators" raising a nation of Johnnies who can't think, the worst result of the anti-conceptual pseudo-philosophy of Pragmatism is that it brought philosophy into disrepute in America. Americans, bankers and all, and (especially) American economists, have come to believe that philosophy does not matter, that it is not needed in "real life." We are now living the result of that belief.

Ayn Rand asked, "Philosophy, Who Needs IT?" Alan Greenspan, I hope, just found out that he does. So does the science of Economics. So does America, and, come to think of it, so does the entire human civilization on Earth.

Hiatus in blogging

2008-10-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

I anticipate a hiatus in blogging until after the elections. The elections are an opportunity for Objectivist activism, and also a chance for me to make a real difference in my life and in the lives of people I value. Working with young people as a university teacher, I am directly aware of the threat posed by California Proposition 4 to their right to chart the course of their lives by the judgment of their own minds. And, more than any other matter in which I can make a difference, Proposition 4 is still too close to call. However small the number of minds I can change, I have a realistic hope of influencing the outcome. My OpEds on Proposition 4 have been printed in newspapers (the largest being the Orange County Register) covering 8 million people - but this is only one-sixth of California.

After the elections I'll blog about lessons learned and about strategy for the future.

Bush-Appointed Judges Exempt Earmarks from First Amendment

2008-10-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

The title (above this text on my blog) links to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about a ruling by Bush-appointed Seventh Circuit judges. The ruling upholds a federal earmark grant of taxpayer funds for a Catholic university program of "opportunities for spiritual growth, including prayer services, Mass, course work, and retreats." With Theo-Republican judges, the United States is rapidly becoming one more banana republic, just like the one that first gave vent to an observation increasingly applicable under such "non-activist" courts: "Constitution c'est papier."

Adolf Hitler anticipates Sarah Palin

2008-10-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

Jim Walker has an interesting page about matters related to the frequently heard allegation that Hitler was an Atheist. In everything that Hitler is known to have said or written, Herr Uber-Adolf always emphasizes his allegiance to Christianity and to the ideas of Jesus. The only source for Hitler's alleged anti-religious sentiments is the Martin Bormann version of Hitler's "Table Talk." The original notes by Heinrich Heim and Henry Piker, on which the Bormann version is supposedly based, were destroyed. And the problem with believing anything written by Martin Bormann, is that Martin Bormann was a notorious, pathological liar. Henry Piker wrote explicitly that "no confidence can be placed in Bormann's editing of it," and that the extant version is full of "Bormann's alterations, not authorised by me." There is, however, an alternative (and reasonably reliable) record of Hitler's private thoughts: Wagener, Otto. Hitler--Memoirs of a Confidant. Ed. by Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. Trans. by Ruth Hein. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, c1985.

Here is Hitler's view of Socialism, Christianity and Jesus, from pp. 139-140 of those memoirs:

Socialism is a question of attitude toward life, of the ethical outlook on life of all who live together in a common ethnic or national space. Socialism is a Weltanschauung!

But in actual fact there is nothing new about this Weltanschauung. Whenever I read the New Testament Gospels and the revelations of various of the prophets and imagine myself back in the era of the Roman and late Hellenistic, as well as the Oriental world, I am astonished at all that has been made of the teachings of these divinely inspired men, especially Jesus Christ, which are so clear and unique, heightened to religiosity. They were the ones who created this new worldview which we now call socialism, they established it, they taught it and they lived it! But the communities that called themselves Christian churches did not understand it! Or if they did, they denied Christ and betrayed him! For they transformed the holy idea of Christian socialism into its opposite! They killed it, just as, at the time, the Jews nailed Jesus to the cross; they buried it, just as the body of Christ was buried. But they allowed Christ to be resurrected, instigating the belief that his teachings too, were reborn!

It is in this that the monstrous crime of these enemies of Christian socialism lies! What the basest hypocrisy they carry before them the cross-- the instrument of that murder which, in their thoughts, they commit over and over-- as a new divine sign of Christian awareness, and allow mankind to kneel to it. They even pretend to be preaching the teachings of Christ. But their lives and deeds are a constant blow against these teachings and their Creator and a defamation of God!

We are the first to exhume these teachings! Through us alone, and not until now, do these teachings celebrate their resurrection! Mary and Magdalene stood at the empty tomb. For they were seeking the dead man! But we intend to raise the treasures of the living Christ!

Herein lies the essential element of our mission: we must bring back to the German Volk the recognition of those teachings! For what did the falsification of the original concept of Christian love, of the community of fate before God and of socialism lead to? By their fruits ye shall know them! The suppression of freedom of opinion, the persecution of the true Christians, the vile mass murders of the Inquisition and the burning of witches, the armed campaigns against the people of free and true Christian faith, the destruction of towns and villages, the hauling away of their cattle and their goods, the destruction of their flourishing economies, and the condemnation of their leaders before tribunals, which, in their unrelenting hypocrisy, can only be described as balaphemous. That is the true face of those sanctimonious churches that have placed themselves between God and man, motivated by selfishness, personal greed for recognition and gain, and the ambition to maintain their high-handed willfulness against Christ's deep understanding of the necessity of a socialist community of men and nations. We must turn all the sentiments of the Volk, all its thinking, acting, even its beliefs, away from the anti-Christian, smug individualism of the past, from the egotism and stupid Phariseeism of personal arrogance, and we must educate the youth in particular in the spirit of those of Christ's words that we must interpret anew: love one another; be considerate of your fellow man; remember that each one of you is not alone a creature of God, but that you are all brothers! This youth will, with loathing and contempt, abandon those hypocrites who have Christ on their lips but the devil in their hearts, who give alms in order to remain undisturbed as they themselves throw their money around, who invoke the Fatherland as they fill their own purses by the toil of others, who preach peace and incite to war....

Change the German stuff to its middle-American equivalents. If the result sounds a lot like what we have been hearing lately from Sarah Palin - essentially everything, except only that Hitler was explicit about Christian Socialism while Palin sticks to euphemisms - it probably isn't plagiarism (I've never heard Palin accused of reading books from Yale University Press) - just similar minds thinking alike.

California Proposition 4 and the Self-Lobotomy of the Pragmatist Left

2008-10-08T15:23:00.000-07:00

Our totalitarian Christianists are pushing not one but two constitutional amendments in the coming election: Proposition 8, which would outlaw marriage for Gays and Lesbians, and Proposition 4, which would mandate parental notification and impose a de-facto parental veto of young women's abortion plans. And because GLs vote, and 17-year-old women don't, the fund-raisers of the left have already handed a victory on the latter to the National-Christianist mob.

You would think that my University colleagues would have something to say about that. Most students at the university where I teach are the first generation of their families to attend college. Many of their parents are immigrants, often from collectivist cultures that have no notion of individual rights - nor sympathy with the American idea that a young woman has an individual right to chart the course of her own life. We know from statistics that some of our students were pregnant in their teens. If Proposition 4 had been law, some of the most talented would not be studying at a university. They would be working in a menial job, supporting an infant or child carried to term against their will.

But my University colleagues have been silent. Even to have a motive for speaking out would imply an endorsement of the principle of individual rights, and of the superiority of the American culture of individual rights against the collectivist cultures of the rest of the world and of the growing Christianist movement at home. It would contradict the dogma of multiculturalism, and this is what the Christianists appeal to and exploit.

No one, inside or outside a university, dares to identify the issue that separates a parental veto of abortion, from a requirement for parental consent to treatment at a tanning salon. I did try to do so in op-eds I sent to several newspapers, but none has been printed so far (Subsequent note: now one has been. See the bottom of this posting.) As I wrote in the submitted op-eds, Proposition 4 is the latest in a decades-long series of attempts to obliterate what the American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand called "the right of young people to set the course of their own lives." What a young woman does about an unintended pregnancy may affect the course of her life for the next 19 years. Most of those years will come after she becomes an independent adult. Those years - indispensable years in which to complete her education and start a productive life - are rightly hers to decide about. This puts her decision on abortion into a different category from short-term decisions whose consequences - like the risk of needing the care of a dermatologist after a visit to a tanning salon - are limited to the immediate future, when her parents will still be paying the bills. Her decision on abortion is rightly hers alone: she is the one, who will bear the burden of care for a child if she is forced to continue her pregnancy and to give birth against her will.

It is obvious why the more Christianist editors would reject my op-eds. But why would the supposedly secular ones? I suspect that it is because the principle here, is the principle of responsibility - and it is the Pragmatist left that has been fighting to sever the link between decisions and consequences. The Christianists know this, and they smell the blood from the secular Pragmatists' self-inflicted lobotomy.

Proposition 4 was written to deceive the voters into believing that it is "filled with caveats and exceptions." The young woman could seek a waiver from a court - but only by presenting "clear and convincing evidence" for her case. This is not the "preponderance of evidence" standard normally used in civil courts. "Clear and convincing" is a much more demanding standard, so demanding that it is used in civil courts to justify the imposition of punitive damages. No lawyer has ever met the standard of "clear and convincing evidence" without weeks, months or years of preparation. No lawyer that I know can even imagine this standard as something that a teenage girl might meet in a brief hearing held on a single day's notice.

Proposition 4 pretends to exempt from its requirements those young women whose pregnancy carries serious medical risks. But this exemption is limited to a risk of immediate death, or of "a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." A non-immediate risk, even as severe as a family history of post-partum depression and suicide, would not qualify.

Proposition 4 also seems to create a narrow exception for young women who claim to have been severely abused by their parents. When such allegations are made, the notice may be delivered, with a written allegation of abuse, to a "grandparent, stepparent, foster parent, aunt, uncle, sibling, half-sibling, or first cousin." Most young women don't have foster parents or step-parents, and everyone else on this list is a blood relative of the young woman's parents, and is not likely to take the young woman's side against them. In some cultures the young woman's pregnancy is enough to discredit her. Few young women have adult relatives whom they can trust to keep the pregnancy secret from the rest of the family, even if that pregnancy resulted from abuse.

If read carelessly enough, Proposition 4 seems to bar parental coercion of the young woman "through force (such as forcible confinement,) threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter." But this bar applies only to coercion intended to force the young woman to undergo an abortion. Proposition 4 conspicuously does not bar parents from using forcible confinement, or other "force, threat of force, or threatened or actual deprivation of food or shelter" to force their daughter to continue her pregnancy, eventually forcing her to give birth against her will. This asymmetry effectively endorses parental force - against that pregnant young woman who wishes to set her life on a course that does not include giving birth in her teens. As I wrote in the rejected op-eds: those who hear Proposition 4 defended as a measure for parental involvement, should understand, before they vote, exactly what kind of parental involvement is being endorsed.

Existing California law protects the young woman's individual right to set the course of her life by the judgment of her own mind. If Proposition 4 were to pass, that individual right will become California history. This is what happens when militant religion is given all the room in the world, by the secular side's self-inflicted philosophical lobotomy implicit in Pragmatism.

This November I will hold my nose and vote for the Democratic ticket, because I agree with Leonard Peikoff's analysis: a vote for the Republicans will bring even more Christo-Fascist oppression than we already live under today, and with Palin on the ticket, a realistic threat of National Christianist theocracy in the United States within the next 4 years. A Democratic victory will buy time for a counter-revolution. Perhaps as long as two decades' time. This is a fight in which we have no allies but zombies, and no weapon except our naked minds.

(P.S. The _Daily Breeze_, the local newspaper of the Coastal Southern Los Angeles County and nearby communities, covering a population of about 1.5 million people, just published the op-ed I sent them. Yippee!)

(P.P.S. Other versions of my OpEd were printed in the Press-Telegram (Long Beach and surrounding communities, population a half-million or so, and the Orange County Register, one of the world's largest newspapers, covering a county of 3 million people. And there are more left to try - I haven't covered all of California yet!)

Teaching Math from Logic in the Primary Grades

2008-09-27T11:43:00.000-07:00

I recently read a posting entitled "Math Magic" by Lisa VanDamme on the blog of The Objective Standard. What VanDamme describes seems to be a slow re-invention of the elementary mathematics curriculum that I fondly remember from grade school in Poland, the Łukasiewicz curriculum. Łukasiewicz, a philosopher of logic and mathematics who would later write Aristotle’s Syllogistic from the Standpoint of Modern Formal Logic (Oxford University Press, 1957,) was briefly (in 1919) Poland's minister of Education, which prompted him to write a radical, logic-based primary-school mathematics curriculum. The greatest difference between his curriculum and the usual one was the removal of almost all memorization, and its replacement with algorithms based on principles that the student already understood. For example, no memorizing the 9 times N multiplication table: the student learns to take 10 times N (already understood, easy) and subtract N. Of course, after calculating the result a few times the student remembers the result, at least as well as though it had been memorized - but also understands how getting this result was grounded in previously understood principles.

One beautiful thing was really understanding the logic of everyday algorithms. Learning to add and subtract minutes, hours of the day and days of the week - in first grade, I understood not only how to tell time, but also the logical principles of modulo arithmetic and number bases. Another was how quickly one could advance through concepts when no time was wasted on memorization: the Łukasiewicz curriculum, at least in the school I attended, got to analytic geometry and trigonometry in grade 4, calculus in grade 5. I don't know if the Łukasiewicz curriculum was ever translated into English, although it is the standard in Hungary, Japan etc.

The History and Relevance of Enlightenment Ideas

2008-09-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

The title (above this text on my blog - AR) is a link to a great panel about the History and Relevance of Enlightenment Ideas - 5 speakers, 1 hour and 34 minutes. Much to agree with, some to disagree, but mostly - useful insights from intelligent speakers. But a note to fora.com: next time, please post a list of speakers to copy and paste! Frank Furedi, Hirsi Ali, 3 others...

Another Economic Crisis. Another Age of Dictators?

2008-09-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

It is now likely that ongoing government intervention will lengthen and exacerbate the current economic crisis, just as such intervention exacerbated the crash of 1929 into the Great Depression. The Great Depression led to the establishment of fascist, socialist, or mixed fascist-socialist regimes in most previously liberal countries, including the short-lived "New Deal" in the United States, the National Socialist regime in Germany, and a Socialist-Fascist civil war in Spain - an era known to historians as "The Age of Dictators." What, then, are the likely political consequences of the current crisis?

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Robert Heilbroner, the world's most eminent Marxist economist, examined the newly declassified record of the Soviet economy. The results disconfirmed, with the actual evidence of the facts of reality, the foundations of Marxist economics, and the ideology built on that foundation. Marxism, as a foundation for Socialism, was dead.

Marxism, for all its horrors, was an Enlightenment-based idea, and therefore subject to reality-based disconfirmation. As Heilbroner demonstrated from the evidence, "The crucial missing element (in Socialism) is not so much information, as Mises and Hayek argued, as it is the motivation to act on information." Marxist Socialism failed in reality, because it had inherited from Christendom its belief that men can be motivated by appeal to self-sacrifice. It failed because an economy for humans, an economy that works in reality, requires, as its foundation, a morality of self-interest. (This is yet another instance of a fact that was first derived from philosophical considerations by Ayn Rand, and later confirmed independently by a scientist's integration of relevant objective measurements of facts of reality.)

The spectre of the Twenty-First Century is the return of Socialism - that is, of economic systems based on an ideology of self-sacrifice - no longer on the basis of Marx's incomplete embrace of the Enlightenment, but on the basis of Christian "Imitatio Dei" - the original source of all ideologies of self-sacrifice, including Marxism. Economic crises - the previous Great Depression, and the one now around us - bring a popular demand to re-base the economy on a foundation of common morality, which for Christians, as for Marxists, refers to their (pseudo-)morality of self-sacrifice.

But it is a mistake to take the parallels too far. When the Great Depression had run its course, it did not take long for Americans (still animated, back then, by the Enlightenment ideas of America's Founding Fathers) to dump the Marxoid policies of the early FDR administrations and to return to something that at least pretended to be Capitalism. Socialism persisted the longest in Russia, in the world's most darkly mystical and, at its foundation, most deeply Christian culture. Today, the anti-intellectualism inculcated by a Pragmatist educational system has all but erased the ideas of the Enlightenment - America's founding ideas - from the culture of the majority of Americans. Kant, through Pragmatism, has limited Reason and given room to Faith. Leonard Peikoff demonstrates, in "The Ominous Parallels," how Kant's ideas led to National Socialism in Germany. Pragmatism, the dominant pseudo-philosophy of current American politics, is "Kant on Steroids." If a faith-based Fascism/Socialism were to take hold of America, then this time there will be no quick way out.

And so we come to the politics of the day.

In the last couple of weeks, Nick Provenzo and Diana Hsieh took the time to provoke some Christianists into writing and speaking their minds. The results show that the Christianists are fundamentally totalitarian: The theocratic Right lives by faith - and, as we have seen, responds to an argument mainly not with arguments but with wishes for and threats of violence, including murder - the argument from the fist and the knife. They are reason-proof (credo quoia absurdum) and evidence-proof. In their brains, arguments from reason and evidence invoke not thought, but resentment against the intellect for being capable of thought. It is this resentment of the intellect that is the direct cause of the appeal to violence in their responses - and in the policies that a McCain-Palin government would enact and enforce. The Christianists are as totalitarian as the Communists, the National Socialists and the Fascists of the previous century, or their Islamist contemporaries. But the Christianists, unlike the Islamists, are here in America and not mostly overseas. They wear Respectability. And one of them is the vice-presidential candidate to a presidential candidate who is in his seventies and in poor health - a probable replacement President.

The threat level from the far left is not much in comparison. The remaining Communists - Stalinists, Trotskyites, Castroites, Maoists and so on - are totalitarian. But they are, everywhere in America including the Democratic Party, a disreputable fringe. The left-totalitarians can vote and contribute to political organizations and post to left-wing blogs, but not one of them has been elected to political office, anywhere in America, in the last half-century or so. There is no symmetry of threat level here, except in fiction.

The Democratic Party is now, just as it was in the days of FDR, the party of Pragmatist compromise: then of compromise with Marxism, now of compromise with religion. But if religion is the new Marxism, then the Republicans - explicitly in Sarah Palin, implicitly in Senator McCain - are the Communist Party of our time. And if they win, America will be to the 21st Century what Soviet Russia, or National Socialist Germany, were to the 20th.

The NSA Teams Up with the Chinese Government to Limit Internet Anonymity

2008-09-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

The title (above this text on my blog - AR) links to an article by Bruce Schneier, one of the top two independent Internet security experts in the United States. The other of the two, Steve Bellovin, with whom I worked writing a course on Internet security back at Bell Labs, is also cited. Schneier's article is about the UN "IP Traceback" project. Don't miss the comments, one of which reads:

"I'm working on some infosec security projects based in China, and I enjoy telling my client "the Chinese government requires a liaison who can hand over all encryption keys on request." Then when they get the very serious "oh, yes, we're dealing with China" looks on their faces I say "...which is exactly the same requirement as in the U.S." Both the U.S. and China are considered 'surveillance societies....' .... the two nations look increasingly similar. But at least having our every blog post traced back to us keeps us safe from terrorism. Or something."

Adam Reed's full disclosure: One of my pre-tenure projects was to put together a professional program in computer and network security at Cal State LA, and to obtain NSA certification for this program. I have a briefcase from one of their more open events, which is simply labeled "The Symposium" with no other text. Their own anonymity they take very, very seriously indeed...

Christianism and I, and How It All Became Personal

2008-09-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

When the current wave of Christianist policy first washed over America, I was not among those who might later say that they did not know. I knew. I knew about women forced to bear defective infants because late-term abortions were prohibited. I knew about medical scientists forced to move overseas if they wanted to continue their work on therapeutic cloning and other newly prohibited technologies. I knew that government "recommendations" for prescriptions of pain medications had been "tightened," and that physicians who exceeded those "recommendations" were tried and imprisoned for drug-dealing. I knew that one renowned specialist was convicted on testimony about his "nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude" when explaining the government's "recommendations" to his patients, and so doctors, talking to patients in pain, now made an extra effort to sound sincere. But I was not any of those people, and so I did not go very far out of my way to speak out.

And if I had, what good would it have done? The suffering inflicted by our recent Administrations was not about to be condemned by the Christians, who make up the majority of my fellow citizens. Their belief, however nominal, is that suffering is a precious gift from God. If someone suffers, from oppression by our government or from any other cause, then either God has decided that the victim deserves to suffer, or God has graced the victim with an extra opportunity to earn salvation points with Jesus. A Solidarity movement (like the ones that brought down the Communist regimes of East-Central Europe) would have been, in Christian America, unthinkable. So how much could I have accomplished? And what would the payoff (or payback) have been? I had arthritis of the knees (and other joints) but the pain, even at its worst, was not beyond what could be relieved with over-the-counter pills. Otherwise, my life was (and is) very good.

And then one day, moving a big old computer monitor to the side to make room for a new LCD panel, I felt a spiral of pain around my right leg. It was evening, and so I took a sleeping pill and planned to call my doctor's nurse the next day. The next morning, as I got up from bed and sat down to scan my e-mail, the pain shot up to an intensity I had never imagined possible. The pain was so intense that all was overwhelmed: I could not work or think or focus my consciousness on anything besides the pain. My wife had already left the house for work, and I could not get up from the floor until the evening, when she came home and got me up and took me to a hospital emergency room.

It turned out that a ruptured disk in my spine had crushed my right sciatic nerve, amplifying the pain in my knee a thousand times and turning all sensation from the leg into amplified pain. After an injected shot, the physician wrote out a prescription, explaining that I was getting the strongest pain medication that he could prescribe for sciatica, and that it was limited to 20 pills per week, to prevent withdrawal symptoms when I no longer needed the pills and stopped taking them. Each pill started to work about 15 minutes after I took it, and after a few minutes of relief the pain began to grow again. It grow slowly, and for some two hours I still was able to think and work. At the end of two hours the total pain returned.

I was 3 weeks from the end of the quarter, teaching senior and graduate classes three nights a week, to students who worked full time in the day and then sat in my class from 6 to 10 PM. I was proud of my students, too proud to cancel their classes with just 3 weeks to go. I kept 14 of the pills for my morning chores and to fall asleep at night. I used the other six to cover my teaching hours. Looking at my colleagues, I saw that they knew, and would do the same. For the rest of the day and the week I was one with the pain, and could neither do or be anything else.

Then came the end of the academic quarter, and the operation. The surgeon prescribed a time-release pain killer, and warned me not to take it until after the operation. I took one on my way out of the pharmacy, and the pain withdrew into the background for the rest of the day. I still felt the pain, but now I was again able to feel other things, to think and to focus my mind and to live. This was what I should have been prescribed from my first day in pain. This was what I would have been prescribed, had American physicians been free to practice medicine without fear.

Two months after the operation the pain had gone down enough for me to stop taking the pills. I had the withdrawal symptoms: like two days of a mild flu. And to prevent this, I was forced to spend three weeks in indescribable pain?

And thus it was, that the cliches I had ignored for decades came to meaning in my life. I had not had enough interest in politics, and so politics took an interest in me. Only then was my consciousness raised, and the personal became political. And I started speaking the truth to power.

Listening to Heroes

2008-09-12T14:57:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan's RAWA has been involved in principled resistance against the full spectrum of tyrants: Soviet-supported Socialists, US-supported (and later anti-American) Taliban, and now the US+NATO-imposed experiment in totalitarian democracy: an Iran-style Islamic Republic built on the corpses of American soldiers. RAWA are not Objectivists, but they are Enlightenment-based secularists, and in the context of Afghanistan's tribalist-supernaturalist culture, that's a enough to be heroes. They write:

The US "War on terrorism" removed the Taliban regime in October 2001, but it has not removed religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all our miseries. In fact, by reinstalling the warlords in power in Afghanistan, the US administration is replacing one fundamentalist regime with another... Under the US-supported government, the sworn enemies of human rights, democracy and secularism have gripped their claws over our country and attempt to restore (probably meaning "re-impose" - AR) their religious fascism on our people.

So. One faith-based, sacrifice-based regime supporting another. And from Washington, our gang of elected traitors claims, of all things, that they stand for America.

The Church's preposterously dishonest abuse of biology

2008-09-11T00:14:00.000-07:00

According to a recent statement by Catholic bishops, "The Church recognizes that the obligation to protect unborn human life rests on the answer to two questions, neither of which is private or specifically religious.The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment? While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at conception... The Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact."

Now that is the most preposterous abuse of science that any of us are likely to see in a lifetime. Scientific knowledge is contextual. In the context of biochemistry, the embryo is indeed a separate organism: its DNA, and the peptides and proteins derived from that DNA, are distinct. But the physiology the fetus is, until birth, completely dependent for the requisites of life on the pregnant woman's organism. Physiologically the fetus is, until the moment of birth, part of the pregnant woman's body - part of a single functioning physiological system. Why does the Church take the perspective of biochemistry to be more "scientific," claiming that it ought to be imposed by the state, even on unbelievers, by force, as a matter of "natural law," and ignore the equally scientific - and much more directly relevant - perspective of physiology? Because the biochemistry fits the Church's prior doctrine, and physiology doesn't. Like the proverbial drunk with a lamp-post, the Church picks one bit of science, and ignores the rest, because it is using science for support - preferring this dishonest claim of support to objective illumination. This swindle - for that is what it is - is dishonest enough to disqualify the Church, even if one were to ignore its other crimes, from any claim to genuine moral authority. Either on abortion or on anything else.

Sarah Palin: Still a Reality-Proof Advocate of Abstinence-"Education"

2008-09-02T01:39:00.000-07:00

If Sarah Palin got her way, every child in America would receive the same kind of abstinence-"education" that Palin gave to her own children. As one woman wrote,

This is just so sad.

This poor 17-year-old girl is now saddled with a baby, trapped in a marriage that is statistically doomed to fail, with pretty much no hope of a college education, a career, a future...

And all because her mother abdicated her responsibility as a parent by not teaching her child the basic biology of sex.

My mom taught me about responsible sex. It was awkward and uncomfortable, but she did it anyway. And she taught me about abortion, too, which was more awkward and uncomfortable, but she made it clear that in case of accidental pregnancy, she was my first stop. She'd take me to Planned Parenthood, she'd pay for the procedure, she'd hold my hand the whole time, she'd love me anyway, and she'd help me to get on with my life.

Too bad this kid didn't have my mom instead of hers. She could have had a future. Now she's just stuck.

Theocratic politics is a new phenomenon in America, and so we don't have (yet) a scale of toxicity for its gradations. So I'll borrow the scale from the history of the left. George W. Bush is the theocon equivalent of a Social-Democrat. Sarah Palin, on the same scale, scores as a Maoist. The kind that saw the results of Mao's cultural revolution, as we are seeing the result of the Christianist revolution that Sarah Palin imposed on her family, and kept on believing, and kept on destroying every human life in his path.

The outrage of September 11 and the tragedy of September 14, 2001 - and the choice of 2008.

2008-08-31T13:47:00.000-07:00

It sets my teeth on edge whenever some timid weasel speaks of the Al Queda attacks of September 11, 2001 as a "tragedy." It was not a tragedy - which would mean something that was not the perpetrators' design. It was a massacre, a crime, an outrage. It was followed by a second outrage on September 13, when Christianist sociopaths Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson broadcast their endorsement of the perpetrators' "reasons" for the massacre. The real tragedy came on September 14, when President George W. Bush sponsored a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance" at the Episcopal National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

I was born in Europe, where many a country has a thousand-year-old Established Church, and a solemn national memorial would have been held at its National Cathedral as a matter of course. The setting, hymns, and some perfunctory rituals would have been there to provide a link to national history and tradition - but the essential content was always secular, and addressed not to God but to all the citizens, whether atheist or devout, of the nation. This is what I expected - and got shocked. Bush's show, such as it was, was adressed not to Americans but to God - and it came across as a desperate attempt to convince Him and His believers across the world that America was not, contra bin Laden and Robertson and Falwell, a den of sinners deserving of additional Divine chastisment, but rather a nation of faithful believers in God, just as pious and self-sacrificing as the suicide terrorists who flew planes into buildings three days before; humbly begging God for forgiveness of whatever grievous sins had caused Him to withold His protection from America on that day.

There was a seemingly unending sequence of clerics of many different faiths, but their selection made it clear that this was not a memorial to all the Americans who had been murdered by the God-crazed killers. Religions that do not teach Man to shiver in fear of God - Humanists, Buddhists, Unitarians, Reconstructionist and Humanistic Jews - were not invited to speak, regardless of how many of their members had been murderd three days before. There was to be no dissent from a ritual of national abasement before the mystery of the Divine chastisement of His faithful, and from the promise that America was to be humble, self-sacrificing and God-fearing in the future, so as to avert a repetition of His wrath. One of the Islamic clerics invited to sermonize was a Wahabbi, of the religion (and the motivator) of the suicide fliers. This worthy cleric used the occasion to lecture Americans on the Sin of Pride.

There could have been no more total treason to America's Enlightenment foundations than this spectacle, directly out of the Dark Ages, of genuflexion to faith and self-sacrifice. Most of America's Founders believed in a God, having (in their time) no natural explanation for the apparent design of Man and of the world. But the intellectuals among them were Deists, believers in a God who created the world, and then set Nature to run its course without His further involvement. That "Men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights" was their way of saying, that every man had those rights by virtue of his nature as a man, and not by a grant or fiat from some religious book or political power. In 2001, it was America telling the world the opposite: that "liberty" (whatever that might mean, for it no longer meant individual rights) was not a matter of Man's nature, but a gift from a fickle God. And that Americans needed, and were going to, plead for this gift from God by abjuring reason and self-interest and by practicing self-sacrifice. And so this ceremony to erase, from Americans' minds and memory, the fact that what had been done to them on September 11 was done, by those 19 pious men, as an act of self-sacrifice to the God of their faith.

In the seven years since, the world learned that to our own religious gang - the one ruling an America that no longer recognizes individual rights as a matter of Man's nature - "liberty" now meant "democracy:" putting the people of each nation under the yoke of whatever regime that nation's majority (vox populi vox dei) would vote for. Even when that majority's choice was (as it predictably turned out to be in Iraq and Afghanistan) an Islamic Republic, where no human has any individual rights that the Shariah Police would need to recognize. And, to demonstrate to God that America was now a pious land of self-sacrifice for faith, the lives of American soldiers, of Americans, were sacrificed to set up and maintain the Islamic Republics that the local savages of Iraq and Afghanistan had voted into power. It was the new, pious government of America that had murdered these American soldiers, just as the dead of September 11 had been murdered by another religious gang, as a sacrifice to and for the rule of supernatural religion, and of its godly men, over the Earth.

Seven years after the tragedy of September 14 we live in a different America, a country made weaker and poorer by seven years of national self-sacrifice. Until this week, it looked like the next President, whoever he was, will be calling on Americans for more years of self-sacrifice; but neither of the two candidates would (and in this they both differ from the present occupant of the White House) actually and faithfully mean it. One of the candidates, John McCain, by legislation (especially McCain-Feingold) and by promising to appoint judges who will overturn Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, had appointed himself America's number-one enemy of the freedom of speech. So I planned to vote for the other, because doing so would count twice as much as not voting, against McCain and in defense of free speech. This week, McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his vice-presidential running mate has given me, and all Americans who still live by reason, a reason to not even consider staying home on election day.

Sarah Palin is, to the Christianists and the Islamists of the world, an actual saint. In her last pregnancy, she learned that she was carrying a fetus with a genetic defect, one that will make the child, that this fetus could eventually become, forever incapable of fully human conceptual life. Sarah Palin, rejecting the option of abortion, decided to sacrifice a large fraction of the rest of her life to God's Will by completing that pregnancy, and deliberately giving birth to a genetically defective child. Even for George W. Bush, religious self-sacrifice is mainly something he orders and demands of others. For Sarah Palin, religous self-sacrifice is what she is - I was about to write "herself," but it is precisely her self that Sarah Palin, in total obedience to her faith, has sincerely done everything she could to strangle by her personal sacrifice to the Will of God.

John McCain is in his seventies, and in poor health. It is possible, and not altogether unlikely, that, if he were elected, his deteriorating health will prevent him from completing his full four years is office. And then the Presidency would fall into the hands of Sarah Palin, who will sacrifice America, just as she has deliberately sacrificed her own personal life, to the Will of God. This would be the end of Enlightenment America, at the hand of America's first fully theocratic head of government and state.

During my first years in America I was often asked why several European nations, allied with America against the spread of Communism, were ruled by nominally Socialist political parties. I explained that the European voter, given the choice between the Communist who sincerely believes in total redistribution, and a Socialist who tries to believe in it, but is actually sane enough to fail in his attempt to believe, no rational man would vote for the true believer, nor abstain and thus allow the true believer to win. Communism took seven decades to fizzle. The last time around, the Dark Age of godly self-sacrifice lasted seven centuries. Those who would bring it back must be stopped.

InLine Activism: A University Policy on Free Expression

2008-08-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

In recent years, the university where I teach has been, like most non-elite universities, beset by religious extremists "witnessing to" - that is, harassing - secular people, with a particular animus against the campus GLBT organization. After one particularly nasty incident, when the Bible-thumpers invaded a meeting of the GLBT club and destroyed its banner, claiming afterward that their actions were legally protected religious symbolic speech, the Academic Senate decided to draft a University policy on free expression. The matter was referred to the Committee on Student Affairs.

Under similar circumstances some other Cal State campuses adopted grossly illiberal hate-speech policies, so I knew that this was an occasion for me to help draw the lines from an Enlightenment-based, Classical Liberal perspective informed by Objectivism. Committee work usually falls to pre-tenure faculty, and is quite time-consuming, but I volunteered to be vice-chair of the committee for the year. At the start, only I and one other member favored something other than a hate-speech code. By the end of the academic year - and much time spent in discussion and persuasion - the committee sent to the Senate a draft document that (except for boilerplate added by the University lawyer) was close to what I had hoped for.

As usually happens in University politics, the Executive Committee of the Senate did a Cortland on the document I had worked on. So on the second reading I proposed and argued for an amendment that replaced the draft on the floor - that is, the Executive Committee's Cortlandized version - with mine. My amendment passed, and my draft was adopted as an academic policy. Here it is:

Freedom Of Expression

Preamble

Exposure to the widest possible range of ideas, viewpoints, opinions and creative expression is an integral and indispensable part of a university education for life in a diverse global society. California State University, Los Angeles, supports the right of individual students, faculty, staff and student organizations to exercise free speech, including but not limited to artistic, political, and/or symbolic speech, provided only that such expression does not disrupt normal activities or infringe upon the rights of others. This policy establishes reasonable, non-discriminatory, content-neutral guidelines and procedures designed to protect the rights of speakers and non-speakers, respect the rights of faculty and staff in the classrooms, ensure fair access and due process for those who wish to use the university's public forums, and maintain a safe environment on the university campus.

General provisions:

California State University, Los Angeles, supports the right of individual students, faculty, staff and student organizations to exercise all forms of expression and free speech including but not limited to artistic, political, and/or symbolic speech, provided that such activities do not prevent the university from carrying out other aspects of its mission, or infringe upon the rights of others.

Learning to respond to the widest possible range of free expression in a civil and responsible manner is an integral and indispensable part of a university education for life in a diverse global society. The university will not condone behavior that violates, by intimidation or force, the freedom of speech, choice, assembly, or movement of other individuals or organizations, or that restrains others' voluntary exposure to free expression and free speech.

Freedom of expression in the university does not extend to actions that are illegal under the constitutions, or under valid applicable laws, of the United States and of the State of California. This policy does not endorse, or relieve any person from legal liability for actions that amount to libel, slander, or infringement of intellectual property. All persons or groups engaging in activities on university property are subject to, and are expected to comply, with any applicable university policies and procedures.

Unless legally required to do so, CSULA does not support cooperation with individuals, organizations, or agencies that directly or indirectly investigate, surreptitiously monitor, infiltrate organizations or harass persons legitimately exercising their constitutional prerogatives of free speech and assembly.

The mention in this policy of certain means and contexts for freedom of expression shall not be construed to deny or disparage any aspect of freedom of expression by other means or in other contexts.

Whenever any provision of this policy is subject to interpretation, it shall be interpreted to maximize freedom of expression, consistent with the educational mission of the university and with the constitutions and laws of the United States and of the State of California.

Your comments are welcome.

Essential Issues: W's Birth-Control-Is-Abortion Directive

2008-08-13T16:47:00.000-07:00

In recent article from Colorado, Bill Grant presents a pragmatist but secular take on Colorado Proposition 48 and on Bush's directive prohibiting "discrimination" by hospitals against doctors - physicians, surgeons, dentists, psychologists etc - who base their treatment decisons on their religious beliefs instead of scientific evidence and the best interest of the patient, avoid effective medications that may interfere with the implantation of a fertilized zygote and so on. Unfortunately, Grant assumes that the relationship between a doctor and a patient is inherently unfree, and the debate is about who is entitled to coerce whom:

.... religious radicals in the Bush administration have devised yet another way to undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom. Although doctors who refuse to perform abortions for reasons of conscience are already protected from discriminatory hiring practices, the administration proposes redefining abortion to include most forms of birth control and any procedure resulting in the termination of a fetus “between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.” Medical personnel who object to these procedures would be under no obligation to explain them to a patient, or refer her to a practitioner who would offer counsel .... This rule completely subordinates the rights of the patient to receive the most appropriate medical treatment to the personal beliefs of the medical staff.

The focus instead ought to be on the essential moral issues:

The doctor (at least here in California) works _in_ a hospital, but _for_ a patient - the doctor bills the patient, not the hospital, for services performed etc. But under the Bush regulation, the patient has no way to know which doctors (witch doctors?) will be making their treatment decisions on the basis of supernatural beliefs that have nothing to do with scientific medicine. The Bush regulations would have the effect of removing the moral requirement for the patient's informed consent - in a context in which no rational patient would give her consent (to pay for treatment decisions made on the basis of supernatural beliefs instead of science).

The other issue is that the regulation prohibits hospital organizations from limiting privileges - as any rational hospital board would insist - to professionals who will base their treatment decisions exclusively on science and a rational consideration of the best interest of the patient, and not on their supernatural religions. Even if I know and trust the owners and managers of a hospital, I cannot trust their institution - because Bush's criminal gang, pretending to be a legitimate government, will use force to prevent them from running their hospital according to the rational, principled judgement of their minds.

But of course it would take someone with an Enlightenment-based understanding of science, medicine, and individual rights to make these points. Trust a Pragmatist such as Grant to miss the essential moral issues entirely.

Essential Issues: W's Iraq War

2008-08-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

From a comment I posted on Diana Hsieh's NoodleFood:

1. Essential issues in the macro context of the Iraq war as a whole: The aim of this war was to replace a nasty but secular tyrant with whatever government the population of that country, without the benefit of an occupation long enough to change their culture, would vote into power, even when their predictable choice, in their unmodified cultural context, is an "Islamic Republic." That aim was contrary to the interests of every sane American, and of every sane human in a world threatened by the spread of those "Islamic Republics." The Islamists are enemies of Human life on Earth, and a war fought for the purpose of putting them into power, in Iraq or anywhere else, is a crime against America and against Humanity. The only people against whom that war is NOT a crime are those who are fighting against US soldiers out of loyalty to Islamist factions that happen to be out of power now (and think that the best way to get into power is by shooting at Americans,) or just want to get into Muslim heaven by killing infidels, or who shoot at Americans out of loyalty to the previous tyrant. And that includes everyone actually shooting at Americans there.

2. Essential issues in the context of the situation of individual Americans whose lives are at risk as a result of that war. There aren't any good guys shooting at Americans in Iraq, and a rational soldier will do whatever he needs to do to survive. This includes shooting in situations in which innocent people will also be killed. The moral responsibility for any civilian deaths in such a situation falls exclusively on whoever was trying to kill the soldiers who are shooting back. If the American soldiers were not there, those who are shooting at Americans now would NOT be living peaceful lives: they would be eagerly imposing tyranny or killing other innocent people, in Iraq or elsewhere.

Our Obscene Department of Theocratic Injustice

2008-08-08T05:38:00.000-07:00

The course of justice, as conceived by Americans of the Enlightenment, went from evidence, to trial, to acquittal or punishment. By the end of the 19th century that conception of due process of law had become a fixture of American culture. But now, things have changed. Over time, our laws have mutated from prohibiting violations of individual rights to lists of arbitrary prohibitions of even completely harmless private behavior; from objective criteria to infinitely stretchable language; and in the last seven years into prohibitions based on nothing but faith-based fear of the exercise of those very rights, especially freedom of speech, that the founding fathers put at the top of their list of individual rights that the government was formed to protect. Punishment is now meted out even before there is any evidence of guilt, by means of official statements of spin, innuendo and outright lies designed to drive the designated victim of "law enforcement" to suicide, or at least a guilty plea that spares the government the trouble of presenting its case in court.

In the latest case, the victim was accused under an obscenity statute that, in the age before our current theocratic administration, most Americans thought would never be enforced again. Obscenity statues punish pure expression of thought. They do not involve in any way the protection of anyone against anything - certainly not against any conceivable violation of individual rights. The only function of these obscene laws is to protect "society" against the expression of ideas that our theocratic masters disapprove of. Yet the accusation of having had bad ideas in her head made the life of the accused woman into such hell that she pled guilty. To a charge that no honest judge could sustain after swearing to uphold the Constitution.

By punishing her first, the theocrats of DOJ have managed to avoid a test of the constitutionality of such laws. If the next President appoints more theocratic judges, as McCain has promised to do, such obscenity laws will never face an honest constitutional test. As Ayn Rand wrote, "not fire and brimstone but goo."

How Pragmatism Kills Enterprises and Nations

2008-08-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

The most amazing thing about the Lucent swindle is how stupid it was. Rich McGinn doubled his income for two or three years at the height of the swindle. But what he lost was at least another decade as the CEO of what would still be, except for the swindle, a great and profitable enterprise. How could a man smart enough to hold his own when talking with Nobel Prize winners, and not only because he was their boss, do something so unbelievably stupid?

The answer, I see now - after thinking about Tara Smith's lecture at the 2008 OCON - is Pragmatism. "Pragmatism," Charles Sanders Peirce wrote in 1903, "is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood." Or, in the form that McGinn may have learned and followed, that ideas have no meaning beyond "if I do x I experience y." And if indeed I do x and experience y, then according to Pragmatism the idea is true - it "works." Thus Pragmatism takes Kant one step farther. Kant allowed that there is a reality which is a source of our conscious experience; he only asserted that our knowledge is limited to and by the nature of that experience, so that we humans may never know, except perhaps by faith, rather than by reasoning from the experience of our senses, what that external reality truly is. According to Pragmatism, the only things that we can know at all are our experiences and actions. The pragmatist holds that it is meaningless even to talk about reality as something external to consciousness, or about our experience as being a result of something external to our own thoughts and actions. Therefore the pragmatist denies that one can meaningfully account for the regularities of our experience by induction or deduction of principles - of conceptual knowledge - about what reality (which to the pragmatist is a meaningless idea anyway) is and how it works.

So how does Pragmatism look from my own (hopefully Objectivist) perspective? From the perspective of my own integration of Objectivism with the available scientific knowledge of our day, it looks like Pragmatism strikes directly against, and if permitted to, destroys, Man's evolved means of survival: his conceptual faculty. Pragmatism destroys Man's species-specific ability to preserve and enhance our lives by discovering and using conceptual, principled knowledge. Pragmatism makes smart men stupid. Rich McGinn and the Lucent swindle is just one case in point.

Unfortunately, American schools have been inculcating Pragmatism into the American mind for the last half-century or more. Thus Pragmatism dominates American culture and American political life today, as no bad idea had ever dominated both the culture and the politics of any place in the Western world, at least since the Dark Age of Christian domination in both. Yet, except for critiques of Pragmatist John Dewey's destructive heritage in the field of education, I cannot recall any previous discussion of Pragmatist ideology, and of its wider effects, at any Objectivist conference before. Objectivists sometimes assume that because dishonest ideas are philosophically unimportant, they must also be existentially impotent - and Pragmatism is perhaps the most monumentally dishonest ideology in the entire history of philosophy. Yet Pragmatism is so pervasive in contemporary American culture and education that Tara Smith spent a good third of her lecture telling her listeners how to confront it, not even in society and politics, but in the ideas and habits inculcated by American education and culture into the minds of her (Objectivist!) listeners.

It is now a quarter-century since the graduates of the Pragmatist curricula that Ayn Rand wrote about in "The Comprachicos," and Leonard Peikoff spoke about in "Why Johnny Can't Think," reached middle-age and began to take control of American institutions: legislatures and courts and defense and police agencies and universities and corporations. And, looking at the results of their actions, one cannot miss the destruction brought about by Pragmatism.

Pragmatism in America is the source of policies and actions that have given American voters and leaders their current world-wide - and well-deserved - reputation for anti-intellectualism and stupidity. CEOs who destroy titanic enterprises by one unprincipled scheme or another are just the tip of the Pragmatist iceberg. In international policy and in war, it is American Pragmatism that brought America's and Mankind's worst enemies, the Islamists leaders of Islamic Republics, into power in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Schools of Education and in the Philosophy Departments of America's universities, Pragmatism has given us professors who cannot tell the difference between religion and science: teachers who teach teachers to inculcate anticonceptual, anti-intellectual stupidity in American children. And when those children reach the universities, fields that require principled conceptual thought - like engineering and science - are mostly beyond their reach. America's high-technology industries depend for nearly all of their graduate-level high-technology workforce on people who immigrated to American universities from schools less ravaged by Pragmatism than ours. Republican presidential candidate McCain's proposed reduction or suspension of their immigration amounts to a plan for national suicide by Pragmatism.

And there is worse. Kant's agenda was to limit knowledge to make room for belief. Pragmatism is Kant on steroids: it reduces conceptual knowledge to zero, and gives religion all the room in the world. Pragmatism is the ultimate handmaiden of theocracy. And today, unfortunately, it is this combination of Pragmatism and theocracy that has become America's de-facto national political ideology.

If you are an American, as I am, be very afraid of American Pragmatism. And if you are also an Objectivist, or at least an advocate of America's previous, pre-Pragmatist, secular, Enlightenment-based original principles, then damn it and do something about it. The The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: Activism website, is a good place to start.

2008-07-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Disregard the false start (below; don't disregard the picture, though, it's still good.) Soon after the first post I got hit by a serious health incident (sciatica; pain; spine surgery etc.) and it took me a while to recover to the point where I have time to blog. In the meantime Aster decided to finalize her break with "Libertarianism" and to terminate her mailing list, which had gotten filled with that unfortunate mix of crackpots and poseurs that is "Libertarianism's" inevitable consequence. I am teaching at the University (where I work) this summer quarter, and attending the Ayn Rand Institute's OCON this week - and getting ready to blog my reactions to OCON, a recent foreign trip, new Romantic music and whatever else might come my way.

2006-11-02T23:21:00.000-08:00

Starting an independent blog:

I (Adam Reed, above with my wife Yoon Merrill) now comment mainly on Diana Hsieh's NoodleFood Blog, and on Lady Aster's Salon_Liberty@yahoogroups.com. But at some point I anticipate posting articles of my own, rather than merely commenting on others'. So this is the start of my own Blog.