Losers Manipulate Markets

Whenever a company has no viable business model, they give up on trying to survive on their profit margin and start trying to manipulate the market.

This has already happened in the recording industry. Music labels couldn’t make their old profit margins because customers outwitted them and stopped buying products that were not priced according to their actual market value.

So, then the RIAA had to start suing music listeners and making moral appeals to make them feel guilty. Is it because the music recording industry has lost property and is being victimized by a more powerful entity? No, it’s because the true value of their product is now being reflected in the market. Is it because the music recording industry is a righteous arbiter of moral values that does everything possible to support musicians’ rights to their music and their profits? No, it’s because it is a huge scam and since their claims have no intrinsic moral value, they have to demonize all their potential customers as criminals.

Likewise for the movie industry and the book publishing industry. When Amazon tried to create a market for new media products by lowballing the prices of e-books, this aggravated the book publishers. Not because they were losing money on the deal, but because it emphasized the huge scam they were running. So now they are fighting to stuff the genie back in the bottle and pretend that they are being victimized by low prices on e-books. Bull. They are doomed to suffer the same market declines as the recording industry, and they know it for certain now, as evidenced by their panicky behavior.

Newspapers have already learned the same lesson about the intrinsic value of their product. Note that they are hoping that with Apple’s help they will be able to lock in paying customers again and revive the myth of their indispensability. After this strategy fails, I predict they will move to get local or national government to enact laws giving them monopolies on news distribution, on the principle that they are essential to the political process.

Again, look at the auto industry and the housing industry. In both cases the products were being priced way beyond any intrinsic value. In both cases they have persuaded the federal government to step in with price supports because the market values are below the arbitrary price levels they had set. I don’t know about the auto industry, but the housing industry (as represented by real estate agents, banks, builders, and mortgage companies) is still working full-time to get more price supports from government.

As with the music recording industry, the mortgage companies are also demonizing potential customers, claiming that they are morally obligated to pay on a secured loan when in fact they are not. Note that no business observes any “moral obligation” to pay on a secured loan; if an asset isn’t worth the expense to own, they just dump it.

Health insurance companies also don’t have a working business model, so they need to manipulate their markets. Note that despite the exaggerated claims of the phony conservatives, the US healthcare market is not primarily supported by “private” money:

For all the hue and cry over a government takeover of health care, it’s happening anyway.

The tipping point is likely to come next year, Truffer said. For technical reasons, the report assumes that Congress is going to allow Medicare to cut doctor fees by 20 percent later this year, as required by a 1990s budget law. But lawmakers have routinely waived such cuts, and they’re not likely to allow them in an election year. So government probably will end up picking up most of the nation’s medical costs in 2011, instead of 2012.

The US private health insurance business model is breaking down. It was premised on the idea that all voters have lifelong full-time jobs making higher than average pay, and everyone else will die miserably, painfully, and quietly. Unfortunately, not only do some obnoxious people make less than average pay and work less than full time, but some of them retire:

Long in coming, the shift to a health care sector dominated by government is being speeded up by the deep economic recession and the aging of the Baby Boomers, millions of whom will soon start signing up for Medicare.

Therefore it is not at all surprising that the deal they cut with Democrats is to mandate coverage:  that is not a “socialist” program, it is a blatant attempt to manipulate the market to guarantee them income despite their faulty business model.

The worst nightmare of the health insurance companies is the same as for the music recording companies, the book publishers, and the newspapers:  that the majority of potential consumers will discover that they are not indispensable and will simply bypass them entirely if given a chance.

Modeling Pointless Justifications

Little Green Footballs points to this catastrophic discovery by a climate science journalist:

Kris Wilson, an Emory University journalism lecturer and a former TV news director and weatherman himself . . .  surveyed a group of TV meteorologists, asking them to respond to Coleman’s claim that global warming was a scam. The responses stunned him. Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam.* Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue. “I think it scares and disturbs a lot of people in the science community,” Wilson told me recently. This was the most important scientific question of the twenty-first century thus far, and a matter on which more than eight out of ten climate researchers were thoroughly convinced. And three quarters of the TV meteorologists Wilson surveyed believe the climatologists were wrong.

Oh, surely this will make no difference at all to the professional scientists. I mean, they are the experts at reviewing each others’ work, and these simple-minded “weather girls” have really nothing to say about it.

Skepticism is, of course, the core value of scientific inquiry. But the essay that Coleman published that week, on the Web site ICECAP, would have more properly been termed rejectionism. Coleman wasn’t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research—something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves.

Oh my, it isn’t skepticism–its REJECTIONISM. Skepticism is good; but arguing against conclusions without having done careful original research is bad.

I would like to say to Charles Homans, that that remark is completely hypocritical. I am certain that, like most of the “science lovers” who earnestly vilify everyone they hate, he has never done any original research. In fact, there are a huge number of “skeptics” who know only that they despise anyone who contradicts their favorite celebrity scientists, journalists, and PR hacks.  They do no research and, in my experience engaging with them, most of them do not even trouble to read the actual studies they spitefully defend. Many of them know less than I do about their own position, since all they do is read lists of talking points written for the uneducated “true believers” of their own position, whereas I am curious to read the strongest arguments against my position.

Of course, it’s possible they really are not concerned with “scientific consensus,” and are simply engaged in a politically driven public relations campaign. In that case, it would be very important for all the weather forecasters to be on board.

More striking is the fact that the weathercasters became outspoken in their rejection of climate science right around the time the rest of the media began to abandon the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach that had dominated their coverage of the issue for years, and started to acknowledge that the preponderance of evidence lay with those who believed climate change was both real and man-made. If anything, that shift radicalized the weathermen. “I think the media is almost sleeping with the enemy,” one meteorologist told me. “The way it is now, there is just such a bias as to what gets out.”

Again with the obsession over popular opinion! For some reason, just when journalists had decided that there was no controversy, that they could stop pretending to be objective and just go whole-hog into free PR for the global warming acceptionists, just at that time the weathercasters decided that there was something fishy. How could they be so callous as to deny the journalistic consensus?

Meteorology has a deceptively close relationship with climatology: both disciplines study the same general subject, the behavior of the atmosphere, but they ask very different questions about it. Meteorologists live in the short term, the day-to-day forecast. It’s an incredibly hard thing to predict accurately, even with the best models and data; tiny discrepancies matter enormously, and can pile up quickly into giant errors. Given this level of uncertainty in their own work, meteorologists looking at long-range climate questions are predisposed to see a system doomed to terminal unpredictability. But in fact, the basic question of whether rising greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change hinges on mostly simple, and predictable, matters of physics. The short-term variations that throw the weathercasters’ forecasts out of whack barely register at all.

This is another totally disingenuous remark. It’s all so simple and predictable, except when it isn’t, which is when they try to actually explain it. It’s simple and predictable from a distance, only because they are oversimplifying the overall system and plugging it into a computerized model. Yet, for some reason, they can’t actually predict anything using these models.

This is the one explanation that everyone who has mulled the question seems to agree on—and indeed, when I spoke with meteorologists who were skeptical of or uncertain about the scientific consensus, it was the one thing they all brought up. “Meteorologists know our models,” Brian Neudorff, a meteorologist at WROC in Rochester, New York, told me. “There’s a lot of error and bias. We’ll use five different models and come back with five different things. So when we hear that climatological models are saying this, how accurate are they?”

This is the crucial point. The weather forecasters are in the same position relative to the climate scientists as engineers are to theoretical physicists, or as doctors and molecular biologists are to evolutionary biologists. For some reason, “theories” that can’t actually be used in the real world just don’t mean much to someone whose job depends on producing useful results on a regular basis.

People like Charles Johnson, PZ Myers, and Ed Darrell will whine on and on and on about how stupid you are for questioning evolutionary theory:  how deliberately ignorant, anti-science, anti-intellectual, illiterate, politically biased, fascist, dishonest, insincere, or crazy you are for not just bowing down and kissing the boots of your natural masters.

Yet, when it comes to the bottom line, medical schools don’t feel the need to teach “evolutionary medicine” because evolutionary theory provides absolutely no practical benefit for physiology, biochemistry, medicine, or any therapy at all. Biologists and psychiatrists alike denounce evolutionary psychology as “just-so stories” because, in fact, it has absolutely no benefit for psychological therapy or counseling. Molecular biologists and genetic engineers do not use evolutionary theory because it has nothing to do with their actual work. And now we see that weather forecasters have no use for climate science because it provides absolutely no predictive value.

Look, I’m an engineering school dropout. I only wish I could have stuck it out and learned everything they could have taught me, because I would be making four times as much now. But at least I learned how to mathematically model physical systems in engineering school, and later on I worked in a factory where I learned how to make theoretical models actually work with real materials and real systems. This has given me an appreciation for how science actually contributes to society and technology:  it just provides a framework and a justification for the people who do the real work. And when those people say that some overeducated stuffed shirt doesn’t know how to make a real model and doesn’t understand the limitations of models, that makes me ask them why I should care about their “theory.”

No, I’m not going to make all sorts of facetious arguments about how their models are constructed or how their theory is worked out. Only another geek can argue with someone totally steeped in the pedantic details of a narrow specialty. It’s kind of like the pointless theoretical arguments of medieval Scholasticism, nineteenth-century idealism, or Marxist socialism:  Who cares anyway, if they don’t actually have anything useful to say? At bottom, they are just trying to justify their personal prejudices.

Gaia Wants Your Brainz

More mystical psychobabble, this time from the priestesses of Gaia:

At present, ecopsychology seems to be struggling with this question. Philosophically, the field depends on an ideal of ecological awareness or communion against which deficits can then be measured. And so it often seems to rest on assuming as true what it is trying to prove to be true: being mentally healthy requires being ecologically attuned, but being ecologically attuned requires being mentally healthy.

Of course it is circular. Everything is circular in pantheism.

Recently, The American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, invited the members of the organization’s climate-change task force to submit individual papers; Thomas Doherty is taking the opportunity to develop his categorization of responses to environmental problems. His model, which he showed me an early draft of, makes distinctions that are bound to be controversial: at the pathological end of the spectrum, for example, after psychotic delusions, he places “frank denial” of environmental issues.

The denialists, you see, are actually schizophrenic, since they live in an imaginary world where fake science doesn’t matter.

The most telling feature of the model, however, may be how strongly it equates mental health with the impulse to “promote connection with nature” — in other words, with a deeply ingrained ecological outlook.

Strap ‘em down and sedate ‘em, boys! Their refusal to buy a Smart Car shows that they have a psychotic urge to destroy the planet!

Bin Laden Boogeyman

Here is why the folks who are paranoid about Islamic terrorists are the real “conspiracy nuts”–because Osama bin Laden (“UBL” to the FBI), supposedly the worst threat to Western Civilization since Attila the Hun, sounds like a whiny, manipulative, half-educated American liberal:

Bin Laden Rebukes U.S. on Climate Change

“Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality,” Mr. bin Laden was quoted as saying in a report on Al Jazeera’s English-language Web site. “All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.”

What is this, a hoax by a right-wing agent provocateur? Let’s read further:

In the message broadcast on Friday, Mr. bin Laden veered away from his traditional vows to inflict death and destruction on the United States, and instead discussed climate change, globalization and monetary policy in a message that he said was directed to “the whole world.”

Typical terrorist tactic:  inflicting death and destruction is just a prelude to the important stuff, such as preventing climate change.

He called for a worldwide boycott of American goods and the dollar. He faulted the United States for failing to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which sought to curb global warming by restricting greenhouse gas emissions. And he offered a word of praise for Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and liberal political activist.

“Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the U.S. policies to those of the Mafia,” Al Jazeera quoted Mr. bin Laden as saying. “They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the U.S. dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.”

More than likely, any UBL announcement in the last few years is a publicity stunt by left-wing propagandists hoping to capitalize on the Bin Laden Boogeyman syndrome. We should ask, who benefits and what is at stake?

Bank and government officials in China, Russia and elsewhere have previously floated the idea of abandoning the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, replacing it with a basket of other currencies and commodities such as gold.

This suggests that the audience for UBL is not the American left but the anti-American nationalists in the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China bloc).

The Vain Quest for Meaninglessness

Suffering and the vain quest for significance

Give me the indifference of the laws of physics rather than the hubristic self-righteousness of the religious any day.

Why is it more comforting to think that suffering happens by chance?

iJunk

What a huge waste of time:

For Media Industry, a Mixed Bag in iPad

One of the main things Apple has going for them is the Apple Mystique, a superstition about their marketing genius. For this product they wasted all their free publicity and brought out an oversized iPhone without the camera or phone–an e-reader that links directly to an overpriced marketplace for the some of the biggest old-media losers. When a half dozen other manufacturers bring out cheaper, more versatile products later this year, the iPad will sink into obscurity as another Apple also-ran.

The only thing that might save the bottom line is if Apple sells them at cost to every public school in the US and negotiates deals with the textbook publishers to put DRM-locked e-textbooks on them.

Unaccountably True

Little Molotovs

Here’s an article about the “fall from grace” of Little Green Footballs:

“It’s just so illogical,” Geller told me heatedly not long ago. “I loved him. I respected him. But the way he went after people was like a mental illness. There’s an evil to that, a maliciousness. He’s a traitor, a turncoat, a plant. We may not know for years what actually happened. You think he changed his mind?”

This reminded me of former commenter JF. It’s not that I identify with Charles Johnson; it’s more like I think JF would identify with Geller.

I encountered LGF a couple of times when wandering around the link universe, and it never impressed me. I’m totally sympathetic with the criticism of radical Islam, but I don’t prioritize radical Islam as a demon that I need to cast out. The new turn of LGF also is not that interesting; apparently LGF has gone from trite polemics against Islamic conservatives to trite polemics against Christian conservatives:

IN THE LAST DAY of November, Johnson delivered the final blow to his old alliances. In a post that he said took him about three minutes to write, he listed 10 reasons “Why I Parted Ways With the Right” . . . .

“I saw the bill of particulars he nailed to the door of his Web site,” says the author Peter Collier — himself a survivor of the special vitriol directed at those who change sides in the ideological wars, after he and David Horowitz, his fellow former Ramparts editor, publicly leapt from far left to far right in the late 1980s. “Not exactly Whittaker Chambers, is he? I must say I was pretty put off by the profligate and kind of lame use of the word ‘fascism,’ a word that has been systematically denuded of its meaning, so that now it just signifies somebody you don’t agree with. I don’t want to say that it didn’t take some bravery and forethought and all that stuff — it just didn’t seem like a very considered and certainly not a very theoretical break. More of a take-this-job-and-shove-it moment.”

Like Collier, I would take the LGF complaint at face value, as a list of petty annoyances that gradually built up until the whole political equation simply blew up. Johnson defends his Ten Theses and sums up by writing:

I wasn’t aware that I’d chosen a new team; am I allowed to have independent views or does parting ways with the “right” inevitably mean I have to join the “left?” I choose to believe that I can remain independent of political affiliation, and in fact I’ve never seen the purpose of blogs to be simply promoting a party line. That’s why I don’t see this whole kerfuffle as a big sea-change; I see it as drawing some lines and setting some boundaries, and saying, “No, I’m not down with this.”

In conclusion, I don’t really care about the larger or smaller political issues surrounding this “right wing flame war.”

The Rhetorical Issues

Instead, as is typical for me, I am more interested in the rhetorical problems. The NYT reporter Jonathan Dee writes:

NO ONE SEEMS TO WANT to believe that his thinking simply changed over time — and in fact he still has that much in common with his old allies, for Johnson, too, insists that he hasn’t really changed.

What can we make of this? Who betrayed whom, and why should we care?

THE SOUNDEST CONCLUSION seems to be that he has indeed changed his mind — less about issues (though there are a few, global warming chief among them, on which he will admit to having gradually reversed positions) than about the people with whom he is willing to share the stage, or, perhaps, about his willingness to share the stage at all. Not that changing your mind, even in today’s political environment, makes you into some kind of intellectual hero. People change their minds all the time, for all kinds of reasons.

Yes, Dee also sees the controversy as purely a question of political affiliations; but he also makes a good point about changes of mind. Is it really possible to have  changes of mind?

If your life is like my life, there are within it brief stretches, usually a week to ten days long, when your mind achieves a polished and freestanding coherence…. Such alert intermissions happen only infrequently: most of the time we are in some inconclusive phase of changing our minds about many, if not all, things. [Nicholson Baker, "Changes of Mind"]

Now then, I don’t totally agree with Baker’s conclusions. The blog I linked to quotes him as writing, “Changes of mind should be distinguished from decisions, for decisions seem to reside pertly in the present, while changes of mind imply habits of thought, a slow settling-out of truth, a partially felt, dense past….” Later on he is quoted as writing that “we change our minds as we change our character.”

But in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis notes that decision and character are connected in that we make moral choices that establish habits and cause subtle changes in our character, changes that we will live with forever. Lewis, of course, is talking about eternal life and a kind of psychological interpretation of heaven and hell.

In this sense, changes of mind are simply variations of habit influenced by environmental variables; but for an intelligent agent acting in the real world, all of these things are affected by actual [conscious] choices.

The results of these moral choices may not be evident to the broader society, however. Johnson shows that he has concerns quite similar to those of John A. Davison:

“This is one area where I did change,” Johnson admitted. “I realized you can’t just let it be free speech. It doesn’t work that way on the Internet. Total free speech is a recipe for anarchy when people can’t see each other.”

Again with the anxiety about anonymity! Johnson reiterates this point in a response on LGF:

I have a few significant disagreements with the angle taken by Jonathan Dee in his profile for the New York Times, most of all his willingness to accept unverifiable anecdotal information from people who post comments on the Internet under fake names….

As if verifying all information and identifying all sources were ever truly the main concerns for paid journalists! I know, supposedly they were and are, but their status as “rules” is overrated; they’re more like guidelines.

Accountability

The point is that society maintains a delicate balance of accountability and anonymity for individuals, and some folks are just fed up with the lack of accountability. Some people in the past were happy to hand over the job to a supposedly impartial observer such as the news media, but I think the time for that is mostly over in the US, and that’s why some journalists are all whiny and scared right now. (Their social value is currently very low and they need to justify their economic burden by jumping into the labor market and actually performing a useful function or becoming clownish entertainers.)

Another compromise in the past was to give college professors free rein to criticize everyone else in society, without giving them any actual authority over anyone except their students. I think that the legitimacy of the academic public intellectuals is also very low right now, mainly because of their misguided efforts to deconstruct truth, which paradoxically accompanied the scramble to make themselves “relevant.” Like the journalists, they are faced with doing something useful or being entertaining.

For some people the concern for accountability for others devolves into a pathological need for authoritarian rule, whether by the church or by a governmental authority. Whereas I respect the need for a government to maintain peace and order, and I appreciate the voice of moral indignation from the church, I really have no regard for the pathetic desire for authoritarianism. In this matter I classify the One-Worlder, the Communist, the Dominionist, and the Islamist together as useless, weak-minded, insignificant squids who deserve to be ignored as long as they are unarmed. They only appeal to other like-minded morons or to the manipulative politicians who crave power, so as long as I can keep the morons and the politicians at arm’s length, I’m not worried.

The worst nightmare of the political animal is that someone on their side might conclude that it is possible to have a change of mind. The objective of political accountability, as in any criminal organization, is to convince the proselyte that a change of mind is impossible.

Anonymity

Now then, I don’t believe that anonymity is such a bad thing. True anonymity is the lack of identity due to being completely submerged in a crowd of indistinguishable, similar creatures; while I consider that an unpleasant idea, I can’t say that it is necessarily bad. However, what most people now call “anonymity” is really “pseudonymity.” That is, we establish certain identities that may be distinct for different situations.

Before the Internet, this was not really a controversial idea:  someone could be known in his childhood hometown as a loser, yet be a ruthless leader at work and a sensitive father at home. Depending on where and when one lived, there was more or less an expectation that someone could really only be “known” if their family and friends were known. Sometimes this meant judging people by their ethnic identity, race, livestock, horses, tribe, surname, hometown, neighborhood, clothing, religion, trade, profession, education, and so forth; but their was little expectation that the average person could be “known” simply by looking for a record of everything they wrote over the last five years. That is a purely modern superstition carried over from the literary world, where the production of a written text is conclusive proof of who one is as an author; nevertheless, pseudonymity is a well known aspect of writing.

This paradox is possible because the idea of the author is artificial:

Anne Stone’s own comments are a good place to start. “Authorship is an industry concept,” she tells us. “It doesn’t identify or see the communities from which a work comes.” Elsewhere she is even more to the point: “I’m still completely unclear of what it means to be an ‘author’.”

Confusion about what being an author means may seem a little strange, especially for someone who has written a couple of novels. Stone’s attitude, however, has found a good deal of support in the media….

A column in the Globe and Mail quotes one editor’s opinion that 50% of Canadian non-fiction is significantly re-written. Later, the columnist describes her own initiation into the “dark art of hands-on editing”, which is “code for saying the book will be restructured and rewritten, and very few paragraphs will resemble the original.” Hoodwinking the “author” into thinking the book is their own is, apparently, just part of the game….

Now even Philip Marchand has come out of the closet, admitting to completely rewriting a children’s book that was, strangely, accepted for publication despite being unpublishable. He goes on to opine, “The notion of the author as the solitary genius, owing nothing to the collaboration or input of others, is an invention of print culture”….

In any event, the message to take from all of this couldn’t be clearer. “Everybody does it,” and the idea of any author, or “author,” creating a masterpiece all on their own, shivering in a garret or hiding out in a log cabin somewhere, is just naïve. Such romantic notions of solitary genius belong to a myth of creative individuality that doesn’t apply any longer. Indeed, listening to some of the comments that have been made, you’re left to wonder if it ever did.

Actually, the increasing influence of the unpublished (and unpublishable) blogger, who can become known mainly for his proficiency at googling and linking and ranting, merely emphasizes the transience of written identity. There is more and more pressure to be creatively expressive while tediously conforming to political expectations and pretending not to be a real person. The only antidote to this pressure to conform is the universal Internet maneuver of reinventing one’s persona or simply going anonymous.

Gotcha!

Part of the political game is to constantly one-up the other guy and subvert his persona, to play Gotcha! and Scandal! and Traitor! by comparing what everyone writes and says. The extensive data mining and search capabilities afforded by the Internet, along with the proliferation of sousveillance hardware, have given netizens the impression that they can “know” anyone immediately and thoroughly.

It is true that demonstrating the ability to track someone online can make them a little more discreet in their choice of words. However, that is not the same as accountability; it is simply useful as a kind of crowd control, as well as providing ammunition for political target practice. Accountability, on the other hand, requires moral authority, which depends on actual power, defined standards, and explicit choice. The actual power must reside in the person, group, or institution acting on moral authority; the standards must be clearly defined and known to all those under authority; and authority is conferred by the decision of those under authority.

Clearly this can be applied to a blog owner with regard to comment moderation; however, it would still make the individual accountable only in his role as commenter. Note also that while this could apply to someone living under an authoritarian government, it places the responsibility on the individual for choosing to obey or dissent. The worthless scum who lives in relative liberty and yet advocates involuntary authoritarian government control over his neighbors is still responsible for being a jackass and a moron.

Ultimately, our accountability is to the Lord of lords, the God of creation. Obviously, anyone who thinks that God is a creation of man’s imagination will conclude that the Christian considers himself accountable only to an imagined authority coming from his own perverted nature. This is the source of the atheist critique of Christian morality, and the reason why they will end up demanding that Christianity be ruthlessly oppressed by a powerful government. However, it is also the source of the Dominionist, Islamist, Russian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic insistence on using religious criteria to stifle political dissent and enforce dogmatic belief:  in the name of God, they claim that the infidel will not answer to God in this life and so must be viciously brutalized by the secular powers.

Real Accountability

Accountability means reminding someone of their identity and confronting them with their discrepant behavior. A truly anonymous modern person is a pre-linguistic child, an adult from a pre-literate culture who is cut off from his oral traditions, an illiterate adult in a text-oriented culture, or anyone whose persona is completely destroyed or denied by his culture. Such people cannot be held accountable because they lack a distinct personal identity or personal history.

For most people with any kind of Internet persona, this is impossible. They have multiple distinct identities and histories. This is not necessarily the result of deliberate deception, but merely because what can be found on the Internet is like a slide-show of snapshots. Each hit represents a single facet, a particular interaction, a reaction to a particular event, a one-time expression of feeling, a message tailored to a particular audience, a mashup of unique influences, a burst of temporary insanity, the ramblings of a sleep-deprived brain, or the detritus from a drug-induced rage.

In a real person, all these different perspectives and potentialities coexist simultaneously in a multidimensional entity that presents, perhaps, one side at a time to an individual observer, like the momentary product of a multivariate vector analysis.

Interestingly, at one point Jonathan Dee unwittingly uses the example of the Internet to construct this theological metaphor:

Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.

Dee is using this to show how Internet opinions become reified and online debates become locked in cycles of endless, unfruitful bickering. However, I would argue that it provides a framework for a more nuanced understanding of opinion and moral choice:  Opinions are situational and contingent on political concerns, regardless of the absoluteness of moral standards and the judgment that we will receive from God for the character we form. People are not gods, even with the right computer system and a broadband Internet connection. Moral choices are always based on incomplete information about the world and incomplete understanding of God’s will. By contrast, God sees all of Time at once and knows why everything happens in the way it does.

Keynes vs. Hayek

I don’t really enjoy much economics or rap music, but this is hilarious:

Keynes vs. Hayek rap video

Evolution versus Genetics

In his 1936 book Paläontologie, Entwicklungslehre und Genetik, Otto Schindewolf wrote:

An essential blame for the presently hostile circumstances is borne by the longstanding opposition between evolutionary theory and genetics…. Since only one can be right, some extreme Mendelists, proceeding from their one-sided viewpoint, reject evolutionary theory entirely. On the other side the persuaded phylogeneticists see in the theory of descent a science that is above all doubt and believe accordingly that the results of inheritance theory can be neglected. ["Forward"]

Ah, yes. Yet another piece of evidence that the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by extreme tension due to apparently irreconcilable differences between geneticists and evolutionists.

It is also yet another piece of evidence that Ed Darrell is full of baloney. Ed Darrell is the evolutionary activist who doesn’t know the history of evolutionary theory, the “history teacher” who doesn’t read twentieth-century history, the Internet scholar who cites lots of printed books but doesn’t read them, the Darwin-worshipper who thinks Darwin understood genetics, and the defender of murdered Soviet evolutionists who thinks Stalin was a creationist. The self-righteous Vox flea “JF” was sorely offended when I called Ed an idiot, but it is an inescapable fact that Ed cannot be taught anything. And that is how I can rationalize being mean to Ed, since I wish only that he was capable of reading and learning at a tenth-grade level, and I expended much effort to patiently instruct him, while he remained stubbornly ignorant and entrenched in his prejudices.

Once again, just in case Ed or another illiterate squid groupie shows up here to whine, I am not saying that biologists necessarily concur at present that there is any conflict between genetics and evolutionary theory. I personally think there is, and I know that a lot of biologists consider evolutionists to be religious fanatics, but I am not saying right now that there is a general attitude of hostility between the two disciplines. The point is that scientific opinion was unsettled during the early twentieth century, and the deaths of Soviet geneticists had absolutely nothing to do with any prejudice against evolutionary theory.

Politics Is an Insurance Scam

The phony “healthcare reform” pushed by the socialist Obama might have helped save the phony “businesses” now known as health insurance companies:

The health care legislation under construction in Congress would force the insurers to conduct business very differently, but the companies had already agreed to some of the most fundamental changes. One was their pledge to offer coverage to everyone, regardless of medical status, if the government could ensure that people, even the young and healthy, would have to sign up.

In return, Mr. Funtleyder noted, Congress was potentially delivering as many as 30 million new customers to the insurance market — many of whom would be able to afford coverage because the government would subsidize the cost of premiums.

“That’s real revenue, even for Wall Street,” he said.

These changes were necessary in order for them to keep up the pretense that they had a viable business model rather than a rigged gambling racket run by mobsters called “insurance executives.”

But now, in the possible absence of forced change to their business, the insurers still face the daunting challenge of selling a product that is increasingly out of reach for more Americans as the cost of medical care — and thus premiums — continues to climb.

Oh no, they might still go out of business! Is it possible that their old strategy of locking in customers by stealing their wages is self-defeating?

Moreover, the industry’s main business of selling coverage through employers has largely stalled, while the weak economy has speeded the loss of customers as people lose their jobs and their health insurance.

“People are still being crowded out of the market because they can’t afford it,” said Sheryl R. Skolnick, a health care analyst for Pali Capital in New York.

Not to worry–like all the other corporations who are “citizens” of the US, they have a constitutional right to smothering help from their sugar daddies in the federal government.

For insurers, the largest risk may be that without a government-led overhaul, their industry faces an even bleaker future should medical costs and premiums continue to soar, perhaps eventually prompting draconian changes from the government.

Once again, this little exercise in modern democracy proves that most “partisan politics” is fake. The larger system is set up to benefit certain people by milking other people. If some of the fake “people” called corporations fail at sucking money out of the real people, they will be trashed and replaced with a more efficient mechanism.

And what about all of that baloney about the free market, capitalism, conservative Republicans, self-reliance, property rights, and fighting against the evil “redistribution of wealth”, as was preached to me by self-righteous “conservatives” here? The only free market capitalism going on in Washington DC is by the “conservative” and “liberal” politicians who whore themselves out on a regular basis.

Politics is an insurance scam.