antikoan

 |::| Tuesday, July 16, 2002

 |::| Time for us all to do our part...  4:02:35 PM 

... to combat the latest anti-communist measures [direct link] (courtesy Daypop Top 40). If you're really motivated, you can even head over to A Small Victory to join S.P.O.R.K.

 |::| Quote of the Moment / Thing to Remember  3:02:15 PM 

A noble spirit embiggens even the smallest man.
-- Jebediah Springfield

 |::| RSS Aggregators  9:48:55 AM 

From the "how did I miss this" department (actually, I know how), Jon Udell's survey of RSS aggregators in Byte ("Byte is dead, long live Byte.com"). (Courtesy John Mahoney... and no, I don't know if it's that John Mahoney.) [ADDENDUM: Too bad -- it's not.]

 |::| Oxymoron of the Moment: "Libertarian Samizdat"  9:17:40 AM 

It's probably just me, but somehow I find the idea of "Libertarian Samizdata" [direct link] just really funny. As though libertarians weren't fellow-travellers to corporate interests... I'd chalk it up to being English, but among Libertarians here in America (where right-wing and quasi-Libertarian thought basically rules our airwaves), the rhetoric is even more strident. You'd think they were getting hauled away to gulags instead of featured in drive time.

The "put-upon [Conservative/Libertarian]" schtick is getting old, guys: The cold war's over. Right-wing reactionaries are not your friends. Learn who your real enemies are.

(Courtesy Daypop Top 40.)

 |::| Ethics Without Religion  8:56:50 AM 

From Synergic Earth News, a discussion of the development of ethics that (for once) avoids the semitic (judeo-christian-islamic) insistence on tieing it inextricably to religion:

Does Ethics Require a Belief in God ?. Ed Brownlee writes: The objection that ethics needs god seems to depend on at least three questions: can altruism evolve?; can ethics be developed without a perfectly ethical model or modeler?; and is ethics not so different from other human behaviors that it must be of a non-human origin?  (07/09/02)

 |::| The Myth of Mass Libertarianism [v. 02.07.16.01]  8:28:59 AM 

DayPop notes a top-40 hit for a review [direct link] of Barry Carter's Infinite Wealth, what appears to be a new-economy Libertarianism screed apparently advocating the latest variation of re-insistuting the war of all against all into the working classes -- here, going under the name "mass privatisation." It's the same old utopian song-and-dance, really: "Everything would be better if we did everything completely differently, and the only people standing in the way of progress are the ones who don't see things my way." Ahem! Which means almost everybody, coach, considering that only an intellectualized subset of the North American population is going to buy into this nonsense..

Let me be blunt: In practice, the only reason stuff like this gets printed and hyped is because it so effectively mystifies human interests that it leaves monied and power interests free to do what they want. This type of philosophy cannot but lead to the greater accumulation of wealth by an essentially hereditary oligarchic class, of which Our President is a fine and upstanding lifelong example.

The basic idea is simple and attractive: Give everyone the power to negotiate their own compensation. Let everyone be paid for the work that they do. Pay for merit; pay for contribution.

In a phrase: From each according to a blanket rate, to each according to his abilities. As long as he's able. There's a reason that humans have never used this kind of a system in our several million years of evolutionary history.

The rhetoric is that of empowerment; but when the rhetoric is stripped away, what you're left with is excellence through competition, the core dogma of Re-engineering. Competition is good, right? It leads to better end-products, and people are naturally competetive. It's a basic characteristic of capitalism, right? It's what evolution is based on, right?

The chief problem with this kind of argument is that it ignores the tendency for power to accumulate. Hierarchies happen in human societies, and the manner in which they spring up seldom has much if anything to do with merit relative to the stated criteria. You typically get hired for a job based not on your skills but on your personality (that's a fact, ask any recruiter). You get promoted based on "soft skills" that more often than not have more to do with your political abilities than how well you do your job.

To be fair, the root cause of a lot of this would appear to be bureaucracy. But that's an illusion; the real root cause is the basic ways that humans tend to organize themselves. The Carter book apparently advocates an elimination of bureaucracy, replacing it with this system of "mass privatization." Everything would be better, then. Everybody would be motivated, though the reviewer omits the motivation we're supposed to feel. (Perhaps it's the hot breath of the landlord on our necks?)

(Another big problem with arguments from natural selection is that it's just plain not that simple. Humans have evovled a tendency to function in organized groups, and we're far from the only species that does that. We are evolved to be inherently social animals -- we simply do not ever exist outside of a social context. Never. Doesn't happen -- not as long as we think with words. That fact has consequences.)

What's always missing from any of these utopian visions are the steps we'd take to realize them. In a typical utopian novel, the steps to the end are usually glossed over because the utopia is just an extreme case used to illustrate some points. Thomas More didn't ever expect society to work the way he outlined in Utopia, but he did have significant points he wanted to make.

But for books like Carter's, the point is not illustration: It's conversion. The only way that any of the ideas could work is a mass conversion of humanity to Libertarian ideals -- and, since variance by even a small opportunistic minority queers the whole deal for everybody, that is, in fact, the only way it can work.

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is probably the most effective work of philosophical advocacy in the last several hundred years (Marx notwithstanding). Much as I disagree with many of his modern followers, I think it's rather a good, balanced, well-argued work. But it's not utopian. Smith makes arguments and supports them; later authors (among them Marx) critiqued but nevertheless largely supported his arguments. It was a rational work, in other words, based on insights into human nature and accounting for flaws in human nature.

Modern mass-libertarian thought like Carter's is pure utopianism, by contrast, largely devoid of insights into any but one restrictive type of human character, and unable or unwilling to account for the fact that people will generally do what they're raised to do, the opinions of some ivory-tower libertarian be damned.

 |::| Free as in ... Freedom?  7:19:08 AM 

So, tell me again about how the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it?

Israel Blocks Palestinian ISP. The Israeli government takes over the offices of Palnet, effectively keeping thousands of Palestinians from accessing the Internet. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]

Yeh, sure, the Palestinians can get around this just like Chinese used fax machines in '89. But unless they're stupid (and there are enough seriously good internet technologists in Israel that I'm pretty sure they're not stupid), the Israelis already know that a simple move like this doesn't shut down Palestinian internet usage.

But they'll know what can. Shut down the phone trunks, jam the wireless, build that fence. Hell, I'd be surprised if the Israelis didn't have a way of jamming satellite traffic.

And, yes, there are sure ways to work around just about everything. I can think of a bunch of off-the-shelf ideas for getting IP access -- for example, just toss Cat5 from one cheap router to another. Toss enough (augmented by 802.11x where it's not jammed) and the durability of IP will allow you to get out. But getting out onto the Big Net is still the problem, and masters of tactical analysis will figure that out pretty quick.

Again: Good enough (or "bad enough", depending on how you put it) is good enough. They don't have to shut it down; they just have to hamper access enough. And they can.