This is another area of government overreach that I’d like to see rolled way back.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Leviathan Fail
Jonah Goldberg reviews Kevin Williamson’s new book:
Williamson offers a wonderfully Nockian tutorial on how all states — and nearly all governments — begin as criminal enterprises, while acknowledging that not all criminal enterprises are evil. Criminals — whether we’re talking Somali warlords, Mafia dons, or the Tudors of England — often provide vital goods and services, from food to security. Often what makes them criminal is that they are competing with the State monopoly on such things.
Sidestepping the distinction between State and government, Williamson instead identifies what causes the Dr. Jekyll of government to transform into the Mr. Hyde of the State. He calls this elixir “politics.”
Williamson’s core argument is that politics has a congenital defect: Politics cannot get “less wrong” (a term coined by artificial-intelligence guru Eliezer Yudkowsky). Productive systems — the scientific method, the market, evolution — all have the built-in ability to learn from failures. Nothing (in this life at least) ever becomes immortally perfect, but some things become less wrong through trial and error. The market, writes Williamson, “is a form of social evolution that is metaphorically parallel to biological evolution. Consider the case of New Coke, or Betamax, or McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, or Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt Shampoo. . . . When hordes of people don’t show up to buy the product, then the product dies.” Just like organisms in the wild, corporations that don’t learn from failures eventually fade away.
Except in politics: “The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.” While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”
Read the whole thing, and buy the book
The Bioethics Of Mars One
With apologies to Bernie Taupin, Mars ain’t the kind of of place to raise your kids. And I put in a pitch for the Gravity Lab.
That La Jolla Starship Conference
Why A One-Way Trip To Mars?
Three applicants explain.
And over at Space News, Rod Pyle has the story on why Bernie Taupin had it right: “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” What he doesn’t mention is that the issue came up as a result of a question from me to Lansdorp. I think that it would be bioethically irresponsible, given the current state of knowledge, to send a fertile woman there, at least with men along, and it didn’t appear to me that he’d given the matter much thought. I’ll probably write a piece on this, maybe even today.
Piers Morgan, Mugged
“OK, so maybe those gun nuts weren’t as crazy as I thought they were.”
Out: Gun control.
In. Government control.
[Update a while later]
Joe Scarborough is having second thoughts, too: “Gee, maybe background checks aren’t such a red-hot idea after all.”
I hope that this is the week that the American people finally wake up, after having stared into the abyss.
The ABC Conjecture
The paradox of the proof. A very interesting story about math.
Those Nutjob Founding Fathers
Obama tells students, hey, don’t sweat this tyranny stuff. Big Brother Barack loves you!
As others point out, this experiment in self government was born from a justified fear and rejection of tyranny. Yeah, what would George Washington, John Adams or James Madison know about tyranny? And then there’s this wingnut:
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and those will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Man, that black guy, Fred Douglas, must be one of those crazy militia types.
Jonah has more thoughts:
I like America’s instinctual fear of tyranny. It is single best bulwark against, you know, tyranny. It’s a bipartisan tendency by the way. Conservatives tend to fret most over government exceeding its Constitutional authority to encroach on civil society. The left tends to fret over excesses in the government’s constitutional obligation to protect our citizens from crime and foreign threats. Libertarians have an abundance of both concerns. Not surprisingly, I tend to find the left’s excesses more annoying than the right’s (“Oh no, the state is trying too hard to fight our enemies!”) but both instincts are healthy and shared to one extent or another by all Americans. It is the fundamental dogma of Americanness and I for one would hate to see it erode further.
It’s just another facet of the president’s lack of understanding of the founding principles, and his deep aversion to limited government and Constitutional principles.
Snow, And The Universe
It spent its fury on the southeastern part of the state, which got 15 inches of snow. All of which will melt and soak the soil and well, well, what do you know: the drought lifts. The dryness of the last few years is forgotten as the mean reasserts itself over the long run of the decade, which itself will be a wink, a blip, an inhalation to the next decades exhalation, just as the universe itself is a bang at the start and a great collapse at the end, like two flaps of a heart valve. Assuming there’s enough matter to cause the universe to contract, that is. I hope so. I hate the idea that it begins with a great gust of matter, spreads and cools and ends in silence. Because that would make the universe, in essence, a sneeze.
Geshundheit.
May Day
Time to celebrate Victims of Communism Day.
There are hundreds of millions of them.