Wednesday, December 31, 2008
My Return, Postponed
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.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Free Internet versus Free Internet
The Ayn Rand Institute has a great comment on The FCC’s Plan to Censor the Internet:
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.
....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.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.
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.
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.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Wedge Strategy, Part 4: History and Implications
(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.
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
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.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Censorship Express
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.
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.
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