Setting The World To Rights

Did the French Revolution influence the American Revolution?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:08:00 -0500

Setting The World To Rights Is On A Break

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:57:00 -0600

Thanks to everyone who has enquired. Yes, we are all fine. We're just busy for a while with other interests. We shall be returning as soon as possible.

Ignorance

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 08:56:52 -0500

On the occasion of the outcry over the iPhone's $200 price cut, a critic of Daring Fireball claimed

No, there’s more to this issue than people not understanding capitalism.

Indeed. It wasn't just ‘not understanding capitalism’, it was not having even the remotest clue what the proponents of capitalism consider to be their core position and their core arguments. This is not unusual. Many people in our society lack any such clue.

[T]his price drop shows that Apple was making more of a killing than anyone could have possibly imagined, more than anyone could have possibly thought was fair.

I mean, you could probably figure out the raw cost of a pork belly, but an iPhone is a little harder to pin down.

In a sense, this sweeping ignorance is a terrifying state of affairs. In another, a very hopeful one.

The Backlight is On, But Nobody's Home

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 09:11:32 -0500

Can Google really save the world by changing the background colour of their home page?

Nick at CharcoalDesign peers through the screen of environmentalist silliness.

Who Will Blame The Blamers?

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:22:46 -0500

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel wanted to scrap nuclear power, but has decided not to for environmental reasons.

Why is it that the environmental movement is not being blamed for global warming? They must be the largest single cause, due to their decades-long campaign against nuclear power. (Though perhaps they will soon be the second largest cause, after the desire of Indian and Chinese people not to remain destitute for ever.)

Perhaps it is because the sacred task of blaming people for global warming has been entrusted to the high priests of the environmental movement itself. So who will blame the blamers?

Watered Down Nonsense

Sun, 27 May 2007 09:06:41 -0500

In the Sunday Telegraph, James LeFanu writes that we should be nicer to homeopathy. Specifically he takes issue with Michael Baum, Professor Emeritus of Surgery of surgery at University College London, who has pointed out that homeopathy has no more merit than astrology. LeFanu writes:

The claim that homeopathy is "unsupported" by evidence would be contradicted by the many tens of thousands of people worldwide who say that it has cured their asthma or eczema or markedly reduced their reliance on conventional medicines. Are they all, as he would suppose, foolish and self-deluded?

Of course they are; either that or for some reason the news has not reached them (as it clearly has not reached LeFanu) that science is, in the words of Richard Feynman, "what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves". So if you don't use it when reasoning about what does or doesn't work, what will reliably happen is that you will continue to fool yourself.

Millions of people believe in witches and would swear that killing old women can and does alleviate a wide range of misfortunes including diseases. So, finding a group of people who claim that something cures them has no bearing at all on whether it does. LeFanu, unfortunately, continues:

It is true that homeopathy's supposed mechanism - treating like with like, where "the lower the dilution the more potent the remedy" - seems "barmy" to Western science. But so does acupuncture.

No demonstrable channels of communication cross the six feet that separate the toes from the skull, so how, as is undoubtedly the case, does twiddling a needle in the former cure a crashing migraine in the latter?

What? First of all, there is in fact no good evidence for acupuncture as a treatment of anything. But never mind that: pain and touch nerves do carry information from the foot to the brain. LeFanu is a physician and cannot possibly be that ignorant of basic anatomy. So it is, again, his standards of argument that are at fault. The Telegraph's editors ought to require a higher standard of reasoning in their newspaper than this watered down nonsense.

Joe Republican And A Better World

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:10:31 -0500

Curi fisks a didactic leftist story by telling a better story.

The Sailors And The Holocaust

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:41:33 -0500

The affair of the 15 British sailors and Marines illegally captured and mistreated by Iran and then released has been a humiliation for Britain and the West, and a triumph for the Iranian regime and every other enemy of the West.

Clearly the British government is not claiming the moral high ground to which it is entitled. It is not demanding the trial and punishment of the perpetrators of the blatant war crime, nor reparations for the victims and for Britain itself. It is not behaving in any way like the wronged party. This stance implicitly, but unmistakably, legitimises Iran's actions and creates a new, more dangerous status quo.

We don't know what additional price was secretly paid, if any. But it seems plausible that, in some way or other, Britain conveyed to the Iranian regime that it will never use force against Iran under any circumstances. If so, this reverses Prime Minister Blair's official policy of not ruling out force. It is rumoured that only last year this policy was important enough to Mr Blair to cause him to sack the then Foreign Minister, Jack Straw.

What does all this have to do with the Holocaust? Only this: A reversal of that policy would translate into a British endorsement of the Iranian nuclear weapons programme. Hence it would be tantamount to condoning, and enabling, the Iranian regime's planned destruction of Israel and Second Holocaust.

Hounded By Animal Rights Activists

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:03:06 -0600

Some animal rights activists are getting hot and bothered because some people sell coats made partly of dog fur – which is illegal in the United States.

Now, measures to prevent fraud (like selling fake fake fur under the guise of real fake fur) are one thing. But we think that people should be allowed to sell real dog and cat fur if they want to. Dogs were created by nature and human civilisation through natural and artificial selection. Dogs themselves can't generate new ideas, although people can train them to do stereotypical things like fetching sticks. So everything that might make a dog unique can be easily recreated by getting another dog of the same breed and treating it in a similar way.

If someone acquires a psychological attachment to a dog that they own – or for that matter to a picture that they own of a dog that never existed – then of course it should be a crime for someone else to destroy the dog or the picture. But for the same reason, if somebody chooses to kill their dog, that is an innocuous act. They can, for example, easily replace the dog with another that is just like it. If they also sell the dog's fur, everyone concerned is better off.

By contrast, human beings are capable of generating new ideas. So if somebody kills a human being they may have destroyed unique ideas that could make the world better. They cannot be replaced by simply treating another human in a similar way – even if that were a moral thing to do. Even if a person appears to have no good ideas, we may simply misunderstand the merits of his ideas. That is why we set up institutions, such as law and moral traditions, to ensure that choices between rival ideas can be made on the basis of reason, not violence. That is why killing a human being is wrong, except as a necessary consequence of defending another human being.

And that is why human beings have rights, while dogs and other animals do not.

Microsoft, Again

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:15:45 -0600

Nick at CharcoalDesign is not pleased with Microsoft.

Christians In The Middle East

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 04:15:25 -0600

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said that by invading Iraq the British and American governments have made life more difficult for Christians in the Middle East. In particular, large numbers of Christian refugees are leaving Iraq in fear for their lives. But it's not the Coalition forces whom they fear. The alleged responsibility of the British and Americans is indirect. What is it?

Islamists say that Christians are crusaders trying to dominate the Middle East along with the American and British governments. Hence the Islamists' campaign of terrorism against them is not unprovoked religious persecution and mass murder but simple self-defence. That the Islamists made that argument is not news. But why has Rowan Williams accepted it?

On the purely factual level he is simply wrong. For example, in Sudan, Islamists have been trying to exterminate Sudanese Christians on and off since 1955. The American government can't have prompted this campaign of genocide by invading Iraq. And, as Daniel Pipes points out, Christians have been disappearing from Iraq and most other countries in the region for several decades.

Williams blames the American and British governments because he has a cartoonish view of the world in which foreign people are only ever poor or violent because the rich Western countries have persecuted them. He doesn't treat Islamists in the Middle East as human beings, responsible for their actions, but only as ciphers, their deeply held convictions mere reflexes, determined by the decisions of Westerners. That's why he doesn't say that the Islamists are to blame for murdering and persecuting people, and instead blames the American and British governments who are trying to prevent the Islamists from doing that.

In doing so, he isn't just slandering the West, he is also doing a disservice to the Islamists by not expecting them to act as civilised human beings. And by publicly transferring responsibility for their crimes specifically to those who are trying to stop them, he is collaborating with them against their victims, including many Christians. Williams may be well-intentioned, but his moral relativism can only make the terrible situation in the Middle East worse.

Questions For The Iraq Study Group To Study

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 01:06:56 -0600

It is reported that the Iraq Study Group led by the highly Realistic James Baker

has unanimously agreed to a report that will call for a gradual pullback of American combat troops in Iraq but stops short of setting a firm timetable for withdrawal, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

And this differs from the present policy how? Like this:

the Times said the Iraq Study Group will recommend that Bush make it clear that he will start the troop withdrawal "relatively soon," indicating sometime next year.

That's very clear and Realistic. No firm timetable, but a firm timetable of withdrawal by December 31st 2007. Independently of what may, realistically speaking, happen as a result.

That recommendation would be a compromise between calls from some Democrats for a timetable to withdraw U.S. forces and Bush's insistence that forces should remain until the mission to stabilize Iraq was completed.

Recommendations of the panel, which is co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker -- a close Bush family friend --and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, will be much harder for Bush to resist than if the group were divided, experts and study group advisers say.

This is an astonishingly amoral position for something called a ‘study group’ to adopt. It is almost as if they would rather have an effect – any effect, even one that none of them agree with – than be ignored. They would rather subscribe collectively to a report that every one of them considers mistaken, than state individually what they believe to be the truth.

If the result is just a vague anti-Bush editorial that could have been written without study, at the outset, we wonder what the Iraq Study Group has been studying, and why. We hope that they have at least studied the following vital issues, and will include careful guidance on them in their final report:

Will the report be cleared with Allies, such as Iraq, Australia and Israel, before any action is taken to implement it?
Is there a Plan for the Aftermath of the report? In particular, have enough troops been allocated to ensure that the report's Aftermath in Iraq is completely non-violent?
If not, will all use of force resulting from this report, by all parties in Iraq, have full UN Security Council approval?
Will the arrangements properly safeguard Iraqi antiquities?
And Iraqi oil installations?
Will there be adequate arrangements for the refugees?
Has sufficient attention been given to the effect of a US retreat on the Arab Street?
What does the group recommend as the exit strategy from their report?

Ecological Footprints

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:37:47 -0500

The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) has devised a measure of the impact that a given country has on the planet's environment. They call this the country's ‘ecological footprint’ and they report it in units of area. It is the area of the Earth that could notionally produce the resources in question (for example, forests could convert atmospheric carbon dioxide back into trees at a certain rate per unit area). The metaphor there is that the planet has only a fixed area. So if we use it up, some of us are going to have to be ejected through Spaceship Earth's metaphorical airlock. At present,

each person needs 2.2 global hectares to support the demands they place on the environment, but the planet is only able to meet consumption levels of 1.8 global hectares per person

So we are overdrawing our ecological account. Soon we shall need two planets, they say.

Using the WWF's annual report on these issues, the BBC report cited above includes a chart showing the ecological footprint per capita of a few selected countries, essentially as follows:

As you can see, the huge boots of Americans, Australians and Britons are trampling over the world's bio-space, while poor but virtuous Sierra Leoneans and Afghanis are treading lightly on the Earth's sacred resources. It seems obvious who most deserves to be kicked off the planet.

But does this measure make sense?

First off, we're not at all sure that the measures of ‘footprint’ themselves are accurate. The data are hard to collect and harder to interpret, and many assumptions had to be made. For example, 48% of the footprint is currently due to carbon dioxide emissions. So if you think that the global warming problem might be solved, you will have to reduce most of the footprint estimates. And so on. But never mind all that. Even on the assumption that their footprint measure is accurate, dividing it by a country's population is of doubtful value. For example, if a country doubles its population without doubling its productivity, its real impact on the environment will increase, but its impact per capita will go down. The country will count as more environmentally virtuous – smaller ecological footprint per capita – by virtue of its runaway overpopulation! Conversely, a country that uses resources very efficiently may still count as becoming more environmentally unfriendly (larger footprint per capita) solely because it has also achieved low population growth.

This is the wrong way round. A better measure of environmental virtue would be the ecological footprint per unit GDP. This does not allow countries to ‘cheat’ by merely increasing their population without changing their physical effect on the environment, but it does take account of whether a country is wasting resources or using them efficiently. Out of curiosity, we used the WWF's numbers and the BBC's countries to construct the appropriate chart:

The countries are now in approximately the opposite order. Notice that the United States goes from worst on the chart, to using less than capacity, even though the worldwide average is 125% of capacity. This isn't a coincidence. Western countries create their ‘footprint’ as part of their productive process – creating the very things that let us lower the footprint while also increasing human welfare.

Footprint-per-GDP is, in our opinion, a better measure of countries' environmental virtue. And it does not even take account of the other huge factor that is missing from the WWF's analysis: the ‘area’ (real or metaphorical) needed to sustain one person is not a constant of nature but depends on the available technology. For instance, how well the Earth can recover depends in part on how many carbon-dioxide-fixing machines we can build, and how efficiently, which in turn depends on how much wealth we can create and how fast. And hence the developed countries, the villains of the piece according to the environmentalists' narrative, are in reality even more environmentally virtuous even by the WWF's standards of ‘impact’ than our chart makes them seem.

(Data collected by Elliot Temple.)

‘Software Piracy’ Is Not Theft

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:42:10 -0500

Charcoal Design has an article arguing that the metaphor of ‘theft’ or ‘piracy’ for unauthorised use of information (such as software) can be highly inappropriate, immoral and damaging.

Yes, software creators need to have an incentive to produce their products, and they also have a moral right to receive the fruits of their labour. But they have no moral right to harm someone who has done them no harm. And it will be disastrous if a law based on a silly metaphor continues to shield this vital industry from the need to create innovative ways of marketing, and new types of relationships with their customers, appropriate for the still more knowledge-dominated economy of the future.

This, too, is a problem that has to be solved if we are to set the world to rights.

Update: See also their article on the future of Apple Computer.

A Reflection On The Town Square Test

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 21:12:24 -0500

A free society is not just a place that lacks oppressive laws. It is a place that is made free by people taking freedom seriously. They not only value freedom, they want to live in a free society, and they want to do, and to speak up for, what is necessary to keep their society free. Such as defending freedom for others, not only themselves.

In regard to the events we reported here, where someone was harassed and threatened for wearing an Israeli-flag cape in Oxford (see also here), some have said that being threatened by one individual is not a failure of the town square test: one person is not representative. But the town square test is not about whether a society has any criminals. It is about whether citizens take steps to create a free atmosphere. It is true that the police can't be everywhere, so if you aren't necessarily safe to express your political opinion in dark alleys, at night, that is no failure of the town square test. However, the point of the test is that you are in the town square. It's daylight, people are there. Are you now afraid to state your political opinions? If you are, the people around you are not reliable in their commitment to freedom. They can't be counted on to help you be free, should you need that help. In a country that properly passes the test, you will feel safe despite the existence of some criminals, because the other people in the square will stand up for you even if they disagree with your view.