The latest in a string of riciulous moves.

So the picture to the right appeared this morning on Digg. I must say, this little piece of rhetoric from the right has gone beyond the traditional rhetoric of the free market, and into something a little bit more crazy.

The pamphlet is distributed by a lobby group, LaRouche Political Action Comittee. LaRouche has cited that the US health system reforms proposed by Obama and his cabinet are akin to the eugenics programs of the Nazi Party in the lead up to and druing the second world war. Their justification (based on my understanding of this video)

1. The German eugenics program pre-world war two involved a panel of experts to decide who was clinically unfit to foster the German people.  Obama's new healthcare will be streamlined and rationing decisions will be made by a panel of experts (because of limited resources and a large distribution problems).  The existence of this panel of experts, much like the panel of experts in Hitler's regime means Obama is evidently a facist.
2. The creation of an independent board of experts to oversee health reforms is beyond congressional oversight, and thus is the sign of a dictator.

Now, if I remember correctly, this board that is being set up is in direct response to republican concern that medical treatments would be distributed by non-professionals.  As it is, although Peter Orszag proposed the new board, he is not on it.  If Ezekiel Emmanuel is on it, his "fascist" tendencies come from a number of articles he's written over the years about the allocation of medical resources when we can't meet all required needs.

Because the market so obviously can meet those needs.

Have a look if you can stomach it.  I'm a bit too busy on this particular day to trawl through all the mindless rhetorical maneuvering that goes on in the video.  The sad thing of it is, most people who see that flier aren't likely to follow it around the webs tracking down what's moving underneath.  Its just another piece of lunacy by those who believe in freedom (TM).

Racism in America

A nice little piece of Colbert.  I thought it was a good depiction of how race is being dealt with in the US.

(Lifted from Lean Left.)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - He Who Smelt It, Dealt It
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

Rome is burning

For those of you who like to watch the decline of civilizations, I think that we have front row seats to a slightly less sexy Berlin Wall de(con)struction (though with far less immediacy, imagery or baaaadddddd music).

What caffeine fuelled apophenia am I babbling about this fair morn? Well, the call to re-consider the almighty U.S. dollar as the world's key reserve currency.

To paraphrase an advertorial 'its not happening overnight. But it is happening.'

Happy New Year

Well, we're back. I got a bit slack come year's end about blogging, so I'll kick it off with a welcome, and then a shout out to the Obamarama. I found this on Uncertain Principles today: A picture tells 1,000 words.

McCain = Yesterday's Hero

Though one doesn't want to count chickens before the egg, it looks more and more likely that in the U.S. Presidential election, McCain is going to lose badly, and Obama may win really really big. So much so that the Republican strategy is less surge and more retreat with damage control. The news media in the U.S. are trying to 'maintain suspense' about the outcome.

Now again, this is not a forgone conclusion, and a number things can happen in the next week, but it looks more and more like Obama will win. Who cares, you may ask. Well, given the mess that the world economy is in, potentially leading to a massive destabilisation in many many countries, as a result of many things not the least being that incompetent twit 'W', the spectre of McCain and his moronic side-kick Palin, many many people will suffer under 4 more years of Republican incompetence, stupidity, greed and moral bankrupty. So I hope, with the deepest sincerity that I can muster, that the Republicans are not returned, and that the Democrats do something tangible and worthwhile if they get in.

This from today's Age gives me reason to hope:

"Senator McCain attracted several hundred to his indoor rallies in Iowa while Senator Obama was speaking to 100,000 at the Denver rally and to 45,000 at a rally in Fort Collins, Colorado."

John McCain = Human Garbage

As part of his last ditch attempts to fool people into not voting for Obama, John 'I'm a Maverick' McCain has gleefully descended into into the human filth that seems to compose the Republican party.
The focus of his campaign now seems to be scare voters away from Obama. In their final debate McCain pitifully bleated that a voter enrolment group, ACORN (associated with Obama) "is now on the verge of maybe perpetuating one the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, MAYBE DESTROYING THE FABRIC OF DEMOCRACY." (My emphasis)
Now, these are serious claims, and they certainly warrant investigation and explanation. Yet the political import McCain's pig-screams cannot be understated. Democrat Congressman John Conyers raises the issue of the FBI leaks about the ACORN investigation. The concern here is that the leaks from a supposedly independent arm of the government were intended to influence the outcome of this year's election.

But, to my main point, how can John McCain say this crap and maintain his dignity as a human? Let me repeat his words - "maybe destroying the fabric of democracy'. My response to that consists of three words (and one letter) George W Bush President? This is the party who, through electoral fraud, stole the 2000 election. Stole? Yes. Whether it was the erasing of racial minorities from voter rolls, the collusion of the conservative dominated media in swinging the Florida vote or the role that Republican judges played in deciding that George W was the president, to name but a few examples, the 2000 election made a sham of democracy.

Well, that was just once, a one off, one might say. Wrong. The 2004 election was again plagued by Republican manipulation. And now, the same process is being repeated. Now, maybe I am simply a commie, blinded by my liberal bleeding heart, deliberately searching for facts to match my bias. But these examples seem factually accurate, and display the Republican party as willing to sacrifice democracy to keep their talons on the position of the president.

Over reaction? Perhaps. But when one reads that some republicans are attempting to prevent voters from voting in this election, because the banks have foreclosed on their home, one finds the bile rises to throat quicker than you can say 'democracy is the right to equal representation'.

No, John McCain, the ACORN situation is not a threat to the fabric of democracy. The Republican Party tore that fabric up years ago, wiped their arse with it, and now you want to jam that stinking rag in the face of U.S. voters? You sir, are garbage.

The Ethics of Ethics

So it's a bit mean of me to pick on the Ticking time bomb argument (TTBA) in any of its forms, because it gets so much bad press. As it stands, I'm not really going after the conceptual problems with the TTBA, but more the practical realities of some of the empirical presuppositions I think it reast on.

Today's news article that brings all this up was on the cover of the wikinews site, which I use because its often a cross-referenced amalgam of a number of news sources, which I find intuitively somewhat more promising. At the very least it provides a convenient dump site for the big reports on the same issue across the massive news industry that sprawls the length and breadth of Interwebia.

The article, stating that Secret memos reveal Bush administration endorsed torture made me a touch cross. The kicker was when apparently Condeleezza rice, in all her obvious care and compassion, had questioned whether or not waterboarding was legal or not.

...

wait for it.

...

IT'S TORTURE! YOU ARE TORTURING PEOPLE! USING TORTURE METHODS! OF TORTURE!

Honestly! How can these people live with themselves? How can they be so STUPID!? Legal? Did anyone stop to even look up what Waterboarding was? Who cares if its allowed (which I'm pretty sure its not, Condie)? TORTURE!

And yet, philosophers and lawyers alike persist in constructing scenarios which could give these people a foothold for legitimacy? I mean, we worry about the scientists doing the research to give the technology to build the weapons, but the ethicists are creating and legitimising the tools by which corrupt administrations will attempt to vindicate themselves! Should we be analysing the ethics of giving these logical tools? Its worse than guns, we're giving these people the tools to send our sense of decency back to a place that even cavepeople would look and go "Grarg? (translation: What the F***?)"

Maybe I should start another dissertation on dual-use ethics. Because sure, its a nice little set of thought experiments, but its like the bright idea of whoever it was to give George W. Bush the words "just" and "war." Should we as philosophers be culpable for giving evil people the tools to try and justify atrocities?

Demo-kratos and other lovely concepts.

One of my favourite authors, Patrick Rothfuss, wrote an interesting blog post today. Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind (which I heartily recommend you all read) describes in his self-styled Public Service Announcement why Americans should not vote. That's right, not vote. Let's take what I think is one of the funnier parts of the open letter to the American public (i.e. the interwebbers who watch his blog) is this:

For example, I was eating dinner the other day at a local restaurant and I heard someone at a nearby table say, "I'm voting for McCain. I heard Obama's into gun control. Nobody's taking away my guns." I'm not making this up. I'm not exaggerating or paraphrasing. These words have been echoing around in my head for weeks, and it's entirely possible that I will never be rid of them. If this sounds like something that might come out of your mouth, you need to realize that you are not very smart. I'm not saying you're a bad person. I'm not saying you're evil. What I'm asking is that you consider the very real possibility that you might not be capable of casting an intelligent vote. Let repeat myself just for clarity's sake. If you're willing to throw in with one candidate based on senseless fear and "something you heard" you are not well-informed, and you shouldn't vote. Again, I'm not saying you're a bad person. What I am saying is that the fate of the nation is probably too complicated for you to deal with properly. You should stay home on election night and watch some Nascar instead. That's right. Nice, comforting Nascar.

It raises what I think is one of the most interesting problems of democracy, or with any normatively significant practice: when rights or freedoms become duties or obligations. I'm a big fan of a view towards democracy that goes like so: every citizen has a right to vote. This right is given under a certain set of expectations, namely that such a citizen has the obligation to vote, and under an expectation that they will vote in an informed manner. Unfortunately, as with most of my beliefs, this is somewhat too good to be true. It seems that of the 224 countries who have universal voting processes, only 19 of them enforce compulsory voting. And, as Pat wishes to point out, maybe that's for the best. Whether or not compulsory voting leads to more extreme political stances is an empirical question, and one I'd love to have answered. It seems that the standard intuitive response is to the affirmative, that to allow voluntary voting within a western, developed, media-dominated democratic nation does lead to a more extreme stance by those who do turn out to vote. But I'm not really sure what this means: is this skewed towards one end of the spectrum or the other? I'm not a big fan of left or right extremism, and i don't think that the answer is so simple as one lovely blogite seems to imply, that if such an extremism is symmetrical than they cancel each other out. Please people, learn to math. These are vector sums at their simplest, although I'd suspect we'd need some pretty sophisticated, high ranking Tensors to sort that shamozzle out.

Also, it should probably be made clear that democracy does not presuppose libertarian views: some reasonably rudimentary history should settle that. Go look up some wikipedia, Indian Times opinion piece guy. If we are going to take the tack that we seriously want a liberal democracy , than maybe we want to say that one of these rights we've concocted to give people is that of voting, and right does not imply obligation, etc. Maybe so. Such arguments usually rest on some pretty boring and awful construal of everyone's favourite piece of philosophical cheap shots, The Harm principle. A whole swag of dead Afghanis and Iraqis, a crushed economy, and a streak of rights defacement beg to differ with how you use your vote, people. And as the right to vote does nothing to tell us when we shouldn't exercise such a right, maybe (don't faint, libertarians) we should be empowering voters to make the decision to vote or not. That means education, which may mean government involvement. Ha! Who would have thought that in order to live free of a restrictive government in a fashion which would allow for maximum preference satisfaction, we'd need some government involvement? Aaaah, Irony.  As my good friend Adam related though, democracy is not the right to decide how you live your life, but the right to ruin how others live theirs.

Ah, a bit of a convoluted post.  I've been away too long from the blogosphere.

Failure of democracy or evidence of its success?

For those of you following the current US economy, no doubt you are enthralled by the failure of the US$700 Billion bailout of their economy. The proposed emergency legislation was canned last night, in a decision of 205 for and 228 against. ( Interestingly, the party split was 33% Republicans in favour and 60% Democrats in favour. Despite this, however, some lay the failure of the rescue plan at the feet of the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who is a Democrat.)

Bipartisanship aside, it seems that one of the decisive factors was the looming election, and politician's fears of supporting an unpopular policy. “People’s re-elections played into this to a much greater degree than I would have imagined”

So this raises the question, is this evidence of a mortal failure of the model of representative democracy or a rallying cry, screaming that it is very much alive and kicking? On one hand, this may show that a politician's chief concern is re-election: Blind to all other considerations until this condition has been met, politicians are willing to sacrifice anything to maintain personal power. On the other hand, however, this may show that politicians are deeply receptive to the fears and wishes of their constituents, and won't be bullied into supporting something that they don't believe, simply because their party leaders command them.

So what does it all mean? Are we watching the collapse of representative democracy as we know it, or witness to its phoenix-like rise from the ashes?

As the US economy shits itself, we look on in confusion...

I am not an economist. I know nothing of economic theory, and have a five year-old's grasp of economic practice. Yet even a five year-old can see that there is something hideously wrong with the US/World economic system. Some of the big thingies* in the US have encountered troubles - Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie May. Now the US federal reserve has bailed out the insurance company American Insurance Group with a loan of US $86 Billion.

It seems that the so called 'sub-prime' crisis is tearing apart the fabric that holds together modern economic theory. Fascinating to watch, unless of course, your house is being repossessed, your job cancelled, or your food is too expensive to buy for eating. No-one, it seems, knows how long this recession will last, what the long term effects may be, or if there even is a recession at all. (In The Doubter's Companion John Raulston Saul argues that the world economies have been in a depression since 1973 (pp 95-99). Coincidentally, the same year that Black Sabbath released Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. But I don't think you can blame them entirely). I am sure that there are a stack of tricksy economic sleight of hand tricks to pull, and like rabbits out of a hat, we will all emerge unscathed and better for the experience.
One idea, that is so simple that it must surely be wrong is put by former US senator in a NY Times article today: “We’ve been consuming more than we’ve been producing. We’ve been spending more than we’ve been earning...It’s been a big holiday.”

Governments in the developed world have followed the mantra of privatisation to the letter, and privatised debt, shifting debt from a public responsibility onto the backs of 'working families'. Now, the US government is throwing money hand over fist to prevent full scale collapse of the US and world economy. For years, free market advocates have been voiciferously opposed to the state interfering in economic matters. Should we now demand that the state remove its hand and let the world economy collapse, or will the invisible hand come to the aid of struggling economists to explain why the system is not working?

As should now be entirely clear, I don't really know what I am talking about, and have no idea of what I want to say. But when US $86 Billion is thrown at something, I wonder what in hell is going on, and could that money be spent elsewhere?


* Again as the use of the technical term 'thingies' shows, I am not an economist. I don't know who these Freddie Mac or Fannie May people are, why they had a fight and are now not talking. And I don't know who let the Stearn Bear into the US stock exchange, causing a Bear-ish market. I think there is some gun related freedoms going on here: as some of you know I fully believe the Second Amendment and the right to arm bears, but maybe not in a crowded stock exchange. But more on that some other time.

U.S. Federal Election

I am sure that some of our loyal and devoted fan base (consisting of millions, no doubt) have been following the recent developments in the U.S. Federal Election.
First off, we have Obama as the first 'non-white' major party candidate, then McCain names Sarah Palin as his running mate/potential Vice President. She is young (mid fourties) conservative, and she is female. She also has five children, one of them 17, pregnant and - shock horror - unwed. As the dirt diggers fire up their engines, and rumours and scuttlebut abound, I am become more and more fascinated by this election. Obviously the outcome wil be interesting, but to see what happens during the process leading to the outcome will be really really interesting.

Just to add a little slacademic fuel to this fire, this is a quote from our girl Sarah P from today's Australian: She is expected to highlight her focus on ethics issues in Alaska and other accomplishments...

Hmmm, I wonder if she takes an irrealist or a non-descriptive cognitivist approach, or whether she is a full blown realist. Methinks the last.

Time for a rant.

It is unfortunate that this blog post will go almost unread on the interwebs, but as the history of this great institution of online communication has shown me, that's hardly to the point now, is it?

So, McCain. A war hero. A patriot. A veteran. Gotta say, the man has the political chops needed to convince just about any American that he is worth voting for. I mean, what could make for a better leader? Especially in a country so devoid of understanding of its own military history that romantic militarism isn't just a problem, its THE problem. "He understands our world is dangerous":



Isn't this beautiful? Can't you see the craftsmanship that has gone into this particular piece of political garbage?

Now, don't let me put you offside and get words unceremoniously shoved into my mouth. He was a victim of one of the more horrible places to be in the world: a POW camp. The place on this earth that hasn't got "Geneva" in the dictionary. And that makes him a remarkable spirit, make no mistake. I'm a bit miffed in the above ad as to why voluntary imprisonment through denial of early release counts as an honourable, American thing to do. "Sure, I'll stay in for another round of solitary!" Wow, shows the guy definitely is canny. That'll show em. I think?

Back to my point, the juxtaposition of the war against the "summer of love" is a masterpiece of spin. Of course, while the hippies were out taking drugs and banging each other senseless in an unchristian show of prurient, lustful action, John McCain was out fighting for your freedom. But wait, wasn't part of this strange lefty movement a protest against your unjust war? And if that's the case, then every thing McCain says is up for question, isn't it? Well, unless you are a conservative, military realist. So I suppose its all okay, right?

But that wasn't what got me into this rantin' mood. Well, if I'm going to be honest, my recent Bill Hicks pilgrimage may have something to do with it, and it is terribly unfortunate that I'll never have the skills in dark poetry and satire that Bill did. But while reading this post in (to my mind) the quite respectable Framing Science Blog by Dr. Matt Nisbet, I came across this:



Isn't this great? Gotta love them always honest, considerate American politicians. I'm so ignorant! Of course the only solution to the oil crisis in America in a world with dwindling supplies of this natural resources is to invest even more money in creating an entirely new site where we can dig up the planet and kill a whole bunch of land, using a resource that is going to run out very soon! Wow! Thanks John McCain, for enlightening me. As for Obama, well, the fact that he won't endorse the offshore drilling projects or new oilfields is obviously because he has absolutely no policy on energy!

Or maybe, because he isn't on the payroll of the oil industry.

To at least try to introduce some ethics into this diatribe, consider the very basic ethical problem we encounter when the money of lobby groups impacts in such a way so as to not educate the public on the issues at stake in their voting, but instead lead to lead to what Nisbet refers to as "playing fast and loose with the truth" in order to fulfill the preferences of the said lobbyists. Truth, Justice and the American way indeed.

From donuts to Jihads

Thanks to Alison Parsons for this link.

Say what now?

Please discuss!