The blogger's dilemma

Sackers recently sent me this link - a post by John Michael Greer who blogs as The Archdruid Report. It's very well written and well worth reading.

To my mind, one of the problems with blogging is the attraction of extremes. It’s all very well trying to tease out one or two strands of the Great Complexity with what feels like honesty sometimes leavened with a touch of feeble humour. Unfortunately, that approach is almost bound to veer towards the pedestrian.

It would be much easier to choose a more extreme standpoint, skip the logic, ignore the data and blast armies of straw men to smithereens with every trick the rhetorical arsenal. Not that I'm suggesting this is Greer's approach because in a very broad sense I don't disagree with his overall theme.  

However, a gung ho approach would certainly attract more blog hits and probably more comments. The posts might even be more satisfying to write. After all, controversy keeps us on our toes, sharpens the debate and identifies the enemy - and we all like our enemies don’t we?

For me, Greer’s blog is one of the better rhetorical blogs. I think his message is well written, intellectually high-flown but not necessarily wrong. To my cautious mind, nobody can paint worthwhile pictures on such a large canvas, although the temptation is hard to resist and people seem to like the result. Maybe the two are connected?

For me it’s a scoping issue – Greer's scope is too wide. Accuracy suffers and the unfortunate result is that some of what is said is exaggerated and pushed beyond the boundaries of strict veracity. I’ll give one example.

That answer was that science and technology would eventually create such abundance that everyone in the world would be able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle and its attendant opportunities. That same claim can still be heard nowadays, though it’s grown shrill of late after repeated disconfirmation.

What repeated disconfirmation? What about a few hundred million Chinese and...? But the list is too long and too obvious. To my mind he makes far too much use of emotional rhetoric to push his imminent collapse meme.

Ironically the idea doesn’t need so much pushing because whatever a middle-class lifestyle might be the threat is real enough. Yet it’s only a threat, not a certainty. The complexities, the politics and maybe some more optimistic possibilities could be inserted as caveats – but of course they aren’t because it slows the pace and dilutes the message.

Greer's overall theme of the breakdown or corruption of social imitation, or mimesis as he frequently calls it.

The habit of imitation is as universal among humans as it is among other social primates. The question becomes this: what will inspire mimesis among the internal proletariat? What will they use as the templates for their choices and their lives?

It’s a good question which one should turn around and address to social commentators, popular pundits, journalists and bloggers. A fascinating subject, but an exceedingly complex one where motives continually lurk in the depths of any argument. Unfortunately, tackling the complexity also inclines one towards the duller end of the public arena, the end where caveats come in. Caveats don’t win hearts and minds, don’t feed the anxious soul.

The problem is that people are not amenable to persuasion except under duress or the endless subtleties of social pressure - or mimesis perhaps. So argument is mostly a waste of time. One is mostly stuck with preaching to the converted - and converts like their dose of rhetoric.

The writer enjoys it too.

So the only real alternative for caveat-shackled bloggers is to make a less rhetorical appeal to like-minded people who do not necessarily agree with posts, but are interested enough to read them and interested in the ebb and flow of public debate for its own sake.

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Perverting justice: no time limit for prosecution

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sentencing_manual/perverting_the_course_of_justice/

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Parliament and paedophilia: is the lid coming off?

Post-apocalypse London, by Hungarian artist Páldi Balázs

Simon Danczuk MP, in the Mail on Sunday:

"If MPs have harboured paedophiles, the damage to British democracy will be fatal...
 
"During the committee hearing later that day, one MP asked if pressure had been put on me to keep quiet about suspected child abusers. I nodded. Yes, it had. The MP pursued it no further...

"I believe we're on the verge of a Savile-like scandal sweeping through Parliament. Yet, for most people at the top, this prospect is not even on their radar. They're completely impervious to it.

"Once the idea that paedophiles have been lawmakers gains wider traction and people start to think political parties have knowingly harboured paedophiles then our parliamentary democracy will suffer an enormous, near fatal blow, the likes of which it will take years to recover from."

On the other hand:

From BBC TV's "Yes, Minister" - "The Skeleton In The Cupboard" (25 November 1982)

"It is possible to remove everything of significance from a file released under the 30-year rule by saying that it is complete except for:

a. A small number of secret documents.
b. A few documents which are part of still active files.
c. Some correspondence lost in the floods of 1967.
d. Some records which went astray in the move to London.
e. Other records which went astray when the Department was reorganized.
f. The normal withdrawal of papers whose publication could give grounds for an action for libel of breach of confidence or cause embarrassment to friendly governments."

(A paraphrase - see last 3 minutes of episode)



But maybe not this time...

Link to site (htp: Max Keiser)

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Tax haven sh*ts

Vanuatu Independence 1980 ribbon and medal (Images source)

Andrew Roberts in this week's Spectator:

"To the magnificent Skinners’ Hall in the City to watch my wife, Susan Gilchrist, CEO of the financial communications group Brunswick, be feted as a newly elected honorary fellow of King’s College London. A tremendously proud moment, only slightly spoilt by the fact that I seemed to be about the only person there not to be wearing an order, medal or decoration. I felt naked. Along the enormous rack of medals sported by Field Marshal Lord Guthrie was a yellow-ribboned one I didn’t recognise, so I asked him what it was for. ‘I had to put down a native revolt in Espiritu Santo about 30 years ago,’ he said, before adding, ‘They only carried bows and arrows and all they wore were penis-sheaths.’ I suddenly felt awfully less naked. Intrigued, I looked into what’s called the coconut war of 1980 and, needless to say, Charles was being modest. It was a nasty, sharp little engagement in which people died and the French seem to have been on both sides."

From Wikipedia on Espiritu Santo:

Between May and August 1980 the island was the site of a rebellion during the transfer of power over the colonial New Hebrides from the condominium to independent Vanuatu. Jimmy Stevens' Nagriamel movement, in alliance with private French interests and backed by the Phoenix Foundation and American libertarians hoping to establish a tax-free haven, declared the island of Espiritu Santo independent of the new government. A Republic of Vemerana was proclaimed on May 28. France recognized the independence on June 3. On June 5 the tribal chiefs of Santo named the French Ambassador Philippe Allonneau "King of Vemerana", Jimmy Stevens became Prime Minister. Luganville is renamed Allonneaupolis. But negotiations with Port-Vila failed and from July 27 to August 18, British Royal Marines and a unit of the French Garde Mobile were deployed to the Vanuatu's capital island but did not invade Espiritu Santo as the soon-to-be government had hoped. The troops were recalled shortly before independence. Following independence, Vanuatu, now governed by Father Walter Lini, requested assistance from Papua New Guinea, whose forces invaded and conquered Espiritu Santo.

From Wikipedia on the "Coconut War":

Prior to Vanuatu's independence, the islands were known as the New Hebrides. The New Hebrides were governed by a condominium of France and the United Kingdom. In 1980, France and the United Kingdom agreed that Vanuatu would be granted independence on 30 July 1980.

Beginning in June 1980, Jimmy Stevens, head of the Nagriamel movement, led an uprising against the colonial officials and the plans for independence.^[1][2][3][4] The uprising lasted about 12 weeks. The rebels blockaded Santo-Pekoa International Airport, destroyed two bridges, and declared the independence of Espiritu Santo island as the "State of Vemerana". Stevens was supported by French-speaking landowners and by the Phoenix Foundation, an American business foundation that supported the establishment of a libertarian tax haven in the New Hebrides.^[5]

Confrontation

On 8 June, 1980, the New Hebrides government asked Britain and France to send troops to put down a rebellion on the island of Espiritu Santo.^[6] France refused to allow the United Kingdom to deploy troops to defuse the crisis, and French soldiers stationed on Espiritu Santo took no action. As independence day neared, the Prime Minister-elect, Walter Lini,^[7] asked Papua New Guinea if it would send troops to intervene.^[1] As Papua New Guinean soldiers began arriving in Espiritu Santo,^[8] the foreign press began referring to the ongoing events as the "Coconut War".

However, the "war" was brief and unconventional. The residents of Espiritu Santo generally welcomed the Papua New Guineans as fellow Melanesians. Stevens' followers were armed with only bows and arrows, rocks, and slings. There were few casualties, and the war came to a sudden end: when a vehicle carrying Stevens' son burst through a Papua New Guinean roadblock in late August 1980, the soldiers opened fire on the vehicle, killing Stevens' son. Shortly thereafter, Jimmy Stevens surrendered, stating that he had never intended that anyone be harmed.^[9]

At Stevens' trial, the support of the Phoenix Foundation to the Nagriamel movement was revealed. It was also revealed that the French government had secretly supported Stevens in his efforts. Stevens was sentenced^[2] to 14 years' imprisonment; he remained in prison until 1991.

No important people were harmed in the making of this colonial program.


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The Guardian on... tolerance?

Andrew Brown writes in the Guardian of Yetis and realities.

Living in a world where yetis do and don't exist
Yeti scientists have shown we can bounce through different realities, where what's regarded as 'real' is ambiguous at best.

Scientific hunters for the yeti are easy to recognise: they want to bring back the corpse of some other animal altogether. Most recently, a team led by Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford sorted through 36 samples of supposed yeti fur using the resources of modern genetics and reported their findings with the full scholarly apparatus, including a footnote referencing Tintin in Tibet as the source of "Captain Haddock's suspicions that the yeti was an ungulate".

I see the piece as a welcome affirmation of uncertainty in an often over-certain world. Not quite an unambiguous plea for tolerance though.

Some myths are of course actively pernicious. The stories spread by Aids denialists or anti-vaccine cranks have helped kill thousands if not tens of thousands of people. It's a public duty to go after them.

It's a public duty to go after them - really? In all cases? Actually I suspect Brown's criteria may be pretty tight here, but unfortunately it's a notion many Guardian readers seem to adopt too well and too widely.

Maybe Brown could have included Marxists as an illustration of death-dealing cranks too. Merely to illustrate how complex and confused human notions of reality can be - to widen the spectrum a little. Or perhaps he knows his readership too well for that. I like his last paragraph though.

Normal people – well, everybody, actually – are adept at bouncing through these different "realities" like lumberjacks bounding over spinning logs. We live quite comfortably in worlds where yetis do and don't exist, where they're real in stories and not in the Himalayas. The only dangerous scientists are those who don't understand this or don't believe it's true of themselves, and that they only believe true facts. You couldn't accuse these latest yeti hunters of that. The reference to Tintin proves it.

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Dolphins don’t buy books

From Wikipedia

We can be fairly sure dolphins don’t read books simply because we never find sodden pages of dolphin literature on the beach. Anyhow they have no money to buy them.

The dolphin’s lot is abject penury with nothing to read and a diet of cold fish. If they were as bright as some folk make out, they’d do something about that.

Yet suppose human intelligence is merely a complex feature of the natural world. In that case it may be interesting to take dolphin illiteracy and indigence a little further. For example, what if some of our important inventions are not peculiar to humans, but arise naturally from a high level of intelligence and co-operative social organisation?

The two inventions I’m obviously suggesting here are money and books. Paper books are under competitive pressure from electronic devices such as the Kindle and the internet generally, but functionally there is an important equivalence. So I’ll use the word book for traditional or electronic media.

Books are a route by which many adults further their education as they see fit Money is mostly how people manage their material lives as they see fit. Books and money help maintain two of our key freedoms, the freedom to share labour and the freedom to understand what others have understood before us - or at least their opinions.

To my mind it is tempting to imagine inventions which might be common to intelligent species across the universe. In other words, certain socially important inventions could arise naturally on any suitable planet supporting a species of sufficient social intelligence. Perhaps there is a universal logic of exchange and all intelligent social beings would understand both money and books.

Of course we are constrained by our humanity and it is too easy to picture alien species which conveniently share some of our characteristics. Klingons and Dr Who for example. Yet the conjecture is potentially testable because it could be verified if SETI ever makes contact with another intelligent species.

Life being what it is we expect things to be rather more complex though – we expect to be surprised. Also, if dolphins turn out to be as intelligent as we are, then the idea is wrong to begin with because dolphins don’t seem to have much use for money or books. Although as far as I can see, dolphins don’t seem to be particularly intelligent.

So in an odd and inverted sense it may be anthropocentric to assume that money and books must be purely human inventions. On the other hand, it may be that this line of thinking really is anthropocentric and we will never contact an alien intelligence because we cannot recognise intelligence other than our own. And how common is that!

Yet natural law looks very much like the universal language of nature and we would not search in the first place if we did not believe our intelligence to be at least a little more than narrowly human. Surely any contact with non-human intelligence would have to be based on some mutually understood natural regularities – or natural laws.

As things stand this is all lighthearted speculation, but maybe one day it won’t be. Certain aspects of social life could turn out to be aspects of all intelligent life, taking us beyond the range of any telescope - philosophically at least. 

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Democrat vs Republican economics

Eric Zuess' book "They're Not Even Close" compares the economic record of the American political parties from 1910-2010. His analysis shows that most aspects of the US economy are historically stronger under Democratic control than under Republican control. This is also true for the individual states, in that those which lean Democrat have a strong correlation with a robust economy and educational attainment.

Given that Republicans are strongly in favour of self-reliance, big business and the free market, while the Democrats have inclusion and the common good as their official platform planks, this data appears to be counter-intuitive. It does, however, explain why the Democrats have a hard time getting anything done, as they try to please everyone.

One possible explanation is the Game Theory of John von Neumann and John Nash. In brief, many human interactions, including economic transactions, can be modeled as a finite collection of players playing a game. Each player has a finite set of possible decisions/strategies, and a pay-off function, which depends on all of the current choices being made (for a very good explanation, see the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium ).

Nash showed that each such game has at least one Nash equilibrium. This is a choice of strategies such that, if any single player changes their choice, their pay-off will decrease. Getting there requires perfect knowledge of all other choices, which is most easily achieved by cooperation.

For a brilliant and simple example of the dangers of pure competition, consider Martin Shubik’s bidding game: We auction off $1 to a group of players. The highest bidder wins it. However, the wrinkle is that the top two bidders have to pay. The only possible non-negative pay-offs for the group as a whole require cooperation, with the maximum being one player bidding 1 cent, and the others not bidding at all.

These models explain why wolves do better than tigers, and ants beat everyone.

So what is it that Democrats do ‘better’? I would argue the concept of public spending as investment, not waste. Here are the kinds of projects usually funded by Democrats, but vehemently fought by Republicans.

Infrastructure – build better roads, water systems, airports etc, and companies can move products and workers more efficiently. In addition, construction involves well-paid jobs, which increases the tax base.

Entitlements – as onerous as this word is to hard-working people, we don’t often see the elderly starve to death, or massive epidemics. Every US city is probably safer than Buenos Aires. How would that change if the poor were actually living on the streets in large numbers?

Education – better-educated people make for a better society, are healthier and less likely to commit crimes (except for fraud).

Science – a bigger contributor to economic growth than abundant natural resources. The problem is that it requires huge investment for unlikely pay-off. This is generally not what companies like to do. Those that do so want results to be proprietary, which necessarily stifles the free exchange of information that progress requires.

So what can we conclude? Mathematics can predict that some cooperation is better for the economy than pure competition.

However, this prediction is after the fact, which is much less useful than before. The only people who will accept the original data are those to whom it is emotionally satisfying, namely economists and Democrats. Republicans will find a way to ignore or explain it away. In other words, the book is sadly unnecessary.


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