Category General Idiocy

Entries 132 Total

Libertarianism and Public Goods

Apr 18, ’10 11:08 AM

The other day, Jason Kottke posted a thing attributed to Reddit titled ‘I am an American conservative shitheel’.

This is similar to a bunch of stuff that was particularly popular while the ‘health care’ bill was being rammed through Congress, and I meant to write something then. It’s still worth looking at the suppositions behind it.

The simplified version of it is something like this:

You conservatives are against ‘socialist’ health care, so it’s hypocritical of you to drive on ‘socialist’ roads, benefit from ‘socialist’ police and fire departments, send your kids to ‘socialist’ schools, and hold your little teabagger rallies in ‘socialist’ parks!!!1

Really. You can go read the original for a more nuanced version from someone who doesn’t think that this is utterly ridiculous, but that’s the real message there.

The argument is: roads, police, firemen, and parks are all provided by the government though coercive taxation, and if you do not think that that’s a big problem, you shouldn’t think that it’s a big problem to provide health care the same way.

This is such an absurd straw-man argument that it’s not worth addressing in detail. It is worth noting, however, that this kind of thing does not actually address the real argument against more government. It merely charges ‘conservatives’ with hypocrisy because they are opposed to more of something that they don’t like in the first place.

In Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, which takes place about fifty to seventy-five years in the future, one of the older characters says:

“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?” [...]

“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.”

So I am always a bit suspicious of charges of hypocrisy. In cases like this, I am doubly suspicious.

A lot of libertarians (these things complain about ‘conservatives’, but they’re really complaining about that part of conservatism that’s indistinguishable from libertarianism) actually are against public police forces to one degree or another, on the basis that, to judge from investigations of cops that hit people over the head, or zap them with Tasers, or shoot them dead, the members of the public police forces seem to be absolutely superhuman in the performance of their jobs in that they are almost never found to have done anything incorrectly. And what’s more, the ‘procedures’ — which are always found to have been followed — are not revised after it’s found that they lead to the police killing people wrongly. Amazing. And apparently the left-wingers think that’s great.

Because if you accept the left-wing complaint about non-statists being hypocritical because they drive on public roads and use government weather forecasts, the only conclusion that remains is that the real goal of the left wing is to have us all living in a totalitarian state, with everything provided by the government.

Which suspicion is part of the motivation behind opposition to things like government health care.

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Three Things

Apr 15, ’10 6:27 PM

1: which is actually two things in one. Nicole bought some half & half the other day from our local artisanal food jobber. This is primarily a butcher shop, but they also sell local dairy products, eggs, etc., etc.

When she got home, she noticed that the sell-by date had already passed, by about 24 hours. She called the place, and they told her that the next time she came in, they’d give her a free quart of half & half. Additionally, the store now knows that either they’re not getting frequent enough deliveries from the dairy, or that the dairy is selling them nearly-expired products.

In a completely separate matter, Nicole took some olive oil back to the local grocery store the other day, because the stuff wasn’t actually olive oil. If you know what olive oil is supposed to taste like, it’s pretty easy to tell the stuff that’s 5% olive oil and 95% bean squeezings; and if you’re not familiar with olive oil, an easy way to tell is that olive oil turns solid when you put it in the refrigerator. This stuff didn’t.

Nicole didn’t tell them that she was returning this because it had been misrepresented, and was in fact not at all what it said on the label. Try explaining all of that to the bored teenager working at the grocery store: the only difference between that and not saying anything is that you will have done some talking, and you will have been looked at like you have lobsters coming out of your ears.

It’s virtually impossible for a customer to get a message (like: “You are selling counterfeit olive oil”) through to anyone with any decision-making authority at a company with more than about 20 employees. The end result? We’re probably not going to be buying olive oil at the grocery store any more.

2: At a different grocery store today — Wegman’s — I noticed an interesting thing. Most of the products are arranged not by function, but by ideology. Or by ethnic origin.

By this, I mean that there was one department full of nothing but hippie tea, from relatively ordinary things like Red Zinger all the way to Japanese roasted twig tea. Then there was another aisle full of ordinary tea, ranging from Bong Ho Industrial Tea Concern Ltd. Sachets Of Reconstituted Tea Sweepings (864 ct.) all the way up to Red Zinger, the hippie tea for people with jobs.

Then there was a huge aisle full of Coke and Pepsi and so forth; but if you were looking for Coke with sugar in it, you wouldn’t find it there. You had to look in the aisle full of Mexican food, where they had Mexi-Coke by the bottle or the case, next to twenty kinds of Tamarindo. According to Wegman’s, the Hecho en Mexico Coke is more like Tamarindo than like, say, Coke.

There were three separate selections of chocolate bars:

  1. Yuppie chocolate, all of which is the color of tires, with oh-so-subtle labels promising that the things contain little more than cocoa stuck together with the absolute minimum of binding agents;

  2. Normal candy, which ranges from the low end of yuppie chocolate down to Hershey bars and Nestlé Crunch;

  3. Candy typically sold only in Exotic Lands like England and Germany and Canada.

Similarly the digestives are next to the English mustard, not next to the other cookies; the Radenska water is not next to the Perrier and the San Pellegrino, but next to the other German things (though Radenska is actually from Slovenia); and so on and so forth.

All of these things are widely scattered, so if you actually want to see your mineral water options, or the cookies available, you have to be prepared to wander all over the store. Which may be the whole point: but in my case the result of this kind of thing is that I always feel like I’m somehow missing the thing I’m really looking for, because my taxonomy does not match Wegman’s.

More annoying than that, the effect is to ghettoize this stuff, so that you’re not going to consider, say, the German mustard when you’re looking for mustard in general; you’re only going to see the German mustard if you are looking for German things in the first place. The most important thing about the mustard, Coke, digestives, etc., Wegman’s is saying, are not their food natures as mustard, Coke, and cookies, but rather their country of origin.

3: I think that all of this points to a problem the United States has with the culture of eating. You actually see the same thing at work all over the place, but it’s much easier to demonstrate with food.

I started thinking about this again while watching that Jamie-Oliver-Feeds-The-Hillbillies show on ABC.

I shouldn’t really call it that, because Huntington, WV, where it takes place, is a small city, with trains, and an airport, and an Interstate, and a navigable river, and so on and so forth. True hillbillies are the result of the incredible isolation that a lot of West Virginia produces; you can easily have to cover 150 miles there to get 20 miles away from your starting point in a straight line. Huntington is actually a fairly nice place.

But according to the CDC, it’s also a fairly fat place, in fact the fattest town in America: Fat City U.S.A. And so Jamie Oliver has come there to teach them all to eat.

Oliver cooks meals, and tells them to stop deep-frying everything, and tries to get the schools to actually cook food rather than reheating frozen stuff, and that’s all fine and well. The most interesting thing happened when he cooked something or other in a school that required knives and forks.

And it turned out that a lot of these elementary-school kids didn’t know how to use utensils. I don’t mean that they weren’t very coordinated: I mean that they really had no idea what the heck they were doing. The strong impression is that they’d never used a knife or fork before.

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And that seems likely, because they seem to survive on a diet of nothing but chicken nuggets and french fries. I have nothing against either chicken nuggets or french fries, mind you, but these kids really do seem to eat nothing else, unless it’s some other variety of state-fair midway food being served up for dinner. They inhabit a completely different food culture.

Think about what you eat at home, when you cook from scratch. If you never do this, think about what your mother or grandmother might have served. The meal that I’m envisioning is a smaller, non-gut-busting version of Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner: you have some meat, and some vegetables that are recognizably vegetables, and possibly a salad (though salad is never, ever part of Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners for reasons I haven’t figured out), and so on and so forth. You sit down and eat most of this off one plate.

Now try finding that in a restaurant.

You can get a specific version of it in a steakhouse, from a fancy place with a special port-wine cellar all the way down to Ponderosa and its ilk. And you can assemble it at Old Country Buffet. But nearly all restaurants instead serve either some conspicuously ethnic food, or what I call stunt food.

Stunt Food is all branded and specialized, and mostly unrecognizable as anything other than its branded, specialized self. The Bloomin’ Onion® is a perfect example, as is anything that comes to you while sizzling in any manner, as is the entire menu at TGI Friday’s.

Some of this is just logical: the restaurant needs to offer you something that you can’t easily do at home for 10% of the cost, and there are some things that you can pull off in a restaurant kitchen at scale that are difficult or impossible to do at home. But people must like the simple meat-and-two-veg meal, or they wouldn’t go on making it at home so much. And it’s almost non-existent outside home kitchens. Cracker Barrel delivers things that are vaguely similar, but their enormous portions at least push them up against the Stunt Food line.

Why the hell is this? Why is our food culture so messed up? Why is the country of origin or the market segment more important than the basic nature of the food for organization at Wegman’s? Why are the things people eat in restaurants and at home almost completely different? Why does nobody seem to notice this?

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'Hunger' in the U.S.

Nov 20, ’09 1:44 PM

The USDA released its annual report on Food Security (i.e. whether people can secure enough food to eat, not whether Chef Boyardee is an Al Qaeda mole) this week, and the media have temporarily stopped writing stories about the crisis of Obesity among the poor to write stories about how the real problem is that they’re starving.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith approaches his job of revising The Times to ensure that the government’s predictions always can be shown to have been accurate:

For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.

We seem to be living in a kind of strange mirror image of Oceania here, where everyone has a different pair of boots for every day of the week but where the newspapers are full of hand-wringing editorials about the boot shortage.

The New York Times reports on the USDA Food Security Report:

Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

The important thing here is to note that the Times uses the common and easily understood word ‘hunger’ in the headline; but the lede backs off from this quite a bit, putting the actual thing being measured in quotes, and interjecting a ‘what it calls’. It seems to have occurred to someone at the Times that what is at an all-time high is not hunger, exactly.

A better headline, really, would be: Some People Too Stupid To Use Food Stamps because there’s absolutely no reason for anyone in the United States not to have enough to eat. If your income is $0, the government will feed you. If your income is greater than $0 but less than an amount that’s almost impossible to figure accurately, the government will partially feed you.

The Times again:

About a third of these struggling households had what the researchers called “very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.

The other two-thirds typically had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods, relying on government aid like food stamps, or visiting food pantries and soup kitchens.

It falls to Tino to do the reporting that, for whatever reason, the New York Times won’t, and explain what these terms mean.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has four categories for ‘food security’:

  1. High Food Security
    Pretty much what it says. USDA says ‘no reported indications’ of food access problems.
  2. Marginal Food Security
    Basically: anxiety. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of changes in diets or food intake.’
  3. Low Food Security
    Poor. Buying store brands. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of reduced food intake.’
  4. Very Low Food Security
    USDA says: ‘Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.’

You are sorted into these categories based on your answers to the questions in this survey. The questions are like:

I worried whether my food would run out before I got money to buy more: Often, sometimes, never

I couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals: Often, sometimes, never

In the last 12 months, did you ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food?

In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn’t enough money for food?

I relied on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed my child because I was running out of money to buy food: Yes, no

Basically, you get a point for each ‘Yes’, ‘Often’, or ‘Sometimes’ answer. So if you’ve worried, and eaten a small meal, and eaten what you think is an unbalanced meal, or relied on ‘only a few kinds of low-cost food’ to feed the kids at least once any time in the past year, you have ‘very low food security’. That might be a valid thing to measure, but it certainly is not ‘hunger’.

Incidentally, it’s notable that the people in the survey report markedly better ‘food security’ in the 30 days immediately prior to the survey than they do when asked the same questions about the past year. This strongly suggests that people are remembering things as worse than they really were. On top of the vagueness of the questions, this renders the survey almost totally pointless.

The official victim class (to which a lot of ‘food-insecure’ people certainly belong) would all be pretty skilled in being sure to always tell the government survey that everything’s terrible; this is, after all, the job of the professional victim.

In the United States, if you can’t afford food, the federal government will subsidize your eating, usually on the spot. When you apply for food stamps, unless something goes wrong you generally leave the office with your EBT card. In 2007, Nicole and I tried the food stamp diet to see whether it was possible to eat well on it, and the conclusion is that you need to know how to cook, but that other than that, it’s pretty damned easy.

What we actually did was the $21 per week diet. At the time, the average food stamp benefit came to $21 per person per week. You’re not actually meant to spend only $1 per meal; as your income rises, your benefit is cut. If you actually have no income at all, you got $155 a month, which is $38.75 a week. Given that it’s entirely possible to eat a healthy and tasty diet on $21 a week, $38.75 would be a piece of cake. Literally: on $21 you can only afford cookies.

The benefit has increased since then, and if you receive SNAP benefits (the actual name for the food-stamp program these days), any kids you might have are eligible for free breakfast and lunch at school.

The Times story goes on, eventually leading here:

Some conservatives have attacked the survey’s methodology, saying it is hard to define what it measures.

Considering that the statistics don’t make sense and that even the New York Times feels a need to distance itself from the weird terminology involved, I’d say that ‘some conservatives’ might have a point.

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The Narcissism of the Activist

Nov 18, ’09 9:08 AM

I am reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers, which, in the version I’m reading, carries a preface about copyright.

In case you don’t know who Doctorow is: he’s a sci-fi author, anti-absolute-copyright activist, and general left-wing complainer, possibly not in that order. He’s originally from Canada and now lives in the UK; as with pretty much all such people, this gives him a special insight as to everything that’s wrong with the United States.

Doctorow’s main issue is copyright, or, more specifically, absolute copyright. Himself, he gives away all (most?) of his writing via his website while at the same time selling the stuff through normal channels. His intention is to be a one-man experiment to prove whether it’s possible to make money from intellectual property without hiring a team of lawyers to sue your fans. So far, it seems to be working.

In the course of explaining why he does this — he quotes Tim O’Reilly in saying that his, and most writers’ — biggest problem isn’t piracy but obscurity — he writes

I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don’t get oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch.

First: astronauts do not spend 28 hours on the launch pad under any circumstances.

Second: note here that he uses cowboys as an example of people who are oppressed. Now, I’m sure that there were and are some bad cowboy jobs. But to see a cowboy — the very symbol of independence and self-determination — as oppressed takes a special kind of view of the world.

And I’ll be forever indebted to Cory Doctorow for illustrating this so perfectly, because his illustration has allowed me to put words to a concept that’s been annoying me for a while.

The activist’s credo is: everyone’s fucked but me.

The argument goes something like this: Things are just fine for me, but everyone else is getting the short end of the stick, and so it is up to me and other similarly comfortable people to fix all of this for them. In many cases, you can add to that: because they are all too stupid to see the truth.

This is why I can respect Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Tea Party people, etc., but find ACORN and WTO ‘protests’ disgusting. There’s a big difference between a group of people looking out for itself, making its opinions known, and attempting to influence the government or the culture so that its members will be better off on the one hand, and organizations of the Professionally Outraged, abstractly arguing the cases of other, usually unseen people on the other.

The logical conclusion of this way of thinking is that People in general either

  1. do not know enough to run their own lives (search for ‘voting against self interest‘ for many examples) or
  2. the real majority supports X, even though the most accurate measures seem to indicate that people support Y.

Either one in the end justifies autocratic rule by a ‘benevolent’ dictator, and the best part is that you don’t actually have to demonstrate that people are hungry/oppressed/being shipped to Gitmo/whatever: you just assert that they are from your perch of middle-class comfort.

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Decadence Inflation

Oct 30, ’09 3:23 PM

Until recently, chocolate was usually involved in any desserts described as ‘decadent’. Apparently pumpkin pie is now also emblematic of decay.

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Speaking Truth To Power

Oct 29, ’09 11:01 AM

Someone wrote in to Glenn Reynolds with a point I’d been thinking about yesterday, and planning to write about today. Speaking of the Obama administration, he wrote:

These people are so steeped in Saul Alinsky that they fail to realize that they were written for people trying to topple the system and mau-mau the flakcatchers. But now THEY ARE the flack-catchers and they obviously never really understood the problems of governing.

Reynolds comments:

Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as to say that Obama & Co. ‘never really understood the problems of governing’, but the rest of this rings true. The Left, and the Democrats in the US in particular, have become something like a dog chasing a car. The dog is just acting instinctively and chasing after anything that moves; he doesn’t really have a plan for what’s going to happen should he actually catch the car.

The Democrats, from 2000 to 2008, blamed all of their problems — hell, all problems full stop — on George Bush. Couldn’t get their policies enacted? It was all the fault of George Bush (spit) and those corporations (spit) and talk radio (spit)!!!11 It’s all just lies and fear that are fooling the people into a false sense of complacency!!!1 so that Halliburton (spit) can get richer (spit)!!1

And so on. Before George Bush, it was just corporations and talk radio and the vast right-wing conspiracy etc.

Some lefties actually seem to understand that their real problem is that the majority of the people don’t like their policies. Once in a while, this slips out, as in these examples from just after the election in 2004, but in general you have to keep this kind of contempt for the electorate under wraps if you want to have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually winning elections.

Immigrants-Against-Democracy Fuck-Middle-America Dailymirror-Bush

By spitting at the straw-man enemies of George Bush and Fox News, though, the left was able to forget about, or at least to paper over, its differences; this is how you have a ‘coalition’ that include both billionaire capitalist George Soros and the Berkeley Marxist League. What did they stand for? Well, a lot of things, many of them directly contradictory. But more than anything, they stood for opposition to Bush, hatred of Fox News, etc., etc.; many of the Democrats’ troubles now are the direct result of their confusing this emotion-based unity with genuine agreement.

The left now controls the universities, TV, movies, nearly all major newspapers, NPR, PRI, all TV news except for Fox, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, and yet you have Valerie Jarrett saying

I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power.

Their ideology has become so wrapped up in ‘struggle’ and ‘organizing’ against some more powerful force that you wind up with a person with an office in the White House who reports directly to the President of the United States talking about how she and her colleagues are going to speak truth to power. It’s like a tic.

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Be Afraid!

Oct 27, ’09 9:06 AM

These idiotic ads for home security systems aren’t anything new, but this one happened to air while I was in a position to capture it.

If you are afraid of such a thing:

  1. You’re nuts. Such a thing is only slightly more likely than your house being hit by a meteor;
  2. You need a gun, not an alarm.
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Politicians and Innovation

Oct 24, ’09 8:49 AM

Philip Greenspun writes:

Isaac Newton was a member of the Royal Society, but I don’t remember King Charles II taking credit for the Principia.
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The Pronunciation of Pakistan

Oct 20, ’09 9:01 AM

I’ve long found the idiotic hyper-’correct’ pronunciation of ‘Pakistan’ — ‘Pahk-ee-stahn’ — annoying.

Pakistan was split off from India in 1947, but the name was coined in 1934 by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, from the names of the constituent provinces: Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchistan.

Now Or Never

Ali was writing in English. Using the English names of the provinces. ‘Pakistan’ is an English word. ‘Pahk ee stahn’ is a rough phonetic spelling for how it sounds to an American ear when spoken with a Pakistani accent. This is a result of the accent, not some more-correct local pronunciation.

Logically, if you say ‘Pahk-ee-stahn’, you should also say ‘Chermany’, ‘Eetaly’, ‘Sveden’, ‘Frawnce’, ‘Uhstraalya’, etc. If you don’t, why do you think it’s necessary to fake the local accent when saying ‘Pakistan’?

On Morning Edition last Thursday there was this bit of idiocy when Afghanistan and Pakistan were mentioned in the same breath:

Why ape the local accent when pronouncing the name of one country, but not the other? I’d think that rehearsing this sentence would kind of drive home the stupidity of this, but apparently not.

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Yet Another iPhone Killer Identified

Oct 18, ’09 9:00 AM

Michael Arrington, of all people, writes in The Washington Post — or maybe just the Post‘s website, since it’s impossible to tell whether something was actually printed in the paper or not:

Verizon and Motorola finally lifted the curtain on their new Droid Android phone yesterday. Make no mistake, this is Android’s flagship product, and the first phone that will pose a significant threat to Apple’s iPhone.

I’m sure the Droid will be an excellent device. I even suspect that Arrington may be correct in that the Droid will finally provide at least some competition for the iPhone.

His statement would have more credibility, though, if clueless reviewers hadn’t dubbed damned near every single awful smartphone released since June 2007 an ‘iPhone killer’.

Crunchgear:
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ZDNet:
200910180844-1

PMP Today:
200910180845

Telegraph:
200910180845-1

Gizmodo:
200910180845-2

Businessweek:
200910180846

ZDNet again:
200910180846-1

Unwired View:
200910180847

Today Show via MSNBC:
200910180847-1

CBS Evening News:
200910180848

IntoMobile (note that this was written before the original iPhone was released):
200910180849

Betanews:
200910180849-1

SearchMobileComputing:
200910180850

I do have to wonder whether the recent FTC web-endorsement-payola B.S. has some of its roots in this kind of thing. Since before the original iPhone was released in June 2007, it seems like every new smartphone — even ones that turned out to be colossal stinking failures, like the Blackberry Storm — has been proclaimed ‘the iPhone killer’ by someone.

In many cases, the manufacturers and carriers have even been claiming that their device is an ‘iPhone killer’. Note that Verizon did this two years ago with the LG VX10000 Voyager. Now, I understand that Verizon is in the business of selling these things and thus needs to present them in their best light and to boast about them as much as possible. But anyone who would seriously consider that thing a rival to the iPhone should have his head examined. The hardware was neat, and the Verizon network was and is vastly superior to the AT&T network that iPhones are locked to in the United States. But the software sucked, just as it still sucks on just about all phones. Nobody seems to take notice of this.

There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement in the iPhone, and I’m certain that something will eventually come along that’s better — though to be honest the next better-than-the-iPhone device is likely to be the iPhone Mark IV. These reviews by iPhone-hatas (I assume they’re iPhone-hatas because they seem to see everything through the lens of iPhone-killing) don’t help matters, though: if it hasn’t happened already, the public eventually will learn that ‘iPhone killer’ nearly always means phone with neat industrial design and terrible software and UI.

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