Devil's Advocate

Advice, and a warning:

You want to play devil’s advocate? Then the purpose in your words, actions, and fucking HEART had better be to help that person become Stronger, by having presented them with the angles of attack and rebuttal that will be leveled against them, and not some attempt to score points for your morally and intellectually bankrupt little worldview.

This is consistent with my understanding of הַשָּׂטָן. I take seriously the legends which teach that you do not want to invoke him sloppily.

Mansplaining

Since there's a bit of a tendency to use the word sloppily, Karen Healy describes nicely what “mansplaining” does and does not include.

Mansplaining isn't just the act of explaining while male, of course; many men manage to explain things every day without in the least insulting their listeners.

Mansplaining is when a dude tells you, a woman, how to do something you already know how to do, or how you are wrong about something you are actually right about, or miscellaneous and inaccurate “facts” about something you know a hell of a lot more about than he does.

Bonus points if he is explaining how you are wrong about something being sexist!

Think about the men you know. Do any of them display that delightful mixture of privilege and ignorance that leads to condescending, inaccurate explanations, delivered with the rock-solid conviction of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation?

That dude is a mansplainer.

To my knowledge, the ur-article on the subject is the wonderful Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things To Me.

.... the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

....

I began to speak only of the most recent [of my books] on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”

So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book—with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said–like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen’s class on Chaucer—”gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” Still, there are these other men, too. So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless–for a moment, before he began holding forth again.

Update:

Usage of ’splain has grown more expansive in both good and bad ways. It's become a more general social justice term of art:

Splaining or ’Splaining is a form of condescension in which a member of a privileged group explains something to a member of a marginalised group — most particularly, explains about their marginalization — as if the privileged person knows more about it. Examples include (but are not limited to) a man explaining sexism to a woman, or a white person explaining racism to a black person.

I can think of countless examples of a White guy being egregiously racist, then telling Black critics that obviously they don't understand racism, oh no, but he does, and there is nothing racist at all about what he has done. It's not hard to recognize the problem there, value having a name for it, and insist on rejecting ’splaining as an illegitimate move that we should reject outright.

But this is slippery. If a man disagrees with a woman about something, and then she calls it out as sexist, and he expresses his skepticism about the sexism involved, then he is “explaining sexism to a woman” and thus ’splaining, yes? Familiar, odious examples of this leap to mind ... but this same turn makes it possible for a woman to frame any disagreement as sexism and then lock out any disagreement as further sexism.

I think we can recognize that dodgy accusations of sexism are a long, long way from being a pressing social problem but also recognize how people in activist culture have been known to shut down discussion with facile versions of this move, which is not the healthiest thing for our ability to discuss and dig into how sexism and racism and other injustices work.

Beyond that, Katy Waldman observes how ’splaining has leaked out of social justice rhetoric into the world at large.

Meanwhile, -splain has ’sploded in its own right. The writer Annabel Crabb coined the term ladysplain to characterize how some women couch their comments in self-deprecation and apology. The site Femsplain appears to want to reclaim -splain. Specific people can -splain—GQ crowned one Republican candidate “The Mittsplainer” in 2012—and so can publications (Voxsplain) and entire industries (techsplain). Bras outfitted with sensors can bras plain your feelings to you. Forbes recruited the feline Mr. Higgs to catsplain the finer points of computer-generated text.

She offers a crisp description of a usage beyond the social justice context that focuses on the spirit of its original meaning.

At its heart, -splain should be about the marriage of two concepts: irony and information asymmetry. In economics, information asymmetry describes transactions “where one party has more or better information than the other”—an imbalance that can lead to market failure. When I Waldsplain to my co-worker, I believe I am correcting an information asymmetry that, in fact, runs in the opposite direction. That’s the irony: My misapprehension of the situation only worsens the skew. Cue conversation failure.

But we no longer just use -splain to highlight ironic information asymmetries in conversation.

I like her proposal. (It even speaks to the one and only usage of “womansplaining” in a social justice context that I think might be defensible.)

But I worry that Waldman is right that the word's usefulness is slipping away.

Key concepts

On Facebook, a friend asks:

What are some concepts you wish were more widely understood?

He offered an example:

• Externalities

Another person offered:

• Confirmation bias

Which inspired me to produce a whole list, which I'm now adding to progressively:

• Nothing scales: square-cube law, network effects, Metcalfe's Law, etc
• Market failures
  • externality
  • non-excludability
  • non-rivalry
  • increasing returns
  • adverse selection
  • moral hazard
  • maldistribution
  • miscalculation
  • monopoly power by sellers
  • monopsony power by buyers
  • race to the bottom
  • expectational disequilibrium
  • rationing disequilibrium
• Bullshit
  • Frankfurt's definition
  • If a source lies to you once, it is never a source of information again
  • One-way hash arguments
  • Deceiving us has become an industrial process
  • The Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
• Consent
• Survivor bias
• The scientific method, in particular falsifiability
• Hanlon's Razor
• Pareto distributions (and how networks produce them)
• Multiple equilibria
• Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy
• Distributed computation
• Positive liberties (as opposed to negative liberties)
• The tyranny of structurelessness
• Korman's Law
• “Expertise is knowing where common sense is wrong”
• Hagbard's Law
• Systemic injustice
• Dunning-Kruger
• Correlation versus causation
• Incentives
  • Perverse incentives
  • Campbell's Law aka “juking the stats”
  • Reflexivity
• Nothing scales

Over time I'm going to make more of these into links, but if you don't recognize some of these, I recommend looking them up.

Karl Marx

At the moment there's a piece by David “The Wire” Simon floating around the web which I don't think reflects him at his best, but which does include a good statement of something I agree with:

I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.

You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism — of how his logic would work when applied — kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.

My relationship with the political left

A friend recently commented that he has divorced himself from the political left; another friend waggishly suggested that he is still married to it but could use some relationship counseling.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't quite claim that I'm happily married to the left, but I am committed to the marriage.

Truth to tell, I've been stepping out on the left a bit, in online forums, for some time. It's fun, and some of those other political philosophies are sexy and fun. But while the left can be annoying at times, it isn't batshit crazy like so many of those “alternative” political philosophies you meet on the internet.

So a little flirting with other philosophies has only strengthened my marriage to progressivism. It may not quite be like when I was young, but when you get older you develop more realistic expectations.

Conservatives and racism

Jonathan Chait at New York offers us Why Conservatives Got Segregation Wrong a Second Time in South Africa, which reminds us that their specific arguments vary but their conclusion about racism is perennial.

Over the last century, the conservative line on racial questions has undergone a constant flux in its particulars. The distinguishing element of conservative thinking on race is the belief that, at any given moment, the balance of actual or threatened power is arrayed against whites. The conservative line often concedes that whites may have sinned against blacks in the past, and may even continue to do so, but that at the present moment the risk lies in taking things too far in the opposite direction.

These arguments are not always entirely wrong. They often contain important elements of truth: Mandela did have some dangerous communist allies; some affirmative-action programs can have terrible side effects; and so on. For that reason, whenever it’s plausible to do so, the specifics of conservative racial thinking need to be analyzed and debated on their merits, not stigmatized as racist. And even if conservative racial arguments had been completely wrong, it wouldn’t prove they would continue to be completely wrong forever. Still, understanding the history of conservative racial arguments is vital to understanding what conservative racial thinking is.

Dogs in the Vineyard play aids

Dissatisfied with the available handouts for players in D. Vincent Baker's brilliant, groundbreaking tabletop role-playing game Dogs in the Vineyard, I created these.

• Player character sheet — The character sheet in the rulebook is oriented around character creation; this sheet is oriented toward play
• Player's game summary — Key rules and play advice in a readable format, for players
• The World of the Faithful — A short summary of the setting information from the game rules
• GM's game summary — Key rules and advice, for the GM

You can find more resources from John H. Kim, Carl Rigney, and Jason Morningstar.

One more thing: in the game I GM, I use Sacred Harp's track “Whither the Wind” as title music at the start of the game: wistful and a little bit spooky.

Close reading

Two blogs at Patheos, the religion site, offer close readings of texts held as sacred and inspired by millions of Americans. I'm speaking, of course, of Atlas Shrugged and Left Behind.

These are critical readings. Very critical. Slacktivist, who writes the Left Behind blog, tells us:

I'm not a pastor, so I won't be pastoral here. These books are evil, anti-Christian crap.

Worth your time.

---

Update: Fifty Shades of Grey!

Lady Blackbird

Pound-for-pound, Lady Blackbird may be the best tabletop roleplaying game ever made. It weighs in at only sixteen pages (including the blank character sheet and two half-page illustrations!) but you could run a ten-session campaign grounded in its single page of setting. Or you can finish the game with a satisfying climax in one sitting. It delivers character relationships, a vivid and interesting setting, a simple game engine with a novel dice pool mechanic that plays swiftly and encourages good roleplaying, and an adventure setup that is open-ended but has a strong narrative drive. You can run it with experienced roleplayers or story game virgins or a mix of both. I have never heard of it going wrong for a player group; I can't even imagine how you could screw it up.

I love it so much that I made special dice for using the system.

And it's free!

On the Non-Aggression Principle

I would very much like the elimination of coercive violence as a factor in human society.

I would also like a pony.

Until all people abjure violence, I will regard those who fight against publicly-accountable government coercion as de facto allies of the forces of private coercion.

If you're wondering what the “Non-Aggression Principle” is:

• von Mises Institute
• Wikipedia
• Lew Rockwell
• Advocates for Self-Government

If you're wondering what the illustration is, it is Norman Rockwell's painting “The Problem We All Live With”, depicting young Ruby Bridges attending public school, defended against the violent objections of bigots in her community by U. S. Marshalls.

(And another comment from Bleeding Heart Libertarians describes how the Principle isn't the strong argument that many libertarians imagine it is.)

On smarm

A brilliant analysis for our times from Tom Scocca at Gawker. I'm serious.

But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of what is it contemptuous?

....

If you listen to the crusaders against negativity—in literature, in journalism, in politics, in commerce—you begin to hear a recurring set of themes and attitudes, amounting to an omnipresent, unnamed cultural force. The words flung outward start to define a sort of unarticulated philosophy, one that has largely avoided being recognized and defined.

Without identifying and comprehending what they have in common, we have a dangerously incomplete understanding of the conditions we are living under.

Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I've accumulated dozens of emails and IM conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online comments, tweets—the shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter.

What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?

It is reacting to smarm.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

Malcolm Gladwell's riposte is, well, what it should be.

I am shocked! Shocked!

This should be handy to have around.

Freedom archipelago

From the Associated Press:

The case marks the first time that Europe’s role in the CIA’s controversial rendition program, which was in operation at the height of then-President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, has reached the European Court of Human Rights.

All the prisons were closed by May 2006. Interrogations at sea have replaced CIA “black sites” as the U.S. government’s preferred method for holding terrorism suspects and questioning them without access to lawyers.

Thank goodness we have ended the shameful American practice of secret torture prisons on land. Oh, except that one, though I guess it doesn't count because it isn't secret.

Choose two

• Good
• Cheap
• Fast

---

• Omniscient
• Omnipotent
• Omnibenevolent

---

• On spec
• On budget
• On time

---

• good grades
• social life
• sleep

---

• having the time
• having the skills
• having the resources

---

• easy to use
• non-proprietary
• secure

---

• power
• understanding
• control

(Kelly's First Law)

One demand

A Message From Occupied Wall Street (Day Five) still moves me profoundly.

This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

On September 21^st, 2011, Troy Davis, an innocent man, was murdered by the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was one of the 99 percent.

Ending capital punishment is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more wealth than half of the country's population.

Ending wealth inequality is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges.

Ending police intimidation is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters.

Ending corporate censorship is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly eighty percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.

Ending the modern gilded age is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly 15% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing.

Ending political corruption is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of Americans did not have work.

Ending joblessness is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of America lived in poverty.

Ending poverty is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly fifty million Americans were without health insurance.

Ending health-profiteering is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America had military bases in around one hundred and thirty out of one hundred and sixty-five countries.

Ending American imperialism is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America was at war with the world.

Ending war is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we stood in solidarity with Madrid, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madison, Toronto, London, Athens, Sydney, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Algiers, Tel Aviv, Portland and Chicago. Soon we will stand with Phoenix, Montreal, Cleveland and Atlanta. We're still here. We are growing. We intend to stay until we see movements toward real change in our country and the world.

You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, the people will speak. Join us.

We speak as one. All of our decisions, from our choice to march on Wall Street to our decision to continue occupying Liberty Square, were decided through a consensus based process by the group, for the group.

A just society is my one demand.

Privatization

For future reference, a long report from In The Public Interest talking about breakdowns from privatization in the US:The Coast-to-Coast Failures of Outsourcing Public Services to For-Profit Corporations.

Gawker has a list of highlights:

• Los Angeles County continually renewed its ^$3 million year contract with a firm called Wings of Refuge to place foster children, despite numerous reports of kids going to abusive homes where they were beaten and locked away for days on end.
• Indiana hired IBM to run its food stamp and Medicaid programs, then bungled it and dumped thousands of residents from the rolls—including an elderly nun who was denied food stamps because she missed a recertification interview while hospitalized for cancer.
• School-cafeteria workers in New Jersey saw their hourly wages cut by ^$4 to ^$6 an hour after their jobs were privatized. “[W]e use our personal sick days just to get paid so we can pay rent for the next month,” one told investigators.
• Also, there was the whole Chicago parking meters thing.
• Denver contracted with a Portuguese company to run a toll-road for 99 years. That firm successfully prevented the construction of a free road nearby, citing its contract. The city is stuck unable to build new roads nearby for a century unless it richly compensates the toll-road operator.
• During the 2008 flood emergency in Indiana, tolls on turnpikes were suspended for travelers. The company running the toll roads, citing its contract, billed state taxpayers ^$447,000 for the lost revenue… and got it.
• A company contracted in New Mexico to tape city commission meetings refused to make those tapes available to the public because they were "private property."
• A California public transit district hired for-profit companies to run bus routes—companies that didn't do complete drug-and-alcohol tests on drivers and stranded handicapped riders at their stops.
• Two-thirds of Florida's privatized prisons failed to meet the legal requirement to run at least 7 percent more cheaply than state-run jails. Half of the private jails were actually more expensive to run. But the state never set up a mechanism for punishing them.
• 65 percent of private prisons require the states and cities they work with to meet inmate quotas, forcing governments to find inmates to keep the jails up to a profitable capacity.
• Northwest Missouri State University forked over tons of taxpayer cash to contract out most of its food, vending, and bookstore services. Rather than open up the contract to bidders, it took contractors at higher rates who were willing to donate to the university's athletic stadium fund.

The origin of corporations

In an online discussion an anti-corporate anarchist who held that the regulatory state is just a tool of corporations' project of extracting wealth from society linked the article Our Hidden History of Corporations in the United States, and said:

It's hard to discern why [progressives] ... are so ingrained in seeing government as their sole savior in fighting against corporate Frankensteins — but they are clearly incorrect, as a legal and historical matter.

I wanted to keep this lovely reply by another participant in the discussion:

I have never denied the moral hazard in tax breaks and limited liability. I have never denied the corruption ensuing from thence in how corporations can achieve protected status from government.

I, like Theodore Roosevelt, and some of our early practitioners of government, would never have been cozy with this idea. Nevertheless, the reality is that corporations file for incorporation, pay on a periodic basis for their limited liability, but are not created by government.

More particularly, you can thank the Supreme Court for its ruling in Dartmouth College v Woodward, February 2, 1819, for first overturning the attempt by government to limit and control business charters.

How can you read these paragraphs and not see that government put up a good fight against corporations:

But the men running corporations pressed on. Contests over charter were battles to control labor, resources, community rights, and political sovereignty. More and more frequently, corporations were abusing their charters to become conglomerates and trusts. They converted the nation’s resources and treasures into private fortunes, creating factory systems and company towns. Political power began flowing to absentee owners, rather than community-rooted enterprises.

The industrial age forced a nation of farmers to become wage earners, and they became fearful of unemployment—a new fear that corporations quickly learned to exploit. Company towns arose. and blacklists of labor organizers and workers who spoke up for their rights became common. When workers began to organize, industrialists and bankers hired private armies to keep them in line. They bought newspapers to paint businessmen as heroes and shape public opinion. Corporations bought state legislators, then announced legislators were corrupt and said that they used too much of the public’s resources to scrutinize every charter application and corporate operation.

Government spending during the Civil War brought these corporations fantastic wealth. Corporate executives paid “borers” to infest Congress and state capitals, bribing elected and appointed officials alike. They pried loose an avalanche of government financial largesse. During this time, legislators were persuaded to give corporations limited liability, decreased citizen authority over them, and extended durations of charters.

Attempts were made to keep strong charter laws in place, but with the courts applying legal doctrines that made protection of corporations and corporate property the center of constitutional law, citizen sovereignty was undermined. As corporations grew stronger, government and the courts became easier prey. They freely reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution and transformed common law doctrines.

Corporate personhood was a court reporter's mistake in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Ralroad. And forever after it has become a stare decisis nightmare.

Corporations were never intended nor are now creations of government.

Having said that, I still believe with you we need to fix corporate status.

Informed radicalism and Korman’s Law

I end up spending a fair bit of time talking to radicals of various stripes, both online and in real life. It is something I enjoy, and I think it is important for an intellectually curious person to do.

Understand, I do not mean “radical” as a dismissive insult, as most Americans seem to misuse the term. I mean it in the proper sense of striking at the root. These are times that call for radicalism. Our institutions are failing us.

But we mostly have a poor crop of radicals, and one thing I find particularly vexing is radicals who only know their own radical school of thought.

An anarchist who doesn’t know who Hobbes was, or an Austrian who doesn’t understand what Keynesian economics actually says, or a leftist who doesn’t know what liberalism is, or an anti-globalist who doesn’t know what comparative advantage is has not done their homework. Conventional thinking is often wrong, but even when wrong it’s rarely just stupid; it usually emerged from smart people thinking hard and coming to their conclusions for compelling reasons. If one has not devoted enough attention to understand the best arguments for conventional solutions at least well enough to recognize and describe them, one does not have an informed opinion worthy of attention.

A friend suggests this could be coined as Korman’s Law:

if you do not understand the conventional thinking, there is no point in offering radical thinking

Another friend reminds me that this is a variant of Chesterton’s Fence and the Ideological Turing Test.

And of course John Lennon said it well:

You say you want a revolution?
Well, you know
We’d all like to see the plan.

Korman’s Second Law

Further reflection inspires me to offer a kind of corollary:

if you do not understand any radical thinking, there is no point in offering conventional thinking

More

What if not liberal democracy?

A post of mine addressing a specific frustration I have with radicals dismissive of “liberalism”.

Why I Talk To Loons

Jim Wright at Stonekettle Station:

Yeah, but why do this at all?

Aside from the fact that these silly buggers should be ridiculed publically, you mean? Because, I was trained as a intelligence officer. Because I was trained as a military leader. Nothing drives you to disaster quicker than assumption. You must know the battlespace, the failures of intelligence and assumption should be glaringly obvious to every single American in these post-911, post-Iraq days. You must know the adversary, how he thinks, how he sees the world, what matters to him. There is no substitute for boots on the ground, i.e. direct observation. Comments like those I used in yesterday’s post convey layers of information beyond the obvious opinion expressed by the commenter. Taken as a whole they show trends, memes, the spread of viral concepts though the public mind.

Boom economics

In a Facebook discussion of my previous post comparing the current web boom with the last one, I observed that one difference between the two was that the current boom takes place in a generally weak economy, contrary to the last one. Which creates troubling incentives: a lot of rich people have a lot of cash and very few places to put it. Dumb money is an attractive nuisance.

A friend with proper economics training had a striking reply.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, JK. There’s a lot of big, but dumb money out there. Thanks to the global “easy money” policy that's currently in effect, investors can’t get interest income, so they’ve thrown caution to the wind in order to chase equity returns. Clearly, the markets reflect that, but a lot of the big, dumb money is also going to VCs, private equity and hedge funds, and the investors have no idea where that money ends up. A lot of it is chasing presumed IPO candidates, even if their business propositions are flimsy. (To be considered an IPO candidate, no one really wants to mess around with a company unless it can get to a ^$1 billion market cap, even if there’s only a 5% chance of that happening, with the other 95% chance being failure. So, it’s an all or nothing proposition.) This is very similar to the dot-com era, and the business models are getting more flimsy all the time. In contrast, the businesses that are having trouble getting new or increased funding are traditional businesses that have more solid prospects, but which will never reach the size necessary to IPO. Their odds of actually providing sustained employment to, say, 100-500 people are much better than the typical VC-backed firm, but that’s not what the agents of the big, dumb money care about, as such companies do debt financing, which yields pitiful returns these days compared to what people think they can get in equity investments. The trouble is, the current equity returns are illusory, as we have the greater fool theory in full effect right now.

Conventional metrics indicate that we're in a frothy market. One that I like to keep an eye on is the (Robert) Schiller PE10. It calculates the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 using the average of long-term (10-year), inflation-adjusted earnings as the denominator. This helps to see what’s going on more clearly, as short-term noise is smoothed out. The current PE10 is over 25, which is well above a more desirable level of about 15. Sure, we can continue to go up from here, as we did in 1999-2000, be things have never gone well longer term when we’ve reached this level.

Boom

Matthew Yglesias reminds us how crazy Web Boom 1.0 was during the late ’90s. There were a lot of companies whose business plan was:

1. Raise venture capital money
2. Use that money to do a bunch of marketing to “build the brand”
3. Oh yeah, invent some kind of business, though it was kind of better if it didn't make sense
4. IPO strong because the brand was well-known
5. Profit

People would tell you this in so many words, with a straight face. If you told them that this was not, y'know, a business, they would tell you, “You don't GET IT. This is the New Economy, man.”

The bullshit is thick this time around, but it's not that thick.

Yet.

Geeks against democracy

Klint Finley at Techcrunch has an article Geeks For Monarchy about neo-reactionaries like Mencius Moldbug. Lots of good links.

It’s not hard to see why this ideology would catch-on with white male geeks. It tells them that they are the natural rulers of the world, but that they are simultaneously being oppressed by a secret religious order. And the more media attention is paid to workplace inequality, gentrification and the wealth gap, the more their bias is confirmed. And the more the neoreactionaries and techbros act out, the more the media heat they bring.

Man of Steel

Max Landis, the screenwriter of Chronicle, offers us a reading of what Superman is about, inspired by Zach Snyder's Man of Steel.

Geeky humor

James Mickens' meditation The Night Watch is a very fine example of a certain kind of geeky tech humor.

The main thing that I ponder is who will be in my gang, because the likelihood of post-apocalyptic survival is directly related to the size and quality of your rag-tag group of associates. There are some obvious people who I’ll need to recruit: a locksmith (to open doors); a demolitions expert (for when the locksmith has run out of ideas); and a person who can procure, train, and then throw snakes at my enemies (because, in a world without hope, snake throwing is a reasonable way to resolve disputes). All of these people will play a role in my ultimate success as a dystopian warlord philosopher. However, the most important person in my gang will be a systems programmer.
....
You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Denying the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with so that polite society can exist. Make no mistake, I don’t want to write systems software in a language like C++. Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked, obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and forbidden knowledge. When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours, and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love. The C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness ....

The Ghost Who Walks

The Phantom is a big hero in Africa^* the jungle. No, really.

* Commenter Erik catches me seriously failing to read correctly. I hereby give myself the Edgar Rice Burroughs Memorial Award For Stupid Western Fantasies Of The “Jungle” for this embarrassingly stupid error.

Californian Ideology

A recent conversation reminds me of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s classic article about the Californian Ideology.

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA. As usual, Europeans have not been slow in copying the latest fad from America. While a recent EU Commission report recommends following the Californian free market model for building the information superhighway, cutting-edge artists and academics eagerly imitate the post human philosophers of the West Coast’s Extropian cult. With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete.

The widespread appeal of these West Coast ideologues isn’t simply the result of their infectious optimism. Above all, they are passionate advocates of what appears to be an impeccably libertarian form of politics they want information technologies to be used to create a new ‘Jeffersonian democracy’ where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace. However, by championing this seemingly admirable ideal, these techno-boosters are at the same time reproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery. Their utopian vision of California depends upon a wilful blindness towards the other — much less positive — features of life on the West Coast: racism, poverty and environmental degradation. Ironically, in the not too distant past, the intellectuals and artists of the Bay Area were passionately concerned about these issues.

Written back in 1995. Still relevant.

Russian politics

I have a Russian “friend” on Facebook (who on later reflection was obviously a Putinist troll farm worker) fascinated by Russian radical politics much as I am by American radical politics. We exchange a lot of lore. From him, I have learned just how weird the Russian political spectrum is. This is largely because Russian conservatives looks back to a golden age conceived as a kind of mythical version of the 1950s much as American conservatives do … but for them that means Sovietism. So the left-right axis for them is very weird. Content warning: layer upon layer of offensive politics and slurs.

So for example, they have a political party movement called the National Bolshevik Front with a flag which looks like this:

Yes, that’s a hammer-and-sickle in place of a swastika on a Nazi flag. Holy Jonah Goldberg, the mind boggles. So in that spirit, my Russian correspondent offers this astonishing propaganda painting depicting the left-right political axis.

He explains:

Notice that on the right side, half of things depicted are tools for murder (bogatyrs, T-34 tank, PAK-FA stealth fighter, etc). Hitler on the left side is in his “nice guy” image, implying “cultural imperialism”: Third Reich = United Europe = European Union. Also, note that this picture is a commentary to the Ukraine's recent pact with E.U. (the guy in the middle is Ukrainian). Kremlin wants to keep the Ukraine in its own Eurasian Union. Hence, propaganda wave: European Union = Hitler = “fags”.

Kremlin considers White Nationalists (at least Eastern European ones, yes, including Russian) to be a subset of “Cultural Marxism”, a “radical spearhead” of it. In a “first, Waffen-SS parades, then, gay pride parades” logic.

And Kremlin’s alternative is vague “pro-White Orthodox Communism” or something like that. Which is shared by Communist Party of Russia, but in more radical form.

Russian politics turns out not just to be stranger than I imagine, but stranger than I can imagine. My Russian correspondent expands on the point:

Russian politics explained

From Kremlin POV, Marxism as a political force was funded by Wall Street as a tool against old European empires who prevented the emergence of single global market which Wall Street wanted to have. In other words, the Left were the tool of banking capital against industrial capital. When the Left in Russia disconnected itself from its sponsors through the bloody power struggle known as Great Purge, it split in two: Trotskyists in the West and Stalinists in the East (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc). After the fall of USSR, Western Trotskyism evolved into Neo-Con movement, which transformed “permanent revolution” into “democracy promotion”, i.e. bombing the shit out of third world nations and stealing their resources via CIA-sponsored coups (“color revolutions”).

From Kremlin POV, Third Reich was used by the West as an instrument to weaken the Soviet Union, repeating WW1 German fiasco when British promised Germans alliance against Russian Empire, but turned against them when the war actually started. Official justification for it in the West is “Hitler’s bad, Stalin’s worse”. Modern Western democracies support Neo-Nazi movements in Eastern Europe (Baltics, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, etc) through network of NGOs, so “Hitler” isn’t some temporary aberration.

In the modern world, there are three primary powers: China, Russia and the West. Both China and Russia are post-Stalinist countries, and they are de-facto allied against the post-Trotskyist West. So, “Russian political matrix” is actually “global political matrix”, while American political matrix is a local American/Western thing that stops being relevant the moment it leaves boundaries of the Golden Billion. That being said, modern conflict is not just a product of Cold War, but a continuation of the Great Game: the global competition of Russian Empire and British Empire. It’s just now the map also has Americans (modern version of British Empire) and Chinese (who re-emerged as big player after Soviet Union killed itself, and sworn not to repeat USSR’s mistake of group suicide).

As for homophobic part of Kremlin propaganda, it has nothing to do with Christianity, but with Russian prison culture, where bottom recipient of anal sex (or anybody who touched him or things he touched) is marked as pariah. Since half of Russian male population go through prisons, and nobody wants to end up at the bottom of the food chain, Russian homophobia is shared by atheists and the Left.

Face of “Ultimate Evil” in Kremlin propaganda:

This is Marat Guelman, and Pussy Riot was his project. “Trotskyist”, “Jew”, “modern art sponsor”, “loves America”, “hates Russia”, “mocks WW2 veterans” (read: “loves Hitler”), “loves orange color” (read: “loves color revolutions”), etc. The books beneath his foot are History of Russia and Dostoyevsky’s Demons (which was about people like him). And the best part: THIS GUY IS ON KREMLIN PAYROLL. Kremlin took cues from Orwell’s 1984 and maintains its own supply of Emmanuel Goldsteins, recycling them if necessary. Kremlin even uses disempowered Oligarchs (like Berezovsky) in Emmanuel Goldstein role, which is especially effective since their crimes are real and still painfully remembered.

Aside of “Emmanuel Goldsteins”, Kremlin also maintains supply of “useful Jews” like Berel Lazar. When Stephen Fry accused Putin of “new Holocaust”, Berel Lazar accused Stephen Fry of “trivializing Holocaust”. Kremlin’s logic: “we can’t name you by name, but we can use your own ideology against you”.

As for Chinese Communist Party, it shares Kremlin viewpoint about West being run by “Trotskyist ZOG”, but isn’t as vocal about it, because it feels more secure in its position. Russia, on the other hand, always balances on the brink, and this insecurity transforms into pre-emptive geopolitical actions (like in Syria) and psy-ops (think Russia Today). In Russia/China alliance, Russia acts first, China joins second.

My Russian correspondent sharpens the point about Russian antisemitic rhetoric:

Modern Russia isn’t anti-semitic.

After Putin disempowered Oligarchs (read: “the Jews”), Russia turned from being ultra-antisemitic to being the least anti-semitic nation in Europe.

Russia, once an extremely anti-Semitic country, has become an “Island of Peace” for Jews since the fall of the Soviet State

So, people who bitch about oligarchs/bankers/illuminati/reptilians/NWO/etc (read: “the Jews”) are viewed as retards. ESPECIALLY among Far Right.

The difference is that Russia is politically incorrect. Both Jews and non-Jews use words like “zhid” (“kike”) ironically or even un-ironically. My Jewish friends had to specifically ask me not to use them in Anglosphere because “us kikes sometimes find it offensive”. Real anti-semitism, like link above shows, is extremely low by European/American standarts. Russians don't feel insecure about “bankers” because Putin took them down. Russians feel insecure about Putin.

Another mind-boggling observation from my Russian correspondent:

Communists = angry old white guys and provincial vatniks (rednecks) longing for “good old days”

[They] are ethnic nationalists, and also Christian conservatives. “For white Russians, Communism and Orthodox Christianity” and against “blacks, fags and kikes”. Stalin is good because he is “true Communist, kicked the kikes out of Politburo, restored Russian Empire, resurrected Church and Tradition”. As for Hitler, Communist think that “Hitler is a good guy, too bad kikes tricked him into attacking Russia”. One problem is that Stalin is Caucasian, i.e. “from Caucasus”, i.e. black. So, Neo-Nazis love to troll Commies in “hey, you call yourself Nationalists, yet you worship black-assed highlander”. Sorry for slurs, but that kinda how they talk. Also, note, that Communists consistently on the Kremlin side, and were even used by (Jewish) Oligarchs like Khodorkovsky to press Kremlin for more de-regulation.

All modern Russians believe that [about Hitler]. They had “Hitler envy”. “It would be so cool if Stalin was actually Aryan National-Socialist”, “it would be so cool if Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact wasn’t broken”. Looking at sorry state of affairs Russia is now, despite all the suffering, it’s hard to blame them for feeling entitled. And of course, if tomorrow swastika flag raises above the Kremlin, everybody would cheer — Commies, Nationalists, Democrats.

It should also be noted that Russians are natural Germanophiles, and always were, since at least Peter The Great. National Socialism has an added benefit of being “Western” (i.e. “better”) ideology in Russian eyes. In Russian Liberals, it is represented in Reagan-worship. “Cool Aryan capitalist empire, fucking towelheads up — God bless America”.

Skinheads in Russia are basically Western fetish. “It's from Britain, so it’s cool”.

“Hitler is a good guy, too bad kikes tricked him into attacking Russia”!?! I have to laugh, else I would have to cry.

NIMBY

In a Facebook discussion, Rhett Aultman observes:

NIMBY is a manifestation of externalities. The failure to capture externalities is basically the blind spot of capitalism (both institutional and black market). Democratic governance is the backstop for externalities. Ergo, NIMBY is the tangible manifestation of our age's dialectic between the errors of capitalism and democratic governance.

Feature creep

My favorite Dilbert strip.

You need more features

What Osama bin Laden means

Ian Welsh’s crackerjack post Bin Laden’s insights and the Egyptian Coup covers a lot of territory beyond what it says on the tin. Here’s just a taste:

This critique is not just a critique from an Islamic perspective, it strikes to the heart of the West’s ostensible ethics, to the equality of all humans, to the right of self-determination, and even to the western theoretical preference for democracy. Democracy is a powerful idea, but bin Laden (and others) have observed that the West only believes in elections when the right people win. This was best on display when Hamas, in Palestine, won elections the US had insisted occur (over Israeli objections) and the US then backed a Fatah coup to make sure that Hamas did not take power. (Hamas later kicked Fatah out of Gaza, leading to the current divided rule of Palestine.) It doesn’t take a genius to see that this applies to the current Egyptian situation. Whatever one thinks of Morsi’s government, it was elected in what seem to have been fair elections.

So, if you play the West’s rules, if you win fair and square in elections, and the West doesn’t like who came to power, they will help undo the results of the elections. If you try and get rid of a regime you don’t like through violence, the West will support the regime, making it unlikely you will win, and if you do win despite all that, they will undermine or destroy your regime through economic sanctions. All that failing, as in Iraq, they may well invade.

The problem with this critique is that it is, substantially, accurate. Hate bin Laden or not, this is a model of the world which has predictive and analytical utility. It explains the past, it predicts the future, and it does both well ....

Healthcare.gov

On Facebook, my friend Miles Kurland says what a lot of people in my biz have been thinking:

As a web developer, people keep joking about Healthcare.gov to me, and I pity the folks who had to do the work on that site — given the data integration work with the large variety of providers and the overall complexity of the system.

But I think that criticisms of the site, and the ACA (Obamacare) often focus on a perceived failure of government to be able to do “big things”, and I think that's misguided.

Because the website is a synecdoche for the system as a whole, whose complexity derives from that very notion that private insurers — not government — should manage health insurance. But it's empirically been shown that Medicare is run more efficiently than the private insurance companies.

A complex, difficult to grasp ACA resulted in a complex, difficult to build website.

It would have made more sense as both policy and as technology for Healthcare.gov to have been a simple form with the instructions being: “Sign up for Medicare for All”.

I suppose that there's one good thing about this debacle: it will be an example that web developers can point to about how software tends to expose flaws in human systems.