A Voice in the Dark

By now, everyone who cares has heard that Oklahoma Representative Sally Kern thinks homosexuals are a bigger threat to the nation than terrorists.

Well, the trouble is, she’s right. We have had one successful attack by terrorists on the World Trade Center, and a whole slew of successful attacks by homosexuals on state legislatures. If you consider gay marriage comparable to death - and in christian theology, gay equals sin and sin equals hell and hell equals death - every gay marriage is two deaths. In 9/11, there were about three thousand actual deaths (but, one would assume, no gay marriages). Between May of 2004 and May of 2005, over six thousand gay marriages were performed in the state of Massachusetts. That’s twelve thousand deaths, four times the toll of 9/11, in one state over the course of one year.

Bear in mind, you have to first accept the premise that open practice of homosexuality is equivalent to death. If you don’t accept that, and you believe the only thing comparable to death is… oh, I don’t know, death?… then the statement is ludicrous. Who cares if Joe and Bob are gay and hump each other in the butt? It’s not killing anybody.

But from Sally Kern’s perspective, it is. It’s killing Joe and Bob, they just don’t know it. And as long as Joe and Bob are running around saying “it’s okay to do this”, they’re effectively promoting suicide. So she feels it’s her duty to speak out about it, and to do something about it, and to enact laws that prevent it.

The problem is not that her perspective is wrong (even though it is). The problem is not that her perspective is offensive (even though it is). The problem is that her perspective is a religious perspective, and therefore has no place in American government. It is her duty as a representative of the American people to present a professional image and avoid the appearance of impropriety, but frothing at the mouth about gays certainly isn’t professional. It looks like she’s dangerously insane, even though she clearly isn’t - she just feels strongly about the subject.

I also feel strongly about the subject. I don’t agree with Sally Kern. Indeed, even though I understand her position, I disagree with just about everything she said; the introduction of homosexual topics to preschool classes isn’t intended to make preschoolers gay, it’s intended to ease the social interactions of the many children who have been adopted by gay couples. You can certainly have a problem with the idea that Joe and Bob are talking to your five year old about their sex lives, but if Joe and Bob have a five year old themselves, isn’t your child going to wonder why his classmate doesn’t have a mommy?

And, most importantly, shouldn’t any reasonably qualified parent understand this concept? What happens when the first black child joins a class? The first Asian child? The first non-English speaking child? The situation needs to be explained, and the conditions monitored, until the child is accepted as part of the group. Nobody complains that you’re trying to make the other children black, or Asian, or Spanish-speaking… except dangerously insane people.

How would Sally Kern explain it? “Little Timmy is the poor innocent victim of two evil sinful people who are going to HELL, and they’re raising him to be a Godless heathen sinner who will burn in hell himself. You should bring him to Jesus!”

Absolutely unacceptable in a public servant. Get that bitch out of office.

Filed under: Gay Rights, Parenting, Politics, Religion
No Comments

Anthony de Jasay writes an interesting essay about the current teaching of economics. I do, however, take issue with his arguments.

When he covers the question of inequality, he calls the notion “undiluted bilge”. But the fact is, economic growth increases income inequality. The argument that capitalism causes inequity is, indeed, fact. What is not fact is the liberal assertion that income inequality is bad. Income equality - like trade - can be bad, but there are significant mitigating factors. What de Jasay fails to consider is that certain negative effects of income inequality are - in particular - bad for the government, and it is in the government’s best interest to mitigate them. While he correctly perceives that it is in no way society’s best interest that is served by government sanction, he fails to recognise that it is only incidentally in the liberal American’s best interest.

The liberal, after all, deifies the government. The government does not serve an economic purpose, nor does it serve an imperialist purpose; it serves to enforce the will of God on the people, or - in the liberal mind - to impress objective morality on the citizenry. Nothing could be further from the truth… government exists solely to maximize its own power and perpetuate its own existence. When the liberal willingly assists it, he drives toward the eventual removal of all individual liberty in favor of institutional liberty - which, to the citizenry at large, is no liberty at all.

The conservative (waves hand frantically and points to self) believes somewhat differently: that government is a necessary evil, but its will to power must be restrained by conscientious and self-sacrificing individuals.

Government officials are like zombie hunters; you send someone in to fight, and then you wait in a safe place until you see him wandering stiff-legged through the Capitol building moaning “subsidies, sanctions”. Then you have to shoot him in the head and put someone else into his office. It is inevitable that your representative will be corrupted; it is imperative that the corrupt are removed. You cannot win. All you can do is keep fighting until you run out of people who are willing to fight. Then you lose.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Philosophy, Politics
No Comments

Statements like these are why I support Barack Obama regardless of his “bring the troops home” rhetoric:

“You can’t make a commitment in March of 2008 about what circumstances are going to be like in January 2009. [Obama] will of course not rely upon some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or as a U.S. senator. He’ll rely upon a plan–an operational plan–that he pulls together, in consultation with people who are on the ground, to whom he doesn’t have daily access now.” - Samantha Power, former advisor

My translation of that: Barack Obama knows better than to make military decisions before he consults with military experts. That’s smart. And there’s more, from Obama himself:

“The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died. It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.” - Barack Obama, July 2004

My translation of that… well, I don’t need to translate it. Just read it. That says exactly what you think it says: that we have a duty and an obligation in Iraq that we must not abandon. That shows discipline and honor.

Give me a smart President who understands discipline and honor any day. McCain can go to hell. Clinton could always go to hell. And anyone who complains that a conservative republican shouldn’t support a Democrat can go to hell, too. Barack Obama has every single quality I want in a President, and I won’t let some label change that. He went to a Muslim school as a child? I don’t care. His middle name is Hussein? I don’t care. He lacks experience? I don’t care. He parrots the Democrat party line in his campaign? I don’t care. He’s a nigger? I don’t care, and you’re an asshole.

Labels are just words. Actions speak louder than; Obama sponsored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, and the Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act. If you’ve got your name on only two pieces of legislation, and both of them are all about displaying the government’s actual honesty and integrity or lack thereof to the American people… you have my damn vote.

Filed under: Politics
No Comments

Russ Nelson complains that Microsoft’s patent claims about the 235 patents that Linux allegedly infringes are just FUD.

Well, yes. That is how patents work. The value of a patent is in convincing people that what they are building may be interpreted by the court as infringing a patent. The benefit is that these people, if sufficiently convinced, will pay exorbitant amounts of money to the patent holder.

But in order to leverage this, patents - especially software patents - are made so deliberately indistinct that it takes many weeks of examination by experts to determine whether product A is likely to infringe on patent B. In the end, you still don’t know. The most critical parts of the equation are which product, which patent, which court, which lawyers, and which judge.

See, in the ninth circuit, Microsoft’s patent #178 may stand up in an infringement claim against some product - while in the fifth, it may only stand up when two of the seven judges are making the ruling, and even then one of them may only lend credence to an argument that only one specific Microsoft lawyer can productively make. So in the fifth circuit, Microsoft doesn’t want patent #178 tested against that product, because if they get the wrong judge or their lawyer gets sick on the wrong day, they lose. And once you win or lose a patent case, you’re pretty much done. Most judges won’t reverse a ruling without massive public outcry, which means Microsoft doesn’t get a second chance… but the open source world very well might.

There are no winners in patent cases. A patent has the greatest value when nobody is entirely sure how applicable it is. The practical reality is that FUD is the only way patents work at all. If I can make you worry about your product infringing my patent, you may pay me money - even if I know for a fact that no judge would ever take your product off the market. After all, if I want you to pay me $150,000 a year to sell your product, and the alternative is to spend ten times as much money hiring lawyers and fighting a court injunction against selling that product - win or lose - a product with a five to seven year life span is simply not worth that investment. Your business is better off just paying the licensing.

This doesn’t really work in the open source world, because the “business” has no revenue and sells no product and you can’t make people take it off the market. You can’t issue an injunction to put the genie back in the bottle. The legal system simply has no teeth against individuals on the internet. But if you have a massive business that makes millions of dollars distributing open source software… well, you’re a business, and you can be heavily damaged by a legal battle. So any patent holder can walk up to you and say what amounts to “Nice business you got here… be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

The immediate response you should have is that this is a really shitty thing to do and nobody should be doing it. And you’re right. The problem is that as a patent holder, you have to do it, and as an innovator, you have to patent. If you don’t patent, someone will just file a patent of their own - $1,500 will do it - and come do that to you. And once you patent, if you don’t actively enforce your patent - “nice business you got here” - you can lose it. Once you’ve lost the patent, all the people who are paying you for licenses don’t have to pay you anymore. And when you do the math… $1,500 to get a patent or several million to fight one… the smart business decision is to get patents, because they’re effectively a license to print money. “Hey, I could ruin your business, or you could pay me 15% of your revenue.” What kind of decision is that? Who would choose to be ruined? So if you have a patent and thirty people each pay you $150,000 a year to license it, that’s $45 million a year. People are paying you $45 million annually to walk up to other people and say “nice business you got here”.

See, the problem isn’t Microsoft. It’s the patent system. We need to fix the patent system and put the FUD back where it belongs: on the patent holder. You need to fear the repercussions if your patent is retarded. It should cost you every dime you make from the licensing and more. All the problems Russ cites with the patent claims are not unique to Microsoft’s approach, they are inherent to any patent licensing pitch, because there is simply no downside. If Microsoft’s patent is overturned tomorrow, they don’t have to pay a single dime, and they don’t have to return any license fees they’ve already collected. There is honestly no liability involved in trying to collect more fees.

If they’re asking you to pay, you’re playing Russian roulette: Microsoft can at any time select an example to prove that they can prevail in this fight, and once they start that game, someone has to lose. Pay, and you’re guaranteed not to be the loser. You expose yourself to much more liability by refusing to pay than they do by asking you to pay. The deck is simply stacked against you.

It’s just how patents work. Blame Congress. Microsoft is just playing they game they have to play.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Intellectual Property, Microsoft, Open Source, Politics
No Comments

I made this comment to a post on IMAO and thought I should drag it over here. 

Conservatives do not hate gays. They simply want gays to “know their place”, in much the same way they once wanted women to “know their place”, and blacks to “know their place”, and immigrants to “know their place”. What people mistake for hate is the idea that these people have a place, which is on its face a prejudicial and arguably bigoted perspective.

Unfortunately, it’s also true. Everyone of every variety and in every group does, in fact, have a place. The place you have now may not be the place you have tomorrow, and a smart conservative recognises that. What these conservatives are trying to promote is the idea that while gays/women/blacks/immigrants certainly can and should aspire to have all the same rights and privileges and status that white men have, it is counterproductive to force the issue by ramming “EQUALITY NOW” down the country’s throat.

Historically, forcing the issue when the culture is not ready causes a backlash which results in more pain and suffering than the original state promoted. The similarities between the emancipation proclamation and prohibition are generally avoided as a dangerous subject, but they remain instructive.

I for one do not believe that gays would be better off mostly-closeted as they were in the 1970s. I believe they are better off now. I believe the entire American culture is better off now with more acceptance of gays. I believe that we will be better off still when gays are fully accepted as members of American society and nobody even considers one’s personal sexuality worthy of note.

But I do not believe that is what we will get if we make a law that says you MUST fully accept them (e.g. by extending marriage to include them). I believe what we will get is underground cells of homophobic jerks who go out and do real damage to real people to make a political statement about homosexuality. I believe that this is an unconscionable result that must be avoided at all cost, even if it means people accuse me of being homophobic for the rest of my life.

If we just wait, nature will take its course and homophobia will become a quaint oddity of 20th century culture. It’s the long view. Surely we can endure a few fag jokes in exchange for a culture that really does accept homosexuality, rather than one which gives lip service to the idea in public while continuing to fear, resent, and persecute homosexuals behind closed doors.

Filed under: Gay Rights, Politics
No Comments

It’s a serious question.

Let’s say two people are standing around expressing their views on, say, stealing cable.

“Stealing cable is immoral and wrong,” says the first. “Anyone who steals cable should be shot.”

“Stealing cable is normal and natural,” says the second. “Lots of people steal cable.”

Before the debate can proceed further, an observer pops up and brandishes documents that demonstrate both people are stealing cable.

Which person is more guilty?

It seems to me that both are equally guilty, and neither person can or should be held more or less accountable for his actions. But lately, I’ve heard a lot of left-leaning folk offer the opinion that the first person is more guilty because he is a hypocrite.

I don’t understand why this is somehow worse than simply not respecting the law. Why is it worse to say “please follow the law” and then go break it? Isn’t it worse in practice to say “screw the law” even if you don’t break it?

Filed under: Philosophy, Politics
No Comments

Brilliant, of course, because it isn’t mine.

A friend observed recently that he is skeptical of global warming for one and only one reason: nobody has changed his stripes over global warming.

I didn’t quite understand this until he explained that what it amounts to is, everyone who believes global warming is happening will somehow benefit from it. The most common benefit is political - people want to outlaw a behavior, or change a tax, or shut down an industry, and if global warming is actually happening… the rest of the world is more likely to agree to it.

For example, the peak oil crowd wants us to use less petroleum fuel. Petroleum fuel is used in internal combustion engines. Internal combustion engines generate greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases supposedly contribute to global warming. So the peak oil crowd leaps into the global warming tent, because it makes a good argument for what they want to do anyway.

Many other people want to halt deforestation and plant more trees. Trees consume carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and therefore help to combat global warming. They leap into the global warming tent, because it makes a good argument for what they want to do anyway.

Still other people want everyone to ride the bus to relieve traffic congestion. A bus generates fewer hydrocarbon emissions than a collection of cars transporting the same number of people, so it helps to combat global warming. So the public transportation crowd leaps into the global warming tent, because - you guessed it! - it makes a good argument for what they want to do anyway.

If global warming were really the case, people would be changing their minds. Instead, global warming is simply leading them to yell a little louder, and it’s the same thing they were always yelling. And while that doesn’t prove anything, it’s awfully damn suspicious.

Filed under: Global Warming, Politics
No Comments

So back to the question of Solutions and Investments that I started covering this morning…

The fundamental error in most libertarian arguments I hear is the failure to clearly recognise that removing a problem is not the same as providing a solution. This isn’t in any way a criticism that libertarians don’t understand the situation; it’s simply a criticism of the way they explain the situation as they see it. Without that elucidating plan for what goes in the place of (say) our public school system, and the explicit recognition of how that system hooks into the rest of our political and economic systems, there is this vast gulf of uncertainty.

Now, I do have faith that something could go there, and that it would be a Good Idea, and that it would indeed make things better. But I am not smart enough to know what it is, and I do not trust you to be smart enough to know what it is either. I believe that if you were smart enough to know what it was, and patriotic enough to want the problem fixed for the sake of America, and humble enough not to care if you get the credit - you would tell everyone who would listen.

I don’t know which of those things are missing. I don’t know if the argument leaves this gap in the plan because the speaker doesn’t know what the solution is, or intends to somehow profit from it, or just plain demands that he get all the credit. And it doesn’t really matter, because if any of those things are the case, I don’t want him (or her) solving our nation’s problems. So what I need to hear is some assurance that the person planning to gut the system has some idea how the hell things are going to keep operating.

The libertarian rhetoric is simply too revolutionary. It’s like the Boston tea party. It may feel like a great blow for democracy when you market it properly, but it’s still theft and destruction blamed on an innocent third party. It offends me to propose we steal someone else’s property, destroy it so nobody can benefit, and then point the finger at a group we don’t like. The government belongs to the people. All of its systems belong to the people. When you propose that those who dislike a “bad” system steal it from those who do like it, then destroy it to prevent anyone from using it, and finally point the finger at the people who developed the system as though the creation itself were an invitation to steal it… there is something fundamentally immoral and unjust about that.

It’s a case of two wrongs don’t make a right. Yes, Britain charges too much tax on tea; yes, the public school system is fundamentally ineffective and counterproductive. But it will not make things right if we throw the tea into the harbor and shut down the schools. It will just make people angry who weren’t angry already, and it seems like that’s what the people who are already angry really want. They want everyone else to be angry, because once someone gets angry, you can point him at a target you want destroyed and he’ll just blindly direct his rage toward it.

Most libertarians aren’t angry, of course. They honestly believe in the inherent goodness of their fellow human beings, and the inherent superiority of the market, and in the long term they’re completely right to believe in those things. But some few libertarians ARE angry, and those few draw little distinction between liberty and anarchy, and in the near term it is just monumentally stupid to ignore them. There is simply too much potential for abuse in the libertarian platform. There is a great potential for good in the platform, too, and it would be irrational to ignore that - but I, for one, need assurances that there will be more of the good than of the abuse.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Politics, Software
No Comments

Okay, now that I’m done jumping up and down saying “Russ Nelson read my blog! Russ Nelson read my blog! And he admitted it“… hey, cut me some slack, I don’t have that many visitors… I feel like we’re close to an understanding, but not quite there.

I agree that it’s a good idea to stop bad policies and recognise bad investments. But the system is interdependent - you can’t stop one policy without having a ripple effect on a bunch of other policies, which turns non-bad investments into bad investments. The order of operations is important: you cannot take away the bucket while the faucet is still running. It makes a mess. First you turn off the faucet, and then you take away the bucket.

It seems very much like the libertarian goal is “take away the bucket, it’s a bad policy”. The conservative goal should be (though the big-C Conservative rarely understands this) “let us find a better policy to replace this bucket”. When the libertarian observes that it is reasonably simple to install a drain where the bucket sits, the conservative points to the rope on which the bucket hangs.

“The bucket pulls this rope as it fills with water,” he explains. “The rope goes over a pulley and is attached to a large dumbbell. On the way up, the dumbbell will hit these scissors which will cut this line which releases that hammer which strikes a volleyball that knocks down those dominoes.”

And the libertarian says “OMG, you crazy bugger, WTF does all of this do?” - and he follows the chain and discovers that in the end, it opens the curtains. And he quite rightly observes that this is immensely stupid and there are much better ways to open the curtains.

“That’s true,” says the conservative, “but this works.” And regardless of the amount of work necessary to maintain it, and the amount of hassle involved in climbing over the delicate machinery that does it, he’s absolutely right: this system does, indeed, open the curtains.

And that’s really the crux of my disagreement with libertarians. Their platform is largely “this does not work well enough; let us eliminate it, and someone will design something that works better”. And they’re completely correct. But between the elimination and design, there is an indeterminate period of time during which it doesn’t work at all. Who will design this new plan? We don’t know. When will it be ready? We don’t know. And the pressure of not having anything that works is a massive incentive to take the first solution that comes along, regardless of how it compares to the old one. It’s actually worse than having a system designed by the lowest bidder - it’s a system designed by the fastest snake oil salesman.

I’ll add to this later, but I have a job interview… which is a perfect example of this in action. I have no job. I cannot afford to have no job. The first job I am offered, I will take, because a bird in the hand and all that. This will almost certainly not get me the best job possible, and in the long run it is a losing strategy - but I do not have a better one. I’ll elaborate this afternoon.

Filed under: Business, Economics, Notices, Politics
No Comments

Russ Nelson has a post today about misperceptions of libertarianism and some rebuttals.

I have one major problem with libertarianism. As a conservative Republican, I believe our institutions have value simply because they are institutions, and while I agree that in the long run we would be better off as a society without such institutions - I am primarily concerned about how we dismantle them.

Take public schooling, for example. Public schooling is funded by taxes. A great many taxes have been instituted to pay for it, many of them on unrelated items. It is common, for example, that a tax is levied on gambling activities which helps pay for public schools - a recent initiative here in Washington state would have legalised privately-owned slot machines if 15% of the proceeds were paid into the state’s public education coffers. (I voted no on that one. 15% is not enough. Slot machines are very nearly a license to print money on the backs of the poor. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that produces nothing of value. Get that figure closer to 50% and I might consider it.) Most state lotteries are only legal because they fund public education.

Now do away with public schooling. What happens to all these taxes? If the slot machine initiative had passed, the owners of slot machines would be sending money to the state for public schooling. What happens when public schooling is discontinued? Do they just keep sending the money to the government? Now that there’s no public education for the lottery to fund, don’t the state lotteries now become illegal? What happens to them?

Let’s look at the state lottery. How many people does it employ? How many printers does it contract to print scratch tickets? What happens to the tickets already at store counters? Imagine we send them back. How do we dispose of them? Take all the pick-six printing machines in all the convenience stores, and send them back. Where do they go? What happens to them? Clearly, so many people go to the local convenience store just to buy Lotto tickets, removing that machine will materially impact the store’s business. After all, while we’re here to buy Lotto tickets, we may as well get some coffee or a Slurpee or a giant soda, and - ooh, donuts!

That’s a significant impact. You shut down the public school, and you create a void in the market. You create a cascade effect where multiple other systems need to shut down with it, and the shutdown of those systems has a negative effect on supposedly unrelated systems. The private schools can’t handle the sudden glut of students; the parents, in most cases, cannot afford private school tuition. When you remove mandatory schooling, many parents will choose not to school their children at all. What do the parents do with these children all day? How does a two-income household adjust?

The problem, for me, is not theoretical. It’s logistical. Would we be better off as a society if there were no public education? Theoretically, yes. But there is. And there’s a transition process from a society that has public education to a society that doesn’t. Libertarians never really talk about the plan to make that transition. They simply say “this is better, we will do it this way” and they completely neglect the fundamental truth of human nature: people hate change. You have to make large changes slowly. And there is simply no plan from the libertarian camp to deal with even the larger aspects of the changes they propose. I can understand if they don’t address the issue of bad schools popping up and educating children badly; the situation will, after all, take care of itself in the marketplace. But what about the infrastructure that supports our public schools? Where does that infrastructure go? When, exactly, do the American people get their tax investment back so they can spend it on private education?

And that’s my problem with it. Every libertarian platform talks excessively about where we need to go and why we need to go there, but pays zero attention to how we make the trip. And when you come down to it, a Republican is more libertarian than a Democrat.

Filed under: Economics, Philosophy, Politics
No Comments