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Monday, February 17, 2014

i think he's mostly right. but.

1) the whole dictators-for-israel thing goes back decades. egypt is a particular example. the peace treaty has always been unpopular in egypt and would probably not survive real democracy. so, the americans send them billions a year to prop up the military to prevent democracy. israel isn't the only factor (there was a suez crisis, but it's sort of ancient history), but it is a really important one.

2) 'stabilize' is basically an orwellian term that really means 'destabilize'.

3) american hegemony is weakened but still in tact. they simply can't remove assad due to threats from other players (most importantly russia). but that shouldn't lead to an exaggeration of iran's soft power. if you look at the agreement, it was basically the united states enforcing it's terms in exchange for an almost trivial reversal of sanctions. the greater context is iran turning to other countries. consider the banking embargo, which was supposed to make it impossible for iran to sell oil. instead, india and china and others started buying iranian oil with GOLD. turkey has been unhappy with the sanctions, and they're a really key us ally. the proper term for that is blowback: blowback on a financial level. it would be catastrophic to us interests if the embargo stimulated the rest of the world to ditch the dollar as a reserve currency rather than iran being isolated - it's both a failure of the sanctions and a weakening of american financial power. oops? absolutely. so, is that iranian soft power? sort of, but not really. it's more of a strategic error by the americans, followed by a sort of compensation for it. but, even with the error and it's possible consequences, the americans still maintain enough hegemony to assert themselves and possibly reverse the effects of the errors. so, what the americans are trying to do is weaken the effects of that blowback by pulling them in with honey rather than vinegar, but it's a sort of acidic honey if you see what i'm saying. it's transparemtly cynical. very tough terms. i think the fundamental realization that the americans have come to is that their hegemony is fragile, but that's a big step away from abandoning it. what that means is the iranians are still powerless to reject american demands, even as the americans are being forced to adjust to a failed policy. in the long run, the strategy hasn't fundamentally changed. the americans are still actively pursuing regime change. but they need to be more subtle, because if they aren't then things might unravel very badly. that's maybe a triumph of realism over neo-conservatism? two sides of the same coin, though. another bad move and the iranians could escape their grasp - but the thing is they realize that would mean becoming a protectorate of china, and they're obviously not going to see that as their first choice, so they largely remain optionless. in the larger picture, then, that's not really iranian soft power. it's more of a satellite being stuck between two powers and trying to find a way to make the best of it.

4) he's really exaggerating the opposition to assad. syrians seem to have temporarily aligned with the government as a lesser evil. ironically, the best way to actually remove assad would be to pull the foreign islamist fighters out and let the people rise against him. but, that moment may now be lost for many years, as the state effectively mobilizes it's citizens against the terrorist groups.

whatever assad's crimes, it's hard to blame syrians for choosing secular stability over religious fundamentalism. i mean, it's the old "would you rather saddam husseein was still in power?" canard. the reality is that a huge number of iraqis would say "yes". i think commentators really need to work that out more strenuously in understanding the depth of the opposition to these islamist groups.

there's this desire to project this third option that it seems like syrians realize isn't realistic in the short term. in the short term, the focus seems to be on saving the country from the fascists, rather than aligning with them to topple the government.

it's a constant problem. even in a simple occupy context, there were nazis popping up all over the place. we decided it was more important to kick the nazis out. so, for me, reproducing that line of thinking is very easy. if i'm choosing between upholding parliament and shooting nazis? it's not even a choice, give me a gun. the only good fascist is a dead one.

so, the revolution in syria is not likely to carry on.

but it doesn't fall under the category of "blunder" the same way that the screwed up sanctions do because the crux of the operation was to *prevent* democracy in syria (assad was building a constitution at the time).

it's not the preferred outcome, but it's an acceptable result in the short run.

to an extent, i'm reminded of the spanish or russian revolutions. there were far deeper anarchist movements there than in contemporary syria, and there was a lot of debate, but in the end they had to align with statist interests to fight a far greater threat - franco and the bolsheviks, respectively. they lost in both cases. but they picked the right side of the fight.

it's interesting today, fwiw, that nobody talks about the slaughter that the republican forces were no doubt responsible for. i'm deducing this, i can't cite anything.

i should probably get a good book on the topic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29

it's maybe perilous to draw an exact analogy, but you get the point.

war's a shitty deal all around.

i mean, we see what's happened in libya, and that is far less organized. just total racist and sectarian slaughter. i shudder to think at would what happen if these groups actually succeed, and i think "the average syrian" is well aware of what the stakes are in supporting assad to defeat them.

if anything, support seems to have strengthened. there was supposedly a huge pro-assad rally yesterday.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians-support-assad-western-propaganda

presstv should be read critically, rather than dismissed. they may be exaggerating. i can't possibly know, i can just read the reports skeptically.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/02/16/350993/syrians-hold-progovernment-rallies/

deathtokoalas
the people that censored this didn't understand it. strangely, that's often the case with artistic censorship.

it's anti-hierarchical, but it's explicitly rejecting violence as a means to that end and pointing out that attempts at violent revolution always backfire.

also, for those that are arguing about it, the offspring were, from the start, a middle point between old punk and what i'm going to call corporate punk. they have a certain affinity with the ending points of the first wave of punk - later damned, some dead kennedys and certainly bad religion. but from the very beginning they infused it with a very pop aesthetic. that's not to say they engineered the idea, but they certainly took it to a different level. strangely, though, the thing that made them stand out was a softening of the crossover sound. there's a really strong thrash narrative through their early work that clashed really well with the poppier influence that wasn't just from stuff like the descendants but also bands like the police.

think of it like this: you could very easily take out the lyrics on any offspring record up to 1997 and insert blink 182 lyrics and it wouldn't really stand out that much. it's like they had a pop-punk sound with an anarcho-punk ideology.

that being said, you can tell holland didn't lean completely anarcho-punk. people are often shocked to learn that there were actually republican punk bands in the period. southern california was a very wealthy area, and a certain right-wing subculture did arise from that. my hypothesis has always been that holland started there and grew out of it. you can hear it in his later stuff, like "why don't you get a job?", for example. that's kind of a conservative tune. even 'come out and play' has a certain right-wing vibe to it.

...and it landed them in some hot water with their peers. they really wanted to be on epitaph and eventually got there but gurewitz always hated them, initially rejected them repeatedly and literally sold them to columbia the first chance he got.

so, they don't really fit into either category. along with bad religion, and to a lesser extent fugazi, they form a bridge between punk and pop. the difference is just that they were way more successful than the others...

i don't know how much of their fan base really followed them back to their punk roots. i'm sure enough did. for me, they were the first punk band i really heard (well, excluding nirvana). smash was out when i was 13. had the disc. had the shirt. just from looking around at the other kids around me, it seemed like the same kids that were listening to offspring in grade 7 were listening to avril in grade 12. it seems like most people followed the punk pop trend forwards the way that mtv presented it to them. i hope they weren't listening to thursday after they graduated :\

but i have to say that if i were to run across them today as a new punk band, i'd be a lot more critical of what they have to say, and i can entirely understand why they were rejected by so much of the punk rock community. they were always half very punk, and half very not punk and in a very strange and almost contradictory way.

but i'm glad i'm not a trendy asshole :P

slumdog
Well maybe violent revolution always backfire but maybe killing a president or two would not harm, after all now they can just fuck us in the ass as long and as hard they want without any consequences but maybe if a couple of heads rolled just maybe they'd think twice..

deathtokoalas
nah. you need to think structurally. the president is the fall guy. you're supposed to hate him; keeps the oligarchs safe.

lincoln's death accomplished nothing, and they took out kennedy from the inside.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

"Of such liberty as I have now described, it is impossible there should be an excess. Government is an institution for the benefit of the people governed, which they have the power to model as they please; and to say that they can have too much of this power, is to say that there ought to be a power in the state superior to that which gives it being, and from which all jurisdiction in it is derived. Licentiousness, which has been commonly mentioned, as an extreme of liberty, is indeed its opposite. It is government by the will of rapacious individuals in opposition to the will of the community made known and declared in the laws. A free state, at the same time that it is free itself, makes all its members free by excluding licentiousness, and guarding their persons and property and good name against insult. It is the end of all just government, at the same time that it secures the liberty of the public against foreign injury, to secure the liberty of the individual against private injury. I do not, therefore, think it strictly just to say that it belongs to the nature of government to entrench on private liberty. It ought never to do this, except as far as the exercise of private liberty encroaches on the liberties of others. That is, it is licentiousness it restrains and liberty itself only when used to destroy liberty."

this is from a text that was popular amongst revolutionaries at the time of the american revolution. it's rooted in this idea of "moral freedom", which basically means the freedom to avoid temptation from satan. by this logic, it is reasonable to lynch the gays because they're infringing on your freedom to not be exposed to "immoral" ideas. which is sort of like they do in russia.

that's of course the exact opposite conception we have today. today, we'd talk more about intellectual freedom. this text is really hard to read through as a result of this totally backwards kind of thinking. this guy wasn't a conservative in his period, either, he was a prominent liberal that communicated with some of the early anarchists. he had a big influence on fairly radical liberals like jefferson and paine.

it's just the different concept of freedom that's really startling. so, consider "free love", for example. price (the author) would consider "free love" to be a type of slavery - to satan. in order to emancipate the wicked from the enslavement to evil, "free love" should be restricted by the state. a free society would therefore be one where sexuality was highly regulated, in order to ensure that we do not become enslaved by our own passions.

that's not some dystopian fiction, it's coming from a text written by a leading religious scholar that was one of the dominant ideological arguments underlying the american revolution. this is the concept of "freedom" that north american society was constructed upon - the freedom to not be exposed to ideas that differ from the state's (and church's) official pronunciations.

the same logic would apply to homosexuality, drug use or any other kind of "passion". freedom, to these people, meant the state intervening to ensure we do not become enslaved by our passions. slavery meant giving into satanic pleasures, and even being forced to tolerate ideas that differed from the norm.

i guess the whole tyranny of the majority thing eventually worked itself out. but when you read the constitution or the declaration within the context that the mob understood the word "liberty" as, the whole thing becomes a ridiculous joke....

like, their concept of liberty necessarily implied that society has the right to oppress minority views. they would actually argue with a straight face that a society that tolerates minorities is unfree - *because* they're forced to tolerate those with minority moral views. the whole idea of freedom, to them, was intrinsically related to the ability of the majority to attack minorities if they didn't uphold social norms because it would threaten to unravel the status quo.

so, when you're reading jefferson or paine or whomever else that should be in your mind. "liberty" meant something entirely different to these people than it does to you or i.

Friday, February 14, 2014

deathtokoalas
i tend to agree with damon, but i find he suffers from a sort of "hot head syndrome", which forces him to lose focus in the midst of an argument. the reporter offended his moral sensibilities, and his emotions took over.

there are maybe some bad teachers, sure. the first question is "what does it mean to say a teacher is bad?", and the answer is generally to do with students' performance. arguing that they need incentives to work harder is basically reducing the problem of under-achieving students to an issue of lazy teachers. that's what the reason reporter is really saying: students have bad marks because the damned teachers are too fucking lazy and those lazy, good-for-nothing teachers should be fired. judging by his response, i think damon realized that, but it made him so upset that he couldn't respond reasonably.

of course, if such a policy were actually put in place then the state would no doubt interpret 'lazy' as 'not white, anglo-saxon and protestant'.

a real libertarian wouldn't blame student under-performance on teachers, they'd have students and parents take responsibility for their own behaviour. blaming teachers for student performance is very much collectivist thinking.

but, if we acknowledge that there is a problem (and it's not that teachers are lazy), is firing people going to actually accomplish anything? first, you have to ask what the problem actually is. is it a systemic problem? one to do with administrative policy? if so, firing and rehiring is a waste of time. the only thing that could justify actually firing is to focus on personal defects. if it's not laziness, what is it? drug abuse? so, again, the debate collapses to a baseless personal attack.

nobody debates that there's a lot of things that can be done to improve public schooling, but thinking that firing teachers is going to solve anything is a symptom of the larger problems we face, rather than a solution of any sort.

Ryan Darling
he didn't lose sight for a second.. you fell victim to it by missing it... that was total alpha/domination on the reporter... Through logic

deathtokoalas
c'mon. he was less than articulate when pressed....and obviously very upset.

keith hutchison
to be fair don't you see that from all ideologues?

deathtokoalas
i don't think that having an ideology necessarily blinds one to reason, or that people that tend to react emotionally are necessarily more ideological. nor am i suggesting that the reporter had anything worthwhile to say. i'm an empiricist, but i don't reject theory on that deep a level. theory is useful. the problem is when people refuse to allow evidence to alter it.

i think it's more about anger management. to what extent that's real and what extent it's an act, i don't know.

allixpeeke
You write, "Arguing that they need incentives to work harder is basically reducing the problem of under-achieving students to an issue of lazy teachers. that's what the reason reporter is really saying."

I disagree. Merely mentioning one important factor does not mean it is the only factor. If one infers that the reporter is claiming that the problem reduces entirely to unmotivated teachers, one misinfers.

There are multiple factors worth noting. A teacher may start off highly motivated and, over time, become discouraged upon seeing student performance. This may cause a teacher with job security to, whether consciously or not, put in marginally less effort. Would a teacher with no job security allow pessimism affect her or his performance? Perhaps, but one would have to suspect that such teachers would be marginally more inclined to be vigilant about not letting her or his performance slip.

Another factor is that teachers who start off appropriately suited to teaching one generation of students might not be as appropriately suited to teaching another generation of teachers. Naturally, some humans are better able to adapt to changing environments than others, and the same applies to teachers adapting to changing social conditions among students.

You write, "If such a policy were actually put in place then the state would no doubt interpret 'lazy' as 'not white, anglo-saxon and protestant'."

That's why we need to have a complete separation of education and state. The state should not be able to determine anything about education, should not even be involved in education. Parents, unlike the state, have the incentive to make sure that their children get the most out of their education, and parents will always prefer to hire teachers who are able to provide that quality education. Parents will always take performance into account before other factors, like race or ethnicity, whereas the state, having no capacity for empathy, will be more likely to let petty prejudices influence policy. Moreover, in completely eliminating government involvement in education, we will see new approaches to educating springing up and offering alternatives that, in many cases, will be far better for kids than the government's one-size-fits-all top-down approach.

You write, "A real libertarian wouldn't blame student under-performance on teachers, they'd have students and parents take responsibility for their own behaviour. blaming teachers for student performance is very much collectivist thinking."

It doesn't make one a non-real libertarian to acknowledge that the quality of the teacher's teaching ability can impact a student's ability to comprehend the material being taught. Teachers who do not care whether their students are actually understanding the material should also take personal responsibility for their role in the situation.

Allow me to present some anecdotal evidence. In high school, the one and only C I got was in trigonometry. I certainly wanted to understand trigonometry on a conceptual level, since I believed that understanding it on a conceptual level would help me understand it on a practical level. But, it was never taught to me on a conceptual level. Instead, it seemed we were expected to memorise formulas, not understand them.

Luckily, partway through the year, a student teacher came in to teach. The real teacher sat back and let her. I say "luckily" because this student teacher was actually doing a better job at teaching trigonometry than the real teacher. Thanks to this student teacher, I started to actually "get" it. I started to actually catch on and learn. Then, a few months later, the student teacher left and the actual teacher started teaching again. What happened? I went right back to not understanding. That's when I realised: this teacher simply didn't care. I spent the remainder of the year wishing the student teacher would come back.

It's pretty bad when a student teacher is doing your teaching job better than you.

Yes, students have to take responsibility, but let's not pretend that all teachers are equal, that they bear no responsibility.

You write, "[B]ut, if we acknowledge that there is a problem (and it's not that teachers are lazy), is firing people going to actually accomplish anything?"

Again, it's not entirely an issue of laziness. While that trigonometry teacher I referenced may be a good example of laziness or at least of apathy, some teachers might be better than others at relaying ideas, facts, and concepts to students through their individual teaching styles. Imagine a hypothetical history teacher who simply stands in front of the class lecturing, and imagine another hypothetical history teacher who finds interesting ways to relate, say, the Revolutionary War to events happening in the lives of the students themselves, or who finds fun ways to get the students interested in the Magna Carta. This first hypothetical teacher may say, "I don't understand. This teaching style worked very well for students in the '80s, why are today's students so different?" Adaptability to the changing needs of students is probably just as much, if not more, of a factor as marginal laziness or apathy of secure teachers.

But, in answer to your question, it's not about actually firing teachers. It's about having the ability to easily fire bad teachers. As long as teachers are able to be fired, they will be inclined to try harder than they would if they cannot be fired. (It's very similar to guns. Most of the time, when guns are used to protect a man from being murdered or a woman from being raped, no bullets need even be fired. There are documented cases where a woman has been approached at night by a guy that worried her, and where the guy turns around and leaves simply by seeing she has a gun.) Just knowing that I can be fired will make me work harder than I would if I knew I couldn't be fired, and this is true of any job, even if it's a job I love (or, especially if it's a job I love).

But, to change gears just slightly, in the Sudbury model of education, schools are run directly by the students. Every year, students directly elect what teachers they wish to work in the Sudbury model schools. Students naturally elect the teachers they think do the best job, because what student wants to take lessons from a teacher who is crap? If the teachers do well, they will be reelected in future years, and if they don't, they will not be reelected, effectively meaning they've been fired by their students. Can one imagine a better model for ensuring that teachers tailor themselves to the needs of their students?

While I highly prefer the Sudbury model of education, virtually anything is better than government involvement in education. Government should have no involvement in hiring, firing, funding, taxing, or regulating education. If you own a school, you're going to want to hire the best teachers you can, just as your competitors will want to hire the best teachers they can. Meanwhile, parents will purchase the services of those schools that they believe will do the best job teaching their children and offering their children things the children actually need to survive and thrive in society.

E.g., I wouldn't want my children going to a school where faith is being shoved down their throats, so that is a factor I'd take into account. I also wouldn't want a school that promotes intolerance toward homosexuals, etc. And, I would want a school that has a good reputation at teaching kids. These are three important factors to me. If we had more competition between schools, we would see so many different kinds of school, parents would have so many choices, it would be far better for everyone than what we have now. (Further, without government involvement in education, competition would drive education costs down, which means that we would be paying less than we have to pay for under the present tax-funded system.)

Respectfully yours,
Alex Peak

deathtokoalas
you're missing the point.

can you provide a cogent argument as to how incentives for teachers could possibly have any effect on grades? because that's what i'm rejecting off hand as a ridiculous idea. in order for this to make any sense you have to establish a connection between how hard teachers work and how high students' grades are. i'm going to demand you do this before you continue the discussion, because there's nothing else that can be said until that is demonstrated. and, yes, you have the burden of proof because it's a positive statement.

you provided an anecdotal response, but it doesn't make any sense to me. if you were understanding something better when the student teacher came in, it would have to coincide with an increase in effort on your behalf. the student teacher certainly couldn't make you understand something better by explaining it differently. if you didn't understand it in the first place, rewording it isn't going to magically make you understand it! it had to be something you did. perhaps your interest in the course increased as a result of somebody closer to your age group teaching it.

"Would a teacher with no job security allow pessimism affect her or his performance? Perhaps, but one would have to suspect that such teachers would be marginally more inclined to be vigilant about not letting her or his performance slip."

what performance? what slip? what does how teachers scrawl things on a blackboard have to do with whether or not students take initiative to control their own lives?

there's a much larger, underlying problem with this perspective, which is really very much nanny state thinking and not at all libertarian. it's the idea of blaming other people for your own problems. rather than taking responsibility for being subpar parents when their kids don't do well in school, millions of middle class americans want to blame somebody else. teachers become an easy scapegoat for a society that doesn't want to take responsibility for any aspect of their own lives.

there is a problem with student initiative, but there's nothing teachers can do about it. i return to my initial conclusion: thinking that these problems can be solved by threatening to fire them is a symptom of what is wrong with our society, not the kind of thinking that is going to provide us with answers.

regardless, even if i agree that some teachers have better methods than others (and i deny this - i think it's 100% up to the student, and it essentially doesn't matter who is teaching or whether they care or how hard they work), then the solution is greater training. i mean, if there's some magic trick that can get kids to understand things better and teacher A understands it then there's no reason that teacher B shouldn't be trained to use those methods as well. arguing otherwise reduces to something about the personality of teacher B - that they're incapable of learning the method, unwilling to learn the method or disinterested in learning the method. threatening to fire them doesn't teach them that method, it just creates an unhealthy teaching environment where teachers are more concerned about losing their jobs than they are about doing their jobs. it's consequently not a rational approach to deal with the issue of underachieving students, but a way to scapegoat teachers into taking the blame for students - and a way to put teachers into a precarious position where they are forced to make further labour concessions.

the reality is that there isn't a magic technique. students are going to respond to things differently. especially with math (and i have a master's degree in math, fwiw), there's no way to do it except to sit down and teach yourself. there's a bit of a quip from a famous mathematician of the classical era that, when asked by a king to be taught mathematics, said "there's no royal road to mathematics". that is to say that even the king was going to have to sit down and do the work. there's no shortcut. and that certainly applies to just about anything else, excluding a handful of arts that rely purely on talent - things you can't teach at all.

when you look at studies regarding private and public schools, it all washes out when you control it for class. that is to say that what students bring to class is the dominant factor, not who is teaching the courses. if you take an inner city public school and swap teachers with an upper class private school, the grades will not change to reflect the teacher. rather, the teacher's performance will change to reflect the audience.

what we learn from that is that we need a cultural shift regarding how we raise our children, not a way to beat teachers into submission.

"Losos said Lenski’s talk was particularly appropriate because it occurred on the 205th anniversary of Darwin’s birth. In the spirit of the ongoing Olympics, Losos said that if there were ever an all-star team of evolutionary biologists, Lenski would be its captain."

man, my dad used to use that ridiculous analogy all the time, and i'd make fun of him for it, then he'd laugh at me for making fun of him and use it more to irk me. it honestly bothered me, though. sports analogies, in general, bother me. you never see other things used to explain sports.

"when wayne gretzky scored his 92nd goal that year, he made himself the albert einstein of hockey."

you just don't hear that, because sports are thought of as more intuitive and easier to grasp. well, i'm hear to tell you that's not true. i find physics far more intuitive than sports, which i don't understand at all.

and now it's in the fucking harvard gazette.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/work-it/

the reasons the vote was expanded had little to do with building a better democracy. it was a type of gerrymandering. we don't tend to see it like that, even as we're voting for liberal politicians that have no interest in listening to us. yet, if you understand the expansion of suffrage in those terms, as one really should, then reversing it is little more than continuing forward the process of gerrymandering.

the way the debate is framed in a boardroom context has basically no resemblance to how it's framed in a popular context.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/14/investing/tom-perkins-vote/index.html

Thursday, February 13, 2014

actually, no. i've never lied to anybody. that interpretation of me is not empirical, but constructed out of your imperfect perceptions. it's always been your mental construction of me, rather than my own interpretation of myself. when your prejudices collapse, you blame your victim? no. don't throw accusations at me for not conforming to your idealizations. realize your own oppression.

there's all these ancient cities around the world that are practically buried. consider antioch, which is now in turkey. it was founded as the capital of a greco-syrian empire that one of alexander the great's generals created, around 300 BCE. it was a really important city in the roman empire for the entire time it controlled the levant, even holding one of the most important bishops (patriarchs) in the christian church. it became arab/muslim for a while, then got attacked in the crusades, and is today just a pile of rubble at the mouth of a river.

i could just imagine wandering into the place, though, in the period between when it was destroyed and when it got buried by geological processes. there would have been places to live there, free of rent or labour. i mean, you'd have to figure out how to plant and water some food, but besides that it's just free living. did people do that? i mean, it obviously couldn't have happened on too great a scale, otherwise the place wouldn't be rubble. but i'm interested in knowing who might have lived in these ruins and what kind of a society they may have had.

i guess a modern parallel would be ghost towns out west. i mean, they're called ghost towns because nobody (supposedly) lives in them. but, how empty are they actually? do people (besides the aboriginal inhabitants, but that's a different kind of ownership) actually own these structures? if i walked into an old house in ghost town, saskatchewan and just started fixing it up, is anybody going to charge me rent or demand i pay taxes?

i know there's this common law idea of gaining ownership over a structure by "improving it", but that's something else.

this is an extreme example, the climate's a little much for my tastes, but there must be literally thousands of abandoned houses here:

Uranium City was a thriving town until 1982, with its population approaching the 5,000 threshold required to achieve city status in the province. The closure of the mines on 30 June 1982 led to economic collapse, with most residents of the town leaving. It was later designated as a northern settlement with about 300 people remaining. The local hospital closed in the spring of 2003. The current population is 201,[1] including a number of Métis and First Nations people.[4]

i mean, a place like that, you can't just scatter seeds in your yard. that's far enough north it might even have permafrost.

then again, the permafrost is melting.

this is a little more reasonable. some of the houses may be unliveable, but smashing the doors down on the church might be something like discovering an empty castle.

there's probably ghost towns in southern ontario.

like i say, i believe the common law on this is if you smash the doors down and fix the place up, you take ownership of it.

like, check this abandoned church out. somebody is obviously maintaining the lawn. it's still an interesting possibility.

i'm stable and happy where i am, but it's an idea that crossed my mind and something i'm going to really contemplate should the shit hit the fan. i'll have to check the common law a little more closely, obviously.

http://www.ghosttowns.com/canada/ontario/wesleyville.html

always liked this song, although you'll need to find a translation if your german is rusty.

...and it actually turns out that burke's text is, itself, a rebuttal to this piece, which i should read and analyze before i analyze burke in an attempt to analyze paine. how far back is this going to go?

http://www.constitution.org/price/price_3.htm

actually, burke's response is not to this text but to a sermon published in 1789. note to self that the editor in the burke text has just discredited himself.

i'm going to go through that text anyways because it's fairly short.

this appears to be the text that was actually rebutted:

http://www.constitution.org/price/price_8.htm

yeah. the text (not the sermon) is a response to a text attributed to a james mcpherson, which is considered a response to the declaration of independence itself.

actually, no, that can't be right, it's anachronistic - if the mcpherson text was written in response to the declaration (and it's in the title, so there's no guesswork), it would be after the declaration, which was after the price text. price quotes the mcpherson text in his preface to the fifth edition, and dates it march, 1776, but this must be a later addition to the text, and an unfortunately placed date. so, i'm not going through with that for right now. i do have a copy of the constitution (written later) on my shelf though and will eventually get to it.

rather, it seems to be that price interpreted the mcpherson text partially as a response to his own, rather than only as a response to the declaration. and the declaration, of course, is not very long, so it makes sense to think that any response to it would seek some other source.

but that's not what i'm doing right now.

in context, i think it's important to realize that the american revolution was a dispute amongst members of the trans-oceanic british upper class, rather than something to do with a popular uprising (indeed, popular uprisings were brutally suppressed in this period, with a level of barbarity that would shock most people). people's histories of the period are valuable, but in a way that supplements rather than deletes the upper class philosophical debates.

i mean, all these people - paine, burke, price - were born in britain. only paine even bothered to visit america.

the "philosopher's circle" that price entertained franklin, jefferson, paine and others in was located in london, not philadelphia. it also included the circle of british liberals that first articulated the collection of ideas know known as anarchism.

that goes back to what i said about paine: you want to root for these people, but you know they're out to lunch on some really fundamental assumptions.

and it also goes back to what i said about understanding the american revolution as an internal restructuring of power within the boundaries of the british empire.

it's kind of like when the center of the roman empire moved from rome to constantinople. we sometimes talk about the "byzantine empire" as though it were something different, but we don't forget that it was fundamentally the "eastern roman empire". there were periods under, say, justinian, when the "eastern roman empire" controlled most of spain, africa and italy, while rome was being pillaged by germans. in these periods, the eastern empire was THE empire - and was merely the *roman* empire. likewise, we should be explicitly speaking of the united states both as the western british empire and as THE british empire, especially after 1945.

in the end, the russians might conquer london. well, they might. but the british empire will carry on from washington.

another sort of interesting comparison is that rome was founded on a weak memory of greece - not ethnically, but culturally. the historical foundations of london are blurry, even today, but exist somewhere in a roman cultural tradition. as athens birthed rome, rome birthed london, which birthed washington: stages of a western empire. likewise, there are stages of an eastern empire: persepolis birthed antioch birthed constantinople birthed kiev birthed moscow. and, so understanding the conflict between london and moscow (and now washington and moscow) can be reduced to the conflict between rome and constantinople, and before that between athens and persepolis. the geography has shifted, but the basic struggle (and a lot of the same themes of republicanism v despotism) has remained constant.

again, that's a lot of stasis.

so, i'm coming to the conclusion that burke was basically hired by a clique of aristocrats to represent them in ways they could not represent themselves. that is to say that the aristocrats he represented realized they didn't have the legal knowledge or rhetorical eloquence (and, perhaps, also, the idle time to lay out legal arguments in rhetorically eloquent ways) to advance their causes, so they hired him to act as a front. it's kind of like a michael ignatieff or late hitchens type thing. more generally, the rich still maintain a clique of lawyers to use to get what they want in private life, they just don't see the use in paying for philosophers any more.

when you put it in context, it's hard to even take him seriously. i mean, he's being paid to provide an argument to advance a desired conclusion. he's the guy the aristocrats hired to argue in favour of aristocratic government, to uphold the status quo, which were their own interests. there's no intellectual integrity in that position. it's the definition of charlatanism.

however, it also sort of turns him into a rube who's just arguing for his own job security.

preliminary thoughts that will no doubt evolve through the course of reading this...

i mean, i realize he was sort of a liberal in some ways, but something i'm going to be focusing on is how his brand of liberalism may have actually led to greater benefits for the aristocracy than the bourgeoisie, or more generally how those two classes merged together - specifically in the context of controlling foreign markets. i've never really been comfortable with the way marxists narrate this because i've seen a lot of empirical evidence that suggests a high level of continuity between aristocracy and bourgeoisie. that is to say that as the aristocracy took advantage of religion to advance it's interests (in complex ways that sometimes backfired, or sometimes led to submission), it also took advantage of "free trade" in a way to extend it's influence. that's leaning more to a theory of class *stasis* and class *metamorphosis* than one of class revolution. or, if you want to think about anthropology, it's a continuity hypothesis.

so, to what extent did burke more or less co-opt liberal economics as a tool for the aristocracy to increase their control, particularly in foreign markets?

i think these kinds of "mercantilist" ideas of "free trade" are still with us, are even the dominant form of global organization. they may not be the same when written out, but the general idea of twisting market theory into a tool to prop up an elite is.

i also think there's a comparison to something like fordism, which used quasi-socialist ideas with a similar goal.

but, the question i want to ask is whether burke had the foresight - and i think it is foresight - to realize that the ideas liberals were promoting would actually work in favour of the aristocracy, and if that was the reason he had this liberal streak.

yeah, it's interesting that he seems to have jumped back and forth from being a spokesperson of aristocrats with shipping interests and being a spokesperson for merchants directly, including large family-run shipping interests in the new york colony.

i haven't read the speech and probably won't but the notes here are interesting:

http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv4c1.html

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

yeah. if i'm going to bother deconstructing the paine, i should deconstruct the burke first. i knew i picked up something by burke at a garage sale (i wouldn't expect to connect with burke too deeply, but for a quarter, you garb something like that), but wasn't sure if it was the reflections on the revolution. it was. so, that first, then the paine.

in fact, i'm certain i picked the paine & burke up at the same garage sale. somebody must have taken a course...probably 50 years ago.

well, actually, the editions are '87 and '92.

so, i'm considering setting my clock to cst. i live in the eastern time zone. allow me to explain.

i grew up in ottawa, which is several hundred kilometres east of where i am now, windsor. so, the sun came up earlier there, and set a little earlier as well. yet, i always wanted the sun to come up even earlier, not later. drats. foiled. yet, i feel if i set my clocks to cst, it will overcompensate in the direction i'd prefer.

then i started wondering if maybe everybody was on cst anyways, and it's weird that i'm still on est.

well, you'd have to think that a substantial number of people in the est edge of the midwest live on cst. those boundaries are probably merely a suggestion.

"see, this is why we can't have anarchism - i bet they think they can just pick their own time zones"

stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides (bandstand mix) (original upload)

i downloaded bandstand for the drums because the way i wrote the track required something that would read general midi through track 10. these are the drums that will be worked into the final mix. it's basically a way to play old midi files through vst, so i figure it qualifies as a different card mix.

written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 12, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/bandstand-mix

you know, i admit i've got it pretty good living in the heart of a white supremacist, colonial empire. but am i supposed to want to exchange it for packaging socks in a factory? movements that place labour at the core of a moral outlook frighten me.\

but i realize it's unfair to dump it off to some other entire universe, under conditions of almost literal slavery. so, automation.

it seems to be that the global economy is distributing resources more fairly than we'd like to realize. we're just looking at a different level of fairness than the economy is, if i can anthropomorphize the economy for a moment. see, when the economy sees wealth distribution, it thinks of it in terms of data collections, which correspond with rules put in place by modern countries, or perhaps trade blocks - or even more precisely blocks within trade blocks. so, it thinks that the level of wealth in spain should be closer to the mean level of wealth, which happens to be a much lower standard of living. meanwhile, conditions are improving very slightly in large, developing economies. so, it's a transfer of wealth from certain more wealthy areas to certain less wealthy areas. that's a more even distribution, in that sense. that process is also happening in more developed economies, but is taking longer to collapse because they're more developed. look at detroit.

of course, profits are being hoarded by an elite, so we speak of inequality - and are correct to. but it obscures the global homogenization of class that an open economy is allowing, making middle and working class conditions (finally) roughly comparable on a global scale. the open economy still has a lot to do in reshaping global wealth distribution to establish that comparison without being trivializing, but it is the trajectory that the global economy is heading in.

the flaw in understanding equality like this is that it conceptually separates control into two classes - a global controlling class and a global consuming class. the consuming class may be homogenized, perhaps even to the benefit of the controlling class, but it must be limited in resources to a fixed percentage, while the controlling class takes...control....of virtually all the resources. we must necessarily fall for people in other countries to rise, because we're budgeted to share a resource allowance.

to get to thinking about solutions that increase global living conditions without impacting living conditions in the empire requires discussing ways to go into the bank accounts of the controllers. i'd openly advocate that in as blunt terms as that.

once the resource allocation has been adjusted to more reasonable levels, a global homogenization of class sounds like an acceptable outcome. so, automation for all, then.

to put it another way, maybe you've seen the memes about rising income inequality in north america. the rising inequality is also a global equalization trend, in terms of how wealth is distributed to consumers.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

three midi mixes of stuck in the middle of an alley closing in on all sides

1) played through winamp on a sb live! and captured in a sound editor.

written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.

2) played through winamp on an m-audio delta and captured in a sound editor.

written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/m-audio-mix

3) played through winamp on a sb live! through directmusic and captured in a sound editor.

written in early 2001. initially rendered feb 11, 2014.

http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/directmusic-mix

it's always fun watching viruses fail on my system because i deleted all the functionality in the operating system that they rely on to do stuff. i have no use for the code, it's just sitting there waiting to be exploited.

the first reboot after installing evaluation software will come up with a stream of error messages that will go away on the next reboot: cannot find xxx.dll. that's right. not there. sorry to disappoint you, nefarious script dial, but i just didn't think that file was a good idea to leave sitting there. my foresight is your misfortune.

jessica amber murray
it's funny, you know. i want to talk about the basic respect that's demanded of people to build a voluntary society with equal distribution, and have tried to surround myself with people that i think demonstrate that respect, but how about something as simple as febreezing after you smoke when you live in an apartment, so as not to affect your neighbours? how many people have the presence of mind to think of that?

that's why i'm really of the opinion that anarchism needs to merge more realistically with biology. and it's important that we are talking about anarchism and not authoritarian socialism - let us make that absolutely clear - in merging left-wing ideas with biology. evolution isn't something that should be guided by a vanguard. but, maybe the "shift in consciousness" that the new age weirdos talk about, if analyzed empirically, is a proposed evolutionary event. maybe it's the real preconditions that socialism requires, rather than something about economic growth.

i've noticed there's a dog that walks around the neighbourhood sometimes. it's a little terrier - one of the cute ones. not quite a lap dog, but not much bigger than a decent sized cat. i've noticed it (for i am unaware of it's gender, and don't want to make assumptions - it's interesting how we can talk of a dog abstractly as an 'it', but would be offensive if we spoke of an ambiguously gendered human as an it, and what's really odd about that is that the argument is actually over grammar, it has to do with what category that object falls into - a fully arbitrary classification done by bored monks or something) always takes the sidewalks. that's an interesting observation for a dog, that you wouldn't think would really care about those kinds of social conventions.

the first time i saw it, i thought it was lost. it just came strolling up the sidewalk, looked at me, and kept on turning up the sidewalk around the corner. i looked around, didn't see anybody, figured i should probably take it home and put up posters or something. so, i started calling it. just, "hey dog" - and it turned around. a dog that spends time with humans picks up more language than i think we realize. so, it knew it was a dog, and turned around to look at who was addressing it. i started doing the thigh pounding and the c'mereing, as well as the hand signals, and, sure enough, it followed me. but it only followed a short way, before it turned off into a yard. it had taken my interest as a signal that it was time to go home, but didn't need any help finding the way.

see, that's a creature that can behave in a society in a way that it's ancestors can't. you could not let a wolf walk down the street in a neighbourhood with children, call it over to you when you see it, and then watch it trot off indifferently. there would be eaten people if we did that. it's a highly artificial selection, but it's a measurable level of evolution in social behaviour.

Dave K
the problem with applying that kind of rubric to humans, is that human beings don't make decisions in the same way dogs do

jessica amber murray
well, the dog thing was more an easily understood example of how social evolution can happen. i pointed out it was artificial, and that that's a bad idea with humans. i don't propose that we should be artificially selected by breeders to conform to some idealization of human nature. however, i do think that the biology is relevant in understanding how human societies have organized in the past and may organize in the future.

as to how different it really is? there's certainly some differences, but i think the similarities probably outweigh them. that's less to minimize human intelligence and more to stress dog intelligence.

Dave K
humans tend to draw a lot of influences from culture and intergenerational memory

jessica amber murray
yeah, i think you may actually be trying to suggest that the genetics are different - that artificial selection for behavioural traits doesn't work on humans. i think that's half right. i think that the genetic situation is too complex to control through selective breeding experiments, but that with more sophisticated tools behaviour could in theory be bred. i don't think we *should*. the question isn't whether culture is more important than genetics; i think the key is understanding them within a fluid context. that is to say that they inform each other in complex ways that maybe aren't worth disentangling, but can be studied more rigorously with chemicals than with shards of pottery.

so, relative to the science of about 1960, you're right, and that would have been the wise conclusion. yet, right now it's more ambiguous and, relative to the science of 2050, it will likely be exactly wrong.

i mean, the selective breeding of dogs is a process that has occurred over a very high number of generations, and has included all kinds of inbreeding. i'd bet the dog genome is just disgusting. that couldn't be replicated in human trials over one generation. it's crazy to draw conclusions from that.

Dave K
What we've learned about genetics since the 1960s is that genes turn on and off based on the conditions that a person is living in, which is heavily dependent on the culture of the other human beings around them

jessica amber murray
we still don't know to what extent behavioural disposition (or "nature") is hereditary. it could be that it is in complex ways that are only beginning to be unravelled.

meaning that certain attitudes like altruism may have a genetic basis, and moving to full altruism may be a necessarily genetic process.

more generally, i think we're getting to the point where a lot of social sciences and humanities are becoming applied biology in our terms of understanding them. the development of ethics is now understood as a selective process, for example. that's a massive in terms of naturalist explanations. economics has been slowly taken over by psychology, and should probably find it's final home in population ecology. i think this is a sort of paradigm shift in thinking that anarchists should really jump aboard on.

Kardinal ZG
Well this is rather problematic. If we are to understand morality on the basis of biology we toss out free will. Which is nice and dandy, but free agency is intrinsically tied to the enlightenment project and rationalism. Hence notions such as socialism and left wing politics become empty terms. Sloterdjik proposes something similar, although not appealing directly to biology (for obvious reasons, he lives in Germany), he proposed that in the light of the failure of the humanist project, the human sphere should be run more or less like a zoo or an animal reserve. Got into trouble.

jessica amber murray
i think free will has a lot of problems to begin with, but i don't think that understanding the development of morality as a selective process has much to say about it at all. it just means that different moralities are going to flow out of different conditions. a place where food is plentiful will have different ideas about food distribution than a place where food is scarce. both will enforce those moral rules as a way to distribute resources, fairly or not. both perspectives can flow equally well from reason, but they come with different starting conditions.

insofar as that relates to a secular humanism, i actually interpret it as an application of nihilism rather than an appeal to nature. that is to say that moral rules may be arbitrary, but we arbitrarily choose this one because we like the idea of rational deduction. that's actually a process of becoming self-aware of an evolutionary process and deciding to take agency *over* it.

what that says about us is that our modern conclusions about humans and rights may follow from a relative lack of scarcity.

Monday, February 10, 2014

i think historical internal squabbles within the anglo-american empire have their place in understanding how the center of empires can shift without the character of the empire changing. that being said, i think i'm going to have a hard time reading this paine thing without rolling my eyes.

i mean, he's a liberal, right. but he's one of those early naive liberals that actually believed in the inherent goodness of humans, and so he's no doubt going to say a lot of things that are going to appeal to the communist in me, even while knowing he's going to ruin it all with a bunch of out to lunch economics. you want to go along with the dream, but your brain knows the idea is doomed from the start. it's still the beginning of a discussion.

so, i'm kind of not sure how i feel about just shredding this to pieces, but i kind of expect he's going to piss me off enough that i'll have to.

"it seeks then in russia the enemy it has lost in france, and appears to say to the world, or to say to itself: if no one will have the complaisance to become my enemy, i shall no longer have any occasion for navy or armies, and shall be forced to diminish my taxes. ... unless i make an enemy of russia, the harvest of wars will be terminated." - thomas paine, 1792

Sunday, February 9, 2014

i very much want to agree with him, and the focus on the people caught between is the right focus, but he continues to (perhaps purposefully, in terms of not wanting to) miss the greater context and why there will not be a peace treaty until one side is victorious in a much larger struggle.

a temporary cease-fire is not impossible, but only under extreme external pressure - popular pressure, perhaps, or maybe the opening of a second front.

i'm not denying that, to syrians, it's about syria. but to the people orchestrating and funding this, it's not about syria at all.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11431

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-using-generic-illustrations-in-news-stories-dishonours-the-dead-and-distorts-the-truth-9102466.html

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/29/victorias-new-anti-protest-bill-is-a-threat-to-our-freedom-of-assembly

"In the 1830s a German naturalist named Renous was arrested in San Fernando, Chile for heresy. His claim? He could turn caterpillars into butterflies.”

i just read an article about reintroducing lion and tiger species to north america.

like i want to add that to the list of things i have to worry about. are you trying to drive all the schizophrenics into episodes?

but, more seriously, these animals eat people. not opportunistically. we are a part of their natural diets. they kill hundreds or thousands of people a year in some areas.

you want to bring them here? no thanks.

btw, the video is trying to reduce alamarism by talking about "natural prey".

the truth is that's as much us as it is deer. sorry, anthropocentric types. god didn't put us at the top of the food chain everywhere.

if evolutionary biologists wanted to be real scientists, they wouldn't begin with the assumption of natural selection. it really is teleological.

rather, they'd take genetic drift as a null hypothesis and then attempt to build evidence for natural selection on a case-by-case basis.

i'm sure they'd agree with me, in principle. it's just a matter of pointing it out, then making fun of them until it becomes institutionalized.

then, you wouldn't get biologists talking about the difficulties in determining what the "purpose" of an "adaptation" is; rather, you'd be asking them first to rigorously demonstrate that a specific trait is an adaptation in the first place, rather than the result of chance. that's how real science works - you need to demonstrate a relationship, not assume it as a consequence of a philosophical principle.

Kardinal ZG
If by teleological you mean that biological entities strive to maintain themselves alive yea. But even that is marginal. Final causality requires some minimum predictability and necessity.

jessica amber murray
i've noticed there's a kind of cognitive dissonance in their writings. they try and self-regulate themselves. if you press them on it, they'll present the standard line "evolution doesn't have a final cause", but you can tell they tend not to actually believe that - that they're waiting for the day that it can be shown that it's part of a plan. there's libraries of books of them arguing with themselves over this, levelling accusations of "orthogenesis" at each other.

in practice, they look at a trait and assume it has a cause, then try and determine what the cause is. but, i would suggest that most observable traits don't have a cause. two things that just pissed me off were:

1) an article exploring the difficulties in understanding why female spiders eat their mates. there's an assumption this is an adaptation, and has a cause. no. it needs to be determined this is an adaptation rather than genetic drift (or a mutation that may have a negative effect on survival)

2) they found old dna in spain that was lactose intolerant and deduced it couldn't have had to do with sunlight. again, that's jumping to the assumption of natural selection. selection, here, needs to be demonstrated. it's entirely reasonable that the mutation may have developed as an adaptation further north and drifted south. at the least, finding the lack of mutation in the south does not prove it could not have been sunlight dependent.

but if you read biology journals, the idea that every trait is an adaptation with a cause is just engrained. it's a philosophical position that takes priority over evidence, and demands evidence uphold it. whatever the merit, it's not science.

Kardinal ZG
What youre pointing out is not necessarily new. It has often been leveled against biology as a hard science. Heck crackpot creations argue somewhat along that line. But alot of this has to do with the positivist assumption that all science is derived from physics, if not directly, at least in terms of epistemological criteria. Ergo, only efficient and material causality is properly scientific. But of course this is rather gratuitous (can that be explained under its own parameters?) and it led to a bunch of weird shit like phrenology. Evolutionary biology does not fall under the usual criteria of repeatability and mathematisation. Hence efficient causes cannot be isolated. For that to be possible, organic matter would have to function mechanically, that is, within uniform time, not the cumulative time (duration). So this is ingrained in the discipline's world view which, really, is essentially historical. Narratives tend to have some sort of teleological pull. Im ok with that.

jessica amber murray
i know the line of argument you're thinking of, but it's not entirely what i'm saying. i'm just suggesting that they really ought to be more focused on proving relationships that they take for granted, and that they're not reduces to the substitution of a guiding belief system in place of really skeptical science. there's certainly a different set of challenges when working in biology, but i don't think they're incompatible with a general hypothesis testing approach. i mean, to suggest they are is to give up. i'd be shocked to hear a biologist suggest as much. they're certainly doing hypothesis testing, they're just doing it at too weak a level of inquiry.

you can still - i suggest you must - look at a trait and ask the question "is this an adaptation, or merely the result of chance?" in a meaningful sense, by studying all the things around the hypothetical adaptive process and coming up with an argument that this is really the case. they don't actually do that, though. in the best case scenario, they'll grudgingly admit that maybe it might just be chance if they can't figure out the adaptive benefit. but this is really backwards thinking.

where it's a problem is when it leads to wrong conclusions. one of those examples is with the female spiders eating their mates before they mate with them. it's specifically related to a solitary species that only comes into contact with a mate once or maybe twice in a life time. that is, females are eating their male mates before they mate even though the balance of probabilities is that it's the only chance they'll get to mate. this is behaviour that doesn't make any sense in terms of passing on genes. a slow consensus is developing that the spiders just lack impulse control. they see food, they eat it; they lack the faculties to analyze the consequences. it's consequently the result of one type of adaptation (impulsive eating) having a negative effect on a necessary biological function (mating). that's a chaotic development that will harm the long term health of the species, not an adaptation.

yet, leading up to this realization, there were many arguments that the behaviour was an adaptive trait to ensure the proper spread of genes. the female spider somehow determined that the male was a bad mate, and ate it in order to ensure it's genes weren't going to a bad mate. serious people argued this in serious places.

in order to take such an argument seriously, there's a lot of questions that need answers. how? but, it's the procedural approach that was the problem. it's sort of an extreme example; the shift in thinking would be a lot more enlightening with a more subtle example, where it's not so obvious. but this works better to make the argument for that very reason. so, they looked at an organism, they saw a trait and (regardless of it's absurdity) they assumed it was an adaptation for survival - leading to ridiculous conclusions that are being acknowledged as such. yet, if they began with the assumption of random gene flow (as a sort of background process, as noise) leading to random mutations (that may or may not lead to increased chances of survival), and then determined if there's enough evidence to reject that assumption and deduce an adaptation then they would have come to the right answer in the first place.

and, we can debate about what is a better null hypothesis, but beginning with randomness requires less assumptions and is more appealing for that reason.

nor is any biologist actually going to argue with me on the point. they'll gnash their teeth and say "you're right, but we take shortcuts because we're biased towards darwinian thought. if we were to formally study it, we should do it like you're saying". which is just admitting that they're being unscientific. if you look at a microbiologist or a geneticist, they all study more formally. it's only evolutionary biology, which is peculiarly deductive in it's approaches, that doesn't bother.

if they want to be real scientists, they must take the process more seriously and realize that selection is something that must be proven to arise from randomness on a case-by-case basis every single time, not a monolithic force that can be assumed to be working in nature at all times.

to be a little more specific, i'm talking about the third and fourth axioms of the modern evolutionary synthesis, that states that natural selection is the main driver of change and genetic drift is a secondary factor. this is generalizing in too far an extreme. it may be roughly true, but these are statements that require demonstration on a case by case basis, not a general statement that glosses over specific changes. holding to those assumptions has the potential to lead to bad conclusions; methodologically, it's not very scientific.

rather, i would reformulate it to genetic drift is a constant driver of change and selection depends on forces that must be demonstrated to both exist and lead to the resulting changes.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/2/5371232/microsoft-research-open-science-announcement
http://phy.so/310638008
http://www.columbiachronicle.com/health_and_tech/article_547630a2-8ae8-11e3-89bd-0017a43b2370.html
http://fron.tiers.in/go/FN4ZNj
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/4600-year-old-step-pyramid-uncovered-in-egypt/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
http://phys.org/news/2014-02-genes-pygmy-history.html
http://plos.io/MZomIs
http://phys.org/news/2014-02-team-limits-famous-quantum-principle.html
http://phy.so/310826741
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/dogs-love-eating-human-faces
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/02/quarks-know-their-left-their-right
http://phy.so/310834136
http://medx.cc/310828368
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/12012013/article/researchers-investigate-archaic-greek-city-state-in-crete
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/02/schizophrenia-time-flush-meds
http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1003899
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/insect-metamorphosis-evolution/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook
http://phys.org/news/2014-02-antitrust-probe-samsung-patents.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/07/west-criminal-bloodbath-iraq-media-cover-up
http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/computers_math/mathematics/~3/uYxDHQCxnJE/140207133018.htm
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/materials%E2%80%99-light-tricks-may-soon-extend-doing-math

the bears will move south and likely hybridize. that might mean no more polar bears for now, but the dna won't die. it's actually an interesting experiment.

http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/02/scienceshot-hungry-polar-bears-turn-seabird-eggs

it's long been known that there was some back migration to west africa, but when or how isn't remotely understood. theories range from pre-neolithic migrations to a something along the lines of greeks and romans getting lost in the jungle. another idea is liberia.

i think they have to be careful to ensure it's not just inter-breeding with dutch, english and german settlers.

http://phys.org/news/2014-02-western-eurasian-genes-southern-african.html

Saturday, February 8, 2014

this shit's been going on forever. they told einstein not to bother with physics because it was a closed field. ha. and as i'm typing this, most people don't realize that the process we just went through to find the higgs closed a theory we already knew was unworkably wrong.

rather, we're on the cusp of some radical rethinking that will toss a lot of ideas we hold to into the trash bin.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/01/17/end-of-science-meme-infects-edge-website-again/?WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

the quartet's economic plan seems to be to convert the area into a low-wage labour force, probably to export goods primarily to israel. and the concentration camp comparison just got pretty real.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11448

1) the us objective is written down in the pnac documents. it is to swing areas under the russian sphere to it's own. it's a long term objective that can happen in multiple stages. but in the long run, syria itself is just a piece on a risk board. it has nothing to do with assad, his behaviour or his decisions. it's solely about a struggle against russia for dominance in asia.

2) the chemical weapons weren't really an asset because they can't really be used. the idea that the dictator in it's last throes would gas it's own city is some kind of homeric era romanticism or something. none of these guys want to slaughter their own people. so, as a weapon, they're useless. it's as propaganda that they're valuable. the americans may have won a propaganda coup with it, but they were given away so readily precisely *because* they have no real strategic value. the flip side is that it also indicates a level of naivete (think chamberlain) on behalf of the syrians and russians, as though they really think that concessions will stop this aggression. the americans will not cut this off until moscow has an american flag flying off the kremlin. it would have been smarter to use it as more of a bargaining piece.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11423

it's thought that the common ancestor of bees and ants were solitary insects that used pheromones to attract their mates, and that hives developed out of a process of increasing complexity.

think about how that would have happened. you'd be forced to think of queen bees as practicing a type of witchcraft.

http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2014/01/scienceshot-queen-sex

"Although today’s southern Europeans tend to be somewhat darker than their northern counterparts, they are still relatively light-skinned compared with Africans, an adaptation often linked to the need to absorb more sunlight and so produce adequate amounts of vitamin D. "

southern europe has been successfully colonized by many darker-skinned people, from phoenicians and greeks (and maybe egyptians) through to arabs and moors. there have been population movements from the north as well (germans, vikings, celts, slavs). the result is pretty "gray" across the mediterranean. i see no reason to think that the same process of dark-meeting-light (south-meeting-north) wouldn't have been present in the region at the time.

as pointed out elsewhere, i'm pretty sure the blue eye mutation has been identified as a single event and localized to europe. i guess we know the mutation is older than 8500 years now. it doesn't really answer the question of where it came from, though.

"It seems possible that latitude is not the key factor in skin depigmentation, but diet,"

well, i'm glad people are questioning this, anyways.

truth is it's barely even correlated.

i'm still leaning more towards drift

(maybe sexual selection helped with the drift)

"This suggests, Willerslev says, that there might have been “substantial gene flow between east and west” leading to more homogenous populations than previously suspected."

not necessarily. well, i mean the fluidity. we know there was a migration of people from the north to the south after the ice melted.

well, at least we used to know this. did the goddamned hippies erase the evidence because it created too much negative energy?

if so, there's some old models to dust off that provide an easy explanation.

i'll just be brief about this, i'll get into it with something more topical: a lack of archaeological evidence is not something to reject a theory on.

for those that don't know what i'm talking about, there's been this awful hippie movement in archaeology and anthropology that wants to purge pre-history of all human conflict. we were just all god's children playing happily in the garden. then there was capitalism, and then violence. i'm being overly dismissive.

but they've actually been derp enough to stand up and say "well, i know there's this pile of interdisciplinary evidence, but we can't find an archaeological record, so therefore it didn't happen".

the general response is to point out that there's a long list of historically documented events that cannot be corroborated with archaeological evidence, and yet we know happened. it's a logical fallacy, in fact - an inability to prove an event occurred does not imply it never happened. but, the hippies were arguing from ideology in the first place, so it hasn't been an effective way to counter them.

now, we've got all this genetic and other novel evidence coming in that's backing up the interdisciplinary conclusions, and the archaeologists are just terribly confused by it.

some of the younger ones may not even be aware of the older conclusions.

the answers are there, though. you just have to go back to sources that were published before the 90s to find them.

i'd expect this to continue as more dna evidence comes in.

fucking hippies….

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/01/how-farming-reshaped-our-genomes

" the world's first Internet-connected toothbrush,"

ugh. again, the answer is that the mutation happened in northern europe and moved south with population displacement.

the error in thinking is deeper, though. it's only a contradiction if you take the ridiculous position that every trait is the result of natural selection.

again: that would be a world that was practically created. if you're going to substitute natural selection for god and ignore chance and randomness, you're not really taking the religion hat off, you're just giving it a different name.

biologists need to get it through their skulls that genetic drift is a valid explanation.

the way they should look at it is to assume genetic drift unless evidence exists to justify natural selection. that is, genetic drift ought to be the null hypothesis, and ought to be only overturned under the presence of sufficient evidence.

*that* is a naturalist position.

his hypothesis, though, is worthwhile. i don't, however, see why it should apply specifically to the south.

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-calcium-absorption-evolution-digestion-europeans.html

Friday, February 7, 2014

i think the letter is too optimistic, actually. whatever their own plight, they're being used as tools to rile up militaristic hate against russia. when they no longer serve that use, or start asking questions that challenge that narrative, the media will blacklist them as radicals.

i hope they at least got paid.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26067971

ok, but the solution is necessarily structural. there aren't any good pesticides, and we can't grow the amount of food we need without them.

i suppose stricter regulations might help act as an incentive to build more indoor growing sites. but, i'd rather be pro-active. and in fairness this government actually has been pro-active about encouraging indoor growing.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/02/05/ottawa_agrees_to_review_23_pesticides_after_pressure_from_environmental_group.html

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21593408-publishing-giant-goes-after-authors-its-journals-papers-no-peeking?fsrc=scn%2Ftw_ec%2Fno_peeking
http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2014/01/13/worst-sugar/
http://nyti.ms/1cfRYWi
http://plos.io/OAwin
http://plos.io/1hnvgQN
http://plos.io/1filk9U
http://plos.io/1eAqImU
http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2014/02/03/opening-up-data-access-not-just-articles/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/01/01/the-most-fascinating-human-evolution-discoveries-of-2013/?WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-new-method-to-measure-consciousness-discovered&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2014/01/earth-more-sensitive-increasing-greenhouse-gas-thought
http://news.sciencemag.org/environment/2014/01/video-spiders-spin-electric-web

you can't run a case on a hypothetical, unless it's about a right. there's no legal action to prevent a hypothetical tort that's never been attempted (and probably never will be).

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=monsanto-critics-denied-us-supreme&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

i dunno about the gould idea, conceptually, but it's nice to see some research moving away from ideas of orthogenesis. rather than create a new abstraction and babble on about it, i'd rather interpret the results as evidence for the role of chance in the process.

http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/math/~3/tW6msj4GHQ0/

is this an onion article?

because an abstract idea cannot be quantified, it is therefore flawed? lol.

hey, more empiricism is always better than less empiricism. if you want to understand specific things, studying them through observation is always a better idea than applying abstract ideas. yet, then you want to argue that evolution should be described mathematically? ha! it seems to me that it's the dudes in the article that seem deductively challenged.

but studies are always better than no studies.

my guess is they'll find that the reality is too complicated to model using anything other than game theory.

http://phys.org/news308815368.html

this discourse means absolutely nothing to me.

how about this: it doesn't matter if it's genetic or not (it obviously isn't in most cases) because i ought to have the right to choose which gender i want to be, and people that don't like that can fuck off.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-trans/

i've always found it odd that skeptics cite this to discredit climate science, rather than cite it to discredit newsweek.

....because we should all believe everything we read in newsweek, right?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

i find this is a much trickier problem than it's usually presented as. i do agree with the need to do something to pressure israel to stop the genocide, but i'm not sure a boycott will work, and i'm not convinced the accusations of anti-semitism are without merit.

that's not to conflate criticism of israel with anti-semitism. they're clearly two different things. but there's also clearly a line where criticism is masking something deeper, and i think it's pretty widespread amongst those who argue otherwise.

i mean, there are certain things a bds campaign could do that would be blatantly racist. they could start putting yellow stars over the office of jewish academics, or force visiting israeli academics to wear yellow stars so everybody knows to boycott them. i'm not saying that anybody is suggesting this, but it would be pretty racist.

what i *am* saying is that it's not hard to hear those attitudes thinly veiled behind more politically correct positions and that it's hard not to conclude that it's a factor in many - not all - of the people calling for boycott. this is actually particularly vile, because it co-opts a legitimate human rights problem.

i'm not saying this because i've been brainwashed by zionism or because i hate bds activists or any other diabolical reason. i'm saying this because i can hear the racist contempt in the tone of voice, and i don't like it.

i don't know what the answer is, but i know the bds movement tends to pull out individuals that i could not consider to be allies.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11432

Thursday, February 6, 2014

ugh.

we require only a miniscule fraction of the population to carry out the useful work that is required to make society function. of the population at large, there are more volunteers than there are useful positions. the jobs that people do not volunteer to do are mostly not useful - which is why people don't want to do them. for the few exceptions, we could rotate the labour around to the point where we're working a few hours a *year*. keynes suggested a few hours a week, but the technology is way beyond that point, now. i see no reason to think this reality of volunteers existing to do meaningful and necessary work because they want to will ever change.

what that leaves is millions of people that really have no social value beyond that which we contrive for them. what's the difference, in terms of social value, between working as a server or in a supermarket and living on disability? there isn't one. neither produces anything of any kind of value. while there's no doubt that a retail worker fits the definition of "nothing to sell but labour", they don't belong to the productive class. in terms of actual contribution in terms of producing something valuable, the reality is that they're just as "parasitic" as welfare recipients. a really disturbingly high amount of our workforce exists as an appropriating "middle man" between producers and consumers. the cashier at the grocery store is stealing profit from the farmer that made the food, while the sales person at the clothing store is stealing profit from the workers that made the clothes. so, proletariat by definition, but not proletariat in substance. a union of service workers is a bourgeois union.

when you look at the actual producing class, most of it isn't even on this continent. technological shifts may be in the process of relocalizing production, but it will not create new jobs (unless you count robots as people).

so, there is no longer a concern of the productive v. the unproductive. almost none of us are actually productive. what we need to do is find a way to distribute goods fairly amongst the unproductive, and that's not going to be possible until people come to terms, "en masse", of the uselessness of their daily existence. that is, we will not revolt until we understand how unproductive we really are, and how that makes us all equally entitled to the benefits of technology.

johnny cochran has reappeared to sue nasa for not taking it's own mission seriously.

i think the petitioner kind of has a point.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/01/unconvinced-that-jelly-donut-sized-mars-rock-was-just-a-rock-man-sues-nasa/

this is precisely wrong. randomness is a model that exists in your head to approximate reality, not a description of reality itself. you cannot "harness the power of probability". that's like saying you can channel the forces of the unknown.

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/january-2014/physicists-harness-the-power-of-probability