The Barefoot Bum

Plus ça change

2009-07-12T05:13:00.004-06:00

The more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murderous envious scatological soul, the more I realize that he will never change. Our stupidity is immortal, nothing will change it. The same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice, the same lusts wheel endlessly around the parade ground of the centuries. Immutable and ineluctable. I wish I could believe in a god of some kind but I simply cannot.

— Richard Burton [the actor]

Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods.
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly's uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.

— Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans (translated by Anna Swanwick)

I started this blog two and a half years ago because (and yes, you may laugh) I wanted to do my bit to save the world.

Lately, I've been reading George Orwell's essays. I'm struck by two impressions: One, is that Orwell is a brilliant, perspicacious, and eloquent writer; his talent of course surpasses my own by many orders of magnitude. More importantly, looking back at the last 60-70 years since he wrote, his writing and thought has had less impact on the world than Ann Coulter's.

The world, I now believe, does not want to be saved. Whether the ordinary people close their eyes to the precipice towards which we are rushing headlong, or whether they see and simply do not care, or believe God or science or truth will magically rescue the chosen few, I do not know.

I'm not discouraged by the vitriol of the religious, of the libertarians, of the laissez-faire capitalists. I am, however, discouraged by the vitriol (and worse, the often blithe dismissal) of atheists, philosophers, progressives, socialists and communists, always (to my eyes) for daring to disagree with some item of cherished dogma. Perhaps I'm equally guilty of my own vitriol, but I have always done my best to at least avoid dogmatism, to substantiate my anger with facts and arguments. I have received no such consideration from my detractors. Perhaps I am wrong; I don't think I'm stupid, but who does?

Perhaps I am myself no better than the ordinary person or my detractors; how can I know what I am blind to? Either way: what use is my work? Even the mostly sensible intelligentsia, from Marx to Myers, attract little more than hordes of ass-kissing sycophants: such is the most I could aspire to. Hell with that. I can make more money as a butcher.

The world cannot be saved, does not deserve to be saved, does not want to be saved. Or the same thing: my meager talents and position are insufficient to alter the course of history by a jot or tittle. I've said what I had to say; words writ on air. I've clarified my own thinking; gone forevermore when soon I am dead.

Before the century is out, humanity may well be reduced to under a billion, perhaps only a few tens of millions, perhaps to zero. I'm powerless to change this outcome. It'll happen or not no matter what I do. Those who survive, if any do, will survive and erect their own society, a socialist utopia or a totalitarian nightmare, regardless of my attempts at guidance, advice or effort.

I intend to enjoy my few remaining years (I'm in no danger of dying early, but no person's span of years is more than the blink of an eye) and arguing with fucktards — on the internet or in real life — is no longer enjoyable.

Goodbye.

Closed for good

2009-07-02T05:43:00.001-06:00

I'm closing the blog for good. I've been persuaded to restore the archives, even though I think it's all useless bullshit.

A racist fucktard in a burqa

2009-06-28T07:47:00.005-06:00

Heather claims that A burqa ban is a symptom of racism, not secularism, nor feminism. She's completely full of shit.

She's presuming that the burqa itself has absolutely no direct material effect on women's well-being. This is obviously false. Anonymizing and desexualizing women has a direct negative effect on their well-being. Second Heather ignores the effect of non-governmental coercion: she assumes that when there's no governmental coercion on some category behavior, we can therefore conclude that any behavior in that category is an individual's uncoerced choice. This is again false. Third, she assumes that if racists affirm some statement, then affirming that statement marks one as a racist. This is a logical fallacy.

Indeed, by believing that not-quite-fully-human brown women would "voluntarily" anonymize and desexualize themselves, an action that fully-human white women would consider profoundly oppressive and fundamentally objectionable, Heather reveals her own racism.

Canceling Skype

2009-06-27T07:07:00.002-06:00

Trying to cancel my Skype accounts, I received this email:

Thank you for contacting Skype Support.

We understand from your recent request that, sadly, you would like to have your Skype account deleted. Due to the ever increasing rise of online fraud and Skype's desire to keep each and everyone of its customers' online ID's secure, we must verify each user's identity before we can proceed with any account deletion requests.

Please choose your payment method from the options below and follow the instructions then send us the data you have gathered by replying to this email.

General (applies to all account deletion requests):

1. Approximate date of the last purchase made to your Skype account (you can find this information from your credit card statement or from the confirmation email sent to you after the purchase).
2. The order number
3. Payment method or Credit Card type used to make a purchase
4. Email that was entered during registration (if any)

Additional information required:

Purchases by Credit Card:

4. The first 4 and last 4 numbers of the credit card used
6. Name on the credit card

Purchases by PayPal or Moneybookers:

5. Your registered PayPal/Moneybookers email address
6. PayPal/Moneybookers Transaction ID

We are very sorry you no longer wish to use Skype to communicate with the world. If at any time you change your mind and you would like to avail yourself of Skype's convenience and economy once again, you can register a new Skype ID at any time at www.skype.com

Thank you for trying our products and we hope to see you back using Skype again soon.

What fucking bullshit.

Legal to lie

2009-06-27T06:48:00.001-06:00

Fox News wins a legal right to lie:

On February 14, a Florida Appeals court ruled there is absolutely nothing illegal about lying, concealing or distorting information by a major press organization. The court reversed the $425,000 jury verdict in favor of journalist Jane Akre who charged she was pressured by Fox Television management and lawyers to air what she knew and documented to be false information. The ruling basically declares it is technically not against any law, rule, or regulation to deliberately lie or distort the news on a television broadcast. ...

The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdock, argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves.

Communist printer

2009-06-27T06:35:00.001-06:00

bash.org:

linkraceist: my printer is being rather communist atm
necrokiss: lol, how so?
linkraceist: in theory, there is nothing wrong with it
linkraceist: but when i try to use it, everything goes wrong

The marginal theory of price

2009-06-27T05:50:00.001-06:00

First, I'm going to make a radical departure from canonical economic theory, and unambiguously denote the three components of economic analysis as cost, value and price. I've concluded that using value to represent exchange value, i.e. price, is not just misleading but intentionally misleading. Instead, I'm going to consistently use price to represent exchange value, and value to represent use value.

The marginal theory of price says first that the price (exchange value) of an item is most strongly related to its value (use value). In other words, when two people exchange commodities, what is equivalent about the exchange is generally the increase (margin) in each party's respective value. If a hamburger adds ten "units of happiness" to my life, and a hammer adds ten units of happiness to your life, (and losing the hammer and hamburger subtracts one unit of happiness from each of our lives), I'll give you a hammer in exchange for a hamburger. Alternatively, if we say that a dollar arbitrarily represents one unit of happiness, I'll pay ten dollars for a hamburger if and only if it adds ten units of happiness to my life.

There are difficulties actually making consistent and comparable measurements of "units of happiness", but the concept has intuitive appeal. We can introspectively determine that possessing and consuming a hamburger gives us more happiness than possessing and (somehow) consuming a turd. We can attach a number to anything that can be ranked, so we're in reasonably good shape... at least so far.

The marginal theory of price assumes that value can be ranked: Suppose there are 100 people, and they want widgets. Alice wants a widget most, Bob wants one second most, ... Zelda wants one the least. (If any person wants two widgets, we'll just add how much they want the second widget to the ranking with no loss of generality.) We'll assume we can not only rank their desires, but we can (roughly) quantify them: Alice is willing to work for 42 hours in exchange for a widget; Bob is willing to work 38 hours; ... Martin is willing to work 21 hours; ... Zelda is willing to work 2 hours.

If we order the people by rank, we have by definition a monotonically decreasing value function: The total extra social use value added by supplying one more widget decreases as we add widgets. Supplying one widget gives us 42 hours of use value, supplying the second gives us an additional 38 hours, etc.

There are two forms of the marginal theory of price. The first assumes diminishing returns on cost: the more widgets we make, the higher the cost of the additional widgets. We can see this if we rank the producers of widgets in order of efficiency: Andrew, the most efficient producer, makes a widget in 6 hours; Betty in 6.2 hours hours, ... Mary in 9.3 hours; ... Zachary in 12.7 hours. Again, we rank them, this time from shortest time to longest time, creating a monotonically increasing function.

It's a theorem of mathematics that a function that is monotonically decreasing will intersect a function that is monotonically increasing at at most one point. (We'll assume that our value function and our cost function do indeed intersect in the effective domain of 0-100 widgets.) We can simplify our analysis by assuming our value and cost functions are linear. (There are other simplifying assumptions that don't affect generality; we have to preserve only monotonicity and opposite slope.) The price of a widget, then, will be the point at which the demand and supply functions intersect.

Therefore, assuming that the demand function by rank for widgets is H = -0.75R + 100 and the cost function is C = 0.45R + 16, price will be H(R) = C(R); -0.75R + 100 = 0.45R + 16; P = H(70) = C(70) = 47.5 hours.

However, this analysis trivially agrees with the labor theory of price! If the socially necessary cost (which can be any rigorously defined statistic of actual cost) is defined to be the maximum cost to create a widget to fulfill demand, and it's worth it for the the 70th ranked producer to take an actual 47.5 hours to create a widget, then the socially necessary cost to create a widget is 47.5 hours, therefore the price of a widget is the socially necessary cost in labor time.

To get a marginal theory of price that differs from the labor theory of price, we have to look not at the cost of production, but the choice of what to produce.

Assume we can produce 100 widgets, 100 doodad, or any combination of 100 widgets and doodads; i.e. for every widget we produce, we're not producing a doodad, and vice versa. More importantly, when we produce a widget for the person who wants one most, we are "taking away" a doodad from the person who wants one least (and vice versa). So we'll rank the demand function for doodads from low to high to make it monotonically increasing. The point where the functions intersect is the price of widgets and doodads.

For example, if H_w = -0.75R + 100 and H^-1_d = 0.45R + 16*, then the price of widgets and doodads will be 47.5 hours. We have calculated an equilibrium price without reference to how many hours it costs to produce either a widget or a doodad, thus falsifying the the labor theory of price, right?

*Yes, I just recycled the parameters of the cost equation to avoid having to do more algebra.

Wrong. Consider the assumption: "We can produce 100 widgets, 100 doodad, or any combination of 100 widgets and doodads; i.e. for every widget we produce, we're not producing a doodad, and vice versa." This assumption entails that it takes approximately the same amount of time to produce a widget and a doodad. The labor theory of price entails that things that take the same amount of time to produce will trade at an equivalent price, precisely what we have determined the marginal theory of price entails. If a widget takes approximately 1.5 times as long to produce as a doodad, then the marginal theory of price will find a price for widgets that's 1.5 times the price of a doodad, again, exactly what's predicted by the labor theory of price.

Furthermore, I slipped in a subtle equivocation when talking about the diminishing returns form of the marginal theory of price: I had some people consuming widgets (Alice, Bob, etc.) and different people producing widgets (Andrew, Betty, etc.). But this is not the case: Alice, Bob, etc. are producing and consuming widgets and doodads: essentially, each person makes a widget and a doodad, and either keeps it for him- or herself or trades it one for one for the other item. The "price" of 47.5 doesn't mean anything, since the price of widgets and doodads is the same, therefore they trade one for one.

Thus, the marginal theory of price does not differ theoretically from the labor theory of price: it does not make contradictory predictions. The marginal theory of price tells us how much of a commodity will be produced and consumed to achieve the labor theory of price.

Inconsistency

2009-06-26T21:53:00.003-06:00

It's true that science and religion are inconsistent and incompatible.

It's also true that there are no small few people, such as Francis Collins, Ken Miller, and Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno, who are respected scientists and devoutly religious.

The conclusion: people can hold inconsistent and incompatible beliefs.

Shocking news, innit?

Why We're Here

2009-06-26T21:37:00.004-06:00

Why We're Here: Jack Chick meets H. P. Lovecraft

[h/t to the good Dr. Myers]

Two by Krugman

2009-06-26T18:17:00.001-06:00

Sex and the married politician
Equal representation in Congress

For a capitalist, he's not half bad.

Death

2009-06-26T04:22:00.000-06:00

I hear some famous people died recently. Wow. Shocking.

Shut up, fucktard

2009-06-25T05:06:00.009-06:00

Fucktard Chris Mooney is shocked at the rank hypocrisy of the atheist blogosphere. Why? Because Chris Hallquist tells him to "shut up", and the rest of us don't pile on to reprimand this egregious violation of free speech. Mooney quotes Hallquist*,

It Mooney can´t get his facts straight about something so simple, it´s time to ignore him. For my own future reference, though, and that of anyone who´s morbidly curious about this mini-fiasco, Jerry Coyne has a nice compilation of relevant posts, which he seems to be continuously updating. Though it doesn´s include this most lovely-titled of posts. Notice how Mooney has nothing of substance to say in reply, saying only that the debate is a waste of time–in which case, why doesn´t he shut up? [links omitted]

saying without a trace of irony, "I trust there will be round denunciation of this behavior?"

*Yes, I checked the quotation to make sure it was accurate. If Mooney said the sky was blue, I'd look out my window to check.

A person with two functioning brain cells can figure this out, but I'll spell it out in case Mooney somehow manages to stumble on this post. He still won't get it — if Mooney were any stupider, we'd have to water him — but it's not fair to condemn him for failing to understand a subtle point.

Hallquist is not actually telling Mooney to shut up. He's asking a rhetorical question: Why is Mooney speaking out in a debate he considers a waste of time? The implication is that because Mooney is speaking, he doesn't actually believe the debate to be a waste of time. Mooney, on the other hand, has built his career on trying to make an actual philosophical case that anti-religious, anti-accommodationist atheists really should shut up. And not because their position is mistaken, but precisely because their position is correct.

Hallquist is a fairly minor blogger (not a slam; I'm a minor blogger myself). For some unfathomable reason (Midnight sacrifices to Nyarlahotep? Daily oral sex for the Discover Magazine editorial staff? A rent in the space-time continuum?) Mooney is a player in this debate; players should have better things to do than take offense from the peanut gallery.

Accusations of hypocrisy have a way of rebounding on the accuser. Even if Hallquist really were telling Mooney to shut up, why should Mooney take offense? Mooney is all about the shut up. It would be hypocritical, for example, for Fred Phelps to show kindness and tolerance to George Takai, but I certainly would not be incensed that Phelps showed kindness, nor would I condemn him for doing something I would approve of.

Fourth, and most importantly, Mooney takes offense at a turn of phrase to simply duck and ignore Hallquist's substantive criticism, that Mooney is actually lying. Well, Mooney, are you a liar?

[Note that the title of this post is a sarcastic joke. Mooney should say what he thinks, and so should I, and I think Mooney is indeed a whiny fucktard whose head is so far up his ass he needs a glass navel to watch television.]

Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto

2009-06-24T23:03:00.002-06:00

Matt Taibbi explains Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto:

Gosh it sucks that the crisis happened, but it’s not as bad as people say. Remember how people used to pick on Internet stocks — well, look at Twitter!
The solution to what ails capitalism is more capitalism.
There will be a great public desire to tighten up the laws governing the economic sector, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
You know what’s a great idea? Voluntary self-regulation.
You can make all sorts of interesting collages just using a bunch of dollar bills and a Photoshop program.
If we could just all learn to be better people, everything will turn out fine.

Obama messes up on health care, big time

2009-06-24T11:41:00.003-06:00

Obama messes up on health care, big time:

What was the point of signaling, right at this crucial moment, that he’s willing to give away the public plan? Let alone doing it at the very moment that he was making such a good case for it?

Maybe because Obama's corporate masters don't want him to enact a public plan, nor do they even want him to use the idea as leverage. I'm just saying.

The Falsifiability of the Labor Theory of Value

2009-06-24T09:02:00.008-06:00

I'm reading Studies in Mutualist Political Economy by Kevin A. Carson, recently presented by db0. I'm about 10% of the way through (p 75 of 822). The author is kind of long-winded and drops a lot of names without reproducing or even summarizing arguments, but there's some good stuff there.

The first part of the book is a defense of the labor theory of (exchange) value: First, that labor creates economic value, and second, that the exchange value of a commodity is the amount of socially necessary labor time to create that commodity. This theory stands in opposition to the subjective theory of value, that the exchange value of a commodity is determined by subjective use-value, and the scarcity theory of value, that the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the scarcity of its supply relative to the demand. There's also the marginal theory of value, but that's a topic for another post.

The subjective theory of value seems hard to make falsifiable: how do you quantify the subjective perception of value independently of the actual exchange price. The scarcity theory applies even in theory only when supply is inelastic, but it's fairly obvious that the production of most commodities — food, oil automobiles, DVD players, computers, buildings, etc — is elastic; the most significant inelastic item of value is real estate.

However, Carson makes an enormous philosophical error:

As Mises wrote, the variables of the market are so many that no laws can be induced from mere observation, without the aid of valid starting assumptions established on an a priori basis. ...

If an adequate theory of value requires a high degree of predictive value concerning concrete prices, then both the labor theory and subjective theory fall apart equally. On the other hand, if value theory in the sense of an empirical rule for predicting concrete prices is impossible because the variables are too many, then both theories are likewise on equally untenable ground. But like Mises' subjective theory of value, our version of the labor theory is a set of a priori axioms and the deductions from them, which can be used to more usefully interpret market data
after the fact. [emphasis original] [pp. 75-76]

It's just bullshit to be concerned with the after-the-fact interpretive value of a theory.

It is a fallacy of naive empiricism that one must "induce" laws from mere observation. All scientific laws are not a priori assumptions, but hypotheses from which we derive empirical predictions; if the predictions match the observations, the theory is supported; if not, it must be somehow revised. Empirical observation is the context of justification, not the context of discovery.

The Labor Theory of Value makes several empirical predictions about concrete prices. Most importantly, there should be a substantial correlation between measurable socially necessary labor time and actual prices in any economy. Furthermore the correlation should become when we control for independently determinable variables representing externalities, such as physical and socially constructed inelasticity. (We could also independently determine differences in external variables when two unrelated commodities had similar labor times but very different prices, or similar prices but different labor times.)

The Labor Theory of Value makes dynamic predictions. Assuming we were to find a correlation between labor time and price, we can then determine a general average correlation over many unrelated commodities. The Labor Theory of Value predicts the supply of commodities that had a price/time ratio lower than average would fall over time, and the price/time ratio would increase; likewise the supply of commodities that had a price/time ratio lower than the general average would rise over time, and the price/time ratio decrease.

Scientists and statisticians — especially biologists and ecologists — have figured out a lot of ways to test hypotheses under conditions with a lot of interacting variables. There's simply no reason not to apply these tools and techniques to the Labor Theory of Value.

Carson does note the Positivist fallacy of the Austrian school of economics:

The Austrians have made a closely related argument: that equilibrium price is an imaginary construct that can never be observed in the real marketplace. [p. 76]

We don't need to directly observe anything for it to have scientific validity: it just has to be an ineluctable component of a theory that overall matches what we can directly observe. Furthermore, we can actually observe some sort of equilibrium: all similar DVD players, tomatoes, automobiles, etc. all cost about the same from store to store and from day to day, even though there is (usually) no collusion or intentionality to keep prices stabile.

The public option

2009-06-24T03:27:00.003-06:00

Robert Reich (Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor) gives us a bunch of good reasons to keep the public option part of health care reform. (You should read his blog to monitor both the sensibility and the ineffectuality of reformist capitalism.)

It's clearly in the interests of the people to have a public option. However it's not in the interests of the American Medical Association (i.e. physicians), Big Pharma, and the biggest insurance companies. Shocking news, I know.

It's in the interests of physicians to have tens of millions of working people locked out of health care. Without a public option health insurance will simply be too expensive for these people; any "mandates" that everyone must buy health insurance (similar to auto insurance mandates) will get watered down or ignored completely. A guy making $7.25/hour is not going to drop two weeks' pay on a monthly health insurance premium, whether he "has to" or not. A subsidized public option will put pressure the health care industry to lower costs and lower profits.

Theoretically, under capitalism, you would expect tens of millions of people who want health care and are willing and able to pay for it to constitute an untapped market: demand creates supply. Imperialist capitalism (the dominance of financial and monopoly capitalists) however, is as much or more against actual free market economics as the most doctrinaire Marxist. Truly free market economics brings the exchange value of every commodity, including health care, into equilibrium with its true cost, either by lowering the exchange value to the cost, or by raising the cost to the exchange value.

A truly free market is not in the interest of any owner of capital, except insofar as he wants his competitors subject to free markets. But when capitalists of some industry do not face competition, they have zero interest in free markets. Interests always trump "principles".

If some commodity is relatively scarce, i.e. demand exceeds supply, then the supplier can demand a price (exchange value) much higher than the cost, generating profits. Under free market economics, this gives other people an incentive to allocate more capital and labor to supplying that commodity, either lowering its price or raising its cost, thus reducing profits.

However, if a capitalist can somehow maintain the relative scarcity, by externally restricting the supply, then higher prices and higher profits can be maintained indefinitely. Relative scarcity, though, never distributes the scarcity evenly; instead, some people get a lot and others get nothing. If health care were distributed to everyone, then the price of health care would fall to what the poorest people were willing to pay (or what the people were willing to pay in taxes to provide the poorest with health care). There would no longer be a scarcity to prop up higher prices and higher profits. The capitalists who own the government will make damn sure this scarcity remains. They are no longer naive, as they were when Lyndon Johnson created Medicare — they know they can just buy more congressmen and senators, and the profits are so huge that money is no object — and they are facing no threat of revolution or severe civil unrest.

One ironic thing about the health care debate is that ordinary physicians themselves are participating in maintaining scarcity to prop up their own individual profits. But what they do not realize is that they work for a living (technically physicians are petty capitalists, since they necessarily own their own training, but petty capitalists face the same pressures as ordinary workers, and end up in the same place), and they require enormous amounts of external capital to work: not just their own training, but the equipment they use directly, drug development and manufacturing, and medical technology in general. As the computer programmers have discovered, the owners of the financial capital underlying all of this investment will eventually appropriate the physicians' surplus labor, either directly by lowering their pay or indirectly by raising the cost of education, insurance premiums, use of medical equipment, etc. They may be the last to go, but they will go: medicine isn't that difficult, and there are enough people desperate for even the lowest rung in the professional middle class to do the work for the lowest prices.

We will not see anything resembling universal health care from the Obama administration. We will see at best only a few token reforms. And when the next Republican administration and congress is elected, the physicians will be the next to get the shaft. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Florien Finds a Fucktard

2009-06-23T11:29:00.004-06:00

Daniel Florien of Unreasonable Faith presents bwinwright's fucktardery on Allvoices:

[A]theism is a false idea because it is based on the false premise that orderliness does not require intelligent direction.

His proof?

I ask them to give me a single example of anything, outside of what they call nature, that came into being without intelligent direction. Of course, they can not. Everything manufactured by man required intelligent direction, right?

It's not all bad, though. "[D]ueling with atheists has made me a more patient, accepting, and loving person." 'Tis a pity it didn't make him any smarter.

Because it works

2009-06-23T07:54:00.005-06:00

Why does the Republican party seem completely unable to say anything except trivially obvious lies and bullshit?

Because it works.

No one with any political or economic power has any interest whatsoever in telling the actual truth; there are only differences of opinion between capitalist factions about what sort of lies to tell. The Democrats tell "it's all going to turn out right in the end" sort of lies; the Republicans tell "you're all fucked, might as well lie back and enjoy it" sort of lies.

The truth has ceased to matter, and nobody, neither the powers-that-be nor the people, gives a rats ass about what Ophelia and Jeremy think.

The current depression

2009-06-23T04:32:00.006-06:00

It's important to understand the underlying causes of the current depression.

First of all, we are not in a depression because we lack labor, raw materials, arable land, factories, technology, or any of the physical, material components of wealth. We have not lost a large chunk of our productive capacity due to natural or man-made disaster. (Capitalism is by-and-large resistant to such disasters.)

Industrial capitalism is about the (private, individual) ownership of the means of production, i.e. factories, farmland, tools, technology. Finance capitalism he ownership of specifically money, "real" money such as gold* or fiat, socially-constructed money such as dollars. Industrial capitalism regulates the usage of labor; finance capitalism regulates the usage of industrial capital. Our modern, complex economy does need intentional regulation of industrial capital.

*Capitalists around the world dropped the gold standard after the Great Depression because it is ineffective at regulating finance capital, and hinders governments' ability to dig themselves out of financial crises that the gold standard failed to prevent.

For several decades following the Great Depression, finance capital was heavily regulated by the Federal Government; banks were only nominally private. Since Reagan, finance capital has become increasingly deregulated, allowing the owners of money to make their own individual interest predominate over social, collective interests.

The fundamental function of finance capital is not to allocate but to create new money by making loans. As the economy grows, as more and more surplus labor is "congealed" into physical wealth, we have to create new money to represent that wealth. This creation is necessarily a social, collective endeavor. When finance capital is unregulated, the individual owners of money have incentive to create new money not to represent new wealth, but for their own personal consumption and control over existing wealth.

And that's precisely what happened: We gave individuals and individual companies the unregulated power to create money. And they created money by a variety of means precisely to enrich themselves and enhance their own power.

It was a classic Prisoner's dilemma situation. Of course every unregulated "shadow" bank knew it was creating money out of nothing, not at all correlated to new physical wealth. But if any bank refused to create new money, out of (snicker) principle, they would find that the bank down the street had created enough money to buy them out or drive them out of business. Restraint and "principle" works only if the principle is enforced.

(The Republican party also discovered that it need not keep the economy of ordinary people strong in order to gain votes; they focused on "values", mostly religious, and just blamed all the economic problems on socialists, democrats, immigrants, atheists, hippies and black people. Given that they owned most of the media, it's unsurprising this line of bullshit worked. The Democratic party saw which way the wind was blowing and rebranded themselves as the no-responsibility permanent opposition party and the party of slightly more palatable bullshit. Remember, it was Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton who signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.)

So what the unregulated finance capitalists did was simply this: create a lot of new money with no referent to physical reality. Since this money creation has to happen exponentially, we quickly reached a point where the lack of physical referent could no longer be ignored or bullshitted around. Then they claimed that unless the government supplied the referent, in terms of taxes on future labor, the capitalist system would fall. And that's precisely what the Obama administration has done.

I don't have a Nobel prize in economics, but (given dictatorial powers) I could have solved this financial crisis in 90 days, even staying within a purely capitalist perspective:

Let all the bankrupt banks and hedge-funds fail, and jail all the executives who committed actual fraud
As a temporary measure, make obviously safe short-term loans (e.g. to shipping companies) directly by the government.
Refinance everyone's mortgage without penalty to reflect the true value of their homes.
Reimpose all the financial regulations destroyed in the last 30-40 years.
Make the SEC ten times bigger and have them actually regulate the banks.
Make a few hundred billion — perhaps a trillion — dollars worth of deficit-funded loans to the smaller sound banks, who would be regulated and create new money to fund the production of more actual wealth, not just enrich themselves.

Note that under the current plan, we will end up supplying not just a few hundred billion or a trillion dollars (multiplied by the banks to about 1 to 3 trillion), but ten trillion dollars, i.e. about 6-8 years of the total annual productivity of the United States. And this money is being supplied not to create new wealth or new productivity, but rather to supply a physical referent (our own labor) to give meaning to the money the individual finance capitalists created for themselves out of greed and lust for power.

They key, though, is that finance capital is the capitalist social regulatory mechanism. If it is in the hands of individuals, they will "regulate" the economy for only their own benefit, to the detriment of everyone else. It's not just that people don't follow principles just because they're good principles, it's that in a competitive environment, compromising your own interests out of principle makes you vulnerable to those who don't compromise their own interests: winning is relative.

Because the finance capitalists have an enormous amount of short-term socially-constructed power, they control the government, who controls the laws and the taxes. That's why I would have to be given "dictatorial" powers to fix the financial crisis, to insulate myself from ability of the finance capitalists to control the government. Otherwise, the congressmen and senators they own body and soul would just vote down my proposals. Obama is owned body and soul by the finance capitalists, but even if he weren't, he's functioning in a system that is owned body and soul by the finance capitalists, and they will make damn sure that anyone who doesn't fulfill their interests, their demands, is marginalized and excluded.

We cannot reform the capitalist political system: if we could, we would have. But everywhere, even in Europe, the power of the finance capitalists is growing. Only an actual revolution can break the power of capitalism.

The Tao of Skepticism

2009-06-23T04:28:00.001-06:00

Saint Gasoline proposes The Tao of Skepticism:

I propose that skeptics should borrow the tactics of the believers, performing a sort of mental judo throw and using the weight of the believers against themselves. After all, for every yin, there is a yang; for every summer, there is a winter; and for every nut, there is a nutcracker. Sometimes what is dark leads us to light, and sometimes what is wrong can be right, and sometimes the long-winded and rambling can seem poetic. There is a time for killing and a time for healing, and a time for skepticism and a time for being credulous fucktards. As such, we must embrace what I call the Tao of Skepticism, realizing that we must reign in our passion for critical thinking and occasionally act like raging fucktards to win over the masses to our side.

Accommodationist fucktardery

2009-06-23T04:00:00.004-06:00

Condescending fucktard Santi Tafarella doesn't think religious people can handle the truth:

Atheist and agnostic evangelism can be Diet Coke misleading if we pretend that atheism and agnosticism aren’t real divorces from vital sources of hope in human beings. You’re asking people to give up (or at least be very skeptical of) hope of very particular kinds.

First, whether any atheists at all are "evangelical" or not is a matter of controversy. We're talking about the truth, not trying to recruit people to an organization or community. We typically don't care about anyone's specific beliefs about god per se; we care about how people think: skepticism and critical thought are valuable in and of themselves, it just so happens that if adopted thoroughly they lead inevitably to atheism.

Second, Tafarella does not explain how the atheist position is misleading, i.e. false to fact. It might be dangerous, but we're not lying to people, by commission, omission, or equivocation.

Third, a request is not a demand. We're not making anyone abandon their hope. If they want to keep their hope, we're not going to hit them on the head, throw them in jail, or take away their civil rights. No one ever lost his hope and faith and faced "psychological obliteration" because some atheist said, "I don't believe in God, and there's no evidence to believe in God."

It really is true, sometimes an atheist is just a fucktard with one fewer stupid idea than a theist.

The value of fucktardery

2009-06-23T03:07:00.003-06:00

Shorter fucktard Randy Alcorn: Our lies are much more comforting and aggrandizing than the atheists' truth.

Also, Alcorn's post features yet another supposed defense of religion by focusing on "everything", as if one could defend Fascism by noting that the trains do indeed run on time. (Which they didn't, but you get my point.)

The whole "atheists have no basis for value or morality" argument just burns my shorts. Atheists generally behave like civilized, neighborly people (and even our "monsters" are no worse and no more prevelant than religious monsters); since we do in fact behave this way, there must be some basis for it; an honest person would discover what it is.

The scientific materialist's view of the value of life is that we are indeed similar to and connected with all life on Earth. Human beings are sentient, we can feel and value, and sapient, we can think. We are indeed not alone in possessing these qualities. Human life — indeed all life — is valuable in itself, because we value it, because we are the sort of beings who care, not because we are the slaves or special pets of a tyrannical and sadistic deity. We don't need to believe human beings "should" care, we need only observe that we do in fact care: that's who we are.

We acknowledge and understand too that most religious people also generally behave in civilized and neighborly ways. And we understand the basis for this behavior: religious people are human beings, and they have the same sort of values and caring nature that all human beings do. We don't say that religion replaces these natural human values, we assert that religion, on the whole, sits "on top" of these values, and is the source of quite a lot of uncivilized, un-neighborly behavior. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when an ordinary, civilized person does something rotten, when he murders a gay person, when he throws acid in a woman's face, when he murders his daughter, you'll find he makes a religious justification for the behavior. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when some citizens of an ordinary Western civilization try to deny basic civil rights to some group or class of people, you'll find a religious justification behind that denial.

Note that I said religious justification, not motivation. I don't think religion is much of a motivator. Everyone is motivated by natural psychological and sociological factors, for good or for ill. You don't need any justification to act for good; the good is in itself an adequate justification. I don't need God to justify being happy, and I don't need God to justify being nice to my neighbor.

But you absolutely cannot do without God to justify doing ill, or to tolerate the ills of the world. Because I have no God to appeal to, I cannot help looking at injustice, oppression, exploitation and slavery as problems to be solved, because I do in fact care about the well-being of other people. I cannot be satisfied with tokenism. I don't know how to solve these problems, but I'm looking, and if and when I find a way, I'll implement it, regardless of the effects on my own privilege.

I have two points for my series on fucktardery. The first is just to show how completely fucking stupid some religious people can be about their religion. But I also want to show the religious simply cannot leave atheists alone. To defend their own religion, they must attack atheism, intellectualism, and scientific materialism. Never mind who started it: Christians are supposed to turn the other cheek. It would be perfectly reasonable to say, "Hey, if you're an atheist or scientific materialist, good for you, but you're simply mistaken about the evils of our religion and here's why." But they can't, and that's part of our critique: Not only is it wrong, just dissent and disagreement, not to mention rational examination and criticism, are anathema to Christianity. Even the moderate Christians have to defend fundamentalism against the atheist, scientific and materialist critiques, because they know our critiques are fundamentally just as damning of their own lies and myths, however more benign those lies might today happen to be.

Indeed the benign lies are just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the malevolent lies. It's pretty obvious to see how Fred Phelps goes wrong. But as Diderot notes,

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

And who's to say that Phelps' theology is actually false and the moderate Christian's is actually true? It must be said that Phelps' theology is certainly more in line with the tone and tenor of the Christian bible (not just the Old Testament; the New Testament has its own wickedness and stupidity). A malevolent and sadistic deity is just as plausible — if not more plausible, given the suffering of the natural world — as a loving and caring deity.

Not all religious people are fucktards, of course. This post from South Africa just popped up, and the guy seems open-minded and intelligent. It'll be interesting to see how he sees himself as different from atheists, and whether this difference is superficial or substantive.

We're not against everything Christian

2009-06-22T18:13:00.003-06:00

A couple of fucktards, Andrew (saying, "I know you people are on a mission to discredit anything and everything Christian.") and Suzanne (saying "[Atheists oppose] "theocracy" [which] means ANY laws inspired by Christianity even if people of other religions (and none) can and do agree with them."), seem to think that atheists are against everything Christian. This view is arrant nonsense, a classic straw man fallacy. A culture with two thousand years of history can't get everything wrong, and even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Atheists don't approve of murder, we don't approve of theft, we think families and communities are peachy keen. We do believe we should love our neighbors, and we want everyone to be happy, so far as that's possible; when it's not possible, we want people to suffer as little as possible. We know that people enjoy ritual, and pomp and circumstance have their places.

First, we oppose superstitious bullshit, and even though there are some things that are good about Christianity (at least as a culture), Christianity is simply lousy with superstitious bullshit. More importantly, the "good stuff" in Christian culture is still good even if no God exists, and people can live by it without buying into the superstitious bullshit. Even more importantly, attaching the "good stuff" to the superstitious bullshit makes it easier to sell all the evil, suffering, oppression, exploitation and enslavement that does require all the superstitious bullshit.

So fuck you, assholes. You're not doing anything but covering for your evil, perverted, sanctimonious brethren, and shielding them from criticism.

A somewhat angry fucktard

2009-06-22T17:31:00.004-06:00

Fucktard Andrew Sherwood is angry that atheists don't buy his bullshit.

[just] because God gave us commands [doesn't mean] we can’t think situationally.

I don't think Sherwood actually pays attention to a lot of his fellow Christians, and I don't think he understands what a "command" is. I guess life is a lot easier if you get to make up your theology as you go along and just say that must be what God wants.

Furthermore, what basis does this atheist have for doing anything moral?

Pretty much the same basis use for thinking "situationally"; we just don't bother to attribute our personal moral judgment on a deity.

Who says the Nazi’s brand of morality is any better or worse than anyone else’s?

I do, for one. And who says the Nazi's brand of theology is any better or worse than Sherwood's? How can you tell? The Jehovah of the Old Testament seems to put Hitler to shame.

This person has apparently never had any kind of conversation with an intelligent Christian.

Neither have I. I've never met one, at least one that was at all intelligent about his or her religion.

question God’s plan ALL THE TIME!

It's easy to question; the hard part is, how do you answer the questions? Christians just make something up and call it "God's will." How convenient.

I think part of God’s plan is how we deal with accidents and the unexpected.

I don't think Sherwood understand a "plan" is either.

[Atheists] raise [their children] with their same biases, beliefs, morals, etc. To think that just because you’re raising your children without religion automatically makes them “free-thinking” is just damn stupid.

To think that atheists equate lack of religion with skeptical think is not just stupid, it's fucktarded. We teach our children to think for themselves, to at least examine our biases, beliefs or morals.

Sherwood's not that bad of a guy, but he apparently believes that all Christians are exactly like him, or that there are very few "true" Christians in the world. But this is the problem with (mostly) humanist, (mostly) moderate believers: they shield their batshit crazy co-religionists from the well-deserved criticism of their insane beliefs. I see this a lot: "I'm religious, I'm a Christian/Muslim/Orthodox Jew/Hindu and I'm not like that." Fine: if the shoe doesn't fit, you're not obliged to wear it, but a billion other people are like that. Why criticize us for pointing out the manifest flaws of a billion people even if you yourself don't have those flaws?

And you know, when you talk to these "I'm a nice, humanist, free-thinking, rational Christian" types, you always find something where they say, "Well, that's God's will, too bad if you find that oppressive." Usually about abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia or the exploitation of the proletariat. If you justify the oppression or enslavement of just one person you're just as evil as if you justify the oppression and enslavement of a billion.

Dendreon

2009-06-21T17:55:00.005-06:00

Apparently using an illegal technique called naked short selling, hedge fund managers have nearly ruined a drug company making what appears to be an effective drug for treating prostate cancer, a drug that could save tens of thousands of lives. [h/t to kevin]

Why?

If a man has a gun, and is the beneficiary of your life insurance policy, he's going to kill you. Squeamishness or sentimentality might stop him, but no moral principle will. Religious belief is irrelevant: since you can say anything about God; he'll just convince himself that God wants him to kill you, and who's to say he's wrong? The only way to protect yourself is to make it harder to collect than it is to earn an "honest" living: to remove or counteract his interest in killing you. Happily, bourgeois insurance companies do indeed have their own interest in counteracting your would-be killer's interests, and we don't have a lot of people getting murdered for their life insurance.

This is the problem with bourgeois democracy. Naked short selling is actually illegal, the government knows its happening, and yet they rarely investigate the practice, much less convict billionaire hedge fund managers. All the "principles" were actually in place to regulate the financial system, and all of these principles have been repealed or merely overlooked by our "democratic" government.

Why?

The bourgoisie owns the government. The government acts in their interest. The only interest "moderating" the government is the "liberal" wing of the bourgeoisie, operating on platitudes from Roosevelt era with the justification of "saving" the US from socialism, or communism (or more likely fascism) only faintly-remembered. And too the masses of working people have been ground down so subtly that they don't yet realize they're voting for the people who would literally kill them for a few bucks.

The bourgeoisie is going to push their privilege as far as they can; if they can get away with it, they'll push it to Hitlerian or 1984-like extremes. They won't stop until the people rise up and take their power away. And it is entirely possible that things will get bad enough that the people can no longer do so without the bourgeoisie taking their ball and going home: nuking the world until humanity is extinct.

It may already be too late. But I'd rather go down fighting than submit to slavery.