Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

Democracy and minority rights

Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s ruling on California’s Proposition 8 is a good demonstration of how it is possible for the serious expert consideration of ethics and law to produce better policy-making than direct or representative democracy does:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Gay marriage is restricted around the world not for any rational reason whatsoever, but because large numbers of voters are prejudiced and uncomfortable with the idea.

While it is encouraging when gay marriage is legalized by legislation or popular referendum, I think it is ethically preferable when courts assert its necessity. That is because the power to determine the scope of minority rights should not rest with the will of the general public. Establishing minority rights on that basis is precarious and unjust. Rather, societies that aspire to be ethical have to acknowledge the fact that the majority cannot be allowed to strip minorities of fundamental rights, and that laws that do so ought to be struck down, regardless of how popular they are.

Pickup artists

I find the phenomenon of ‘pickup artists‘ somewhat disturbing.

Basically, these are individuals who exploit quirks of human psychology in order to get people to sleep with them easily. Human behaviour is predictable to such an extent that many tricks are effective against a sizable proportion of the population. For example, you can use a minor insult called a ‘neg’ to make a person feel like they have to prove themselves to you. A long piece on pickup artists in The Point Magazine describes how this is at the core of the technique: “the key to the method is, unquestionably, that the pickup artist ignore, tease, or even insult the targeted female, accustomed as she is to constant, beleaguering attention from men.” There is also the whole collection of cold reading tricks long employed by psychics and con artists to give the false sense that they have special insight into you.

If people were widely aware that such tricks can be effective, the practice of people using them would be less worrisome. When they are employed against unwitting subjects, however, they strike me as exploitative and potentially unethical. The article linked above contains a detailed discussion of the ethics and psychology of this unusual set of skills.

How to shift the US Congress?

Writing for Grist, Randy Rieland has come up with a summary of arguments about why cap-and-trade is dead in the United States for now. He is right to say that the blame lies primarily with Congress, rather than with the Obama administration. Congress is the most powerful branch of government, and has been highly effective at blocking environmental legislation in the past. While the Democratic leadership in Congress is theoretically allied with the administration in the White House, even the two together clearly haven’t been able to overcome the wall of opposition to meaningful climate policies that has been constructed by Republicans, or the cowardice of moderate Democrats who are unwilling to fight to address this key problem.

The stragic question now becomes how to change Congressional behaviour, and do so before climate-related disasters become so frequent as to finally discredit climate change deniers completely. We cannot afford to wait that long, both because of the physical lags in the Earth’s climate system and the lags in our own infrastructure deployment. By the time the full danger of climate change is unambiguously on display, it will be too late to avoid some terrible effects. It will also be too late for the relatively unintrusive policies being proposed today to work. Sterner stuff will be required.

US Senate fails again on climate

So, it seems the possibility of a cap-and-trade system in the United States to help deal with climate change has been killed by Congress, at least for the moment. As I have argued before, if the current generation fails to take action to prevent dangerous or catastrophic climate change, that failure is what history will remember us by. We will be remembered as the people who had all the necessary information, but who were so selfish and dysfunctional that they couldn’t step up and take even the first small step.

I remain unimpressed with humanity.

Legalize, regulate, provide treatment

Just as XUP is pointing out how it makes sense to legalize and regulate prostitution, The Economist is making that case for gambling. Of course, the argument works for drugs too – better to have their production and distribution legal and regulated by the state than criminalized, marginalized, and ultimately more harmful. All of these activities will inevitably cause some level of suffering, but their treatment as criminal offences simply serves to increase how much of that arises. This is unescapable, since those involved in criminal activities have no recourse to police protection and assistance, safety and quality control will always be poor, and criminalizing ‘vices’ puts an unsustainable and inappropriate burden on the justice system.

One further measure I would suggest is that producers of drugs – and purveyers of sex and gambling – should have to pay taxes on their revenues that are devoted specifically to helping people who are addicted to their wares. The treatment options provided should be based on the best available medical evidence, and be run by organizations at arms length from both the companies and the government (to avoid the kind of political bickering threatening Vancouver’s InSite harm reduction project). The taxes should be set at a level that ensures that anybody who wants to get treatment is able to do so for as long as they need it.

Humans have many weaknesses, with addictions among the most serious. By legalizing and regulating drugs, gambling, and prostitution, the harm associated with these activities can be minimized. At the same time, the reality that many people cannot overcome addictions on their own must be recognized through the provision of effective and accessible treatment.

Liability caps

Often, states choose to cap the liabilities of companies operating dangerous facilities like oil rigs or nuclear power stations. They recognize that companies are hesitant to build or own such things, as long as they might be called upon to pay the full cost associated with any accidents.

Of course, providing these caps is a deeply anti-market thing to do. There are very good reasons to worry about oil spills and nuclear disasters, and heavy costs are borne by many people when they occur. Those risks should be foremost in the minds of people who choose to invest in these facilities.

When governments grant companies ‘protection’ against massive claims in the event of disasters, they are saying that building these facilities is so important that it should be done even if there may ultimately be serious uncompensated harm imposed on the general public. This takes the illusory profits associated with environmentally harmful economic activities to a new level, by saying that even in cases where companies can be proven to have directly caused harm to third parties, in the pursuit of their own profits, those profits will be protected by the wealth and authority of the states.

Spaces after a period

Why did anybody ever put two spaces after a period, when typing?

Because of typewriters. Indeed, one name for this approach to sentence spacing is ‘typewriter spacing.’ Typewriters tended to use fixed-width fonts, in which each character takes up as much space on the line as every other. Each character is in its own little rectangle, like on a piece of graph paper. When text is presented in such a way, it arguably makes reading easier to have two spaces after periods.

Computers rarely use fixed-width fonts. The most common example (Courier New) is often used for purposes where seeing spacing is very important, such as when writing computer code. For text meant to be used by human beings, proportional fonts are superior. In these, letters take up different amounts of space, with narrow letters like ‘i’ taking up fewer pixels of width than wide letters like ‘w.’

In this situation, there is no reason to put two spaces after periods. The practice is obsolete.

So, why does it endure like a virus continually making the rounds? I would guess that institutional conservatism is the answer. Organizations like government departments adopted typewriter spacing decades ago, and never changed over. Similarly, typing classes in the world’s elementary schools may well be taught by people who originally learned to type on a typewriter, or who were themselves taught by someone who did.

Personally, I hope typewriter spacing eventually manages to fade away. It is especially annoying when you have to incorporate text from a typewriter spacer into a document mostly written using modern spacing. You have to do a find and replace operation to substitute single spaces for double ones, then manually scan through the altered text to verify that nothing barbarous has resulted.

How cynical should Obama make us?

As the Bush administration was coming to a close, Barack Obama looked like an almost ideal leader for the United States: internationalist, concerned with the constitution and rule of law, apparently concerned about the environment, and so on.

Now, a year and a half after Obama was inaugurated, there are a lot of disappointments to deal with. Guantanamo Bay remains open, the United States maintains an active policy of assassinations in Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan has been a failure in relation to our original aims, and nothing significant has been done on climate change. Instead, the administration can point to its response to the economic crisis and health care as its accomplishments.

As I have said before, I think the credit crisis was a real waste of this administration. It seems like they could have devoted their energy in so much more productive ways, if the banks hadn’t terrified politicians into pulling out all the stops to save them. The unpopularity of doing so has revitalized the Republican Party and sapped public support for the Obama administration. Furthermore, very little has been done to prevent the occurrence of such crises in the future.

What should we take from all of this? Is Obama really as promising a figure as we thought, blocked in his efforts by the political system? Do we need to give the administration more time to effect its policies? Or was the kind of optimism that fueled the Obama campaign misplaced? Perhaps the world simply doesn’t permit the success of idealists.

In fairness, Obama did make an effort to stress how difficult real change would be, while he was campaigning and after he was elected. There is a huge amount of momentum bound up in the status quo, and changing the direction of things in meaningful ways is always difficult. Hopefully, there has been more happening in the background than has been immediately observable to outsiders and the years Obama has left will be filled with meaningful accomplishments.

Agora

I saw Agora yesterday, and found very little in it that was redeeming. The film depicts the mathematical work of Hypatia, set against a background of religious violence between pagans, Christians, and Jews. The great majority of the film consisted of angry young male religious fanatics, killing another for reasons that were never very well established. All the dialog was excessively melodramatic and unconvincing, and the motivations of all the characters remained obscure.

Given the span of time and the number of characters included in the film, it feels a bit as though they took a trilogy worth of material and crammed it into one film by removing everything that wasn’t a critical plot point. Imagine The Lord of The Rings compressed into two hours by removing everything except key plot points; this film has that kind of pacing. As a result, the film feels like a series of climaxes with no lead-up to give them context or follow-through to show their consequences.

The mathematical sub-plot contrasted aesthetically with all the background violence, but also felt unconvincing and unnatural. Rather than being given any appreciation for why people care so much about the mathematical questions, or what solving them might mean, we are treated to an epistemology reminiscent of Dead Poets Society or an episode of House: all sound bites and sudden insights, with little sense of what makes the knowledge significant.

Not recommended.