Almost exactly a year ago, the entire country was abuzz with the news of Kelo v. New London. It was an inevitable happening in a nation that is slowly but surely progressing toward central planning and the road to serfdom. As seems to be more and more often the case, the intense and principled commentary of Originalist judges is ignored, the government is given yet more power, and the leftists are leading the charge in eroding our freedoms. More recently, the New London City Council, showing that greed knows no bounds, re-affirmed their decision to evict Ms. Kelo and several other residents on June 6th. Yes, I know a lot of leftists were upset at this and don’t possibly see how this could be related to their political ideology. Then again, one of the problems with their entire outlook is that they’ll seek to mandate one thing without looking at the social and economic repercussions. Dropping a 400lb fatty into the community swimming pool and then being taken completely unawares by the tidal wave emanating from his entry. So let me say this clearly:

In a political system that sees government control and redistribution of private wealth as inherently good, it is inevitable that such power will only continue to grow.

I found my posts on this subject from almost a year ago and thought I’d throw them up here

Kelo and the Death of a Country
I’m pretty impassioned about American politics. I scream at the TV and at my monitor. I ‘passionately debate’ (read: scream as spittle flies from my mouth) anything from abortion to gun rights to conservation as often as I have opportunity. I’ve been angry, I’ve been happy, I’ve been annoyed. Today, I was depressed. For the first time in my life, politics actually made me depressed.

You see, living in England for the past 8 months, I realized that the difference between Europeans and Americans is that while we are citizens, they have never thrown off the ideological yoke of being subjects. In England, that’s a literal truth; even their passports read “Subject of the Queen of England.” As much as they claim to be free-thinking individuals what all Europeans really want is to be coddled and controlled by an overarching government. Subjects, not constituents.

Today, I actually contemplated whether America really was better than Europe or not, for the first time in my life. Today, we became subjects. The court (the liberal justices anyway) ruled that ‘Government Knows Best.’ The essence of their position is that city officials know more than their constituents about ‘what’s best for the city’. Might as well just call it the Divine Right of Kinghood. In their scathing dissent, Supreme Court Justices (to paraphrase Clarence Thomas) succintly said that if A can potentially pay more taxes than the current occupant B, the govt is justified and siezing B’s property to give to A. The government just became an evil corporation, concerned with only the bottom line. At the hands of liberal justices, i’m at pains to remind you.

Every American’s personal autonomy has just been destroyed. We have become serfs on the feudal lord’s estate. He has allowed us to work it, to live on it, even to call it our own, just as Serfs did in the Middle Ages. And just like those peasants, we are subjects. Subject to the whim of a government who can evict us on the premise that our houses and our small businesses don’t give it enough money…

The guys who settled out West went there for one reason and one reason only; the prospect of owning their own land. A place to call their own. They rode the Oregon Trail, they turned the barren soil of the Dust Bowl into something of a breadbasket. They lived, they sacrificed, they died to call a place their very own. All that work was shat on today by the Supreme Court, who today told us that our land and our property is only ours as long as the government decides not to snatch it from us. This isn’t all that different from England, where Queen Elizabeth II allows her subjects to engage in a parliamentary government…at least until she gets bored of it and decides to assert her sovereignty.

Today I am no longer an American citizen…Today I became a subject.

More Kelo Ranting
Any mention of Kelo, anywhere, in any form, sends me reaching across my room for my cowboy hat. 3 Doors Down - Life of my Own finds its way onto the mp3 player and I snarl at the words: “Kiss me while i’m still alive/kill me while I kiss the sky/Let my die on my own terms…Freedom carries sacrifice/Remember when this was my life”. My hands absently stroke the imaginary 12 guage shotgun of my mind and the confederate flag on my wall gets a glance or three. I snarl softly (it’s 4am and the walls are thin) “Come and get it you dicks.”

Lots of famous dead people have said that private property ownership is key in an enlightened society. Madison said it somewhere in the Federalist Papers. PA’s constitution says it, so do most other states. I’ve even heard a diry liberal say it, for chrissakes. How can you call yourself free when you can’t own the very house you live in?

Heinlein once said that a “generation that ignores history has no past and no future.” The American Dream used to be to own a house and to fill it with things like a loving wife, 2.3 kids, and an assortment of smelly pets. From this day forth, no one will ever live it in the good ole US of A. Not only have we forgotten about that dream, we’ve forgotten the very basis of it: the context in which our consitution was written. In US History we learn about anything and everything, but all too often, the great debates, the Federalist Papers, the original writings of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison et al are forgotten, BUT on the upside, we learn that George Washington Carver made over 400 industrial products from the peanut. We learn the names and the actions, but we never learn the thoughts behind them. This, my friends, is a crime.

As many famous dead (and live) people have also pointed out, the Constitution is not so much a document enumerating the powers of the government but actually an article of delegation. Its intent was not to establish the government’s authority but rather its limits. “This is what ‘We the people’ will allow you to do. This, right here, is what you can’t do.” Somewhere along the way, probably with the invention of the career politician, we lost sight of that. Rather than the people limiting the government, the government now circumscribes our participation in every sphere. Somewhere along the way Democracy (always in danger of mob rule), became a sham. There developed a ruling class, a class that manipulated and used the people to entrench themselves ever more firmly in power by getting the people to shamefully’ delegate ever more to them.

Yes, i’m still depressed over the Kelo decision. And the burning rage of a young man who just watched his beloved country die continues to grow deep within my chest. What bothers me more than anything is the seeming lack of rage in others. The conservative bloggers are up in arms (quite literally in the RKBA sect). A few of the more intelligent liberals are as well. But by and large the erosion of what has always been claimed to be the foundation of personal autonomy has not had the effect it should have.

On his deathbed, Dylan Thomas’s father heard these words whispered into his ear:

Do not go gentle into that good night…
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

That dying light is freedom, the night a slow freefall into Statism, where Big Brother knows best. William Wallace said it, Washington said it, and many others in between and after. Freedom or death. Back in 2nd grade, when we first learned all about the Patrick Henry speech and the letter opener trick we all ran around the classroom, at recess, at home. Standing on a chair, a desk, or a swing, we’d shout it “Give me liberty…or give me death,” before shoving a pen into our armpit. I missed with the pen once and stabbed myself square in the chest. I still have the scar. And the memory of that innocent youthful fervor. The choice is ours, do we go gentle? Yoke ourselves to a burden our forefathers fought tooth and nail to separate ourselves from 230 years ago? Or do we rage, do we scream, do we fight, for the freedom that was given us by the sacrifices of good men for a future many of them would never see?

I’ve made my choice.
——————————–

Shoot, I’ll probably re-use my 4th of July piece from last year as well. I wrote better back then. Course, I was trying to impress a girl, which probably explains some of the difference in quality.

Sorry it’s late. And sorry I haven’t been psychblogging more frequently. Been really busy both on the blogosphere (CAID, Homeland Stupidity, and Liberty Papers) and in real life (two jobs, conferences, geriatric dog, etc). I’ll step it up a bit. Anyway, because I suck, I’m reminding you that we are looking for hosts who don’t suck. If you’re interested, give me an email with what works. Next Carnival will be June 13 over here. But the 27th on is completely open.

Dave over at Dare To Dream takes a really comprehensive look at the prison system and recidivism. The piece covers elements in the equation all the way from cradle to grave. Highly recommended.

The esteemed Dr. Sanity discusses the Sanction of the Victim, in which the very forces that work to correct societal problems are the ones blamed for it:

Only by withdrawing the “sanction of the victim,” –i.e., refusing to be manipulated in this manner–refusing to give aid where there is scorn and not even grudging gratitude; refusing to shoulder the burden of all as they beat us upon the back and tell us to go faster, do it better, and jump higher; refusing to pay their debts; fix their problems; or protect them from their own, deliberate, suicidal behavior–only then will the looters and the parasites be forced to recognize reality.

In Recourse to Authority, ShrinkWrapped discusses how the internet has affected mental health in ways both good and bad.

The Good:

I consider it a major benefit that my patients must take responsibility for their decision and not simply rely on my authority in areas that affect their lives.

I’d have to agree, I’m not much for authority. And I think that the idea of an authoritarian mental health professional is kinda contradictory to the goal of helping your patients to reach self-fulfillment.

The Bad:

We used to be able to rely on our news gatherers to tell us what is going on in the world. We used to be able to rely on scientists to make sense of confusing information. We can’t do that anymore and it is unsettling, confusing, and disorienting.

Assistant Village Idiot brings us a conversation he had with a psychiatrist with Bush Derangement Syndrome. Normally, I don’t much go in for the ‘psychology of politics’ thing, but I thought this was a rather good example of how rationality in humans is highly context-dependent. While the basic position may or may not be irrational, the psychiatrist’s reasoning sure as heck is.

My own submission blurs the lines a bit as I talk about my own experience with chronic pain and injury and its relation to my empathic abilities in Schizoid Tendencies Are A Two-Way Street.

Dilys talks about why some people may prefer not to be happy, thinking that it’ll give them power over others. And discusses that while this may work in the short run, it’s a bad long-term strategy.

Joe Kissel brings us an entry about handheld machines that can aid in entering relaxed or meditative states using only blinking lights and simple tones. It highlights, among other things, the powerful animal ability to impute complex patterns onto relatively simple stimuli. I’d note that sitting out on the field watching fireflies and listening to the crickets chirp often has the same effect on me that these machines do for him.

Unicovia accuses the media of doing exactliy what Dilys was talking about. Namely, that their entire business model is based around only presenting the bad, no matter what good is happening.

Peter Kua of Radical Hop brings us an inciteful discussion about fear; when it is justified and when it’s just holding you back.

I confess that I’m one of those personality test junkies. The Spark, Psych Central, Similar Minds, love em. Don’t know why, half the time the tests spit out blatanly false profiles. Still, it’s fun. And in the case of the more psych-oriented ones, sometimes scary.

For one thing, I routinely come up as extremely schizoid and schizotypal. While those characterizations are generally true, I fail to see how they necessarily reflect anything wrong with me.

At the most basic level, each of us is an individual. Each of us is our own person with our own hopes, dreams, preferences, and temperament. While schizoid and schizotypal tendencies could potentially signal personality disturbances, what they actually measure is how well you fit in. And if ‘not having the personality some shrink wants me to’ is now a disorder, I have a serious problem with that. There needs to be a little more theoretical and empirical justification than that.

As Tim Flynn, the guy who runs Similar Minds points out,

don’t think Schizoid personality is a valid disorder, some of the smartest people in history were schizoid because they occupied a remote end of the intelligence bell curve. Schizotypal personality can encompass highly original thinkers as well as totally insane people so I think it’s a flawed type. I think the remaining eight disorders are generally valid.

I would think much of my readership understands from personal experience exactly what he’s talking about right there. Lord knows I do. I’ve also found it pretty easy to deal with, though. Probably because I went to public school where smart kids would get the crap beaten out of them for not fitting in. And because you can be as creative as you want to be no matter how little creativity your friends and acquaintances display.

No, what I’ve really found boosts my schizoid and schizotypal tendencies into the stratosphere is the chronic nerve damage I’ve been living with for the past 9 years. You’d never know it to look at me that I suffer from a rather painful atrophic nerve condition. Which is part of the problem. I’ve coped too well. Which seems weird until you think about it for a bit.

As I said earlier, schizoid and schizotypal tendencies aren’t a reflection of anything internal, but rather how you interact with and compare to external society.

Tim defines schizoid personality disorder as where an “individual [is] generally detached from social relationships, and shows a narrow range of emotional expression in various social settings.” I’ve often heard it simplified as a lack of empathy or understanding for what’s going on in other individuals’ heads.

And the thing about empathy is that you have to–at least at some level–have a handle and an appreciation for what another is going through. ‘Normal’ people simply can’t understand my kind of pain at all. Imagine that you’re in so much pain that when you take the highest recommended dose of muscle relaxants you actually sleep less than eight hours because the sleep is that much more refreshing. Can’t do it, can you (those of you who aren’t royally screwed up)? Which means if we were looking at your personality using me as a reference point, you’d be the schizoid one.

Flipping it around, because I’ve built a pretty damn impressive pain tolerance up (to the point that much of it happens subconsciously), when people freak out about painful injuries/conditions, often enough I have to work very hard to bite back scorn and ridicule. Dredging up empathy? Yeah, right.

As an example, skinning your knuckles, stubbing your toe, scraping your knee, or getting a splinter are all things that suck.. When I think about it dispassionately, I’m able to admit that when such things happen to me, my brain is indeed filled with the frantic firing of C-fibers and my body does indeed tingle, burn, and throb. But in real day to day life, that kind of thing often flies so far under my radar I don’t realize I’ve hurt myself until I bleed all over something.

This can make things quite uncomfortable for me when something like that happens to someone else. As everyone else is rushing around screaming for bandaids and alcohol, I’m wondering what all the fuss is about. This apparently means I have a disorder.

Of course, a funny thing happens when we start talking about people who are really physically screwed up. I’ve found I’m considerably more affected at an emotional level by their plight than most are. Which has to do with the whole empathy being dependent on personal experience thing. When you see one of those stories or meet one of those people, you often think to yourself “I can’t imagine what that must be like.” Because of my peculiar position, I often can. Using someone who’s really crippled as a reference point, the ‘normal’ person becomes even more schizoid, whereas I start to approach normality.

My big cautionary tale here is that all ’schizoid’ means is ’statistical outlier’. Could there be a psychological problem there? Sure. But there doesn’t have to be. Sometimes the reason you can’t relate to other people is that they can’t relate to you. And if that is the case, what the mental health professional needs to worry about is considerably different. People are social creatures, and like all social mammals, we derive much of our psychological strength from others. My worry as a therapist would thus be making sure these people are able to cobble together an ad-hoc support structure given the fact that sociality won’t work as well for them as it does for others. This is one of the reasons I want to work with kids with chronic illness. No, I don’t know how much it sucks to be them, but I have a much bigger clue than most do, and I’m hoping I can use my own experience to give me a better window into their minds and thus better serve them. If we begin treating schizoid characteristics as the problem instead of just a signal of the problem, we risk making psychology as much a matter of conformity as it is about mental health. And that scares me.

I generally enjoy Rick Roberts in the morning. He had the balls to call one of those California congresswomen (they’re fairly interchangeable aren’t they?) a socialist, to her face, on the air. And then after saying that she and her ilk were what’s wrong with America, He hung up on her. On his own radio show! How can you not like a guy like that.

But every now and then he does the ‘morally outraged citizen legislating something just to feel better’ thing. He supports the flag-burning amendment because, to paraphrase ‘when our rights are used against us, as flag burners do, it’s no longer ok.’ Which is a pretty weak argument.

To quote Boortz, ““Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.” It’s a sentiment he and other libertarians share with the founding fathers themselves. In fact, I’d say that the legality of flag burning is one of the greatest examples of the strength and sanctity of our Bill of Rights. Granted, said argument rings hollow when it comes from the mouths of the people doing the flagburning, but their insincerity makes it no less true. Besides, now you’re hearing it from a patriot.

And one of Rick’s callers, an activated guardsman, said it even better (again paraphrased): “Why should the government have any right to tell me what I can or cannot do with the flag I would die for.”

Says it all, really.

Denise Bode wants to be the US Representative for my district. What caught my attention was her voicing of support for the Fair Tax as I was flipping through the radio on the way to work yesterday.

Sounds good to me. So I went to her website, read a bit about her and I liked a lot of what she has to say.

Of course, there’s the typical
With a deep commitment to traditional family values, Bode pledged to stand up for traditional marriage, to oppose gay marriage, the right of our children to pray or say the Pledge of Allegiance (”Under God”), and faith-based solutions to our most pressing social problems. But here in Oklahoma, such platitudes are practically necessary regardless of political affiliation.

But there’s plenty here for the libertarian and the real conservative anxious to get back to the small government our supposed representative party has taken us so far from:

Bode will vote to reduce federal tax burdens for individuals and small business so Oklahoma families can keep more of their earnings. Bode is, and will continue to be, a true taxpayer and small business advocate. Denise supports the concept of a Fair Tax (a consumption tax), but it must be accompanied by responsible government spending. Supporting President Bush’s tax cuts and making them permanent is a good start, but it is only a start - elected officials say that they support this concept, but have themselves supported increases on taxes and fees while wasting taxpayer money in their respective districts

And it’s not all talk, this is exactly what she’s done with the Corporation Commission here. Back under Reagan, she was a congressional staffer working to effect tax cuts and elimination of the death tax. Her husband was also an important force in working to reform welfare.

On healthcare, “Gaining control over the spiraling costs of health care is a function of driving out unreasonable and unnecessary governmental regulations.”

On immigration:

By some estimates, illegal immigration costs this nation $22 billion per year. Bode will fight to eliminate this economic drain on our nation. How much is enough? It is estimated by the Center for Immigration Studies as well as national think tanks that building a wall along the border would cost $5 billion - reducing the flow of illegals would result in an aggregate annual savings for the taxpayers.

Sounds about right to me. And at any rate, damn the cost, as it is I’m going to be a substantial bulwark in the United States’ social welfare system, I don’t need to be a donor for Latin America’s system as well.

Yeah, I could do without the Christian rhetoric. I’m a big fan of traditional values and am more than a little puritanical in the way I live my life. But Christians don’t have a monopoly on morality, which is how these politicians try to make it sound. They are the second youngest major religion, and I feel more than a little slighted every time I hear the phrase ‘Christian family values’. These are values my family had long before Jesus ever walked the earth; values that are integral to who we are.

They’re also–and this is key–not something that needs to be legislated. Part of what makes up morality is that it’s a choice. If we legislate all temptation away, it wouldn’t be virtue so much as blind obedience. It’s the same thing I say to leftists when they ask why I don’t think political affiliation has anything to do with charitable spirit.

But I’m willing to look past that to get some good people in Congress. Lord knows we’ve lucked out with Coburn and his pork crusade.

Still not sure if I’d vote for her or not, but it really would be something if two of the most outspoken conservatives in Congress were from Oklahoma.

Introduction
Stupid title I know. Blogger’s block. It’s funny, but every time I try to point out the realities of market mechanics, someone gets his panties in a twist and starts calling me a Kos-kiddy. I guess my occasional conservationist posts might be in the realm of those idiots, but you’ve got to give me a break. I’m a big fan of markets. I think that with very few exceptions, markets are the way to go. Those exceptions aren’t pulled out of thin air though, but based on acknowledged problem areas where real and market values won’t be commensurate. Commons and anti-commons situations, where you get a direct and immediate benefit but an indirect and/or future cost, or vice versa for one.

Other times, I just want to make the point that while markets would be preferable to the current situation, expecting them to create a land of milk and honey is simply retarded. And for this I get screamed at. So I’m going to try to explain how the conditions of information and rationality impact market efficiency and allocation of resources one more time. Using cars as an example

Perfect Information
Everybody takes the EPA fuel mileage into account when considering a new automobile, especially these days. But what an antiquated test that’s almost as old as my mother claims and what the real world actually shows are often two completely different things. Nevertheless, that is the number we have to go by. According to the window sticker estimates, I drive a car that does 18 in the city and 24 on the highway. Which is interesting, because in real life I tend to do about 23/30…and I drive like a 22 year old with a sportscar. Which is actually better than the econobox I drove before.

Contrast that with the little hybrids like the Prius and Insight. You’ve probably noticed that the granola-eating hippies that drive those things don’t seem to understand the difference between the 50 miles per hour they’re traveling, the 70mph speed limit, and the 80mph prevailing speed. This has to do with the fact that those cars are ‘ringers’, they’re designed to do well on the EPA test, with its 55mph ‘highway’ speed and 30-35mph ‘city’ speed. Up at 70mph they’re way outside their comfort zone and mileage can drop precipitously.

This is an example of imperfect information. In this case, making gas-guzzling sports cars look worse than they really are, and ‘fuel efficient’ econoboxes and hybrids better. The result is that people concerned about the rising price of oil will be making sub-optimal decisions; they’ll make tradeoffs in any number of areas for the small car form-factor and pay premiums for a fuel efficiency difference that is much smaller than believed. This is a misallocation of resources, better known as waste.

Perfect Rationality
Every manufacturer out there wants you to know how much horsepower their car makes. And they’ll tell you. Repeatedly. Torque? I’ve only seen it advertised for diesel trucks. Even finding that information? Sometimes you’ll find it buried at the very back of the sales brochure, buried in there with all those other numbers like legroom, GWVR, wheelbase, etc. When my parents asked for some help when they went shopping for a crossover, I was completely unable to find that latter number for several of the models they were interested in.

I find this amusing since in general torque is a much more important quality as far as spirited driving goes. Horsepower is largely related to top speed, whereas torque is a better predictor of acceleration and general peppiness around the city, especially from anything other than a full stop. Now, I know for a fact that a 1998 Ford Windstar tops out somewhere over 118mph. Top speed just isn’t that important for a car’s feel. Torque on the other hand, is. Take the new RX-8 and the 1999-2004 Mustang GT. Both have right about 260 horsepower. But the former has only about half the torque of the latter. And sure enough, most people who drive an RX-8 expecting a ‘250 horsepower car’ are surprised that it doesn’t feel like what they’d expect.

Rationality. If more people understood kinematics and dimensional analysis, it would be fairly obvious that horsepower has little to do with how ‘powerful’ they perceive a car as feeling. Yet they continue to make decisions on sports cars based on horsepower. Which results in market inefficiency. In other words, people might be willing to pay $30,000 for a 250hp car, even though because of its lack of torque, it drives a lot like a 180hp car. Meanwhile, 220hp car that makes much more torque, and is consequently much more sporty, may be under-valued at only $20,000.

Conclusion
Clearly such issues don’t apply to all industry. But anywhere specialized knowledge is necessary, anywhere we ask people to make cost benefit analyses, anywhere we expect people to act rationally about quite complex issues, the market will be inefficient. I can think of few industries where this would be more true of than the medical industry.

Which isn’t to say that competition isn’t good for healthcare, just that even in a more open market than the crap we’ve got now, there will be plenty of waste and plenty of inefficiency to go around. Granted, this would still be an improvement…

New post up at Homeland Stupidity:

The American Medical Association has been proposing one protectionist or statist piece of legislation after the next, and while their motives are just as impure as ever when it comes to challenging the growth of retail-store healthcare services, as Dr. Thomas Davis points out, these retail-chain clinics aren’t the free market supporter’s wet dream that some would have us believe.

The basic point is much the same one I used in my critique of market anarchy. In this case, the big sticking point when it comes to a completely free medical market is perfect information. Or more specifically the lack thereof. I can’t think of any other market quite so large where consumers understand so little about the products and services they purchase. It’s not a matter of elitism, just a recognition that medicine is a highly complex field requiring a lot of specialized knowledge. And it definitely isn’t a function of intelligence *cough*.

My biggest proof of this? The fact that chiropractors remain highly regarded, no matter how far into quackery they descend. I’ll admit that due to sampling bias, I only hear the worst stuff. I hear the nonsense about how a bent spine can cause heart arrythmias. And, as a couple of spinal surgeons I’ve known have said: “I love chiropractors. Without their former patients, I wouldn’t own that home in Europe”. And I know the truth about their less-than-scientific education. They are just one example though, big pharma’s manipulation of both consumer and doctor ignorance being a much bigger instance of imperfect information.

I think that licensing and credentials have a vital role to fulfill, one that can only be strengthened by competition. If such agencies competed to field higher quality doctors and practitioners, the result would be that simply by looking at a doctor’s brand you would have a good proxy for his quality. Likewise, I think competition would stimulate a more effective symbiosis between NP/PA’s and doctors. Currently they operate quite antagonistically, with NP’s and PA’s seen as a threat to the primary care doctor’s practice. Sometimes you don’t need the 11 years of training and education a PCP has, but then again sometimes you do. If you could go to one place–and make one appointment–for both, everyone wins. And I think a more free marketplace would allow clinical PharmD’s to assume a role more commensurate with their education (they know a lot more than they’re given credit for).

Choice is important, and I think that opening up the marketplace can only be a good thing. Just don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This discussion will be nuanced, so leftists would have me believe my conservative readership wouldn’t be able to understand it. However, since the logical fallacies I’m about to expose are primarily championed by them, it would probably be very much a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Introduction
The thing about being human is that so much of our interactions are done using something–either a tool, a specific action, or another person–as an intermediary. While this ability gives rise to the wonderfully complex network of human interaction that forms the core of society, it also can make it somewhat difficult so separate cause from effect, especially when the actual cause was several times removed from the effect.

This is particularly problematic when it comes to understanding how the actions of one person may affect another. Whether a matter of criminal activity or public health, government is often eager to leap into the fray, announcing that they’ve decided to make the ’cause’ of this injurious activity illegal. Often enough the cause they find is nothing more than the implement used in commission of said act.

Disregarding the efficacy of such laws, one must question their logic. Unless we’re literally discussing forces of nature, most actions have a human cause and a human effect. Yet, all too often leftist logic dictates that what must be proscribed or punished isn’t the action but the tool.

This willing shortsightedness is boiled down to a few key points:
1. It makes a value judgment about a neutral object.
2. It ignores the human causes behind the action
3. It takes a perverse and confining view of human agency.

This post will be concerned primarily with the first two, the latter needing a bit more exposition.

Together, these fallacies result in laws that are neither effective nor just, as well as offering needless restrictions upon behaviors that are of little threat to anyone. Neither liberty nor safety preserved. Government control of man in his daily life, on the other hand, significantly increased.

Guns Don’t Kill People…
Guns are a very polarizing issue; the (positive) connection between stricter firearms control and higher crime is easily one of the most politically charged topics here in the US. Sadly, in the rest of the developed world, the leftists have won their battle against common sense. But because it’s the most loaded topic, it might be better to start off with something more neutral. Like a steel toe boot.

Yes, we normally think of such footwear as mundane everyday objects. But those of us who shift large amounts of weight and who were born with a certain level of clumsiness find them almost invaluable. Yet in the UK, death by kicking has rapidly overtaken firearms as method of homicide. Steel toed boots are renowned for the damage they can cause in a street fight. Indeed the shiny toecaps worn on the outside of many bikers’ boots are donned for just such a purpose. Which are they? Destructive streetfighting monstrosities only one step removed from coshes and brass knuckles? Or a way that men who work in rough environments can avoid stubbing, smashing, breaking, or otherwise maiming their toes?

And pointed kitchen knives will only be mentioned in passing…

As for firearms, I won’t bother with the standard treatments, just click the link on the left to the gunblog community and have your fill of it. Instead you’ll get an animal analogy. Yes, weapons were invented for violence (just look at Anomalocaris, the oldest known predator). But well before humans ever lived, weapons took on a very important function: preventing violence. Sharp teeth and claws were first seen on predators. But it wasn’t long before they were seen on herbivores. The herd of triceratops pointing their sharp horns at the T. Rex’s soft underbelly, watching him rear up, zeal abated at the thought of a quick disembowelment. Or the alpha male baboon’s canines, bared at the approaching lioness, warning her that the little dog-nosed, monkey-thumbed infants under his care just aren’t worth her trouble. The threat of violence by the meek has become one of the most effective defenses they can wield against the predatory meat eaters who would seek to end their lives. So again, I ask you, do guns promote violence or do they prevent it?

We may have heard in the news about the pitbull bans all over California, the northeast, and Denver. Disregarding the outrageousness of the police coming into a person’s home to ‘confiscate and euthanize’ what is for all intents and purposes an adopted family member, we must ask ourselves if these dogs really are the dangerous brutes they’re made out to be. There is a lot of evidence and discussion out there that would lead us to the opposite opinion. Personal experience with pits (along with a variety of animals ranging from livestock, to everyday pets, to veryexotic) would lead me to the conclusion that no, they aren’t particularly bitey. Particularly telling is the fact that the pitbull scores better on the Temperament Test (which is a very well designed test) than the average, and significantly better than a lot of those high-strung ‘toy’ breeds. Epidemiological data on bite rates confirms this, with retrievers, of all things, being far more likely to bite than a pit.

It just so happens that a pit does more damage when it does decide to use those magnificent jaws. But as I posit when some seek to limit the power of handguns and rifles, why stop there? Why stop at just breeds of dogs. If potential for damage is the issue, why not ban big men? Do you know how hard a big, trained fighter can hit? We’re talking a 200lb boxer hitting 5-10 times as hard as a male of average build. I say this because I’ve been hit by both, and, come to think of it, have been both. ‘That’s absurd’ the leftists tell us, even as they prepare to use that same logic against large ATV’s, powerful musclecars, and a host of different mechanical devices which were not designed to hurt people.

People Kill People
The thing that should be clear is that an implement, no matter how dangerous, has no value beyond that which we impart. Furthermore, like Schroedinger’s much put-upon cat, these devices can be said to be simultaneously both good and bad. Until they are put to either type of purpose, at least. Although perhaps to stick closer to the analogy, it is the observer who imparts such value-laden meaning onto both the tool and the action. After all, although few of the women in such a situation would see it that way, there are those who would contend the rape victim is morally superior to the woman standing with a smoking gun in her hand, a despicable subhuman bleeding at her feet.

But regardless of whether inanimate objects and less-than-sentient animals can be possessed of moral value in and of themselves, legislation that goes after such things is highly logically suspect. Crime after all is committed by people. Although certain implements may be preferred for certain tasks, or certain objects more prone to be neglected (and so contribute to crime of a more passive nature), they are all but roads toward a single end. And, while one road may be more traveled, more wide, and easier to access, other roads abound.

Take the twigs away from the New Caledonian crow and he’s just another crow. Take the hammer and anvil stones away from the chimpanzee and you have a very frustrated animal staring at a seemingly uncrackable nut. Take the gun away from the murderer and he’ll turn to the knife, the boot, poison, or any other number of less-than-pleasant methods (as in the UK and Australia, he might become even more dangerous). Take the gun away from the suicidal and he’ll merely find another way. Japan, with a suicide rate greater than ours, yet with a near-total ban on firearms, is a perfect illustration of this.

Or to come back to negligence and unintentional crimes, lets revisit the pitbull. The representatives I’ve had the fortune of getting to know have all been even-tempered animals I’d trust my child with (I might speak differently when I have a child. But I’d trust my golden with them. Which is just about as close). The pitbulls I tend to pass in the neighborhoods I live and work in tend to be a different story. To a dog you can practically see their owners’ neglect writ large across their unsteady eye. You can literally see their lack of training. These are dogs suffering from the equivalent of child neglect. And of course this is true of many of the dogs in such neighborhoods. It just happens to be that when not raised properly pitbulls can cause a lot more damage than say a toy poodle. And like a young child who never had the fortune of good parents, some are more destructive than others. But few place the fault upon the child. An aggressive pitbull is almost always the result of willfully abusive owners. An aggressive pitbull not properly restrained is always the result of negligence.

It’s a funny thing, but doing basic carpentry and mechanics, like any good hick, I’ve come to realize that even the most mundane of maintenance or assembly tasks has several different routes, several different methods, that can be used to reach the final product. A crescent wrench or a ratchet? Drill or screwdriver? Circular saw or scroll saw? Flathead or Phillips? Dovetails, mortis&tenon, or two 45 degree cuts? (Funnily enough, many of the people destined to be ‘cultural elite’ couldn’t find one way through one of these jobs, let alone the 8 or 10 me and my buddies would argue over.)

I also bear more than a few scars. Paint stripper chemical burns on one forearm, one thumb literally glued back together after an xacto knife split the tip down to the bone, woodsaw, circular saw, runaway belt sander. A rather long list, but not as long as many. One I consider a testament to my own stupidity (and in the case of the woodsaw nearly taking off a finger, my friend not watching out). I can’t even fathom how I could blame the tools.

People are adaptable, we’re flexible, we’re innovative. I won’t say this sets us apart from other animals, but certainly no other animal quite shares our abilities in this regard. So to posit that by removing just one tool in a criminal’s arsenal, they can leave him powerless is the height of lunacy. Faced with the meaninglessness of such bans, a government can either react to failure by admitting the logical mistake and vigorously pursuing the actual agents of destruction (want to take any bets?), or they can continue to proscribe all implements that could possibly be used in such crimes. Not only would the latter be highly ineffective—it is highly unlikely that the entire government could react at the same speed as a single criminal, let alone a society impregnated with them—it would be one of the greatest threats to our liberty yet seen.

Any object with the potential for misuse would find itself banned or regulated. And looking around your cubicle walls (or even worse, at home), just how much do you see that could easily be used to commit a violent crime? Looking up the statistics on domestic violence and lovers’ spats you might find that your imagination pales in comparison to the reality of the resourcefulness of human nature.

Conclusion
Crimes hurt people. Crimes are committed by people. Blame for crime should always be directed at the perpetrators, the ones with the blood on their hands. And fighting crime should always be directed at people, not objects. Everything else is just window dressing. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is a lot to be said about the kind of mind that would say otherwise, that would confuse mechanisms and processes as causes. A lot of condescension for one thing, that to think by manipulating the presence or absence of various objects they can change the way you think. But worrisome than the kind of person who would seek to manipulate humanity in such a way is the way they have gotten the masses to think about themselves. That they are the mindless sheep their masters want them to be, nothing more than reactive products of their environment.

It’s an idea worthy of its own post, and I’ll try to get it up next week in Radical Behaviorism and the Leftist Mind

It’s really starting to bother me when I hear about people ‘being victimized’ just because they ended up on the wrong side of a deal they freely went into. If you make a poor choice, and someone profits off of that, you weren’t victimized…you were stupid. Payday loan services? They don’t ‘take advantage’ of you. Being victimized is when they coerce you . You might be in a situation where you need the money fast, and so you partake of their services. But you didn’t go there because of them, you went because you decided your circumstances warranted it.

Life is a series of games, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Winners aren’t criminals, and losers aren’t victims. They are free individuals engaging in socioeconomic interaction. The winners might be douchebags, and it might not be the loser’s fault that he had to go that route. But neither one of those have anything to do with whether or not a crime was committed.

This idea–that somehow making bad decisions means you’ve been taken advantage of–is a dangerous one. In a world like that can you imagine how we’d have to tip toe through life? Afraid that at any time we might be declared felons for daring to commit the dastardly deed of coming out ahead of the game?

I’m beginning to think that the death of civilization won’t necessarily come from a single action, or apathy, or any of that other stuff. But impunity. The feeling that people won’t be punished for what they do. In England we see it with home invasion (occupied robberies) rates. They simply aren’t afraid. But I’m not even talking about things like crime.

I’m talking about impunity in daily life and (especially) your job. At the airport, at customer service or human resources desks, wherever I happen to be, what I see isn’t necessarily incompetence or gross negligence but the conscious decision not to do a good job, or to do an intentionally bad job, simply because no one can punish them for that act.

Not invincibility, impunity. A “na na na na boo boo you can’t catch me!!!” rather than a “bitch please, you don’t want to step to this”

Whether it’s unions, ineffectual management, or any number of other causes, people aren’t afraid of performing badly even when they know it negatively impacts someone else.

This has me rapidly coming to the conclusion that violence is the answer. Not revenge per se, more a “he needed killin’” kinda thing. In hinduism we call men who do such acts Karma Yogis. The basic idea is that they don’t do the action because they want to, or because it gives them pleasure, but simply because that’s what’s needed to restore order. It was the central point of the Bagavad Gita.

I just think that if some of these layabouts understood that a quick, polite, penetrating knife wound could be their reward for screwing someone, they might behave a little better.

Going to Evolution 2006, where, after widdling myself out of nervousness, I’ll present a part of my dissertation to an audience of older better educated people who’ll rip me to shreds. So, kinda pre-occupied. Don’t expect much until Sunday

The Evolution Of Mating Systems And Paternal Behavior In Neotropical Primate Taxa: A Bioenergetic And Phylogenetic Perspective
RAO, NIKHIL P

Monkeys, Monogamy, and Multivariate Calculus…Oh My! Seriously, if I don’t put myself to sleep I’d be surprised…

Should be fun though, Thursday I’m going to get to go to the American Museum of Natural History for the very first time, and since it’s going to be the conference attendees there, the curators will be out of hiding and showing us around. Which is just badass. Expect tons of pictures unless I short out the camera from the drool.

And Sean Carroll who wrote Endless Forms Most Beautiful

will be giving a talk that night. I’ll be reviewing that book eventually. Evo-devo is not only fascinating, it helps make the modern synthesis considerably more plausible. the mutation problem has always been a sticking point for me, until now.

It’ll be a good learning experience. And hopefully a few more conferences under my belt will help me make up for the fact that I’m not PhD track.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m involving more and more general behavioral ecological theory in my discussion of political topics. I started moving that direction with Evolution, Economics, and Political Philosophy but really ramped it up during the whole minarchy-anarchy debate. Well as the title makes apparent, I’ve finally figured out what to call this kind of thinking. Considering I started thinking (but not blogging) about this kind of thing way back in 2003, it’s pretty sad that it took me this long to figure out what to call political philosophy from a behavioral ecologist’s perspective.

To leave you with something a bit more substantive, I threw up a little in my mouth when I read this:

After compiling the evidence of liberal catechism, Coulter finally turns her bazooka on the foundation of liberalism itself: Darwinism.

OK, seriously, why don’t you just throw down your pen and start waving a white flag? If you’re going to concede that nonsensical idea to them, you might as well start declaring that socialism is a good idea in theory and that the UN is a noble organization.

This isn’t hard, people. It really isn’t. Leftism is about the collective, about the group, about the state, about the people as a different entity from all the persons who comprise it. Evolution is about the individual, about self-interest, about competition, about survival of the fittest.

Even if you don’t agree with evolution, at least use it as a tool to expose their hypocrisy.

A post about affirmative action in law school kind of chrystalized a strain of thought that’s been running around in my head for a few years now.

Even if we disregard the logical failings and moral reprehensibility of an equality of outcome measure like Affirmative Action, somehow rationalizing it as some form of justice that we revisit the sins of the father upon the son (and on me, a freaking immigrant), I believe that AA actively hurts its supposed beneficiaries.

If you happened to attend one of the so-called elite institutions in the past few years, you would have noticed an interesting dichotomy in the aptitudes, background knowledge, and success rates of students. The separation didn’t occur along gender lines, or chosen fields of study. It didn’t correlate all that well with race or income, but both were clearly involved in some way. There were smart and hard-working minorities tearing their way through school alongside their pigmentally-challenged compatriots. But it was almost too easy to point out the AA and legacy kids. Whether intermediate spanish or an upper-level genetics seminar, the students that struggled consistently tended to be from those admissions groups. Now, I’m not saying that every kid given non-merit-based preference was like that, just a good many.

The thing about colleges is that some expect more of you from the get go than others do. You can get an outstanding education from a state school that rivals what you get at any ivy, but you have to ask for it. No amount of melanin in the world can make up for the fact that you hadn’t read Hamlet or taken calculus before you got to college when it comes to the substantive parts of your education. It would be far more in your best interest to go to a school that’ll allow you to set your own pace and make up for some of the deficiencies that aren’t necessarily any fault of your own before you throw yourself into the deep end. As an analogy, I’m starting to row again, but I’m training on my own. Because I’m old, slow, achy, and simultaneously fatter and skinnier than I’ve ever been in my life. I would gain nothing by training with a competitive team again. Might even lose some confidence and conditioning due to the fact that I didn’t even have a shot in hell at keeping up. So I’ll work at my own pace and ready myself for the fall.

Several commissioners expressed concern, shared by myself, Prof. Lempert, and Professor Sander, that many “diversity” candidates have no idea regarding the extent of the preferences that they receive, or how this might affect their chances of successfully completing law school and passing the bar exam. Even Dean Smith acknowledged that it might be a good idea to make more information about the success rate of matriculants available to prospective students, if such data could be gathered accurately. There was significant support among the commissioners for a pending bill in Congress that would require universities to reveal far more about their admissions policies, especially with regard to preferences.

Sounds about like what I saw when I was in undergrad.

Another factor is that at elite institutions, these kids will be far more likely to be passed through regardless of aptitude, only to realize they weren’t prepared for licensing and/or the real world:

As I understood it, Professor Lempert was not at all confident that similar benefits accrue to the purported beneficiaries of preferences at lower-ranked law schools, which (as a emphasized in my testimony) have a much lower (and often disastrously low) rate of success in graduating such students and preparing them for the bar.
[-----snip-----]
(5) Several commissioners expressed grave concern about the extraordinarily high rate at which African American law students at non-elite law schools either fail out of law school or fail to pass the bar exam (over 50% at the bottom two-thirds of law schools), and about the fact that while the new standard requires law schools to pursue diversity in admissions, it says nothng about the need to ensure that admittees actually succeed in becoming attorneys.

Crucial factors in school rankings include retention and graduation rates. And the same schools that vie for the top of those rankings are usually the same ones that bang the diversity drum the loudest. At the undergrad level, we’ve seen their need to keep both high in the proliferation of “look at me, i’m a minority” studies like african-american, hispanic-american, and asian-american studies and an increased ratio of BS (and I don’t mean bachelors of science) classes compared to the hardcore social sciences and liberal arts. When it comes to professional schools, the institution might just keep passing you up, but you’re going to run into a brick wall when it comes time to take the USMLE, Bar exam, or what have you. Which can’t be very fun.

Institutions more localized in their pull and less ambitious in their goals actually have less incentive to keep the chaff around: The US News rankings have little bearing on schools like Oklahoma University Med School where I think 95% of my class is either Oklahoman or has a tie of some kind to Oklahoma. And where around 75% of us will stay in Oklahoma. Career goals are different for these kinds of places, and cachet is less important both to the school and to the student. Which is why these lower-ranked schools show such abysmal pass rates. With such strong ties to their communities and states, they have little incentive to bother playing that arbitrary numbers game. So long as their graduates yield them a good reputation with local laypeople, they’re doing their job. These lower-ranked schools thus offer the best indication of differences in achievement and preparedness in the applicant pool.

But a far more disturbing aspect of the matter is that racial preferences–particularly when less-than-qualified applicants have to be accepted to meet quotas–actually justify prejudicial thought: They actually make such stereotypes valid:

Various commissioners focused on the fact that the proposed standard’s official “interpretations” requires the ABA to consider not just law school diversity recruiting efforts, but also results. The ABA representative (Dean Steven Smith) had no good answer when asked how–given the unfortunately small pool of “qualified” African American applicants available to elite schools–a results-based standard could be met without resort to preferences.

AA often (usually) results in a student pool that is segregated along racial lines, with Asians being the most well-qualified applicants, whites next (expect that difference to disappear in a generation or so), and hispanics and blacks last. This racial stratification remains prominent in graduate testing and even licensing. As an example, there are *cough* certain race-based medical schools out there with slightly low average MCAT scores.

What this means is that at the population level the contention that minority graduates–despite possessing the same degrees and same qualifications as others–are of lower quality is valid. Not because they’re minorities, but because a minority could be a weaker job candidate, student, or applicant and still be accepted. A degree from an elite institution is supposed to mean a pattern of hard work from high school onward. It’s supposed to mean a high SAT score, a lot of in-depth and relatively advanced classes. And it’s supposed to mean that the kid really did get a better education. But when whites and asians are held to one standard, and ‘underrepresented minorities’ to another, this means that a diploma earned by a member of one race means an entirely different thing from a diploma earned by a member of a different race. Furthermore, with many of these AA kids going into joke majors, many are not going to find the career prospects they expected.

Affirmative Action makes a mockery of Dr. King’s words that a man should be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. By focusing our attention on race, AA exacerbates differences and fails to bring any real harmony. Resentment from whites and asians, failure for ill-prepared minorities it’s supposed to help. Not to mention the basic social injustice of making some races work harder than others to achieve the same thing, even when they have no causal connection to a practice that ended almost 150 years ago. Affirmative Action is racism, and it hurts everyone.

linky

Looks like the cities of Hazleton, PA and San Bernardino, CA are poised to step in where the federal government won’t.

I’ve never understood why some cities refuse to enforce immigration policy, on the other hand.

I understand that it’s a matter of federal law, but when an illegal immigrant is charged with a crime, why the hell would you keep him in our jails or release him onto our soil? If an illegal immigrant comes in demanding city or state services (usually extremely progressively funded through property taxes and the like), why wouldn’t you ask for papers? Given the nature of their funding (a relatively small percentage of residents bearing the brunt of taxation) every illegal they dispense services to represents a decrease in availability for legal residents and citizens.

It is the nature of a progressive tax system that the more poor we let in, the worse off the poor already here become. Even if they aren’t taking jobs (which they are). The more people we let in below the ‘break-even point’, the less per capita funding we end up with for government services.

Now, personally I’d rather we give up social welfare entirely (and then I’d be bothered less by illegal immigration as well), but I’m not the one calling for open borders. It seems silly that leftists support these mutually antagonistic causes.

But more importantly, why would we let our resources be wasted on someone else. Especially someone who has already shown a shocking disrespect for this country. And whose governments show an even greater disrespect, actively encouraging such transgressions so we can be their social welfare system.

American socialism pisses me off badly enough, I don’t need to be supporting that foul habit for the rest of the New World as well.

6 years ago, during Kiss’s ‘Farewell Tour’ (they had another one a couple years later), when Ted Nugent stood up on stage and shouted ‘If you can’t speak the language, get the **** out of America,’ I was cheering along with half the crowd (hicks), and worried the other half of the crowd would start a riot (hispanics).

It was not a racist comment.

It was merely a statement of my belief that if you want to live in my country, the least you can do is be able to communicate with me. If coming to America is such a great opportunity, it’s the least you can do in return for the nation we’ve built. It’s a matter of respect. Nothing more, nothing less.

People try to say it’s a ‘white’ thing. It’s not. It’s a common sense thing. It’s about not wanting poverty and crime imported into our country. And we would have the same reaction no matter what color of the people streaming across our borders. At least I would.

People say that most illegals are peaceful, law-abiding hard workers. Even though this claim is patently false, it doesn’t even make sense. They ignore one law, what will stop them from ignoring one more? They are not entitled to driver’s licenses. How many of them drive? They have no social security cards, How many of them give false SSN’s? One of my acquaintances actually had ten different people using his number. All with vaguely spanish-sounding names.

Stopping illegal immigration makes too much sense not to do. And if we want it to happen, it has to come from every level. We can’t hire an illegal for yard work and say ‘well, it’s the government’s job’. That may be, but if you value a closed border, you can show that value by spending a little more to hire a kid or a poor college student. We can’t allow our local officials to refuse enforcement either actively or passively. We can’t allow privileges like driving, medicaid, and welfare. The fat cats in Washington will be forced to get up off their asses and help us out, or be exposed for the self-serving frauds they are. (It’ll be the latter)

Was talking to intellectimpure last night, and it occurred to me that the problem wasn’t finding a decent woman…

The problem was finding a decent woman who isn’t that way for simple reasons.

What I mean by that is that I’m looking for a girl who (among other things) has developed a strong moral and personal code based on something more than “[insert religious or authority figure here] said I shouldn’t.” It’s just fine to be inspired by religious and other authority figures; My code of behavior is built upon a core of eastern values. But it shouldn’t end there.I’m not a big fan of doing things ‘just because’. I believe that the only way to remain true to ourselves is if we understand the why of what we do.

It’s easy enough to find a pretty and intelligent girl. Relatively easy to find one of those with a strong sense of morality. But one who’s really thought it out? That’s a lot harder.

posted the entire thing (not just links) over here

This way, those who are late to the party or found the format otherwise a pain in the butt now have a way to read straight through from beginning to end. Actually now that it’s up in an easier to follow format done, I’m about to do that myself.

This is the last one I’ll do. I’m getting testy, and I’m pretty sure he’s refusing to listen to a single thing I say. In the interest of not wasting any more time on a lost cause, and not venting my frustration on a guy who, for the most part, I respect, I’m cutting myself off. I’ve said everything that needs to be said about the failures of market anarchy to live up to the real world. If that makes me a coercive statist, so be it. At least my eyes are open.

What I respect most about Mr. Tremblay is his philosophical consistency and his ability to get other liberty-loving folks to sit up and think. What I do not like about his belief system–market anarchy–is that the entire philosophy seems a bit like a teenager who’s watched A Beautiful Mind or read Freakonomics and now can’t stop raving about the amazing predictive ability of economics, yet hasn’t put much thought into the basic assumptions made by either market anarchy or economics or the limitations of both.

Market anarchy obviously is built upon economic models. Some of the assumptions that an economic model makes are perfect rationality (yeah, right), perfect information (people know EVERYTHING about what’s going on…), and that market value and real value are commensurate (I’m not even going to bother). When these conditions (and others) are satisfied, the model shows excellent fidelity. When these conditions aren’t satisfied, we see various levels of crappiness.

Furthermore, market anarchy takes the one inviolate assumption of all behavioral modelling, that individuals are self-interested, and then proceeds to make strange claims about how that self interest manifests itself. Not to mention making judgments on what we actually value.

Market anarchists hold that what people will always value life, liberty, and property at a high level. While there is good evidence for the first, and the third could be argued, the notion that liberty is highly valued is laughable.

From hormonal systems all the way through highest-order brain functioning, we are literally wired to seek comfort and security. Comfort and liberty are often, but not always, mutually exclusive entities. Furthermore, contrary to how many of us feel, most people would gladly trade their liberty for comfort. Hence my example of the serf. Liberty is an abstract. An abstract that in and of itself guarantees little or nothing in material wealth. Why should I pay a guy 10,000 dollars to keep other people from killing and stealing my property if he’ll let me starve to death? Surely I’d choose the guy who charges 15,000, performs the above services, but throws in a minimum level of food and shelter into the bargain? So what if he tells me I can’t do certain things (like not wear a seatbelt or leave the house past certain times) in order to be true to my contract? At least I won’t starve.

Mr. Tremblay tries to divert attention by saying that somehow people wouldn’t behave that way when free. Which explains why as I said there is no human society without a monopolizing power structure of some kind or another. He tries again by missing my point about monopolist systems. The structures themselves are remarkably stable. It’s merely the players that change rapidly.

Which brings us to another important facet of self interest: The quest for power. The man charging 15,000 is not merely after wealth but after power as well. He will manipulate the self interest of others, particularly their comfort-seeking, in order to gain power. At first, of course, it might be limited to material wealth. But it will turn itself to control of those under him. Such as restrictions on their behavior, etc. And if this man comes to control a sizeable portion of the total wealth in the population (which he will, given our innate tendencies), little could be done to stop him becoming a tyrant. Mr. Tremblay makes the quaint assertion that:

An anarchy can exist where 99% of people do not desire to be free, and they are free to assemble themselves in hierarchies as much as they want- but as long as some people do desire to be free, those people will be able to assemble and live their freedom relatively fully.

Because ambition has never led a man to want to control others. Oh sure, I guess the 1% could amass their fortunes and attempt to rise up. That’ll of course end well. Like the Alamo or Thermopylae.

Given this fact, there is no point in invoking hypothetical “invasions”. There is no such thing as an “invasion”, for there is nothing to “invade”. There is no “country” or “state” to take over. Another group of people who want to assemble together in a hierarchy is merely that- another group of people who want to live their lives differently. Can Nikhil tell us what is being invaded?

Well, I thought I was being clear about what invadable meant. Invasion is a term used in game theoretics to denote what happens when new players enter (or old players start to play differently) who play by different rules than the old players. Invasion occurs when the old system doesn’t work under this onslaught. Such as when, far from valuing liberty, people would actively yield it. And pay to do so. In this case, the invaders are power-mongers and comfort-seekers, as opposed to the utopian extant population who place a high monetary value on liberty.

Would a society where 99% of people reject rights be free? Not really. But a minarchy in that same society would make people even less free. So once again his point should be returned to himself.

I’ve never said that a minarchist society would be perfectly free. I’ve merely asserted that it would keep people the most free. Now, if you mean to tell me that a society organized along the lines of the intent of say the articles or the constitution (albeit with fewer federal AND state’s rights but more individual rights) would be less free than a society that’s 99% communist russia and 1% anarchist utopia?

Interesting proposition to say the least.

Nikhil keeps making veiled threats of coercion against anyone who disagrees with his ideal system. Unlike Nikhil, I have no wish to force those people to live the way I want. I am not a violent or utopian person. I simply wish for all to be free to live the way they want.

Apparently, this principle is very hard to understand.

I think I’ve done a good job of demonstrating that people won’t be free to live as they want. The majority will willingly choose the comfortable cage. And the ambitious men who guide them into those cages, taking money as they do so, will hardly constrain their ambition to just those many. Armed with the majority of societal wealth, it would be hard to stop such juggernauts from coming down like an armored fist upon those who really did value freedom.

So what we end up with is the market anarchist saying that ‘well at least I let people put themselves in a totalitarian goverment.’ Which seems to be the jist of it as he admits that people won’t necessarily choose liberty. So it doesn’t protect natural rights, by his own admission. But it is a convenient moral and philosophical high ground. Which I’ll concede. He’s more internally consistent, while I’m a violently coercive and oxymoronic statist claiming to defend liberty by chaining people to government. But at least I make sense in the real world.

By supporting ‘market anarchy’ you support a quick return to totalitarianism. Market anarchy is too far removed from the real world, takes too few factors into account, and makes some rather strange and un-thought-out views about human nature. In a lot of ways, they remind me of Marx. Starting out on the right track before veering off into the clouds with daydreams about what they want people to be rather than what we really are. But that’s probably just an assertion too.

The Radical Libertarian’s response to my first post…

Personally I saw plenty of argument in my last piece, but that’s just me. Anyway kiddies, it’s time for my infamous patented MSPaint work.

First up, behavioral modelling is a very old branch of mathematics and science. Started sometime in the mid 1800’s. The goal of modelling–whether in terms of economics, reproductive fitness, food acquisition, or energy expenditure–is to develop an equation or system of equations that, using a set of discrete variables can accurately predict an individual’s (or group’s) behavior:

At least in behavioral ecology, a decent model can predict a behavioral outcome anywhere from about 70-90% of the time, using only a small subset of all of the factors that go into an outcome. In the picture given, the square represents all possible variation in the factors that go into determining outcome, while the circle outlines the range of variation under which the model is accurate. Of the 120 variables that affect outcome, only 7 were used by the model to develop a relatively high predictive ability (the area of the circle divided by the area of the square).

Behavioral modelling of all types is subsumed under the field of behavioral ecology. Economics is merely a small subset of this field:

What I mean by this is that self-interest, the guiding principle of all behavior, is manifested in various forms. Economics concerns itself with only a portion of self-interested behavior, namely the exchange of goods and effort (whether through currency or barter). As I discussed in The Nature of Self Interest, a view of human behavior that considers solely economic self-interest is far too myopic. In the space of one issue of American Naturalist, Behavioral Ecology & Sociobiology, or hell, even American Journal of Primatology (a far less technical journal), you’ll see self-interest analyzed in several forms: maximization of reproductive fitness, minimization of predation risk, minimization of energy expenditure, and maximization of feeding efficiency, just to name a few. Although inter-related, each of these requires a different perspective and a different model incorporating different extrinsic and intrinsic factors.

Why did I go through that? To show the difference between model and reality, and to illustrate that just because a model works in one context, it may not work in another. Traditional economics–and thus the market–at the end of the day can only explain and predict a narrow range of human behavior; that which we give explicit monetary value to.

Mr. Tremblay sums up his position on why anarchy protects freedom through the market with the following:

Actually, there is only one process regulating a market anarchy, and it is that process that “prevents the strong from turning it into” anything: it’s called consumer demand. I want to be free and I will not support anyone who tries to enslave me. If that means that I have to stop getting my services from the company with the best offer, then so be it- my freedom is more important than short-term financial gain. And anyone who did try to use violence to take over society would be met by retaliatory force, financed by all the people who agree with me that freedom is an important value (which are the vast majority).

You see, economics relies on the placement of a market value on a given item. In this case, we’re concerned with classical rights. Anarcho-capitalists assert that consumer demand (and thus market value) for classical rights is high and will always be high. Now, what I value freedom at, what Mr. Tremblay does, indeed what most of the people who read this entry value it at, is indeed quite high. Somewhere between Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that he “would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it” and Patrick Henry’s declaration that he would rather death over loss of liberty.

But do people in general really believe that freedom is that important a value? The past 100 years would seem to indicate otherwise as we’ve seen the rise of the welfare state in every country around the world. I can count on my fingers the number of people I met during my year in London who actually held freedom in high regard. I initially met both of them through an American blog. Among my fellow students, I’m one of two libertarians that I know of. The rest are more or less evenly split between statists of either conservative or leftist flavor. I know that the political compass would claim otherwise, but if we are to be honest, liberty simply isn’t that important to most.

And this goes back to the very limited purview of economics. A greater understanding of the nature of self interest, not to mention a study of human behavior, would inevitably lead to the conclusion that what is most valued is comfort. Not wealth, not liberty, but comfort. In truth, who would choose the hard life of the wolf upon the tundra over that of the pampered labrador? Who would choose the freedom to fail over the security of ensured mediocrity? We may wax eloquent about freedom all we want, but the truth is that even the way our brains are wired biases us toward seeking comfort rather than a cold philosophical ideal.

Most of us are well acquainted with this famous gem:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can only exist until the voters discover
that they can vote themselves largess from the public
treasury. A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can only exist until the voters discover
that they can vote themselves largess from the public
treasury. From that time on the majority always votes
for the candidates promising the most benefits from the
public treasury, with the results that a democracy
always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed
by a dictatorship.–Alexander Fraser Tytler

And while he wasn’t speaking of market anarchy, the basic sentiment applies to the market as well (in which you ‘vote’ with your dollar). During the middle ages, men willingly chose the near-slavery of the serf over the free–but hard–life of the subsistence farmer. Why? Security. The vassal swore an oath of fealty and gave up his freehold that he might receive the protection of his feudal lord.

In fact, the history of middle ages Europe is a perfect example of the failure of the an-cap system. As more and more men chose safety and comfort over freedom, rulers’ power grew more and more in scope. Once upon a time ‘Kings’ were petty little things, ruling over small parcels of land of little consequence. But as time went on, kingdoms grew to the size of entire countries, and in time a Holy Roman Emperor would be crowned.

If men really valued freedom, then why did they willingly choose to create a monarchy of unprecedented size? If men really value freedom, then why at the ballot box does most of europe vote for more social welfare and more subjugation to the state. Why does half our country ascribe to leftist principles? Why does the UN remain in such high esteem despite their overtly and egregious statism?

Now, Francois does bring up the point that:

The most eloquent proof of [an-cap stability], is that natural monopolies are virtually impossible, except when the state imposes one on society, or provides one itself.

Which is a good point, but ultimately too superficial. No, natural monopolies don’t last for very long. But the basic power structures do. It’s a well known fact that the longer you’ve been an alpha male, the less likely you’ll remain so. Yet the basic system of a given alpha male monopolizing (or nearly monopolizing) mating opportunities continues. The same could be said of the breeding pairs in cooperative breeding systems. Monopolistic systems are remarkably stable, although the players at the top may change.

To invoke a little Orwell, the pigs will stand on two legs. And when they do, one will scarcely be able to tell the difference between pig and man. Personally I find little comfort in the fact that although I’ll remain oppressed my entire life, the identities of my oppressors will change.

So once again I argue that anarcho-capitalism is an invadable system. If every member of an an-cap society valued classical rights, then yes, such a system would work. Now show me such a population. And show me how they’d respond to the invasion by not only power-mongers, but those who value not liberty but comfort. Not so well. We saw that happen in the past 70 years as we failed to reign in our own government.

And in this day and age, most don’t even recognize what rights really are. Most can’t conceive of the individual as sovereign and the state just a tool. Most see government as inherently good. Some people want comfort. Others want power. Few want liberty. This combination can ill be resisted by such a system as the market.

Yes, I’m willing to compromise my ideals to build a state. Because, though inherently evil, the state represents our best chance of maximizing liberty. Apparently this is silly. I call it realistic. As I said in an earlier post:

Just as a surgeon must sometimes remove part of the body to save a life, we may sometimes be forced to advocate legislation where we’d rather none exist whatsoever. Beyond that, we must occasionally push for a direct curtailment of liberty in order to protect that which remains.

I stand by that statement, and I hope the past couple of posts will help you understand why.

Introduction
Me and Francois Tremblay have decided to have a bit of a debate, sparked by ‘Why Any Rights At All?’ He says I mischaracterize anarcho capitalism. I say my piece was just badly written. I’d encourage you to read both posts before you read this as it’ll be pretty unintelligible otherwise.

Anyway, framing the issue pretty well, he says that

On the issue of natural rights, I am not in good company. Most anarchists take quite a pragmatic stance, and deny that rights exist, or claim that rights contradict the absolute freedom of anarchy, or require a state in order to be effected (which is patent nonsense said by people who should know better). And minarchists claim that we need a state in order to protect such rights.

Anarcho-capitalism, market anarchy, whatever you want to call it is something I would love to believe in. You know how a lot of democrats with some level of brains say “I wish Marxism could work, even though it can’t”? That’s my basic position on the an-cap philosophy. I wish…

My political ideology is actually built upon a belief in the basic tenets of anarcho-capitalism. What I mean by this is that whereas socialism isn’t even a good idea in theory (despite leftists’ wistful daydreaming to the contrary), anarcho-capitalism is. It is from a basic belief in the self-ordering properties of all animal societies–especially human societies–that my minarchist position stems from. I have great faith in the ability of as simple a rule as self-interest to create complexity, order, and yes, stability. If there was one thing I could be said to worship, it would be just that. I’ve seen it with my own eyes in everything from petri dishes to Indian jungles to human society.

But the problem with anarcho-capitalism is that somewhere on the road leading from theory to practice, we find ourselves amidst a truckload of half-penny nails. Now, you could just go driving blindly through, ignoring the nails. Or you could take that exit right there and take the service road for a bit, being pissed off that you have to go 45 instead of 70 for a while. I am an anarchist with a practical streak.

So I wholeheartedly agree with his statement that

Anarchy implies a return to the natural state of man, which is, as history I think has well demonstrated, that of producer and trader, not of oppressor.

Anarchy Is Value Neutral
One of the problems with using economic/ecological language is that sometimes terms meant to be completely neutral come across as quite loaded. This apparently has fueled Mr. Tremblay’s assertion that I see anarchy as nihilistic. Far from it, as I said, I practically worship at the altar of natural self-order. But there’s a phrase used in evolutionary biology to describe natural selection: “Directionless and purposeless.” The economic mechanism most similar to natural selection would be what Adam Smith called The Invisible Hand. Like natural selection, the invisible hand is directionless and purposeless, moving at the whim of the finicky consumer, often without apparent reason. But ultimately working to promote order, just as natural selection is behing the complexity of a capuchin society.

This is what separates Darwinian evolution from the chain-of-being conception that preceded it. Humans aren’t ‘more advanced’ than amoebas. More complex, sure. But since in evolution there is no direction, one can’t be better than the other. Or to throw in a value-laden example, is the self-interested infanticidal male Howler monkey bad? While the self-interested Titi monkey who’s as devoted a father as you’ll find among mammals is good? Whether killing babies or doting upon them, these males are driven by the same motivation: Self interest drives both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Anarchy isn’t nihilistic, per se. But their espousal of the market not only supports the maintenance and development of ‘good values’, it does so for ‘bad values’ as well, so long as they profit. As Francois says, the “concept of an anarchic society is impregnated with value and meaning.” I won’t disagree there, but I would argue against the assertion that the market somehow promotes good value and meaning over the bad. Self interest isn’t ‘good’, it just is.

Anarchy Is Only An Approximation
This next portion will go slightly out of the order it appeared in Francois’ post so that my thought process will be a bit more intelligible. He brings up a great point about ‘natural’ rights:

I must preface by saying that I see natural rights as a purely theoretical concept- everyone tries to fulfill his values, not a concept of rights. Nevertheless, rights give us a guideline by which we can evaluate how progressive a society is.

Darn tootin. I don’t see natural rights as particularly natural. Which is why I prefer to refer to them as ‘negative’ or ‘classical’ rights. I do, however, see their maintenance as necessary to the protection of the ‘free state’. Which is the crux of the argument. I say that it is imperative that we give up a minimum level of freedom to maintain a minarchist government, or we risk losing the rest of our liberty.

On the other hand, anarcho-capitalists believe that liberty is best defended through market mechanisms.

An anarchy tends towards rights better than statist systems, not because the system is engineered to do so a priori, by divine fiat, but because humans are engineered to seek their self-interest.

And indeed this is what I intimated–but failed to do so clearly–in Why Any Rights At All:

Although the incidences of all of these [trespasses against natural rights] would decrease relative to other animals in a human anarchistic society due to an increased fear (and cost) of retaliation, they would still exist.

Again, because of the language used (fear, cost, retaliation), I believe Francois takes that I’m implying this process of self order is a negative thing, when it is, in fact, just another way of saying what he did when he said:

So our value system is a natural counter-balance to the desire to not be subject to rules. There is a point of equilibrium which should be attained by this process. Where is it? Well, it is definitely lower than the exploitation of statism, and definitely higher than a total lack of organized order (which I think is what Nikhil thinks of when he says “anarchy”). Does it fit perfectly in the peg hole of natural rights? I doubt it, but I assume it must be pretty close.

By his own admission then, an anarcho-capitalistic society would continue to have crimes against liberty, their incidence would just be lower than they are in traditional statist systems. Which is what I meant when I said:

“Although the incidences of all of these would decrease relative to other animals in a human anarchistic society due to an increased fear (and cost) of retaliation, they would still exist. So what the anarchist asserts is that a basal level of murder, coercion, and theft is somehow ok. The depredations against others in an anarchy represent the background noise that proponents clearly ignore as mere stochastic effect.”

It is the latter part of that statement that he takes issue with when he says:

Let me state this clearly: a basal level of murder, coercion and theft is not okay. It is more conductive to my values to live in a society without any murder, coercion and theft, than it is to live in a society with any level of murder, coercion and theft.

Yet, again by his own admission, such things would continue to exist in an anarcho-capitalist system. Anarcho-capitalism can be looked upon as what’s known as a mixed stable system. The mathematics behind these are complex, but the outcome is simple to understand; those who value natural rights live alongside those who don’t. The latter cannot be completely eliminated by selective forces (in this case, market forces), since at some frequency there’s a payoff for ‘being bad’. So by ascribing to the an-cap system, you tacitly accept that the latter will continue to exist. You in essence treat them as a force of nature or act of god. So although he values a society without all the crimes he enumerated, he is unwilling to take the step to completely eliminate it.

Why Anarchy Won’t Last
The preceding was simply a snapshot in time of an an-cap society. Looking longitudinally, one could (and I do) assert that the market anarchist system is what’s known as an invadable strategy. In other words you might start out in anarchy, but you will end up totalitarian.

Remember that Francois and I both assert that the natural state of man is one of anarcho capitalism. Now, can you name a single hunter gatherer tribe where there is no ruling class of one kind or another? Can you name a social mammal group where one family doesn’t exert influence over another? Where one individual isn’t on the top of the heap? Neither can I.

Clearly this basic state doesn’t last. But why not?

Francois says that

We must treat each other as if we were equals, because that is the only way to neutralize the potentially oppressive effects of natural and social inequality. Very good! But statism, which creates a ruling class with considerably more power than the rest of society, cannot possibly be the implementation of this principle, even in a minarchic way. Only some form of anarchy can implement it.

What this ignores is biological or innate inequality. I alluded to this in ‘Men Like Me’. On a similar note, my friend Razib has discussed how meritocracy (very similar to the market in many ways) will result in genetic determinism. Even after you eliminate every social and material inequality, there will be the strong, there will be the weak. And an an-cap system (the basal system of all social animals) has no provisions to prevent the strong from turning it into a meritocracy, a plutocracy, a monarchy, or an oligarchy. Basically any kind of ‘archy’.

Which I hope better explains my statement that:

In such a system, where some are capable of greater acts of coercion than others, and where the threat of retaliation varies widely from almost none to almost infinite, a few will inevitably come to control the many.

Building A Lasting System
By declaring classical/negative rights an absolute, and modelling a society around that, we can create a system that isn’t perfectly uninvadable, but comes much closer than the an-cap system. Which is my essential position as a minarchist: building an uninvadable system around a market-anarchy-based ideology. If market anarchy were the platonic form, minarchy would be closest we could get to it here in this imperfect world.

Now how to build a minarchic system, this is where I’m going to get vague, and use the pitiful defense that you don’t want a young tyro like me to be the architect of your ideal government.

There is a huge problem in that, as Mr. Tremblay said:

On the other hand, what does statism offer us? Democratic states only grow- for that is what their incentive system dictates. A democratic state is ensured to deviate farther and farther from natural rights. Monarchies grow at a much slower pace, because of the private ownership of government inherent in the monarchic system, and the subsequent desire in the king to keep his rule from interfering in his citizens’ lives, in order to maximize his profit. Nevertheless, monarchies also offer us no tendancy towards natural rights.

It would seem that the best we could do is the proverbial benevolent dictatorship. What we really need though is something like what Garret Hardin (a pioneer in the under-explored field of the confluence between sociobiology and politics) would have called ‘mutally agreed-upon mutual coercion.’ We formally and consciously agree to draw a line in the sand and not violate others’ negative rights, rather than merely letting market forces get us merely close to that point.

Of course, any such system needs watchdogs. And watchdogs need power to be effective. And from there we get the conundrum that Francois posed. We can find hope in the fact that self-interest is not limited to things with monetary value. As I’ve said before, the role of self-interest in the quest for power and influence is all too often ignored. Obviously both are dangerous to liberty, but the latter could also be manipulated to its benefit. The key would be to found a government that gives no incentive to those seeking power and very little to those seeking greater influence. But sometimes the quest for influence can be a ‘good’ thing. There are those who would seek influence as defenders of liberty (the founding fathers), rather than manipulators of large masses of people (George Soros, any European politician, and many American ones as well).

We must create a government in which only those who don’t seek wealth, who don’t seek power, and who only seek influence as apostles of freedom would wish to serve in. Michael Z. Williamson offers tantalizing clues to such a system in his work Freehold. Where the government is extensively decentralized and a man must give up his wealth and his comfort to serve.

I have no hope that such a system would not eventually turn to totalitarianism. Humans are simply too complex for any system to adequately guard against the concentration of power. I do however believe that a well-constructed minarchist system can be constructed. One that surpasses the Constitution and the Articles. We know a lot more about human behavior and a lot more about modelling behavior than they did (although their intuitive understanding of such concepts boggles the mind).

Figure 1. Anarcho-capitalism is in blue and minarchy is in red. For illustrative purposes only

I also think that such a system would last much longer than an an-cap system. The bigger the an-cap society, the larger the pool of resources a man can bring to bear against the people. Just think of attempts at unifying more ‘civilized’ areas/peoples through empire-building compared with, for instance, attempts made by more ’savage’ people in tribal unifications (African, North American, Asian tribes).

Conclusion
The key to such a system is that it must, as I do, respect and admire the basic tenets of anarcho-capitalism, and as such support market endeavors where possible. It must only realize that like all things natural, market anarchy isn’t perfect. In the interest of keeping this from getting any longer, I’m going to cut off discussion here. If people would like, I could discuss ‘market failures’ especially ‘commons situations’ in more detail. Meanwhile, for a more concrete look at the basic roles of government I support, Anarchangel provides a great short and long look at it.

Good group of posts here. I’m going to host the next two but from number 5 onward, I’m opening it up. If you’re interested, let me know. Preference will be given to those with lower readership. The 1st carnival pulled in somewhere between 500 and 1000 hits due to linkage from the heavy hitters. It’s a pretty good way for some of the lesser knowns out there to be seen by others. Also, the TTLB community should be up and running by the next edition.

Now on to the submissions…

ShrinkWrapped presents Unintended Consequences, “Accidents”, and Unconscious Processes:

When a patient consciously intends a particular outcome and a different, unhappy outcome occurs from their action, it is always vital to investigate whether or not the unintended consequence was an accident or was unconsciously determined.

Assistant Village Idiot brings us an egregious example of over-thinking the nature and complexity of a patient’s psychological problems despite a minimum of contact and testing in Psych Testing Hall of Shame. After reading it, I don’t even know what to say. It’s my firm belief that most psych problems are rooted in relatively simple experiences, whether past or present. Not everyone has a psych problem worthy of a Jungian treatise. Sometimes–most of the time–they’re just over-extended.

Roy over at Shrink Rap asserts that Freud set back psychiatry by over a century. He contends (rightfully) that Freud singlehandedly pushed us away from the brain-centered perspective it had in the early 1900’s to ’so how does that make you feel?‘.

Personally, I think the current neurochemistry-centered models are entirely too simplistic, and if anything more harmful than Freud in that they ignore the beautifully complex and plastic nature of the brain.

Which happens to be a great segue into mentioningmy own submission for the carnival. I talk about the similarities between the mind and muscles, and how adopting a mind training and injury treatment approach could eventually mean less mental illness as years go by. A sprained elbow is rarely indicative of an underlying pathology or disorder. It’s much more likely to be the result of poor training, overuse, or improper technique. Same applies to a person’s psyche, in my opinion.

Joe Kissell over at Interesting Thing of the Day describes one of the more peculiar phenomena of the mind. Synesthesia is when a stimulus in one sensory modality is perceived in another. Hearing the color blue, or seeing cold. Interesting stuff.

From Dare To Dream comes yet another example of the press jumping on research findings before they’ve been properly vetted by the academic community…not to mention unwarranted assertions by study authors. This instance involves a possible link between childhood trauma/sexual abuse and schizophrenia.

Piebolar bares her soul to us once again, giving us a view into the mind at the other end of the therapeutic relationship as she describes the changes that have come over her since beginning neurontin. I wish her the best of luck in her journey, as I’m sure all who read her entry do.

Cerebration asks if blogging may be unhealthy. It all depends on how you approach it, I think. A blog could be cathartic, allowing you to literally see what’s going on in your own head. Or it could merely be a reinforcer, serving to intensify unhealthy though patterns. *shrug* This is why I’ll be in school and training for another 8 years and why no one should listen to my advice as anything more than a layperson’s. Cerebration also points out a couple articles that might be useful to those in need of a psychiatrist.

Peter Kua of RadicalHop.com brings us The #1 Way to Eliminate FEAR: Chant This Mantra Daily!.

Generative Transformation presents The 3-fold Path of Wisdom. It’s a discussion of the path to wisdom and how all the worldly constructs we surround ourselves with can hamper our spirituality.

How To Produce An Acute Schizophrenic Break, posted at Spiritual Recovery, discusses some of the ways in which schizophrenic breaks are similar to various religious practices, as well as to simple loss in the ‘real’ world. I had to poke around for a bit due to the buddhist allusion and saw some pretty interesting stuff. It’s a blog about a schizophrenic and her recovery.

By the time most of you read this, a new post should be up at Homeland Stupidity. I’ll link to it when I can get to a computer after it’s up.

Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos fame has declared that he’s a ‘libertarian democrat’. A meaningless assertion (although a libertarian-leaning democrat can exist, and I know several). Kos uses the right words, but twists them completely out of shape to the point where they mean about as much as my assertion that I’m white (see picture on left). “Greater Freedom Through Increased Legislation” is his rallying cry. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on the face of it, and makes even less after you get past the surface.

Now the AMA is playing the same game. Insisting that ‘personal responsibility should be required’. Now, I’ve been using those two words since I was about 17. So roughly 300 times longer than the AMA, who seem to have first invoked it about a week ago, after decades of pushing legislation through ‘for the public’s own good’. And in all my reading and discussion of such an idea, I never realized that you could legislate and force personal responsibility. That would be like saying my dog has personal responsibility because she doesn’t pee inside, tear stuff up, and stays off the couch. Obedience is a bit more like it.

It’s a game these guys have been playing since FDR redefined ‘freedom’ as ‘comfort’ in common parlance. It’s a game played by the douchebags at People for the American Way, the entire Democratic Party, and, well, virtually everyone in the business of expanding the role of the state and minimizing the role of the individual in day to day life. They use the words our forefathers bled and died for. They phrase things to make it sound as if they aren’t building a cage (albeit an initially comfortable one) around us. And the sad thing is, all too many of us buy it as 70 years ago our grandparents did with FDR’s socialism, hook line and sinker.

It reminds me of a great Blues Traveler song: The Hook(click for music video). It was about the 500th time I heard the song that I actually listened to what he was saying. First, I laughed my head off at their wit. And then I laughed at my stupidity for singing along without realizing what I was singing. And all these years later I nod my head in understanding at what’s happening to us:

It doesn’t matter what I say
So long as I sing with inflection
That makes you feel I’ll convey
Some inner truth or vast reflection
But I’ve said nothing so far
And I can keep it up for as long as it takes
And it don’t matter who you are
If I’m doing my job
then it’s your resolve that breaks

Because
the hook brings you back
I ain’t tellin’ you no
lie
The hook brings you back
On that you can rely

There is something amiss
I am being insincere
In fact I don’t mean any of this
Still my confession
draws you near
To confuse the issue I refer
To familiar heroes from long ago…

Sometimes it’s scary that songs can be so on-point when they were never meant to be.

Introduction:
I’ve talked about how the brain reacts a lot more like muscle than it does like hormonal or other physiological systems. And I’ve mentioned that I tend to think of most mood and affective problems more like injuries than illness. But I want to spend a little more time on the idea of mind-as-muscle and how it ties in to developing a more realistic model of diagnosis and treatment of ‘minor’ psychiatric problems.

I’ve often heard it said that the mind is what the brain does. And moving weight (actually, producing torque) is what muscles do. But there’s a lot more to lifting weights–especially if you’re cross-training for a sport and not just ‘getting big’–than just slinging lead. It’s much the same way for the mind. Good genes are of course important for building strength. Bone density, tendonal elasticity, muscular growth potential are all things that are in many ways limited by genetics. But a few strands of DNA are hardly the whole story. Building a body capable of moving a lot of weight at rapid acceleration for long lengths of time requires a proper training regimen. And this prescription can help people with not-so-good genes achieve some pretty stellar heights themselves.

Diagnosis And The Power Of Words:
I’ve never met a man who never trained who could bicep curl a 50lb dumbbell. And I’ve met plenty of men who, though more than strong enough, injured the hell out of themselves attempting such a feat. Could you imagine if a doctor told the first that he needed steroids? And if he told the second that it wasn’t his fault, that he suffered from a joint imbalance?

It just wouldn’t be done would it? The doctor would say to the first man that there was nothing wrong with him, he just had to learn how to develop his musculature, and to the second that he had to learn how to use his body.

But when it comes to the mind, the very first thing that many mental health professionals turn to is the DSM-IV TR, and they ask themselves “What kind of disorder does this guy have? What kind of disease? What kind of treatment should we pursue?” Loaded words, every one of them. There are fortunately still mental health professionals who after such a rummage through The Book wouldn’t immediately turn to the prescription pad, but rather to the therapist’s couch. Still, the words we associate with psychological issues–ones of illness and of defects–set the tone from that point on. Which is why I make it an issue to refer to them as issues, problems, or injuries.

Now, I’m not a very PC guy (if you hadn’t noticed), but words can be important. Particularly those that have to do with a person’s health. The labels ‘disease’, ‘incurable’, ‘chemical’, and ‘genetic’ aren’t very empowering; they make a patient feel like there is very little in his power. None of that compares very well with a skinny kid being told he needs to change his diet and put in a little time, but soon he too can be benching 300 lbs, as long as he really wants to hit that goal.

The Importance Of Proper Training:
Every fall, like clockwork, college freshmen join the gym and start lifting, wanting to get huge to compensate for their lack of confidence in themselves and who they are. And every fall, with increasing frustration, I drop my own weights to stop the idiots from killing and/or maiming themselves. I then give them the two minute lesson on exercise nutrition, and another two minute lesson on planning an effective workout to increase your strength at a decent, but safe, pace.

The mind is a lot more complex, a lot more fragile, and a lot harder to strengthen than your average shoulder joint. Yet most of these kids received a good deal more instruction in my short-tempered canned rants on the latter than they ever had on the former. So, if they became depressed, anxious, or otherwise upset, I’d think the default position would be that they were inadequately prepared and/or trained to deal with the world and the goings on inside their heads.

From the first day of orientation at university until the day I graduated, I was a regular at the gym. And you know, I never saw most of those kids for more than a few months. Which honestly, was probably a good thing. Most of the ones that did stick with it were textbook cases of the whole Male Distorted Body Image Disorder thing:

Guy: “I’m soo tiny.”
Girl: “Guy is cute, but he’s too big. Almost grotesque looking.”
Nick: “Dude, you’re more than big enough. Trust me, girls do not go for that kind of thing.”
Guy: “Yeah they do!”
Nick: “You just heard her say that they didn’t!!!”
Guy: “Well, yeah she says that. But she means I need to get bigger.”
Girl/Nick: “Moron”

Anyway, now that I’m completely off point (but have hopefully brought your attention to a VERY big problem among males), I thought I’d say that one of the reasons I think these guys failed so often was that they were after something that weights couldn’t give them. They wanted self-esteem, they wanted self-acceptance, they wanted to fulfill an image that they’d produced of their ideal selves.

And I think when a lot of people come in the door of a therapist’s office, they’re after something that a strong mind won’t necessarily give them. They want to be happy (which isn’t exactly the word I’m looking for). While there’s certainly nothing wrong with being blissful, it’s not exactly what I’d call a natural state of being. But sounding like Eeyore in the depths of your resignation isn’t exactly right either. What people should be after is a happy medium…a state of mind that I think the word ‘contentmen’ captures pretty well. To me contentment isn’t just about affect (happy), or philosophical acceptance (resignation), but about an emotional and cognitive mindset that allows you to roll with the punches. It’s about training a mind that’s strong enough to get you through the low points in life and flexible enough to keep you from breaking when you go through it.

Muscles aren’t supposed to be big. They’re supposed to be strong. They just happen to get big doing it. A mind isn’t supposed to be invariably happy, it’s supposed to help you get things done, something that only really happens if you’re content.

Strong Is Only One Step Away From Brittle:
Even though I approached lifting with a good deal more preparation and sanity than did most, I was still susceptible to adrenaline-induced lack of judgment, overtraining, and–especially in the damaged arm–sprains, strains and twists. If I did see a doctor, she wouldn’t declare that I had a cartilage defect or a musculoskeletal disease that causes my brachialis to sprain when I’m skullcrushin 165. She’d tell me I was an idiot, no one had any business using weights that large, and then she’d put it in a splint, cast, or sling as necessary. After hitting me again, for being a doofus (this is what you get for using docs you’re related to), she’d then tell me not to come back to her office if I hurt it again lifting.

Strong people break too, they’re just a lot less likely to. And when they do, chances are that they don’t have a disease, don’t have a disorder, but simply pushed themselves farther than their conditioning went. They need to be treated that way. Figure out just what pushed them there. And if it can be removed, remove it. If it can’t, make an action plan to deal with it. Maybe it’ll involve a couple weeks or months of pills, maybe it won’t. But the patient will think of it as transitory.

Conclusion:
The main point of this piece is simply that we must treat the mind in a way that reflects both its biological nature and its more abstract psychological workings. If my 7th grade swimming coach had looked upon the 5′ tall 74 lb kid and simply said ‘Well, he’s a skinny wimp, never amount to anything much’, he wouldn’t have been able to turn me into a state level swimmer within the year. He certainly wouldn’t have believed that that scrawny creature would grow almost a foot taller and nearly triple in weight (mostly muscle…mostly lol). If we don’t recognize that the vulnerable patient in front of us can become a resilient, self-willed individual whose strength of character we’d be envious of, we won’t ever learn to ‘cure’ psychological problems. And if we don’t recognize that sometimes the stronger you are, the harder you break, we seriously risk not being able to rehabilitate these individuals.

The man you see on the street is rarely as muscular or athletic as he could be. The same is just as true of his mind.

Same rules as last time. I think we’ve beaten last time’s submission count but I’m missing a few heavy hitters. I’m going to send them a whiny email tonight and see if they get something out in time.

You can send your submissions through Blog Carnival or straight to indiancowboysblog - at - gmail.com

until CAID stops sucking and until after the conference. I still haven’t started preparing for that. Because I suck at life. I’ll be doing a piece or two over there, but more aimed at the ID mess than just plain enjoyment of science. This is also why the science stuff has been light for the past week or so. Sorry (for those of you who actually read it).

In a couple weeks I’ll be back up to at least 3 posts a week on science. Until then, I suck.

New post up at Liberty Papers. There are those who say that positive rights and negative rights are two sides of the same coin. There are others who say that since rights are nothing but an artificial construct, applying them is nothing more than coercion. You’ve heard my response to the incoherent first position. The second position is a bit more difficult to attack. But I think I’ve provided a fair defense of classical liberal philosophy as opposed to anarchy. The central contention is that:

But more importantly, the anarchist imputes too much to statement that ‘All men are created equal.’ Even at birth, some are taller, some are heavier. Some are healthier, some are more alert…In such a system, where some are capable of greater acts of coercion than others, and where the threat of retaliation varies widely from almost none to almost infinite, a few will inevitably come to control the many…The anarchist turns a blind eye to the difference between the perfect world of their assumptions and the real world. The classical liberal merely acknowledges them. He sees that for society to remain free from tyranny, individuals must treat each other as if they were equal.

But on a more personal level, I simply cringe at a world where men like me were allowed to act in an unfettered manner. Once you strip off the 5 or 10lbs of fat I’ve put on, there’s still about 200lbs of Indian that can cause a lot of damage with fists or any other implements at hand. I’d like to think I’m also intelligent, not to mention a student of human nature. And on top of that, I’m pretty emotionally detached from the people around me. I do feel emotions, I do become attached to those I care about, and I have known heartache. It just takes a fairly sizeable stimulus to get that kind of thing going. Sympathy rarely, if ever, comes into play in my social interactions. Empathy is barely a blip on the radar of my social conscience. Nope, what keeps me from coercing others, of using my greater leverage both physical and psychological, is my dharma; my sense of duty. I try to do good; I left monkeys for medicine so I could do good. Not necessarily because I care, but because it is what should be done. I am, in a lot of ways, a moral sociopath.

And the thing about men like me is that we all have greater or lesser degrees of sociopathic tendencies (usually greater). Although I’ve often wondered why this has been the case, I’ve never been able to figure it out. Perhaps it’s because we see ourselves as better than others. We glorify ourselves as Plato’s ‘philosopher-kings’. Maybe we’ve all got a bit of a ‘Raskalnikov Complex’ going on; thinking society is holding us back. Anarchangel talks a whole lot more about it than I do or want to. Razib has mentioned it once or twice. If we lived in anarchy, I’d behave in more or less the same way I do today. My rulebook is inside my head. But the others? I know it’s not the same for all of them. Men like me need rules. Whether inside our heads or codified in lawbooks. We’re far too dangerous without them.

Introduction
I figured that the knowledge that the Founders were hardcore individualists, together with the understanding that milita by its nature means not tied to the government, would make the 2nd Amendment issue pretty damn cut and dried. I was wrong.

Intellect Impure, who’s probably just playing devil’s advocate, has shown how leftie minds work when it comes to the Constitution. Lawyering to destroy and otherwise undermine core principles of classical liberalism.

I have said before that the only way you could take the 2nd amendment as protecting only hunting and sport, or as a collective right, is if you personally want it that way and have no care what the intent of the law actually was. I have one word for you: Un-American. Don’t try to give me your BS about ‘evolving documents’ or ‘but it could be seen this way’ or ‘being American is about compromise.’ No, it ain’t. All that matters are the core principles of the philosophy upon which this country was built. That is what being American is all about.

So let’s go through this word by freaking word with the help of a fantastic resource I’ve used once or twice: The Online Etymology Dictionary, along with some supporting historical information. Not to mention a re-affirmation of the fact that the US was founded by individualists with a healthy distaste for government. Who wrote a document constraining rather than empowering the government they themselves founded. It’s pretty clearly a nonpartisan source. But the interesting thing is that OED has a specific entry for words that lefties attempt (and often succeed) at implying mean something other than the founders’ words.

The 2nd Amendment

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Well-Regulated - Surely this means controlled by government legislation. After all, this is what we tend to mean by ‘regulation’ when we talk about things today, huh? Only, diesel engines have regulators, as do the streets, according to Warren G. Now, I’m almost positive that the mechanical valve in a diesel engine’s air manifold isn’t a piece of government legislation, and I’m equally certain that Warren G wasn’t referring to mid-level bureaucrats in Washington DC…

Not to mention that the phrase ‘well-regulated’ certainly looks like an idiom. That’s the only reason I could think of that it would be used as an adjective in such a short clause. It must have a meaning of its own that goes a bit beyond two simple words. And, lo and behold, it does. It was used in all sorts of contexts which government control do not apply, including ‘well-regulated person’, ‘well-regulated mind’, and ‘well-regulated clock’. Sounds like ‘well-regulated’ means exactly the same thing it does when you’re talking about a diesel engine: running smoothly.

As Brian Halonen (who wrote the piece in the link above) says:

The phrase “well-regulated” was in common use long before 1789, and remained so for a century thereafter. It referred to the property of something being in proper working order. Something that was well-regulated was calibrated correctly, functioning as expected. Establishing government oversight of the people’s arms was not only not the intent in using the phrase in the 2nd amendment, it was precisely to render the government powerless to do so that the founders wrote it.

And OED provides an interesting take on the word ‘regulate’:

In U.S. history, applied to local posses that kept order (or disturbed it) in rural regions c.1767-71

A well-regulated milita thus means a militia that discharges its function in an ordered manner.

Militia
The National Guard is our militia… Nope, not unless sometime in the recent past a group that by definition is a part of the military, and thus the government, can also somehow be outside government control. What does a look at its etymology have to say?

Sense of “citizen army” (as distinct from professional soldiers) is first recorded 1696, perhaps from Fr. milice. In U.S. history, “the whole body of men declared by law amenable to military service, without enlistment, whether armed and drilled or not” (1777).

The word ‘militia’ as used by the founding fathers meant men who could be in the military but aren’t. As a member of the national guard, you are governed by the UCMJ and can be called into active duty without a draft. Not to mention that if you aren’t an officer, you’re enlisted. The National Guard isn’t much of a militia. In fact, members of the National Guard and Reserves, by the very nature of their appointment, are no longer members of the militia.

Civilian men (and women) are the militia. The militia is not a government entity. Pretty clear.

The People
This is the one that lefties love to pounce on. “The People” they say. Clearly that implies a populist/collectivist thing. The people as a single entity, rather than a collection of individuals

The etymology?
Meaning “body of persons comprising a community” first recorded 1292 in Anglo-Fr.; meaning “common people, masses” (as distinguished from the nobility) first recorded 1306 in Anglo-Fr. The verb is c.1489 (intrans.), c.1500 (trans.). The word was adopted after c.1920 by Communist totalitarian states to give a spurious sense of populism to their governments. b.

So the collectivist interpretation came about at the turn of the 20th century, as a specific invention of leftist/socialist regimes, as a propaganda tool. Throughout the Constitution the phrase ‘the people’ is used. With regard to all sorts of other rights, it of course refers to an individual’s right to life, liberty and property. But when it appears in the 2nd amendment, it refers to the right of some abstract known as ‘the people’s right, a usage that didn’t appear until close to 150 years later. Yup, that’s exactly how a reasoned mind would approach the interpretation of the 2nd amendment.

Keep and Bear
Keep of course means to own or otherwise be in possesion of. I don’t know that anyone has attempted to contest the meaning of this word (making it nearly the only one).

Bear means to wear or carry. Which would seem to imply that men could carry firearms upon their person. Concealed or unconcealed they don’t say. But tiny, concealable guns were in use in the 17th and 18th centuries. So they at least knew about the existence of the latter without remarking upon the need to ban them. And besides, the next part leaves little to the imagination.

Shall Not Be Infringed
Implicit in this phrase of course, is that if it looks evil (such as having no wood furniture and being painted black, or having a pistol grip), is a pistol, or fires a projectile larger in diameter than .5 inches, that it’s ok to ban it. An interesting take on an otherwise clear cut statement I might say. Not to mention that the Rifles used by the minutemen (an unlegislated militia that was nevertheless well-regulated) and the revolutionary war soldiers (who unlike the minutemen were enlisted and belonged to a formal military) used firearms that fired a bullet that was .69 inches in diameter. Their officers often carried flintlock pistols both under their coats and over them whether on foot or horseback.

Conclusion
What we’re left with is that well-ordered groups of able-bodied men outside of government employ in such capacity are important to the free state. Indeed, the writings of Thomas Jefferson indicate that one of the reasons for men to be armed is so a government does not take them for granted and thus cage them in tyranny: “No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

We’re also left with the conclusion that civilians should be allowed to carry and own firearms of all types and that government shall not be allowed to take away that right. As Patrick Henry said, “The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.”

Of course, what do they mean by ‘arms’? There are some libertarians who insist that this implies that we should be able to own anything we wish up to and including nuclear weapons. I left this for the conclusion to show that liberty-minded individuals can be just as self-serving when they read the constitution. Arms is the only word that the Founders used that was truly vague, even when viewed through the light of historical perspective. Artillery and bombs were of course known to exist by then, and were also referred to as ‘arms’. However, ‘Keep and Bear’ would be the key phrases here. I’m a strong guy, but I’d be hard-pressed to bear even a four-pounder cannon. And, I’m almost positive I wouldn’t be able to move more than 5 yards with it strapped to my back, if my knees didn’t collapse with weight in the first place.

Nope, very hard to bear something much bigger than a small arm (firearm). Not to mention that artillery and explosives were not (and for the most part still aren’t) individual weapons at the time of the writing of the Constitution. They are instead thought of as force multipliers and methods of projection of power. Even though there are individuals at the trigger, fuse, or button, they aren’t designed to protect the individual or harm another individual, but to protect and likewise damage larger bodies of men from the squad on up. Thus even though mortars, RPG’s, etc can be born and fired by individuals they aren’t really ‘individual weapons’. Besides, as seen by the Patrick Henry quote and the writings of others’, the Framers clearly meant firearms when discussing individual weapons.

The truth about the 2nd Amendment is as easy to see as anything else, once you wipe the grime of 230 years of linguistic corruption away. And once you apply a few techniques from the liberal arts. Maybe just a touch of nuance and sophistication as well. And a bit of honesty.

But I’d like to leave you with a few words that aren’t my own, a more general thought about the purpose of the constitution:

“No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution, and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.”–Edmund Optiz

Added Two Hours Later:
Assistant Village Idiot and Intellect Impure bring up the point that we don’t have a militia, well-regulated or otherwise, for the most part. Valid point, but here grammar comes to our rescue. The implication of the order of the clauses is that without an armed populace, you can’t have a well-ordered militia (indeed, it’d be rather hard to field a fighting force if none of the force had weapons). And without a good militia, you can’t protect a free state. Referring back to the Jefferson quote, we must remember that the 2nd Amendment is the last defense of liberty, included in order for the people to overthrow a government that would eventually find its way to tyranny once again. While I’m not saying that the Michigan Militia separatists have the right idea (at this point in time anyway), I am saying that the militia needs to exist in potentia (not to mention that we’d be better off if the militia really did exist as a potential check against the current crop of legislators). And that militia can’t come to fruition without an armed people.

Again, there as both Intellect and Assistant point out is room for debate (particularly with regard to machine guns, the larger sniper rifles, and types of ammunition), but it remains hard to justify the banning, licensure, or other forms of control of semi-automatic firearms of just about any kind. Driving may be a privilege, but arming oneself is a right.

From a comment thread at Dispatches From The Culture Wars:

Raging Bee: “[T]he Second Amendment does not set forth an absolute individual right.”

Me: “Only if you choose to interpret the constitution in a vacuum, with no reference to writings that inspired the Founders or the other writings of the framers themselves.

If you did choose to read the Constitution the way ANY historical or topical piece should be read (i.e. in the context of word usage of the times, and with references to authors’ collected works), then it’d be pretty clear.

‘the milita’ was shorthand for able bodied men from late teenhood to middle age. The milita was also shorthand for citizens who operated OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF GOVERNMENT.

Or, you could stick your fingers in your ears and scream *nyah nyah nyah I CAN’T HEEEEAAAR YOU*. Which I guess is always an option.”

Introduction
Razib (second contributor at CAID, not to mention the guy who got the buzz going) is up to his usual tricks of making me think.

Anyway, it was a pretty far-ranging post of his, discussing systematics, species concepts, and the difference between micro and macro evolution (none). I’m going to restrict this to a discussion of the latter. Which also happens to be a favorite theme of creationists/IDers since many evolution enthusiasts (and biologists) don’t really understand the concepts. I hope I can shed some enlightenment.

Many contend that micro and macro evolution are really the same biological process, something called Scale Independence of Evolution. The basic gist of this is that no matter what we’re talking about, the mechanism behind it is nothing more than changes in alleles over time and fixation of mutant alleles in the population.

In other words when a creationist says ‘I accept micro-evolution, just not macroevolution’, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on since the only difference between the two is the degree of change in allelic frequency. Up until recently my defense idea has been “look damn you, it’s obvious.” Which is not a good scientific explanation. Even though it is obvious, you have to be able to articulate why without degenerating into screaming fits, broken furniture and insults. This might explain why my publication record is nonexistent, come to think of it.

So without further ado, I give you the simplest explanation I’ve come up with…

The Thought Experiment
Let’s take a population of capuchin monkeys and put sayyy 100 of them on a small island off the coast of India, just because they’re my favorite critter ever and I’m from India. Now, your average creationist has to accept micro-evolution since it can be shown directly in the lab, in the wild, and in humans. Allelic frequency changes are obvious. But mutation fixations have been documented as well. (sorry no links). This is why most of them concede that point to us. So we have a population of animals upon which microevolution is operating.

Now, since this is a thought experiment, we’re just going to take a wall and plunk it down across the middle of the island separating the population into two noncommunicating halves, just like the Berlin wall. We now have two different populations of the same species undergoing microevolution. In subtly different ways. Even if there is no difference in habitat on either side of the wall, the quirks of sexual selection (See marmosets), neutral selection, etc. will result in population level differences in allele frequency between the two. Furthermore, mutations that arise in one population can become fixed in that one, but can’t even get to the other one (no gene flow). Should these mutations affect pre or post zygotic mechanisms, you now have two species who can no longer interbreed and produce fertile offspring.

To complicate matters (and make it more real-worldy), let’s now turn one side of the wall into a marsh, and the other side into a rainforest, complete with a change in flora and fauna. Now selection pressures operating on each population are considerably different. The process will be much more speedy.

All that happened was your basic change in allelic frequency and fixation of mutations. It just happened in a population that was divided into two halves due to external factors.

In other words, the only difference between micro and macro evolution isn’t biological, it’s geographical (biogeographical?). Something in the physical world divides a single population in twain. That’s it.

Species Concepts
This is another problem, one that’s existed since we started classification, and one that I don’t pretend to solve in the following. The idea of pre-zygotic and post-zygotic recognition mechanisms is part of Ernst Mayr’s Biological Species Concept. The basic idea is that if two animals can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, they belong to the same species.

I see a certain problem with this as it completely ignores what to do about ‘incomplete speciation’ and speciation events that are still occurring. Recent research as far as the human-chimp split and the Homo sapiens/Homo neanderthalensis mess reveal that far from being instantaneous, speciation can take a considerably long time.

A couple of examples of the problems the Biological Species Concept has include hybrid zones. There’s a pretty famous picture of the geographical distribution of the 6 (or 8…people argue) species of baboons and they hybrid zones where you get varied degrees of admixture between the two ’species’. You get the same thing with marmosets as well. Are these guys no longer different species despite differences in appearance, behavior, feeding ecology, and the fact that less than 1% of either population mates with the others?

What about tigons and ligers? They can be fertile. And in India, where they have (or once had) adjacent ranges, they’d even be possible, if not a definite occurence on occasion. Do you really mean to tell me that lions and tigers, despite one being a savannah adapted group-living social hunter with more constrained shoulder rotation similar to canids and one being a solitary hunter with an incredible degree of freedom in its joints, not to mention vastly different appearances and builds, are really the same species?

No, the BSC has a problem in that, unlike evolution, it’s ahistoric. It looks at a single point in time. Furthermore, it ignores total amount of genetic variation, as well as differences in phenotype and behavior, restricting itself solely to the reproductive system.

I’m a much bigger fan of chronospecies, the evolutionary species concept, and the ecological species concept. There is very little difference between the three, and for the sake of this discussion it’s safe to say that the main characteristic of all of these is that the process (and thus historicity) of evolution of species is incorporated. They all recognize that a population can change in fundamental characteristics from one generation to the next without a speciation event occuring. Furthermore, the evolutionary species concept in particular allows us to more easily talk about two daughter populations that haven’t completely parted ways according to the BSC, yet have changed in fundamentally different ways relative to each other.

The nice thing about these latter three is that since they’re historical, they can synapse more directly onto the basic idea of how evolutionary change comes about (allelic frequency and fixation).

I’ll update with pics when I get a chance, but right now I’m grabbing my straw hat, my corncob pipe, and going camping.

A two parter up at Homeland Stupidity.

The first part discusses some of the ways in which the current healthcare coverage market is anything but free.

One of my more comprehensive pieces.