The Seditionist

I’m not sure what the statistics in Australia are, but in the U.S non-whites are severely underrepresented on many campuses, especially at elite universities.
In my opinion that must be seen as an injustice since there is no qualitative difference in the cognitive apparatus we have stuffed into our brain-cavities.
One university did conduct a study (Princeton, http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S11/80/77I23/index.xml) and found that if affirmative action policies were removed enrollment of minority students would drop by half for hispanic students and two-thirds for black students in the short term, with long-term effects being even more pronounced. This study also drew on the experiences of a university that eliminated affirmative action, where these effects occured (University of California-Berkeley Boalt Hall Law School, Hispanic enrollment down 66%, African-American enrollment down 81%). This suggests affirmative action is an effective way to increase enrollment of minorities in a tertiary setting.

Given that there are no significant genetic differences, the difference in enrollment numbers must be due to societal and socio-economic factors that are more prevalent in some cultural groups compared to others, often for historical reasons. While I’m fully supportive of the socio-economic root causes being addressed, since that’s hardly forthcoming (it would cost big money and be hard) in my opinion affirmative action is an effective stop-gap measure to attempt to compensate for the disadvantages people from certain backgrounds face, and to ensure that there is at least *some* representation of these minorities in higher-education settings and jobs. This is vital, since these persons are in fact in the best position to address the problems in their own communities if given the resources, one of the most vital of which is education.
That said, means-testing makes sense since the aim is to encourage students who would otherwise not be able to utilise tertiary education or postgraduate education programs.

An article by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?src=me&ref=general) disseminates the idea that in the future, jobs today considered skilled will increasingly become automated, endangering the white-collar workers who today want to consider themselves above the fray of class warfare (… and not workers at all. No, we’re ‘urban professionals’!).

I wrote a comment to that effect some time ago to someone who was arguing that there would never be an underemployment problem since high-tech jobs will replace low-tech jobs 1:1 (in magical faery land). But I’m clued-in enough to the progress being made in machine processing and AI to know that it’s only a question of whether it’ll take ten or fifty years for this progress to begin to eliminate high-paying middle class jobs.

Who is safe? Not doctors, certainly. Especially not surgeons. Perhaps there’ll be one for every ten operations to supervise, but the mainly mechanical task of performing the operation will belong to machines. The IT industry? Accounting? Law? Public service? All replacable. Not at every level, at least not at first. The most abstract jobs will be the last to go. The big decision ones. The CEOs and the politicians.

Everyone else should pay heed. Ridiculing the unskilled worker forced into permanent unemployment for her perceived unwillingness to educate herself better may be satisfying and ego-enchancing. It certainly helps with that nagging conscience. But there will come the day when it takes the programmers and the teachers and the pilots and the general practicioners and yes, eventually even the lower-level managers. There will come the day, where if you’re not in the top 5%, you’ll be queuing for the dole. Perhaps not you. Perhaps it’s a hundred years away till they get to your pay-grade. Good luck. But these things can move very quickly once they get going. Just ask the skilled craftsmen of the early industrial era.

What that’ll mean for society is unclear. It depends entirely on which system of economics wins the day. If it’s one of sacred property rights, the rich will buy up the world, their wealth ever-compounding. And they won’t need us to work for them anymore. We will be free. Free to eat dirt and live in slums.

On the other hand, society can embrace the importance of the right to happiness of all. Wealth can be dispersed with in a time of plenty. With machine bodies and machine minds freeing us from our daily labor, we can turn to more exciting, more enlightening pursuits.

But we’ll have to pick one soon, before we’re obsolete. Because after, they may not care to listen.

Rand’s basic premise is that it takes “Great People” to drive progress. The Civilization series of games aside, that’s not true. In science, knowledge builds up over time, and once a critical mass of knowledge is achieved invention follows. This is why huge inventions and discoveries (the computer, the telephone, the theory of evolution, …) often involve several people racing to finish first. No human brain is so uniquely powerful that scientific progress hinges on it. In fact, due to inequality in the world we’re missing out on 90% of the great minds who grow up with poor or no schooling and no hope for higher education.

As Newton admitted, we all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot through the head by an ex-soldier at a public meeting today. She is alive, but in critical condition. Six others are dead. It happened in Arizona, and it happened to a Democrat who supported health-care reform and had her offices vandalised as a result. It seems reasonable to hypothesise that the guy was a right-wing nutcase, but it’s possible he was a nonpartisan nutcase. Who knows, maybe he was America’s last Marxist.

The coming weeks will see his motivations and his connections put under the microscope. Then we’ll be able to conclude whether he was motivated by any particular ideology and whether he was spurred on by any particular hate-monger.

But however that analysis turns out, one thing’s already beyond doubt. This is a young, white guy. He went to a public meeting and gunned down a politician and several bystanders. He’s a big-T Terrorist. And he’s the worst kind of terrorist, the domestic kind. The right wing has a track record of demanding the harrassment of Muslims (after all, 5% [!!!] of them are terrorists according to Glenn Beck) and ernestly expressing their fear of people in ‘Muslim Garb’. So if that’s the rational response to a one-off terrorist attack and the occasional nutcase (not wearing muslim garb) wearing exploding underpants, we certainly have enough data now to start being afraid of young to middle-aged white men (we also have the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, that crazy guy who shot a guard at the holocaust museum and many more). For my own safety, I demand to be harassed at airports. I’m sure there’s some right-wing nutcase named Smith, so I demand that all Smiths be put on the no-fly list. And please, for safety’s sake, give me suspicious looks and do report me when I start doing anything you consider unusual. Am I meditating because I’m a douchy Buddhisty-type, or am I priming explosives? Err on the side of safety. Make me feel isolated and discriminated against, it’s the only way we can be safe from Caucasio-Fascists that share some of my features.

Ok, so Aphrontisteotheist is not exactly as catchy as Atheist. It may be strategically unwise to deploy this label simply because only Greek scholars will be able to remember it. According to the random english-to-ancient-greek translator I used, ‘aphrontisteo’ means “to have no care of, pay no heed to”. Improper conjugation aside, the term Aphrontisteotheist describes me more accurately than does the term Atheist or Antitheist.

I do find it bloody frustrating debating with the religious about this or that silly belief, but no more than I do debating homeopaths about their silly beliefs. Frustration arises when someone will not accept or refute a coherent argument, choosing instead to answer with a variation of “I hear your argument, but I choose to ignore it entirely and remain convinced of my position.” Frequently, this is accompanied by “I will take further attempts at convincing me as open hostility on your part, and will choose to be offended.” Religion, Politics or Pseudo-Science all provide fertile ground for such unsatisfying debates.

And whilst I think the great Atheist thinkers and debaters are right on the (in)correctness of religious claims, I am completely unconvinced by arguments suggesting that religion is at the root of all or most of the world’s problems. To me, it seems a symptom rather than a cause, and while there’s a certain level of vicious circularity about religious belief and social regression or stagnation, I don’t see good evidence that religion today is among the major causes.

The enormous diversity in how religions are practiced, the huge gaps in tolerance and progressiveness apparent in different sects of the same religion in the same country suggest that people shape their religions according to their inherent beliefs rather than the other way around, at least in the developed world. Depending on which American you ask, Jesus was either the first Capitalist or a supporter of Gay rights. But when it comes to practical issues such as contraception, most developed-country Christians abandon their supposed beliefs entirely in favor of pragmatism. It seems to me that wishy-washy religion with its poorly written texts acts mostly as a mirror of one’s own values in the individualistic societies of the West. As such, I think the demise of religion will hardly solve the fundamental disagreements that exist in these countries.

I do support efforts to ensure truly secular governments, because any mix of government and religion is a bad thing. I do worry about religious and cultural values that are opposed to those of Western liberalism getting a foothold and turning back progress on equal rights for women . When these things threaten, we must respond.

But to leave it at that leaves me deeply unsatisfied. Religion is a player, but a two-bit player. Poltitics and Economics are the real deal. That’s where decisions get made. The approaches we choose here are what change the world. Religion only comes into play in as far as it changes people’s beliefs on these issues, and I think (in the developed world at least) its influence is greatly over-hyped.  When people adopt Atheist as their primary self-identification and the spread of Atheism as their primary Activism, I feel they’re constraining themselves to a small part of the world of ideas, a part that even if they conquer will have limited consequences on those that are suffering today.

That’s why I’m an Aphrontisteotheist, but I don’t really care enough to remember the term.

An excellent talk on Rawl’s theory of justice from Harvard U:

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, has allowed us direct insight into the workings of the real-politics machine that drives the world’s only superpower(-by-a-thread). Revelations include information on torture, crooked bankers, cynical diplomatic relationships and the failure of two major wars. Much more will be revealed as researchers trawl through the documents. Not released so far: nuclear weapon launch codes, names of undercover agents placed with Al-Quaeda, secret formula for super-anthrax or anything else for which the U.S premise of endangering national security seems to hold. Except if endangering U.S credibility equals endangering U.S national security. That may be the case, but if it’s the truth that endangers U.S credibility it seems cynical to the extreme to fault the truth-teller.

As far as the rape case goes, the timing is just too much of a coincidence. Is it *possible* that Assange sexually assaulted a woman in Sweden? Yes. I don’t know the guy. He could be a creep, I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure is that the incident occured just as the whole situation was developing. And I know the U.S has done far worse than frame people to get them out of the picture (like kidnapping citizens from allied countries to torture them abroad). So it’s innocent until proven guilty, and there better be some SERIOUS scrutiny around this court process. And yes, I do see why the (rightly) paranoid Assange is trying to avoid going to court. A bit of CIA money may well set him up well enough to get him behind bars for ten years. In which case we will probably find out about his framing in a document leak or FOI request in thirty year’s time, when we’ll again think “Man, the U.S sure were jerks back then…” But it’s O.K. It was the war on (the Soviet Union) terror, so it was understandable…

But even if Assange were to be shown to be a man of flawed moral character, the documents he’s helped release allow us (the ones that are supposed to matter in a democracy) to have a window into the nasty stuff that goes on in our names. A brief look is all we get, but I’m confident there’s enough there to get us thinking. And Assange always knew he was putting everything on the line, his paranoia’s proof of that. So as a responsible citizen in a democratic world, he’s a hero. One of very few.

There is an increasing anti-immigrant sentiment in most developed countries. Its effects range from far-right politicians winning elections and bans on minarets and burquas to the mob violence of Cronulla beach some years ago. There’s also a tendency for these sentiments to be expressed more vehemently, and for the called-for action to become more extreme.

I think the reasons are to be found in our self-destructive, fear-based, exploitative and commercialised life-styles that impress upon us every day that we are merely parts of a great Progress Machine to be disposed of without notice. But it’s not the reasons behind this wave of hatred towards impoverished countries I want to address in this post.

Rather, it’s the underlying justifications people give for their blatant antipathy towards foreigners (with the most fervent sentiments usually directed against people of darker skin tones or Muslim cultural backgrounds). We who inhabit developed nations say we don’t want any more uneducated migrants. We don’t know what to do with them. There aren’t any jobs. They’re culturally backwards and incabable of integrating. They’re prone to criminality and depravity.

All right, let’s take these things as given. While overblown, there is some truth to these accusations. The mass migration from the poorest parts of the world is unlikely to consist mainly of computer experts and medical doctors. Many of the migrants have had little or no schooling. Their trade, if they have one, is often irrelevant to a modern economy and thus they fall into the growing segement of the population described as ‘unskilled’.
Their cultural views on women’s rights are often outdated (strangely, many of those who complain the loudest are also against giving equal rights to gays).

But what’s the conclusion? That we have a right to keep poor migrants from our bountiful shores?

If we accept that all humans are essentially equal in their intellectual ability and their moral fibre, we cannot blame Africa’s or Asia’s millions of poor for their poverty. The usual derisive arguments directed against our own poor make no sense. If we have a poor country of x million and a rich country of x million, the cause of poverty cannot be found in the human building blocks of the poor country unless we accept some racial theory of white supremacy. No, the difference is historical and the inhabitants of the poor country are not to blame. Being human beings as valuable as those who inhabit the rich country, they deserve the same things. Anything else is unjust and inhumane.

Unless we want to subhumanize the developing world, we cannot escape our ultimate responsibility for the welfare for all of the world’s billions. To do so by one-sided anti-immigrantion rhethoric without a detailed plan of how to raise the developing world to our standard in the forseeable future is hypocritical and deserving only of contempt.

In Germany (my other country of citizenship) we’re currently being lead by a coalition of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and their minor coalition partner, the neo-liberal economic hard right FDP.

The FDP did very well in the last election and finished third with 14.6% of the popular vote (compared to the pitiful 23.0% for the Social Democrats (SPD) and the decent 33.8% for the CDU/CSU, which was still a worse result for them than in the last elections).  They maintained a tidy lead on their two competing minor parties, the left-wing Greens and the lefter-wing ‘Left’ party. And once it was all wrapped up in a tidy package, the average German seemed pretty content with getting on with it. After all, a Big Coalition government between the two major parties as had ruled during the previous electoral term is always a terse and strategic affair. Now the direction was set, and the direction was to the Right!

The only problem is that the current government seems more able at only two things:  becoming less popular and bitchfighting evarey day and evarey night. The question is, how could Germans lose their confidence in the new government this quickly? Didn’t anyone vote? Nope, the 70.8% participation rate was the lowest since the emergence of the German Federal Republic after WW2, but that was still higher than the 62% the U.S managed for their ‘historic’ election of Obama (and that was their highest turnout since 1968!!!) .

No, there’s something different going on. That something different is the FDP’s program. Everyone loved the talk of tax cuts, but it turns out that most Germans don’t favour U.S style economic shit-storm reform. To be fair to the FDP their leader was hardly coy about the insane highs to which he wants to drive the social-democratic regression in Germany, but it seems a positive bias went in his favour.

People voted for him because of tax promises, while ignoring the proposed extensions of a failed series of social spending cuts and market liberalisation that would slam the poor and endanger the comfortable safety in which Germany’s middle class wallows.

Now most Germans, including the FDP’s coalition partners at the CDU, have awoken to the implications. It all becomes so much clearer once one realises that the ‘lazy parasite’ to be impoverished for the sake of the economically fit could be oneself. But for the grace of good health and a good jobs market go even the well-educated to the dreaded strata of lower income.

Perhaps if I were riding the progressive wave of change that all these coming calamities must throw up I would thank the despicable Westerwelle for his hatred of the poor.  Perhaps then I could think “He was the last drop”.

As it is I can only scratch my head at a people’s ability to realise the blatant truth three seconds too late again.