Tag Archives: change

WSJ | There are few permanent victories or defeats in American politics, and Tuesday wasn’t one of them. The battle for liberty begins anew this morning.

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Good pep talk from the Wall Street Journal

Mr. Obama’s campaign stitched together a shrunken but still decisive version of his 2008 coalition—single women, the young and culturally liberal, government and other unions workers, and especially minority voters.

He said little during the campaign about his first term and even less about his plans for a second. Instead his strategy was to portray Mitt Romney as a plutocrat and intolerant threat to each of those voting blocs. No contraception for women. No green cards for immigrants. A return to Jim Crow via voter ID laws. No Pell grants for college.

This was all a caricature even by the standards of modern politics. But it worked with brutal efficiency—the definition of winning ugly. Mr. Obama was able to patch together just enough of these voting groups to prevail even as he lost independents and won only 40% of the overall white vote, according to the exit polls. His campaign’s turnout machine was as effective as advertised in getting Democratic partisans to the polls.

There were several other pieces today that said some of the same things, essentially you cannot win against the progressive / liberal patchwork with a pure social conservative / fiscal conservative mantra.

The Republican side was made up of:

  • survivors of the old line right center Big Business Republicans
  • evangelical social conservative/moderate
  • moderate libertarians
  • constitutional originalists
  • small business owners
  • And a rather long list of single issue activists
  • anti immigrant
  • gun rights
  • anti-abortion
  • anti-tax

The problem seems to be similar to one that the democrats used to lay claim to, Big Tentism…trying to pander to too many one topic interests to the detriment of a centralizing theme.  No party can offer blanket coverage for all the rather distantly touched special interests without weakening itself.

The centralizing theme of the Republican party is, personal responsibility and non intrusive government, based on the rule of law centered on a relatively strong reference to the Constitution.

The centralizing theme of the Democratic party might be seen as common responsibility, government central mediator, based on the interpretation of law referring to the constitution among other iconic law systems.

A key problematic special interests in the Republican party today is Big Business (as a themed entity not as the people in the companies,) not because Big Business is evil but because its interests are really more in line with the Democratic Party centralizing themes, not the Republican party’s.  The only reason Big Business tents in the Republican camp is because the Democrats demonize it, and the actual ‘People’ (i.e. agents) who are the cells of the Big Business are generally very much aligned with the centralizing theme of the Republican party.  But the Players and the Companies when operating in aggregate (or for the company) are much more likely to support the Democratic baseline than the Republican one.

Various single issues activists, particularly the semi organized Tea Party activists of various sub stripes, have pushed their way and their interests into the Republican party.  As above providing huge clubs to beat the overall party to death with.   The TP has tried to remake the Republican party in its image…which purposely does not exist.  This has again and again wrecked the chances of the party by putting up candidates who are very easily caricatured by their opponents and driven into defeat.

That’s not to say that some of the single issues activists are not right and that they all should be driven out.  The gun lobby while demonized is a strength in the party as long as it sticks to the line it has in recent years, this resonates well with personal responsibility and non-interference.  Anti tax when not carried to caricature.  Pro life, when not carried to the level of stupid anti-abortion extremism (as I’ve said before almost everyone is pro-life, most are modestly anti-abortion, but the paternalistic-extremism of an Akin or a Mourdock is nuts in this day.)

Consistency to theme should be considered strongly:  For example:  Pro-Life –>anti-abortion, anti death penalty,  limits to the pursuit of extra territorial murder (drone wars.) pro scientific medical advances (with ethical limits.) In other words limit very tightly the ability of the government to kill anyone unless they pose an immediate threat to the US, which of course has to be defined pretty damned broadly but still consistently.  (i.e. OBL raid was a perfectly reasonable action.)

If you look at the paragraph above you would realize that the Catholic Church while staying out of politics is going to support the Republican theme much more strongly than it did,does today.

Same goes for immigration, we are a nation of immigrants, and the nation needs the flow of immigrants because population growth is inherently good for the US economy in every way for the foreseeable future.  Yes borders should be protected from military incursion (which I think we do pretty well) but no country with a border as long and open (no geographic obstacles like seas, cliffs or rivers) as the US’s can seal its borders without imposing a police state, which largely stops people coming because there is no reason for them to want to go into bondage, who really wants to go to North Korea, all their walls are to keep people in, not out.    Like abortion this is a sore point with fundamentalists but at the end of the day I have never seen anti-immigration sentiment that is not at base about fear of the other or of having to compete.

One of the biggest most fundamental issues that the Republican majority has to come to grips with is that the US has always been about creative destruction and that nothing can stay the same in an evolving world.  We have to compete on the global stage in every venue and that means that in some niches we go up and others we go down.  At the end of the day nothing can protect you as a person from the winds of economic and social change and trying to do so just fosters tyranny. The only thing that provides you a shield is flexibility and the willingness to learn and adapt, which in general the average American has been better at than the rest of humanity, partly because of the freedoms that the country provides to fail and try again.

The Republican party needs to focus on the themes I think it stands for:  personal responsibility and non intrusive government, based on the rule of law centered on a relatively strong reference to the Constitution.

    • Moderate taxes (limit on income taxes, everyone pays income tax
    • Moderate, smart and regulation (stop regulators getting captured by those they regulate)
    • Pro immigrant
    • Pro small business  (not anti big business, just stop giving them special treatment)
    • Pro gun
    • Strong defense
    • Pro Life (not anti-abortion) (anti death penalty)
    • Pro Free trade even if it hurts

Then you have my dreams:

  • One term at a time (no re-elections, you can be president as many times as you want, but only one term at a time, then you take a break before running again.)
  • Individual Health Care:
  • Individual Retirement.

New Post 2 : Why Big(Big) Corporations, Grey in Tooth and Claw may need Unions as a counterparty, whereas Innovative Little Guys need Unions like they need regulations and stray holes in the head

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I’ve been thinking about Walter Russell Mead’s Death of the Blue model meme and some of the ramifications.  Also thinking back on the history of industrialization and laissez-faire economics in English and American experience.  Then Meagan Mcardle had a blog piece on the Daily Beast the other day that had a tangential thoughts of interest.

To Paraphrase rather egregiously:  The United States has the largest economy in the world as well as the most dynamic and creative (though there are many who are trying to change that.) It trades a more secure safety net (which might not work in a large and heterogeneous country anyway) for more vigor and growth, even though that creates a greater disparity between rich and poor.  Many smaller nations could follow the US lead but if they did they would suffer because they would be competing against a vastly larger pool of potential entrepreneurs etc.  This makes it much more sensible for them to curl up and ride the innovation wave the US creates while providing a more comfy and fair life style for their citizens.  If the US turned and did the Comfy-Fair thing, the world would lose its innovation mainspring and everyone would suffer because to a large degree our society/economy requires innovation and change to provide the economic voltage that drives the circuits of world trade.  There is some research into this and the modeling seems to support the intuition in the main.  But the researchers commented that Unions and Regulations offer a buffer against the potential of corporations using up the employees and resources.   And it is that thought that intersects my intuition.

Essentially the problem is, and this can be shown in history, that large operations, even if owned and run by persons of great moral character become more and more ruthless as they grow.  And as the operation turns from owner/operator to corporation the inherent inhuman ruthlessness gets worse and worse.  The more successful a company is the more ruthless its ‘minions’ are going to tend to be.  Look at what happened in the Robber Baron era, and then again in the great multinational eras (60’s and 90’s 50’s to today in my mind.)  They were (are) Big Beasts, Gray not Red, in Tooth and Claw.  It was nineteenth century progressive regulation then early twentieth century unions that tamed them in regards to their employees.  Then it was the regulatory state in the 60’s-80’s taking charge in the 80’s that created Monster Corporations that ‘cared’ about the externals like the environment, customer safety, etc.

But from a libertarians viewpoint, it has always been the state’s fault that these beasts came into being at all.  It can be argued that the great corporations were purposely crafted to employ and control great swaths of the population (I don’t think this was actually planned ahead of time, I think it was/is an emergent pattern driven by economic and social realities of the time but I am sure some saw it ahead of time and some will say it was all a vast conspiracy on someone’s part.)

Small firms, networks of firms, partnerships, franchises, etc, are all different ways of spreading technology effectively if perhaps not as efficiently as monopolistic or oligopolistic ultra large firms that came into existence to industrialize the US and compete on the world stage.  In the UK this smaller/distributed model remained more common and competed strongly for a while until the incrementally crippling damage of WWI, the interwar boom-bust, WWII and the following socialist experiment so badly damaged it that it was off the world stage for thirty years, unitl Thatcher.

It is these smaller more entrepreneurial firms that are damaged by regulation and unionization the most.  Not on purpose but because both cut the small companies ability to turn on a dime and give big companies, which can support big compliance departments, a very large advantage in the ‘rent seeking’ game of playing the regulators.

So the very instruments that you need to tame the Big Beasts of large-scale corporatism are the ones that plow under the smaller firms that offer 1) growth in the economy and 2) alternatives to the big beasts.

A balance is what you seek…

Our problem is that the post WWII boom hid the damage of the Big Beasts and their Tamers for several decades, and during that time we seem to have gotten the impression that there is some natural stable state that is ‘right’ and this state has something to do with large stable corporations and their control of the markets.

It’s clear to me that the bureaucratic-regulatory-union-corporation model does not have legs in a world of real competition from Big Beasts who are not constrained to the same degree.

Sometimes I think the only real hope is that the Industrial Civilization of ‘Big Beasts’ will be supplanted by something one might call the Maker Civilization, where zero cost communications and distributed at need manufacturing cuts the legs out from under all the Big Beasts.

Computer aging and user angst…

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As I’ve noted before my primary writing implement is a Leonovo (nee IBM) Thinkpad T42, at the time one of the best lightweight laptops in its class and certainly (in my opinion) the LAPTOP writing tool available.  I had been using Windows 2000 on my ‘main’ machine (which I had been forced to upgrade with much cursing, from Win NT a couple of years before) but had to move to XP Professional on Writer, which caused a great deal more muttering under the breath and vibrant curses in the direction of Redmond WA and B.Gates in particular.   (By the way, probably the most maligned man on Earth and proof that curses have no effect. He being, to all appearances; healthy, happy and well off despite a {largely unearned} curse load that should have reduced him, and the local geographic, region to subatomic particles long ago.)

Writer replaced an earlier IBM Thinkpad, a black and white 3.5in floppy equipped 12+ incher that I bought at some an early Staples in the early 90’s.  It had Windows 2 if I remember correctly not the soon to be released W 95.  I typed away happily on that machine, transferred to the ‘big iron’ with its much more stable W NT then to the (even better Win 2000, –though it took at least six months for me to admit as much.)

Then of course I started buying systems for the rest of the family, I bought one with Windows Me (what a piece of trash!) and later Windows Vista (urk) and lately Windows 7, which I have to say I find to be at least as good as XP though I don’t like the increasing levels of detail they are hiding behind the magic curtain, that I have to find my way past to do anything once the wizards etc fail (though admittedly that’s pretty rare these days.)

Before and During this time, working first for the Gov’t then a Gov’t/Private partnership.  I had used several versions of DOS, rightly pooh poohed Windows 1, often used the DEC VAX operating system, a version of the other disk operating system common at the time (which I forget the acronym/name for) and then on to Win 2, Win 95, Win 2000, Win XP.  Now the age of XP is passing (I know I know, in the outside world it passed long ago but main line / old line engineering firms are extremely risk averse.)  My latest little (plastic) jewel is Win 7 which has forced me to finally learn the system (like work moving to XP made me learn XP.)

Sigh, and now they are talking about W-8! and that they are going to stop supporting W-XP!! And Writer is finally showing her age <whine, whine> but is not ready for the removal of her hard drive and consigning to the waste stream of history…but if I wait too much longer I won’t be able to get W-7 the bastards will force me to get a new system with W-8!!!  Those fould fiends in Redmond! whats’s name and all his grimy green geek gremlins, with their damned marketing plans…etc, etc, etc….(and by the way its harder to use Ballmer in a curse than it is Gates, makes it much less cathartic for some reason.

So sometime soon I will have to get another Writer…and my daughter want’s an ultrabook to replace the Gateway 15.6 incher I got her for University.  And having had fun building two computers from scratch this summer I want to play around some more…but haven’t found an excuse to build another one, or two, or three….

And the fools at Leonovo will probably not offer a regular old-fashioned 3:4 aspect screen but one of the blasted 9:16 movie screen slots…the old form is much better for writing when using a smaller screen. But ‘everyone’ seems to like the slots because they can see movies better, why do they get to pick the aspect ratio?  I’m doing creative stuff they’re just rotting their brains for crying out loud!!

And so it goes…things change, those that don’t are either perfect or dead.  Personal computer technology is evolving so fast that it is impossible for anyone to say ‘stop I want to get off for a little while.’  One just has to continue to adapt.  Just be thankful that what we are adapting to is a new and generally much better set of hardware and software….not the appearance of a new predator, plague or famine.

Cheers

 

Thoughts for a 4th of July in an early decade of the 21st Century

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There have always been multiple visions of the future of the ‘American Experiment’ despite what comes across from the rather wan gruel we all get fed in public school unless we have unusually good and aggressive ‘social studies’ teachers.

I have read a few interesting modern histories of the united states and the best of these show that there were always multiple threads at work, more than just the now common Conservative / Progressive (NO, not Liberal.)  And I don’t necessarily associate Conservative with Republicanism and Progressives with Democratic ideals.

I think if you go back to your math/geometry and get a view of a three-dimensional graph at the origin ( 0,0,0) with +&- axis for (x,y,z) showing.  Got that picture in your head?

Now simplified political philosophy has taught the Left Right  (x-axis) Dichotomy of Communism and Fascism … which supposedly goes from the people being sovereign to the opposite of one person being sovereign.  With a smooth transition from one side to the other.  This is the sovereignty axis in my opinion And America is not at the far right, its at the middle left, because sovereignty rests in the hands of the people’s elected representatives who can be tossed out.

Now don’t forget that while so-called Communist or People’s regimes claim the mantle of the People they are always in practice Fascist oligarchic or even despotic (one person) systems. And Fascist regimes (when they dared call themselves such) were in reality Party dominated Bureaucratic states and the best run of each type were much more alike than they were different.  They are both basically Oligarchic with a tendency for one man rule.

So there has to be some other axis in play.  Call it the ownership axis, who owns what?  Say this is Up / Down,  Up is personal ownership of everything,  Down is state ownership of everything.  Here you can parse out a philosophical though perhaps not so much a practical difference between Communism and Fascism as practiced in the real world. The Communist state owns all means of production (a person theoretically is still a sovereign actor and can own personal items) Fascism tends to accentuate diverse ownership of the means of production, in fact tends to focus on ownership and ‘winning/winners’ to the detriment of other things.  If you look at the worst of the worst they didn’t really see anything wrong with slavery (but again in practice neither did the Communists, if you were sub-human enough to protest against the regime.)

And then you have the other political axis, call it the regulatory axis, one side you have anarchy, everyone establishes their own regulations, and on the other axis you have the regulatory state where every potential action is regulated by some rule.

Now mankind has never lived in either extreme, every animal has some innate regulation and the more complex an animal becomes the more it operates in some form of society which again has a set of perhaps unstated, but often iron clad, rules.  With humans language and society co developed in complexity and at some point language grew in symbolic power to the point that it enabled humans to think up and then explain new ways to regulate life (as well as explain it and pass the knowledge along so others could build on to what was known before.)  This is the foundation of modern civilization and while I’m a libertarian at heart, I know that humans have to live in a regulated world.  Life in a unregulated world would be impossibly complex because you could never ‘trust’ anyone you did not know at least somewhat, to operate within the same social context as you do.

And as much as many Conservative pundits whine about it we do not live in a regulatory state.  In practice only robots could live in the far limits of the regulatory state because they can be programmed and ‘flash’ reprogrammed to operate by the rules (if their ‘brain’ is big enough to contain said rule set.)  A human cannot learn more than a relatively small set of rules in any lifetime and operationally using rules requires that you focus on a smaller sub set.  This is the reality of the ‘joke,’ “…he knew more and more about less and less until he knew everything about nothing.”

Going back to Communist Fascist dichotomy, what does this new axis explain?  Well to be honest, nothing, in practice both Communist and Fascist states tend toward the highly regulated but in both cases the regulations tend to focus on industrial and militaristic means and social control ends.  However if you look at the ‘Democracy vs Communistic/Fascist’ it tends to show a huge spread, with distributed and relatively low levels of regulation in the Democracies and very highly concentrated and high levels of regulation in the Communist/Fascist states.

Concomitantly the D vs C/F spread on the sovereignty axis shows a wide spread and in my opinion shows a pretty concentrated blob for the C/F group well towards the single sovereign and the D’s a broad spread towards the all sovereign limit (though none get close to the limit)

And the D vs C/F on the ownership axis again shows (in my mind) the C/F’s practically as a spread towards to state ownership side and the D’s a spread towards individual ownership with the D’s getting closer to their limit than the C/F’s to theirs.

So I wandered far from my start point ehe?  No, because if you look at that graph I have tried to form in your head you should see that our Democratic and Republican politicians are in all practical senses identical to each other.  They are for sovereignty of the people, personal ownership of property and moderate levels of regulation all within bounds that most of us would find reasonable, if not totally laudatory.

As much as some ‘Con’ Pundits accuse the Pro Elite of despising America and ‘Pro’ Pundits accuse Con Elites of anti democratic tendencies, both sides almost to a man and woman love the United States of America and its People, in aggregate, if not in personal detail.  Both sides recognize many of the same national failings, but attribute them to different causes, and often times assigning them different levels of importance.  But we by and large live with in the same social memes and can Trust each other on a personal basis (fair dealing on a bet, honesty in word and deed, etc) even when we don’t necessarily agree or even trust them regarding political issues.  As long as this social cohesion can remain to under-gird our political disarray.  In fact I think we are just seeing the chaotic workings of a ‘society and polity’ that while vastly different in detail from what the founders would have recognized, is well within the bounds of what they could have hoped for given that most of what we experience day to day is utterly at odds with their day to day experience.

So, in closing:     As a Naturalized Citizen of the United States I bid all that have always been, those who have become, those who want to become and those who have simply served the greater dreams of our great experiment, have a Joyous as well as Thoughtful, 4th of July.

Best Regards

M.A.Harris

More Blue model Blue Growth

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Saw an op-ed in the Indy Star that started out asking what Romney would say to a police group about explaining why we don’t need more police on the beat.

Juxtaposed with an article elsewhere pointing out that violent crime is at a 40 year low after a significant reduction for the last however many years and that even none violent crime is decreasing.  And this during a recession!

An argument can be made that this is because there are more police and more prison cells than ever before.  Or it could be because police patrolling practices with focus on trouble spots and keeping feet on the street are inherently more effective than the blanket patrol car and large precinct office staff model that preceded it.

However given that most police forces are unreconstructed and there are vast opportunities for more effective use of the people on hand, the need for more police is to me; at least unclear and possibly even preposterous.  As WRMead at ViaMeadia might say this is just more Blue model thinking, pressing for more Blue model growth.

Given that historically locking thugs up just opened niche for other predators to move in, it’s more likely that video games are absorbing a lot of youth time that used to be spent getting into trouble.  And its harder to make crime pay these days unless you have to be savvy, connected and have the gear to do it right or you get no payday.  And with the prevalence of violence in the criminal strata, it seems to me that the number of fools willing to take up the life has to be somewhat limited.

The biggest concern that I have is that a permanent criminal culture could develop, one that is all but self-sustaining, like the preceding and overlapping welfare culture.  This culture is so isolated from the larger american society that its members do not see themselves as having an interest in or path into the society at large because its alien and in some senses very cold and unfeeling.  In the criminal culture life may be ugly and short but it may also be very much focused on immediate gratification and the id of the young men who are its principal actors.

 

Democracy is an Outcome not an Input….

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In this months The American Interest is a fascinating perspective article that like any profoundly effective piece opens ones mind to a better way of thinking about a topic, in this case democracy and the ‘liberal societies.’   The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy    The main threats to democracy lie within liberal societies themselves. by Vladislav Inozemtsev

Its more of a monograph than an article, it’s talking to the reader about taking a different perspective on a whole classes of issues. In short as my title says Democracy historically emerges after life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have already emerged within a society not before.  Also he points out that liberal (in the old sense of societal and economic freedoms) societies emerged in homogenous and élite societies and then democracy was implemented to create a stable and responsive gov’t that would last.  Only later as the rule of law, freedom of speech and assembly, equality before the law, became ingrained, and the polis became generally literate and self-reliant did the right to vote become general.

But as the right to vote became general its strength became debased.  As the right to vote was given to many without a strong tie to the society it became more and more populist and a tool of those able to manipulate it.  

Some societies have developed that are quite ‘liberal’ in the old and robust meaning of the world without democracy (Singapore is one example.)

Many societies have developed democratic trappings but they are not at all liberal (Russia is one example)

Some societies have had democratic trappings dropped on them and then have started to tear themselves apart because there is no homogenous polis, (Iraq, many of the African states)

If you are at all interested in the topic read the article, its one of those pieces that opens the mind to a better perspective that might lead to insights of importance.  unfortunately its all too likely that the right people won’t get the message…

 

Historical Perspective and Narrative

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20120221-220832.jpg

Walter Russell Mead’s blog serial Beyond Blue, currently at #5, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs (from which the pictures in this piece come) is a fascinating monograph putting the changes our society/economy is going through into perspective. Dr. Mead’s explanation goes back to the 19th century:

In the 19th century, government promoted the rise of the family farm, selling cheaply and ultimately giving away millions of acres of farmland, and promoting the rise of railroads (which could carry the produce of western farms to world markets). In the 20th century the government promoted the rise of large, stable corporate employers that offered armies of white and blue collar employees lifetime employment and a bevy of benefits.

And later this:

Currently, the American legal and regulatory system is set up to bind as many people to employers as possible. The government wants you to be a wage slave and sets up a regulatory framework that keeps as many of us as possible yoked to bosses and management. The IRS doesn’t like the self-employed, fearing they many conceal income. Banks and credit card companies view such people with suspicion, and it is notoriously difficult for start ups and part time enterprises to have access to formal finance. Many services are hard for the self-employed to get on terms like those made available to employees of large corporations: from health insurance to retirement planning, many things are harder and more expensive for the self-employed. The payroll tax system is brutal: the self-employed pay both the employer and employee halves of Social Security and Medicare taxes, almost 20 percent of income and likely to go higher. Many cities will tack on unincorporated business taxes, mass transit taxes, and other interesting feudal exactions and dues.

The gov’t used(s) the current ‘Blue Model’ in some senses as a social damping mechanism because it provides for a more hierarchical top down command system (of interest in the Cold War climate of the 50’s to80’s) while also providing a relatively efficient economy and outlets for frustration from the masses. This model has worked since the collapse of the 19th century model….the great depression…but itself is now becoming unstable/unaffordable in its turn because it requires too much command and control.

Too much how? Well now that a high percentage (all high value) workers have been amplified by basic literacy, information systems and other technology, they are capable of much more than the drudge work they used to perform at the command of a ‘supervisor’ and demand / need more autonomy. Many organizations accommodate and move on and up. Others keep the older structure or some bastardized version and sink into the muck. Companies that almost have to operate in the old mode because they deliver one sort of highly regulated good or another, get radically more expensive compared to near peers operating outside the penumbra of regulation and lose relevance and competitiveness at a steadily increasing speed. Look at the post office, once the epitome of efficiency.

What a New Model education would Disrupt

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Megan McArdle’s take on change in higher Ed. Ms McArdle blogs and writes for ForbesThe Atlantic and has a lot of interesting insights on economics, politics and societal change, more libertarian than conservative her opinions are well reasoned with a dash of humility.

(corrected don’t know what I was thinking. Ms McArdle is at The Atlantic not Forbes, sorry about that)

The Decline of Violence

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From Reason Magazine, I hope this is beginning to percolate, it’s actually a perception I’ve had for a long time, that violence of all sorts is declining not increasing.  The perception of greater danger is completely due to the news cycle and our reduced tolerance to violence of all sorts because it is so much less common today than it was even when I was young (and as ancient as I feel I am not THAT old.)

The article is an interview with  Harvard University cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker in his new book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, where he claims that “You are less likely to die a violent death today than at any other time in human history. In fact, violence has been declining for centuries.”  

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Read the book I have not yet so this is not a review, just a commentary on my own observations and thoughts.

A couple of anecdotes:  Growing up I heard repeated references to kids fighting, but mostly it was reference to the generations before me. I never got into a fight (I was a big geek living in the suburbs so maybe not representative) I was only struck twice by other kids in my whole school career, both events were unprovoked single ‘hits’ due to me being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In my family’s early days in the US (mid late 60’s) I distinctly remember my father driving us down a country road someplace in southern Indian and seeing two large farm hand types going at each other with bare knuckles with a ring of what looked like relatives and friends surrounding them. This had been typical in the generations before mine but is rare today. Where it exists it is professionalized and as such the repercussions of the violence are ameliorated and diffused (nothing personal about this beating I’m giving you hey mate?)

I hate to say this but all evidence indicates that in our natural state we’re not peaceful types (despite what fringe utopian greens think.) Hunter gatherer clan life was one of constant warfare with nature and other clans (this can be seen even today in the few places where this life style still exists.)  As we moved to more sedentary life violence was reduced.  Again this can be seen, there was and is a distinct difference in the violence levels of farmers vs herders.  As states developed they tended to damp violence, a dead serf is an unproductive serf, also the ‘justice’ of a third-party tended to defuse feuds and vendettas, which had remained very prevalent (and still survive.) Then the violence of the hierarchical despotic governments was gradually ameliorated by various forms of government based on order and not raw power, again a dead serf is not very productive.  Psychologically we began to be able to perceive others points of view as literacy gave us limited insight into the ways others thought and perceived the world.  As mercantilism developed there was more reason to see ‘the other’ as a possible source of value and not a threat, defusing a great deal of hostility.   Then the enlightenment came with the spread of various forms of representative government and a sense of people at all levels of society having worth. Violence of all sorts began to be seen as an evil in and of itself.   Today we are the beneficiaries of a virtuous circle that this long chain of change has wrought, where the less violence we experience the less tolerant we are of the behaviours leading to violence, and so on.

Of course there may be dangers to this: 

  1. We could become so intolerant of behaviours that we begin to make intolerant and anti liberal laws.
  2. In the land of the disarmed lotus eaters the thug with the shiv rules.
  3. Not all places will experience the same cycle or at least not at the same rate and time.  Are we seeing this with Europe vs MidEast, is it a threat  because it leads to self disarmament and then scenario 2 on a large-scale.
  4. People become disinclined to stand up for their rights because all those around them see ‘standing up for something’ as code for unacceptable pre violence behaviour.

But on the whole I like where we are today.  The only real problem I see is that many of us do not take advantage of the opportunities because A) we perceive violence as increasing not decreasing B) lack of self-confidence in one’s ability to deal with violence.  

Now a curious though (stream of consciousness being what it is) do A and B in conjunction with the very real decrease in average violence explain the increasing prevalence of concealed carry laws?   Given the decrease in violence in general does it make perfect sense to have armed citizens able to provide deterrence pressure on the remaining ‘thugs for life’ in society?   It could be argued either way but I think that it is a sensible question to ask.

Charge Your Phone (and Your Car) from Afar

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Charge Your Phone (and Your Car) from Afar – Technology Review.

This has been coming for some time but as the tag line says at the end, “…It’s going to catch on superfast…”  This may well be the technology that electric cars were looking for. Think about it coils at stop signs and stop lights, etc, or even in charging lanes.  With the technology of the battery and electric propulsion at its current level this should make the electric car a reasonable investment.  The problem is the deployment, investment, but spread out over time and geography and with the expectation that you’re going to have diesel, gas and LNG vehicles around for a long time I think you can see a realistic road to electric nirvanah.