Cracks in the Sanitarium

Cuteness and the Nerf World

2006-10-25T06:08:00.000-07:00

Sweet muttering Jesus it's been a long time since I've posted here. My exuse is that I've been insanely busy with work ... though that's only partially true. I've also been spending way more time than is good for me exploring mixi (the Japanese myspace clone) which is somewhat time-consuming as, well, it's all in freaking Japanese.

Anyhow, some background. I'm an English teacher in Japan, by profession if not by way of vocation, and recently a lot of my work has been doing kids classes. And I mean little kids ... we're talking like three and up. Kindergarten visits, kid's parties ... it's not really education, more like 'Look at the trained monkey dance! Dance, monkey, dance!'

Not that I'm complaining. Easy work, good money. Hit's a little in the self-respect department, but hell, after this I'll never be able to take myself seriously again, which is a definite improvement over my arrogent adolescence.

I digress. These kids, being kids and, moreover, Japanese kids, are for the most part so cute it hurts. I mean, they can really turn it on. It's impossible not to like them.

But what is this cuteness thing? Where the hell does it come from?

One thing I've realized is that it doesn't really exist outside adults' heads. Kids don't notice cute; it's something you become progressively more aware of as you get older. Kids don't see it because they don't need to see it; adults see it because they're biologically wired to see it, otherwise, they wouldn't feel the need to lavish their own kids with attention. Cuteness is basically an evolved reproductive strategy, similar to the sex drive (hoo boy, bet I caught yer attention there!)

But once you get past the whole cute thing, you realize that kids are basically little people. Like I said, kids don't see 'cute'; the really little ones are blind to it, and even teenagers are only vaguely aware of it. For little kids, other kids aren't cute; they're people. And, what's more, really evil, nasty, vile and heartless people. Anyone who spends any amount of time with kids soon realizes that, left to their own and with no adults watching them, children are some of the most vicious and savage beasts there are, at least to their own kind. They have a certain level of morality, but it's just the bare superstructure of how to comport oneself in a social group, something even apes are born with; they're not in the least civilized. They say and do things to one another that are, frankly, horrible. Bullying, taunting, humiliating ... kids do it all, and what's more, they enjoy doing it.

Lest you get the idea I'm some sort of misopedist (that would be 'hater of children'), let me assure you, I love kids (though I'm not a 'pedophile', which would be the direct translation of that into greek or latin or whatever.) Insofar as I'm a mature adult, I'm fairly helpless before the power of their cuteness. I am, however, acutely aware of their shortcomings as moral human beings; civilizing the little savages is what parents (and to a lesser extent teachers) are for.

But, you know, I'm not really sure how many other people are aware of this. Floating around in our culture is this idea that kids are innately innocent ... which they are, insofar as 'innocent' is a synonym for 'ignorant'. But innocence is often used to mean 'good' and that is just complete and utter horsetwaddle.

You hear these people all over the place. Determined to keep kids from exposure to any sort of harm, any sort of risk, any sort of 'bad influence.' It was this story, in particular, about the banning of dodge ball by some American schools (hat tip: Gates of Vienna) that really got me thinking about it. This effort to turn the entire planet into one giant brightly coloured nerf world. No smoking, anywhere (even in old Warner Bros. cartoons.) No violent video games. No bad language. No competition. No violence (not even good-natured rough-housing between friends.) No guns (not even airguns.) No ... well, I think you're starting to get the idea.

Since when did the world become one giant nursery school?

But more to the point, since when did we get the idea that kids must be so extensively coddled, even at the expense of the freedom of adults to do what they please? Do these people imagine that children can somehow be sheltered from every single aspect of the real world, until they reach the age of majority, at which point it all comes crashing in? Actually, I don't think they do; my money is that the safety nazis are counting on neotenizing the population so extensively that there is no 'adult world' to do the crashing.

But really, I think this all comes down to a misunderstanding about what childhood is, the idea that it's some sort of morally pure state that must be protected at all costs, rather than the brutish state of animal ignorance that it in fact is. Get over that, and the urge to make the world safe for the children ('won't somebody please think of the children!?') disappears.

It is to smile.

2006-09-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

Whoo! Been a while since the last time I bothered to post anything ... I'm currently engaged in trying to use the internet through Mixi (that would by the Japanese MySpace.) It's a slow, grinding process.

Anyhow, I thought I'd mention something that I thought was really special: what may well be the birth, in Britain, of vlogging good enough to take on TV news the way blogging has eaten away at the papers. That'd be 18 Doughty Street, of course, which I'm sure you've already heard of. In case you've heard of it, you really should check it out.

I'm really waiting on the first footage to come out of the sight....

Yeah, But What About The 72 Virgins?

2006-08-11T01:54:00.000-07:00

This (via Samizdata, via Andrew Sullivan) is fucking hilarious.

Our Own Homegrown Open Source Warriors

2006-08-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

One of my all-time favorite novels, by one of my all-time favorite writers, is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Now I read a lot (like, a book-a-week, on average: printed words are like crack to me) but there are very few books I've given a second perusal. The list of books I've read many times (as in, I couldn't tell you how many) is so short I can count it. Only three come to mind: Starship Troopers (and if you've only seen the movie and are wondering, Dude, WHY!?, well, let's just say that the director of that movie is one of the few cases in which I'd approve of capital punishment), Neuromancer, and Snow Crash.

So you'll understand why this Arnold Kling post at TCS caught my eye:

In Neal Stephenson's 1992 science-fiction classic, the two main characters have been hired by the Mafia and other ethnic corporate franchises to deal with a fanatic religious cult whose chief warrior possesses a hydrogen bomb. In the novel, governments are too powerless to deal with this threat. It is a brutal, post-national world.

Today in reality, Islam contains a fanatical religious cult whose chief warrior seeks nuclear weapons. Iran may be leading the world toward a post-national era.

The post principally addresses the ugly possibility that the nation-state just isn't up to containing terrorism, which is something I've suspected in the back of my mind for a while now. I'm not totally convinced, though; one of the supporting datums he offers is the following:

From the collapse of international trade negotiations to the failures of international development assistance to the rejection of the EU Constitution to the nearly-perfect record of futility of the United Nations, government institutions at a world level have reached a Snow Crash ebb.

As far as the UN's worse-than-uselessness goes, we could just be witnessing the League of Nations effect: when the most dangerous players are no long much interested in talking (save as a way of buying time to get into position for what they really want to do, namely kicking the crap out of each other), talking shops tend to be become somewhat ineffective.

That said, I've been thinking for some time about this. John Robb's always-interesting (though overly pessimistic) Global Guerillas introduced me to the idea of 'open source warfar': ie, using loose networks to degrade and eventually destroy states, instead of the rigidly controlled hierachical violence we've become accustomed to since Westphalia. The Pentagon's recently been trying to neutralize the advantages of 'global guerillas' with 'network centric warfare', and while this is a promising direction I can't help but suspect it doesn't go far enough.

The question really has to be asked: what if governments just aren't up to the challenge of fighting terrorist networks? What then? Does our civilization just say, "Oh well, it was a nice run, but this whole Enlightenment experiment is done with. Might as well just kneel before our new masters and hope they get bored chopping off heads after the first few thousand?"

Naw. Not our style. If it becomes obvious that governments can't stop foreign irregulars from perpetrating atrocities on our soil, we're going to wind up with our own irregulars: after all, if they can't stop keep out the barbarians, then they can't reign their own in. The West could end up with it's own homegrown open source warriors; everything from volunteer intelligence agencies that work to penetrate and subvert enemy networks (both social and informational), to actual armed insurgents, going into foreign countries and conducting operations ranging from sabotage to assassination. It isn't necessary that these networks be particularly moral; they'll be at war, after all (or at least will perceive themselves as being so.)

Will this happen? Dunno. Like I said, I'm still not convinced that nation-states aren't up to the challenge. All I'm saying here is that, if they aren't, that doesn't mean that we've lost.

Prelude to War

2006-08-10T06:17:00.000-07:00

This article at the New York Sun, Prelude to War by John Batchelor, is really good. In it, he asks "Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran?" He draws a direct parallel with Pearl Harbor, noting that before that grim day, the American people appeared to sense the approaching storm, but no one wanted to come out and say that war was inevitable. Or, perhaps more accurately, no one wanted America to be the country that threw the first punch.

Me, I've got a feeling that sometime in the next couple of years, nukes will be used in war for the first time. It's not even necessary for the Iranians to finish theirs'; Pakistan's got lots, and that whole country's just one strongman away from Islamic theocracy. Then there's the legendary missing Russian nukes.

Once some Islamic nutter lets off a Bomb, the gloves will come off. Mark my words. It'll be on then, bitches. You think you've seen what happens when the Yanks really get pissed? They lost two buildings, and proceeded to take down two countries. Care to bet on what'll happen when the map has a big hole where a city's supposed to be?

If the Iranians had any sense of history they'd back down, now, before things get serious. I don't expect them too. War's a hormonal thing, which is why they're never over 'til they're over.

Security Ad Absurdum

2006-08-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

Update: James H. Hoyner Jr., at TCS Daily, has almost exactly the same thoughts as me, expressed in a little more detail.

I'm currently watching CNN's breaking news regarding the recent arrests in London. Some government official is online trying to reassure us by telling us the threat level's up to orange, blah blah blah. Buried in his statement, though, is this gem: since the terrorists were planning on using liquid explosives disguised as beverages, haircair products, etc, all liquid items are - yep, you guessed it - banned.

This is just getting silly. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't ban footwear after Richard Rede ("If you'll just check your shoes at the line, and step into these standard issue airline flight slippers....") It was one thing when they confiscated my nail clippers, but let's face it, you can disguise explosives as anything, given sufficient time and motivation. If the US government keeps acting in this ridiculous way, a valid strategy for the Islamists will be to just make a whole bunch of fake bomb plots, each one with a different trick; if some succeed, hey, great, but that won't even be the point. The point will be to make the authorities so ridiculously paranoid that their security procedures effectively end the era of international flight.

Now, I'm not anti-security. I like to feel safe when I fly (which is rarely.) But there are limits. There are cases where security procedures really do cross that line from 'necessary' to 'letting the terrorists win'. And this, despite - in fact maybe even because - it's so trivial, is just such a case.

A Heartening Essay Out of Lebanon

2006-08-09T23:15:00.000-07:00

If this voice from Lebanon can be trusted ... well, it's very reassuring. Here's a taste:

Like the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, I pray that no one puts an end to the Israeli attack before it finishes shattering the terrorists. I pray that the Hebrew soldiers will penetrate all the hidden recesses of southern Lebanon and will hunt out, in our stead, the vermin that has taken root there. Like the overwhelming majority of Lebanese, I have put the champagne ready in the refrigerator to celebrate the Israeli victory.

But contrary to them – and to paraphrase Michel Sardou [a French singer. Translator’s note] –, I recognize that they are also fighting for our liberty, another battle “where you were not present”! And in the name of my people, I wish to express my infinite gratitude to the relatives of the Israeli victims – civilian and military – whose loved ones have fallen so that I can live standing upright in my identity. They should know that I weep with them.

As for the pathetic clique that thrives at the head of my country, it is time for them to understand that after this war, after our natural allies have rid us of those who are hindering us from rebuilding a nation, a cease-fire or an armistice will not suffice. To ensure the future of Lebanon, it is time to make peace with those we have no reason to go to war against. In fact, only peace will ensure peace. Someone must tell them because in this country we have not learnt what a truism is.

More on Demographic Collapse

2006-08-07T21:03:00.000-07:00

Frederick Turner at TCS Daily has just written an article in which he addresses a topic I considered not so long ago in this space: the demographic collapse of the West, and the reasons behind it. The explanation he pursues is similar to my own, though perhaps not surprisingly, he doesn't couch his in the terminology of memetics:

If we eliminate all external causes for population collapse, what is left is people's own reproductive choices. The reason people stop replacing themselves is, I would argue, cultural.

What, basically, persuades people not to have babies even when they have the political, social and economic stability to do so? Among the eras and nations where this phenomenon occurs or occurred one basic characteristic stands out: the loss of a transcendent future. What I mean by "transcendent" is some ideal or love or hope or faith that rises above the interests of the self, the practicalities of expected income, the security of predictable outcomes, and the lifetime of the individual. What I mean by "future" is that it is an ideal, love, hope, or faith that extends beyond the present and is not satisfied with an instantaneous and eternal reward in the now.

Turner looks at the issue from the perspective of religion: essentially, he proposes that every society that forsakes the faith of its fathers' in favor of a more epicurean lifestyle is demographically doomed. There's certainly quite a bit of truth to that. If you examine the various declining societies around the world, one of the first commonalities that leaps out is that they are very secular. Not only Europe, but also Japan (which has essentially abandoned its Shinto/Buddhist heritage) and China (which, in the urban territories at least, has lost its Confucian/Buddhist background) share this basic trait.

The interesting thing about the article is that he puts the problem into historical perspective:

For hundreds of years historians have wondered what happened to the Roman Empire in its last days. They agree that there was a demographic collapse in its urban Italian heartland. They noted that Romans themselves became outnumbered in their own country -- while remaining as a shrinking elite, the "domini" (the root of the "dons" of Spain and the Mafia) that became a feudal aristocracy in the middle ages.

I actually didn't know this, but it's not really all that surprising. The Romans became a very urbanized society, after all; urban environments are conducive to horizontal memetic transfer, and this tend to dampen birthrates. Still, it's very interesting that what's happening now has happened before.

Now, if you remember my previous post on scenarios by which the global demographic collapse will come to an end, you'll recall that one of them was 'triumph of the traditionalists', in which traditional religious subcultures grow and eventually form the majority of society. Note that that isn't what happened to the Romans: there weren't any pagans left, instead their old religion was replaced entirely by a foreign import, the mutated version of Judaism we call Christianity. That opens up an interesting possibility, which is that the West will become colonized by a new (or at present, small) religion. The two candidates tht come to mind are Mormonism and Scientology, though I'd put my money on Mormonism (Scientology doesn't encourage high birthrates, and tends to be a very destructive influence in people's lives; in memetic terms, it's more of a parasite than a symbiote.)

So imagine a future where Mormons are the mainstream....

The Economist: Getting the Question Completely Wrong

2006-08-05T00:24:00.000-07:00

I remember a time, not so long ago (which goes without saying, really, given I'm only 25) when the Economist was possibly one of the best sources for analytic thought about the current state of the world. If this article is any indication, those days are gone.

This passage here tells you everything you really need to know:

Why is America so much more pro-Israeli than Europe? The most obvious answer lies in the power of two very visible political forces: the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) and the religious right.

Don't just take my word for it. Read the rest of the article. But I'll bet you could write most of it almost verbatim without reading it. As an added bonus, the writer mentions the Qana 'massacre' (nope, didn't see that coming) which looks more and more like this season's Jenin every day.

Why is America more pro-Israeli than Europe? What a silly question. They'd be better off asking, Why is Europe more anti-Israeli than America? The answers (a burgeoning ungovernable Islamic underclass, and the total dominance of cultural marxism in the political and media cultures) would be far more enlightening. But somehow it's okay to pee on the parade of some sets of religious believers (evangelicals, Jews) but doing it to others is 'racist' or 'Islamophobic' or something.

Genes, Memes, and the Population Problem: Rapproachment Scenarios

2006-07-23T22:36:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know I promised this post a week ago but I've been kinda busy (check out 一＋白＝百 to find out why.)

If anyone hasn't read the post to which this is a follow-up - in which I discuss the link between memetics (particularly memes passed along horizontal vectors) and the declining birthrate - you might find it helpful do so .

Back? Let's get started.

I could only think of five scenarios. There is of course lots of overlap, but it's important to note that I don't see any of these as being mutually exclusive: they might happen sequentially, and all five could well coexist. Without further ado, then, here's my list of scenarios for how the birthrate problem might get solved in the coming century.

This is the one that is probably easiest for most people to envision:

1) Tax-tweaks: Natalist government policies attempt to encourage child-bearing with tax incentives, and perhaps even discourage non-medical childlessness with tax penalties. An example system (I haven't worked out the numbers on this, it's for discussion purposes only) would be a 10% income tax cut for the first child, 30% for the second, and 90% for the third; the missing tax dollars are made up with punitive taxation on the childless. I say this solution is 'easy to envision' to because I could see any governments seriously proposing it tomorrow, but simply because it's not that big a leap for welfare states to make. Indeed, the most natural thing for socialist governments to do is to attempt social engineering by jury-rigging the tax code (which is why it's such a kludgy shambles at the moment.)

While natalist tax-tweaking is easy to envision, I don't see it being very effective. Too easy for the childless to simply abandon whatever nations try it; as a general rule, childless people are unmarried and don't have close family ties, so they're the most likely to leave.

The next scenario is similar, but quite a bit darker:

2) The Three-Child Policy: Just as China slowed its population growth enormessly by forbidding parents to have more than one child, a natalist government might attempt to do the opposite with a similar policy: legally requiring all women to have three children by, say, their 30th birthday. Obviously this solution would require throwing women's emancipation right out the window, but a desperate natalist state driven by a hysterical population might not care (especially if, for instance, tax-tweaks have been tried and found wanting.) The potential for civil disobedience would be high: what do you do with a women who's edging up on the 27th birthday and still hasn't given birth? Well, you could take her in and forcibly inseminate her, a sort of institutionalized laboratory rape, but then what if she goes out and gets an abortion (almost certainly illegal, in this environment?) Well, you send her back to the hospital, inseminate her again, and don't let her out until she's given birth.

Coercive child-bearing is obviously somewhat of a nightmare scenario, and I doubt it would work out too well in the long run. Any society that tried it might indeed boost their birth-rate, but at the sacrifice of their civil liberties (at least for half of the population.) The societies most likely to try something like this would, I think, be Islamic, if only because the legal status of women in those cultures is already analogous to that of my room-mate's pet caterpillar. I don't see this every becoming a serious policy option in the West.

A lot of smart people have warned about the following scenario, which is where we end up if present trends continue:

3) Triumph of the Traditionalists: All around the world, there are reactionary religious groups that go to great pains to isolate themselves from mainstream society. Many of these subcultures maintain birthrates significantly higher than the mainstream average. Given time (and we're talking centuries here) these groups will have outbred the rest of the population, simply because they had lots of babies and no one else much bothered with kids (careers, toys, and nice vacations being preferable.) This could well be a Dark Ages scenario, not because religious people are inherently stupid, but because the religious memeplexes embraced by these subcultures are so uncompromising that they refuse to allow new or conflicting memes inside. Thus, a wholesale rejection of science, and thus an end to technological change.

That's a scary scenario, but luckily it relies on present trends continuing indefinitely. Luckily, this is unlikely.

The next scenario I stole from Brave New World:

4) Baby Factories: This comes in two flavors, mild (supplemental) and extra-strength (total replacement.) The basic idea is that a state might decide that, as it's citizens aren't bothering to replenish themselves, it'll do it for them. Embryos are grown in machines that mimic the function of the womb, and the resulting children are raised in institutions that are essentially boarding schools on steroids. In the mild version, the state simply takes note of how many people are born in any given year, and orders a number of babies made to bring the birth-rate up to replacement. In the extra-strength version, no one bothers to have kids the old-fashioned way; everyone comes from a bottle. This scenario is thus a logical endpoint of the growing disconnect between sex and reproduction.

This option suffers from a big instinctive ick factor, but there are actually a number of advantages. Since the womb environment is totally controlled, health risks to infants are cut down to an absolute minimum. A certain degree of genetic engineering is likely to make the adult population healthier, by eliminating birth defects and congenital diseases, and ensuring all children have useful traits such as high IQ, emotional stability, verbal agility, etc.

Most of the disadvantages from this scenario grow out of the likelihood of state control. Governments are notoriously poor at long-range forecasting; letting committees determine which genes are expressed in the next generation could be disastrous. I can't see such an activity being undertaken by corporations (absent some form of slavery or indentured servitude, there's no potential for profit) nor by private individuals (the undertaking would be simply too massive.) A collection of private non-profits would be a possible alternative candidate, but their collective size, in terms of manpower and funding, would have to be unprecedented. It's possible the cons and the ick factor will combine to prevent baby factories from ever being used; if they are eventually built, whether the cons outweigh the pros is something reasonable people can disagree on.

The final scenario is the one I personally like the most, but which will probably seem like pure sci-fi fantasy to anyone who isn't always a singulatarian:

5) Uploading: The history of our species has been one largely defined by the synergies and conflicts between the genetic replicators we share with every other living thing, and the memetic replicators that are unique to us. At present memes have the upper hand: they replicate themselves faster, evolve faster, and as a result have largely outsmarted genes. In many species (our own, as well as the hundreds of domesticated plants and animals) genes dance to a tune played by memes.

This is something that could change within a generation. Computers increase exponentially in power, carrying a number of technologies (gene sequencing, brain scanning) and sciences (biotech, cognitive science, neuroscience) along with it. Within 25 years it could well be possible for a person's mind to be extracted from their brain and instantiated in a computer. If this should happen, genes will no longer be of any importance to humans or to human civilization, save as a sort of species memory. Reproduction will be accomplished either by direct copying, or by design of new personalities; reproducing bodies via genetic technology will be irrelevant. Essentially, humans will become wholly memetic creatures; memes and genes will become utterly decoupled.

Of course, it's debatable whether the creatures on the far side of this development would be human in any recognizable sense. What isn't deniable is that the uploading scenario would render declining birthrates a moot point.
***
These various scenarios could be seen as a chronological progression. Sometime in the next decade, people start to panic about declining birthrates, and governments start to tweak the tax code. When this proves insufficiently effective, coercive childbearing is introduced in some states, which gives way to baby-making; other states might bypass the coercion stage altogether, and go straight to the factories. Meanwhile, there would be states controlled by reactionary religious movements that simply block out the outside world, encouraging high birthrates through adherence to traditional, agrarian ways of life. These states or regions would be economically moribund and largely ignored by the outside world, whose technology is racing ahead, eventually making possible mind-uploading. Once that option becomes available, modernists around the world excercise it and leave the human condition behind forever. In the long run, the traditionalists inherit the Earth, making up the entirety of the human population; but the modernists, having left their humanity behind, inherit the universe.

***

An important final point is that, in all of these scenarios, I'm assuming the survival of the human species (or at least, of civilization.) It's entirely possible that the issue of declining birthrates will be mooted by the growing extinctionist movement, as I've discussed in previous posts .

Fuji Kicks My Ass

2006-07-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

Read all about it at my other blog, 一＋白＝百.

Hey Gormless!

2006-07-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

I think your comments might be busted. I keep trying to leaves pearls of wisdom beneath your posts, and it keeps telling me that they're being held for approval (and then never showing up) ... unless maybe I've been offending you somehow?

Genes, Memes, and the Population Problem

2006-07-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

People are starting to sit up and take notice of declining birth-rates in a big way. On the left, the main worry seems to be that less people means less workers means less tax money to fritter away on welfare projects. On the right, people are more concerned with Western cultures being crowded out by third world barbarians whose birth-rates are still well above the replacement level (though to be fair, their's are declining to.) Both of these are valid worries, but they're not really something I'm concerned about with this post. I'm more interested in the underlying dynamics, and the possible outcomes.

The main explanation for the decline seems to be a mixture of the economic, the technological, and the social.

The economic argument blames the fact that kids are a lot of cost and not a lot of monetary benefit, in stark contrast to agrarian societies, where kids were a useful source of cheap labor on the farm. This makes a certain level of sense, but then how to account for the fact that high birthrates persisted well into the industrial revolution? Granted that many lower-class families sent their kids to work in the factories, but this practice was abolished (at least in the West) around the turn of the last century, and birthrates stayed high until relatively recently.

The technological argument is basically the birth control argument: in the age of the Pill, people don't hafta have kids unless they wanna. Once again, this is part of the story, but it can't be everything: infanticide was an easily available - and widely used - practice throughout much of history, and even beyond that women since time immemorial have known of plenty of ways (herbal remedies, various excercises) that could be used to abort an unwanted child, or at least raise the probability of miscarriage. They could and did do this, in order to prevent children being born out of wedlock or into families too poor to support another hungry mouth (even on the farm, after all, kids aren't much good until they're three or four, and in lean years that short time can make a big difference.)

The social argument comes down to the emancipation of women. In almost every previous society, the primary role of women - due to unavoidable biological realities - was reproduction. Now that women have stormed the bastions of almost every male sanctum, they're too busy with careers to bother with kids. Despite the dirty looks I get in public when I say such things (at least from women) this is, I think, the hardest to refute. Still, though, one has to ask the question of why, exactly, women decided that now was the time to climb the corporate ladder? The usual explanation is that in previous societies the 'patriarchy' kept women down, but while there's plenty of evidence for patriarchy, there isn't so much evidence that previous generations of women were all that interested in doing guy stuff.

Now, it's obvious that none of these three theories are mutually exclusive, and may well be mutually reinforcing. Chemical birth control and safe abortions are undoubtedly new; modern economies certainly do inhibit child-rearing, to the extent that they make kids massively expensive. The former trend makes it easier for women to put off kids indefinately, while the latter discourages having kids at all. Add in a healthy dollop of ideological feminism (but once again, Why did that ideology thrive in the modern environment?) and you'd seem to have a complete explanation.

I used to be more or less satisfied with that smorgasbord, at least, until I came upon a slightly different explanation in Susan Blackmore's fascinating The Meme Machine. For anyone unacquainted with memetics (and I'll assume that's almost everyone, despite 'meme' having become one of the internet's favorite buzzwords), here's a crash course. It's the theory that culture can be profitably viewed from a Darwinian standpoint, but treating it in a very similar fashion to biology: only instead of genes built of nucleic acid, its memes, built out of synapses. The environment memes replicate in is the human brain; the method they use to replicate themselves is imitation. Every time someone imitates someone else, whether by copying someone's haircut, by humming a tune, or by repeating an opinion or a piece of news, they're spreading a meme. This illustrates one of the primary differences between memes and genes: whereas genes are restricted to vertical transmission (parent to child) memes can also use horizontal transmission, ie transmission between unrelated individuals.

Of course, throughout the vast majority of human history this horizontal transmission didn't actually make much difference. That's not to say it didn't give us a huge competitive advantage over other animals: by enabling technology, and rapid behavioural adaptations - in essence a form of evolution that operates orders of magnitude faster than sexual reproduction, the previous evolutionary record-setter - it made us the most versatile species the world has ever seen. What I mean by 'not making much difference' is that, since humans tended to live in small homogeneous groups, they tended to get the vast majority of their memes from their parents. There was limited memetic transmission within the tribe (though very little as members of the tribe would have virtually identical memeplexes), and probably a tiny trickle between (for instance, a hunter seeing a slightly better-made bow, or a gatherer cottoning on to the idea of hitching her baby up in a harness so her hands stayed free for more gathering) but for the most part memes followed exactly the same vector as genes. Their interests were thus almost (though not quite) perfectly aligned.

Modern societies, of course, are quite different. We have books, newspapers, radio, television, and the internet. The majority of the species now lives in vast metropolises, which in turn participate in a globally linked economy consisting of literally billions of people. We're in constant contact with huge groups of people, spending large amounts of time talking, reading, writing and (for some, and more every day) blogging. If a meme wants to spread in this environment, it'll do a lot better if it's geared for horizontal transmission.

One of the predictions of memetics is that the interests of memes and genes will diverge more or less proportionately to the number of horizontal vectors available to the memes. Put another way, people who read a lot have less babies. After all, spreading memes takes time and energy. Child-rearing uses both intensively. From a meme's point of view, any time spent raising a child - even if you spend part of that time passing said meme onto the child - is wasted time. You could, after all, be out there with an active social life, talking to lots of people, and spreading that meme to a lot more than just one tiny little brain. Logically, in such a world, memes that discourage child-rearing (at the expense of meme-spreading) will tend to prosper, as carriers of those memes will have more time and energy to spread them. The logical result of this is a world full of people who don't have kids (or if they do, have the bare minimum: after all, if you do have children, it makes good memetic sense to only have one, as you can maximize the resources expended on the child and thus best prepare them for a life spreading lots and lots of memes.)

If you look at the world, one of the interesting things you notice is that societies really do seem to see their birthrates fall more or less in proportion to how connected they are. The more satellite TVs, computers, and books, the less babies. You also notice that some societies seem to sense this, instinctively, and try to stop it: look at the Taliban, banning every possible vector by which foreign memes might enter their society, or for that matter the recent identical actions of the Islamic Courts Union in Mogadishu. Iran and Saudi Arabia have both attempted similar measures, though with a great deal less success.

Now obviously this is one of those situations that can't last forever. If the birthrate crashes and stays low, eventually the population follows. A falling population is of no benefit to memes; like an epidemic that kills its hosts, being too virulent screws you over in the long run. It's likely that the memeplexes that survive and thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond will be the ones that consciously ensure a high, or at least replacement-level, birth-rate. I'll discuss what some of those might be in the next post.

The Philosophy Test

2006-07-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Never read a word he wrote (I think) but apparently my personal philosophy matches up pretty well with John Stuart Mill. Which don't sound half bad, what?

Here are the full results:

	1.	John Stuart Mill (100%) Click here for info
	2.	Kant (87%) Click here for info
	3.	Jean-Paul Sartre (86%) Click here for info
	4.	Ayn Rand (85%) Click here for info
	5.	Epicureans (80%) Click here for info
	6.	Jeremy Bentham (78%) Click here for info
	7.	Prescriptivism (77%) Click here for info
	8.	Aquinas (73%) Click here for info
	9.	Aristotle (67%) Click here for info
	10.	Spinoza (59%) Click here for info
	11.	Ockham (48%) Click here for info
	12.	Nel Noddings (40%) Click here for info
	13.	Thomas Hobbes (36%) Click here for info
	14.	Stoics (34%) Click here for info
	15.	Nietzsche (33%) Click here for info
	16.	St. Augustine (31%) Click here for info
	17.	Cynics (30%) Click here for info
	18.	Plato (24%) Click here for info
	19.	David Hume (16%) Click here for info

And here's the test (found by way of Gormless Norman, you can see his results here.) I find it a little troubling that the test says I agree more with Sartre (ick) than Ayn Rand. And kind of weird that Nietzsche is waaaay down near the bottom, at 33%, despite having read a lot of his stuff when I was younger ... easily more than any other philosopher.

The Men of the North

2006-07-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna writes an interesting article putting American culture in perspective with its Celtic, Germanic, and Nordic roots. Well worth the read.

Sustainability and the Value of Human Life

2006-07-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of discussions at the Speculist over the Friendliness problem in AI (basically, how do we ensure that superintelligent AIs don't squish us like bugs as soon as they develop) got me thinking, somewhat tangentially, about an interesting question: the value of a human life. What is that value? And why do assign that value, instead of some other value? Is the value fixed, or variable?

Now, the obvious answer is that 'human life is priceless', and though this is an admirable thought it fails a number of tests in the real world. Societies regularly make tradeoffs between economic efficiency and human lives: sure, reducing the concentration of pollutants in the air might save the one-in-one-hundred-thousand cancer deaths it causes, but the billions of dollars it costs to implement the necessary regulations simply isn't worth it.

Consider human beings as an economic resource. There's a certain supply of people (the population) and a certain demand for them (the unemployment rate in the economy.) Now, for most goods, if you hold demand constant, and increase supply, the value of the good decreases. Thus you'd expect that in a society whose population has increased enourmessly, you'd see the value of human life plunge.

Oddly this hasn't happened, at least in developed nations. Despite the population increasing by probably an order of magnitude over the past thousand years, the value of human life has increased still more. Back in the dark ages, life was cheap. Now it's more precious than ever.

I'd suggest the logical reason for this would be that demand hasn't remained constant; rather, it's growth has outstripped the growth in supply. As the economy increases in size and complexity, the contribution of each worker (more productive than his ancestors could ever have been) is more valuable, even though that worker consitutes a smaller overall percentage of the economy and the population.

I had an interesting discussion with a colleague today during which this came up. He brought up the sustainability question (you know, "Is all this economic growth really sustainable?") which immediately made another connection for me. The sustainability argument rests on the idea, more or less in the face of the evidence, that the productivity of a human being is more or less fixed. One more human in the population is just another mouth to feed, sucking up resources and producing little of value. If the premises of 'sustainability' were correct, then the economy wouldn't have grown at all in the past several hundred years and (assuming similar population growth) we'd all be much, more poorer than a Dark Ages peasant. The value of a human life would likely have declined over the same period, down to virtually nil.

Given that the opposite has happened, I think it's safe to assume that the sustainability argument is bunk.

Thoughts on the Near-Future

2006-07-09T22:02:00.000-07:00

You know when you leave one of those really long comments, and you're so proud of it that you can't bare to leave it buried at the bottom of a long thread on someone else's blog? So I'm reproducing one here, written in response to a post of Charles Stross' over at his Diary, in which he discusses various issues and problems that have cropped up in his latest project, a near-future scifi thriller.

So, the comment:

On a slightly more blue-sky basis, consider the possible fallout of RepRaps. The project is slated for completion by the end of the decade, and given the nature of a self-replicating manufacturing technology, it should spread - and evolve - quite rapidly. After all, the Net achieved massive penetration in something like 1/4 the time television took; it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see desktop manufacturing (even the crude non-nanotech kind) spreading in 1/4 the the time it took the Net to spread, ie, half of all households have one within two or three years.

A lot of people have pointed out that the prevailing zeitgeist, at least amongst the twenty-something professional set, is likely to be one of general exasperation. I can sympathize; I'm feeling that right now, to a certain degree. I'm a 25 year old university grad, B.Sc. Physics, currently teaching English in Japan because it was a better option than doing crappy temp-work, which was all I could find in Toronto.

But, let's say we've got a situation where home-ownership and children are both simply too expensive; where politics is increasingly divorced from reality due to its domination by boomers, few of whom understand the 21st century, to say nothing of the destructive effect of a half-century of politicians doing everything in their power to dismantle real democracy; where the official economy is ever-more restrictive and predatory; where the legitimate options of people within the System are increasingly unpalatable.

We're talking about probably the best-educated, most technology-empowered generation in history here. If the system as currently constituted doesn't appeal, well, why stay in the system? You've got your computers, the use of which is second nature; just a few years ago, you got your reprap (or fab or whatever you want to call it). Between global comms and desktop manufacturing, the potential is there to just say, screw it, let's build a different system.

I call that one the Hippy Option. Another option is simple migration: let's say John, who went deep into debt to study computer science, sees his job outsourced to India. Now his only options in his home country consist of low-paid temp work, doing clerical stuff in the office, or various service jobs; all of them dull, none secure, and all ensuring he'll spend the rest of his natural life paying for the education that was supposed to guarantee future prosperity (and never mind owning a home or having kids.) Then John thinks, now wait a minute, what's more important to me? Getting paid in British pounds? Or doing work I enjoy and getting a decent standard of living besides? Put that way the choice is obvious; John scrapes together the cash for a one-way to India, gets a job as a programmer at 1/20 the salary he earned back home, and starts to make a new life for himself which is much more comfortable than the one he left behind (as that 1/20 stretches a hell of a lot further than the equivalent in Britian.)

As for the political zeitgeist, well, I'd see too biggies, both related to population. First, the pension/healthcare crisis, in which an aging and sickening population acts as a great sucking maw for tax dollars (a situation exacerbated by a combination of dropouts and expatriates, both groups leaving the whole thing behind like rats fleeing a sinking ship). Second, the birthrate crash. I can see things getting a lot more draconian in order to deal with the two of them. Some possibilities:
- making passports much more difficult to get
- predatory taxation to prevent capital flight
- protectionist trade regimes, in order to guard against globalization
- 'three-child' policies, in which women are legally required to reproduce

Not that any of these would be exactly helpful, but then hysteria has a tendency to be counterproductive.

Despite all this I'm an optimist. As a previous poster said, every generation has faced big problems, usually caused by the stupidity, greed, selfishness, and/or lack of foresight of their parents. As a general rule we solve them, more-or-less, (and in the process manage to foul things up for our own kids.) Somehow everything manages to shamble along, the standard-of-living continues its upward trend, technological progress races forward, and life goes on.

Bioterror Watch - Security and Hobbyists

2006-07-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

Over at MIT's excellent Technology Review site, there's an interview with Drew Endy, an MIT biotech engineer who recently helped organize the Synthetic Biology 2.0 conference, during which an entire day was devoted to discussing security concerns, ie how to keep terrorists from getting their hands on the DNA for a microbial weapon. The result was the Synthetic Biology/SB2 Declaration, in which

The researchers pledged, for example, to develop better software to detect when orders for dangerous DNA sequences have been placed with DNA synthesis companies, and they recommended that scientists work only with companies who use such software.

Which is an excellent idea. Given the potential of biological warfare, it only makes sense that there should be some stringent security being used at the companies involved in synthesizing DNA. Not all do, at the moment:

DE: This was demonstrated recently by the Guardian, which published a front-page article stating you could order a piece of smallpox DNA through the mail.

Most of the recommendations in the declaration revolve around using software to detect when a dangerous order has been made. This isn't as easy as you might think: people don't usually request whole genomes, just small fragments. Given as there's a lot of overlap between the genomes of harmless symbiotes and dangerous pathogens, there are problems with this approach:

DE: One limitation is the high false positive rate. If you're comparing the requested sequence against a set of sequences that includes the entire genome of a pathogenic bacterium, many of those genes look like genes of E. coli [bacteria commonly used in research]. Sorting out what's actually versus apparently dangerous is slow and expensive. It often requires a PhD to manually make the decision. A second limitation is the fact that it's naive to ask a computer program looking at DNA sequences to infer the intent of the designer of the DNA sequence. Instead, you want the software nested in a decision-making process. Who is ordering the DNA and where is it being shipped? As important, by asking these questions it helps to ensure that the people designing the DNA and their local community are paying attention to issues of biological safety and security.

And that comment about paying as much attention to who's doing the ordering as is paid to what is ordered leads to my only really problem with the plan as presently constituted (or at least, as laid out by Dr. Endy.) Earlier in the interview, he has this to say:

DE: First, we want to make sure that the use of DNA synthesis technology is subject to the same community and institutional oversight mechanisms that have been used successfully with recombinant DNA work for the past 30 years. The main challenge here is that DNA synthesis technology is becoming easy to access anonymously via the Internet. Thus, we are asking DNA synthesis companies to work together to develop an open framework that can be used to ensure that all synthesis orders are placed by qualified individuals who have proper authority for handling the requested DNA.

Sounds pretty innocent, right? Make sure all the people ordering genetic material are licensed, authorized professionals. How better to make sure no dirty terrorists get their hands on it? Well, there's just one problem with that suggestion: it would, I think, gut the embryonic hobbyist community. This short piece at Wired gives a glance at where things are now:

Eugene Thacker is a professor of literature, culture and communications at Georgia Tech and a member of the Biotech Hobbyist collective. Just as the computer hobbyists sought unconventional applications for computer circuitry, the new collective is looking for "non-prescribed uses" of biotechnology, Thacker said.

The group has published a set of informal DIY articles, mimicking the form of the newsletters and magazines of the computer hobbyists -- many of which are archived online. Thacker walks readers through the steps of performing a basic computation using a DNA "computer" in his article "Personal Biocomputing" (PDF). The tools for the project include a $100 high school-science education kit and some used lab equipment.

Other how-to articles guide readers through cultivating skin cells and "Tree Cloning" -- making uniform copies of plant tissue.

As the piece at Wired makes clear, there's a strong parallel with the early computer hobbyists, guys that did a lot to advance computing technology for nothing more than the simple joy of working with new technology. Let's not forget that the giants of the modern IT industry (people with names like Gates and Jobs) came out of these communities.

If companies did start issuing blanket refusals to synthesize DNA for non-accredited hobbyists, it would crush these communities. There's precedent: once again from the Wired article, the case of Steve Kurtz:

All the members of the collective are familiar with the case of Steve Kurtz, a professor and artist who has had to defend himself against accusations of "bio-terrorism" after local police happened upon his amateur home lab in May 2004.

He says his case has had a moderate "chilling effect."

"Amateurs need experts," Kurtz said. "We come to them with ideas and ask them for help. Scientists are (now) a lot more hesitant to get involved."

Kurtz adds that Tepnel, the company selling a biokit used to conduct a homebrew test for genetically modified organisms designed by Critical Art Ensemble, now refuses to sell to the general public.

As much as the prospect of a synthetic plague causing a dieback worries me, I also wouldn't want to severely jeopardize economic and technological growth by crushing hobbyist movements; these have a tendency to be massive sources of innovation, especially in fields where the barriers to entry - at least in terms of capital - are low and falling.

Whether or not companies do adopt a policy of only selling to in-group members (ie universities and corporations), it can only ever be a stopgap. At some point - and probably sooner than later - it will become possible for people to synthesize their own DNA, at which time any security procedures used by the synthesis companies would be moot.

That's why I'd forget all about persecuting hobbyists, and instead look for network solutions. In the long run, the only real way to deal with bioterror is a sort of technological immune system. The first line of defense would be vigilance: keeping an eye out for potential pandemics (as is currently being done with avian influenza) and attempting to synthesize effective countermeasures, antibiotic or antiviral as the case may be, beforehand. The second is to respond fast when there is an outbreak, as happened with SARS: rapid quarantining, rapid genetic sequencing of the pathogen, and rapid development of a counteragent. At the moment such a network is already developing, consisting primarily of a partnership between corporations and various national and international government organizations (this is one of the very few cases where I'm all for government involvement.) However, I'm of the opinion that a fully mature bioterror defense network would almost have to include hobbyists. What they lack in resources, they'd make up for in numbers. A volunteer organization of biotech hobbyists would be invaluable for detecting potential threats, developing vaccines on short notice, and most anything else that required a distributed effort. Shutting such organizations down before they even get a chance to get strikes me as a hysterical, counterproductive move.

Cosmic Bitchslap

2006-07-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

This is freakin' scary: Japanese CGI (embedded YouTube) showing what would happen if a giant meteorite smacked the planet upside the head. Admittedly, by giant, we're talking significantly bigger than a dinosaur killer, but still, it's worth remembering that weaponized germs aren't the only existential risk to human life.

Repurposing Life

2006-07-06T10:15:00.000-07:00

A couple of very interesting articles - one very in-depth report at Wired, and a fluffier piece at MSNBC - deal with the fascinating subject of programmable biology. For all that I bang on sometimes about the dangers of superplagues unleashed by crazed extinctionists, it's only fair that I also take a look at some of the more positive developments.

First, the MSNBC article, Making Factories and Computers With DNA. According to the article (and I've seen referrences to this kind of work before) DNA is being exploited by many researchers, not for it's information-carrying and processing capability, but for it's structural talent. Essentially, DNA loves to hook up with DNA, and if you arrange the base-pairs just right - something that's getting cheaper to do all the time - you can get it to self-assemble into complex three dimensional mechanical structures. On it's own this isn't all that useful, as DNA is kind of floppy: you can make something that looks like a gear, but when you try to use it like one it'll disappoint pretty quick. But you can use it as what amounts to a scaffold. The result: smaller, faster electronics, and an on-ramp to molecular nanotechnology.

The Wired, Life, Reinvented, looks at a completely different aspect of programmable biology. Rather than using DNA as a simple construction platform, programmable biology aims to create wholly synthetic life-forms, starting with a from-the-ground-up rewriting of the genetic code.

Part of this involves making 'biobricks', a standardized set of genetic components that would perform functions analogous to logic gates. This would radically simplify biological engineering, bringing it into the same ballpark as writing computer code.

Another trick they're looking at is reassigning various codons (three-nucleotide sequences) in order to widen the 'vocabulary' of life, allowing the inclusion of far more than the 20 amino acids that life has heretofore been limited to; this has the added benefit that such organisms would find everything else in the biosphere inedible, thus somewhat reducing the risk of an intentional pandemic.

The initial goal is to create industrial bacteria whose genomes have been stripped down to the raw essentials so as to make them much easier to program for various tasks, such as cleaning pollution or synthesizing everything from drugs to plastics. Further down the line, well, imagine planting a seed and digging up a car a year later.

Faster, Please

2006-07-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a collection of links to things I've added to my Christmas wish-list (though even with the galloping pace of the modern world, it'll probably be a few years before any of those items will ever get ticked off.)

Check out this demo (embedded YouTube) of an operating system called BumpTop that incorporates a physics-engine to help you organize your desktop in a more intuitive way. I want one for my next computer.

Imagine being able to print a robot out onto flexonic paper. The robot folds itself up like magic origami, and then goes about it's business doing, well, whatever you'd like it to do.

I've already got some ink (and used to have an eyebrow piercing, until a regrettable incident at one of my schools in which a staff member surprised me while taking it out. Those little beads are devilishly hard to find....) But this is way, way cooler than any of that: a programmable tattoo, capable of changing shape, size, and color. And of course, animation.

And while we're on the body-modification trip: I remember back when I was a ten-year-old, infatuated with R. Talsorian's CyberPunk 2020, that I told my dad I wanted to be a cyborg. Well, it looks like that just got a little bit more plausible, as scientists have finally figured out how to attach prostheses directly to bone. Now all I need is a reflex boost, a skulljack, and eyes capable of seeing infrared, and we're in business.

Extinctionism and Religion

2006-06-25T21:54:00.000-07:00

AussieGirl at Ultima Thule writes about apocalyptic environmentalism, a very relevent topic here at the sanitarium where the gathering dangers of Extinctionism are an ongoing preoccupation. Her take is from the religious rather than the political angle, and if anything I think that makes Extinctionism even scarier. Religious fanatics are usually a crazy lot, whether they believe in the Book of Revelation, Xenu, or Global Climate Change. And crazy people are much more likely to do something, well, crazy. Like, say, try and wipe out the species with airborne ebola.

And lest you think she's just a crazy blogger like me, her post includes most of an article from the Economist - not a magazine noted for it's wild flights of fancy. Here's a taste:

Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending. Perhaps, until it does, environmentalism is destined to remain in the political margins. Everyone needs redemption.

In the comments, Gormless Norman is the first to suggest that that redemption could be extinction.

Political Incorrectness and Compassion

2006-06-25T21:48:00.000-07:00

Fjordman's PC post continues to makes waves in the 'sphere. For me, it sparked the desire to write the Sanitarium's inaugural post, on Extinctionism. Gagdad Bob, at One Cosmos, writes a lengthy essay on the religious aspects of Political Correctness, discussing PC ideology, religion, and evil. A very interesting take, and well worth your reading time.

Pretty in Pink

2006-06-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

Anyone who isn't blind has noticed the epidemic of pink shirts that's currently sweeping the world of men's fashion. You see the benighted metros wearing them everywhere, on the street, in the office, and if you go into a menswear store, you're confronted with a sea of pink, leavened by the occasional pastel highlight.

Now, normally I don't care about men's fashion. "This is in this year? Whatever. Just ring it up so I can get out of this damn mall and back to doing something interesting." That in a nutshell is my usual attitude towards clothing.

But this is different. This is pink. And ever since the pink trend started to catch on (first observed in Toronto, but recently it's followed me to Tokyo) I've had a niggling suspicion that there's something, well, sinister about the whole thing.

Or maybe I'm just an unreconstructed homophobic backwoods redneck, and I'm over-reacting to the whole 'pink' thing because I Fear Change (then again, sports bore me, I've never been hunting, and I expect and hope for a technological singularity, Coming Soon to a Planet Near You. I do like beer, though. And whiskey. Sweet, sweet whiskey....) So I'm open to the possibility that I'm ranting about nothing here, but anyways.

Now, as is fairly well known, color has a very strong psychological aspect. Blue is calming and authoritative, red can mean aggression or sex. That kind of thing. And yes there's a cultural component to all this, but mostly I'm talking about this as relates to one culture (the West) so that's not really at issue, I think.

Most of the hits I got on a quick google gave the psychological components of pink as calm, warmth, and nurture, with the particular emphasis on calm. All of them of course generally feminine qualities (which would explain the color's historical association with femininity.) A little more digging revealed that "Sports teams sometimes paint the locker rooms used by opposing teams bright pink so their opponents will lose energy," a dirty trick inspired by the technique of using pink jail cells to calm inmates (using a very specific shade, call 'drunk tank pink', which was discovered by the U.S. Marine Corps.) Apparently drunk-tank pink must be used sparingly: exposure to the color for more than an hour pacifies the subject so effectively that he becomes suicidal.

So what does all this say about the latest fad for feminized menswear?

I see it all as a symptom. Here we have a generation of men raised in schools that treat them as deffective women, to the point of medicating them if they prove restless. They then go to work in office environments where overtly masculine displays are greatly frowned upon, and where traditionally feminine abilities - multitasking, consensus-building, that sort of thing - are prized. The surrounding culture tells them that women want soft, sensitive men (men who get sympathy pain, not men who shrug at pain) with soft, sensitive skin (waxed, not shaven.) They're not allowed to take part in any 'men-only' organizations, either in work or in play; it's instructive that the Boy Scouts' name now counts as false advertising, though the Girl Guides remain true to their title.

It's only natural that many choose, consciously or not, to subdue their masculine side, and wearing pink is undoubtedly a part of that.

At the same time, instinct whispers to them, "Something is wrong." It's a persistent, niggling disquiet in the back of their minds, the notion that they've been cheated, somewhere, somehow, of something that every other man in the history of the species expected without even knowing they expected it. And so they need to be calmed ... and that nice pink polo shirt for the club, or the soft pink business shirt for that important Wednesday lunch, speak directly to that need.

But the calming power of pink is not forever. As the experience of the police shows, expose a man to pink for too long and he'll go suicidally insane.

Not that it will come to that.

Things will start to swing, soon I think, in the other direction. A lot of men don't buy the whole 'senstive modern man' thing and never did. A lot of women admit they don't even really want that. Both of those groups resent having masculinity squelched because it's inconvenient. And as for the large numbers wearing pink, to me they seem to be as a group desperately, silently pleading for help. They'd like to be men, and though they can't really remember how, instinct as always will prove stronger than social engineering. There will come a time when they demand to start learning.

From this perspective, the epidemic of pink might even be a hopeful sign. Short of mass vasectomies and mandatory estrogen injections, how much worse could it get?

Crying Wolf

2006-06-22T08:38:00.000-07:00

America's like my Dad. No matter what it does, someone complains, and complains bitterly. Every once in a while, the criticism would get to him, and he'd be unpleasant company for a time; but though he'd bitch and yell, he'd still try and be the best Dad he could.

Let's hope the US has the same level of patience with the rest of the world.

It was this post from the New Sisyphus that got me thinking along these lines:

Another day, another dead American. We are expected to die. The world has long since past expected that Americans be treated with honor and respect or according to the basic rules of war.

In Korea, we were expected to take the lead in the fight. Our captured soldiers were horrifically tortured. In Vietnam, we were on our own. Our captured soldiers were horrifically tortured. In the Iraq War, we were expected to take the lead in the fight. Our captured soldiers were horrifically tortured and, since our captured then included, for the first time, women, raped.

None of which was or is thought by the world community as a weakening of the laws of war, of the Geneva Conventions. Those are what Americans fight by. You can't expect those oppressed people who America is unjustly fighting to respect those, can you?

Sisyphus holds out the possibility that the US will, in essence, walk out on the rest of the world: serve it divorce papers, get a restraining order, and let the wife keep the kids. Oh, and you can forget about child support.

I don't give this a very high probability, if only because America is so heavily invested - in every sense - in the global economy. The time is long since passed when the great Republic could slam the door and lock out the world.

I find it marginally more plausible that the U.S. - or at least the elements within it that happen to have guns - might finally stop caring about the opinions of other people. "Fine", they might say, "If we're scum, beasts, and war-criminals, no matter what we do, then that's what we'll be." There's no reason beyond their own sensibilities why they should go the extra mile to avoid civilian casualties: in terms of American blood and treasure, a far more cost-effective way of dealing with rogue regimes would be summary nuking. "Annoy us, and your capital city is a parking lot." The U.S. possesses an arsenal capable of annihilating the planet several times over. They could sow horror the likes of which the world has never dreamed, and barely scratch the surface of what they have at their fingertips.

Head-hacking? Suicide bombing? Nuclear terrorism? That's nothing to what America could do, if it stopped caring. And that's just with the capabilities they have now. The US just happens to possess the world's most dynamic, most creative economy. If they really put their minds to developing doomsday weapons, they could invent some nasty shit. Imagine, for instance, viruses which only activate in the presence of specific ethnic markers. Or smart-dust equipped with tiny packets of poison, enabling the U.S. military to establish blanket surveillance over an area and then execute anyone who stepped out of line. Pharamcological weapons which disable the psychological ability to fight, permanently. None of these ideas are original with me, but none of them exactly stretch credulity, now do they?

The same logic can be applied internally, as well. The US Army, and conservatives in general, are constantly under attack for being mouth-breathing monsters, regardless of either motivation or deportment. If, one day, they snapped, well ... it's the conservatives who have guns. Largely, conservatives who man the armed forces. And in this day and age, many people leave a long and detailed trail of their political opinions, all of it electronically archived.

Just sayin'.

Now before you think I'm sitting here panting in anticipation of all this, you should note a few things. 1) I'm a Canadian, and thus unlikely to benefit if America goes rabid. 2) A few paragraphs up, where I say, 'marginally more plausible'. I don't rate this dark future as being overly likely, not because I have any great deal of evidence, but simply because I have faith in the basic decency of the American soul. I think that, like my Dad, they might bitch and moan and occasionally threaten but in the end, their skin is thick, their shoulders wide, and their back strong. They can take the criticism, and keep on doing what's right, whenever they can, do the best of their ability, because that's just the kind of people they are.

I don't see the scenario I've sketched all that likely. Nor do I find it at all desirable.

But some times, I do wish the critics would just shut the fuck up.

The Pocket-Bike

2006-06-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the first version of this contraption looks like it's top speed wouldn't be significantly different from a leisurely stroll, but it's still a very cool idea. The solution, I think, would be to design wheels that could fold, too, possibly using a memory metal of some kind. Fix that problem, and the pocket bike would be a brilliant little gadget.

Allocations vs. Markets, or, Neofeudalism vs., um, Neofeudalism

2006-06-21T20:13:00.000-07:00

David Brin, the eminent science fiction author (well, eminent to those of us who pay attention to those things) has a thought-provoking new essay up on his blog: "Allocations vs. Markets" - an ancient struggle with strange modern implications:

I am talking about the struggle between those preaching “prudent sustainability” and those who claim that market forces will solve all looming crises of poverty, pollution, energy depletion and so on.

We’ve all grown familiar with these apparently rigid “sides”, and so let me avow something from the start. If I am forced to choose between them, you can bet that I will side with the New Puritans of the sustainability crowd! They, at least, want somemodernist attention paid to assertive problem-solving, instead of preaching an indolent, pollyanna faith that some grand and superior external force will come to our rescue, averting calamity in the nick of time.

(Did it, ever, in the past? I repeat that challenge. Did such a thing happen? Ever?)

But that’s the point. I will not choose sides between the extreme poles of yet another absurd "devil's dichotomy." As I say here: http://www.davidbrin.com/collapse.html and here: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050911/news_lz1v11science.html
... we don’t have to pick between two perfectly opposite positions! In fact, that kind of inflexibility is the surest way to guarantee our failure as a civilization.

So let’s pull back from our immediate troubles, once again, and ponder how these two viewpoints may reflect assumptions that are far older and more similar than any of the adversaries think, reflecting habits of thought going back thousands of years.

In fact, there are certain ways in which doctrinaire leftists are taking up old-time feudalist positions while today’s neo-feudalists of the right seem, at first, to be standing up for the Enlightenment... only to show their truer, reactionary colors when we dig a little deeper.

....

Returning closer to the topic at hand, how does any of this apply to the cornucopian mythology of Huber and Mills? Of Julian Symon and Bjorn Lomberg? The supreme rationalization of those in the elite who do not want governments, legislatures, universities or other publicly accountable institutions to deliberate or plan strategies for dealing with onrushing change.

Let’s step back. Consider what these authors (and their benefactor/patrons) are preaching. The deliberately provocative title “Bottomless Well” forecasts a coming feast of both energy and human empowerment -- a predicted perfect storm of human problem-solving creativity -- arising from a combination of mass education, freedom and fecund market forces. It is, deep down, yet another expression of what’s recently been called the Copenhagen Doctrine or, more generally, the precept of Faith in Blind Markets (FIBM)

Now first let me put aside any notion that I’m an adherent of the opposite principle -- the general notion called Guided Allocation of Resources (GAR). As you will see below, I most definitely am not!

What I will show is that this dispute goes back a long way. It is an ancient dichotomy... and one that’s deeply misunderstood

As usual, his very unique point of view is independant of easy left/right pigeonholing. Brin is the ultimate centrist, so deep in the center that these days he might as well be a radical. Anyhow, I definately recommend that you hop on over and read the whole thing.

Essentially, Brin argues that the pyramid-shaped economy is the natural form for human societies to take on, and that the diamond of the past two centuries is so is a (highly desirable!) aberration, less a natural structure than a finely tuned machine. He goes on to argue that those in power are inherently hostile to this machine, as, by disabling it, they can - over the short-term - increase their own wealth and power. Furthermore, many essentially goodwilled people will be hostile towards it, as it's structure isnt' exactly intuitive. It works, but all our evolutionary programming tells us it shouldn't.

Now here's the kicker, and the reason why the article tickles me cortex. The 'right', sez Brin, is more dangerous to markets than the 'left', because while all those leftoid profs and politicians and culturejamming antiglobalization activists are openly hostile to capitalism, the libertarian think tanks and corporate lobbies and such claim to be for markets, while deep down acting to subvert them and put in place an old-style oligarchic system. In the final analysis, there's no real difference between the two, because they want to impose essentially the same system: the one dressed up as a socialist bureacracy, the other costumed in the vestements of corporate autonomy, but the basic end-result of either being that our socioeconomic structure slumps back into a pyramid.

Cool New Webtool

2006-06-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for something like this for a while. Wikipedia is all very well and good - I'm a regular user, as anyone who clicks on my links can tell - but WetPaint lets you set up your own wiki, and brings all the ease of use of blogging to the experience. You can set up a wiki thats open to all, limitted to wetpaint users, or locked down to those who have password access. It takes seconds to set up a wiki, the interface is seemless, and the templates they offer are just gorgeous.

Why are you still here? Go play!

Extinctionism

2006-06-18T22:05:00.000-07:00

And I thought I'd invented the word myself. A google search proved me wrong (though a lot of pages had a religious instead of environmental bent, but still.)

Bioterror Watch - Smallpox Synthesis

2006-06-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

This is kind of scary. Via the Guardian:

In a front-page article in The Guardian on 14 June, the newspaper's science correspondent describes how he arranged for a tiny fragment of the smallpox genome to be synthesized by a mail-order biological-supplies company and delivered to his home address. The company involved, VH Bio, based in Gateshead, UK, did not screen the sequence using software that checks orders against the genomes of dangerous microorganisms.

The smallpox virus has been synthesized before, and while it was by university molecular biology professors, they claimed that doing so was pretty trivial. It will only get more so as time goes on: the technology necessary for genetic engineering continues to fall in price, and odds are there will be plenty of people who just teach themselves how do it. For that matter, it's not impossible that, say, a molecular biology grad student might get infected by extinctionism memesets, and decide to synthesize smallpox or some other virus in his free time.

There's a lot of debate about whether such information should be suppressed. Apparently there's an ammendment banning it's synthesis, and when the virus was first synthesized (a feat the researchers performed as a warning) a lot of people said they'd gone too far by actually publishing the genome. The argument is that it's sort of like nuclear secrets: the recipes and techniques should be held secret, to keep bad guys from making them. The other side of the debate says suppressing information is never the way to go.

Of course widely distributed biotech expertise could be a blessing as well. Hundreds of thousands of basement biolabs run by hobbyists might be able to find vaccines, antiviral agents etc within days or even hours, thus providing the world with a kind of technological immune system. I figure this is the world's best bet for avoiding some kind of biological apocalypse, which is why I actually support letting that information roam free. The more people are working on defenses, the better, and unlike with nukes, they need all the information they can get to build effective defenses.

Monday Sci-Tech Links

2006-06-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

Researchers have developed a new “liquid armor” that “flows normally under low-energy conditions, but when agitated or hit with an impact it stiffens and behaves like a solid”. Now that's just cool.

Apparently, green tea might explain why Asians - who generally smoke like freakin' chimneys - have lower cancer rates than all those healthy-livin' po-faced westerners.

Hopefully this anti-aging molecule won't prove to be another faked-up boondoggle for Korean researchers.

Speaking of stem cells, a recent paper in Nature suggests biologists are close to being able to reprogram adult cells to go embryonic ... that should nicely sidestep the embryo wars.

Japanese researchers at MTT use quantum dots to measure individual electrons, creating a precursor of the world's most sensitive ammeter.

Google is building a ginourmous data center ... so big it requires to four-story cooling towers. I figure they'll be the first to develop strong AI (but that they won't tell anybody until the beast is mature.)

More on Extinctionism

2006-06-17T22:57:00.000-07:00

And it begins. The following is taken from the Church of Euthanasia's Gaia Liberation Front 'Statement of Purpose':

Fortunately, we now have the specific technology for doing the job right--and it's something that could be done by just one person with the necessary expertise and access to the necessary equipment. Genetically engineered viruses are already being custom-designed for use in "pest" control. These viruses have the advantage of attacking only the target species. To complicate the search for a cure or a vaccine, and as insurance against the possibility that some Humans might be immune to a particular virus, several different viruses could be released (with provision being made for the release of a second round after the generals and the politicians had come out of their shelters). Of course, natural viruses, such as the smallpox virus, that attack only Humans could be used as well.9 (but don't, for goodness' sake, go around saying that you're actually advocating any of this. We can get our message across just as effectively by, for example, campaigning to make it legal to exterminate the Humans.)

These people really are dangerous, but of course, until they do something actually illegal (like, say, trying to make one of those viruses.) I hope to hell that the various intelligence agencies aren't so busy trying to keep track of Islamists and their dinky bomb threats to keep a close watch on people who want to exterminate the entire human species.

Links to Random (mostly science-related) Stuff That Caught My Fancy

2006-06-17T22:27:00.000-07:00

A journalism grad student posts about his thesis research into scientology. The youtube video is pretty lame, but the flash animation is pretty cool. It didn't teach me much I didn't already know, but the more people who tell the truth about this abonimable cult the better.

It seems Broca's area is important, not just for language processing, but also for the general executive functions involved in planning.

Graham's Number makes my head hurt.

Chimps and humans made booty calls on each other during their long evolutionary breakup.

Novamente (who I've never heard of before) has a plan to build human level AI within six years. Possible? Maybe. Likely? I'd bet no.

It seems the Milky Way is actually a barred spiral.

Did Native Americans record a supernova? Certainly technology is no prerequisite for fascination with weird goings-on in the night sky.

Planemos - basically superjovians that float freely through space, with no parent star - might spawn their own planetary systems.

The Third Wave

2006-06-15T18:36:00.000-07:00

Fjordman, over at the Gates of Vienna, has a long post up concerning political correctness (and though the title doesn't mention it, multiculturalism), which is, as he puts it, the revenge of marxism:

Not only has Marxism survived, it is thriving and has in some ways grown stronger. Leftist ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse, their critics vilified and demonized. By hiding their intentions under labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship of public discourse they could never have dreamt of had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

That's pretty much my view of it. I've been reading a bit lately about the theories of Antonio Gramsci, an early twencen Marxist. His contribution to the endless Marxist discussion is essentially the idea that the way to win the war against capitalism, and create the necessary preconditions for a revolution, was with subversion of it's educational, political, media, religious, and commercial institutions. His name is fairly obscure, but his influence is not: anyone who's spent any time on a modern university campus, sat through 'sensitivity training', or had to carefully police their own language in front of colleagues in order to avoid breaking the ever-tightening strictures of political correctness has encountered it.

This has all been in the works for a long time. There's some evidence that, even fifty years ago, Stalin was using fellow travellers and useful idiots inside American communist parties to subvert the U.S. at a cultural level. Evidence only came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the release of the Venona transcripts, which document KGB contact with agents inside the U.S. ESR at Armed and Dangerous has a post in which he discusses this in more detail.

At any rate, it's occurred to me that at the moment we're at the crest of a second marxist attack on the West. The first one, universally known as the Cold War, was motivated - on the surface at least - primarily by economics. I'll call this strain anticapitalism. The Marxist argument was that communism, or socialism, was a better method of generating and distributing wealth than capitalism. This proved false, as was obvious to all but the most intellectually dishonest by the 1970s.

Not that this empirical truth stopped the marxists: they simply switched the target of their hostility, from capitalist economics to Western culture. Call this strain anti-occidentalism. The anti-occidentalists invented postmodernism, radical feminism, deconstructionism, political correctness, and any number of [insert oppressed group here] studies. And, of course, after 9/11, they largely sided with the Islamists who wish to drag our civilization back into the medieval mud, taking the side of barbarians that violently repudiate every principle they claim to cherish.

This too shall pass. Already, the resistance towards the cultural assault gathers, stronger every year. The wilfully blind media; the dissembling politicians; the academics gone off the deep end; all these groups hemorrhage credibility with every lie, every mistake, every rejection of obvious truths for increasingly empty ideals.

Boys raised in schools that treat their gender as a disease. University students who go deep in debt to endure four years of stalinism and learn nothing save that which they teach themselves. Women made to feel subhuman if they elect to make their career the raising of their children. Christians whose faith is spat upon at every opportunity, while they watch those who spit with the most enthusiasm bow and scrape before muslims.

The anger grows. Anti-occidentalism will not survive it. One day we will wake up, and nothing will be more disrespectable than hating the West merely because it is the West. We will have realized their only power comes from us listening, and we will simply ignore them.

Not that that will be the end of it. What we're dealing with isn't a series of unrelated mass psychoses, or simple human error: it's an evolving memetic virus, more virulent than anything ever seen before. Religions are as nothing before it. It will mutate again, and come back as something even nastier.

The generations aren't self-contained; there's considerable overlap. Even today, you'll find those who refuse to admit that economic marxism doesn't work. "Communism just hasn't been really tried," they insist, though their plaints fall on deaf ears. Communism is out on the long tail of the intellectual market. Thirty years ago, at the height of economic marxism's power, was when cultural marxism was incubated; the more farsighted amongst the fellow travellers saw the writing on the wall, acquired a different target, and began their long march through the institutions of the West.

And now? If you look closely, inside the lunatic fringe that the marxists themselves refuse to give much in the way of credibility or attention, you'll find the next generation: embryonic, largely ignored, and for now, essentially dormant. But it's there nonetheless, and when anti-occidentalism implodes it will move into the niche it leaves.

I call it extinctionism.

The Church of Euthanasia. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. EarthFirst!. Deep Ecology. These various groups and movements have been around for years. Their position is simple: civilization is an existential risk to the biosphere, and thus the population should either be severely curtailed or even eliminated entirely (after all, even if 99% of the population died, and only a few scattered hunter-gatherers were left, they might well expand and start the whole nightmare of civilization all over again.)

How many times have you heard humanity compared to a virus? A malignant cancer? A dangerous pathogen, that must be removed. Expect such rhetoric to increase as time goes on.

The progression is simple. Generation 1 targeted capitalism. Generation 2 targets western civilization, And generation 3 will target the human species itself.

Note that the first two generations tended towards methods appropriate to their focus. The first used labor unions, general strikes, nationalization of industries, and welfare; the second, speech codes, behavioural restrictions, textual 'analysis', guilt, and shame.

Nothing so elaborate will be required for the next generation. Their weapons will be simple: infectious disease. After all, if humanity is dangerous to the biosphere, then they must be eliminated. Today, most sympathizers claim that the viral pandemics will arise naturally, out of crowded urban conditions and natural happenstance. The problem is, as we've seen with SARS and bird flu, modern medicine has the capability to contain outbreaks when they occur, and even track them before they do. Some will grow impatient, and opt to help nature along.

And this is the really dangerous thing. The previous generations required the participation, or at least acquiescence, of a massive segment of the population to be effective: revolutions don't happen unless the people actually rise up and revolt, and speech codes are useless if ignored. But viral weapons can be developed by tiny cadres; all extinctionism need do is attain sufficient intellectual credibility that a fraction of a percentage of supporters are willing to help nature along.

Ray Kurzweil, amongst others, has called for a 'Manhatten Project' against biological warfare. I think it's doable, but not easily and not quickly, and one of the things that keeps me awake at night is the thought that a lot of people will die before such a project can be completed. Extinctionism might not kill off the species, but it might well kill billions.