David’s Distate for Discussion

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Tito

Some time ago, I pointed out a connection between Michael Gove’s bizarre belief that anti-semitism, being evil, is something that ought not to be dissected and understood, and David Cameron’s desire to paper over discussion following the London riots.

In both of these cases, a senior Conservative politician seems scared of allowing analysis and discussion to go on. Rather than pushing for a particular course of action by arguing for it, they argue that there can be no arguments or analysis, and then try to present their own preferred action as the default one.

David is at it again over the Olympic opening ceremony. Rather than saying that the ceremony is a political expression that he agrees with, and thereby risk alienating people, he tries to pretend that it is an entirely apolitical affair.

To do this, he pushes the elements under criticism as if they were moral axioms that transcend all people, things about which disagreement is not possible.

Specifically:

He added: “It is not about politics. We all celebrate the NHS. We all think James Bond is fantastic. We all revere the Queen.”

Think what you will of the politics of both Danny Boyle and David Cameron: this statement is untrue.

Obviously, not everybody “revere[s] the Queen”: The existence of the Republic campaign confirms as much. Some people, myself included, wish for the NHS to be abolished, and a great deal more wish for it to be replaced or reformed. I’m sure that there is disagreement over whether or not James Bond is loveable.

Once again, David Cameron avoids sticking his neck on the line  by declaring an issue impervious to reason.

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The Guardian issues an Ayn Rand correction!

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Tito

You might recall reading my post on Victoria Bekiempis’ absurd attack on Ayn Rand earlier this year.

Well, would you believe it, The Guardian has issued a correction about the whole affair!

• Confessions of a recovering Objectivist was corrected because Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged is 1,200 pages long, rather than 1,200 words as the original said.

Right, because that was the biggest problem with the article.

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Are internet trolls self obsessed?

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Tito

Stephen Fry seems to think so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=19uaccC2pq4&NR=1

He says that:

  • Trolls crave attention
  • They post deliberately offensive comments to get that attention
  • They can’t stand people other than themselves receiving attention, so they direct the attention to themselves by being vicious

If we take his description of the behaviour as true (I’m not sure if it is, but it seems reasonable), it’s hard to conclude that such trolls are self obsessed.

Firstly, from a purely observational level, they are spending their time trying to squeeze reactions out of other people.

Obviously, Fry is trying to say that they do so so that the attention of other people falls on the trolls themselves, but this is is pure social metaphysics. If people really feel the need to be the centre of attention by any means possible, they must suffer from a horrific lack of self esteem. Seeking validation through the opinion of others is bad enough, but to seek validation through the attention of others, regardless of the reason for that attention, is altruistic madness.

Real selfishness looks like Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Roark didn’t care one bit that everybody ignored him, or that everybody hated his work. All he cared about was that his work was good by his own standards.

If somebody truly can’t stand not being discussed or not being the centre of attention, that person values the opinion of strangers far too much. He is obsessed with validation in the eyes of strangers, not with himself.

Internet trolls are other-obsessed.

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Funny, until you think about it

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Tito

It’s possible to over analyse a joke until it loses its humour, but language is really important, so I’m going to do just that.

(from Times Free Press)

Libertarians believe in leaving people alone to help themselves, and so the lifeguard left the people to drown. Very clever… sort of.

Obviously, the parallel can be extended to just about every job. Libertarians don’t believe in interfering with the food supply, so restaurants won’t serve you food. Doctors won’t perform operations because they don’t want to interfere with their patients health, etc.

These ones are slightly less funny, because it is much faster to identify the “flaw” in the joke. All jokes have a flaw, that’s what makes them funny, they elevate something unreal to the position of being real, and you have to rethink the whole thing to spot where it departed from reality.

I remember hearing somewhere, probably a podcast, where Dr. Peikoff told the joke:

“What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?”
“A flat miner”

 

He then identified that the source of the humour comes from the “flaw” in believing that two homophones have equal meaning. He also mentioned a pretentious woman slipping on a banana skin, which he identified as being funny because the woman’s pretentions were ultimately unreal (“flawed”), and didn’t stand up to the real world problem of avoiding the banana skin.

The lifeguard cartoon can be interpreted benevolently, where the “flaw” is that critics of libertarianism don’t understand the distinction between state and private intervention. Or, it can be interpreted like a political cartoon, which would suggest that the principle of laissez faire, when taken to its logical conclusions, would mean drowning swimmers.

Political cartoons are usually interpreted like that. They caricature political positions or actions, often using some form of the reductio ad absurdum.

As a joke based on the former flawed premise, it is a good one. As a joke based on the latter reduction, it makes no sense. A more accurate political cartoon on the same theme would be a socialist lifeguard who refuses to save the swimmers, because he doesn’t believe that humans are capable of taking actions without the threat of government arrest.

I hope the joke is now suitably ruined, so that we can get on with our sombre, stoic lives.

(Disclosure: I’m definitely not a Libertarian)

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Blogging and Facebook

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Tito

For her “blogiversary“, Rational Jenn notes how comment sections on blogs have become less lively, and how many of her thoughts are now shared via social networks instead.

 I don’t know about you, but I find that I am engaging with people less often in the blogosphere. Facebook and Twitter (be my friend! follow me!) are the primary places where I “talk” to people on the internet. Both platforms have their pros and cons, but in my opinion both are also more efficient and convenient methods of interacting with others than the blog is. And I’m all about efficiency and convenience!

This is largely true for me too. Facebook is great for quickly pushing your thoughts to a fairly big group of people, and the potential for things to be virally shared is appealing to anyone with a message, but there is a record and a permanence that is lost.

It’s true that Facebook posts are stored indefinitely, but they aren’t usefully archived. If somebody wants to find that thing I said about Obama in 2010, or that essay about art I wrote in 2009, they shouldn’t have to scroll through thousands of other updates to find what they are looking for. With the blog, they can use Google, the blog tags, or the blog search to find what they are looking for.

Permanence acts as a quality control, people will post a quick update with their immediate thoughts much faster than they would write a permanently archived blog post.

Facebook also limits the amount of useful discussion it is possible to have. A single, narrow width thread of comments is unsuitable for lengthy replies or addressing multiple commenters at once.

The nature of Facebook, as a social platform, also can make things appear personal. Quickly switching from “That’s a cute photo of your dog”, to “I disagree with your views on the New York Mosque” is socially weird.

I find myself bored by people who are pleasant in real life, but who post repulsive welfare statist articles online. My option is either to hide their updates, and miss out on the things that we do have in common, or subject myself to yet another George Monbiot headline. They probably think the same thing about my own Facebook posts.

Even with people who I agree with on most things, I’m often too absorbed with productive, enriching work to sit around and contemplate how disgusting the coalition government, or Obama, is. If I don’t want to spend time analysing the latest political car crash, then I will just choose not to read certain blogs. I probably won’t cut myself off from my entire online social circle for a day though, so I have to tolerate it on Facebook.

Yet Facebook is still awesome, and I’ll keep using it in this way until I think of a better way to organise things, but I will be sorry if blogs go out of vogue.

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John Allison in London Recording

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Tito

John Allison at the Draper’s Hall, on the financial crisis and it’s philosophical cause.

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Objectivism’s Week in London

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Tito

Last week was awesome.

  • On Tuesday, Yaron Brook spoke at the Institute of Economic Affairs about “Why government keeps growing”.
  • On Wednesday, he spoke in Parliament about “Why bad economics won’t go away”
  • On Thursday, Teresa Bianchi and I made a short film with John Allison (Teresa gets  the credit for organising *all the things*.) We both interviewed John Allison on Millenium Bridge and the gardens of Draper’s Hall.
  • Later on Thursday, John Allison gave a talk to 250 people in the Draper’s Hall (venue pictured) – politicians, journalists, university lecturers, students, and financiers were all present, and they all left with a copy of Atlas Shrugged. The lecture was the Adam Smith Institute’s Ayn Rand lecture.
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Chicks love science

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Tito

And when they do it, they do it with lipstick, sexy poses, and makeup. Hell, they can’t even spell science without lipstick.

EU Fail.

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Andrew Brown wins 1/9th of a free coffee

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Tito

Hot on the heels of Victoria Bekiempis’ outburst about a philosophy she has not studied, and knows nothing about, comes Andrew Brown’s insane interpretation of Objectivism. Again from The Guardian:

 It’s hard to see how you could persuade a dedicated follower of Ayn Rand, for example, that it is wrong to lie in court even when telling the truth would have unpleasant consequences.

But there’s a little Randian in all of us. In each of us, there is a moral battle between honesty and its opposite, or selfishness and its opposite.

Got that? A Randian won’t be honest, he’ll just do whatever gets him the most loot. We can corroborate this with the Ayn Rand Lexicon:

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.
-Rand

A quick search on Google might have told Andrew that Rand’s position is the complete opposite of the one he attributes to her. The frequency of these “mistakes” in the Guardian left me puzzled at first, but the contents of my pocket have given me one plausible hypothesis.

Cafe Nero Loyalty CardWhen you buy coffee from Caffé Nero, they give you a card like this. Each additional cup you buy gets you another stamp, and you can exchange the completed card for a free coffee.

The Guardian must have a similar scheme, whereby each insane misrepresentation, smear, or cheap shot at Objectivism or Ayn Rand is rewarded by a stamp. 9 stamps give you a free cup of coffee.

So in lying about Ayn Rand, Andrew was actually acting in his self interest. This, of course, makes him moral by a “Randian” standard… or something.

**Update: The URL of this page says “sam” because I originally typed that name when drafting this post, inexplicably.**

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Gay Marriage

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Tito

If you are British, and a believer in the separation of genitals and state, you should fill out this Home Office Consultation on marriage equality.

There are lots of happy, awesome couples in Britain who, because of the random genitalia they were assigned at birth, are unable to call themselves married.

Britain’s best traditions are those that were forged in defence of the innocent individual. We’ve come a long way to making marriage equality a new, important, part of those traditions. It would be a terrible shame for the government to back down from this final push.

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