1) Why free speech advocates reject the “but it will offend Muslims!” argument as if it were clearly not worth considering.

Personally, I preferred the bear suit.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea that you should not be able to draw a picture or write an article about something because somebody might find it offensive really is inherently stupid. I think blasphemy laws suck, that they’re a disgrace to a civilised world and that they’re taking us back to the dark ages. But the idea that some things can offend us simply by existing is not in fact particularly new or unconventional, as much as it might go against my libertarian principles. Few people demand the categorical repeal of obscenity laws, which are essentially just that. Here is a Less Wrong article asking a similar question.

My theory is that this is a problem that inevitably arises in heterogenous societies. Most of us don’t object to a law that bans public masturbation because we share the same instinctual reaction to it, and we don’t share the reaction of an observant Muslim faced with a cartoon of Mohammed. Of course, I still say the offended Muslim can go poke his/her eyes out if he cares that much, but then I’m also perfectly comfortable to generally push “enlightenment values” and secular traditions in the face of local cultures everywhere.

2) Why people cried for Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs and a device people now identify with Steve Jobs.

Which is an entirely different question from why people exhibit such strong emotions for their Apple devices. Because let’s be fair, Apple makes a lot of good products. They have great designs and generally trouble-free, marvelously smooth interfaces, and the customer support in Apple stores is wonderful (or so I’m told).  But Jobs himself was never the most savoury of characters. The man was horrible to work for, stole ideas all over the place, never gave significantly to charity despite his vast wealth, promoted quack medicine until it almost killed him, and cared little for how his subcontractors treated workers.

Of course he was smart. And of course he had a good eye for design and had vision and was a good executor and gave good speeches. If I owned a tech company-ok, pretty much any company- and Zombie Jobs offered to run it I would jump at the chance. But since when does any of that lead people to care so deeply about a total stranger?

My answer is a combination of the media’s increasing tendency towards hagiographic obituaries, the fact that he had very consciously developed a personality cult and tied the company and its products strongly to himself, and the simple truth that he was a very well-known figure and there will be someone who cries for just about any celebrity, just because it means a change in their world. I remain unsatisfied at the idea that so many people the world over chose him as the only corporate titan to connect to in such an emotional way, though.

3) Why people care about the US elections

Like the first one, this is a bit of a tease, because I find myself reading a fair bit about it and I’ll probably continue to, if only because I won’t be able to escape it. But from a purely utilitarian viewpoint it’s a pointless exercise.

I mean, look at him.

“But Nikhil!” , you protest. “Perry’s a whore, Santorum’s santorum, and Gingrich is such an obvious prick: wouldn’t it be horrible if one of them won?” And I say: it won’t, because they won’t. The truth is that none of them have a real shot, let alone the gallery of buffoons (Cain, Bachman, and oh God, Palin) that have sprung up and dropped out one by one. Mitt Romney is the only real Republican candidate who has a chance- sorry, Ron Paul- and no matter what he says in the primary to appease the raving horde, his actions as president are unlikely to be significantly different from Obama’s. Of course he’ll be a little to Obama’s right but on most things we would care about-foreign policy, Internet regulation, general IP regulations/agreements, free trade agreements- that isn’t saying much. As long as he isn’t stupid enough to start a new war-and however much you might despise his views, he shows all signs of being a rather intelligent man- the rest of the world could easily close their eyes to this entire circus.

Partly due to Occupy Wall Street, I was reading some Marxist theory-distilled, condensed, simplified, etc, but in book form, and it seems to cover the basics- and it’s really startling to see how so many of the arguments have remained essentially unchanged. Post-scarcity economics has always been a contradiction in terms but at least it is something that can be considered in a science-fictional setting; however, a similar optimism about the abundance of the industrial age and the bounty of the coming era seems to me to be woven into much of Marxist theory.

The basic idea that wealth becomes ever more concentrated and that this is the inevitable product of the system and so on is something that I have a certain amount of sympathy with, but on the other hand, the clear failure of Marx‘s theory that wages will always be pushed down to subsistence levels and that productivity gains will always be captured by capital and not labour do not seem to be sufficiently impressed in the minds of those who continue to call themselves Marxists. Even more, the simple fact that Marx’s theory of human nature- human nature having always been the largest and most obvious impediment to the success of practically every alternative to plain old capitalism that has ever been suggested or implemented- was wrong doesn’t seem to be fazing anyone in the slightest. Clearly, though, the less-than-necessarily-pliant selfishness of man is a fact that most people grow up to accept (I have always thought this rather than a decreasing sympathy for unfortunates was at the core of that old joke: “if you’re not a socialist before 20, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after 20, you have no head.”)

This, then, is why the “why don’t these people have any actual demands?” question is worth asking, all rhetoric about pushing “the idea” and “maintaining unity” and “not allowing ourselves to be boxed in” aside. (I feel fairly comfortable calling it rhetoric because after all the focus on rhetoric is precisely what “momentum” and “the idea” are all about.) I can accept their premises in the narrowest sense: inequality is widening, and this is bad. I can’t accept their details because the details vary with every telling*, and I can’t accept their solutions because there aren’t any**. Capitalism-as-she-is-practised may well be a system nobody wants, but neither an alternative workable system nor a feasible transition to it (the bigger hurdle, in my opinion) seem to be on offer.

PS: This isn’t to say there’s nowhere to go from here, of course. The system could use more than a few tweaks, and a fair bit of re-shaping. It’s not going to change it’s essential incentive-based structure, that’s all.

PS2: And, of course, burning books is bad.

* I mean, of course crony capitalism is bad, of course banks shouldn’t be given bailouts and then turn around and hand their executives huge bonuses, of course we should avoid moral hazards and try for a more stable, better balanced financial system- but yet again, these aren’t details, those are practically tautologies!

**Some solutions that have been proposed by some people, like a well-targeted debt jubilee, I actually think make sense. (I will, however, wager a small sum of money that no broad-based debt jubilee will happen in the United States for the next 5 years.) The same goes for a reasonable tax increase, although I have a better sense for the numbers than to suggest that it can be restricted to the top 1% and still be sufficient to reduce the deficit.

Ooh, and here’s an inkling of the sort of crap I’m talking about.

Image via Wikipedia

Maybe you don’t want to get as complex as that title, but you could do with being a teensy bit more complex than this:

“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever. No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Who’s saying otherwise?[1] Rush Limbaugh isn’t even saying otherwise, he’s just ranting at perceived tonal issues and liberals and Marxists. Most minarchists still think you need a state for providing security and some subset of those think you need one for public infrastructure. This isn’t really news. This isn’t something that anyone but the odd anarchist needs convincing about. Of course you set aside a certain amount of your earnings for public goods. The problem isn’t to convince people that they need some sort of a state. The problem is to convince people that this state should do all the things it does today, and that they have to pay for it.

PS: Of course Elizabeth Warren isn’t the only one “unduly simplifying” the debate. She isn’t even on the list of prime offenders. But this is the sort of simplification that even otherwise intelligent people feel the need to produce as a manifesto, hence the post.

[1]Aside from objecting to “the rest of us”-what, factory owners don’t pay taxes- and “paying it forward” framing vs “paying back”, at least.

Via pol sifter on flickr

Never watch this film sober. Not because it’s a bad film, but because a certain level of disorientation greatly enhances your ability to appreciate the basic premise of this movie (Bradley Cooper gets hold of a “super-intelligence” drug that lets him do a series of implausible things that he couldn’t do before, but with a catch: it only lasts a day and you die if you stop taking it.) Otherwise, a perfectly serviceable if not all that realistic (which is?) thriller.

Midnight in Paris:

I don’t know why people like Woody Allen‘s characters, because none of them have the faintest bit of subtlety (at least in this movie). It is, however, an absolutely wonderful film despite that, and I’m not sure if it even counts as a flaw when you consider that the extraordinary characters that inhabited 1920s Paris are the major draw of the film. Although the ones I found irritatingly stereotyped were all from the present day- even “anybody want to FIGHT?” Hemingway is handled with a certain respect. And now I really want to finally read something by Scott Fitzgerald.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner:

I cried! Which is possibly because I was a teeny bit drunk and because I’m just that sort of person, because this is actually very much a feel-good film. Given the premise- white girl wants to marry a black guy- the movie is set up in such a way as to ensure that going ahead with it is the most obvious decision ever (wiki tells me that this was very much intentional: “the young Sidney Poitier, was purposely created idealistically perfect, so that the only possible objection to his marrying Joanna would be his race, or the fact she had only known him for ten days: the character has thus graduated from a top school, begun innovative medical initiatives in Africa, refused to have premarital sex with his fiancée despite her willingness, and leaves money on his future father-in-law’s desk in payment for a long distance phone call he has made.”) In any case, it’s a very enjoyable film and is heartily recommended.

Shit My Dad Says (pilot episode):

It’s not like it’s any worse-definitely no better- than a lot of sitcoms, but I can certainly understand why it didn’t gain a major audience. There’s a certain shock at finding, well, shocking things in your twitter feed that makes the original medium far more conducive to this sort of humour than a sitcom, where it’s actually a very conventional sort of premise- Shatner might as well be Frasier‘s dad!

I’m pretty sure there was at least one other movie that I watched recently, but I can’t seem to remember it, so I’ll just assume that it can’t have been very good.

Stonehenge

And yes, I realize it’s terrifically bad timing to go to London. Which is ironic because I was feeling rather lucky to be going at what I thought was rather good timing, before these riots started. And now people are talking about curfews and even the upscale neighbourhoods are getting torched, and… argh. I will now proceed to ignore it for the rest of this post.

Edinburgh

I’m going to England! To London and Cambridge and Oxford and Bath and Stonehenge and Brighton! I’m going to Edinburgh, and the Festival (and the Fringe) is on! I won’t have a laptop, so I won’t be online that much, although I am taking my new iPhone 4, so I should hopefully be able to check in every now and then. This time, at least, I hope I’ll be able to write up something about the trip.

You'll find this image in every single post comparing the two, but who am I to break ranks?

I’ve had an iPhone 3G for about a year and a half now, and while I have been less than happy with a LOT of things about it[1], it’s certainly been enough of a positive influence that I’m sure I wouldn’t willingly go back to using a mediocre-phone, for lack of a better term. So now that it’s time to switch- and it really is, I bought the phone second-hand, it fell into the sea, it has scratches on the screen and I can feel some sort of buzzing sound in the background when I use it sometimes, which can’t possibly be a good sign for continued use- I was pretty sure that I’d want to get either the iPhone 4 or, more preferably, one of the better Android-based models. My choice up until an hour back was the Samsung Galaxy S2. It has far better specs- faster dual core processor, more RAM, a nicer camera, a better form factor, you can increase the memory relatively cheaply by using micro-SD cards, and so on. But when you actually use it, as my uncle exhaustively showed me, the story’s a little more nuanced.

For starters, very strangely, Samsung has insisted on fitting this phone with some sort of colour display enhancement, which means that everything you see in this is quite noticeably different from most standard displays or from “life”, as you can see if you compare photos. This would have been OK because it really does look quite nice in most cases, except for one thing: you can’t turn it off. There ARE 3 display modes which apply various levels of enhancement but all of them give you substantially different images from what you would see on a “normal” screen. This won’t be a problem for a lot of people and I’m still deciding if this is an issue for me, but for anyone who really cares about the “true” colours of something as opposed to how crisp a movie looks- and it definitely looks crisper, if much darker, even with the brightness turned all the way up- this might be a dealbreaker.

Then, the battery life. The battery theoretically has a greater capacity than the iPhone but possibly because of the better specs it does not, in fact, last as long. This might not be a major issue because it does last 6-8 hours of “active” usage, but it’s certainly less than ideal, and I can think of lots of situations where I would want more than 10 hours between charges.

Third, there’s the fact that it really isn’t as quickly responsive as the iPhone. I’m sure loading times for games and so on will be faster- that dual core processor and extra RAM must show up somewhere- but the basic touch sensitivity is just a teeny bit less. Not necessarily very irritating, but certainly noticeable, even when you’re not looking for it.

Fourth, there’s the screen resolution, which is quite a bit less. This is as advertised, but that doesn’t help the fact that if you’re going to be reading something on it, you’d have to scroll much longer on the galaxy s2 than on the iPhone 4, even with the bigger screen. The iPhone does look positively puny if you set them next to each other, though.

Now, all of these are minor points, and it’s entirely possible that I’m overweighing the small inconveniences and underweighing the substantially greater power of the Galaxy S2, and that awesomely large 4.3″ screen. A lot of these bugs like the colour enhancement are meant to be features, or are inevitable side effects of features, and they probably are features for some people in some contexts. My initial plan was to get a decent Android phone for the present and see how the iPhone 5 will be when it comes out, which probably will not be very long. But at least for now, despite my initial bias, I think I’m going to stick with Apple.

Footnotes:

[1]Where do I start? The biggest issues:

1. Apple blatantly screws over people with older phones, as evidenced by the iOS 4.0 update rigmarole for the iPhone 3G. This update is by far my biggest reason for hating Apple.
2. You need to resort to some extremely inconvenient workarounds to do anything to this phone without using iTunes every step of the way. I don’t really hate iTunes, I just hate being forced to rely on it.
3. They… well, let’s just say they don’t have the cleanest corporate image.
4. I really, really don’t want to be yet another Apple fanboy. Oh, but look…

Image by UggBoy♥UggGirl

I’ll just make it here, for the record: no matter what happens in the Greece/EU situation- whether the ECB keep feeding them short-term, expensive money, whether the Germans suddenly decide that the Greeks are just dandy folks and give them all the money they need at the low interest rates they need, whether the Greeks decide that they shouldn’t cheat on their taxes and they should totally work really hard and cut their public sector in half and sell off government assets and pay back all the money they owe as soon as possible, whether they default without pulling out of the Euro, whether they pull out and do some sort of restructuring or soft default, whether they pull out and cut themselves off from the world- no matter which of various unlikely, utopian or too-horrible-to-comprehend scenarios take place, there are going to be tremendous opportunities for arbitrage somewhere in the system.

Yes, some of these might only be feasible on a small scale, some only on a large scale, some if you know the right people in various Greek/EU organizations, many in ways that legitimate global financial entities cannot employ, but they’ll be there.

(Inspired in part by this.)