The latest brainchild from England's meddlesome Labour government is the "Single Equality Act" now being drafted. This is meant to combine several anti-discrimination provisions into one overarching law, forbidding every kind of discrimination in one swoop. Further, discrimination is to be prohibited not only in employment but in the "provision of goods and services". The story made the papers when Saga Cruises, open only to those over 50, was informed that it would have to abandon its business model:

Saga has been told that the law would require it to offer all cruises, resort and touring holidays and numerous financial products to everyone irrespective of age, unless ministers make some services exempt.
Saga has warned ministers that the company will go under unless it can restrict its services to the over50s. Company insiders said that ministers seemed not to have considered the effect of the law until it was pointed out to them.

But don't worry -- there will still be room for the right kind of discrimination:

The new Commission for Equalities and Human Rights chairman told MPs that his body should have sweeping powers to permit positive discrimination to prevent jobseekers from migrant communities being disadvantaged.

Freedom means nothing if it does not include the freedom not to do as other people might wish. Freedom means freedom to choose one's associates, and even sometimes to say mean things about people. This is what the nanny staters cannot stand: the idea that someone might use their freedom in a way different from their preferences. They will choose equality over freedom, every time.

Russell Arben Fox, in a call for "left conservatism", skillfully phrases its call for government assistance to the right people:

... the wealth that really matters is one that can be generated and held by the productive arts of a community of working people.

Those communities are mostly gone now. If the ideals behind them are to be realized again, it certain won't be the government or a new progressive program which will recreate them--that will happen family by family, community by community, away from the rush to modern media and markets. But families and communities are no longer, if they ever were in our theoretically classless and mobile society, locked in one place, able to allow their dynamism who work them deeper into the land they occupy. To provide some security for those few who do try to lock themselves down for the sake of the future and more permanent things, some assistance will be needed.

The ends thus defined will serve to define "populism" for our purposes.

Note that this populism is explicitly aligned against "creative destruction", which it portrays as the conversion of man to mere homo economicus:

"Oh, the places you'll go," crooned Dr. Seuss, and Americans went and went and went until we became a rootless itinerant people – which, it turns out, is exactly the kind of workers required by an economy built on creative destruction. Nanny-state leftists and corporate-state rightists have long been in bed together promoting the wage-entitlement economy with its instantly mobile and fetter-free worker and 100 percent out-of-the-home servitude.
There is a tremendous cost to the health of the republic, to the common good, that comes with the creative yet destructive power of unlimited economic and political progressivism.

The idea of community-centered life is certainly appealing, and the case that we should attempt to make such a life possible for those who choose it seems compelling. This is the stated aim of modern populism: not enforced agrarian living for all, but a palatable option for those who choose to exit the rat race.

But there is one salient feature about converting people to mobile, insecure economic engines: it works. And governments at all levels now depend on that new plateau of productivity to pay for an increasingly comprehensive buffet of services. The more Messrs. Fox and Stegall and their cohorts manage to extract government financial assistance for those who live differently, the more that same government must demand maximum productivity from all its citizens. This is the paradox which populist leaders have not faced: that their prescriptions, which entail increased governmental outlays, will be self-defeating unless the growth of government dependency is reversed.

It is worth mentioning that this same argument is sufficient to justify the "fusionism" between social conservatives and small-government libertarians -- big government is intrinsically inimical to any way of living that is not maximally productive in measured GDP terms.

President Gerald Ford said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." This is in fact understated: a government big enough to support your preferred lifestyle is big enough to prefer that you live so as to support it in style.

[HT: Ross Douthat]

Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper's blog asks the question on whether people can change from gay to straight.

Prompted of course by the news on a former Evangelical Minister who had some problems in this regard, but says he is now straight and that his homosexual trysts were a form of "acting out" due to other problems in his life.

This reminded me of a sports star a couple years back who came out; at the time, I figured the media would give the comment a pass, even though it didn't match the usual gay-rights group insistence that your sexual preference is something you're born with. See, when Sheryl Swoops came out, she said point-blank that she was not born gay.

It's an interesting question. I don't have an answer. Some might say that those who claim to have "changed" were merely bisexual all along; others insist that everyone is inherently bisexual to some degree; some say that sexual preference is something caused by DNA, some by developmental issues of the brain (though some of those are dictated by DNA), some insist it's a choice people just make at some point in their lives and that it can be changed.

Thoughts?

I sort-of watched the Super Bowl this year... which is to say, I sort of flipped to check the score every so often while playing Oblivion.

The reasoning was simple: I didn't expect much of a game, expected even less of the commercials (which is bad considering that the commercials were why a lot of people watched a few years back). I was pointedly avoiding all the newscasters who would be doing nothing but wondering which of the two coaches they got to ask "How's it feel to be the first black coach to (win / lose) the Super Bowl?"

I left it on long enough to see Chicago completely fall apart by getting intercepted on and seeing the ball run back for a touchdown. At which point I realized that even if they asked that question, it didn't matter, because the coaching wasn't what won this game for the Colts or lost it for the Bears; the fact that the Bears were playing like the Keystone Kops is what lost it for them and won it for the Colts.

However, what really got me about it is that the NFL were apparently going around trying to destroy anyone holding a public party.

See, as it turns out, part of our asinine copyright laws gives the NFL the right to set "rules" on public display of the game. Municipalities and Sports Bars are free to play it on whatever size screen they want, charge admission or a cover charge, sell drinks/food/booze, etc.

Churches, for whatever reason, the NFL doesn't want showing the game. Apparently football, even for kids as young as 6, must be watched either at home or in an establishment full of cigarette smoke, drunken people, and general bad manners.

Either that, or the NFL really needs to get a clue.

TP has written a very thought-provoking follow-up to a conversation that we had in the comments section of my abortion post:

To return to Alex's example, the fact that Joe and Jack have different moral compasses should be entirely uncontroversial given their differences on the nature and source of their own moral beliefs. Joe probably understands full well that Jack does not share his ethical beliefs. Given that, why does it follow that it is 'reversely hypocritical' for Joe to conclude that he must act in a certain way, but that Jack is not bound to act in that way? Why can Joe not say, with no 'reverse hypocrisy,' that only those who already agree with his moral beliefs must act according to their dictates? Why can he not acknowledge that those who reject his beliefs, like Jack, are under no obligation to act according to them?

Here's what I wrote about Joe and Jack:

It also ties in to what I call reverse hypocrisy: the belief that something is wrong for me to do, but not necessarily wrong for others. If it's wrong for you, then unless there is a distinct difference in situation, it's wrong for someone else to. If Joe is a recovering alcoholic, then it's right for Joe not to drink but say that it's okay for Jack to drink. On the other hand, if Joe doesn't drink for moral reasons (say he's a Mormon or Pentacostal), but then says that it's morally okay for Jack to drink because he's an atheist, then Joe is being whatever the opposite of hypocrisy is.

The question, I guess, comes at the root of Joe's opposition to alcohol consumption. Joe's views are informed largely by religion: what he considered God's way. God (or God's representative) has said that alcohol (except the Blood of Christ, in some cases) is unholy and wrong. If God is God, then this applies to everybody.

Even outside of God, though, sincerely held morality ought to be applied to everyone. Hypocrisy isn't bad because the person is doing something "wrong" so much as it is bad because he's issuing a double standard. Well, "reverse hypocrisy" is a double-standard, too. It's applying a moral system based purely on someone's attitude or state of mind. Murder is still wrong, even when it's committed by someone without the mental competence to know what they are doing is wrong. We may be more forgiving of the culprit (as well we should be), but that doesn't change the rightness or wrongness of the action itself.

TP defines two different forms of relativism. The first (cultural relativism) is the observation that different cultures have different moral codes. Here is the second:

Ethical relativism is normative; it is the belief that determining right action ought to be relative to the subject, or the culture, or another referent, not simply that morality is culturally relative.

It seems to me that ethical relativism ought to be divided into subtypes. Holding different people to different standards because they're in different situations is one thing, doing so because they are different people is another.

The question of Joe and Jack may well come down to which category you put it in to. The First Joe was an alcoholic, therefore the situation is different than for First Jack, who isn't. Think of it this way: if First Jack were to tell First Joe not to drink, but Jack himself drank, would he be a hypocrite? I don't think he would because Jack is not a recovering alcoholic. So Joe holding himself to a different standard makes sense. Now, with Second Joe and Second Jack, it's a bit different. Joe may be religious and Jack not-religious, but that does not necessarily constitute a different situation in itself, though it does constitute different subjects.

I am a little more lenient, I think, to different situations than I am different subjects.

Subjects, to an extent, play a significant role in determining who they are and what they do. To an extent, what they do defines who they are. Therefore to argue that Second Jack is not under the same moral obligations as Second Joe simply because Second Jack chooses not to embrace a particular moral code is to argue, to an extent, that none of us are obligated to follow any moral code. At the base of it, it encourages immorality (however morality is defined).

Situations are more often the product of our actions than we consider them to be, but often they are not. Or, at the very least, we often play a much less conscious role in putting ourselves in situations where otherwise immoral acts may be committed out of desperation or as the least bad of a swatch of bad outcomes. If Jim take a particular narcotic to deal with an illness, but refuses to take it when he is not ill because he doesn't believe he should, he is not necessarily being morally inconsistent and may be doing the right thing in both circumstances. If at two different times under a similar set of circumstances (he's not ill) he takes the narcotic, then he is being morally inconsistent. Therefore if you have two people under a similar set of circumstances (they're not ill) and one person is doing what the other believes is wrong, then either the taker or the non-taker is wrong. It's either okay to cloud your mind with narcotics to "smooth the edges" after work (for instance) or its not.

Now all of this deals with morality. There are other reasons that what is okay for Joe is not okay for Jack. For instance, if Joe doesn't drink because his religious wife would disapprove, then there's no inconsistency with him telling Jack that it's okay to drink. It's not a matter of morality with Joe as much as it is practicality. What works for one person may not work for another. If Aaron is a stoic and Alan theatric, it's not necessarily wrong for Aaron to tell Alan that though he believes it bad to lose his temper, it's different for Alan because it provides him a pressure-release while all it does for Aaron is get him more wound up. But this is more means than ends.

On a side note, a lot of what I have said may sound pretty self-righteous. Who am I to say what is right and what is wrong, after all. Well, if there is one thing I've learned this past couple of years it's moral humility. Because I view morals in a more wholistic manner than relativistic, I am increasingly non-prone to sweeping moral judgments. Knowing that something applies not only to me but those I love as well has given me a new appreciation for situational differences and the fact that even when I believe something, I could be wrong. On the other hand, I tend to move forward with what beliefs I have (even if I am unsure) because I believe that one must at least have an operational moral code in order to function above the least common denominator.

In that sense, actually, I am frequently a reverse hypocrite. I cut others slack that I don't cut myself because I am not sure enough to hold them to my standards, though the surity threshold for me is not quite so high. I still see things in a more black-and-white manner than most, and I'm probably more judgmental of others than most, but probably not quite as much as I often sound.

Arnold Kling tries to explain why economic motivations are worthy because they compare so favorably to status motivations:

I suspect that the most likely alternative to economic motivation is a worse motive: status-seeking. I believe that is more important to curb our lust for status than our lust for goods and services.

The drive for economic gain helps the individual, and, as Adam Smith famously showed, helps others. Trade and economic growth are positive-sum games, in which there can be winners without losers. Moreover, when people seek economic gains, this is usually transparent. You usually understand when you and others you transact with are trying to improve your economic well-being.

Status, on the other hand, is typically a zero-sum game, in which one person's gain comes at the expense of others. Adding to the evils of status-seeking is that people often deceive themselves and others into believing that they are doing something for a higher motive when in fact they are seeking status.

It's an interesting idea, but I believe he understates the large overlap between the two. Though he acknowledges that some people use their money for status, I would say instead that once you move beyond a certain point economically, money is viewed primarily as an engine to achieve status. Kling rejects Maslow's hierarchy of needs in favor of four co-equal drives:

1. economic, the self-interested calculator
2. empathic, desiring close personal relationships based on understanding and empathy
3. "higher calling," trying to live a meaningful life
4. status-seeking, focused on membership and role within a well-defined group

This is where I'm really on a different page. I view economics (and, to a lesser extent, empathy and calling) as a means to the ends of status. After basic needs are met (and my hierarchial view I guess puts me more with Maslow than Kling) more money goes towards status than anything else. The search for status may be nicer clothes of a squeaky-clean Hummer, or even the latest and greatest stereo setup. Some people need Hummers and nice clothes and get a lot of mileage out of technology (so says the computer guy), but a lot of people seem to buy these things in autopilot.

Kling, to his credit, acknowledges this, but he seems to associate such spending as "higher calling" rather than economy-driven:

Sometimes, people will do good deeds as a way of enhancing their status. However, in my view, that phenomenon is overshadowed by the harmful behavior that status-seeking induces. Examples include avoiding learning for fear of "acting white," joining cults and violent gangs, wasting money on status symbols (again, the Bar Mitzvah comes to mind, with the lavishness of the celebrations ratcheting up each decade), and seeking political power over others.

This is not incidental, in my view, towards an economic thinking of the world. Economically, where should excess money go? In self-interest, they should go in favor of what makes the person the happiest. The problem is that almost universally, comparing favorably to peers brings happiness. Temporary, fleeting, zero-sum happiness, but happiness nonetheless. The distinction between status and economics completely breaks down when they start feeding off one another.

And this stuff does matter. Perception is important. If I go out and buy a suit for a job interview, that may be in my best interest, but it's also a status thing because I'm doing so in order not to compare unfavorably to the next interviewee. Buying a house in a posh neighborhood and even getting my kid in to a good school may be status-oriented, but they also increase the chance of success, which will then allow them to play the status game. It's not so easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.

We don't live in a void where we make these decisions independent of everyone else, as Kling would like us to, precisely because economics and status feed off one another so ferociously.

Even Kling himself gets the distinction confused:

The November 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly has several articles that show the status-seeking side of academia at work. An article by Matthew Quirk is particularly eye-opening.

"enrollment managers direct financial aid to students who will increase a school's revenues and rankings. They have a host of ugly tactics to deter low-income students and to extract as much money as possible from each entering class."

If government gave its financial aid directly to poor students, in the form of vouchers, then those students would have leverage with respect to colleges and universities. Instead, it is the other way around.

Another way that academic status-seeking behavior harms low-income students is the denial of accreditation. Colleges and universities use their ability to deny credit for work at other institutions in order to stifle competition and to maintain their own status. Instead of testing a student to see whether a subject has been learned satisfactorily, institutions simply refuse to accept credits from "inferior" sources of education. This status-oriented approach to accreditation pits traditional colleges and universities against the newer "for-profit" model of education, as described in a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on September 30.

How exactly is it that universities trying to attract the wealthiest students and deter the low-income students not a self-interested, economic one? And further, I would argue that the accreditation denial is at least partially economic as well because it means the students will have to spend more money to take more classes. The actions are dishonorable either way, and I agree with Kling on vouchers as a whole, but it undermines his larger argument, in my view, in demonstrating why moral direction is important and how economics and status-seeking work against everybody.

Things that do not - in and of themselves - constitute having a personality, an incomplete list:

• Wearing all black.
• An unrelenting grumble-and-mutter.
• A "philosophy" of cynicism
• Thinking that conservatives/liberals are soulless, evil entities of which one must spend their life opposing without, you know, actually doing anything to change things.
• Knowing extraordinary amounts of minutae regarding esoteric subjects of minimal use in day-to-day operations.
• Being really, really skilled with computers.
• Knowing six stock philosophical points gleamed from pop culture (Star Wars, Fight Club, Matrix, etc.).
• Believing that information, entertainment, and everything else ought to be free - and believing this to be a profound, revolutionary concept.
• Liking to party a lot.
• Being stuck in the 60's, 70's, or 80's and viewing things from those periods as the pinnacle of... something. Whatever. The decade is over, dude.
• Understanding what irony is and failing to acknowledge that irony may have its limits.
• Loving Jesus totally and making a spectator sport out of your love for Him.
• Apathy as a philosophy.

I suppose it's been too long since I had a tire burst on the road. I equally suppose that taking into account that 80% of my driving is done on an unpopulated freeway, it would happen in BFE.

One of the things that I did not realize is how difficult it is to drive slowly on an open freeway. Donuts are not supposed to go above a certain speed (40mph, from what I understand) and I tried to honor that. But my cruise control wasn't working and it was quite tough. Without constant dilligence, I found myself creeping up to 70. Way too fast, though naturally too slow for my fellow driver. My usual speed, and the flow of traffic, is about 80mph.

When I got off the freeway I drove down a self-declared highway with speed limits ranging from 25-55mph. I consistently found myself creeping up to about ten below my usual level (except at 25mph, where I went 25mph).

I hadn't realized, I guess, how hardwired I was to go a certain speed in certain areas. I have no difficulty going 55mph on the self-declared highway, but going even 60 on the freeway was almost painful.

I learned to drive on a 55mph cap on Interstates. The federal law was repealed my first year behind the wheel. I remember what a glorious feeling that was. Once it sank in, which wasn't immediate.

I was driving Anna down to Galveston one evening when a Galveston County Sheriff's vehicle, which had been waiting on the shoulder, demonstrated the accelerating power of a Camaro and pulled up behind me. Even before he flipped on his lights I looked down and realized that I was going 70. I was about to get my first speeding ticket. As any guilty-as-sin driver does, I slowed down to the speed limit, thinking that he might not have looked at his own spedometer.

The cop lights went on and I slowed down even further to gravitate towards the right. I got to about 40 and he started flashing me and honking his horn. When I finally made my way over, he darted into the distance at 90mph to catch, I would guess, the car in front of me. About that time I saw a speed limit sign tell me that I had never actually been speeding at all.

Felt like I was. Going 70mph was adventerous in those days because I was not used to legally being able to go it (US highways allowed it, but around Houston there are few opportunities for it to get that high). When the speed limit was lowered to 55mph for Harris and the eight surrounding counties, it sucked doubly. Not just because it took so much longer to get there, but because 55 was slower than it had been before.

On my way to Idaho, the first taste of freedom was Colorado, which has an 80mph cap. I, naturally, went 90. What a thrill! When I got to 75mph Wyoming, it was a bit of a let down.

Of course, if the speed limits around here were 90mph, it would take 100 to feel adventurous. If they were 30, then 40 wouldn't be so bad.

But 25 miles an hour is bad regardless of the norm, and the guardians of language transperency ought to prohibit anything so limited from calling itself a "Freeway.""Highway." [corrected]

Why Marx is man of the moment - He had globalisation sussed 150 years ago

Even the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, eager cheerleaders for turbo-capitalism, acknowledge the debt. 'As a prophet of socialism Marx may be kaput,' they wrote in A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation (2000), 'but as a prophet of the "universal interdependence of nations" as he called globalisation, he can still seem startlingly relevant.' Their greatest fear was that 'the more successful globalisation becomes the more it seems to whip up its own backlash' - or, as Marx himself said, that modern industry produces its own gravediggers.

The bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. 'Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones,' he wrote in The Communist Manifesto.

There is something uniquely irritating about this article. When I was in high school and stepping knee-deep is the aspirational counterculture, I had the idea that most embattled young men and ladies have that maybe there was something wrong with this system (democracy & markets) that had produced a society that wasn't to keen on me and that, by extention, perhaps its cheif adversary and the opposing system (Communism) might be right. There were certainly enough Soviet-Union-wasn't-really-Communism arguments floating around for the reds to save face and get young people like me to think that maybe - maybe - they had a point.

But I never truly bought in to it and mostly it was just the desire to agitate. The desire to feel a bit different and to have views that separated me from others. But while I rejected Communism the system, I did hold on to the notion that the Soviet Union wasn't Communism and that, in theory, it could work, and besides it's not like our system was perfect and one imperfect system is truly equal to every other imperfect system. Then I got to college and met some Communists and determined that people in that mind set would inevitably screw things up. And, along the way, I grew out of the adolescent state of rebellion that seemed to fuel so many of the true-believing Communists.

The February following 9/11 I got into a conversation with an Austin artist. The subject of bin Laden came up and he suggested that bin Laden wasn't out to get America but rather the imperial America and its capitalist system. Though he looked both ways before saying it, I could tell that he someone prided himself on his courage to speak up. Almost as if the courage to say something unpopular alone made his view both more courageous and more correct. Having only been a few months removed from college, I found such ideas considerably less groundbreaking. I even found his giddiness more off-putting than the idea that inspired it.

But what I find irritating is the cocky tone and "I'm-so-naughty" tone of those saying that Marx has been vindicated. That Marx may have been right about globalization is collossally beside the point. As a system, Communism (and I'm talking about capital-C Communism, not socialism) has been a miserable failure both economically and humanitarily in every place that it has been tried. The system either causes or so fails to safeguard against brute totalitarianism that the two are unavoidably intertwined. Even if Marx's prediction of globalism didn't remind me of reading Nostradamus's tea-leaves, who cares if he was right about a particular aspect of the market? I personally think that Marx's insights in the alienation of man from his labor were enlightening, but the sheer magnitude of what was mistaken surely outstrips what was gotten right.

It's akin to arguing that the Confederacy had a point about interstate law enforcement. Even if true, utterly irrelevent. What philosophical differences the Confederacy had with Washington were primarily dealing with a highly immoral institution. But God knows there are enough that will make the same "naughty" arguments in favor of the Confederacy that others make for Communism.

[via Orrin Judd]

According to the New York Daily News they are. And with anecdotal, everyday examples like Courtney Cox and Christina Aguilara, how can it ever be wrong? Not sure how nerdy David Arquette is, though. It depends on where you draw the line between nerd and clown, which can indeed be a thin one. A recent humorous post on Craigslist made a similar point. A long time and a blog ago, I pointed to a now abandoned post that made a good argument that geek is chic. His basic point was that last generations' geeks have spawned a legion of daughters that are either used to geekery or appreciate it in the sense that girls want to marry someone like their father. But a dark side to geekery still exists in the professional world, as I pointed out a while back. As they (we?) are not unfairly characterized as being unsocial or antisocial, they shouldn't be exalted. As does an inequity: in the Geek2Geek dating service mentioned in the NYDN article, Houston has 7 males 22-30 and no females. Los Angeles has 40 males and 4 females. That's even worse than anime conventions. A whole lot of thoughts percolating underneath this for a post at some point in the future.