To Procreate or Not to Procreate? It's Not Even a Question

When I first set out to write this essay, I intended to give ethical arguments for and against having and raising one's own biological children, which, we've been told, is an act and process that is an integral part of this crazy thing we call life. Notwithstanding, if we view having our own children from a purely ethical perspective, the answer is simple—there are no good reasons.

Before anyone begins throwing a fit about me making some sort of claim that no one should have children, I'm certainly not. You are someone's child, and, more than likely, I'm sure you'll say now that you don't necessarily regret being born. If you have any children currently, I'm sure they're great, and I'm sure they're cute. They'll be a great boon to society one day. But if you don't have any children, and you're thinking about it, think hard. Think about the fact that:

The world population is growing at a rate that the planet cannot support.

All of us already know that the world population growth is, simply put, unsustainable at its current rate.

By some accounts, world population could reach 10 billion in the year 2050, while the Earth's carrying capacity is said to be between 4 billion and 11 billion. According to some experts, we may have already transcended the Earth's carrying capacity. Considering that developed countries, especially America, produce some of the greatest amounts of waste per person in the world, deciding not to have children will do more to reduce your carbon footprint than any of the small steps you may currently take, like walking to work.

The "but my future child will be happy" argument doesn't hold water.

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: How Statistics Frame Presidential Campaigns

The bidding process for the 2012 US Presidency has gone on for at least ten years.

At least that's how it seems to many people fatigued by incessant news coverage of the topic. In reality the race has extended well over a year, with the vast majority of media attention going to the contenders for the Republican Presidential nominee. In the time various candidates have vied for the (still ongoing) Republican nomination, they’ve utilized a wide suite of statistics and figures on domestic policy issues to either bolster their own argument or decry their opponents. Most of these figures pertain to joblessness rates, economic growth, consumer buying trends, and so on, as the US economy has become more or less the central issue of this election cycle.

What’s interesting is that multiple candidates cite the same statistics, and each one seems to find a way to frame that statistic to his benefit. The relativity with which these candidates approach the same statistic is remarkable in this election cycle, and it warrants a closer look.

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Some Underwhelming Reflections on “3/11″

Sunday was the one-year anniversary of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people, and I feel I kind of owe it to myself and others to share my thoughts. I haven’t really gleaned any kind of wisdom in the one year since Japan’s disaster – it could be I’m still a little bit shocked, or still picking up the pieces of my life, or just doing what I have to do – so there hasn’t been any sort of a-ha! moment. I imagine that from the standpoint of the impartial reader, what follows will seem trite and hackneyed. But here it is anyways:

The big one-year anniversary had actually slipped my mind up until Sunday, and I was folding napkins during some downtime at my brunch shift when suddenly I realized what day it was and felt a sudden urge to go home and be with my family. In retrospect, it was probably good that I was engaged in such a mindless task as folding napkins, because there was nothing to be distracted from and no one to talk to.

I decided to let my mind wander freely, since menial tasks often encourage such, and one of the first places my mind went was towards the topic of God. I realized that in any just universe I would be obligated to hate a God that would allow such a thing as the tsunami to happen, if an omnipotent God were not such an absurd proposition to begin with. As embarrassing it is to admit this, I actually became very angry with the idea of God and religion and people continuing to believe and worship indifferently, as I continued folding napkins.  It was a pure, visceral hatred that burned through me, which I do not regret, even if I feel it is not representative of my overall religious views.

I thought of all the children I knew in Soma, where I had worked for a year and a half of my life, and wondered if they were okay, and how I might find such a thing out. I thought of our good friend, Kentaro, who disappeared without a trace last March and no one has seen since. To our knowledge, he was nowhere near the water when everything happened, so why would he be missing? Maybe we’re just out of the loop now. Or maybe he is. Or maybe he’s just depressed and doesn’t want to talk to anyone and has been keeping a low profile for the last year.

I thought of my wife’s next-door neighbor whose family had lived next door for generations and generations; this was an elderly man whom I’d heard lots of funny stories about. Right after the quake, his wife made rice balls for our family using a gas stove, and she brought them over for us to have for dinner in the dark and cold. Her husband was a roofer by trade and semi-retired. A few months ago he was repairing a roof that had been damaged by the earthquake, fell off, and died. At the time I heard it, this was one of the saddest stories I had ever heard.

I let my mind wander to the idea of land in Japan and in the old world being an extension of self, like a limb. Generations and generations had lived and died on the same land, flattening the valleys with their industry. My wife’s parent’s land had once been a great farm, but, with the Twentieth-Century economy and the jobs it brought, there was no one willing to tend to all that land, and my wife’s grandparents and parents gradually subdivided, rented, sold, or dismantled much of it for various purposes: parking lots, subsistence or hobby farms, roads, advertisements, etc. Now that land is poisoned, whether actually or effectively, a great tragedy indeed. But someday it will be alright again, and, if you’re someone with a sixth-generation ethic like many of the Japanese living around Fukushima Daiichi, then this someday is soon enough.

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Featured Find: Madness: The Afghan Massacre is History’s Dial Tone

Gawker's "Mobutu Sese Seko" has a piece up about how the massacre in Afghanistan should not be seen as an anomaly but as par for the course. (I have argued similarly in my posts on the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and in one of my Hobbes posts at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.) To wit:

Racism, at least, would have been a kind of excuse, evidence of a critically planned process. It's almost comforting: Even the most saintly among us has harbored or inspired some racial resentment. Racism is a universal form of bullshit—a lower-social-order attitude, but at least an indicator of some ordered thinking.

Instead, the shooter, allegedly an 11-year veteran, with three tours in Iraq, was probably crazy. Which basically means we're fucked.

Through the power of euphemism, we've come to think of madness as some regrettable and essentially random byproduct of combat instead of an intrinsic part of it. InWartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, Marine veteran Paul Fussell documents how we've officially added syllables to this condition to transform it almost into a logistical inconvenience.

In the First World War, it was "shell shock." In the Second, "Combat Fatigue" or "Battle Fatigue." We jumped from two self-evident syllables to four sublime inanities that make it sound as if soldiers only want for more naptime. And, of course, in the present day, we obfuscate via the king-hell syllabic nightmare of "post-traumatic stress disorder." It not only relies on the anodyne stress ("I have a party to plan and am running late! I am so stressed! I'm a Cathy cartoon! Ack, ack, ack!") but the post-trauma modifier, which makes it seem as if the horror has passed and needs only to be endured in a series of diminishing aftershocks.

History maintains a stronger grasp on the matter. Both the Bible and Herodotus chronicle bloodlust and mass rape in wartime. Old Norse sagas speak both of fey warriors already seemingly ethereal and dead, as well as berserkers so consumed by bloodshed that they lose awareness of the world around them in their mad violence. In With the Old Breed, Marine Eugene B. Sledge not only describes his formerly perfectly normal comrades cutting gold teeth out of the mouths of still-living enemies but also watches as someone urinates into the mouth of a dead Japanese soldier.

If that sounds familiar, it's because a similar story emerged a few weeks ago, about four Marineswho urinated on three Taliban corpses while laughing and telling jokes. And the latter, dehumanizing comedy, echoes Philip Caputo's memoir A Rumor of War, in which his men joke, "Oh, excuse me, Mister Charlie," after kicking the corpse of a teen whom they knew was not Viet Cong but shot anyway, for swiping a tree branch at them and running away.

As Fussell notes, conduct similar to the above deserves words more honest than euphemism—words like insane. This is what killing and the fear of being killed fosters. Wanting to preserve the dignity of soldiers (or "heroes," if you will) does them no favor if it requires dishonesty about their condition, especially if such dishonesty allows it to metastasize into the methodical slaughter of women and children.

Even without the alleged shooter's three tours in Iraq (which, conservatively, would amount to more combat time than American soldiers saw in Europe in the Second World War) and a possible nervous breakdown, it's easy to see how service in Afghanistan could drive anyone mad. Outside of the Forward Operating Base, it's difficult to distinguish friends from enemies. The people of Afghanistan increasingly loathe our ability to piss on bodies, burn Qurans and rain bombs on weddings from a great height. The line between resentment and violent malice is a fine one for soldiers to read when they have no objective for striking back, no uniformed enemy, no certain position to attack, clear and defend.

What Gives

I have a long post up at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen about the changes in my search for work since August and the implications of this. Here is an excerpt:

I hesistate to say I am on the edge of a new transformation now, in February 2012, but it just feels that way, even though rationality points to my situation continuing like this for the foreseeable future. Some of the optimism I lost over the summer has come back: my translation workload is increasing, I'm doing well at what I can do well at, and tonight, right before my grateful eyes, my wife and children sleep peacefully. Psychology is important in these things, and my psychological state has moved from a need for present security to a need for future security. Time stands still now; every week is the same. My children become more-and-more enraptured with American culture and more-and-more obsessed with our ubiquitous and inescapable kid's entertainment culture. There is no backyard for them to play in here, but there are Backyardigans. My older daughter speaks no more Japanese in the house. My stepson wants an earring. I grow fatter by the week. During the summer, when I was unemployed, I managed to find outlets for limited exercise. Since August, I've gained fifteen to twenty pounds - despite my best efforts to eat healthy, I have no time for exercise. I seem powerless to stop the creep of apple fat around my midsection that reduces my life expectancy by the minute, but my weight gain still remains pretty far down my list of problems to solve. Exercise is just one of those luxuries that gives way when the threat of an endless and inescapable cycle of late fees and penalties dangles like a tantalizing, decadent bizarro carrot in front of me. One of the few medium-term "dreams" I have is to be able to afford a kayak, so I can paddle around the Boston Harbor Islands each morning.

Please make your way over to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to read and comment. 

Your Final Chance to Understand These Men (and me)

I was late tuning into the debate tonight because (a) I was busy reading Clifford and the Grouchy Neighbors to my kid for his pretend-to-go-to-bedtime story, and (b) I forgot all about it. I’ve got a lot on my plate these days, and unless one of these presidential hopefuls stands up and says he’s ready to sign seal and deliver my wife’s green card before the weekend they have nothing I care to hear.

The digital clock on my laptop from Japan read 10:20, which meant it was 8:20 here when CNN’s live feed finally came stuttering onto my screen. Romney was talking – no surprise - and in the first 45 seconds covered balancing the budget, cutting taxes, English immersion schools, life begins at conception, an embryo farming veto, balancing the Salt Lake City Olympic budget and, as a successful businessman, understanding the crucial importance of fiscal conservatism. Nothing, nada, zilch about speeding up the green card process for pregnant wives of US citizens. Strike One Mitt. You are out of touch with my needs.

Moderator John King, who I mistook at first for Anderson Cooper after an extended Valentine’s Day chocolate binge, asked Newt Gingrich a question with more modified phrases than Arizona’s border has snipers. Newt looked as bored as I feel when Sam Harris is trying to make another one of his non-points, but he took advantage of the probability that no one else in America knew what the question was either and proceeded with what would become the theme for the night: support what the last guy said, but then add a caveat of booger-flicking.

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Going For Brokered

JournalistBack on January 15^th I groaned in vague disappointment at the news that Jon Huntsman was leaving the race for the GOP presidential nomination. I say disappointment because after extensive research consisting of skimming a BBC News summary of the then-remaining hopefuls and my own analysis of the New Hampshire debate a week earlier, I had come to the conclusion that the former US Ambassador to China was by far our best hope for a sane and at least moderately-reliable President.

I say vague because something told me he would be back.

Well now, today, that very possibility seems to be materializing.

Mr. Huntsman is not actually mentioned in this article by Steve Holland, Journalist, but the mere specter of a brokered convention this August gives me hope that the door is still open for him to step up and lead our great country. (I understand that history does not paint a rosy picture for me here but I’m not one to base my political insights on things like reason and considered thought.)

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Convenience, Coffee & How We Use Our Time

My New Year’s Resolution – the one about time-management – is slowly taking hold. (Thank you, I know, it’s a tough one.) After washing today’s lunch dishes in record time (only one thing broken) I jumped onto the pc, leaving the wife to play zookeeper with the boys since that is her job. Then I started plowing through a dozen critical, mindless tasks: checking my e-mail for that inevitable offer of employment (if they want me bad enough then yes, they will contact me on a Saturday); promoting the Staten Island Film Festival on facebook (if Broccoli can get 16,000 fans, this shouldn’t be that hard); and shamelessly throwing my work at the latest ‘Look at what a great writer I am!’ website, among other things.

My powers of concentration, or maybe denial, are strong enough to get all this done even as the boys are shoving plastic train tracks in each others’ ear canals. When the bigger one sticks his thumbs in his little brother’s eye sockets, however, it’s time for me to take a break from my assault on the world and give my wife a break from the world’s assault on her.

She came back an hour later, the blood vessels in her forehead having receded. I told her to relax for a while longer, setting the stage for my permissioned escape to Dunkin Donuts.

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Featured Find: Lake Vostok!

Russian scientists have acheived what's being called the moon landing of our generation:

MOSCOW — In the coldest spot on the earth’s coldest continent, Russian scientists have reached a freshwater lake the size of Lake Ontario after spending a decade drilling through more than two miles of solid ice, the scientists said Wednesday.

A statement by the chief of the Vostok Research Station, A. M. Yelagin, released by the director of the Russian Antarctic Expedition, Valery Lukin, said the drill made contact with the lake water at a depth of 12,366 feet. As planned, lake water under pressure rushed up the bore hole 100 to 130 feet pushing drilling fluid up and away from the pristine water, Mr. Yelagin said, and forming a frozen plug that will prevent contamination. Next Antarctic season, the scientists will return to take samples of the water.

The first hint of contact with the lake was on Saturday, but it was not until Sunday that pressure sensors showed that the drill had fully entered the lake. Lake Vostok, named after the Russian research station above it, is the largest of more than 280 lakes under the miles-thick ice that covers most of the Antarctic continent, and the first one to have a drill bit break through to liquid water from the ice that has kept it sealed off from light and air for somewhere between 15 million and 34 million years.

Hobbes: The American West and 21st-Century America

"Thomas Hobbes" by Leon Douglas

<cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

In my last post on this topic, we got through Hobbes as relative and Hobbes as overstated. To continue our discussion:

Claim 3: There is a significant difference between political and personal liberty.

Lockeans love to claim themselves the true lovers of liberty, but their liberty is political by nature: the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to rebel against an unjust leader, etc. Hobbesians are most concerned with the first of Locke's three inalienable rights: the right to a peaceful existence, wherein personally-meaningful activities can be pursued. That is to say, peace and stability trump discussions of essentials. As long as I am effectively free, that is all that counts. Who cares about the structure of our legislative process or checks-and-balances or bipartisanship or whatever so long as I am able to pursue freely my chosen career of saxophonist?

That is not to say structural issues don't matter, but they should be seen as means to an end rather than as ends themselves.

Claim 4: The freest nations are the ones with the most effective court, police, and military systems.

By "most effective" I certainly do not mean most expensive; nor do I mean largest or most powerful. If one dedicated protector of peace is enough to prevent Precinct 13 from being overtaken by those who threaten the social contract, then that dedicated protector is more than enough.

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Hobbes: Authority

legitimate rule

<Cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.>

Since Rufus and Jason have covered Hobbes in such excellent detail thus far, my contribution to this discussion will be more about tying up loose ends.

As a student, I read Hobbes four different times in four different contexts for four different unrelated courses, and that's how I feel Hobbes is best approached: through a plurality of heterodox methodologies and interpretive structures. We'll attempt to do that below.

Claim 1: "Hobbesian" is a relative term.

A question at the center of any discussion on Hobbes is often: what does the eponym "Hobbesian" mean, essentially? Jason made reference to Wittgenstein in his most recent post on the topic. Rufus asked the question non-rhetorically. I'll expand on the discussion of semantics and claim that the best definitions of "Hobbesian" stand in contrast to other prevailing ideas of the period.

Hobbes is usually studied in relation to the positions of Locke and Rousseau. Regarding Hobbes and Locke, Hobbes felt that universal surrender to an absolute sovereign is the only way to secure civil society, while Locke's political thought went on to serve as a primary influence for the American democracy. In contrast to Rousseau's optimism about human nature - that men are inherently good - Hobbes argued that men are inherently weak; in contrast to Rousseau's belief in the noble savage and the morally-cancerous influence of civil society, Hobbes believed that the state of nature was a state of perpetual suffering and that only the stability of civil society could foster human flourishing.

These two ideas: (1) the Hobbesian positive (commonly called pessimism about human nature); and (2) the Hobbesian normative (the necessity of a strong, central authority) comprise an internally-consistent school of thought that stands with Lockeanism and Rousseauvianism as one of the three pillars of social contract theory. The debates hashed out centuries ago between these three thinkers still rage strong today.

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In Case You Decided to Watch Football Instead

Two minutes ago I was staring at the all-important Lions-Saints matchup down on the Bayou, an evening of passive adrenalin infusion ahead of me when I remembered the other game being televised tonight. Thanks to someone in my neighborhood providing unsecured Wi-Fi I am now at the dining room table, ready to hunker down with the last six of our highly-funded and eminently-talented GOP nomination pool. It is 8:58pm; I’ve got an oversized cup o’ joe in my belly and my blood is suddenly supercharged thanks to the sparks flying at me from the socket where I was hastily plugging in the old Hewlett-Packard. Add to this my uncanny political judgment, unclouded by any trace of actual knowledge, and I am ready for two uninterrupted hours of Yahoo-powered policy and bickering.

All right so I just missed the opening question because I had to go let out my coffee. Mitt Romney is talking about…ah yes, it’s nice that our economy has been creating lots of new jobs but of course Obama is not to be credited. He hasn’t yada yada, his policies yada yada… Great start Mitt, you’re debating someone who is not even in the room.

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Regulations Kill Industries: Porn Edition

Did social conservatives think of this?

This week, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation launched a new war against porn’s potentially reckless ways, proposing a strict initiative that would require male porn stars to wear condoms during vaginal and anal intercourse.

Since California is one of two states in which porn is legal (the other is, only recently, New Hampshire), could this be the end of porn?

Immediately, the porn world was up in arms over the initiative. “Hey, dicks, it’s really quite simple,” says Jeremy. “We don’t mind wearing rubbers, but no matter how you slice it, the viewers don’t want to see them.”

“The fact that these workers’ health and safety has been neglected is a very dangerous situation,” AHF president Michael Weinstein tells The Daily Beast. “It’s a matter of fairness. Why is this the only industry not afforded protection when they go to work?”...

...But Cal/OSHA and the AIDS Health Foundation insist the initiative—a stricter version of the state law—will be easier to enforce on a smaller scale. They need 200,000 signatures by June 5 to add the measure to the November 2012 presidential ballot in L.A. County. Weinstein is confident they’ll amass the votes, since they easily collected 70,901 signatures for the citywide measure. The initiative argues that the adult entertainment industry should have to comply with the same laws as any other private employer in California. Just as construction workers are required to wear hard hats on site, porn stars should have to wear rubbers on set. Cal/OSHA even mandates that porn bosses provide employees exposed to blood-borne pathogens (seminal and vaginal fluids) with dental dams, gloves, and eye protection.

This all raises the question: If condoms are enough to drive viewers away, who’s going to pay money to watch people go at it while looking like CDC agents?

It's a brilliant plan, if it is a plan.

How Do You Translate 'Wa'?

I remember talking with Billy, a guy from Vancouver who married a Japanese girl and was living in Fukushima. His son was a few years older than mine, and had so far survived what concerned me now about my two-year-old speaking much more Japanese, at a higher level, than English. Yes, he was only two, but this was the kind of thing I’d rather tackle sooner than later.

‘Kids pick up on these things,’ he assured me. ‘The pronunciation, the details.’ But what he said next gave me pause. ‘They say a kid will keep developing that language base until he’s ten or twelve years old.’ Which made me wonder: first, what if all of a sudden I turn around and my son is a teenager and doesn’t have that solid English foundation? And second, are we still going to be living in Japan ten years down the road?

This was in October. In December I brought my family to the States for Christmas, and after four weeks my son returned to Japan speaking better English than Japanese. It didn’t take long for his Japanese to catch up again, and I redoubled my efforts to not only keep him speaking English but to constantly add new words and expressions to his repertoire. (After years of teaching English as a foreign language it is too easy to fall into the habit of slowing down, and dumbing down, one’s own speech.)

This Spring we spent three months in the US, and in September we moved here for good (for now). Naturally, ironically, my concerns have shifted from my son’s English capacity to his ability not just to hang on to his Japanese but to continue advancing it.

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O Seasteaders!

The tetrahedral floating city of Triton, designed by Buckminster Fuller for Tokyo BayAdmittedly, I subscribe to the Seasteading Institute newsletter. Patri Friedman is an interesting dude, to say the least, and I am a futurist. The Seasteading Institute has some of the brightest minds in the world behind its cause. Today's newsletter read thusly: 

Greetings Friends of The Seasteading Institute,

As protests spread across the USA, Congress approval ratings hit all-time lows, and the European Union contemplates dissolution, interest in seasteading is higher than ever. There's never been a greater need for an alternative to today's inadequate governments.

It's unfortunate that such gloomy news fuels our project, but the future is bright. The whole world will benefit when seasteading societies pioneer new forms of government, new policies, and new institutions. It is finally time for humanity to discover what government always should have been - innovative, effective, responsive, diverse, and benevolent.

With your support, The Seasteading Institute is enabling the next generation of government technology. We thank you, and thank the entrepreneurs, investors, volunteers and others who work on this cause all over the world.

Sincerely,

Michael Keenan

President of The Seasteading Institute

They've kind of got a point, don't they? Has government ever been less effective? And less reviled? And has an effective alternative ever been less quioxotic than it is now, in the age of information technologies and mass cooperation?