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Saturday
Sep042010

Everything on The Cove

AuthorChristopher Carr

Of all the work I've done for The Inductive, it seems the most popular has been my review of The Cove. As The Inductive pretends to be a conversational, critical, non-partisan online magazine, we would like to allow commentors to say whatever they desire in hopes that it will advance our public conversation.  Basically, this means we will never erase any comments (unless they're spam).  We do ask, however, that commenters remain civil, and try not to bring up debates that have been "resolved"; that is, we kindly request that commenters read everything we have on a particular topic before commenting. 

In the case of my review of the Academy Award winning documentary The Cove, however, I have to take responsibility for poor site layout as the direct cause of a general incoherence on the part of commenters leading to Joe and I repeatedly explaining the same point.  Since The Cove as a topic encompass Japan (Dispatches from the Wild Wild East), culture (the generally neglected Art of Leisure), and public policy (Specific Facts), posts on The Cove have appeared in three out of four sections of our online magazine, roughly based on whatever focus each specific post seemed to have at the time.  So here, to clarify everything, I'd like to present a discussion map of sorts:

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DateSaturday, September 4, 2010 at 3:26AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Friday
Sep032010

A Last Word on Liberaltarianism

AuthorChristopher Carr

The debate on "liberaltarianism" all over the Internets has made me realize what really is the main thing separating libertarians such as myself from Joe and his progressive liberal brethren.  A comment from Katherine at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen summarizes how most liberals feel about libertarians, a perception likely to proliferate as libertarianism faces increasingly intense scrutiny from the mainstream, liberal press and the liberal cheap seats crowd starts hurling D batteries in our direction:

I don’t think libertarians believe people exist to serve institutions (that’s more like something libertarians would accuse their opponents of believing). However, they do seem to believe that a certain way of doing things (minimal regulation, minimal government action, maximally free markets) is ideal regardless of whether it makes people better or worse off materially.

In short, liberals and left-wingers tend to see improving people’s lives as the goal and try to find policies that will achieve that, while libertarians have an ideological goal that, for them, takes precedence over whether people are actually better off.

NO!  For the last time NO!  My response to Katherine:

In my opinion, the reason why this portrayal doesn’t really hold up is that liberals never seem to perceive the full extent of the consequences of their direct, goal-oriented policy. A policy may succeed in lowering a particular measured unemployment rate from 10% to 9%, but what is not discussed is how that policy did so. It may be that in some cases, the sum total of energy redirected to a particular cause outweighs the merits of that particular cause. Unanticipated negative effects of policy are always a strong possibility. A liberalism unconstrained by the knowledge that error rates exist is dangerous.

I realized Joe and I have been going back and forth on this topic for as long as we've had the blog.

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DateFriday, September 3, 2010 at 6:48AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Thursday
Sep022010

Honest Water

AuthorChristopher Carr

Is there an optimal strategy for water consumption?  My family lives at the base of a volcano next to a river.  Upriver is a series of rice fields, a vinyard, a cherry farm, several peach farms, an apple farm, a Buddhist cave temple, and then nothing but nature all the way to Moniwa Dam. 

By the time it gets to our house, the river is brown and full of garbage: PET bottles, plastic bags, and empty washing machines.  My Father-in-law's eyes water when he tells me how he used to swim in that river, how it was clear and full of fish when he was growing up after the war.

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DateThursday, September 2, 2010 at 3:19AM | Comment1 Comment |
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Tuesday
Aug312010

A Response to Jane Mayer

AuthorChristopher Carr

typical libertariansI read all of Jane Mayer's New Yorker epic takedown of the American libertarian movement.  "Covert Operations: the Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama" is about the Brothers Koch a.k.a. "The Kochtopus", two - or four, depending on which brothers one considers part of the Koch inner-circle - shady oil billionaires behind the curtain of the libertarian movement from the Cato Institute to the Tea Party.  It's creepy to think there's one devious, eight-armed creature pulling all those levers of influence, like "The Company" from Prison Break.  But Mayer's propagandistic assessment is underhanded, full of political bias, and based on fallacious logic.  And before you suspect me also of being on the Koch's payroll (I live below the poverty line.), I go on the record as saying that I think we should use as little fossil fuels as possible, that big business is obstructionist and has unduly influenced policy-making in Washington, and that oil is the devil.

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DateTuesday, August 31, 2010 at 12:43AM | Comment3 Comments |
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Sunday
Aug292010

"The Million Moron March"

AuthorChristopher Carr

Image courtesy of Mario PiperniRiffing off John Batchelor's column ("The Festival of Fools") and John Avlon's column ("I Have a Nightmare"), both for the Daily Beast, I too came up with a pithy title for this post on the most recent Tea Party event (because that's really what Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" march on the Washington Mall is.  The demographic is exactly the same.)  I generally agree with Batchelor that this particular march is a non-issue:

The celebrity Glenn Beck has organized a festive and apparently harmless public event for the Washington Mall that he calls “Restoring Honor.” This theme is so deeply bland that it invites us partisans to look for inner meaning, such as the fact that August 28 is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s revolutionary March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or such as Beck’s Fox News Channel seeking a low-budget reality show to sell for the dog days of summer programming.

The trick here may be that Beck’s event, which will feature the celebrity Sarah Palin, is not about anything at all. It is a farce of an event in the way the bookish Karl Marx meant it, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

However, I disagree with Batchelor's contention that we should take Beck's idiocy at face value: and I have a few general qualifications for the "Tea Baggers are morons" crowd.

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DateSunday, August 29, 2010 at 4:03AM | Comment8 Comments |
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Thursday
Aug262010

We Are Not Seth Godin

AuthorChristopher Carr

Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise.Thanks to Andrew at 30 Words for the link to Twist Image's take on business writer Seth Godin's move to abandon his ties with traditional publishers.  The way the move was reported by the Wall Street Journal, one would think the singularity was now and cyborgs waited in the on-deck circle to tear us carbon-based lifeforms all to pieces.  (No, not really, but it's a pleasant fiction.)  Twist Image brings it all down to Earth with the headline, "You Are Not Seth Godin":

We tend to see this one act: "Seth leaves major book publishing behind." What we forget is the track record (twelve best-selling business books, as many speaking events per year as he would like to do, his own seminars, thousands of Blogs posts, free eBooks and more goodwill thank you can shake a stick at). This amounts to decades of doing tons of things (let's not forget about Squidoo) that all had him in direct connection with the people who will buy his books from him, talk about it to their peers and evangelize his always-brilliant thinking.

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DateThursday, August 26, 2010 at 2:48AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Wednesday
Aug252010

A Pincer Movement in Higher Education

AuthorJoseph Cox

If wishes were horses... - image by Fibonnacci BlueRecently, in short succession I came accross two exposes on higher education in the United States: "The Long-Haul Degree," Patricia Cohen's April article for the New York Times about the hopeless economics of humanities PhDs, and then "College Dropout Factories," by Ben Miller and Phuong Ly for the Washington Monthly on the colleges with the worst graduation rates in the country.  In both cases students suffer from an information disparity before they embark on their education.  For very different reasons, many PhD candidates and low-income, high risk undergraduates are worth more to their institutions than the educations they are receiving.  These PhDs, earned in subjects that only allow for jobs in academia, take an average of over 9 year to obtain, yet afterwards finding any gainful employment proves elusive.  Meanwhile, the worst colleges in the country graduate less than fifteen percent of the students who enroll and treat incoming students as disposable assets that are easily replaced by fresh meat.  It is quite a system that fails to serve both the best and the most common equally- not quite the sort of equality we should aspire to.

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DateWednesday, August 25, 2010 at 1:31PM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Wednesday
Aug252010

More on the Burlington Coat Factory Non-Mosque

AuthorChristopher Carr

I was pretty short on material for today, so I decided to see what the good folks over at National Review were up to, and saw that Charles Krauthammer himself had weighed in on the Burlington Coat Factory Islamic Culture Center controversy with a piece called "Moral Myopia at Ground Zero".  I was not particularly impressed by this one, and I have been impressed by Krauthammer before.  Basically, he lumps the standard liberal argument into an effigy of straw to be sacrificed to the god of conservative caricature. 

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DateWednesday, August 25, 2010 at 10:11AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Monday
Aug232010

A Modest Proposal for Marriage

AuthorChristopher Carr

This is based on a comment of mine at a comment of mine at LoOG:

I’m one of two 26-year olds I know who has any children. I have two beautiful little girls with the same woman, and we’re unmarried. The reason we’re unmarried is not because we’re uncommited to each other. It is simply because we find the very concept of marriage to be absurd as it relates to our unique situation as members of two diferent cultures.

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DateMonday, August 23, 2010 at 3:00AM | Comment1 Comment |
Monday
Aug232010

Minipost: North's Comment on LoOG

AuthorChristopher Carr

Commenter "North" on League of Ordinary Gentlemen thread about gay marriage succinctly summarizes the only sane position on the issue:

To quickly fill in a hole that Jason skipped Bob, the accepted “librul” position as I understand it on both interspecies marriage, furniture marriage and child marriage is that one of the two entities married in such unions is inherently unable to give informed consent. Thus any of those aforementioned unions would be inherently acts of either despicable violence or meaninglessness (in the case of inert objects) perpetuated on the non-consenting entity.

DateMonday, August 23, 2010 at 2:05AM | CommentPost a Comment |
Friday
Aug202010

Dennis Kucinich is a Maverick

AuthorChristopher Carr

As the bowtie attests to, Dennis Kucinich knows PR.Ron Paul is the most mavericky (read that story if you haven't yet.) in our static and worthless government, and Dennis Kucinich is the second most mavericky.  John McCain is not a maverick, and is probably nothing more than a soulless talking meat puppet.  Anyways, here is Kucinich's take on the Obama Administration's taking a page from the George W. Bush playbook:

Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said 'Mission Accomplished'. In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq, but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities. 

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DateFriday, August 20, 2010 at 5:22AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Thursday
Aug192010

Thowing Free Market Elbows

AuthorJoseph Cox

Free Parking as Always! - by netanIn a column in this week's New York Times, Tyler Cowen, perhaps the internet's most erudite libertarian, endorsed the "free parking isn't free" theory that has gained a lot of traction in liberal circles.  Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, lays out the case that minimum parking restrictions are actually a subsidy for drivers that makes biking and walking more difficult and thus: "Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist."  Cowen's solution is twofold, remove minimum parking requirements from zoning laws and, whenever appropriate, charge for parking.  Seems like a slam dunk for libertarians: remove market distorting government requirements and charge a free-market price for a service that has costly societal side-effects.  Naturally, Randall O'Toole at Cato Online immediately posted a rebuttal.  Why can't libertarians get behind a good idea that should have come from their neck of the policy woods?

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DateThursday, August 19, 2010 at 8:59AM | Comment2 Comments |
Thursday
Aug192010

More Mini-Postage

AuthorChristopher Carr

NRO says China should teach U.S. lessons about economic freedom, since apparently Chinese citizens enjoy more economic freedom than their counterparts in the U.S.  Joe tweeted:

"NRO says China could teach US lesson in economic freedom. I say: Stop smoking crack, wannabe edgy Obama critics!"

I agree and disagree with what Joe's saying here.  NRO should stop smoking crack, and they are wannabe edgy Obama critics, but as a an openly conservative magazine, NRO kind of has a duty seemingly to massage some Obama criticism into nearly everything that outfit puts out.  It's par for the course, which is why I rarely read NRO these days.  I prefer to get my "conservative news" from Sarah Palin's facebook page.  No, not really.

Nevertheless, as I commented in Google Buzz a few days ago, I don't think it's at all controversial to claim that Chinese citizens enjoy more economic freedoms than their counterparts in the U.S., nor is it an attack on Obama. It's just a fact.  Without a strong regulatory state to impose things like safety standards and enforce zoning laws, people with money in China can pretty much do whatever they please, as long as they don't criticize the government.

People fallaciously assume that democracy and capitalism forever go together like peas and carrots.  I prefer to think that capitalism is the natural state of civilization.  Fighting free markets is like trying to grow European crops in the New World.  Democracy on the other hand, as history seems to attest to, is fragile, and must be protected by complex systems of law and civic robusticity.   

That is to say, imposing Democracy neccesarily entails curtailing economic freedoms.  I can't buy votes.  I can't bribe officials.  I can't pay you to kill a business rival.  etc.   

DateThursday, August 19, 2010 at 4:47AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Wednesday
Aug182010

July 2010 News Time Capsule

AuthorChristopher Carr

This is from the EconomistI decided to celebrate the birth of my second daughter with a rehashing of news stories from the last time I really kept a continuous link with civilization via the mass media: here is July 2010 as a time capsule of our civilization's most idiotic component.

In the Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses the famous fire hydrant experiment in which subjects were shown increasingly less blurry pictures of a fire hydrant until they were capable of identifying the object.  The experiment concluded that subjects were more likely to correctly identify the object sooner if they were shown fewer pictures.  Taleb interprets these counterintuitive results as proof that if we have discontinuous, intermittent exposure to something, we are more likely to understand that something.  He particularly discusses how intermittent exposure to news stories makes one more likely to know what's truly going on in the world than those who voraciously follow the news.

As an American living in Japan and returning to the U.S. twice a year on average, I sympathize with Taleb's premise (another post), but I think this particular overgeneralization is one of very few glaring faults in his book.  Either way, I'd like to present a news roundup of sorts.  I receive "the Slatest" everyday from Slate Magazine, which basically offers snapshots of news stories, and so I'd like to present some selected Slatest stories, and offer my visceral two cents.  Here it is:

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DateWednesday, August 18, 2010 at 1:00PM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Tuesday
Aug172010

The First of Many Mini-Posts

AuthorChristopher Carr

In response to Matt Yglesias:

Fundamentally, listening to TED lectures confers no more benefits than watching a lot of Discovery Channel. As someone who regulatly listens to MIT Open Courseware podcasts, I can tell you that learning neuroanatomy or chemistry aurally is no easy feat. People will still need workshops and access to equipment and individual attention and credible official qualifications. For the foreseeable future it’s really really difficult to believe that any 18-year old and his parents are going to pass over Harvard for Parag Khanna and Sam Harris pacing and overusing “now” as a transitional phrase.

Contrary to what Krugman and Delong might think, the internet’s making all this information more easily accessible makes this kind of cocktail party knowledge even less valuable than it already is, which is pretty damn valueless.  Real, technical knowledge such as that conferred by advanced, specialized degrees for which a bachelors degree is prerequisite (as a high school diploma is prerequisite for a bachelors degree), will rule the future, just as real, technical knowledge rules the present.  No matter what way you look at it, the internet is not qualitatively any different than public libraries, which we've had for thousands of years, as tempting as it is to believe in the specialness of our own era.  And while the internet may affect the makeup of the intellectual landscape of the masses, the elite will still be comprised of the few who endured.

DateTuesday, August 17, 2010 at 4:25AM | Comment1 Comment |
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Tuesday
Aug032010

Why Individual Freedom Sucks and We Shouldn't (Necessarily) Fear China

AuthorChristopher Carr

image courtesy of www.patriotdepot.comI'm about to commit an American taboo worse than almost anything except making a racist joke: I'm about to make the suggestion that the individual freedom held as a sacred value in Western Democracies can be bad.  As a libertarian, this is especially uncharacteristic of me, but self-criticism is necessary and awesome.  Keep in mind that I'm not saying that individual freedom is always bad; I'm simply making the point that there are trade-offs, and a strong case to be made for restraint coercive or otherwise, preferably otherwise. 

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DateTuesday, August 3, 2010 at 12:37PM | Comment1 Comment |
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Tuesday
Jul272010

Drug Policy: Engaging with Reality

AuthorChristopher Carr

AFter In Japan, there is a widespread benign ignorance about the effects of recreational drug use on the human body.  I know only one person here who has tried a hardcore drug (by which I mean it doesn't pass the lunchbreak test), and he happens to be an extremely unique, strongwilled, powerful, and privileged individual.  Drugs (besides of course alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, nitrous, and until recently, both marijuana and mushrooms) are not a part of Japanese culture, and so if Japanese people do not dispassionately understand the physiological effects of crystal meth, who cares?  

However in America, a country saturated with recreational drug use, we suffer from a malignant almost willful ignorance on the part of parents and authority figures.  Our drug laws and programs designed to combat youth drug use, personal experimentation, and addiction are universally poor and self-defeating.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the easily-debunkable urban legends and boogieman stories disseminated through networks of parents and school officials engaging in discussions of mutual ignorance.  Like priests and nuns lecturing Catholic school students about sex, bureaucrats, PTA officials, and politicians not named Hunter S. Thompson should not be formulating drug policy or setting curricula.  This job should be the proper province of neuroscientists who understand the physiology of addiction and the chemists and clinical researchers at the FDA.

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DateTuesday, July 27, 2010 at 12:01AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Thursday
Jul222010

Liberalism: The Only Fighting Faith

AuthorJoseph Cox

Christopher Hitchens by EnscepticoI've always thought it was telling that the founding neoconservatives were all apostate liberals.  Their's was a nightmare marriage of the cynical worldview of conservatism with the forward momentum of liberalism and the results were aggressively bad: the Iraq war, the War on Drugs, record deficits to "starve the beast" and the culture war.  Liberalism is dangerous stuff- look no further than the horrors of Communist excess- if not tempered by a restrictive, almost naive, morality.  Neocons were jaded liberals, looking the ugliness of the world in the face and getting "serious."  They thought, maybe crime isn't the result of historical inequality, maybe it's just people making bad decisions they should be severely punished for.  A prison population of millions later, and we are talking about one of their great policy successes.  Nowhere is the embrace of the once unthinkable more apparent than in the muscular foreign policy of liberals who grow up; Christopher Hitchens, Jeffery Goldberg and Peter Beinart all took deep quaffs from that heady cup- Beinart notably in the essay that title this post- but at least Goldberg and Beinart have been chastened by being incredibly wrong headed in their advocacy for war in Iraq, Hitchens remains devoted to military utopianism:

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DateThursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:51AM | Comment3 Comments |
Thursday
Jul222010

The Well-Meaning Ethnocentrism of the Left

AuthorChristopher Carr

Don't ask me why, but I regularly receive email petitions from change.org, the left-wing activist organization which is listed in the dictionary as an antonym to the word "thoughtful".  Monitoring the organization's communiques, I believe, will give me advanced notice when liberal overreach means it's time to start running for the hills again.  But enough fun; I agree strongly with the vast majority of change.org's positions: immigrant rights, gay rights, the rights of animals, sustainable farming practices, environmental protection, ending the drug war, reducing America's prison population, etc. it's their methodology which I find repulsive: "activism". 

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DateThursday, July 22, 2010 at 5:01AM | CommentPost a Comment |
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Monday
Jul192010

The Zero-Sum Economics of Immigration

AuthorJoseph Cox

A Protest against AZ Immigration Law - by nflravensDavid Frum ended his week hanging around Andrew Sullivan's the Daily Dish by reminding me why even the most even keeled of Conservatives harbor a few indefensible positions.  David's unorthodox solution for curbing unemployment is immigration reform- but wait, not the kind you are thinking of that would make it easier for hard working immigrants to move here and grow the economy- as in, kick em out and don't let them in.  From the horse's mouth:

But here's a crucial fact that Brookings omits: that 125,000 per month increase in the US labor force is not a law of nature. In fact, during the Bush years, more than half the growth in the US labor force was due to the arrival of immigrant labor. 

Immigrants now make up some 15% of the US labor force. They are concentrated in the less skilled portion of the labor force and in industries hardest hit, especially construction.

 If immigration levels were curtailed, the job gap would be a lot smaller. And if illegal immigrants returned home, rather than being put on a "path to citizenship," the problem of putting the unemployed back to work would be smaller and easier. 

 For someone who considers themself a champion of the free market this demonstrates an almost willful naivity about how free markets actually work.  Free markets are decided not "zero-sum"; when an unemployed worker reads that the unemployment is going down they shouldn't be upset that all of those jobs available have been filled by other people.

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DateMonday, July 19, 2010 at 8:17AM | Comment1 Comment |
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