On Brainwashing

I often here that suicide bombers are brainwashed morons. Whether this be from a guy at the pub, friends, family, respected political commentators or politicians. Lets make no mistake, they are but it's far more understandable than our brainwashed armed forces. Unlike 'them' 'we' are rich, we're not being constantly bombed, occupied, starved and treated like vermin. An elementary moral truism is with with privilege comes culpability. We are millions of times more privileged than the people we occupy and slaughter. Even those in the slums of Harlem, LA or Brixton.

Our armed forces are far more brainwashed than any suicide bomber. Worse than killing in the name of religion, we kill on command for a state. We take 18 year olds, usually straight of high school with no other prospects, enlist them, put them through grueling boot camps that have no athletic or training goal but to break one's spirit so they blindly follow commands. We then equip these boys with M-16's, M1 Tanks, we equip our pilots with B-52s and tell them to slaughter on command thousands of innocent villagers below. We tell them to purposely target dams so they can starve the population by flooding their lands. We tell them to inflict gruesome, sadistic 'interrogation' methods on their fellow men, because they are designated the 'bad guy' without any evidence, without a court of law reviewing the case. All this because we defer to authority. I recall the most ironic thing back in 1999, there were loads of people whining about Kosovars (or as the locals say 'Kosvans') coming into England and stealing shit. That is astounding. We go round bombing their country, causing a pogrom against them and we have the audacity to complain about them stealing ? I was working with a guy from Nigeria recently, he said something damn funny: "you guys whine about people wanting to come here, yet you go about bombing other countries, keeping others down. Of course people are gonna come here. It's nice here". Another example I can whittle off is the minor £37 million given to Asslym Seekers to go back home, pennies in budget. This sparked outrage in the press and pubs alike. Yet the government gives tens of billions of tax payers money to Northern Rock, a large corporation, money it may never get back. I've not heard one person whine about this.

I think the scene in The Bourne Ultimatum where Bourne's trainer instructs him to kill on command, without any knowledge of his victims crimes is a perfect image of our armed forces. As Emma Goldman put it

The military spirit is the most merciless, heartless and brutal in existence. It fosters an institution for which there is not even a pretense of justification. The soldier, to quote Tolstoi, is a professional man-killer. He does not kill for the love of it, like a savage, or in a passion, like a homicide. He is a cold-blooded, mechanical, obedient tool of his military superiors. He is ready to cut throats or scuttle a ship at the command of his ranking officer, without knowing or, perhaps, caring how, why or wherefore. I am supported in this contention by no less a military light than Gen. Funston. I quote from the latter's communication to the New York Evening Post of June 30, dealing with the case of Private William Buwalda, which caused such a stir all through the Northwest. "The first duty of an officer or enlisted man," says our noble warrior, "is unquestioning obedience and loyalty to the government to which he has sworn allegiance; it makes no difference whether he approves of that government or not."

I wonder how brainwashed we all are.

More lulz from Bush

Apparently he was on the phone to Musharraf and told him, "You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time". I wonder if Musharraf informed him that is precisely what the president of the United States is, as commander-in-chief the US Constitution provides the president shall be:

shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United
States, and of the Militia of the several States,
when called into the actual Service of the United States

Bush is not ignorant he's CIC. As he constantly goes on about, the nation is at war, you don't change CIC's at a time of war. This is indeed epic lulz.

Furthermore, this is not just of academic importance. The substantive effect of the president being CIC has enabled the executive to effectively unilaterally declare war without Congressional approval, evidenced by a long bloody history in Latin America and Indochina that is so obvious it doesn't even need to be discussed. In the words of Dean Baker, it would have been useful to point this out to readers.

Prototypical example of a lack of empiricism in jurisprudence

Guido Calabresi, in his paper on the roots of Tort law distinguishes criminal and contract law as such:

Contract law reflects the most libertarian set of relationships, in which – once
an entitlement has been given or recognized by the polity – that entitlement can
only be transferred if the parties themselves agree to do so at an individually
determined price. Regulation/criminal law represents the most collective set of
relationships in which the State not only decides who owns what, but determines,
under pain of criminal sanction, when that entitlement can be removed,
transferred or abrogated.

In all of legal theory this is just a given, it is beyond debate. It is seen as a fundamental axiom from which all other theories derive. However as I constantly bang on about, this just isn't the case. There is hardly a distinction between the two when we consider what it means in reality for the majority of the world. Perhaps jurists should consider reading the history of the United States as a great example of what the sanctity of contract meant in reality for the working class, rather than reading hundreds of pages of judgments and law journals.

Some arguments in favor of a Common Agricultural Policy

The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been under some scrutiny for, well yeah for how long now? Over 25 years? The general mainstream economic opinion, and even the opinion of a large part of 'the left', has been that the EU should move from the current protectionist agricultural policy position towards a more open free trade policy. The arguments on which this is based are usually: it costs too much, unfair towards the developing world farmers and the developing world would profit from an open market and so would European consumers.

Neither of these arguments seem to make sense to me nor weigh up to the possible strategic role of food. I'll try to 'debunk' them by addressing first the economic realities by focussing on what would happen when a more free trade agricultural policy would be achieved. Secondly, something which most people forget, I'll address the political-economic nature of agriculture. Note that I'm arguing in favor of a Common Agricultural Policy, this doesn't mean that I consider the current policy 'amazing', there are lots of things that can and need to be changed (increases of scale, bringing down the number of small scale farmers). But what I'm trying to prove is that it makes sense to be protectionist from a strategic perspective and that it also makes sense from a leftist point of view because opening up of agricultural markets would make the developing world worse of in the longterm.

First, the economics. Current protectionism means that European farmers get higher prices than what they would get under free market conditions. The excess harvest which is the result of overproduction (which has decreased in recent years) usually gets dumped below world (and domestic) market prices in the developing world. Which also means that consumers in those countries profit from it, except the ones who work in agricultural sector (a large part of the workforce) . Now what would happen if we open up markets. There would only be a few few countries capable of being large scale export producers: Argentina, Brazil, the USA, New Zealand, Canada and Australia (because of land, technology and climate).

What would this mean vis à vis the other developing countries? Given that the current dumping prices are below market prices they would suffer from a price increase. Yes this would of course stimulate the export there too (which would be small compared to the big 6), except that would make an even larger part of the local population starve, the ones that can't afford world market prices. However this pricing fixation, which can be debated because I went over it without much caution given that its not the core of my argument, ignores the concessions the developing world would have to make at the WTO to get an agreement with the developed world. They would have to give up protectionist measures in industrial related sectors which would harm their longterm development and economic growth. So the short term gains by an increase in export would be offset by the limits on investment measures the government can take to stimulate local industry. A wiser decision would be for them to focus upon agricultural products designed for export, the ones the developed world doesn't produce itself.

What would it mean for the EU and the European consumers? Well for the latter it won't mean that much given the % of food expenditures in their overall budget. For the majority of European farmers, it would probably lead to bankruptcy. But what would it mean for the European Union as a whole? This brings me to strategic and political-economic part of agriculture. I'd wish everyone had learned a thing or two about foreign energy dependence but apparently they haven't. Since there are only a couple countries with the possibility to 'feed the world' (as the Brazilians like to say of themselves) it would make us dependent on a couple of countries. Given that Argentina has already suspended the export of beef in the past because of domestic price concerns and the Ukraine appears to do the same with its sun flower oil, it doesn't seem wise to me to be too dependent on imports when it concerns such a basic necessity as food. Which could undoubtedly be used the same strategic way as oil and gas are used today, especially if it would be in the hands of only 6 producers.

Racial sensivity in hypermode!

It's everywhere in the papers and the TV news. James Watson has made some comments about black people being 'dumber' than white folk. There's been angry letters written into newspapers, fellow scientists denouncing him in the strongest terms and lots of other hypersensitive stuff.

Firstly, the man is a scientist. Lets take his assertion as a hypothesis and test it against the data. It clearly doesn't fit, so just say so. I'm not sure why to get hyper over it. It's no worse than recent studies showing short people have shitty lives. It's a hypothesis, test it against the data and report back in a sober fashion. If Watson had meant it seriously he should have written a paper on it, he didn't, so let it be. The height study was a peer-reviewed scholarly study, so that has weight.

Judiciary can judge scientific facts

A couple weeks ago I posted

If suddenly the legislature decided to legislate on scientific facts no one would use them to analyse what the actual law is, because those facts existed long prior to law.

It seems the judiciary has taken on the mantel of 'legislating' scientific facts. Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth has some scientific errors in it and does not reflect the scientific consensus. I'm not sure why Justice Barton's LLB qualifies him to be a judge on scientific facts, as I'm sure no climate scientist would argue their PhD entitles them to make declarations of law (even though the climate scientist is far better educated). But nonetheless, this is how the decision turned out. If I had a kid in school I'd want to bring a complaint that free market economics taught at A-Level has no basis on empirical facts and is rather an ideological sword to stab the third world with. A judge could actually decide on that, because economics is no where near as complicated as climate science. But I'm sure this will never happen.

The decision is a surprise to me because in medical tort cases the test for breach of duty relies heavily on expert testimony, not judges reading medical journals which they cant possibly comprehend.

Best summary of logical-positivism

if two people have differing opinions but no way of settling their differences through empirical facts then their conflicting statements are meaningless and they should go and have a beer instead - Jim Al-Khalili