Lipstick On A Pig

"I’m sorry, but this sounds like lipstick on a pig, and I think you (Dr Curry) are missing the only relevant point: science isn’t a club, and the problem isn’t in how to get the kids to trust the club members. You speak as if “transparency” is an image problem best solved as a marketing issue.

Science as I was taught is a method in which you do an experiment and the expectation is that any interested party ought to be able to reproduce the experiment. Repeatability of results can’t happen when a scientist doesn’t release data. There should never be the need for FOI requests. If whatever you did can’t be replicated and/or examined openly, it ain’t science.

Your essay reads as if you assume that the underlying problem is that FOI requests need to be handled more cleanly.

RUBBISH.

The underlying problem is that climate people have to be threatened with FOI action in the first place, and to rub salt in it, these people are employed out of MY wallet. When public funding is used, this is MY data. I paid for it. I don’t need no stinking FOI request.

You want to fix this problem? All data is open and online to any citizen who wants to download it. Period."

This is a comment from one G.L. Alston over at this guest essay by Judith Curry at Watts Up With That.

China A Few Years From Now...

"You're going through a period in China now where the regime.... is clamping down very very hard on any sort of free expression... and they're time will be up in about three years and then we'll see..."

Rupert Murdoch sounds an optimistic note over Google's recent confrontation with China.

ACORN Rebranding

"ACORN isn’t the first gang of riff-raff to discover that there’s lots of money to be made at the intersection of politics and poverty — that was part of the original mafia’s business model, too..."

So says Kevin Williamson at National Review. To suck political power out of the souls of poor people in the way ACORN do, impoverishing them further and under the false flag of charity to boot, is beyond disgusting.

Taipei Trip 2nd Post: Tamsui

So back to our trip to Taipei last week. We left on the thursday morning arriving there around 12pm, but after having checked into the hotel, showered, changed and made a few MRT jumps, the light was already starting to fail by the time we arrived in Tamsui. There is an old market street there with faux road cobbles and, though I couldn't clearly identify the terraced shops as belonging to any particular architectural style, there was a definite European feel to the architecture of the terraced shops and the whole street. How much of that is original (it was presumably built by the British in the 19th Century - which would make it Victorian), and how much of that is modern reconstruction I wouldn't like to guess. Anyway, I didn't get any pictures of that because it started to rain quite heavily - so we retreated into a little hotpot restaurant (with which I wasn't too impressed).

When we got to the San Domingo Fort the rain had eased off to a drizzle. We took a bus from just outside the old street, though by the time we arrived, we realized we might as well have just walked; the distance was a five minute walk (if that). Incidentally, that's one of the little things of daily life in England - walking - that I miss when I have an opportunity to do it (especially on a cold, rainy day); by and large the streets of Taiwanese towns and cities are simply not designed to cater to pedestrians and in the summer months you really don't want to be walking in the sweltering humidity anyway. This is a measure of just how much riding scooters and motorcycles has become second nature to me; I cannot imagine life here without them (cars are generally useless here due to the congestion and extreme difficulty of parking - they're only useful for those with a family to bus around). I'll have to write a whole series of posts on traffic in Taiwan at some point... christ I could probably write a hundred if I went for it.

Anyway, San Domingo Fort. As mentioned, the rain had reduced to a drizzle by the time we arrived, and I did get a couple of pictures outside before it started up again and we were forced indoors. The picture in this post is of me standing outside the governor's mansion. Photography indoors was prohibited - which is a crying shame because I found so much of interest inside with most of the rooms being preserved with their nineteenth century British furnishings (the Fort, along with the house in Sizihuan, Kaohsiung, had housed Britain's consular service in Formosa prior to the stupid decision by the FCO to do nothing to prevent the Japanese from annexing the island in 1895). After touring the governor's mansion, there wasn't enough time left to properly take in the rest of the Fort and we had to start making our way back to the old street and the MRT station. Shambolic, I know.

Perhaps later in the summer I might be able to engineer another opportunity to visit San Domingo under better skies, and take my time about photos and note-taking.

The Identity Of The Real "Carbon Monster"

A father reads his little girl a bedtime story about "the carbon monster" swallowing up whole towns to leave people and their pets drowning due to floods and rising sea levels. UK government propaganda over "climate change", such as this example reported in The Register, uses an evocative design ostensibly in order to persuade otherwise inattentive people to do such mundane things as switch off lights and drive their cars less. In this particular instance, the government's advertising standards agency Offcom received more than seven hundred complaints from the public and so has decided to "investigate" (i.e. consider removal of) the propaganda. Although, as Andrew Orlowski notes, this particular piece of propaganda was produced prior to the Climategate scandal and the failure of the Copenhagen conference last year and is thus noteworthy as a display of government miscalculation/incompetence, I would like to draw attention to another aspect of the ad.

The evocation of fear, innocence and guilt is undertaken in order to manipulate the context within which any rational discussion of the subject of climate change can be framed. It is a tactical move to reduce the chances of opposition to government policy. It can be very difficult to talk openly about a subject with people who already regard any alternative position with some mixture of fear, guilt and indignation. That is precisely the purpose of the ad - not the soft and soapy sounding nonsense about "encouraging" people to turn off lights and so forth, rather it is to direct popular anger toward the State's opposition (which is most emphatically NOT the "Conservative" Party).

The reason I see the issue this way is partly that although there have always been people with a genuine love for wildlife and ecology (hey, me too), they were joined and supported by people with much bigger ambitions. I have long held the view that the green movement generally and climate science in particular, came to be seen increasingly as an "investment" by politicians and others with political links (e.g. via the U.N.) during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Certainly this is true of Al Gore, whose 1992 book "Earth In The Balance" I can recall reading as an undergraduate back in 2000. It is such figures as him (quite irrespective of political party) who share the same Hobbesian premises about human society as the communists in the former Soviet Union. I am not identifying Thomas Hobbes as the first communist, but I am identifying his philosophical conclusion - the necessity of the Leviathan State to the achievement of human order - as the basic premise upon which modern statist movements like communism and fascism were to develop. The acceptance of this premise always necessitates some degree of opposition to the principle institutions which facilitate individual freedom - private property and the market as well as constitutional restrictions on the entanglement of the State across all the various markets (land, capital, labour, communications, education, transport, healthcare, security, housing, food etc...) from which the particular character of a society emerges.

The green movement and the global warming / climate-change scare have been merely the latest strategic attempts by the totalitarian Hobbesians at removing the obstacle of popular opposition to the further dilution of society with the concentration of State power. To remove the locus of State power away from the mere existence of institutions like the police, military, tax offices, courts and so on and into the reflexive attitudes and habitual behaviours of a majority of the population has been the chief driving purpose of the green movement for the past three decades.

SEVENTY U.S. Police Chiefs Resigning January/February 2010...

Although police departments in the U.S. suffer from relatively high rates of staff turnover, I'd imagine that much of this attrition would occur among the younger LEOs, as indicated in this admittedly twenty-two year old study. But what, I wonder, has been the average base rate for staff turnover among U.S. police chiefs in the past, say, five years or so? The importance of that question relates to this news item which, perhaps unsurprisingly given the kooky background whence it comes from, hasn't made the mainstream news. I have checked up on some of the individual cases for confirmation elsewhere, but I haven't checked all of them. Is this apparently large number of seventy police chiefs resigning their positions before the first two months of 2010 are out an alarm signal of what might be about to happen later this year or is it just an extra noisy bit of noise?

Billy Beck linked that via the eighth comment on this WRSA piece.

Homeopathy = Unspeakable Stupidity

"Epistemologically the small child who believes a monster lives in his or her closet is on firmer ground than the homeopath."

Nick M throws funny bones again. And this comment from David Gillies:

"Did you hear about the guy who forgot to take his homoeopathic medicine? He died of an overdose."

Ha! Homeopathy is just about the most stupid thing there is, except of course for government funding of it through taxation.

Bitter Weeds

"When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone: there are bitter weeds in England."

- Winston Churchill, 4th June 1940.

H/T: Brian Micklethwait

Taipei Trip 1st Post

Well our trip to Taipei was something of a let down, principally because of the awful weather and traffic; it rained all day thursday and friday with a bit of drizzle on saturday, and the traffic, especially to and from Keelung, was just murder. My main objection to the rain was that it prevented me from using the camera more outside. When inside buildings we wanted to visit (e.g. the San Domingo Fort in Tamsui and Chiang Kai Shek's "Camp David" in Yan Ming Mountain) there were prohibitions on photography - which I don't understand given that such buildings are managed on behalf of the public. I did get some pictures however, but due to the general crapness of the blogger-webkit, I'll have to put up several posts to include pictures and my commentary on them.

Another problem was our limited time and the necessity of sharing it; I didn't get to see the old Forts in Keelung for example and I would also have liked much more time in Tamsui. The girlfriend wasn't best pleased with the fog up in Yan Ming Mountain or with the amount of time it took to get up into the gold mine mountains of Keelung. There were simply far too many interesting things to see and photograph and we simply didn't have enough time. She'll be off to Taipei again this weekend with her friends however - whereas I'll be staying in Tainan to work so I'll have to plan my own little trip to Taipei sometime in the summer perhaps.

Edging Toward Another Princip?

"...anyway, if it's a non-violent future we're looking forward to perhaps we should bring it about non-violently. I look forward to the day when McDonald's refuses to serve state employees."

- Patrick Crozier

"The building he attacked, although it did house a small IRS office (and, apparently, a few other government offices as well), was primarily a garden-variety commercial office building. Most of the inhabitants were not IRS agents, or even government employees at all, but simple "civilian noncombatants". The building itself was not owned by the government, but by private investors. Attacking it was wrong. Conversely, a similar attack on the IRS's headquarters in DC would not have been."

- "Laird"

Comments over on the Samizdata thread on the story of one Joe Stack flying his airplane into a building in Austin, Texas last thursday.

My own thoughts later: responsibilities first...

Was Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the spark that ignited the compressed forces across Europe into the First World War? Is today's pressurization of political forces in the United States similarly in danger of being ignited by another Gavrilo? I don't honestly know, but I do have two thoughts about this:

The first, and most obvious one, is that neither Timothy McVeigh nor Joe Stack were Gavrilos in that, unlike him, they targeted buildings that were peripheral to their enemy in both a physical and institutional sense. Gavrilo Princip targeted a single man at the very centre of Serbian Nationalist objections. I don't even know whether a comparable event is even possible in the U.S.

*My second thought is that the so-called "Tea-Party" movement in the U.S. will eventually be bought off, if not by this administration, then quite easily the next one; Nixon offers some historical precedent for this with his placating of the civil rights movement - strip away the healthcare reform, offer larger Federal tax-cuts and make some larger concessions to reducing the fiscal deficit and most likely they will go home and shut up. I haven't seen anything from the Tea Party lot to suggest that they are capable of opposition to government on principle rather than merely opposition to the size of the government. So given that, I think the forces are perhaps not as pressurized as those in Europe were in the years leading up to 1914. But I could be wrong about this - the intensity of the conflict in the U.S. now is perhaps edging beyond the point at which the dynamics of democratic politics can contain it. Are the Timothy McVeighs and Joe Stacks just the first drops of the broth beginning to boil over? Whatever the real case will prove to be, it doesn't look good.

*Edit: Actually, why would the "progressive movement" in the U.S. even have to bother buying the Tea Partiers off with crumby concessions on the size of government when they can just smear them? Smear the "Tea-Baggers" as a lunatic fringe - after all incidents like Joe Stack's ineffectual use of suicide bombing against a peripheral IRS office provide the perfect palette from which to paint that picture of a lunatic fringe shouting about taxes. Surely there will be further incidents like this one and that of McVeigh to follow? I'd be willing to take a bet that the time-frame for using reason to resolve this conflict is diminishing. The "Tea Party" movement is not going to accomplish anything as it is currently constituted. I am going to have more to say about this in another post when I get time...

新年快樂!

I'm off to Taipei tommorow for a few days; will be taking in the old Spanish fort in Tamsui and the old forts in Keelung; those are my two bits - after that, my girlfriend gets to do what she wants to do. I'll be getting lots of pictures - and actually we'll probably getting very wet too looking at the weather forecast...

The Fundamental Economic Problem Does Not Recognize Cultural Differences

INDIAN: Say, are you guys going to build restaurants too?

COLONIST: Yeah, but you're going to need a reservation.

Heh... That's from an unpublished little piece called "Good Fences Make Good Neighbors" by Sasha Volokh (of The Volokh Conspiracy) way back in 1998.

The Corruption Of Amnesty International

“To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment..”

That's Gita Sahgal complaining to the leadership of Amnesty International. Christopher Hitchens has the story over at Slate.

The Look & Feel Of Newspapers

"Design and presentation is going to be essential."

Says Rupert Murdoch in conversation with Peter Robinson of National Review. He was referring to the increasing popularity of the web-based, non-tactile format of newspapers in the near future. I'm not entirely satisfied with some aspects of the presentation of my own blog, but it's good enough for now.

When In Rome...

Do As The Romans Do Not?

"Just as the Iberians, and Libyans, and Thracians were hungrier and more enterprising than Italians back in the bay of Naples, so too we, the beneficiaries of this wealth, lost the values that were at its heart, in a way that the Indians, Chinese, and others have not — yet."

That's Victor Davis Hanson drawing parallel lines on the blackboard. The last word in that quote carries a lot of weight for me; my experience of the Taiwanese is that although there has been and certainly still is something of the entrepreneurial spirit throughout the island, there is also a disturbing imitation of nihilist and anti-intellectual trends from the west. The western tradition of rational criticism with its accompanying institutional channels for opening, stimulating and managing intellectual conflict just don't seem to find quite the same traction in Chinese culture and I have little doubt that the ubiquity of different methods of conflict evasion has quite a lot to do with this.

AC Milan vs Man Utd last night

Stayed up late to watch AC Milan vs Manchester Utd last night on a stream. Sky Sports' commentators are absolutely useless; on and on about Rooney and on and on about Scholes' flukey finish even though Fletcher was probably United's best player and the passing move between Fletcher, Scholes and Carrick to create their equalizing goal was excellent (though the footytube highlights don't show enough of the build-up to that goal for this to be appreciated). I thought Milan were shocking though Seedorf's goal was good, drifting in between Johnny Evans and Evra, United had, I think, three players trying to close down Ronaldinho and nobody picked up Seedorf getting into a forward position. Actually it probably should have been Fletcher getting back!

The Tyne-Wear Derby & Remedial English History

"The Tyne-Wear derby may be perceived by the uninitiated as parochial and unsophisticated, but like the world's greatest derbies it has a historical conflict as its bedrock. And if anything, as a basis for a rivalry, the Sunderland-Newcastle derby is the most legitimate conflict anywhere."

Bullshit, it is a parochial sporting rivalry nothing more - and there is nothing wrong with that. The sporting rivalry between the two football clubs in question - SAFC (Sunderland Association Football Club) and NUFC (Newcastle United Football Club) is actually quite recent and arguably a result of the popularization of the motor car - making travel between grounds easier and leading to increased ticket prices thereby encouraging fans (to whom money did not grow on trees) to choose one team over the other. Even as recently as the 60s it was still relatively common for fans to regularly attend matches of either team.

"It became a conflict between Sunderland's socialist republicanism, against Newcastle's loyalist self-interest."

Bullshit again. This is Richard Stonehouse shite-hawking in the Observer some five years ago; an article to which I was alerted by a thread on Ready To Go, a SAFC message board.

It's true that the "Roundheads" (the name given to the league of various political factions opposing the dictatorial rule of Charles I) found large support in Sunderland, but they were neither socialists nor even republicans; they were in fact fighting not against monarchy per se, but for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. In fact the Roundheads, although they executed Charles I, actually failed to achieve any substantial political reform. That dirty little shit Charles II, upon succeeding to the throne following the murder of his father, never took them or Parliament seriously and took the piss for years - starting a perverse war with the Dutch and treacherously trying to sell England out to Louis XIV on the side.

In fact, the aim of establishing a constitutional monarchy wasn't realized until, with the support of men like the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, and through his marriage to Mary, William of Orange was able to ship his way across from Holland to take the English Crown. I don't know to what extent William himself was convinced of the rightness of accepting constitutional limits upon his power, and there can be no doubt that he was considerably indebted to the political maneuvering of Shaftesbury, but insofar as "architectural responsibility" for the massive political reforms can be attributed to any one man then John Locke must certainly be in the running for that particular crown. That these reforms were carried out in the cause of freedom of religion and freedom of thought and together came to be known as the "Glorious Revolution" is now all but commonly forgotten in England.

It was on the 300th anniversary of William III's Glorious Revolution that Mark E. Smith found occasion to make the point: "He is NOT appreciated."

Fork

That last bit of feeling-sorry-for-myself nonsense was somehow prompted by reading this on the Von Mises blog.

Recollections Of A Previous Life

I remember the year 2002. I forget which month now but (I suspect it was January, actually) when I bought a new suit and took the train up from Durham to Edinburgh I was filled with a strange feeling of excitement I think I've only ever had once since then. I had prepared well. I knew how to present myself in the short time I was going to be alloted. I was confident - and, more than anything else - I wanted it. I just knew I was going to get the position, and I did. I still remember the interview and the realization that I had succeeded and that I'd be getting my offer in the post.

I had poured more than six months' passion into a certain project following the awful heart-breaking disaster of discovering the University would not support me despite what I'd been told. I'd pulled myself back up again and got stuck in and now I was about to be offered a postgraduate research position at the Edinburgh College of Art. I couldn't have been more full of myself if I'd tried.

From that heady start, 2002 went fairly quickly downhill for me. I was stuck out in the sticks at Riccarton in the summer, with almost nobody else around. I was frustrated that the institution was pulling me in a different direction from the one in which I had launched myself back in 2001. I was frustrated by the lack of colleagues around me, and when I eventually got some, I was frustrated by the variance at which I found myself from their basic premises and academic jargon (being arty types, me being a science+something else type). I don't think I made any friends in that whole year. It was terrible. But I soldiered on pretending everything was alright - largely because of the memory of what I had been through to get where I was.

In 2003 I moved out of the sticks into town - sharing an old Edwardian flat with some Brazilian engineering students. That move gave me a massive lift; I was within walking distance from the castle and the Edinburgh College of Art, the libraries, museums, cinemas - everything, and I made as much of it as I could. Which of course included girls - good times! But 2003 was also intellectually stimulating, in total contrast to 2002. The U.S. and U.K. finally looked like they were going to invade Iraq and the controversy was everywhere and talked about by pretty much everyone. Early that year I discovered both Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" and Karl Popper's "Open Society", and it was those two books that really encouraged me to continue at odds with the nature of the institution I was employed by. Also in that year, though I don't recall the month, I discovered Samizdata as a result of searching for writings by Popper online. The discussions on there would be an invaluable education for me over the next two years.

Nothing stands out in memory as distinctive about 2004 apart from the friends I made - Hong, John and Tom. I have largely lost touch with them now, but I still miss them whenever I have an opportunity, like now, to remember. There's an awful lot mixed up with that, some of it is mine but some of it belongs to each of them on their own separate accounts. It's awful to me now to think of them, and I'd like to put that right at some point in the future; I really miss them. Actually, there are quite a few people I need to make amends to - but whether they need that from me is another question.

But it was no good, and I pretty much carried on out of inertia and the pleasures I got from living in Edinburgh, but toward the end of 2004 my heart just wasn't in it anymore. Sometime in early 2005 I remember our institution held its' first international conference - for them it was a real sign of achievement, but for me it was the mark of death; I could barely withhold my contempt for every single person attending that conference. It was eating me alive and that's when I knew I had to get out and get as far away from those people as possible. Today I think they'd get ill just sitting next to me - my radiation of anger and disgust wouldn't even need to take the form of words.

I made a terrible, terrible mistake - and there was nobody around at the time to advise me otherwise. It has cost me years and years and god knows what else. I now find myself back in the position at which I started six months into 2001 after the disaster following graduation. Hard work and a hard heart; I have quite a mountain to climb.

The Bishop Speaks To Orlowski

Andrew Orlowski interviews Bishop Hill at The Register. In among all the other stuff I'm trying to get done at the moment, I'm preparing another letter to the Taipei Times on the climategate scandal so this interview should be interesting...

Michael Jennings meets James Waterton

Listen to this podcast between Michael Jennings and James Waterton in Hanoi if you can endure the screeching of the traffic in the background.

See Things As They Are

Ooh I'll link this up for sure:

“An equally useful distinction comes out in M. Renan’s use of the word “intelligence.” To most of us, I think, that word does not mean the same thing that it means to a Frenchman, or that the word Intelligenz means to a German. To a Frenchman like M. Renan, intelligence does not mean a quickness of wit, a ready dexterity in handling ideas, or even a ready accessibility to ideas. It implies those, of course, but it does not mean them; and one should perhaps say in passing that it does not mean the pert and ignorant cleverness that current vulgar usage has associated with the word. Again it is our common day-to-day experience that gives us the best possible assistance in establishing the necessary differentiations. We have all seen men who were quick witted, accessible to ideas and handy with their management of them, whom we should yet hesitate to call intelligent; we are conscious that the term does not quite fit. The word sends us back to a phrase of Plato. The person of intelligence is the one who always tends to “see things as they are,” the one who never permits his view of them to be directed by convention, by the hope of advantage, or by an irrational and arbitrary authoritarianism. He allows the current of his consciousness to flow in perfect freedom over any object that may be presented to it, uncontrolled by prejudice, prepossession or formula; and thus we may say that there are certain integrities at the root of intelligence which give it somewhat the aspect of a moral as well as an intellectual attribute.”

That's "John B" quoting AJ Nock over on the Enlightenment thread at Counting Cats in Zanzibar.

Wrong

Michael Turton clearly doesn't understand anything about free trade.

"Speaking as a mathematician, I am outraged..."

I missed this excellent post by Pa Annoyed a couple of weeks ago, and only noticed it now thanks to a link from Rob Fisher. I really would like to be reading Pa a lot more than I have been.

Change Your Mind

Comments on this item to follow when I get time....

Later...

"And needless to say, the cultivated man comes into contact with other cultivated men and with good literature; the ignoramus does not."

Absolutely - when Taiwanese people ask me how to improve their English (the second most popular question they frequently ask me) I always insist upon two things; building up a regular practice of both reading and writing AND avoiding the automatic choices (CNN, BBC, Yahoo etc) and opting instead for a mixture of the literary classics ("Robinson Crusoe" is my top recommendation for kids, "Crime & Punishment" for teenagers and "1984" for adults - largely because of their ready availability at different levels of language competency and their incomparable superiority to more or less everything else on offer) and what I consider to be some of the best bits of the web including the blogosphere. But -

"applying what you learn is everything."

Mark those words.

Was Mark E. Smith right?

A War On Intelligence? Mike Soja spins this story just enough to make me dizzy with Gustav Holtz' "Mars". Turbines to power turbines indeed. See my earlier comments on Pa Annoyed's "Englightenment" banner-waving.

Regarding the Wang Dan interview

Sirs,

To stand up to any government, but particularly the Chinese government, must surely take enormous courage, and for that alone Wang Dan - interviewed Thursday 4th February in the Taipei Times - can have applause from me all day long. I have disagreements with him however. Essentially, I believe that Wang is mistaken in his identification of democracy as an instrument for establishing freedom. And let's be clear - if freedom is not the value in play here, then power can be the only alternative. Democracy, at its' best, is nothing more than an uncertain means of inconveniencing the growth and maintenance of state power. It's connection to freedom is a bug rather than a feature.

Now is it true that there is a greater measure of freedom in Taiwan than there is China? No and it is most emphatically not a matter of semantics to identify the supposedly greater "freedoms" of Taiwanese as nothing more than a greater latitude of state sanctioned privilege. A free man does not account to the state for his existence; a free man does not need to develop connections among the local government and police in order to be allowed to continue his business unmolested; a free man does not run to a polling station every few years to sanction state violence over the natural rights of himself and his fellow "citizens".

Wang Dan will always command respect because of what he has done, but it is a truly horrifying irony to see him urging the young to place their hopes for freedom upon the process of democratization just as the great democracies in the west are falling over themselves to extinguish all memory of individual freedom and its' necessary institutional corollaries. The heroes of the future must necessarily dwarf the likes of Wang Dan.

Yours as ever,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Tuesday 9th February 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

From A Mountain-Top In Kinmen...

It is of interest to me how much further value I can obtain from writing to the Taipei Times - they have clearly put me in their "Dislike Intensely" box quite some time ago, and anything I write to them must surely have only a 50% chance (or less) of being published. The blog allows me to keep score however - it's just a question of figuring out the best way of drawing a wider audience without throwing myself upon the torture of a facebook rack. Twitter is the obvious alternative but it has some of the same problems. The other alternative is to man the comments sections of Taiwanese blogs and challenge them, which will likely be seen as an enormous faux pas given certain generally accepted assumptions ("when in rome..." etc). Oh well.

Kant Touch This...

"My preference in trying to describe the Enlightenment is to select particular events, advances in knowledge and changes in institutional design rather than specific people because whoever you choose, you’re going to get a mixed bag to some extent."

My comment on a post entitled "Enlightenment" over at Counting Cats In Zanzibar. There is no doubt in my mind that the task is not one of defending what we now call The Enlightenment but of trying to advance it through popular mediums of communication. Anyone can pull a few soundbites out of a Kant or a Hume, but I say this is distortion and is not really adequate to the level of discrimination demanded by the nature of the task - if it is to be taken seriously at all.

After the DPP...

The Taipei Times does the job for which they are paid (support of the Democratic Progressive Party: 民主進步黨) by reporting the comments of Chen Shui-Bian (陳水扁) on the current administration's ECFA (Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement) negotiations with China. I agree with this:

"Chen also accused Ma of lying when he said that it would be easier for Taiwan to sign free-trade agreements (FTA) with other countries after both sides of the Taiwan Strait sign an economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA). As Beijing never saw Taiwan as a country, but rather as a region of China, Chen said China could not agree that Taiwan is eligible to sign FTAs with other countries."

Ma believes he can help to bring about the democratization of China whilst achieving reunification - whereas Chen was always a strong advocate of Taiwanese independence. Chen is the realist here, not Ma and this is disturbing because the Taiwanese nationalist movement, whilst still maintaining some measure of political power, is fast becoming an historical relic. It is a party whose popular support is predominantly among the older generations and which has returned to being little more than a protest badge. Although they differ from the Nationalists by their clamoring for independence, the political "principles" they hold for the actually running of the country are indistinguishable from the national-socialism-lite of their opponents . The State must distribute its' weight around the funding and management of the key areas of the economy: monetary policy and banking, the military, education, healthcare, transport infrastructure, agriculture and the large electronics industry. The disagreements between the two parties on these matters are small potatoes with no serious difference in principle - for example, neither of the parties has its' electoral candidates campaign on a promise to cut back the interference of the State.

"Invincible Ignorance"

Martin McPhillips' description of the New Paltz school district "authority" in New York State. Here it is:

"It [the school district authority] repels critics with its institutional demeanor and its own invincible ignorance based in the rightness of itself as all-good object."

This is a common experience: somebody says a particular agency of the government should "invest" in a particular project; I object on grounds both practical and moral; people look at me with smiles that communicate their sense of empathic embarassment on my behalf, because of course no "sensible" person could honestly expect their objections to such reforms to be taken seriously now could they? To object to state management of the economy via democratic means is quite simply beyond the pale don't you know?

Wang Dan (王丹) Interview

Comments on this item to follow when I get time...

Later...

To stand up to any government, but particularly the Chinese government, must surely take enormous courage - and for that alone Wang Dan can have applause from me all day long. I wonder about his prison time.

I have disagreements with him however. Although I am with him in the great NO to the Chinese government, I part from him in my view of what should constitute the great YES to replace it:

"The democratization of China absolutely benefits the future of Taiwan."

I believe that Wang is mistaken in his identification of democracy as an instrument for establishing freedom. And let's be clear - if freedom is not the aim of this man, then what the hell does he stand for? Democracy, at its' best, is nothing more than an uncertain means of inconveniencing the growth and maintenance of state power. I wish everyone would quit all of this "freedom & democracy" bullshit. The two have nothing in common.

Now is it true that there is a greater measure of freedom in Taiwan than there is China? No - there is certainly a large difference, but it is more accurately expressed as a greater latitude of privilege than of true freedom, for the simple reason that the poisonous effects of State coercion exist throughout Taiwanese society.

"The Taiwanese government just wants to deal with the Chinese government on economic issues, like Western countries in the past. But that’s impossible."

Agreed, which is why the future of this island may well be shaped by real political radicals - the philosophy that informs these people is where the real fight is now, whatever the means of communication and that is why this bullshit about "democracy" must be shown in sharp relief.

Keynes V Hayek

Chewed up by the government bureaucracy today - so my plans are trashed. This rap video of Keynes v Hayek however, might be worth spreading.



Later - off to the beach with my dog who is looking better now. Plamus linked that over on a Samizdata thread.

Voluntary Funding Of The Military

Sirs,

In response to Tuesday's headline item publicizing Tsai Chi-chang's call for the government to push for the purchase of the C/D class F-16s and diesel submarines from U.S. firms, I say that the value of helping Taiwanese pilots and naval captains to establish and maintain air and naval superiority over the Taiwan Strait is one I'd always be willing to support. Nothing however, must be allowed to distract from the fact that it is individual pilots and their support teams, individual captains and their crews who bear this awesome responsibility - it is not solely a matter of simply purchasing the right equipment. The morale of these people is crucially important and going out of one's way to thank them and show one's appreciation in person at airshows and other opportunities is the very least they deserve. That they are funded by the coercive operations of government however is something I cannot approve of - I would quite happily contribute more of my income than the rate I am currently taxed at if only I knew it was going directly to the air force or the navy and not into the coffers of government.

Heroes should never have to go begging to thieves.

Yours as ever,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Tuesday 2nd February 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times).

Heroes Yes - Thieves No

"Tsai also called on the government to push for the 66 F-16C/D fighter jets and the diesel submarines that were omitted from last week’s arms deal announcement, saying the two items were crucial for defending the country."

Yes - helping Taiwanese pilots to establish and maintain air superiority over the Taiwan Strait is a value I'd be willing to pay for, but it must never be forgotten that it is individual pilots and their support teams on the ground who bear the awesome responsibility of maintaining air superiority over the Straits. The same goes the for the navy and the captains and crews of Taiwanese naval vessels. That this value is provided by the coercive means of government however is something I will never approve of. Heroes should not have to go begging to thieves for the money to buy their weapons.

Tsay Ting-kuei

Ideally, I'd like to jump on important stories the day they are published, but the reality of trying to keep a life together just doesn't always allow that.

The story of Tsay Ting-kuei, published in the Taipei Times last saturday, is a good example.

What this man is doing - protesting against government regulation of protests - is exactly the kind of action which I think will be necessary to any serious attempt at recovering the condition of freedom.

His style is certainly old school (MLK, Ghandi...) but what interests me is the man's narrowness of purpose; I'm certainly in favour of trash-lobbing the Assembly and Parade Act, but I have no use for the Taiwan Referendum Alliance - principally because a referendum is merely a challenge to the direction and control of government power, rather than a challenge to government power itself.

Make no mistake, we cannot live in freedom whilst evading the necessity of this challenge.

Stepping In Puddles

My simmering contempt for Taiwanese nationalist posers boils over from time to time. The Taipei Times editorial team never gets tired of printing the same old "Hey, Taiwan isn’t China" letters as if that had anything to do with a principled defence of freedom. What it really means is nothing deeper than "hey look at me, I'm cool because I support Taiwan".