Alert! My response and rebuttal to Bruce Schneier’s recent article “The Myth of the Transparent Society” has been posted by the good folks of Wired.com.
Alas, the argument over how to best protect freedom and (yes!) privacy has not advanced much beyond the simplistic nostrums of ten years ago. Those who dispute that transparency can ever engender freedom and (yes) privacy routinely begin by claiming that my book is about the end of privacy, rather than how to preserve it by empowering people to defend it themselves. The exact-same method that underlies the entire Enlightenment Experiment.
Judge for yourself. But don’t come into just dip a toe and never to consider new ideas. That’s not how to defend the only true revolution in the last ten millennia.
Continue... if you want to enter a tsunami of science, games and cool stuff....
(...with almost no politics!)
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Speaking of the year 10,000BC... Game impresario Steve Jackson and I have spent more than a decade, "Tribes!" a realistic role playing game (formerly called "Darwinopoly"), that offers fun for six to eight players (or multiple tribes of 8 players each) who follow simple rules to simulate life as it must have been for our ancestors, anywhere from 10,000 to 500,000 years ago -- hunting, foraging, mating, and occasionally fighting.
Can you figure out how to survive... and have successful offspring... in a world where only your own wits stand between you and harshness of nature? Tribes! has been created with the advice of several prominent anthropologists, as well as one of the most experienced game designers on the planet. (For more information see the web site for Steve Jackson Games.) Among the things people have found most fascinating is the sexual politics that can arise from a very simple rule set.
Recently play-tested with more than thirty players! Hence, we’re interested in finding a few anthropology professors who might like to try the game out on students, as a whole-classroom exercise.
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For the Predictions Registry... or that Brin Forecast Wiki... India Nurtures the Business of Surrogate Motherhood -- with shades of my short story “Piecework.”
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Want more about one of my perennial themes - the rise of tech propelled Citizen Power? Taking the whole “smart mobs” scenario a step farther, see Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Hardcover)by Clay Shirky.
Here’s a riff from a recent Salon interview with Clay: ”We are used to a world where doing anything at large scale requires a formal and hierarchical institution. The great debate of the 20th century was, Are really big activities better taken on by governments -- the communist answer -- or are they better taken on by businesses operating in the marketplace - the free-market answer? But the "dot dot dot" at the end of that answer was, "because obviously people can't just get together and do these things on their own." That is increasingly what is happening now. Groups that were once so disassociated from one another that they couldn't do anything are now starting to work together.”
This is a take on the old “Cathedral vs Bazaar” argument. And - despite being one of the early promulgators of the “Age of Amateurs” I must tell you that there are many ways that the jury is still out. Or, rather, we clearly all win when neither side dominates. Indeed, the Bazaar has had its failings. Take the inability of the Linux community to settle on a set of standards that would turn it into a truly great, people-generated rival to the cathedral operating systems of Apple and Microsoft.
Shirky offers many great examples, such as self-organizing networks of disgruntled airline passengers, getting redress in ways they never could have, before. (Now, if only this sort of thing could make a revolution in stockholder “democracy”, ending the crony-control of top corporations by an interlocking cabal of golf buddies.)
===== Tech Tsunami =====
Looking down the rifle barrel of a nearby (only 8,000 LY) star system that could go supernova any time. Dang, I really needed that worry, too!
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Fascinating new work on the “altruism hormone” oxytocin. It seems that it only increases generosity in humans when humans actively have to imagine or picture the point of view of another. It does not affect philanthropic behavior much at all, in test games where the subject wasn’t prompted to consider the other player’s perspective. In other words, it seems to be involved in turning empathy into sympathy... but for it to happen, there must be empathy (in the true and neutral sense of the word) in the first place.
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Okay, this is just too cool and fun. Top 10 Barely-Legal Gadgets for the Modern (Amateur) Spy. (Every student at Caltech learns to pick locks, by the way.) And no, I don’t endorse all of these gadgets. But I do have teenagers..
Stewart Brand is one of my heroes. His Long Now Foundation is exploring interesting avenues for provoking modern minds to think over wider horizons in time. He also has a terrific blog. Drop in and see Stewart’s summary of a seminar given by gene-mapping pioneer Craig Venter.
See George Dvorsky’s cool blog-essay about Seven ways to control the Galaxy with self-replicating probes. Cool and fun...
... and a nice counterpoint to my story “Lungfish.” (In fact, I think that story covers a few bases that George missed.) George does (courteously) cite my Uplift notion as one of seven possible motives/goals for self-replicating probes. (Thanks George!) He also goes into a very smart riff about why we don’t see any of these probes yet, even though they seem logically to be the way to go. Indeed, at the Los Alamos conference on Interstellar Migration, back around 1982, I saw the work of Jones and Finney suggest that ONE such probe might fill the galaxy with it descendants in just three million years. An eyeblink that really pushes the Fermi Question hard.
(Note, the "Lungfish" link may need to be repaired across the next few days, sorry.)
One of the scenarios that George leaves out is the “voyeur-lurker” possibility. That probes might be out there, nearby, right now, listening in. Even tapping our... well... web discussion groups. See my take on this at:
See the following article from Snopes... the great mythbuster site. (explore it!) The great “Cough-it-off” rumor, about how to survive a heart attack, is itself under attack. It should only be tried if the heart has definitely stopped... and loss of consciousness looms. A weak pulse? Angina? Coughing might make it worse. It seems that chewing an aspirin, the moment you have heart pain, then calling 9/11, is still the best thing.
The first detailed images of a binary asteroid system reveal a bizarre world where the highest points on the surface are actually the lowest, and the two asteroids dance in each other's gravitational pull.
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And finally, back to the Transparency Wars.... ”London's Metropolitan police a new counter-terrorism PR campaign complete with anti-photography propaganda. The campaign is meant to encourage people to turn in "odd" seeming people that they see taking photographs. "Thousands of people take photos every day," reads their advertisement being run in London's major newspapers. "What if one of them seems odd?"” http://www.met.police.uk/campaigns/campaign_ct_2008.htm
Ironically, both the London Metro Police and their critics completely miss the point. In fact it is perfectly legitimate to ask that citizens be aware of what is going on around them, and for them to serve as an outer line of detection and defense against those who might be seeking to do harm. But the odds are SO microscopic in any one case, that our professional protectors simply have no business at all, getting involved at such a low -- and vast(!) -- level.
the way to do this is not to turn neighbor against neighbor, reflexively reporting each other to paranoid state authorities. The answer, indeed, is to make greater use of the tool in question -- photography. People who spot suspicious photography taking place should simply take their own pictures to those doing it!
Generally, these should NOT be given to the police! That is the road to Big Brother. Nor does it inherently threaten any rights for one citizen to view and “remember” another, who was in the act of doing precisely the same thing. The mere act of expanding the number of citizen “eyes” at the roam does not by itself impinge on other peoples’ right to look and record. It is simply the same right, after all. And if it helps us to become better witnesses, on rare occasions, fine.
We need, as citizens, to restore our habit of being slightly wary but politely tolerant and reciprocally protective neighbors. Not a trivial balance to strike, but then, what is, these days? Anyway, it’s our job, not the cops.
96 comments:
Our world will be revolutionized when anyone can own a wireless web-enabled video station. Impeccable witness systems and perfect transparency of our public servant's dealings would prevent much of the remaining abuses of power which the constitution was unable to banish.
One a total off-topic note: here's a super cool story about a dolphin saving a whale off New Zealand's coast.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7291501.stm
I've run Tribes games for classes of 30+ grade 10 students. The results were quite interesting.
To make things rewarding, I promised the kids home-made cookies: one for every victory point they earned in the game. Some kids focused on maximizing their own cookies, others on having more cookies than anyone else.
I had some interesting results. One girl shocked her mother by announcing one night that she was pregnant! Again!! (Lesson to self: kids tend to identify strongly with their characters.) A boy discovered, after borrowing the rulebook, that there is nothing preventing a group of characters from intimidating other characters into mating with them. Which may make anthropological sense, but I had to disallow on practical grounds. (Lesson to self: explicitly disallow rape at the onset of future games in a school setting.)
The most successful character died for his children. At the end of the game the character was injured, and his player worked out that she stood a better chance of winning chances of winning if the character died and his body was fed to his children (who might otherwise have starved).
Fun times.
This issue is something I have been thinking about for awhile and wondering at as I see more and more kids willing expose their lives with no fear of judgement or fear of consequences (which has good and bad consequences).
Anyway, I just put a post on my blog (http://bodbrain.blogspot.com/2008/03/transparency.html) regarding your article.
A quote regarding how openess could help ensure privacy:
Along this extreme, you realize that if all your secrets are out, then it becomes difficult for any one to use them against you (You could call this the Clinton Theory). Of course, this would assume a free, liberal society where you would not be prosecuted for what you think and say. Also, this type of thinking has worked on the Internet to a point, because when people do say things beyond the pale they risk being ostracized, not by the government, but by their peers. Freedom of thought and speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
As Brin states, this could help protect privacy, in the sense that while much of your life is public, your can still live your life privately from the government, from corporations, etc. Also, from other citizens, in a kind of MAD strategy. You have bombs, I have bombs. If we launch, we are all destroyed. Maybe, we should not launch them.
I think it's great that SJGames is giving Tribes another outing. The original had plain-paper b&w charts and simple counters. It looks like a much fancier production this time around.
I remember playtesting the initial drafts. My test group at Stony Brook's SF club came up with some important rules changes. The way spears are handled, for example.
* * *
Interesting article about Hyenas, social structures, and intelligence. The size of the frontal lobes of four hyena species seems related to the complexity of their social structures.
Robert, terrific story! I'll pass on to Steve Jackson.
Aaron, tho I am "Mr. Transparency," oddly I am a moderate on the issue. I chide people who demand total exposure and 1/4 of the book is about the virtues of (some) privacy!
In ch 9 I also discuss ways that a VERY transparent society could go very wrong. Sure, there'd no longer be fear of domination by a powerful, elite minority. But MAJORITY rule can also be oppressive, if the 60% is close-minded, intolerant, homogenizing, oppressive.
Implicit is a continuation of the "horizon expansion" and "suspicion of authority" ethos that I talk about elsewhere, plus the dogma of Otherness. If these cultural norms accompany transparency, then harmless eccentricities will not only be tolerated but valued and disagreement won't be a sin, but rather "interesting."
Yes, it demands a humanity that grows up, incrementally. But I show, in my Google Tech Talk: http://tinyurl.com/yy7yxm that this maturation has already been going on!
But you can see why this picture is hard to get across. It violates religion #1 -- cynicism. And it is complex, a major sin.
Oh! BTW, the URL for "Lungfish" is:
http://www.davidbrin.com/lungfish1.html
Re potential supernova: if we had a rational society, we could (fairly cheaply, I'd think) deploy a fairly small shield to go sit out between the Earth and the star, and block the Earth from the star's radiation during the worst of it.
Of course, it could be a long time before the star goes off (if it ever does), so either you'd have to have the shield keeping station the whole time (burning fuel, or possibly using the solar wind to counteract the sun's feeble pull at that distance? but it would still need to track the earth's orbit, of course...) or else have it in a stable orbit as ballistically "nearby" as possible -- which raises the question of what the numbers are: What's the window of notice before action would need to be taken? How long would the worst part of the radiation last (i.e. how long would the shield absolutely need to be in place to be worth the trouble? How long should the shield ideally be in place, in order to reduce minor radiation effects? (Might turn out that we'd need a "necklace" of shields in solar orbit, so there'd always be one close enough to deploy.) What's the maximum angular diameter the dangerous part of the radiation might achieve? And so on.
At the very least, we'd be funding a group to work out answers to these questions and pose a solution. Maybe NASA is on this already? The problem, of course, is convincing anyone to fund it. As we have discovered recently, there's far more immediate profit in chaos and disaster than in saving humanity.
Re here comes everybody: What we lack now is (are?) the tools for self-organization. The internet is tremendously fertile soil in which to grow such tools (pardon the mixed metaphor) and I'm seeing various web sites gradually approaching this problem from several different angles -- but there's still some distance to go.
What I think needs to happen is that we need a way of forming what I call "opinion-forming entities" or "decision-making groups" -- groups of people who get together via 'net with no particular cause in mind and work out what they think about various issues. Groups which agree can form alliances, groups which disagree but are sincerely seeking the best outcome can compare notes and work out their differences, and those who are dogmatic/doctrinaire will (hopefully) be marginalized by the overwhelming flood of moderation. (Wouldn't that be nice?)
Maybe we could start by creating our own Office of Technology Assessment.
DB, I just read through the comment trail on your Wired rebuttal article. The lasting statement that sticks with me is your exhortation to make the Enlightenment our business. My question is... where do I start? :)
liquid water has been found on Saturn moon. The Cassini space probe recently flew through a geyser at the southern pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus to determine the composition of the geyser. Preliminary results suggest the geyser contains pure water-ice and water-ice mixed with other particles, suggests there may be a hot water source in the moon. While this is not definitive that life exists in the moon, it does increase the possibility.
We may in fact encounter our first alien lifeforms... as natives of our own solar system. And while these won't be the grey-skinned aliens of popular lore, these bacterial inhabitants may very well help give us a glimpse of just what life was like back when it first evolved on Earth.
Robert A. Howard, Tangents Reviews
woozle wrote:
"Re potential supernova: if we had a rational society, we could (fairly cheaply, I'd think) deploy a fairly small shield to go sit out between the Earth and the star, and block the Earth from the star's radiation during the worst of it."
Have you read the Clarke/Baxter novel, Sunstorm? It's basically the same idea, except the shield is deployed at terrisolar L1 to guard against an induced solar flare designed by aliens to sterilize Earth. (Not only does it fail due to Our Heroes' efforts, but it does all the heavy lifting to make Venus and Mars easily terraformable!)
Hey Dr. Brin,
I think you rebuttal in Wired made a lot of great points. And I think the discussion here has continued to enlighten and educate me. However, I winced a bit after reading your reply to the other commenters on the Wired page.
I understand your frustration with being misunderstood regarding your ideas in The Transparent Society (I still need to get and read a copy), but I think the style of your response to the Wired readers will be off-putting, and work against getting them to dig deeper that that little toe.
On your blog, the discussion is fairly mature, and we all have fairly well-developed thick skins. We care most about coming to a consensus on ideas, and making sure our conclusions reflect the facts and reality. Not that people don't care about this elsewhere, but as a longtime lurker/commenter here, I see that most people are willing to ignore/let slide perceived insults, slights, condescensions, etc. and focus on the substantive points of discussion. This makes for a great proto-disputation arena, and there are few worries about hurt feelings and flame wars.
Fortunately and unfortunately, your Wired article is going to a much wider audience, and one that is not quite as open to your ideas as we are. I think if the goal is to persuade those people to give your ideas a fair hearing, you have to care about your perceived tone and style in addition to providing a coherent and educational message.
When I read your response to the commenters, I got an overriding impression of condescension and arrogance. My first thought was that the people you responded to are going to storm off in a huff, rather than ingage your ideas. To whit, see the next comment from Badams76 right after yours:
Anyone else think that Brin is being a bit of a, well... dick? Schneier at least makes his points with eloquence and manages to refrain from biting sarcasm.
So (at least for this commenter) style overrides the substantive points in your comment, and your entire argument is dismissed out of hand. As someone who generally agrees with a lot of your notions, this is exactly what I don't want to happen.
So I offer this bit of CITOKATE, not about the substance or tone of your original rebuttal, which I thought was great and informative, or the substance of your later comment, but I think the tone you struck in this comment response is likely to turn some (perhaps many) people off.
I know it sucks to be misunderstood and misrepresented by your critics, and it can get quite frustrating when good ideas are continually ignored. But I think your comment here plays right into the "stuffy know-it-all guy who is never wrong, and if you don't get it you're just stupid and/or ignorant" stereotype. I know this is the farthest from the image you actually do portray and want to portray, but this was my honest first impression after reading that comment.
Thanks for the citokate, big c. I have gone and revised some of my responses.
Dennis asks “where to start” making the enlightenment his business.
Argh. There are so many battle fronts. Of course the biggest is political, since getting pirates off the helm should help a lot. We’ve talked about this.. Helping a national campaign. Recruiting or helping a savvy moderate to run in a more local race, like assembly or congress. Grabbing the lapels of a few ostriches and waking them up...
But there are other fronts. If your business can get engaged with some worthy local activity - engineering firms sponsor the nearby high school’s robotics team with both dollars and mentors, for example. There are lots of sponsorship/mentoring opportunities at most schools, appropriate for almost any business. (Best approached in an organized way.)
Then there is “proxy power”... my point about how there’s now an NGO for almost any opinion or passion you might have, and adding your dues to - say - the Sierra Club or Project Witness lets that group (1) have a bit more working funds to achieve your goal, (2) claim a bigger citizen membership, and (3) keep you informed on the topic.
See:
http://www.davidbrin.com/proxyactivism.html
I personally believe that spreading a love of science fiction would help civilization no-end! But I was naive to think that SF fandom would want projects to do just that. Most fan groups, except a few back east, seem to want fandom to die out with them, like the shakers. Still see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_for_the_Future
http://readingforfuture.com/
and www.aboutsf.com
I’ve donated thousands of books to military bases. It’s a worthy activity. Always seems chaotic, though. (Anyone know any bases in Iraq?)
Next Generation? My boys are in scouting. Still the best way to ensure all the boxes get checked. Though there are flaws.
I hope when you modified your responses, you noted that you did the editing. One thing I've noticed on the web is the tendency of some individuals to alter what they said in the face of criticism without acknowledging what they had originally said. It's far better to admit to being wrong or apologizing for tone when rewriting than to pretend it never happened.
It is perhaps one thing I like about the comment system on this blogsite. You can't edit out (though you can delete) your comments. While it makes correcting typos and bad links difficult, it also decreases the ability of people to "erase" controversial comments without accepting responsibility for them.
Rob H.
Depends on whether you have left in place FOLLOWING remarks by other people. If you edit, and leave those remarks in place, then you are sabotaging them, making their reply look incoherent or improperly motivated.
Simply fixing up the tone of a terminal remark is much less problematic.
David, thanks for the detailed answer. I'm glad I asked, because based on your answer I feel like I'm already in the mix. Thanks :)
My personal situation restricts some of my ability to act - as a resident alien, I fear getting personally involved in politics (partly fear of backlash against a perception of me as a meddlesome intruder, and partly fear of jeopardizing my residency status - you never know with this gummint), so I'm limited to persuasion by rational argument. Also as a new parent I've got a time/energy crisis. It helps to imagine that I'm raising a future Nobel laureate ... ;) I can't remember - who was the Gaia matriarch character in Earth?
I've roused some ostriches. I've got a 2-time Bush voter pulling for Obama now.
Thanks for the other tips. I'll definitely use some of them.
Dr. Brin...
As a former ship's librarian, I can tell you it looks chaotic because it IS chaotic. A couple of military truisms can be invoked: if you don't tell somebody that they're responsible, then no one will take responsibility AND only officers can be responsible, enlisted men merely get blamed.
Navy (and Marine) librarys are 'run' by the Chaplain Corps, who often believe that they have better things to do with thier time. Add in the fact that getting sailors to read isn't on the list of Things Required to Make Admiral and you get ships libraries like mine: improvised bookshelves in the crews lounge, overfull with Harlequin Romances (NOT popular reading with all male ship crews) and multiple copies of Dianetics.
Hawker- Scientology at Sea? That is a scary thought.
I've been finding the economic argument to have some potency in ostrich-wrangling, by the way. A lot of folks who have bought the party line about security and moral necessity or whatever they're selling this week get pretty freaked out when you start talking about how much it costs...and how that's going to affect the bottom line back home.
It may not be the most important argument, but it's one people can get their heads around.
Two small tidbits here. First, Republican Senator Wayne Allard offered an amendment Thursday that was said to total up the costs of Senator Obama’s favored initiatives. These initiatives were to the tune of $1.4 trillion, which would then be added to the $3 trillion budget.
It was ridiculed as an attempt to smear Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. Further, Obama and Senator Clinton came into the Senate and Obama ridiculed Allard by saying "Hey, Allard, you working this hard?"
The amendment was voted down 97 to 0.
Second, continuing on your theme of transparency in government, Obama has released a list of his earmarks since he's been in the U.S. Senate. It includes what he asked for and what he received (which is about 30% of what he requested). He has requested Clinton do the same, but she has resisted releasing her earmarks.
Questions about some of the earmarks (including a $1 million earmark for a hospital where his wife works) have been mostly dismissed (the hospital one, for instance, was turned down and was part of a series of earmarks for a number of hospitals rather than something specifically for where she worked).
This is just another reason why transparency in government is needed. Why Clinton is refusing to release her records when Obama has freely done so is puzzling, as this can only damage her politically, showing she appears to have something to hide.
Rob H.
Another optimistic turn, Obama's superdelegate momentum is outpacing Clinton's, to the point where he has almost pulled even.
I saw a headline recently (can't find it now) that the Clinton camp has stated that Obama's abandoned PA. He should counter that since the Clinton campaign hadn't planned for beyond Super Tuesday, she never even considered Pennsylvania until recently, whereas he considers all states important...
Dr. Brin's rebuttal to Schneier's criticism of the Transparent Society concept seemed unconvincing to me.
Bruce Schneier made several cogent points, but he neglected to point out other weaknesses of Dr. Brin's flawed arguments in favor of souveilliance. For example, a keystone of Dr. Brin's argument is the claim that historically, transparency has always increased and never decreased. Dr. Brin constantly challenges objectors to cite one isntance where rules have been successfully passed to limit the availability of knowledge.
It's surprising that no one has taken up this challenge, since so many examples erupt from the pages of history.
During the 18th century, all Prussian women were required to list their monthly onset of menses with local police stations. This is a clear and obvious example of the kind of information which subsequent generations have taken drastic steps to limit. It is now regarded as no one's business whether, or when, young women menstruate, and it is certainly not regarded as a necessasry piece of public information required by local officials. Current privacy strictly forbid the dissemination of this kind of personal information, as, for example, in leaked medical files.
That's one example. But there are many others. During the 19th century in the deep south, whole classes of people who looked caucausian but had small amounts of African-American ancestry were required to legally register with the locla authorities. Known as "quadroons" and "octaroons," and so on, these people had to carry special indentity cards and were forbidden under penalty of law from owning property, entering certain types of establishments, etc. etc. Once again, today no one gives a damn about this kind of information, and efforts to disseminate this kind of info are regarded as being criminal, since it once again would require disclosure of medical records -- specifically, a DNA test.
Once again, in ancient Rome, all slaves were required to wear talea which identified their owner. The modern equivalent would be publicly broadcasting your motrage holder and mortgage bank account numbers and employer identification number and social security number. These are once again all against the law.
So, contrary to Dr. Brin's claim, in many cases laws have been passed against the dissemination (or even the collection) or many types of information. Tranparency has in many cases gone down over historical time since past eras, and there's general agreement that this has in most cases improved the functioning of society (viz., it's now illegal for an employer to demand an I.D. card or DNA test guaranteeing that you're 100% caucasian with no mixed blood in order to qualify for employment).
However, I'd primarily like to concern myself with Dr. Brin's comments about the size of the military budget. Dr. Brin claimed that this was due to fraud and waste, and his remarks seem to imply that if we just get the kleptocrats out of power, the U.S. military will return to its former glory and effectiveness.
However, Dr. Brin's asssertions about the miilitary seem entirely simplistic, and the notation that our military effectiveness has collapsed (which it has) due to someting as jejune as a "great kelto raid" seems to me to entirely miss the point. It's simply inaccurate.
Consider the following data point:
"So while at the micro level an American Army colonel has a merc security detail, at the macro level mercenaries are filling the gap between American military forces engulfed in their own war and the security units of Iraq’s Vichy regime, most of which are less than keen to fight.
"What does the return of mercenaries on a large scale, in a theatre of war, tell us? It tells us that state militaries have become so bureaucratic, expensive and top-heavy that they are losing the ability to fight.
"As expensive as mercenaries are – and the Post article quotes a figure of $1,000 per day for skilled bodyguards – they are still cheaper than state military forces. This is not because the U.S. Army overpays its privates and sergeants, but because the $400 billion America pays each year for defense buys very few privates and sergeants in the combat arms, guys who can actually fight. Most of the money goes for overhead: contractor welfare in the form of multi-billion dollar programs for irrelevant weapons like the F-22, endless consultants (most retired generals and colonels who already collect large pensions), a bloated officer corps above the company grades, a vast rear area made ever-larger by the needs of complex, computerized "systems," and layer upon layer of headquarters, each with a small army of horse-holders and flower-strewers. If you want to imagine a modern state military (others differ from our own only in degree), think of a brontosaurus with three teeth."
[William S. Lind, "The Withering Away of the State, Continued," 21 February 2004]
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind11.html
Cost of Buying, Flying Military's New Jet Fighter To Hit $1 Trillion, Audit Says
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080311/jets_high_costs.html?.v=1
The Pentagon's bureaucracy has become so byzantine and so inefficient that the Pentagon itself literally does not know where its money goes. The Pentagon has failed the last 10 audits, and more than a trillioin dollars of Pentagon money are now unaccounted for:
Military waste under fire - $1 trillion missing"
Missing trillions make mainstream at last
Let's be clear about what's going on here: this is not a case of theft or mismanagement. Instead, the Pentagon procurement process and the entire military-industrial complex has become so large and so complex that it has escalated beyond human capacity to control it.
We see this in other areas. Beyond a certain level of complexity, national power grids become unstable and shut down in cascade failures for unanalyzable reasons. Likewise, beyond a certain size, computer programs become too complex to produce. As a result, more than 50% of all large computer programming projects are abandoned as unworkable.
S the claim "all we need to do is get the kleptocrats out of power and the U.S. military-industrial establishment will start working again" is flatly and provably false. How do we know the problem isn't simple theft, or mismanagement?
Take a look at the military's tooth-to-tail ratio (T3R). The tooth-to-tail ratio was 1:1 during WW II and has steadily declined to 1:2 today. That is, 2 logistics support and management personnel for every person in the field today. The degradation in T3R continues, and it's now actually worse than 1:2 and approach 1:3. Soon, the t3R will become 1:4, then 1:5, 1:10, then 1:20, and so on. This is a structural problem, it's not due to theft or mismanagement. More complex weapons systems, like the Patriot missile battery or the B2 stealth fighter, require proportionately more support personnel than the old artillery pieces and prop planes used in WW II. As the weaponry gets more complex, more and more support personnel are needed to service it and operate it.
Dr. Brin will predictably deny that this is the cause of the U.S. military's bloated budget, so let's take some specific concrete examples:
[1] Apache helicopter rotor blades delaminate during service and must be duct-taped to keep them working. Even this remains only a stopgap, however. As a result, apache helicopter squadrons typically have many helicopter shells from which the rotors have been stripped to keep the remaining helicopters operational. This is a problem caused by the complexity of the helicopter's design, not by theft or mismanagement.
[2] The complex electronics in modern F-18 fighter jets tend to fry and die because of the high temperatures and extreme operating conditions. All U.S. airbases now have row upon row of F-18 fuselages from which the electronics have been stripped to keep the remaining jets in service. This failure rate has gotten much worse in Iraq, but it's not because of a design failure or becuase of theft or mismanagement. Instead, it's caused by the extreme temperatures in the mideast, which typically hit 135 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer on the ground, and soar proportionately when the engines get fired up.
[3] The ablative reactive armored laser-targeting M1A1 Abrams tank must be followed by a suite of support vehicles. Without the support vehicles, the tank can't function for long, in part because it gets 4 miles per gallon, and in part because it needs consntant repair. This once again is not due to bad design, but simply because of the size and weight and complexity of the M1A1 Abrams tank. A more complex machine tends to break down more often than a simpler machine.
[4] WW II jeeps were light and used a minimal design with a manual transmission and a mechanical distributor and no fuel injection. As a result, WW II jeeps didn't break down very often, and when they did, they could be repaired quickly, often using improvised tools like a penknife or a screwdriver. Today's humvee uses an automatic transmission with disel fuel injection and EMP-hardened computer-controlled electronic ignition. As a result, today's humvees break down much more often, and when they do break down, can't be repaired as quickly or as easily as a WW II jeep. For exmaple, if there's a problem with the computer that controls the electronic ignition in a humvee, you need to swap out the electronic ignition assembly -- you can't just go in with a penknife and fiddle with the mechanical distributor to fix it, because the humvee doesn't have one.
Lastly, bureaucracies that grow beyond a certain size fall victim to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. This is what has happened to the Pentagon.
Pournelle's Iron Law states that an institution finds itself populated by two different groups of people: the people who actually do the work, and the people who become expert in making the bureaucracy function, and the second group always winds up in control of the organization.
A recent example is the well-known process of "wikitization," in which ever more labyrinthine procedural rules clog up the functioning of an organization until it drops dead of paralysis, as is happening with Wikipedia. The same thing has occurred with the U.S. military-industrial complex. Most money poured into the U.S. military now goes not to contractors and not to pay the salaries of soldiers, but to service vast masses of red tape. Attempts to "cut the waste" always fail because these end runs around the Pentagon bureaucracy wind up wasting even more money on outside contractors. For example, it turns out that the wholesale privatization of the U.S. military which costs so much money today was actually started as a way of trimming costs:
"Iraq Needs Contractors"
Kikrpatrick Sale has discussed this phenomenon in ths classic book Human Scale. Beyong a certain size, all large systems become so complex that they stop working reliably. The human mind is not capable of managing or maintaining systems beyond a certain critical complexity and size.
Incidentally, the same problem explains why Dr. Brin's vision of the Transparent Society can't work. As smaller databases get merged into ever-larger ones, more and more errors creep in. Eventually, the entire sousveillance database becomes so corrupted with garbage information that it becomes useless.
Transparency only works if the information is accurate. But universal surveillance means universal GIGO, databases so large they're full of useless misinformation.
"At the current rate of growth, the U.S. watch lists will contain a million records by July. If there were a million terrorists in this country, our cities would be in ruins" said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program. "The absurd bloating of the terrorist watch lists is yet another example of how incompetence by our security apparatus threatens our rights without offering any real security."
The new counter features a rolling, odometer-style display with a real-time readout showing how many individuals are on the list at a given moment. The figures are extrapolated from a September 2007 report by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, which reported that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007, and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month. As of today, the list stands at approximately 917,000 names."
We can see the same three problems that afflict the U.S. military-industrial complex at work to destroy the effectiveness of U.S. security surveillance efforts. [1] As the bureacuracy becomes more and more complex, more and more money gets wasted on the systems for controlling and organizing the surveilliance and security apparatus, and less and less on actual security or surveilliance -- i.e., the "tooth to tail ratio" constantly drops as time passes. [2] As the bureaucracy gets larger and larger, Pournelle's Iron Law takes over and security and surveillance becomes less important than maintaining the size of the DHS & TSA fiefdoms and expanding pensons and benefits of the TSA & DHS employees. As a result, an ever-expanding list of supposed "threats" get discovered (example: liquids on planes, kiddy porn on incoming travellers' computers) and ever more security personnel must be added to deal with these nonexistent "security threats." [3] As the bloated organization produces more and more intel, the databases get more and more corrupted with garbage info. This in turn requires that the organization add even more personnel and even more rules in a futile effort to purge the databases of misinformation, which is turn feeds back to [1] and [2], worsening the entire situation in a Catch-22.
For the Rube Goldberg in all of us:
an Etch-a-sketch clock
http://www.revver.com/video/719432/etch-a-sketch-clock/
Every minute it erases itself and draws a new time.
Zorgon, the problem with your hypothesis is that it fails to function with improvements in technology. If we go with "contractors" for our military, we risk not only someone who may be unreliable (if they are willing only to fight for pay, then might they not reneg on a contract if offered significantly more from someone else? Might this not thus hand a country defended by mercs over to an invading richer nation?) but also someone who uses outdated materials to fight with.
If we stayed with the fighters from World War II and never bothered to improve our technology beyond that, then the Soviet Union would have invaded and we'd be all under a dictatorship far worse than what we have currently in place.
The Soviet Union would have seen our avoidance of new technology as a sign of weakness and attacked, even with the U.S. possessing atomic weaponry, because they could overwhelm us. (And also because we'd not have the missile technology to nuke them into oblivion, having stayed with bombers for delivery of the low-level nukes we'd have.)
Technological improvements are needed in our military hardware. They help foster improved technologies for the commercial sector and encourage government investment in scientific discoveries that fuel the economy. The technological improvements also help save lives through better protections and improved surgical techniques. Ignoring them or relying on other parties is foolishness.
As for transparency, there is a difference between needless meddling and transparency. What you were listing before was not transparency. It was bureaucracy. It was information for information's sake. It was a means of dividing people and lessening them. Transparency in government, in industry, and in our own lives is much more than simple statistics revealed. It is accountability. Take the recent action by Senator Obama. He is laying on the line his earmarks and holding himself accountable to people who view those earmarks. That Senator Clinton refuses currently to do the same suggests that she does not want that information getting out... which is systematic of abuses in government.
Rob H.
Robert remarked:
Technological improvements are needed in our military hardware.
That's the very attitude that has led us, step by logical step, to a vastly bloated U.S. military which is no longer able to fight.
Robert's comments on the former Soviet Union are insightful, but, alas, not germane. The point is not that we ought to stay with obsolete technology -- indeed, if we did, it's easy to deduce that an equally elaborate and complex support and logistics process would spring up to service those ever-more-obsolete specimens of antique tech. Custom-building old WW II prop planes by hand would be used an excuse to justify fabulous expenditures, vast amounts of red tape. layer upon layer of management to make sure the money for all those painstakingly hand-tooled pistons and hand-lathed reproductions of the 1939 Rolls Royce merlin engine wasn't wasted.
Rather, my point is that as the U.S. army has grown in size, it has stopped being able to fight. This is in the nature of all bureaucracies: they all eventually turn into the Kremlin and collapse if they are not put on a drastic diet.
Ironically, this is a highly conservative view, as my citation of Pournelle and William S. Lind (notable conservatives) makes clear.
Robert went on to aver:
there is a difference between needless meddling and transparency.
Really? What is it? Can you define it succinctly?
This, once again, is precisely the problem to which I alluded. Just like pornography, you can't easily define total transparency. Your needless meddling is my total transparency, and vice versa.
A fine illustration of the fatal error in Dr. Brin's "transparent society" argument arises in the case of the lone stalker. A transparent society is a stalker's paradise. Rapist-stalkers would love it. "Ah, but the transparent society would work both ways," goes the counterarguments, "so the rapist-stalker would be easily identified by the police and caught before he struck!"
That's a fanciful fiction that just doesn't work in real life. In the real world, a lone rapist-stalker is much much much harder for an understaffed typical urban metro police force to identify and stop, than it is harder for the lone stalker-rapist in a tranparent society to identify and do whatever he wants to to his lone victim.
"Oh, well," continues the counterargument, "we'll just add more police. And more surveillance!"
Nope. That way lies Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. The police just become the Kremlin, a vast bureaucracy gobbling up so much of society's resrouces that they become more concerned with maintaining their vast bloated institutional budget by inventing phoney makework "crimes" and arresting "perps" (who really arent' doing anything dangerous) than with actually doing their jobs by doing the tough work of ID'ing stopping the real criminals.
And so, in such a fully transparent society manned by immense armies of sousveillance police, the vast police bureaucracies who spend their lives staring through vast phanalxes of universal surveillance cameras and listening to rank upon rank of microphones and doing millions upon millions of database searches in quest of wrongdoing, would spend all their time ID'ing and arresting litterbugs (the low-hanging fruit), while the stalker-rapists went on their merry way undeterred.
Every once in a while, a rapist-stalker would be caught. But not often. Most of the "perps" would be harmless ordinary citizens dragged in on trumped-up charges to justify the omnipresent security-surveilliance state.
Why? Because those vast armies of surveilliance cops would be compelled to justify their immense budgets and workforces...which they would obligingly do by producing an ever-expanding list of "perps" who have been arrested for an ever-expanding list of ever-more-trivial trumped-up "crimes."
Want proof?
Cops raid legal herbalist in Nebraska.
Police just raided an herbal shop that sells the legal herb Salvia Divinorum. Pressed by the urgent need to justify their ever-expanding budget, the DEA and the cops must invent a constant list of new "crimes" which aren't actually crimes at all. Soon, cops and the DEA will be raiding ice cream parlors for selling coffee ice cream with too much caffeine in it, the DEA will break down the doors of private homes to arrest people having party where people are drinking too much Mountain Dew, and they'll smash in the windows of people's homes with squads of body-armored machine-gun-armed SWAT teams backed by SWAT tanks and helicopters and riot guns because incense is being burned that now appears on some new "prohibited herbs" list put out by the DEA.
If these hypothetical cases sound insane and ludicrously exaggerated, ask yourself if they're any more insane and ludicrously exaggerated than these real world examples of the security-military-industrial complex run amok:
Two four-year-olds handcuffed by school safety officer for refusing to take a nap.
Police use taser to subdue six-year-old.
Sick man driving to hospital for treatment arrested for DUI even though he blew 0.0 on breathalyzer.
Baltimore man arrested for paying his parking tickets.
Woman arrested for overdue library books.
People arrested in a New York subway for "taking up more than one seat."
Couple arrested for flying American flag upside down outside their house.
Senator McCain floats the theory that Al Qaeda or other terrorists may attack before the general election to try and thwart his efforts to be elected President. Hmm... Dr. Brin, I seem to recall you suggesting a scenario very much like this and that the Democratic candidates should make a statement sooner rather than later to avoid the Republican from capitalizing on such a scenario. And now we have Senator McCain saying that terrorists might attack to keep him out of office.
Why do I feel the need to don a tinfoil hat now?
Rob H.
Oh, and Zorgon? Stalker-Rapists already can perform their horrific crimes without transparency in place. How do you see transparency as assisting them more than it stops them?
Indeed, genuine transparency laws could be used with mandatory DNA registration for all people. The DNA segments that are used for identification would not be usable by the insurance agencies because of its lack of relevance for diseases and the like. The person who commits the crime would leave some form of DNA evidence and thus would quickly be arrested without infringing on the rights of people. With true transparency in place to ensure the government and industry does not abuse the DNA information, safety increases and the Stalker-Rapist finds himself unable to indulge in his sociopathic attacks on women.
You claim that if a situation ain't broke, don't fix it. The problem is, it's already broken. And Transparency can help fix a lot of issues.
Rob H.
Zorgon, it seems you're making arguments for a transparent society. Every instance of power abuse you cite would be less likely if those in power know they're being watched. Consider that we only watch those who we deem worth watching - if we can watch those in power, we will. If a brutish cop knows that everyone is watching him, he might not tase that 6-year-old bro.
As to the stalker-rapist scenario, while it may not be prevented, the ensuing investigation would be rapid and conclusive in a technically-enabled transparent world - with cameras everywhere, instantaneously recording everything (I know, it sounds Big Brotherish, but I'm thinking more like the TwenCen geezer gogglers in Earth), after-the-fact investigation becomes a breeze. And it becomes difficult to tamper, as long as the investigators are equally transparent (Who will police the police? We all will.)
Speaking of matters of transparecy:
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/03/14/president_weakens_espionage_oversight/
Charlie Savage has a story on the Bush Administration dismanteling the reforms put in place by the Ford Administration, after Nixon screwed the pooch.
And now for an interesting article where a critic of Senator Clinton defends his remarks and talks about how the Clinton Cult is behind the racist talk... and that Geraldine Ferraro's comments were deliberate and part of an ongoing attempt by the Clinton Cult to insert race into this political campaign to destroy Senator Obama's chances of being a viable presidential candidate.
The more I see of her, Dr. Brin, the more I'm thinking that Senator McCain (who I am deathly afraid of and who I believe will drag us into a war if elected President... and I'm not talking Iraq) would be a better political candidate than Clinton.
Rob H.
Robert I'm starting to agree on that point (that a Clinton presidency could be as bad as a McCain presidency). Till recently I've considered her and Obama somewhat equivalent in administrative potential, agreeing with DB's assertion that either one would re-install real professionals to the civil service. But now... professionals like Mark Penn?
Oy, Zorgon, I’ve been trying to make this blog LESS of a TIME SINK! Hence, do not expect me to answer (or even read) it all. I have children to feed.
“For example, a keystone of Dr. Brin's argument is the claim that historically, transparency has always increased and never decreased.”
This is one of the most bizarre paraphrasings of my work I have ever seen. It runs counter to everything I have written and proves, right off the bat, that Z hasn’t a clue, alas. Nearly every civilization across 4,000 years, squelched transparency. ONLY the Anglo Saxon wing of the Enlightenment saw increases in Transparency, and this has only been across 200 years... and in many cases, the increases were merely compensations for the naturural growth of secretive elies.
“Dr. Brin constantly challenges objectors to cite one isntance where rules have been successfully passed to limit the availability of knowledge.” He then cites an obscure example of deregulation of menses records to say that the elites were blinded. Oy! How silly. (1) Prussia was accepting a bit of the Enlightenment. But (2) The elites did not feel they NEEDED that knowledge. All the examples clearly miss the point. The top social elites maintained info flows that let them keep their status. Period.
The military screed (I skimmed) is more of the same. Z tallies example of example of Iraq War bloatedness and deliberately-fostered inefficiency, and somehow concludes that all this supports HIS argument that the size of the military has increased. Let’s just call this one a case of being from different planets and reasoning systems.
I just read the next screed. Oy vayzmeer. More of the same. Hey Zorgon, I’m over here! Exactly what do you think you are yelling at? I doubt that even you know.
Robert, I, too, do not like the side of HR Clinton we are seeing. Argh, using the initials made me realize it is “Her Royal”... both ironic and part of the “name weirdness” of this political season. Anyone know what McCain and Huckabee mean? (Son of Cain? Yipes.) Yes, she feels entitled, is desperate, and does not put much care to management tasks in her campaign. All bad.
Worse, she would prevent a blowout.
Still, I care foremost about those 5,000 appointments. My eyes are on the prize., I want the Civil Service (the fourth branch of government) to function again. When that happens, the immaturity and stupidity of the other three branches will be bearable. We already have enough laws (almost) and once we have allies again, the world will be less dangerous. She can then fight Rush Limbaugh for 8 years. I’ll hate it. But we’ll be okay.
The good news? If she keeps this up, she WON’T get the 1,000 patronage slots BHO has probably offered. (Through deniable third parties.) And Mark Penn will go chasing ambulances.
I'm hoping she's take the patronage slots (her own people may start pressuring her to do so) puls a few nights in the White House. I don't mind here running till the convention, for the sake of pride. But her target needs to be Bush.
I don't have the URL or the time at the moment to look for it, but apparently during their time on the floor of Congress Senators Clinton and Obama had a chance to talk privately and agree to a few ground rules. While the damage she has inflicted has already struck (especially with our dear friend G. Ferraro and her very divisive remarks concerning race in this campaign), voters have a relatively short memory.
Five weeks is plenty of time for Obama to cover a huge amount of ground in Pennsylvania, meeting with a lot of people and getting the word out. It seems that Obama works best when he meets people and talks to them... and they realize that there truly is something to him. He's not just words. He also researches things and will alter his mindview if you put up a well-informed and intelligent argument. (That's another URL I don't have time for at the moment.)
Back to the words on the floor, it seems Obama and Clinton have declared peace. It could be that words were spoken, Clinton remembered that hey, they're both Democrats here and both political allies even if they're fighting for the Presidency.
It could also be that Clinton was met by the remaining undeclared SDs who let her know in no uncertain terms that she will not be getting the nomination, but that if she tones back the rhetoric to help Obama strengthen his arguments and create defenses against expected Republican attacks (that aren't ad hominum attacks) then she may very well get a position in his government. Heck, maybe even head of the Senate with Pelosi taking on a Cabinet position. (Which would also put her in line for the Presidency should worse come to worse.)
Rob H.
“It seems that Obama works best when he meets people and talks to them... and they realize that there truly is something to him.” Want irony? That is PRECISELY what worked for Bill Clinton and turned things around for him, in 92. An example of this, see the blog by web browser inventor Marc Andreeson, that I linked-to a while back. He spent 90 minutes with BHO and kvells over him.
I doubt that HRC would consider many cabinet positions to be higher than being a senator, except Sec/State. But 1,000 patronage slots (most of them people BHO would appoint anyway) would let her and Bill stay labeled as top “lords” insofar as status is judged. One can hope.
But note, Pelosi is in the House. HRC is in the Senate. She could try for President ProTem and be 3rd in line of succession... I’m not sure I like that and it usually goes by seniority.
The article on how Obama researches things and can modify his point of view.
Democratic candidates agree to play nice.
"George Dvorsky’s cool blog-essay about Seven ways to control the Galaxy with self-replicating probes."
George Dvorsky's 404, you mean. Blogger claims that there's no such blog.
Try this:
(and in future, try googling 'George Dvorsky' before complaining about typos in urls: it isn't hard! Easier than grumbling, in fact!)
http://sentientdevelopments.blogspot.com/2008/
and then add to the end
03/seven-ways-to-control-galaxy-with-self.html
Remarkably spleenful analysis of Libertarianism from The American Conservative:
Marxism of the Right
Thanks, Stefan, for pointing to the article in The American Conservative, deconstructing libertarianism. I can well expect it aroused an uproar... and that the responses from fervent libertarians wholly missed the point, as much as Robert Locke (the ironically named author) did.
Yes, he poses many interesting points, revealing a few of the many logical oversimplifications perpetrated by most American styles of libertarianism. Locke's second paragraph, and somewhat the third, are especially cogent. Indeed, I have long made the clear parallel between libertarianism and Marxism, at many levels, all the way from their common emotional and romantic underpinnings to their eerily shared vision of an ideal society.
But read between the lines. Locke's piece has an agenda. The masters of neoconservatiism can see that the occupants of the Karl Rove's Big Tent are getting restless. Huckabee roused the restive fundie herd to lift its head and start demanding a real voice (at which point, the more populist impulses of Christianity might burst their bonds). Moderates are deserting the GOP en masse for Obama. And Ron Paul put a real scare into the kleptocrats -- the one group that had, till now, been able to take the rest of the red coalition for granted, simply by shouting the curse word "liberals!"
The kleptocrats have invested twenty years and close to a billion dollars in dazzlers and court rationalizers, like Perle, Nitze etc... and now Robert Locke. The same coterie of shills who brought us a catechism of New Conservatism (reversing almost every responsibility principle of the old), now must come up with fresh distractions, in order to keep everyone from noticing one raw fact: that neoconservatism stands only for the empowerment of a new aristocracy.
A new oligarchy of inherited privilege. A return to feudalism. Nothing less, nothing more.
Hence a need to savage libertarianism. Forget the silly excesses of Ayn Rand. The thing that the Masters find most terrifying about libertarians, is the possibility that some of them might actually go back and read Adam Smith! Whereupon, they might realize that freedom and markets always had an enemy far worse, far more persistent and destructive, than any paternalistic bureaucracy, or even socialism. The very enemy that Adam Smith railed against, for engaging in collusive power-abuse, secretive market manipulation, contortion of state authority to personal advantage, and restriction of opportunity for any conceivable source of competition.
Thus, Locke does the perfectly expected. He creates a caricature of libertarianism, to taunt and mock and marginalize as a realm of kooks. True enough, a large fraction of libertarians do adhere to enough of the cartoony beliefs, so that every arrow hits a real target -- Locke's strawman goes ouch!
But that's the point! One can critique today's libertarianism for being a simpleminded, indignation-drenched, silly-ass romantic version of something with real potential... as I have done at:
http://www.davidbrin.com/libertarian1.html
and:
http://www.reformthelp.org/marketing/positioning/models.php
Or, one can engage in the demeaning act of slagging an entire worldview, just because some of its frenzied adherents happen to be silly people. Locke chooses the latter approach not because libertarianism is fundamentally flawed, in any of the ways he describes. (A mature, adult version would correct all of them, quickly.)
No, he does it because the kleptocratic rulers of the far-right have to dispose of the Ron Pauls out there. Marginalizing them as freaks, not as role models... just in case their anxious, confused lowing ever turns into a dangerous murmur and growl. Especially in case they ever realize (or remember) that freedom is always under threat by an ancient foe.
One with a far longer history of suppressing liberty than any combination of goody-meddlers or pathetic socialist ideologues..
Someone post the above in an appropriate place?
David Brin said:
Most fan groups, except a few back east, seem to want fandom to die out with them, like the shakers.
Hey! Not all of us Shakers want to die out! That was just a few old sisters, and they were too trusting of their lawyers. It was the lawyers who wanted control of Shaker villages and artifacts once they were dead. They are all gone and, we are still accepting new converts just as we have for over two centuries. The problem is everyone has been culturally conditioned by an insanely materialistic society to settle for what marketing will provide.
Sorry to rant off topic, but these myths keep getting propagated like some bad urban legend. In the meantime the human population is rapidly using all the clean water, destroying the environment, and wiping out eons of biological memory. I don’t get how everyone thinks there is something suicidal about a small minority not having children. That may have been true thousands of years ago as cavemen. When you look at the worlds two biggest nations India and China, for the last thousand years you see two nations that actively promoted monasteries and a chaste lifestyle. And what did they get for this supposedly crazy idea? A big time payoff in the genetic lottery.
http://www.maineshakers.com/sunday.html
That is me third from the left. The Picture is seven years old and I no longer live in Maine, but other than that we are still here.
Brother Doug
Yeow! I LOVE cognitive dissonance and surprise! (No wonder I was throttled in all my other lives, before age 15)
Brother Doug, you rock me back, eleven ways. To find a shaker among this modernist community, well, you just feel free to tell us more, whenever the mood strikes you!
As for SF fandom dying out, however, let me say that I have cultural and practical reasons for wanting the"cult of sci fi" to spread and flourish, rather than die off, or fade into quaint obscurity. The correlation of anti-youth sci fi fan Smofs and those who have no kids is one that I came to observe in harsh, practical experience. Those who are invested in the next generation in one way, often are in others.
Look, I am an eco-guy. China's one child policy saved us all. But I'm fully invested in the time stream. I want kids (mine and others) to be problem solvers and Earth-savers.
Hey, it could happen. Especially if they love SF.
Or as Bruce Sterling once said, "Real futurists have kids."
I wouldn't worry too much about the non-breeding Science Fiction fans; plenty of Science Fiction readers I know have kids, and are encouraging them to be avid readers. They're not steeped in SF culture or go to conventions, they just read the stuff, and a fair amount of it.
Of course you are right, Stefan. Fandom may have been its own thing, not really crucial at all. Maybe the solution is more amorphous. Something already happening.
Dr. Brin's reading of the Locke anti-libertarianism editorial as a hit piece against Ron Paul supporters seems insightful. I think the kakistocrats who run the collection of lunatics now misnamed "The Republican Party" correctly recognize that Ron Paul and his followers represent the single biggest threat to their gigantic smash-and-grab operation. Put simply, the past 7 years has been a smokecreen for the kakistocrats to smash the U.S. economy, smash the U.S. army, smash the U.S. government, and grab as much loot as they can and beat feet before the cops arrive.
Robert Locke's editorial seems like a fancy version of telling the Ron Paul supporters: "Shut up and get back down on your knees and keep sucking Karl Rove's c**k."
Dr. Rbin urges us to "read between the lines." But you don't have to read between the lines to see the problems with Locke's editorial. He starts out using the most intellectually & morally bankrupt attack of all, the ad hominem attack:
ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism
Wow! So libertarianrs are drug-using commie perverts! Boy, I sure don't want to have anything to do with libertarianism!
We would just as easily employ this bankrupt sort of ad hominem attack against the Republican party: closet homosexuals, embezzlers and sexual predators who prey on underage boys often become members of the Republican party...
Or we could use the same kind of debased attack against Democrats:
presidents who get adulterous oral sex in the Oval Office and New York governors who hire $5000-a-hour hookers find the Democratic party attractive...
When someone opens a purportedly serious op-ed piece with a backstabbing underhanded attack as low as the ad hominem smear, it sets off flashing red alarm lights that whatever follows should be taken with metric assloads of salt.
That said, Dr. Brin's attempted defnes of libertarianism seemed to me to fall (msotly) flat.
Dr. Brin did a good job of exposing the scurrilous motives behind Locke's attack. However, Locke made quite a few good points. In fact, while the motives behind Locke's op ed seem underhanded, and his opening salvo was simply scurrilous and greatly undermined his credibility...overall, the article does a fine job of explaining both the drawbacks of libertarianism and the practical reasons why it's not a credible oplitical philosophy.
Calling libertarianism "the Marxism of the right" once again involves an ad hominem attack: to my knowledge, no libertarian government has yet set up gulags or conducted show trials or tortured people into phoney confessions. But Locke hits on an essential point, because, like Marx's crackpot philosophy, libertarianism represents a wildly unrealistic extreme fringe of the political spectrum.
Dr. Brin's attempted defense of libertarianism fails on multiple levels. Brin contradicts himself:
True enough, a large fraction of libertarians do adhere to... cartoony beliefs...
contradicting his later statement
one can engage in the demeaning act of slagging an entire worldview, just because some of its frenzied adherents happen to be silly people.
If most of the adherents of a worldview hold crazy beliefs, we are justified in rejecting that worldview. Dr. Brin's use of deceptive qualifiers and bogus weasel-words like "a large fraction" (read: MOST) and "enough cartoony beliefs" (read: ESSENTIALLY ALL) and "some of its adherents" (read: VIRTUALLY ALL OF ITS ADHERENTS) greatly weaken Dr. Brin's claims.
As a practical matter, virtually all the liberatarians I've ever read or heard from or talked to subscribe to essentially all the "cartoony" beliefs Locke describes. Moreover, essentially all the liberatiarins I've read or encountered personally seem, as Dr. Brin remarked about Ron Paul, "half crazy." They make some solid sensible remarks and then veer off into batshhit-crazy-land with schemes like allowing underage kids to consent to sex with adults, or eliminating all pollution laws, or getting rid of government-issued currencies. Locke zeroes in on these crazy aspects of libertarianism and I think he's correct to do so. This craziness seems inherent to libertarianism, just as gulags and secret police seem inherent to Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism. Libertariasm needs these crazy schemes because the crackpot philosphy of pure freedom breaks down without it, just as the former Soviet Union needed gulags and secret police because their version of communism would break down without 'em.
Dr. Brin goes on to make the mistake of attack Locke for his motives rather than for his facts and logic. This is once again a poor argument, because a person can make an accurate and true argument for the wrong motives, and this doesn't impeach the accuracy of his debating points. I think that's what's happened here, in fact. Locke's motives for trying to demolish libertarianism are underhanded...but Locke's facts and logic remain valid. Essentially all liberatrians seem to hold so manyc razy beliefs that libertarianism can't be taken seriously. There does seem a large self-serving component to libertarian beliefs -- I don't see a lot of homeless people speaking up for libertarianism, only well-off folks who hate paying taxes. And libertarianism does center around egocentric selfishness -- there's no other way to put it.
Nothing in Dr. Brin's failed rebuttal successfully denies or refutes any of the observed realities.
Lastly, Dr. Brin jaunts off on a bizarre tangent and proclaims that what is currently generally understood to be "libertarianism" is not true libertarinism. If only genuine mature real libertarianism were espoused, Dr. Brin assures us, everyone would recognize as the wonderful political philosophy it really it.
But this is simply deceptive. Dr. Brin is being deliberately disngenuous when he claims that every aspect of the political philosophy which is generally understood to be "libertarianism" is not actualy libertarian at all, but merely a debased inaccurate caricature of the true liberatarianism. Brin's claim fails because it is unfalsifiable. This is edactly the same kind of intellectualy bankrupt defense Marxists tried (and failed) in defnse of the former Soviet Union: "The Soviet Union isn't true communism, so criticizing the USSR is pointless. Real communism has never been tried! So all attacks on the Soviet gulags and torture chambers are beside the point."
This attempted defense is dishonest because, in fact, the USSR had enough of the features of genuine communism that crticizing it as a form of communism was valid. And, second, this ia a fundamentally dishonest defense because you can never disprove it. Any time any communist regime fails and descends to torture and secret police and phoney show trials, you can always claim, "Well, that's not real communism!"
Thus, according to this phoney and dishonest argument, communism can never fail...since every version which fails is by defiition not communism. The dishonest and cravenness of that kind of argumetn becaomes obvious as son as you ask: "So how do we test whether communism works in the real world?"
You can't. Because any time communism gets tried and fails, it is simply declared to be "not communism." This dishonest argument equates to the claim that "communism can never be tested to see if it actually works in the real world," which is obviously a scam. That's the same kind of scam run by ufologists or psychic surgeons or dowsers. Every time you ask "How do we test whether ufos actually exist?" or "How do we test whether dwosing really works?" the ufologist comes up with some elabroate new reason why ufos can't be detected by raradr or photographed: the ufos have special force fields, etc. It's all just a scam, ad transparent attempt to avoid having to admit that your claims are vacuous and there's absoltuely no hard evidnece to support 'em.
Likewise, every time someone tries to test a dowser's claims, the "negativ aura of doubt" caused by the test destroys the dowsers "delicate spychic equilibrium," so the test doesn't work. Once again, it's just a scam.
Likewise, Dr. Brin's failed argument in favor of liberatarianism seems to me to represent the same kind of scam. ANy time any aspect of libertarianism fails in the real world, Dr. Brin merely declares it to be "not true libertarianism" and dismisses that evidence of failure as irrelevant to criticisms of libertarian philosophy.
The proper response to this kind of scam is always to ask: "What evidence would you require to disprove your claims?"
This always shuts up the ufologists and dowsers real fast. Ask them so specify a double-blind experiment whose results would conclusively disprove their claim, and they fall silent. The reason? Because their claims are vacuous and untestable, thus meaningless.
So I would like to ask Dr. Brin: "What double-blind economic or social experiment would suffice for Dr. Brin to consider libertarianism disproven as a valid political philosophy?"
We can see the disingenuousness of Dr. Brin's paeans to libertarianism, because it's pretty clear that he won't be able to answer. Any time any aspect of libertarianism fails in the real world, Dr. Brin simply declares it to be "not real libertarianism" and sails smoothly on, undettered for facts or reality.
By contrast, let me specify some conditions under which representative democracy with divided government and universal suffrage and a balance of powers would be disproven as a political philosophy:
[1] It's often said that "all democracies eventually become corrupt when the people discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public coffers."
I don't see this happening in any current liberal democracies. There is current liberal democracy in which most fo the people have stopped working and have simply voted themselves a stipend. The evidence seems to show that most people enjoy working for a living, and they do it even when they don't have to (i.e., bored retirees who return to the workforce).
If we saw a large-scale trend of the poplations of liberal democracies slacking off and stopping work and voting themselves lifetime sinceures, I would consider this is a powerful disproof of democracy as a political philosophy. But it simply hasn't happened. Wherever democracy has been tried, this just doesn't happen.
[2] "Mob rule" is often proclaimed as the great danger of representative democracy. If mob rule became SOP in democracies, this would be a valid disproof of democracy as a political philosohpy -- it's the one Plato constantly emphasized.
But once again there's no sign of this. Occasional outbrekas of mass insanity (i.e., the WMD craze and the 2003 Iraq invasion) are always tempered by a rapid return to sanity. The history of the last 200 eyars seems to show that democracies hew to generally moderate policies, with a few rare exceptional outbursts of insanity. The craziness isn't sustained, however, and democracies always seem to self-correct fairly quickly.
Compare with fascism or communism, which failed to self-correct, and whose pathologies reached horrific extremes.
[3] Suppression of exceptional indivdiuals is another claimed weakness of demcoracies. This one is so contrary to observed reality that, if it were true, we could certainly accept it as a disproof of democracy as a political philosophy...but it's so much the opposite of what we observe that the contrary seems true. I.e., all other political philosophies other than democracy seem to suppress exceptional individuals. For bringing out talented musicians and artists and scientists and scholasr and writers and businessmen, nothing seems to work anywhere near as well as democracy.
So what conditions would suffice to disprove libertarianism as a valid political philosophy?
I challenge Dr. Brin to asnwer.
Some historical experiments come to mind: the old west in America had a lot of traits we generally accept as libertarian: lack of laws, personal freedom, lack of central government, etc. The old west in America consisted of a lot of thievery and killiing and stealing and the main effort seems to have been to extend govenrment and law as rapidly as possible into stateless territories in the American west, in order to cut down on all the thieving and killing and lynching.
Chile in the 1980s was a testbed for the Chicago School of Economics in which essentially all the aspects of economic libertarianism were tried. They failed. The Chilean economy collapsed to the point where the deregulation had to be abandoned and normal market contrlls and standard economic regulation had to be put in place.
The current deregulation of banking, the airline industry, the airwaves, food safety, etc., has resulted mainly in the collapse or near-collapse of all these industries, massive corruption, a catastrophic decline in the quality of bank loans, air travel, food safety and so on. The 28 years since the senile criminal Reagan slithered into office have represented a grand experiment in deregulation and libertarianism, and it has failed as decisively as any political philosophy can be said to have failed throughout history. Removing the rules from the economy makes everything break down. Capitalims simply doesn't work without rules.
So what set of conditions, what historical example, which double-blind social experiment, would be sufficient for Dr. Brin to consider libertarianism disproven as a valid political philosophy?
I don't believe Dr. Brin can answer. This suggests that his claims about libertarianism are vacuous, and that whatever he calls "libertarianism" remains such a shadowy indefinable will-of-the-wisp that it's essentially meaningless.
As a larger issue, I've noticed that Dr. Brin tends to define-out-of-existence a number of different poltical and economic philosophies. For example, Dr. Brin appears to consider what most people think of as "the Enlightment" as not the true Enlightenment, but a mere caricature of the real, genuine Enlightenment.
The problem with these kinds of word-games is that words have recognized generally accepted meanings. You don't get to define any word as meaning something entirely different from what people generlaly recognize as the meaning of that word. You especially don't get to define a word ot mean something completely different, and then use that bizarre new meaning as though it were common accepted, or had some actual grounding in observed reality.
Words that Dr. Brin has defined out of existence, to the point where they have esse