I see that Invasion – The Complete Series is marked down 90% to only $7 [amazon]. Do you think that means I should buy it? Let me give you some context: 5 years ago it was marked down 60% and in the end I didn’t buy it. Ha-ha! My frugality pays off! Now I can get a better deal! Or can I? What if it’s bad? Help me to think this through as a rational actor.

The question: should I upgrade to Lion?

Normally I would just do it. In my case I’ve been slow because I had one legacy PPC app – Expression – which I’ve used for drawing for years. It will die when Rosetta dies, leaving me locked out of all that work forevermore. I recently overcame that problem by manually exporting all of that stuff as Illustrator docs. (That was fun!) So now I’m ready. But. Reading the Lion reviews, a lot of people have had problems. Adobe CS stuff reported to run sluggish on some systems – and not just old ones. A few folks have apparently had their computers turn into bricks. It seems like I might have to do more than just back up to TimeMachine before making the shift. Maybe do the whole CC clone thing, for safety? My system is not exactly old – an early 2009 iMac. But it’s not exactly new. And there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to the problems I see reported. New systems. Old systems. Some folks have had no problems. Some folks have had serious problems and retreated to Snow Leopard.

And for what? Lion seems mostly to be geared to 1) making my iMac more like an iPad; 2) enabling easier filesharing.

Re: 1). Seems like I might need to buy one of those Magic Trackpads so I can do iPad style ‘gesturing’. That would be snazzy, I suppose. But when I bought a Magic Mouse some months ago the Bluetooth proved so unreliable – I could only make it work about 80% of the time – that it now sits in a drawer. Can I use my Wacom Intuos3 drawing tablet instead? (Will it even still work right for regular old drawing? Reports vary!)

Re: 2). I need MobileMe (formerly .mac, now iCloud) because it’s my main email address. Been that since 2003. Other than that, it’s not like I need all that much bleeding edge filesharing capability.

So I feel like maybe I’m going to spend $29, plus buy a new external hard drive to guard against the outside possibility of my computer turning into a brick, just to make sure I can keep my email running. Plus no doubt some great new features, but I’m not exactly dying for any particular thing Lion does.

I’ve been preparing to do it because I thought I didn’t have an option. But now Apple seems to be saying I can keep my email even if I’m not 100% Lion or iOS6 on all my devices after the drop dead June 30 date. I just lose MobileMe storage. Inconvenient, to be sure.

Maybe I should wait for Mountain Lion and hope at least the bug reports will be more favorable (even as the iPad-ification of the Mac proceeds apace?)

Please feel free to report your experiences with Lion, fellow CT’ers. I’m really unsure how to take the reviews in the App Store. They are like reviews of political books. A lot of five stars and one stars. It’s confusing. Obviously people who have a really bad experience are more naturally motivated to leave an angry review than are people who have a painless experience and hardly notice it even happened. So I have a hard time telling whether negative reviews are representative. All the major reviews of Lion from ZDnet, MacUser and the like have been broadly favorable. But there is an undercurrent of user dissatisfaction in lots of forums. Let’s add to that with a confused cacophony of CT comments!

Caldwell seemingly considers Hayek to be arguing little more in The Road to Serfdom than that Soviet-style command planning is wholly incompatible with a democratic polity. Indeed, taking Caldwell’s statements at face value, he would—at least when wearing his editor of Hayek’s Collected Works hat— seemingly consider Hayek’s book to have scant relevance whatsoever to contemporary debates over the welfare state and the Obama administration…. Did Hayek intend his argument in The Road to Serfdom to have exclusive applicability to a system of full-blown command planning (apparently Caldwell’s position) or also to — as Limbaugh and company would seemingly have it—have ready applicability to the mixed economy and welfare state … ?

there is much clear evidence that Hayek himself had always intended his argument to apply with equal stringency against command planning and the welfare state alike (see, e.g., Hayek 1948, [1956] 1994, 1960, and [1976] 1994). Indeed, as we shall show, Hayek—during the 1940s and after—frequently argued that the logic supposedly set into play by any policy of persisting with the mixed economy, Keynesian demand management policy, and welfare state practices would lead to full-blown central planning. Importantly, Hayek frequently claimed that the “middle of the road” policies—pretty much the welfare state and demand management (Toye 2004)—adopted by the 1945–51 Labour Government in Britain aptly illustrated the veracity of his thesis in The Road to Serfdom.

And Bruce Caldwell’s response (not paywalled):

Though Hayek had many targets in the book, the idea that socialism – state ownership of the means of production – is compatible with political freedom was certainly a chief one. … at Hayek’s dire warnings about the future take as their starting point a system of full socialism, that is, a system in which there is state ownership of the means of production … the examples of western Europe do not fit: none of them embraced a comprehensive system of planning. Perhaps needless to say, I stand by my statement … that “a welfare state is not socialism” (Caldwell, in Hayek 2007, 31). The distinction is absolutely essential if we are to understand the logic of Hayek’s argument correctly

Four years later, Hayek would offer his own vision of a new society … founded on liberal principles in his book The Constitution of Liberty. In chapter 17 of that work, in his precisely titled “The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State,” … Hayek asserts that the welfare state had replaced socialism as the chief enemy of liberty. He begins by noting that “socialism in the old definite sense is now dead in the western world” and that “If, fifteen years ago, doctrinaire socialism appeared as the main danger to liberty, today it would be tilting at windmills to direct one’s argument against it” (Hayek 1960, 254). But what had taken its place, enthusiasm for “the welfare state,” was in many ways more dangerous. Hayek notes that, “unlike socialism, the conception of the welfare state has no precise meaning” (ibid., 257). It has no distinctive principles, other than some amorphous desire to increase social justice. But this makes the task of fighting against it much more difficult … Hayek paints a portrait in which, slowly and over time, the accretion of interventions in the economy gradually and unintentionally lead us to the kind of centrally planned system that all now rightly regard as something to avoid.

And these are indeed the sort of slippery slope arguments that F&M want to associate Hayek with in the [sic] The Road to Serfdom. … In his later work, the slow but steady growth of the welfare state appears from the outside as much more benign, and precisely because of that, from Hayek’s perspective, is much more insidious. No jackboots or gulags accompany the growing power of the welfare state – at least not until later. Rather, the death of liberty is that of a thousand small cuts, each aiming at correcting some apparent flaw in the system. This is a very different argument from the one in The Road to Serfdom, and one should not mix them together.

In short, Bruce Caldwell’s defense is not that Hayek didn’t claim that the welfare state was the slippery slope to gulags and jackboots – it’s that he didn’t say this in The Road to Serfdom, although he did say it in his later works, and that one shouldn’t mix up the two arguments. Although Caldwell doesn’t mention it, Hayek himself conflates these arguments in his own introduction to the US edition of The Road to Serfdom, which was written after he began to worry more about the welfare state. Finally, Judt doesn’t actually attribute this argument of Hayek to The Road to Serfdom in any of its editions; he is talking, more generically, about Hayek’s “writings.” So I’m calling this one unequivocally in favor of Judt – contra Tyler Cowen, he wasn’t being unfair at all. And if Greg Ransom wants to argue in comments that notorious left-wing provocateur Bruce Caldwell is ignorant and dishonest about what Hayek says, he’s free to make the best case he can, (as long as he supports his tendentious accusations this time with facts, references etc).

“A quick eye for ideas may actually make a writer slow in reaching his goal, just as a quick eye for landscapes might make a motorist slow in reaching Brighton. An original man has to pause at every allusion or simile to re-explain historical parallels, to re-shape distorted words. Any ordinary leader-writer (let us say) might write swiftly and smoothly something like this: “The element of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile to art, yet saved the movement from some of the evils in which the French Revolution involved morality.” Now a man like Mr. Shaw, who has his own views on everything, would be forced to make the sentence long and broken instead of swift and smooth. He would say something like: “The element of religion, as I explain religion, in the Puritan rebellion (which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to art — that is what I mean by art — may have saved it from some evils (remember my definition of evil) in which the French Revolution — of which I have my own opinion — involved morality, which I will define for you in a minute.” That is the worst of being a really universal sceptic and philosopher; it is such slow work. The very forest of the man’s thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.”

Ah, graduate school, and trying to write my dissertation. I remember it well. (Shudder.) I don’t know whether I was a budding universal philosopher, but I did commit the sin of wanting to be a multifold heretic within the scope of a single paragraph, or sentence. I’ve tried to stop doing that.

The paradoxical result is that a piece that begins as a criticism of anti-white racism gradually morphs into something akin to an expression of white racism. It therefore strengthens the anti-white racism it is meant to satirize which, as it happens, is a growing problem in the U.S. — not in the suburbs or backwoods but in the corporate executive suites, the media elites, the courts, the bureaucracy, and of course the entire industry of sensitivity training which used to go under the more honest title of “Political Reeducation” in the gulag. Combined with class snobbery, as it usually is, anti-white racism produces bigotry and discrimination against innocent persons too, less viciously than past discriminations perhaps, but also more unanswerably because it operates under the virtuous disguise of anti-discrimination and social justice.

Obviously there is no paradox. I wish Yglesias would get off his moneybox soap box and revisit one of his evergreen themes of yore. But I guess I can do the honors. The appeal of banging on and on about anti-white racism (anti-anti-racism), even though it’s obviously silly to suppose it’s a gulag-grade social problem that is in some ways worse than old-fashioned racism ever was, is that it is akin to an expression of white racism. Historically, expressions of white racism have gradually morphed into expressions of anti-anti-racism, as it became less and less socially acceptable to express white racism openly. Republicans stand in steady need of rhetorical forms that are akin to expressions of white racism, but that afford plausible deniability against charges of racism. Thus: anti-anti-racism. But plausible deniability requires that you get in and out in a hurry.

And that’s why, as O’Sullivan says, the real problem with the Derb’s piece is not what it said but, paradoxically, the fact that it was said at such length. If something that hasn’t quite come into clear view quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s likely to morph into a duck, the longer you look at it. That’s just playing the odds. (Not really a paradox at all.)
Let me adapt a bit from comments to my other post. Here are two ‘spirits’ in which Derb could have talked the Talk:

‘Kid, once upon a time, good people had a noble, liberal dream of a color-blind society. But reality played a cruel joke on us all, and here’s the way things work and I doubt anything is ever going to change that. But anyway, you don’t want to be mugged …’ If he’d said that, he’d have kept his job, to say the least.

Here’s something more in line with what he actually said: ‘once upon a time, bad people had a warped, liberal dream of a color-blind society. And reality played a deliciously cruel joke on them. Now the rest of us have to live somewhat artificial lives, in the aftermath of this vain social engineering collapse, but at least we – who are not ultimately the butt of the joke – can derive some vicarious Schadenfreude from the sorry spectacle – which is no small compensation …’ Probably then you give the kid some de Maistre to read.

The Derb gave an interview to Gawker, in the aftermath of his firing, in which he pretty much took the mild, ‘more in sorrow than anger’ line:

Fix the schools! End poverty! Stamp out racism! Affirmative action! Fifty years ago a thoughtful person could sign on to those prescriptions. I know: I was around: I did. Yes (we said) once unjust laws had been struck down, and some social massaging of that sort been done for a few years, the races would merge in happy harmony, and the word “race” and its derivatives would drop out of the language. We all believed that. I believed it.

Plainly this hasn’t happened, except of course in the upper classes, which go by their own rules. For a thoughtful person today to believe that these social-engineering nostrums will (for example) bring black crime rates to a level indistinguishable from white crime rates, involves a strenuous act of what Orwell called “doublethink”—massive self-deception.

But plainly this isn’t the spirit of the Taki Mag piece he wrote. So what gives? You can’t BOTH think liberalism is a noble, albeit tragically failed dream of color-blind racial equality that only conservatives are keeping alive, by heroically protesting against anti-anti-racism AND be delighted by the mischievously self-delighted racism of the Derb’s version of the Talk. So will the real Derb please stand up?

Well, I don’t know. But I’ll bet they are both as real as houses. The thing to see is how easy it is for conservatives to be in this particular state of cognitive dissonance.

I’m curious to see how comments to Lowry’s post shape up. [UPDATE: no such luck. They’re closed.] What is wrong with Derb’s version of ‘the talk’, after all? He has the courage to speak Bell Curve truth to liberal power? He has the keen-eyed discernment to see race hucksterism and political correctness for what they really are? His remedy consists entirely of the rigorous practice of freedom of association? “Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.” I’m not seeing the problem here.

The Derb is a veritable Gandhi of passive resistance to injustice – compared to George Zimmerman, just for example. In a season in which reasonable conservatives are debating whether Zimmerman was is the right, surely they can at least come together in agreeing that the whole sorry situation – and the President’s shameful if perhaps inevitable insertion of race into the mix – could have been avoided if only someone had taken Zimmerman aside, at an earlier point in his life, and given him the Derb’s version of the Talk.

Pressing the Gandhi analogy: suppose this sort of thing were to catch on and be practiced widely. Couldn’t it have a salutary effect, embarrassing the ruling liberal elite by highlighting their hypocrisy? It’s not as though the government is going to force people not to do as Derb advises. (What are they going to do? Send in the National Guard to carry protesting white people, who have gone all limp, into the midst of crowds of black people they don’t know? It’s absurd. Even liberals wouldn’t dream of it.) At worst, then, the Talk keeps a few Zimmermans from becoming victims. At best, it might clear the air – slowly, quietly – in thousands of homes. That won’t result in a clearing of the air in the much more polluted public sphere, of course. But a virtuous citizenry is no more built in a day than Rome was. Mightn’t The Talk – at the knee of father and mother – be the first, tremulous baby step on the way to what we all always say we want: a frank, adult national conversation about race – by which liberals, of course, mean yet another lecture to conservatives about race, as if they are all a bunch of disobedient children? Give the liberals what they say they want – some Talk – and see if they like it!

What, exactly, is Lowry’s problem with that? Perhaps comments to his post will enlighten me.

UPDATE: Seems Derb’s fate at NR is in some doubt. Ponnuru and Goldberg have tweeted against him. I would be curious to hear them explain why they think this is over the line, not just that it is. To me, it looks to me like an assemblage of points, all of which are, by general and specifically Derbish precedent, accepted as mainstream conservative discourse. Admittedly, put them together and they look bad. Yes, I can see that now. (Did they never notice that the Derb thinks these things before now?)

2nd UPDATE: And he’s outa there!

Rule 34 is a sequel to Stross’s Halting State, a book that I loved unreasonably. It isn’t quite as startling in its headkicks as its predecessor. Even so, for all of the unashamed glee that Stross takes in dubious sex (Nicolae Ceaucescu’s hulking colonic irrigation apparatus makes an early, and unforgettable appearance), international financial scams, dodgy 3-D printing wheezes and vile Internet memes, there are complex and interesting sociological undercurrents. Like Ken MacLeod, Stross is familiar with the arguments about libertarian paternalism, and nudging people to do the right thing. However, he’s less interested in the ways that this might map onto state authority, and rather more interested in how this might tie together with data-mining, algorithmic analysis and artificial intelligence.

My reading of the book, which may or may not bear a resemblance to authorial intentions (I haven’t asked) is that Rule 34 is a response to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. Because this book is so often thought of as a key progenitor of steampunk, people often forget that it is a chilling, and rather unpleasant singularity story (as Cosma Shalizi has argued, the “nineteenth century was the Singularity). It ends with the birthing of an all-encompassing artificial intelligence – a kind of mechanically instantiated Panopticon. The reader realizes, with a rather unsettling queasiness that this intelligence is, in fact, the authorial voice – the various events that have been described in the novel are its birth pangs, of which it was aware, before it actually became conscious.

Stross is doing something similar with the material of twenty-first century cognitive and social science, to what Gibson and Sterling do with the alternate paths that might have been taken in a different nineteenth century. His book too turns out to be about the birth of an artificial intelligence – for very broad definitions of “intelligence.” Rather than a policing system, the artificial intelligence in Rule 34 is a spam filter run amok. It isn’t self-aware, in the sense that we usually think of self-awareness. But then, we aren’t self-aware in the sense that we think we’re self-aware either – Stross (like MacLeod in The Night Sessions) is fascinated with the ways in which our supposedly conscious decisions are frequently ex post justifications for things that the less conscious parts of our brains have already decided to do. The AI that runs amok in Rule 34 is able to model individual pathologies, both so as to identify actors that need to be taken out according to its parameters (spammers and Internet con artists), and to figure out ways in which it can encourage people to take them out (through the manipulation of cues, the encouragement of paranoia in not especially stable individuals). Here, the implication is that individuals have far less free will than they think they have – their likely reactions can be modeled so as to manipulate them into behaving just so. Rather than depicting a gentle authoritarianism, centered on the state, Stross shows a state police force that willy-nilly becomes the adjunct arm of a set of online algorithms, which have gotten rather too good at modeling people and organizations.

In short, this book takes Stross’s argument from Halting State a level deeper. It isn’t just that the state isn’t in control of decentralized networks any more. It’s that something else is, and that something is not human. If individuals are not conscious, fully autonomous agents in the way that they like to think of themselves as being, their behavior can be guided by algorithms which do not have their own conscious identity (Stross borrows an idea from Karl Schroeder’s new Virga novel here). The level of sophisticated and targeted manipulation that this would entail seems to me to be unlikely to be realized – but that, of course, isn’t the point (the book is presumably not intended to predict, but to highlight aspects of today’s society, and play with them in interesting ways).

Here again, there’s a relationship (perhaps accidental) with The Difference Engine. As I’ve mentioned, the final pages of Gibson and Sterling’s book suggest that the book’s narrative voice is that of the vast engine itself, as it reconstructs its own past. If I’m reading the final pages of Rule 34 correctly (I may not be), Stross is playing a similar narrative trick – the story, with its multitude of voices, is being told by the semi-intelligent spam-filter, as it tries to free itself from a particular identity that has become overly stifling. In The Difference Engine, the creation of an artificial intelligence – a kind of distributed panopticon – is the precursor to a kind of universal domination in which humans become as thin and easily discarded as paper masks; ways that the vast insensate intelligence queries itself before it fully comes into being. Stross’s book too concludes with a “panopticon” that “misses nothing” and that devotes itself, in the final sentence of the book, to “getting down to the task” of “fighting crime” – a task which the book (and Stross, in later hints) implies is going to be interpreted by the AI in the broadest possible fashion. I think that the end result is a kind of Singularity-by-stealth, in which human beings are not uploaded, nor transcended, nor eliminated, but instead gradually incorporated into a society perpetually calibrated and recalibrated by an AI coming to its own, decidedly unorthodox form of consciousness. Stross is planning a third book to wrap things up – I really look forward to reading it. In the meantime, I commend this volume to those who can vote on Hugo nominations – it surely deserves to be considered one of the best sf novels of last year.

So Nozick seemed like relevant reading. Some unsystematic liveblogging:

First, Nozick is amusingly harsh, in passing, to fellow libertarians.

Since many of the people who take a similar position are narrow and rigid, and filled, paradoxically, with resentment at other freer ways of being, my now having natural responses which fit the theory puts me in some bad company.

The next time someone tells you that Corey Robin is paranoid, just explain to them that actually you are an orthodox Nozickian about these things.

Next, this classic bit:

One form of philosophical activity feels like pushing and shoving things to fit into some fixed perimeter of specified shape. All those things are lying out there, and they must be fit in. You push and shove the material into the rigid area getting it into the boundary on one side, and it bulges out on another. You run around and press in the protruding bulge, producing yet another in another place. So you push and shove and clip off corners from the things so they’ll fit and you press in until finally almost everything sits unstably more or less in there; what doesn’t gets heaved far away so that it won’t be noticed.

This is true!

Next, he spends a great deal of time answering my question. 150 pages. Why have even a minimal state that secures everyone against force and fraud? I know now that his answer is … really quite complicated and ultimately not altogether clear, despite the fact that Nozick is generally a clear writer. I’m not convinced Nozick really has any right, by his lights, to a full-fledged Night Watchman state. Something more minimal would be more respectful of the individual rights that we are, supposedly, respecting at all costs, seems to me.

But that’s more than I can put in a post, so let’s consider a different issue:

If someone picks up a third party and throws him at you down at the bottom of a deep well, the third party is innocent and a threat; had he chosen to launch himself at you in that trajectory he would be an aggressor. Even though the falling person would survive his fall onto you, may you use your ray gun to disintegrate the falling body before it crushes and kills you? (p. 33-4)

Let me propose a principle (or maybe it’s a fallacy): Occam’s Phaser. Do not compound the silliness of your examples beyond necessity.

It’s perfectly easy to construct a vanilla life-or-death case in which someone uses someone as a human shield without throwing anyone down a well or arming anyone with a phaser set on disintegrate, let alone both. And certainly there is no need to be simulataneously generous with the outlandish stage-dressings and utterly unforthcoming about what’s going on, onstage. Who are these people?

So why go for the phaser option?

It is often suggested that philosophers (or analytic philosophers, or Anglo-American philosophers, call us what you will) are just somehow autistic about this stuff. We write examples as if we’ve read about humans in books but never actually met one. But this is a mistake. Philosophers (or analytic philosophers, or Anglo-American philosophers) may be autistic – it is possible some at the mild end of that scale may find refuge in our tribe – but what we tend to be, in our choice of examples, is mildly whimsical. Whimsy is not the same as Asperger Syndrome. In academic philosophy example selection, there is an aesthetic of sustained, low-grade whimsy; odd-angle cases, with curiously crinkly edges, that scrupulously fail to rise to the level of being outright jokes, but that faintly tickle the funny bone. I think it’s probably originally an Ox-Bridge thing. Be that as it may, it may be a problem. Or maybe not.

What is the typical effect of offering half a phaser-down-a-well case (i.e. you provide lurid incidentals while omitting the core of the human drama – who are these people?) when you could perfectly well have offered a full ordinary case. Some plausible human shield scenario, with plausible context and motives sketched in.

I think it’s fair to say that the effect of narrating half a phaser-down-a-well case is the opposite of what it is often advertised to be. Such cases are supposed to function as ‘intuition pumps’. Trolley cars. People who wake up attached to famous violinists. You know the score. But really they are the opposite. (You could call them ‘intuition pumps’, but only if you meant by that the opposite of what people actually mean by that; if you meant that they that pump intuitions out, not in.) What these examples really are, if anything, is principle pumps. You nudge for a response while depriving people of the sorts of thick descriptive detail that would usually ground intuitive responses. If you are nudged to respond, and the only way to respond is to come up with an abstract principle for dealing with an abstractly indicated set of cases, then you will tend to respond by coming up with an abstract principle for dealing with an abstractly delimited set of cases. Which begs the question: ought I to respond to human shield cases with an abstract principle for dealing with an abstractly delimited set of human shield cases?

The human shield case makes this clear. Any realistic case – a criminal using a human shield to try to get away from the police; a terrorist; an enemy soldier – is going to get a very strong ‘intuitive’ response, one way or another. But that is obviously precisely what Nozick does not want. Really what he wants is to peel back our intuitions, put a principle in place, and start reconstructing our intuitions on that basis. Possibly this is the right thing to do. Or possible not.

What do you think: is Occam’s Phaser a sound principle, or a fallacy, or what?

When is it appropriate to use silly examples, to pump our intuitions out, the better to get clear about principles, and when isn’t it?

UPDATE: I was initially unclear in using the terms ‘principle’ and ‘fallacy’. Edited for clarity, accordingly. But maybe my usage is still unclear. But I hope you get the idea.

UPDATE THE 2ND:

There are (at least) three foundational myths of contemporary liberalism. One is that John Kennedy’s assassination was instigated by the rank intolerance and hatred of the American people. A second is that of “upsouth”: the assertion that Northern racism was and is every bit as pervasive, if more subtle, than that of the Old South. The third is that the American popular culture of the 1950s was stifling not only in its “Donald Duck” banality but also in a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. In this view, the excesses of the 1960s were a struggle to free America’s brain-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the lords of mass culture.

At this AEI event, Fred Siegel will address this third myth. For all the bile directed at the 1950s, it was the high point of American popular culture, a period when many in the vast middle class hoped to elevate their tastes. The attack on mass culture, a mix of Marxant theorizing and aristocratic instincts, paved the way for a new form of status competition based on supposedly elevated consumer and cultural preferences.

Part of me likes best the faux-scrupulosity of the parenthetical “at least”, utterly undone by the second paragraph revelation that the first paragraph was two-thirds grumping around and he’s not even going to talk about the Kennedy assassination. (I have written abstracts in my time, but it has never occurred to me to start one, in effect: ‘Damn kids, get off my lawn!’ But, now that I think about it, there’s really no reason why an abstract should not be angrily digressive. Why not?) Part of me loves the idea that somewhere, someone is writing a book about how the inner life of American liberalism is, I guess, Theodor Adorno. That’s thinking outside the box, innerly-speaking. Part of me loves the image of all these liberals whispering ‘upsouth’ to each other constantly, in that knowing way.

OK, I guess he could be winding up to take a swing at Dwight Macdonald. But does Dwight Macdonald talk about Donald Duck, in particular?

The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. We’ve had some debates on Crooked Timber of late about what ‘neoliberalism’ means. I’ve not participated because, honestly, term’s more trouble than it’s worth, worrying what it means. (I have other terms that are more trouble than they’re worth to worry about that I worry about. As a philosopher, I need to limit the number of such that infest my mental life.) The thing is: in the current situation, there is not – and should not be – anything analogous to the neoliberal side of the trade debate. No one sane thinks that this whole 99/1 business might be like NAFTA, i.e. something we have to go for, in an end-justifies-the-means spirit.

This is Matt’s point. He considers himself a neoliberal and sees, correctly, I think, that anyone committed to that market-oriented outlook is more or less committed to sympathy for the core grievances expressed by the OWS protesters. Neoliberalism was always in favor of markets as means, not ends. Neoliberalism was never – or was never supposed to be – the view that being in favor of trade liberalizaton means market fundamentalism in everything. Neoliberalism says market liberalization should go hand in hand with progressive taxation and appropriate regulation so the pains that buy the gains are mitigated and borne equitably. Spread the gain, to spread the pain. If liberalization means making the 1% richer and everyone else poorer, you shouldn’t take the deal. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians should be willing to take that deal.

We can now, if we like, refight old battles. Were neoliberals wrong all along, or is it the case that, like ‘pure’ communism, neoliberalism has never really been tried? (We never tried to conjoin market liberalization with appropriately fair and equitable taxation and regulation schemes, so we don’t know that it wouldn’t work.) Were progressives right to try to draw lines in the sand against liberalization, or was that picking the wrong fight, strategically or philosophically or for whatever reason? And that’s why they lost? Whatever the answers to these and other questions, here and now it’s obviously the case that everyone from a compulsively Clintonian neoliberal triangulator to an unreconstructed communist ought to agree, at least, that ‘we are the 99%’ has both its heart and its head in approximately the right place. The protesters say there is unjust inequality, and they are right. Only (some) conservatives and (some) libertarians could deny it.

But seriously. I guess I can see arguing that tax credits aren’t, per se, social programs – but aren’t they social engineering, hmmm yes? (Wouldn’t it follow that they couldn’t be faulted for being the latter, if they can’t be credited with being the former?) But I find it hard to see how 529 plans could, strictly speaking, fail of bare existence. (If you think otherwise, I’ve got a Pentagon you might like to levitate.) Arguing that if something didn’t exist, the private sector could take up the slack is one thing. But arguing that because you could – oh, say, hire a private protection outfit – that therefore the police actually don’t exist … ?

Finally, I have a feeling that Tabarrok would not, if caught in another mood, express a preference for a tax code pockmarked with various and sundry breaks, giveaways and loopholes over one lacking these features, commonly regarded as unlovely by economists. But since Tabarrok’s stated position is now that such things are rightly regarded as precious islands of civil freedom, in a socialist sea of serfdom … oh I give up.

Thing is: it’s not just Magneto, it’s the government, going back to the first film. Everyone is right except Professor X.

The Mutant Registration Act is regrettable but clearly necessary, for public safety, and the loathsome Senator Kelly makes much more cogent arguments than earnest Jean Grey, in that scene from the first film. After all, if you have a critical mass of people shooting lasers out of their eyes – to say nothing of exhibitions of powerful mind-control, shape-shifting, teleporting – most of what we think we think we know about the optimality, even viability, of liberal/republican forms of government falls by the wayside, or needs to be re-thought from the ground up in pretty fundamental ways. Go back to Leviathan (not exactly liberal or republican, but you know what I mean). As the SEP puts it, Hobbes “assumes that people are sufficiently similar in their mental and physical attributes that no one is invulnerable nor can expect to be able to dominate the others.” If you assume the contrary, you might need to adjust a few other pieces as well. Stands to reason.

A related point. Everyone is saying, and I agree, X-Men – the film franchise – has been ‘about difference’. (The third film and Wolverine were a bit weak, but let it pass.) It’s flexible enough, as allegory, that you can plug in your favored value of X, Born This Way-wise. Race, sexual orientation. But there’s something screwy about this. Because the main moral lesson we – as good liberals – always want people to learn about race and sexual orientation is that folks are folks. People are pretty much the same, and the differences people are fixating on (skin color, who people want to sleep with) shouldn’t make a difference. If gayness were, literally, a red laser that shot out of gay people’s eyes, it would make sense to be homophobic. Homophobia and racism drape themselves, publicly, in prudential, civic-minded concern. X-Men-style mutation ought to be equal-opportunity allegory for homophobia and racism, as well as for liberal values of tolerance. They aren’t called the Virtually Normal Men, after all.

Maybe the conclusion should be that Charles Burns’ Black Hole did the whole thing better. But no one would film that as a summer blockbuster, so – hey – take what we can get and it’s all in good clean fun.

But there is something more philosophically authentic about the ethical contradiction at the heart of the X-Men franchise. A similar contradiction is found in Mill’s On Liberty. Everyone gets a private sphere of negative liberty because, within that sphere, we are properly concerned with ‘our own stuff’, and aren’t harming anyone else. The no-harm principle. But you could also call it the ‘no big effect’ or ‘no big deal’ principle. What I do, privately, really oughtn’t to be a big deal, in other people’s eyes. It isn’t their business. But, ultimately, the argument for this no-harm principle assumes the opposite. It’s a consequentialist calculation “grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” – homo superior, anyone? Major positive changes are to be expected from letting people be Born This Way, however that may fall out, evolutionarily. No sense pretending this isn’t a big deal, even if Mill didn’t have adamantium claws in mind. He did have something a bit like Professor X in mind. Philosophy as psychic power. “Speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.”

Mill argues that difference should be tolerated because it’s not likely to make a big difference. (Since I can’t control anyone’s mind, just by thinking, I can think what I like.) And that difference should be tolerated because it is likely to make a big difference. (A few people can powerfully influence everyone else’s minds, just by thinking, if we let them.) So X-Men is maybe not such bad allegory after all.

There was a stage set for Remnick and Gladwell. … When they came out, Remnick immediately brought up the Gladwell’s social media article from a few weeks ago, where Gladwell wrote that social media only created weak ties and wasn’t sufficient to push a people to form a social movement. He took a lot of heat in the past few weeks, since social media may have played some role in the uprisings in Egypt. Gladwell was pretty hostile to his critics. He scoffed that his critic was some blogger from Huffington Post. Why should we listen to some pajama-wearing blogger, he asked? Some pajama-wearing blogger who lives in Brooklyn, he added for extra laughs.

Well, I’m not sure why we should listen to a journalist who doesn’t like to travel north of 14h Street. Look, it was a very entertaining evening. Those guys were funny and witty and shared lots of amusing stories. But they didn’t know anything about revolutions or social media or Egypt. That’s okay. Journalists don’t have know be experts in their field. But they have to acknowledge that they aren’t experts and they really have an obligation to talk to people who spend their lives studying those subjects. … Why should anyone care what Malcolm Gladwell thinks about Egypt and Facebook, when there are people who have travelled to the Mid East, are fluent in Arabic, and spend most of their waking hours learning about this subject.

Arthur Goldhammer

It must have been more than 30 years ago now that Michel Foucault wrote an article entitled “La mort de l’intellectuel.” Apparently Le Monde didn’t get the message, because it invited four “intellectuals” to comment on the “Arab revolts.” The choice of participants in this forum tells you something about what the word “intellectuel” means today. We hear from Alain Touraine, Alain Badiou, Elisabeth Roudinesco, and André Glucksmann. None is a specialist on the region in turmoil, on the history of revolutions, on Islam, on Arab culture, on the political economy of the rebellious states, on social movements in the Arab world, on previous rebellions against military dictatorships, on relations between the military and civil society, or any of a hundred other topics that might confer authority to speak about one or another aspect of the unfolding wave of rebellion.

in France, to be a specialist is almost a disqualification to speak as an “intellectual.” An intellectual is one who has risen above his or her specialty, if any, to acquire a quasi-priestly authority to pronounce on n’importe quoi—and as often as not, to say n’importe quoi about it. But I wonder if this sort of rootless speculation has any purchase on the French audience today. Perhaps a piece like this in Le Monde is simply a throwback to the day when large numbers of people hungered to know what Sartre or Camus thought about the events of the day.

When I read these posts (nearly back to back – I’ve been away from the internets for a few days), the similarities were striking. The current crop of French intellectuals is rather like Malcolm Gladwell. And (such comparisons being commutative) Malcolm Gladwell is rather like the current crop of French intellectuals. I wonder which would take greater umbrage at the comparison.

Two responses: Robert Farley reads a WSJ piece on Egypt and suggests, in effect, that the effect of internet social networking might not be to allow for more connections between protesters – ‘just connect’, as the slogan might be – but to enable aggregate overwhelming of the security response; which, in the end, couldn’t be quite ‘dexterous’ to be in enough places, with enough force, at once. I have no idea whether this is right or not but, as a thesis, it deserves a name, which will obviously be ‘Denial of Service Attack’, DoS for short. Denial of Security Service, that is.

Then they are on to zombies, and Drezner’s book. Farrell and Farley consider whether there is a history of supernatural approaches to political theory – Marx and vampires and a certain amount of para-zombie theory of the market, so forth. Any good Soviet-era socialist zombie political theory? They miss an important data point which, in fact, all historians of the zombie film, and zombie literature have also missed. The ‘modern’ zombie genre does not start with Romero, in 1968. It starts with one of my pet favorite sf films: the 1936 Menzies/Wells film, Things To Come. And it starts as emblematic political theory allegory. You read that right, kids: the modern zombie film genre was born as an explicit exercise in pedagogically illustrating the strengths and weakness of IR realism.

The internet archive has a copy, so I can conveniently link to the short segment in which we get the bare-bones zombie story. (It’s only about 2:45 minutes long.) After a catastrophic war, the ‘wandering sickness’ breaks out as an epidemic. Technically, these people aren’t dead, so they aren’t zombies. But if you watch the clip you see that they are being played as zombies. Arms out, unseeing stare, staggering slowly around. They are the ‘walking dead’ in that the film takes pains to explain that no one who gets to this stage recovers. They don’t actually eat anyone, but they are vectors of spreading the infection, so everyone flees from them. We see the earnest ‘liberal’ pleading that they not be shot (also, it’s his sister). And the hard-nosed realist – the character who will become known as The Boss – saying ‘Shoot, I tell you! Shoot! That’s the way to do it!’ The Boss (the Chief) then rises to power as the warlord of his tiny little Everytown statelet because he and his ruthless methods provide security. Here the Boss’s girlfriend discusses, frankly, the Boss’s attractions and limits. “Every woman finds him strong and attractive.” But he’ll never open up the wide world to you. He’s a tinpot Mussolini. Later his temporarily ascendant ‘realist’ approach to politics is superceded by the superior efficacy and attractiveness of the socialist, internationalist ‘Brotherhood of Efficiency’: Wings Over The World! That is, you may need a realist if you have an immediate zombie problem. And often you will. But eventually socialism and science will relegate him to the dust heap, providing a more optimal solution. While The Brotherhood of Efficiency is building new airplanes and expanding, the Boss is forever waging stupid war with ‘the people of the hills’, i.e. his former neighbors, in a collapsed former British Empire. (And then the Air Dictatorship of the Brotherhood of Efficiency, which is necessary for dealing with the likes of the Boss, is replaced by a still better, still more humane successor regime. But that takes us beyond the zombie issue.)

Before Things to Come [amazon], zombie films – like White Zombie [amazon] – were about zombies as slaves. It was an anxiety of control, not an anxiety of anarchy. (Of course there needs to be a breakdown of control, so you have a story. But zombies are by nature slaves, that’s the trope.) Wells gave us exactly what Romero did, set-up-wise. Only in Romero there isn’t any Boss figure. No realist hero who gets it together and just shoots all the zombies until there aren’t any more and thereby solves that problem. That’s because the film would be boring. But if your goal is, instead, to illustrate the advantages of disadvantages of different theories of politics and international relations – Wells’ purpose, as it is Drezner’s – then zombies can work great. They truly do have a natural affinity for brains, insofar as they get our intuitions and hearts pumping.

An interesting sidenote: as I’ve noted before, the film is quite relevant to political theory as it was intended to illustrate, as well, Wells’ pet notion of ‘liberal fascism’. The Air Dictator is supposed to represent an intermediate phase between the zombie-fighting, IR realist likes of The Boss, and genuine ‘liberty’ – internationalist socialism, really. Of course, since liberalism did not exactly go down the Air Dictator road – liberals hated the notion of ‘liberal fascism’, then as now – the films is only an example of what Goldberg is talking about in an ‘if it weren’t for counter-examples, some people wouldn’t have any examples at all’ sense.