In the context of all the sabre-rattling going-on these days, a quotation is gaining some traction:

The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you.

And our governments are very much the same.

I don't know what the original context of Ms Satrapi's remarks were, but now they are now being used as-if she were a proxy for the Iranian people and the listener for the American people. If either person is admitted to be exceptional in some relevant way, then there is no general lesson to be drawn! Ms Satrapi in fact lives in France, rather than in Iran; there wouldn't be much reason to fear her being bombed qua Iranian by Western military forces. So we're to take it that the typical American and the typical Iranian are so similar as to be able each perfectly to understand the other.

We're also told that our respective states are pretty much the same. With the previous claim about people, this would imply that very similar relationships obtain between the peoples and their respective states. But, more than this, we are further told that the differences between the peoples and their respective states is greater than the difference between the peoples.

Well, logical alarm bells go-off in my head. This set of claims of similarity is not consistent with direction of such remarks more to one people than to another. If the relationships are as claimed, then such remarks should and could be directed to both populations. But they're not, and for good reason.

The claims of similarity between peoples and of differences between peoples and states being greater than differences between peoples should at least be questioned, though they are not evidently false and might prove true.

My experience of non-Americans from almost anywhere is that they greatly over-estimate how well they understand Americans. However, though a claim of similarity of peoples being proved by mutual understanding is false, people can be quite similar each without understanding the other; perhaps indeed the differences between Americans and Iranians are not so great. I wouldn't simply reject the claim, but it would need some substantiation.

I'm not sure how to measure the difference between peoples and states relative to the difference between people and people, but let's accept the claim that that the former is greater than the latter.

The states are not very much the same. It would be hard to falsify a claim that the proportions or absolute numbers of knaves and of fools in each state are the same, but also hard to prove such a claim; in any case, the powers of the knaves and of the fools are not the same in one state as opposed to the other. While the United States indeed has got more repressive in some important respects, and unfortunately can be expected to continue to do so, it is simply not as repressive as is the Iranian state. For example, in America, one can still easily and openly criticize the state and social norms, and consume such attacks, without fear of being criminally charged. (I suspect that Ms Satrapi's claim that the states are very much the same results largely from a combination of nationalistic embarrassment and insufficiently critical consumption of French antipathy to America.)

(I note en passant that it would be a d_mn'd fine thing if the anti-war political left would remember the propensity to wickedness of the state when it starts to get excited by thoughts of expanding the state for the various purposes that the left favors. The anti-war political right and classical liberals don't lose sight of that propensity when talk shifts from war to other matters.)

The relationship between the Iranian people and the Iranian state is plainly quite different. The United States may have a very flawed democracy, even as democracies go, but neither major party in the United States is able to control elections to the extent that the Iranian regime has. (Elsewhere, Ms Satrapi has claimed that the ruling Iranian party actually received only 12% of the vote in the national elections of 2009.)

One makes the case for peace not to the Iranian people but to the people of the West because one can make the case to them, and because they can more readily insist upon peace to their respective states. I strongly suggest that, when the case is made, it be better made than by misrepresenting the relationship between state and state or between peoples and states. Proceeding with a reckless disregard for the truth persuades people that one is not to be trusted, and they may leap to the spurious conclusion that they should invest their trust in one's principal opponents.

Those who attempted to visit this 'blog yester-day met with this proclamation that it were suspended by its author in protest against SOPA and against PIPA. None-the-less, when the Woman of Interest asked me whether I thought that the black-out protests would be effective, my answer in the late morning was negative.

First, I was inclined in advance to believe that deciding positions had already been taken (albeït not announced) some days ago by a majority in Congress and by the President, and that final outcomes would not be actually swung by the sort of protest that could plausibly be expected.

Additionally, by late morning, I felt that a rather poor protest had been mounted. Wikipedia, most famous of the protestors, ostensibly blacked-out its pages, but had left them so that hitting Esc as they loaded caused the ordinary content to be delivered. Google merely changed its home-page graphic, partially (but, tellingly, not fully) covering-over their name with a cocked black rectangle; never mind that those who invoke searches with a browser text-field don't see that graphic anyway! Many sites did no more than change their color-schemes.

I think that least effective were those who expressed their ostensible support for the black-out by posting those expressions, through-out the day, on the WWWeb, while withdrawing nothing. Now, let me make it plain that I have no quarrel with those who simply didn't participate in the black-out, or those who shut-down only some of their sites; the former may be perfectly consistent, the latter perhaps efficient. But those who weren't blacked-out in the least and discoursed upon their support for the black-out on the WWWeb as that black-out were in-progress seem not to understand that they were providing content in attempted support of an effort to provide a sense of the loss of content that would follow upon the passage of something such as SOPA or as PIPA. And if the only content that one normally provide were tweets and such, then exactly that were what one needed to halt to actually support a black-out.

Those in that last group ought to understand that SOPA or PIPA wouldn't simply mean that the WWWeb no longer offered them so much information and passive amusement; such an act would limit their ability to express themselves as freely as they do now. Along with Google and YouTube and Tumblr would go Facebook and Twitter and Blogger and all the other centralized social-networking sites. (Which is not to say that more autonomous sites, such as mine, would be spared.) People who won't g_dd_mn'd shut-up would be quite hard hit — which might be an amusing thought, but freedom of expression is essential, and not to be reduced to quiet chatter-boxes and pontificators.

My participation in the protest, however, wasn't conditioned on a presupposition that it would sway the body politic. My actions were essentially symbolic, and it wasn't necessary for me to believe that I would sway anyone, though I would hope at least that there'd be one or two sympathetic readers.

And my negativity about the black-out doesn't mean that I expected or expect one of these bills to pass, nor for it to avoid a Presidential veto, nor for the Supreme Court to rule in its favor. I don't know about the first two. (The President will certainly require cover if he is not to veto a bill of this sort, but perhaps he will think that he can get that cover from a signing statement.) I would be unpleasantly surprised by the last; the Supreme Court seems more genuinely alert to concerns about freedom of expression in recent years.

Of course, I may be wrong about the effect of the black-out, however feeble it may look to me. Representatives and Senators have been spooked by scarecrows in the past. But, if the bills failed, that failure wouldn't itself demonstrate that the black-out had a deciding effect.

I would definitely caution at this point that what appears to be strategic retreat may be merely tactical. The interests behind these bills are not going to go away, and features of these bills may be withdrawn at one stage only to be reïntroduced at another (such as reconciliation).

The principal recommendation of many of those participating (however convincingly or pathetically) in the protest was that people should contact their Senators and Representatives. Well, the Senators from California are a knavish fool and a foolish knave, and the Representative for my district is at best a twit. I've tried moving those three in the past, and been met by silence or with inane boiler-plate. If they voted against these bills, it wouldn't be because of anything that I said to them. There's not even a sympathetic reader to be found amongst them. But I do know that other districts are not so grim.

There's a lot of talk these days about the political center, especially on the part of pundits who express concern about the lack of a centrist Presidential candidate amongst the Republicans. Rarely if ever does this talk explain what is meant by the references to the center, let alone why, really, one should want someone or something to be there.

In fact, people aren't talking about the same thing when they use this term.

For some people, the center means a center of mass of some sort. To the extent that one could average the political opinions of the voters or of the adult citizenry or perhaps of the adult population, the center would be this average. There's some real problems in locating this center. Some things resist averaging of any sort. And, because its determination has become significant in influencing opinion, people are all too quick to confuse the results of some collective decision-making process with a quantification of opinion; one sees this phenomenon in how election results are interpretted, and pollsters often design polls to advance the views that they want to promote.

For some people, the center is more tightly defined as a region in which the people whom they do not despise could reach agreement. It's still something of an averaging, but now the averaging excludes the opinions of the far left or of the far right or of both; and if these people acknowledge political opinions that are neither left-wing nor right-wing, the center will exclude those who are far out in any other direction. Of course, different people will regard different sets of opinions as far (which really means disagreeable to the persons in question); there is no common agreement amongst them as to where the center is located.

People such as I want to define the center in terms of the conceptual possibilities. For example, one might ask whether the state should redistribute wealth from rich to poor or from poor to rich. The center would seem to be to favor neither redistribution, either opposing both or being indifferent to either. Now, I say seem advisedly, because the mid-points are determined by the taxonomy. If the center is to be naturally defined, then, the taxonomy must be a natural taxonomy. And reasonable people might use different taxonomies. But what would surely make a taxonomy inappropriate would be for it to make it difficult or impossible to discuss something that otherwise could be discussed — for example, state redistribution from poor to rich (which is a very real phenomenon) or no state redistribution.

Not only do we see most people failing to be clear which of these notions of a center they are using; we see evident confusion — sometimes deliberate confusion — of their properties. The right- or left-wings of different jurisdictions will be implicitly defined based on local culture, but then lumped-together across jurisdictions as if ideologically equivalent. The center of mass for some culture (especially that of the writer) will be treated as if it is moderation. Whatever view the speaker favors is asserted to be the unbiased perspective and whatever policy the pontificator wants is called the balanced approach.

In most cases, whether some approach to policy falls in any one of these aforementioned centers is utterly irrelevant to whether it is a particularly good policy. The policies of the center of mass might be the best policies that one can get in the face of democracy or of a populace inclined to civil war, but they'll only be good on the assumption that there is a symmetry of insanities within the population. The policies of those whom one tolerates are only good on the assumption that one is genuinely wise in whom one excludes (which assumption begs the question). And there is no reason to see good policy in the conceptual center; nothing says that swallowing half as much arsenic as one might is better than swallowing none at all; all of the good policies with respect to some things are at or near extremes.

In eartly August, I wrote of how most of the political left had lost its sense of conviction in the decades following the '60s, of how their ability to believe had been restored by the 2008 Presidential campaign of Barack Hussein Obama, but of how that sense of belief was disintegrating in the face of the actual Presidency of Mr Obama. Well, a large share of the left has since found something new from which to draw Hope — the Occupation movement.

It's widely noted that the Occupation movement lacks a programme. They've made it plain that they think that there's a 1% who are the Enemy; but, aside from the intention to somehow beat wealth out of this group,[1] the movement as a whole is short on specifics. Individual members or groups within the Occupation movement may espouse something more precise, but other members deny any sort of responsibility for those proposals. There isn't even meta-agreement within the Occupation movement on a protocol for agreement.

In lieu of a programme, what the Occupation movement gives us is a sort of attitudinal posture. That ought to remind people of something. In particular, it ought to remind people of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. Granted that, in his case, the ambiguïty was a deliberate choice, whereäs in the case of the Occupation movement it results from collective indecision. Still, once again, a large share of the political left has invested itself in a cypher.

[1] The urging of state action may not itself be immediately violent, but the whole point of using the state is to employ its capacity for violence, to threaten or worse.

Paul Krugman walks into a bar, and asks How much for a scotch, neat? The bartender looks at him, and thinks What could a Keynesian know about money? So he says One trillion dollars. Krugman gets on the phone, calls the Fed and the White House, and they send over $1 trillion. As Krugman is drinking, the bartender remarks You know, we don't get many Keynesians in here. Krugman replies Well, with these prices, it's no wonder!

[This post was delayed from yester-day, as my hosting service had a technical failure, and it took me rather a long time to persuade them of such.]

I read

This past week it was reported that the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous claimed credit for taking offline over 40 websites used for sharing pedophilia — and for exposing the names and identifying information of more than 1500 alleged pedophiles that had been using the sites.

But the actual list is of user aliases, not of personal names.

Not only are pædophiles not being exposed here, but non-pædophiles who've had the misfortune of pædophiles' using the same aliases (by chance or from malice) are going to come under suspicion by those who think that they recognize them on this list.

Further, if agents of law enforcement were themselves working to track-down the actual legal identities of the pædophiles, their investigation has now been severely compromised, possibly fatally so.

Once again, Anonymous has done less good than they have led the gullible to believe, and have caused more damage than they have acknowledged.

Fred Flare, Inc, has received the not-so-coveted rating of F from the Better Business Bureau.

Readers may recall my entry of 12 August on how Flare had allowed some of the information that I'd provided to them to be used by spammers. (I had creäted an e.mail address exactly for business with Fred Flare and provided it uniquely to them.) Not long after I'd posted that entry, I contacted the BBB; Flare should have been responding to the issue of a hacked customer dB with a sense of urgency, but there was no evidence of such a sense.

On 6 September, a representative from Flare commented to the 'blog, and also sent e.mail:

Please forgive our late response to customer complaint #8703538 from Daniel Kian M cKiernan.
We are investigating whether our email service provider iContact might have been hacked.
We haven't found any evidence confirming this as of yet but are being extra thorough.
Rest assured, no credit card information has been compromised. We DO NOT save cc details for that very reason.
I will update you as I learn more. Thank you for your patience.

Now, as I implied in reply to the 'blog comment, the theory in that comment casting suspicion on UPS is a poor one. There's no particularly good reason for the spammer to spoof the name of their source (indeed, there is good reason for them not to do this), other spam from this breach spoofs other senders, and UPS (along with FedEx and DHL) has for many years routinely been spoofed by spammers.

The second theory (that in the e.mail) has some plausibility, but was, at that point, just a theory.

The promise (in the 'blog comment) of More soon! went simply unfulfilled. Meanwhile, spam continued to be sent to the address, at least one piece using my full name.

When the BBB dead-line for communication from Flare was imminent, they sent no more than a copy of that original 'blog comment and of that theorizing e.mail. The BBB, following SOP, asked me if this resolved my complaint, and I explained why it didn't.

What that communication did was reset the clock. But this time it just ticked-down to zero with no further communication from Flare, and the BBB regards such silence as unacceptable; hence the F

I don't know how the NYC BBB handles attempts at a ratings change; the San Diego BBB has been known to allow merchants to revive cases after many months (and known then to completely discard the rating if the customer does not respond). (If Fred Flare does not act on this case, it will eventually be considered sufficiently ancient as not to be used in rating.)

For my part, I guess that my next step is to file a complaint with the FTC. I don't know that a lot will come of that, though.

I'm really saddened by this whole course of events. There is no question that Fred Flare offers some cool and whimsical stuff that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere; I think that they should be rewarded for that much even setting aside whatever desire I might have for any of that stuff, and ceteris paribus I would want such an enterprise to prosper.

But it's imperative, in these days where information once loosed flows so freely, to take responsibility for the databases that we keep of information on other people (including the addressbooks of our e.mail handlers). Mistakes will happen, but we need to own any mistakes that we make, and to off-set their effects.

I had hoped that I'd get a reply within hours after I'd first contacted Flare. I should have been quickly told (as I was eventually told) that no credit-card information had been released. And Flare still needs to do something for those victims who, unlike me, provided addresses that are not easily discarded.

One claim about Libertarians that won't withstand any real scrutiny — yet is very common amongst journalists and educators — is that Libertarians don't believe in doing anything to address the immediate needs of the poor. If asked to defend the claim, those who make it will either note Libertarian opposition to various state programmes, and with a crude induction draw the inference that Libertarians don't believe in doing anything to achieve the ostensible goals of those programmes, or they'll note the Libertarian objection in principle to any state programme with such goals, and treat this as QED.

Well, let's lay the form of that out:

L does not believe that X should be done by S,
therefore
L does not believe that X should be done.

Oooops! That isn't really very logical, is it? I mean that we can find plenty of X and S where this won't work, when we make ourselves L.

Libertarians don't believe that the state should do a lot of things, including farming, financial intermediation, and managing roads. Genuine anarchists go further, to claim that the state shouldn't do anything. That hardly means that they don't think that these things should be done by someone. It doesn't even mean that they won't agree that they should be those who do these things. (Indeed, people who rely upon the state are most likely to say that it ought to do whatever it does at the expense of someone else, as when they call for higher taxes on those who make more money.)

This point of logic ought to be obvious. Well, many journalists and educators are such damn'd fools that they truly don't see it, and an awful lot are knaves, who see it but don't want it to be seen by others.

One way that I see the eristicism effected is by the specious society-state equation — by treating the state as if it is society, which is to say as if it is us. Formally, this would be

L does not believe that X should be done by the state,
which is to say that
L does not believe that X should be done by society,
which is to say that
L does not believe that X should be done by any of us.

except that it's not explicitly expanded in this way, else the jig would be up. One place you'll see this eristic equation employed is in many quizzes that purport to tell the taker what his or her political classification is. If he or she answers affirmatively to a claim such as that society should help the poor then the typical quiz will score that towards state socialism and away from classical liberalism (of which Libertarianism is the extreme).

(Actually, one needs to be very careful whenever encountering the word society. In practice, it is often used to mean everyone else. Sometimes it's used to refer to some hypothetical entity which is somehow more than a group of people and their system of interaction; this latter notion tends to operationalize, again, as everyone else. Equating society with the state, and coupling this with demands for the state to make greater demands on other people is a popular way of making society mean everyone else.)

The fact is that one simply cannot tell, one way or another, from the datum that a person is a Libertarian whether he or she thinks that some goal ought to be pursued, unless the goal involves what a Libertarian would label coercion; because Libertarianism itself is no more than a belief that one ought not to initiate the class of behaviors to which they apply this label. A person can be a Libertarian and be all for voluntary redistribution, or that person might indeed be someone who embraced some of the more callous proclamations of Ayn Rand, or the Libertarian might hold some intermediate postion. Libertarianism itself is neutral.

(Within the Randian camp, there has been a willful confusion of the fact that Libertarianism itself has limited scope with the proposition that any given person who is a Libertarian must somehow have no view about matters not within that scope, or with the claim that a Libertarian must think that anything not prohibitable is good.)

Parallels can be found here with the claim that atheists do not believe in morality of any sort. Not only is the underlying fallacy very similar, but the implication in each case is that, should the persons in question believe that something ought to be done, they are more likely to see themselves as the someone who ought to do it.

A financial bond or note is a promise to pay some fixed amount at some given date. Two things, beyond the promised amount of payment, determine the price of a such an instrument.

First, there is the associated danger of a default. A possibility of default turns the bond or note into a sort of lottery, in which the actual pay-off could be the full, promised value, or nothing, or anything in-between (at least, anything reaizable in terms of the minimum division of the payment), or even some new pledge, promising a later payment of some sort. Each of these outcomes has some associated plausibility, and the lottery is valued accordingly.

Second, there is also the fact that the instrument is a promise of future payment; since pay-off cannot itself be put to immediate use (as consumption or as investment), its price is discounted to reflect time-preference and the forgone productivity of assets used to buy it.

Just to get the gist of that clearly, imagine that the value of a lottery were simply that of the mathematical expectation of its pay-off. The price of a bond would then be discounted expected pay-off.

So far, the causality here is just flowing one way. Possible-pay-offs and their probabilities determine an expectation or something like that, and then time-preference and productivity determine the present value of that expectation or expectation-like value, and that's the price of the instrument. And if the pledge were issued by a private institution, that would generally be it.

On the other hand, when such instruments are issued by a state, politics can make things interesting.

The Greek state is going to default on repayment of its borrowing. Its citizens are simply not willing to accept the costs to them of full repayment. In fact, they're not willing to fully repay what remains after politically possible subsidies from other states. Those who have lent money to Greece will receive less than they were promised.

The price of bonds issued by the Greek state already reflects the expectation of default. This reduced price is going to be used against bond-holders, both against those who are paying it now, and against those who paid a higher price and have held onto their bonds even as value dropped (as they gambled that the Greek state would not default or at least not default as much as some expect). What will happen is that populists, anti-rentiers, and opportunists will argue as if all bond-holders had paid that steeply discounted price, and as if those who paid that price lose nothing if they only recover the nominal purchase price.

And what makes that interesting is that it means that causality should now be flowing cyclically, where present price pronouncèdly affects the relative plausibilities of possible pay-offs, even as these continue to affect present price.

I've not sat down to work-out a formal model. But, while I don't expect that the equilibrium price of a Greek bond would be zero, I don't know that one can rule that out. (On the other hand, while economic equilibria are useful in understanding and approximating, the world is never in equilibrium.)

I do think that something might be said here about the ethics of sovereign debt.

It isn't heads of state or of government, or treasurers, or legislators as such who repay this debt. It isn't voters as such who pay-off this debt. It is tax-payers as such who pay-off sovereign debt (except where it is paid by selling assets such as territory and state enterprises). Sometimes the tax-payers weren't even born when the state went into debt. Moral claims against them for repayment are thin at best. I once read buying sovereign debt compared to buying shares in pirate ships (which one could at one time do openly in some places, and can still do quietly in some places), and I think that comparison quite apt.

On the other hand, it is plain that most of the Greeks protesting against austerity measures are signally unconcerned about the welfare of the Greek tax-payer; they just want any resources drawn from him or her to be directed to them.

If one wanted to know the solution to particular mathematical problem, and found that different groups gave different answers, then it might be interesting to hear or to read what each group said about the motives of rival groups, but one really ought to chose which answer or answers were correct based upon principles of mathematics, rather than based upon which groups seemed most noble. If one lacked the competence to decide the issue based upon principles of mathematics, then it would probably be best to resist coming to any decision if at all possible.

Likewise, if one wanted to know the solution to a particular problem of the natural sciences, but found that different groups gave different answers, then it might be interesting to hear or to read what each group said about the motives of rival groups, but one really ought to chose which answer or answers were correct based upon principles of science, rather than based upon which group seemed most noble. If one lacked the competence to decide the issue based upon principles of science, then it would probably be best to resist coming to any decision if at all possible.

And if one wanted to know what sort of social policy ought to be applied to some case, but found that different groups gave one different answers, then it might be interesting to hear or to read what each group said about the motives of rival groups, but one really ought to chose which answer or answers were correct based upon principles of science in combination with rational criteria for evaluating ethical philosophies (if, indeed, those criteria are not themselves scientific). And if one lacked the competence to decide the issue based upon such principles, then it would probably be best to resist coming to any decision if at all possible.

Now, all of that ought to be obvious; but consider how much pundits and the major media focus on personalities and theories of motive when it comes both to policy and to science applicable to policy, and how little real science and how little careful dissection of philosophical case is presented. If one party wants one thing, and another wants something different, then we are given some tale of the nobility or at least the level-headedness of one group, and of the knavery or foolishness of the other; accompanying this narrative will be cartoon physics, cartoon biology, or cartoon economics. If ethics are relevant, then one might get cartoon philosophy of ethics, or some ethical philosophy might be implicitly imposed, as if no rival philosophy were conceivable. (If something is treated as good, there generally ought to be an explanation somewhere of what makes it good. If something is treated as bad, there likewise ought to be an explanation of what makes it bad.)

This practice is so prevalent because so many listeners and readers unthinkingly accept it. And I'm not just talking about low-brow or middle-brow people. The self-supposed high-brow folk, more educated and ostensibly more thoughtful, accept this practice. Most of the people who would, if they read them, say that the previous four paragraphs were trivially obvious accept this practice. I don't simply mean that they don't cancel subscriptions or write angry letters to the editor; I mean that they allow their own beliefs to be shaped by some group engaging in the practice. They fall into attending to one narration of this sort, and let it guide them until and unless some crisis causes them to turn their backs on it, at which point they almost always begin to be guided by a narration using the same basic practice to advance some different set of policies.

Sometimes, one must make a decision, with nothing upon which to go except the discernible motives of conflicting parties. In those cases, one should bear in mind that, except to the extent that they are reporting brute fact (rather than interpretation), one typically learns more about the narrators themselves from what they say (and avoid saying) of their opponents, than one learns about their opponents. (And one should not allow the emotional appeal of a narrative to lead one to pretend that one must make a decision that one can in fact defer.)