Activity Log

Representative tries to put the fear of God in atheist.

That’s terrible.

I do wish the article at the Tribune had more details, though.

(HT to The Agitator.)

Department of Homeland Security will Waive Laws to Build Border Fence.

How terrible.

I don’t like movies in general, and as such I rarely go to see them, but for The Golden Compass maybe I can make an exception.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1029mexico-halloween1029-ON.html

No, wait, I do have comentarios. Here’s one: “the Catholic Church is an evil institution.” And another: “fortunately the Catholic Church is losing influence, albeit slowly, in Mexico.”

Three days after Americans saw the Bush administration’s counterterrorism chief say the Iraq war has likely not made the United States safer from terrorism, the official announced his resignation, citing health reasons.

As some people say some of the time, sick, mate, sick!

[This was written in the heat of the moment and has been removed pending a rewrite.]

According to this blog, the government of the DF has started clearing some streets of vendors. It’s difficult to believe that it’s really Eje Central in the first photo.

I have mixed feelings about the operation in general — commerce is good, but so is being able to walk down the street without being harassed (or banging your head on all sorts of lowhanging things) by people hawking things at you.

In the argument between (economic) liberalism and socialism, Mexico City comprises a big data point. What isn’t clear is whose position, if either, it buttresses.

(Earlier.)

A letter to the Boston Globe, in response to the latest case of hysteria:

Re: MIT student arrested at Logan in bomb scare:

In the current climate of overreaction, Star Simpson may gave been unwise to go to the airport with exposed electronics, but she didn’t do anything morally wrong. Most of us avoid such legal entanglements by going with our electronics discreetly out of sight: we call them laptops and iPods.

The best that can be said for the brainwaves who pass laws and who are tasked with enforcing them is that at least Simpson wasn’t tased.

Michael Wolf
Mexico City
+52 55 xxxx yyyy

Well, can you?

The latest example…

Soon, if the Teamsters don’t get their way, some Mexican trucks may be allowed to drive throughout the United States.

On the face of it, it’s easy to write off the Teamsters as being Teamsters — a powerful, self-interested, violent, and corrupt force with nothing constructive to add to society in general.

On the other hand, lots of trucks in Mexico are undermaintained. Many shoot huge clouds of black exhaust (suggesting little to no engine maintenance), have bald tires, etc. And, if the training of drivers of everyday cars is anything to go by — it isn’t mandatory — then there also are probably plenty of untrained truck drivers too. And not all of them would understand English road signs.

So, people not wanting to allow these drivers and vehicles into the US (for reasons other than fear of competition) aren’t being entirely unreasonable.

The best solution seems to be to ignore the Teamsters and the racists and figure out what the real problems or potential problems would be: the problems I outlined above, basically. Then fix those problems: only allow trucks that are properly maintained and driven by properly trained drivers into the country. Which may be the case already: “Participating Mexican carriers must comply with all legal requirements governing operations of domestically owned carriers, and in some cases stricter requirements,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler.”

Assuming anyone with “Attorney General” in his title can be trusted these days, I’d say that’s a good enough. Let the trucks in.

Citizen exchange seems like an interesting idea. It’s actually an idea I’d vaguely and briefly thought about before, but I’d never thought through the implications, most of which seem to be good ones.

“I lost my vacation time and my money. I would have expected this from the U.S. but never from Canada. It would almost be better if Canada had a visa requirement for Mexicans. At least then the rules would be clearer.”

I wonder how prevalent it really is, though.

Argentine president calls US border fence plan ‘insult’ to Latin America.

Of course it is. But Latin Americans shouldn’t feel singled out — racists within the US would be just as happy to insult any other country where most people are brown. But since it doesn’t border any other country like that it can’t. At least not by building a fence.

The Neocon Reader by Irwin Stelzer (ed) et al. Grove Press.

I was writing a review when, meaning to open a new tab in my browser, I hit C-r instead of C-t. Everything lost.

Fuck this shit. It’s sufficient to say that Irwin Stelzer is an intellectual lightweight, and whoever the pseudointellectual who wrote the piece about pr0n was is even worse, and few of the people whose writings are included are much better.

Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t read the book.

Good.

god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. Twelve.

If Richard Dawkins is “Darwin’s rottweiler”, then who is Christopher Hitchens? He is certainly more vicious than Dawkins.

In any case, buying their books is a public service; best-selling books about controversial topics (and the more I think about it, the harder I find it to believe that anything said in this book is really controversial) get their authors on television and on the radio and on speaking circuits. That much is a good thing.

No real surprises: it discusses the harm that religion has done and continues to do, and has lengthy sections on the absurdities of various religions.

A lot of people, whose motives I suspect but cannot prove are less than pure, say that they aren’t opposed to immigration per se, but have a problem with the many immigrants who have already entered the US in ways that contravene the law.

I always knew that there was something fallacious about that line of reasoning — it sounds appealing and reasonable on the surface but something about it has long struck me as not being quite right.

This post, at Café Hayek, clears the confusion:

A critical distinction in Anglo-American law is that between actions that are malum in se and actions that are malum prohibitum. Some actions are malum in se — wrong in themselves. Examples are murder, rape, theft, and fraud.

…

Other actions are malum prohibitum — “wrong” merely because the government proclaims these actions to be wrong.

…

To attach the label “criminal” both to persons who commit actions that are malum in se and to persons whose only wrongdoing is the commission of actions that are merely malum prohibitum is to use language confusingly.

Yup, that explains it swimmingly, but do read the whole post.

(It’s also amusing to see that the commenter on Café Hayek whose comment sparked the post is also the author of one of my favorite blogs, The Doosra.)

I’ve read in a few places recently that Mexico is now the second most dangerous country to be a reporter, after Iraq. It has taken this dubious distinction from Colombia.

Which is bad.

But it also sounds like a half-truth; I don’t believe that there many imprisoned journalists here.

This page puts Mexico at about the middle of the road with respect to press freedom. It could and should be better, but I guess it could be a lot worse, too.

Critics cast Clinton’s Alabama speech, on the 42nd anniversary of the historic civil rights march over the city’s Pettus Bridge, as an example of her being phony and pandering.

Clinton? Phony? Who’d ever think that?

A blog I enjoy reading, Separated by a Common Language, today linked to a blog of similar interest, English, Jack. Interesting stuff.

I particularly liked this post, largely because of its conclusion, which is how I feel about a lot of stuff that ends up being wrongly censored:

I can’t say I find it offensive, but it does strike me as gratuitous and puerile.

That is a concise way of saying something that I wrote years ago: “I think Howard Stern’s radio program sucks. It’s not offensive, it’s not obscene, and it’s not indecent, but it is boring and trite. I didn’t even like it when I was in high school.”

This article in the Boston Globe bothered me.

So I wrote them a letter.

It may be that, under a strict interpretation of the law, the promotion run by Jordan’s, Alpha Omega, and others is a lottery.

What’s far more certain is that most people who buy jewelery and
furniture are adults, and those with money to gamble are usually
adults as well. So why not treat them as such? Scrap statist laws
that permit only the government and its friends to conduct gambling operations. While such laws remain on the books, the government should not enforce them.

It was a hard letter to write since there are two points I want to make. One is that the government has no business protecting people from wasting their own money. Second is that the control of gambling is almost certainly a form of corruption, although one that’s difficult to prove, so I left this mostly implicit.

We’ll see if they publish it.

I’ve always enjoyed, and, as far as I can remember, agreed with, Salman Rushdie’s opinion pieces. This is no exception.

Abortion will likely be legalized in Mexico City. Currently it is only legal in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger.

Unsurprisingly, the Catholic Church is against it.

I say they should go screw. The Catholic Church is an organization whose lasting legacy is one of some nice art and architecture, ignorance, poverty, corruption, destruction, and disease.

It’s clear that the bad parts of its legacy more than offset the good parts.

In this age of relative tolerance, the church may be slightly less destructive; the rest remains as true as ever. The church continues to be a cause and promoter of ignorance, poverty, corruption, and disease.

Why does the Catholic Church hate humanity more than a misanthrope like me?

This is pretty sickening.

And even if I’m misrepresenting the desires of closet authoritarians collectivists, I still think that to send children to a school that actively discourages naturally forming hierarchies is to do those children a serious injustice. An injustice certainly far worse than the results of said hierarchies, even when they go bad. It’s similar to the injustice perpetrated by religion.

Clearly I need to cram it into my head that techocrats telling you and other people what to do makes you free.

I sent the following to the Boston Globe:

If you think that genuine bombs in real life actually use blinking lights and are placed in conspicuous locations, I think that you are barely fit to turn on your DVD player to watch the daft movies where that does happen. You are certainly not fit to work in government or law enforcement. Nor, for that matter, are you fit to be writing for a newspaper.

Somehow, I doubt they’ll publish it. But I hope they do.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html

and

http://www.mass.gov/legis/laws/mgl/272-36.htm.

I’m embarassed anyway.

Or don’t.

…and that is why I am in shock. No, wait, I didn’t, so I’m not in shock. That “[two] election workers were convicted … of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio’s most populous county” does not shock me either.

A commenter wrote “It’s becoming clear that pure market economics will not solve Mexico’s poverty problem”. But it’s not clear at all. One might as well say that it is clear that socialism won’t solve Mexico’s poverty problem. After all, neither - and nothing even approaching either - has been ever attempted here.

(I don’t think socialism would solve Mexico’s proverty problem; on the contrary I think it would exacerbate it for a variety of reasons. But I would never claim to know since it hasn’t been done.)

He also says, in reference to Mexico, “In real terms, salaries (especially lower-middle class salaries) have been in decline for decades now.” They’ve been going down in lots of countries, if the people saying that they’re going down are to be believed.

On the other hand, a lot of things are better today than they were twenty years ago. To put it another way: money schmoney; it’s wealth that matters, and that has increased for many people.

I am watching videos of Dawkins at a reading and Q&A session at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In the Q&A section, against mostly hostile questioners, he is like a ninja with a lightsaber beating the crap out of 3 year olds. Except it is funny, not cruel.

(If you’ve read God Delusion you might want to skip the first video, in which Dawkins reads some passages from Delusion, and just watch the second, which contains the Q&A.)

Israel Bombs Anti-Semitism Out Of Lebanon

Last night I finished Gabriel García Márquez’ Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping). It’s a rare story where I don’t identify with a single character; this is one of them.

Some inbred and elite Colombian journalists were kidnapped by Pablo Escobar and his group, who, facing extradition, wanted to apply pressure on the government to make sure that their eventual arrest happened under their own terms.

(Calling the kidnapped people inbred is no mere figure of speech. One minor actor had actually married her uncle, and had had several children by him. I had to ask Alma to read the passage to confirm my interpretation. It wasn’t hard to understand or anything, but holy crap! I thought I was just confused reading Spanish, which still happens occasionally. Not this time.)

A big fuss was made, numerous cows were had, and negotations started.

When bad things happen to elites, it’s a big deal. How many Colombian poor people stayed poor during this time is anyone’s guess. Basically all of them, I’d guess. It doesn’t seem to have concerned the government much.

It takes a priest to secure the release of the last two prisoners. He even becomes chummy with Escobar. (Showing what Catholic morality really is all about: do whatever the hell you want - kill, kidnap, steal, ruin lives - just say a few Ave Marias and it’s all good. Not that other religions are much better.)

And since the kidnapees were of the elites, it seems only fitting that they suffered for the corruption and lack of rule of law that was essentially their own creation, even if they never realize it themselves. When Maruja, one of the kidnapped, was set to be released, I found myself hoping that she’d stay kidnapped longer, or that maybe there’d be a violent incident during her turnover. That would have been sweet.

Upon her release, Maruja was more concerned about looking good than anything else. Others were similarly vain and ugly as human beings.

García Márquez knows how tell a story like few others do, and he seems to be honest in his account, if not nearly judgmental enough. Now, the book is essentially a long (~345pp) journalistic piece, but what good is a journalist these days who doesn’t color his writing with his own opinions and who doesn’t filter facts through his own world view anyway?

A few weeks ago I posted about a study on the effects of gun control in Australia.

Today, I came across a different conclusion.

I recently finished The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It discusses why God is highly unlikely to exist, with digressions discussing the harm done by religion, the bizarreness of many religions, and alternatives to religion. Dawkins mostly focuses on the Christian God, but does not discriminate against others.

Some comments: overall, I’m in agreement with Dawkins. I have a suspicion that most of his readers are too. Which means that he is preaching to the choir. Much of the book is quotable.

Some people are critical of Dawkins’ relatively intolerant approach, especially towards moderate religious people, which, they claim, is too confrontational and is likely to turn away people who would otherwise be sympathetic. This is a reasonable point, but I don’t know whether I agree. Time will tell.

A few quibbles:

The book has over 150 endnotes, and many footnotes as well. They are well-used. The endnotes provide references to things mentioned in the text, so that interested readers can look them up, while the footnotes are explanations and asides. I wish all books with notes were like this. Some of the references are sloppy, though. Many are to URLs, some starting with http://, some not. Many of the URLs are long, and may not last even the forseeable future. Better would be to link to his own website, which could contain mirrors of and links to content as appropriate.

In places the book is fairly impersonal and detached. In other places it uses ‘I’. Either is fine, really, but the sections that use only one or the other are far stronger than those that mix them.

Is it really true that all people against abortion are so for religious reasons? It is true that many pro-lifers are, but certainly not all. It is a complicated issue, and I think that atheists could still be against it, and for good reasons, even if I am not.

Dawkins is no computer scientist. It shows.

I’m pretty sure there are some grammar mistakes, particularly with respect to the usage and placement of commas. I say I’m only pretty sure because there are some differences between American and Commonwealth English, and I may be applying the rules I was taught to the author, who was, of course, taught a similar but distinct set of rules. But I didn’t notice the mistakes early in the book, only in later chapters, and the mistakes are ones typical of writers of Commonwealth English. So perhaps Dawkins was tired of writing, and maybe his editor was tired of editing too.

It is a hardcover, which makes reading in bed unpleasant. That’s the fault of the publishing industry, though, and not of Dawkins or his editor. Such is the price to pay for reading recent books.

I can recomend this book to people who argue with religious people about religion, something that I very rarely do. Maybe religious people themselves would be served by the book, maybe not; it is hard for me to put myself in their shoes. In my own case, I often found myself saying “hell yeah!” and “right on” and “that’s a very good point”, but I probably should have spent the time reading something else anyway.

…the airline employees would have been offered bonuses and employee of the year nominations.

But they were instead in New Zealand, where things are at least a little bit saner.

After Mr Adam laid a complaint, the airline replaced his ticket, provided financial compensation and a written apology, held staff training on cultural practices and reviewed how it dealt with security threats.

It was passed today.

Some people think it defuses separatism, others thinks it encourages it. I’m not sure.

As for Québec separatism itself, I think it’s probably a bad idea, but I’m not strongly opposed to it.

A bunch of racists are against immigration and amnesty for illegal immigrants. They’re also against the invasion of Iraq.

I disagree with them, strongly, about immigration. They’re right about Bush and Iraq, though, and it’s nice - if very strange - to find myself in such strong agreement with neanderthals like these about anything.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/10/23/1161455665717.html

I don’t have a strong opinion on gun control. I don’t know enough, and it seems like everyone who writes about it has an agenda. And, of course, it’s hard to do a proper experiment since there’s no way I can think of to set up an alternate control group.

But it is interesting.

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/do-we-really-need-bad-reasons-to-be-good/