Sentiment

You know, sometimes I feel like I'm the only person willing to say "It's not a perfect world, and that's okay" without using it as an excuse to ignore an actual problem.

Stupidity

I really can't understand how anyone who survived K-12 (to say nothing of college) with a semi-functional brain can possibly support public schooling. The criminal incompetence is staggering, and you want to reward that sort of behavior?

Apparently they don't teach how to identify idiocy in high school.

Neoliberal Communists

I've been saying for awhile now that the People's Republic of China is practicing a sort of Communist Neoliberalism. It appears the Chinese Communists are perfectly aware of this. Following a recent party meeting, the CPC released a statement saying that markets need to play a "decisive role" in allocating resources.

The article says they'll be pursuing a policy of open, unified markets, reducing regulations and expanding free trade zones. This should encourage economic growth and increase revenue for everyone, from the factory workers to multinational CFOs. American economic nationalists will probably cringe at this news, but from a free market capitalist standpoint this is good news. Free trade is good for everyone in the long run, and capitalist nations rarely go to war.

My main concern is that this will be chalked up as a victory for central planning, when in fact it's an example of more laissez-faire policy. Admittedly, it's an ordoliberal approach of rather careful liberalization and deregulation, but fact that Communists are freeing the markets should not be overlooked.

We'll have to wait and see just how far they go and how successful this program is. Considering that the Chinese haven't had much real experience with free markets since, well, ever, a careful gradualist approach is probably the way to go. Hopefully, one of the last bastions of central planning will finally yield their power, and show the world just what liberty can do.

Antarctica

I did a silly thing and started thinking about Antarctica again.

I don't know why this happens, but it undeniably does. Last time I had it really bad was in April. Give me enough time, and I'll get obsessed with anywhere that doesn't have too many people. Maybe it's an aspect of my introversion, maybe I'm just a touch too misanthropic.

Either way, I'm probably going to accumulate more posts in my drafts because of this.

Political Spectra

Traditionally, we're taught that politics is a left-right spectrum, with authoritarian communism on the far left and authoritarian fascism on the far right, with some quibble about how it's actually a circle when the similarities between the two are pointed out. I think it's obvious that this arrangement isn't adequate for describing the various political philosophies at work in the world.

The primary problem with Left and Right is that they mean different things to people at different points along the spectrum. Leftists tend to believe that leftism promotes egalitarian societies, and that rightism promotes elitist or hierarchical societies. Rightists, on the other hand, tend to believe that leftism promotes an expansive state, while rightism promotes a minimal state (by this definition, anarchism is right-wing). In either definition, rightist do tend to be more tolerant of social inequality, for various reasons. But that's another post.

Follow up

Following up a previous post, I've had a few more thoughts about some of these ex-"libertarians." You've got your high profile Bill Mayer types, then there's the social justice warrior I encountered, and then there's the communist I was talking about before. Interesting how they're all leftists. Also interesting how there's precious little evidence to suggest they were ever actually libertarians.

I'm beginning to think that a lot of these people never were libertarians, in the classically liberal, anti-state, pro-capitalism sense. They were probably disgruntled*  "moderates" (read: modern liberals) who latched onto "libertarianism" because it was principled in its opposition to the drug and Iraq wars. They never understood the whole idea of free markets and economic freedom (maybe they confused it with the leftist "freedom from want" definition), and when they found out what all that entailed, they split for pinker pastures.

I might argue the same thing of the claims of frequent Objectivist recidivism: the people who backed out, probably never understood what they were dealing with in the first place. If they had, they either wouldn't have picked it up in the first place, or would have stuck with it.

That's my amateur psychologist take, probably 70% wrong.

*I know I'm not the first to ask this, but what is it like to be "gruntled?" It doesn't exactly sound good.

Terraforming

Here we go again. I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year (which is what I should be working on instead of a blog post), and because it takes place in part on Mars I've seemed to have fallen off the terraforming deep end again. I'll assume you know what terraforming means and dive right into it.

I really like the idea of terraforming other planets to make them habitable for humans. It's the most permanent solution to sustaining a larger human population. Mars and Venus are the most likely candidates, but I sometimes wonder: what if we terraformed every possible world in the Sol System?

Now, there's obviously this scenario, which is by authorial admission impossible. But there are a large number of potential terraforming candidates around. Let's go through the list and see what we think.

Mars