Me on USAnian politics, 2024

So another election looms. I find my words from 2020 are weirdly recyclable: Well, there's an election coming up - you may have noticed - so it is Time to Opine, thereby fixing my words in stone for posterity to hold against me. Just like last time the presidential choice is unappealling. Trump is, obviously, horrible: personally, and in many but not all policies. By contrast Biden Kamala is a nice enough std.pol, or at least projects that as an image, but it is hard to get enthused over his her policies. Last time I continued Given his opponent I hope he wins; and given a choice I'd hold my nose and vote for him but I find that harder to do this time; read on.

As a reminder of how different things can look in retrospect, the Economist has Angela who? Merkel’s legacy looks increasingly terrible.

If you want to believe that the election is about character, then you'll vote for Harris, obvs. Here for example is Paul Graham saying so. Or in Supreme Court Refuses to Remove RFK Jr. from Wisconsin and Michigan Ballots I can find "I'm going to let [RFK] go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on the medicines," Trump told supporters at Madison Square Garden; and RFK is a nutter. Or you can listen to Arnie^3,4.

The case against Harris - as far as I am concerned - is that she is a low-grade generic Dem Pol with precious little to recommend her. You might well say - and you'd be correct - that in most respects that puts her far ahead of the Mango Mussolini. But all her policies and instincts are bad; see e.g. the price-gouging stuff.

The case for Trump is the one I need to make. And it isn't for Trump himself, obvs, no it is for the people he'd bring in. Not Vance either, obvs. It's effectively Richard Hanania's Hating Modern Conservatism While Voting Republican¹. Here's a bad answer to Hanania; if you want to say that again, please don't. I should also point out that many of Harris's stupid economic ideas require Congress to pass them, so will likely not happen; Trump's stupid ideas on tariffs can likely be done via executive action, so might happen. Trump is more hawkish for Israel, which is good, but less for Ukraine, which is bad and more important.

The point of this post, though, is to write down my thoughts now so I can't pretend they were different later, not to offer you advice that you'll ignore. In brief, I think it amounts to: Harris is a bland non-entity who will hopefully do very little²; Trump is everything you think he is, and unacceptable. In the end I would cast a vote, if I had one, against Trump and therefore for Harris.

A couple of other thoughts: firstly, I don't see much if anything said about Harris being female, or being "of colour". Which is good, obvs; such properties are irrelevant to the role. I also see little about abortion, which is similarly good; the much-reviled-by-the Progressives Dobbs seems to have had the desired effect of drawing some poison from national poitics. Secondly, I don't see anyone (credible) endorsing Harris as a good candidate; only as "Trump is worse". So we perhaps think about her selection process. I discard the last-minute nature of the choice, because I think we'd likely have had the same result regardless: so we're left with the totally unsurprising result that the Dem machine has chosen someone so unappealling. Which tells you a lot about the said Dem machine prioritising its own interests above those of the country.

Update: the result

Trump won, fairly strongly. To find out what this means we'll need to wait, especially in the Ukraine. If I were the MMs, I'd be keeping very quiet. Initial S+P reaction is up, modestly, by ~100 aka ~2% to 5900. I take that to be a good sign.

Refs

* Elon Musk's Story Highlights Harm Caused by Immigration Restrictions.

* Mission unaccomplished: The British budget combines large numbers and a narrow vision. A bigger state but an irrational way to fund it. Or, the govt as bandits (my take). But on the scale of USAnian politics, just a ripple; the AIM market even rose a little.

* El Econo explains why they (unlike WaPo) do endorse candidates. Their reasoning is somewhat obscure; in their words "To give opinions on policies but not politicians would be odd".

* Noah Smith is sad that "Trumpism systematically appoints the worst people to positions of power, since it prizes *loyalty to a personality cult* above competence and principle". But he doesn't really explain why it is a personality cult. Part is easy: thinking about policy is hard, supporting or hating people is easy. But the hard part - that he doesn't really want to talk about - is the people that see <someone, anyone, oh very well Trump> as a bulwark against the woke-that-is-evil.

* Living in a Post-truth World - Peter Woit.

* Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class; Kemi Badenoch.

* Johnny Cash - God's Gonna Cut You Down (h/t).

* Just one of many bad takes: Welcome to the American petrostate, Michael E. Mann. Or None of this is meant to imply that most progressive causes are mistaken... in the Graun. Stefan Rahmstorf: it's all the fault of the right wing meeja.

* A collection of great hang-wringing: Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose.

* Journal of Free Speech Law: "Corporate Speech and Corporate Purpose: A Theory of Corporate First Amendment Rights," by Sean J. Griffith.

* PG: Socialists... cherish the idea that the game is rigged so much that they'd rather talk about that than about how to improve their situation.

* The Graun flounces out: Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X.

* Sam Harris on why critique of the media and the establishment must not turn into nihilism, though I now rather regret linking because of his use of "coronated".

* Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy.

* Economath Fails the Cost-Benefit Test.

Notes

1. "Cut the applause and dim the light".

2. Although it is arguably in the spirit of the framer's intent, I find it... well, not amusing, but whatevs... that a better candidate than either on offer can be constructed by simply offering to do nothing. I should probably also point out that I've paid very little attention to anything she has said.

3. Or ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein. But that brings in some problems: it reminds me that Trump, if he won, would have had his two terms and not be up for re-election (if you doubt that you need to explicitly argue against it). And it also asserts that Repubs are typically-Trump, which I doubt.

4. Or A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks: if The Economist had a vote, we would cast it for Kamala Harris.

Sound to hide the broken bone the sunken ship

My headline is a half-remembered quote from a poem read at school in childhood. And since I haven't had a poem or art here for a bit... good greif has it really been that long? I think I have to go back to Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I in 2018. Doesn't time fly when you/re getting old. Since then I've been to the Orsay, but fortunately that one isn't there, I'd have been sad to have missed it, if you see what I mean. Which you probably don't, but I no longer worry about that.

Aanyway, the point is that having searched the web in vain, I finally remembered that I probably still had the book - and it turned out that I did - and leafing through managed to find this, after some Betjeman complaints about Encase your legs in nylons.

Not quite the words I remember, and A. S. J. Tessimond turns out to be not-very-famous. Still I'm a bit surprised that "Sound like a sea to conceal the bone, the broken shell, the broken ship" gets me only one hit. Perhaps I can invoke more with this post. As to the meaning, ah well, see perhaps Old B+W speakers: I don't play music at home any more. But I do in the car.

As to the words, I kinda like mine more.

Refs

* The Progressive Moment Is Over.

* Kamala Harris is a Far Lesser Evil than Donald Trump.

* Illegitimate Attacks on the Court’s Legitimacy.

* Writes and Write-Nots - PG.

Reason and Morality

Having established - at least to my own satisfaction - The Foundations of Morality, I can now play the fun game of deconstructing other people's ideas. And by happy chance Reason and Morality by Alan Gewirth, falls into my hands¹. The contrast in language with Hazlitt is immeadiately obvious; this is academic philosophy. But casting that aspect aside, he's wrong, which is the important point. Wiki, naturally, can't bring itself to say this; partly because it just doesn't do that and partly because - all together now - philosophy doesn't do that, because philosophy is too scaredy-cat to make such sharp distinctions³.

AG is keen to found morality on rationality; to this extent he is part of the Enlightenment Project and that is good. Unfortunately... well, read his words:

...every agent must claim, at least implicitly, that he has rights to freedom and well-being for the sufficient reason that he is a prospective purposive agent. From the content of this claim it follows, by the principle of universalisability, that all prospective purposive agents have rights to freedom and well-being. If the agent denies this generalization, he contradicts himself. For he would then be in the position of both affirming and denying that being a prospective purposive agent is a sufficient condition of having rights to freedom and well-being.

This is (I think; don't let me claim to have read the whole thing) the core of his argument: that if you have F+WB, you're logically obliged to accept that others also have F+WB. And so:

...the statement that some person or group of persons has a certain right entails a correlative ought-judgment that all other persons ought at least to refrain from interfering with that to which the first person or group has the right. Since, then, the agent must accept the generalized rights-statement, All prospective purposive agents have rights to freedom and well- being, he must, on pain of contradiction, also accept the judgment, 'I ought at least to refrain from interfering with the freedom and well- being of any prospective purposive agent.' The transition here from 'all' to any is warranted by the fact that the 'all' in the generalization is distributive, not collective: it refers to each and hence to any prospective purposive agent.

And there we have it; we've deduced a general duty to behave nicely to people whoops I mean agents².

The problem though is that this isn't morality; the morality that we all know and use isn't found in an absence of contradiction or in logical reasonning. Worse, what he has deduced is essentially just the Golden Rule: do (or refraim from doing) unto others what you would have them do (or refraim from doing) unto you.

His error is to attempt to apply rigourous logic to morality, where it doesn't belong. In something more like normal language, he is attempting to found morality on benevolence: he wants us to behave well to others - implicitly, at some cost to ourselves - having logically deduced that we "owe" that to them. Hazlitt is closer to founding morality on prudence - the moral rules experience have taught us show that being nice to people is not only good for them, but for us as well, over the long term. Hazlitt is congruent to human nature; Gewirth isn't.

AG's scheme (like Kant's; like Hazlitt's) isn't actually a moral code but a schema that moral codes must fit. In chapter four he looks at what he can actually deduce. Do-not-harm-people is his first deduction, in 4.5, but with an exception for self-defence, in 4.6. This doesn't work well: the problem is that although he "knows" there must be such an exception, his schema doesn't really provide for it; nonetheless he tortures it into doing so. This is, incidentally, yet another hint that his proposed moral principle is wrong: he is not really deducing morals from it, instead he is desperately trying to make things he knows to be moral fit into it. Similar things happen with the duty-to-rescue in section 4.7. In chapter five he realises that we actually live by various social and moral rules; but he still prioritises his principles and does not as far as I can see, get to realising that those rules bind because they have "evolved" to, rather than because of his abstract principles.

Notes

1. I bought it second-hand for £15 from the Oxfam bookshop - it had been relegated (or stolen?) from the University of Lancaster philosophy department. If you're not from the UK, or are from some benighted part of the UK, Oxfam run a number of shops that are just second hand books; this works well in Oxford and Cambridge; though for Cambridge, Heffers is generally better for the heavyweight stuff.

2. But not to non-agents. Is animal cruelty bad, in his world? There's some whiffling around this (and mentally deficient persons) that I didn't have the patience to plough through; I sense he is uneasy on this point.

3. And partly of course because they don't even realise it is wrong, sadly.

Refs

* Reflections on United Arab Emirates.

* Do We Need Sports Betting to Get to Mars? Maybe.

* The flower of justice is peace.

Who knew what when, again?

WKWW refers. The shiny new Parliamentarians’ Guide to Climate Change says "Climate change is an area fraught with disinformation, creating a vital need for reliable, accessible and trusted data and analysis". How true. Naturally, it will hold itself to the highest standards, and rigourously eschew any misleading statements, such as That a warming planet is chiefly the result of human carbon emissions is extremely well understood. The greenhouse effect has been known about since the 19th Century and the first detection of human-caused warming was in the 1930s... oh, hold on. This "first detection" is Callendar's stuff. He did indeed make some kind of global temperature series, and he did indeed think It Woz Us Wot Dun It, but to present this as agreed upon or sure or even as "detection" is distinctly dubious¹; we have IPCC '90 saying Global - mean surface air temperature has increased by 0 3°C to 0 6°C over the last 100 years... The size of this warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability, alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse warming. IPCC '90 had not "detected" human-caused warming; claiming it for the 1930's is dodgy.

Don't ask me about the rest of it; I stopped at that point.

Notes

1. I'm pretty sure that calling it "the first definitive proof of rising global temperatures" is wrong too. We like it, now, because he turned out to be right (and British, too, which is nearly the same thing). As Spencer Weart puts it, It all sounded dubious to most meteorologists. Temperature data were such a mess of random fluctuations that with enough manipulation you could derive all sorts of spurious trends. Taking a broader look, experts believed that climate was comfortably uniform.

Refs

* Supreme Court allows EPA emissions rule to stand while litigation continues (Three Thoughts on same); actual text.

* Court Holds the First Amendment Bars Florida from Threatening Media with Criminal Punishment for Spreading Supposed Health-Related Disinformation. The ACLU’s wise decision to defend the NRA in NRA v. Vullo bears fruit.

* SpaceX is NASA’s biggest lunar rival.

The Foundations of Morality

The Foundations of Morality by Henry Hazlitt is an essentially correct analysis of morality; I recommend it highly². You can, if you like, read his Summary and Conclusion but that might be a mistake; it is better to start from the beginning.

Somewhat more precisely, it is a morality-schema; its main point is not pushing any one morality³, but in telling you what morality is.

And the schema is: morality is a system of general rules that ensure social cooperation in the long-term.

Other, failed, theories

There are many many wrong theories of morality. Hazlitt goes through various of these; I won't. That morality is divinely imposed, I consider not worth considering. Kant's ethics of Duty doesn't work, as everyone who reads it immeadiately realises, the only puzzle left being why people take him seriously.

Morality, Law, Manners

Morality is abstract rules that you should observe, for your own long-term good and the good of society, which in itself is your own long-term good. Law (as opposed to legislation) is similar, but enforced by coercion by the State when required; since it is enforced by coercion it should be the minimum. Manners are again similar, but enforced by disapprobation or honour.

The curious case of Haidt

There's a curious relationship to Moral foundations theory, which is essentially what went into The Righteous Mind. The curiousity is that much of the value of TRM is contained in FOM, and yet nowhere does Hadit show any awareness of prior art. It seems unlikely that he can genuinely be ignorant; that leaves rather less pleasant motives for the exclusion. Because whilst TRM contains quite a bit that FOM doesn't cover - Haidt is rather interested in explaining political differences - there is much that could be compressed into "read Hazlitt". The same goes for Morality as cooperation, 2024/03¹. Haidt has a slightly different focus, as the word "Righteous" implies, but that's not enough.

As a bonus, Hadit's definition of morality, viz Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible, isn't as good, since it omits the explicit "long term", which would have got him out of his cult and fascist problems.

One of Haidt's prize examples is the eating-a-dog. He struggles to fit that into his schema, because he struggles mightily to ensure that no harm is done. But everyone "knows" it is immoral, and in Hazlitt's version it is clear why: it is violating one of our taboos, which we know even though we don't know the reason we have it.

Notes

1. When we discussed that then, Tom complained that I'd omitted coercion in discussing cooperation. In retrospect I should have said that is simply part of it.

2. Although not unreservedly; he needs to read a bit more Popper; he wouldn't be so confused by Thrasymachus if he had. And his discussion of free will, like everyone else's, is a waste of space.

3. Although he correctly defends Capitalist morality and attacks Socialist "morality".

Refs

* A Kahnemanian Theory of Funerals.

* Kant's Dialectic.

* China's Upside-Down Meritocracy.

* Why Americans Should Die for Ukraine.

* A Fashionable Appeal to a Benevolent State (or read Noah Smith).

* Reflections on India.

* ACX reminds me how tit-for-tat fits into this (though why early-Christians weren't cooperate-bot is obvious: despite the fine words, they were effectively tit-for-tat with a high forgiveness factor).

* Bryan Caplan in Maximum Progress on Progressivism recommends Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism (also available for free via IA). A quick scan says I don't believe him, but I should look closer... the index has no entry for Hazlitt, which is dodgy.