Inside the Asylum

The Belmont Club has a couple of interesting posts up. One is about a largely forgotten phase of the campaign to retake the Philippines in World War II. Well worth a look if you have an interest in military history. The other is about concealed costs and corruption.

Italy wanted to be rid of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a suspected terrorist, but was unwilling, for domestic political considerations, to act against him. Therefore it arranged to have the United States snatch him from Milan. The United States wanted information from Nasr, but for domestic political reasons, was unable to apply torture to get it, however much the Left wanted that to be true. Therefore it passed him to Egypt for actual questioning. It goes on.

Torture is problematic. Abducting the citizens of allied states is problematic. But worse than both is this connivance between liberal democratic states to bore holes in their own constitutional orders. Nothing is left of Italian civil rights if the Italian government can drop one of its citizens through a hole like this.

The long expected genocide in Zimbabwe is now getting into full swing. I think it is a safe bet that nothing will be done to stop it and nothing will ever be done to punnish those responsible. In fact, I'll go way out on a limb and predict that, when Mugabe is done killing all the people that he wants to kill, he will be rewarded by the international community with more money and more power in the form of "aid".

I just noticed that Harry Frankfurt's classic essay "On Bullshit" has been published as a (very short) book. You can read the orginal essay here, or go see an interview with Frankfurt about the book here.

Lying is usually understood to involve saying something that you believe to be false, although some might add that what you say must actually be false. Misrepresentation, I think, involves saying something that you believe to be true, in order to get your audience to believe something that you believe to be false. Bullshit, according to Frankfurt, involves saying anything at all, with complete disregard for whether it is true or false, in order to get your audience to believe what you want them to believe.

Did we win?

A common bit of pop evolutionary psychology is that men want quantity in their sexual partners, because that is how they maximise their chances of reproducing, while women want quality, because that is how they maximise the chances of their off-spring surviving and reproducing in turn. In "sex by the numbers" I showed that the average number of partners must be about the same for men and women, and explained why women might want quantity just as much as men. Now I am going to explain why men might want quality just as much as women. (more...)

A common bit of pop evolutionary psychology is that men want quantity in their sexual partners, because that is how they maximise their chances of reproducing, while women want quality, because that is how they maximise the chances of their off-spring surviving and reproducing in turn. But some problems crop up when you do the numbers. (more...)

If we accept humans are evolved to devote most of their energies competing with other members of their society for status, it makes sense that we will never be truly content. For those humans who were too easily satisfied were at a evolutionary disadvantage and weeded out, as reproductive opportunities were limited to those who with the highest social status (if we discount the strategy of rape, which is basically a fringe form of competition).

So in that light, it's pretty obvious that almost every men in modern society will experience what's commonly known as a midlife crisis. For sooner or later, their evolutionary trait will propel them to seek more status and therefore mating opportunity. (women do not have midlife crisis because they do not gain any significant reproductive advantage with multiple partners)

In this predominantly Christian society, it's easy to forget that monogamy is actually a fairly recent invention. Almost all successful men have multiple partners, if not all at once, then serially.

So what's the point of this post? Well, obviously I am interested in hearing what others have to say on this subject. It should be pretty obvious that neither the usual Christian morality nor the trivial "what's natural is obviously good" sort of justification is what's looked for here.

I have long thought that the US should have stayed out of Vietnam but that, once in, the US should have cast aside all restraint and done what was needed to win. No half measures. So my interest was piqued when I ran across "Vietnam: the Necessary War" over at Far Outliers. From Publisher's Weekly:

In a very opinionated and sharply reasoned attempt to debunk three decades of conventional wisdom about Vietnam, Lind (The Next American Nation), the Washington, D.C., editor of Harper's, attacks both the right-wing contention that the U.S. could have won the war if only the politicians hadn't interfered with the military and the leftist orthodoxy that maintains the U.S. should never have become involved in the first place. Lind treats Vietnam as simply another battle in the Cold War, no different in principle from Korea or Afghanistan or any other Cold War confrontation. As such, it was both necessary and proper to intervene in Vietnam; a failure to do so, he asserts, would have permitted the Soviet Union and China to tighten their grip on the Third World. But once the U.S. committed itself, Lind argues, presidents Johnson and Nixon were obliged to fight a limited war in order to avoid the very real possibility of China entering the fray (just as it had done in Korea). If anything, Lind says, "the Vietnam War was not limited enough."

I also thought it was pretty funny that my views wound up described as both the left-wing and right-wing orthodoxy.

Microsoft Aiding the Chinese Government
I find it disgusting that an American company is willing to support the communist party in oppressing its own people for a chance of getting cozy and creating a stonger business relationship over human rights.

Unfortunately this is one of the few moral judgements that just about everyone agrees on. Which means that, whenever someone is casting about for a suitable metaphor with which to express their moral outrage, and they want to make sure that everyone will get it, they always pick Hitler.

This blog is just getting started. In a little while I will start putting up some old posts from the now defunct thinkindifferent.org, and maybe something new. Meanwhile here is a quick FAQ:

What happened to ThinkIndifferent.org?

The server died. I fixed it. It died again. I fixed it some more. It died some more. I gave up.

What's with the name?

A character in "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" called Wonko the Sane always appealed to me. After encountering a packet of toothpicks that came with instructions he became something of a recluse. He withdrew to a place called The Asylum, that looked like a house that had been turned inside out. Wonko lived Outside the Asylum. The rest of the world was Inside the Asylum.

What is this blog supposed to be for?

Hard to say. ThinkIndifferent.org turned out to be a mix of politics, philosophy, and BS. My guess is that this blog will turn out to be more of the same.

Who the hell are you anyway?

Dr. Strangelove: I'm a graduate student in philosophy. I mostly do ethics and political theory. I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb a long time ago. I'll let the other posters speak for themselves if they feel inclined.

Filthy Stinking No.9: Who the hell am I? Who the hell are you? No seriously, sometimes I'm not sure myself. I work in the Ivory Tower ... and why shouldn't I? The real world is over-rated. My nickname, Filthy Stinking No.9, comes from the nature of my job. In China after the communist takeover, they categorized all the people into 9 categories, such as peasants, workers, soldiers, etc. Not everyone made it into the 9 categories, such as landlords and capitalists. At the bottom of the list in the 9th place came the intellectuals. Even though they were allowed to exist in the people's paradise, they weren't well liked, and were often called such names as "filthy stinking number 9s."

Ethlite: Ethlite is the top google hit for Ethlite. What more needs to be said?