JayB

That you can listen to online. Share-em. Wolfmother Sorta Zepplinesque guitar-rock with a bit more oomph.

To answer the do battle question, nope. With regards to eating meat and spit-roasting the wife, do you really think that the the two are morally equivalent practices under any framework? If not, then the Indians-invading-the-US-to-put-an-end-to-the-Quarter-pounder analogy seems like a bit of a stretch. There's probably a marginal subculture somewhere that would take issue with any given aspect of civilized existence, but recognizing that there may be a culture somewhere that's a marginal left-over from the paleolithic era which thinks that flaying left-handed toddlers is the moral thing to do is one thing, pretending that any critique that they would level against a culture that spares left-handed tykes that treatment carries a moral force equal to the arguments against the practice is quite a stretch. Far fetched, but training kids that politically motivated murder-suicide is the highest good that they can achieve in this world is not too far off.

Of course they aren't equivalent, but neither is the nature of the objectives that they are intended to accomplish nor are the targets. You can effectively target specific cultural practices, like, Slavery, apartheid, female genital mutilation, and even eating meat with argumentation and various kinds of diplomatic pressure. Sometimes, but not always, you can get rid of a regime that alligns itself with the values that you are campaigning against, as was the case with the Apartheid regime, or the Indians getting the British out of India. If your primary objective is to elminate a regime that has stated its intention to kill or conquer you, then the odds that you'll be able to bring about your intended objective with anything other than force are pretty slim. Wouldn't have worked with Hitler, or Hirihito, and it wasn't the threat of widespread condemnation and dissaproval that kept the Soviet Union's tanks from rolling into Western Europe. I doubt that a loud chorus of "tisk, tisks" will do much to dissuade the Jihadis either, but I don't think that we have much to lose by criticizing behavior that's outside the parameters of civilized behavior in any culture.

So if you had a daughter engaged in a divorce proceeding brought about by a husband who claimed infidelity, and you had to decide whether the case would be tried in a Western court, or in a court which enforced Sharia law - you'd flip a coin? Ditto for deciding whether a suitcase nuke would end up in the hands of a Baptist congregation in Lubbock Texas, or in a Mosque in northeastern Pakistan? Riiiight. so are you prepared to do battle w/ every culture that rejects our values? They can reject whatever values and norms they wish, but when they do so I think it's odd that so many folks in the West are convinced that it's an ethical duty to withhold comment and suspend their moral judgement entirely. It's not like we are talking forks versus chopsticks here. There's a wide variety of cultural practices out there, but acknowledging that is one thing, accepting every manner of barbarity practiced in a particular culture without comment is quite another, as is trivializing them with glib pc analogizing. "We have domestic violence in this country, so who are we to criticize: 1. Stoning a pregnant woman to death. 2. The widespread practice of honor killings. 3. Public beatings of women who shed the beekeeper suits in public. 4. Genital mutilation, etc." Does that really help the folks who are on the receiving end of these practices? Do they take comfort in the notion that while they are being stoned to death, at *least* they haven't been subjected to the indignity of outsiders pointing fingers and critiquing the practice? Anyone remember the Sutee? If not, give it a Google. The reason that it's unfamiliar is because the British ended it. A quote from general Napier summarizes the moral perspective that lead to it's abolition. "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours." I'm sure there were a million wonderful things about the culture in which this practice occured, but most widows in the region are probably quite thankful that this particular practice is no longer commingled with them. Appreciating other cultures and acknowledging their merits is one thing, failing to critique barbarity is another, especially when it seems to have widespread approval in that culture, and is unlikely to cease without external pressure. It's also worth mentioning that just like it was the widows who would have suffered if the British wrote off the widow-B-que as a harmless cutlural quirk, it's the kids in the video who are ultimately going to bear the cost of the "cultural practices" that we're busy apologizing for. What kind of future are they going to have in a society which instructs them that their highest aspiration should be to detonate themselves amongst civilians in a cafe? Thanks to a few decades of Western "understanding" of ever-more-inhuman practices and tactics, the Palestinians are now saddled with a political culture that bears more resemblance to a death cult than a governing class that's actually capable of bringing them either statehood or a viable economy. Even if they got a state, what are the odds that it would be either stable or prosperous, ever? In a world of intense competition for capital, is IBM going to set up a new facility in Bangalore, or the place where they danced in the streets after 9-11, mourned Zarqawi's passing, and march kids through the streets with mock suicide belts? And finally, anyone here remember the campaign that ended Apartheid? I don't seem to recall many folks who are ostensibly opposed to cultural imperialism arguing against the divestment campaigns, diplomatic pressure, and widespread public criticism that helped bring an end to Apartheid were unconscionable assaults on the Afrikaaner's unique cultural heritage. It was okay to condemn Apartheid and criticize the culture that produced it, but it's wrong to do the same for suicide bombing?

Just calling the bluff, kemosabe, and I can afford to tell it like it is without worrying about my social well-being. You are quite generous to stand up for the defenseless, but the fact of the matter is that you could pretty much anhiliate all graduate programs in the humanities outside of history and economics and not deprive humanity of a whole hell of a lot. Can anyone claim that the study or practice of literature or philosophy have made any concrete advances in the past 100 years, much less the pomo-derivations thereof? This guy probably has all the answers

Neat. I'm also agnostic and think that anything that consenting adults choose to do to one another is nobody's business but that of the said consenting adults, but that's another story. Whenever Prole chimes in I'm always reminded of what my Dad said after looking through the Dissertation topics in the UW graduation program in the Sciences, and the English Department. The guy was validictorian, went to Northwestern on a full-ride scholarship, and still has most of his books from all of the philospophy and history courses he took there, so I was kind of surprised to hear him say that you could take every last dissertation produced by the English department and drop it in a vat of battery acid, and the world wouldn't be any worse off afterwards. Reminded me of one of my favorite Hume quotes, "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, 'Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?' No. 'Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?' No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

Developing a novel-high throughput screen for compounds that target a hitherto unexploited weakness in HIV replication with some other folks at an institution that probably bears substantially less resemblance to Bob Jones University than your own alma matter, actually.

So if you had a daughter engaged in a divorce proceeding brought about by a husband who claimed infidelity, and you had to decide whether the case would be tried in a Western court, or in a court which enforced Sharia law - you'd flip a coin? Ditto for deciding whether a suitcase nuke would end up in the hands of a Baptist congregation in Lubbock Texas, or in a Mosque in northeastern Pakistan? Riiiight.

Glad you're back to recite more of the limpdick WWU undergrad-colloquia calliber discourses for me. Speaking of civilization - what is it, exactly, that you'll be contributing to civilization when you graduate? Another monograph on the Latent Homo-Eroticism in Late Victorian Poetry?

Falwell and Roberts are slacking a bit on the beheadings these days....

Yeah - there's evil in every human/culture/whatever, but an inability or unwillingness to distinguish between grades of evil and asses the threat that each poses is a dangerous shortcoming. Even if you want to argue that Klansmen and Islamic Murder/Suicide enthusiasts are equally evil, you'd have to be a fucking retard to believe that the Klan represents anything even remotely like the threat that the aforementioned Islamic Murder/Suicide corps represent to civilized people and the values that make their civilization possible.

Yup. Pretty uninspiring unless you're from Iowa.

Not much, but it's pretty heavily settled/plotted-out. Woods vs Wilderness. No wilderness here until you get a ways up into Maine.

Pretty much. Worth visting if you are ever in South-Central Colorado (not terribly far from the Crestone Group).

Glad we cleared that up so that you can continue making your involuntary contribution via corporate extortion.

Thread Drift - but it's pretty amazing to look at photos of New England from around a century ago and compare that to today. Back then I think New England was something like 80 percent field and 20 percent forest, and now the reverse is true.

This place was pretty cool, but not for sale:

Here's a suggestion: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm "The idea of comparative advantage -- with its implication that trade between two nations normally raises the real incomes of both -- is, like evolution via natural selection, a concept that seems simple and compelling to those who understand it. Yet anyone who becomes involved in discussions of international trade beyond the narrow circle of academic economists quickly realizes that it must be, in some sense, a very difficult concept indeed. I am not talking here about the problem of communicating the case for free trade to crudely anti-intellectual opponents, people who simply dislike the idea of ideas. The persistence of that sort of opposition, like the persistence of creationism, is a different sort of question, and requires a different sort of discussion. What I am concerned with here are the views of intellectuals, people who do value ideas, but somehow find this particular idea impossible to grasp. My objective in this essay is to try to explain why intellectuals who are interested in economic issues so consistently balk at the concept of comparative advantage. Why do journalists who have a reputation as deep thinkers about world affairs begin squirming in their seats if you try to explain how trade can lead to mutually beneficial specialization? Why is it virtually impossible to get a discussion of comparative advantage, not only onto newspaper op-ed pages, but even into magazines that cheerfully publish long discussions of the work of Jacques Derrida? Why do policy wonks who will happily watch hundreds of hours of talking heads droning on about the global economy refuse to sit still for the ten minutes or so it takes to explain Ricardo? In this essay, I will try to offer answers to these questions. The first thing I need to do is to make clear how few people really do understand Ricardo's difficult idea -- since the response of many intellectuals, challenged on this point, is to insist that of course they understand the concept, but they regard it as oversimplified or invalid in the modern world. Once this point has been established, I will try to defend the following hypothesis: (i) At the shallowest level, some intellectuals reject comparative advantage simply out of a desire to be intellectually fashionable. Free trade, they are aware, has some sort of iconic status among economists; so, in a culture that always prizes the avant-garde, attacking that icon is seen as a way to seem daring and unconventional. (ii) At a deeper level, comparative advantage is a harder concept than it seems, because like any scientific concept it is actually part of a dense web of linked ideas. A trained economist looks at the simple Ricardian model and sees a story that can be told in a few minutes; but in fact to tell that story so quickly one must presume that one's audience understands a number of other stories involving how competitive markets work, what determines wages, how the balance of payments adds up, and so on. (iii) At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world. Both comparative advantage and natural selection are ideas grounded, at base, in mathematical models -- simple models that can be stated without actually writing down any equations, but mathematical models all the same. The hostility that both evolutionary theorists and economists encounter from humanists arises from the fact that both fields lie on the front line of the war between C.P. Snow's two cultures: territory that humanists feel is rightfully theirs, but which has been invaded by aliens armed with equations and computers."

Wow that's a pretty cool pad. Probably the optimal shelter for that part of the world, at least in terms of energy-efficiency.

oh goody another semantical argument about voluntary Sorry JayB, there are quite a few countries where people believe in the soical contract so there contribution to government is voluntary. There are others where people feel corporations are extorting them and their contributions are involuntary Who's the semantic quibbler here? The guy punching the clock at the GM plant is in the same boat as the guy marching in the parade in N. Korea?

In my opinion, that's an assinine view of economics. Where is the competitive advantage in a world dominated by the commoditization of natural resources? There isn't much value in natural resources: the value is created after extraction. To continue your example, crude oil is less than $75 for 50 gallons, but gasoline sells for $150 for the same amount. Refining, however, can be done anywhere on the planet for virtually the same costs. If you are equating possession of natural resources to some nebulous concept related to a country's economic development, you are way off from the conceptual framework developed to support the (in my opinion) specious, nationalist idea of 'competitive advantage'. BTW, I've never heard of in the literature before. wow. how's that for off-topic? That's really not what I was claiming at all, actually. It's been clear for a long time that the presence or absence of abundant naturally resources in a given country has relatively little to do with the prosperity of its inhabitants, and yeah - they're clearly worth something, as people are still willing to spend money to acquire them, but there's more value added post-extraction/harvest/whatever. I was just using oil and lumber as examples to illustrate a case of mutually beneficial exchange between two parties. Could be a doctor and an auto-mechanic, a plumber and Dell computer, etc, etc, etc. As far as the priciple I'm talking about being nationalist, it seems to me that it's actually the direct opposite. Parties engaged in such exchanges can gain all the benefits of another country's resources without having to physically occupy them. Quite different from the notion that one must have physical posession a given geographic area to benefit from the resources contained in the said area.

if you consider bribes 'private justice' yes.. but thats the problem. If you can get a large group of people to cooperate for the good of each other, that's government. Call it whatever name that makes you and your ideology happy, it doesn't change the nature of the beast. I'd say whether or not the cooperation is voluntary or not makes a bit of a difference in the nature of the said beast.

Pretty basic stuff. If Saudi Arabia needs large amounts of timber for construction, it will make more sense for them to sell some oil to purchase it, rather than embark upon several decades worth of capital intensive futility while attempting to grow it in the desert. If the folks in BC need petroleum, it makes more sense for them to sell some of their abundant timber to purchase it from the Saudis, rather than attempting to extract it from their own soil. If you need a car, it makes more sense for you to sell some backpacks and use the proceeds to pay for it, rather than starting the process by digging for iron ore in your backyard, etc, etc, etc. Comparative advantage.

Yeah. Eliminating the tarriffs and subsidies that detroy their ability to profit from the enterprises that they actually have a competitive advantage in would go a long way towards improving the lot of the third world. Money flowing directly to the people producing goods and services, rather than credit/capital/goods flowing only through the wretched governments that they have to live under, which would go a long way towards reining in the kleptocracy, and actually enabling the people who need them to pay for clean water, insecticides, food, and basic medication.

From what I hear in Australia, at least in Victoria, the state has installed a pretty robust network of speed-cams and the population there didn't seem to object much at any stage of the project. If anything, I would have expected the folks in Victoria BC to take the speed-cams lying down, and for the folks in Victoria AUS to raise hell. Surprising inversion.