Pun Salad

A short (albeit dense) book that's a very mixed bag.

The author, Philip Goff, starts from the observation that the fundamental physical constants that govern how the universe behaves seem to be "fine-tuned" to support the presence of life on our planet. (And, although I don't think Goff makes this argument, probably other planets too.) If, for example, the "strong nuclear force" were a little bit weaker than it is, we'd have no atomic nuclei at all, just protons whizzing around. And if it were a little bit stronger, then stellar nuclear fusion would have burned up all the hydrogen, leaving nothing for blimps. Or water.

If you're a believer, the reason behind this is pretty straightforward: thank God. Or some other intelligent designer. See the Discovery Institute for their take.

Goff is not convinced by that, devoting a chapter to why God (who he calls the "Omni-God") probably doesn't exist. He also mentions alternate efforts to explain fine-tuning: the anthropic principle, multiverses, and explains why he doesn't like them.

Instead, he is a fan of panpsychism, which is the notion that the concept of "mind" is present in all things, down to the lowliest neutrino. For elementary particles, and simple arrangements thereof, their "mind" is limited to minding the physical laws we know and love. Once things get more complex (nervous systems, for example), the idea that things have a mind of their own grows more plausible.

And, of course, once you get to really complex things, like the whole universe, the associated "mind" gets really sharp and powerful. And can be said to have the ability to engage in purposive behavior.

At which point I was dubious. Thinking that it's pretty amazing the lengths to which even smart people will go in order to avoid the God explanation. Still, Goff presents his argument well, deals with objections, honestly says why he prefers his viewpoint. Even while admitting any actual evidence for it is lacking.

But, sad to say, things kind of crash and burn in the last part of the book, which veers into politics and economics for some reason. It's a pretty much standard progressive/democratic socialist jeremiad against free-market capitalism, with the usual swear words: "Reagan", "Thatcher", "neoliberalism". etc. This argument would not survive two minutes in the ring with (for example) The Myth of American Inequality by Phil Gramm et. al. Goff should not have even tried.

But as an entertaining aside, he puts in a plug for legalizing psychedelics. Saying, "I took psychedelics a lot when I was a teenager." Bravely daring readers to even think about thinking: Well, geez, that explains a lot.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of legalizing psychedelics too. I'm just dubious of getting profound insights that way.

Things really fall apart in a final postscript, titled "Is Taxation Theft?" Spoiler: his answer is "no". But his argument is hand-wavingly poor. A natural, obvious, question behind "Is taxation theft?" is (or should be) how is taxation different from theft?

Obviously: taxation is accomplished under the political authority of the state, and theft is not. That's pretty much the only difference.

But what is the justification for the political authority of the state? Since I read Michael Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority back in 2013, I'm pretty sure there isn't one. What I said then:

We would not tolerate our next-door neighbors suddenly assuming powers of taxation, legislation, punishment for misbehavior, etc. Especially if (at the same time) they claimed that we had some sort of patriotic duty to submit to their demands and dictates.

In fact, we'd consider our next-door neighbors to be crazy and dangerous.

So don't we need at least a good yarn about how existing states might have justifiably claimed the same powers?

And we simply don't get one from Goff. I'm unsure whether he even notices the problem.

Funny story: I had forgotten why I'd put this on my get-at-library list. And for the first 66 pages or so, it seemed to be mostly a gentle sendup of pretentious, earnest guerilla gardeners in New Zealand.

And then on page 67, things take a sharp right turn into thriller territory. And (as it turns out) the reason I put this on my get-at-library list was its presence on the WSJ's Best Mysteries of 2023. If you click over to the Amazon page, you'll note other raves as well.

It's a thriller, sorry for the spoiler, although it's described that way on the book flap. But it's a very literary one. In fact, it will probably be the only one where John Rawls' views on equitable wealth distribution are briefly derided (page 146).

Another literary feature: at the end, you'll find there are unanswered questions and loose ends aplenty. A lot of action happens off-page, left to your imagination. In fact, I went to the Google with my questions; had I just missed something? No, as it turns out.

David Harsanyi notes one small problem with the guy Trump recently promised to let "go wild" on health, food, and medicine issues. And that problem would be: RFK Jr. is a dangerous quack.

Just the kind of guy you'd want "going wild".

Fun Wikipedia fact about the alleged traditional Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times":

Despite being so common in English as to be known as the "Chinese curse", the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced.

That does not make it any less ironically apt to our time.

Also of note:

• For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!' If GOP primary voters had been just slightly less enraptured by Trump this year, I'm pretty sure Nikki Haley would be cruising to an easy win tomorrow. Instead, she has an op-ed in today's WSJ, claiming Trump Isn’t Perfect, but He’s the Better Choice.

  I don’t agree with Mr. Trump 100% of the time. But I do agree with him most of the time, and I disagree with Ms. Harris nearly all the time. That makes this an easy call. Here are the facts most relevant to me.

  Americans today on average face some $13,000 in higher annual costs than they did four years ago. Prices on nearly everything—food, gasoline, utility bills, insurance—have gone up. This is the direct result of the Biden-Harris agenda, which stoked inflation and stuck families with the bill. Americans are stuck with another bill, too: the national debt. It has reached nearly $36 trillion, thanks in part to Ms. Harris’s tie-breaking votes on the grossly misnamed American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act. Despite its title, the latter is still boosting inflation. Its estimated price tag has more than doubled since President Biden signed it, and it is funding projects that are largely stalled. As president, Ms. Harris would make America’s fiscal crisis even worse.

  Then there’s national security. The Biden-Harris agenda has made the world far more dangerous. Our southern border is our most pressing security threat; Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have made it dramatically worse. Their debacle in Afghanistan not only created a new terrorist state; it also signaled weakness that sparked Russia’s war against Ukraine. Their appeasement of Iran has enriched that despotic regime and emboldened it to pursue war with Israel through its terrorist proxies. And the administration’s weakness toward China has done nothing to impede the communist power’s expansion at our expense. This is the world that Biden-Harris failures have given us in four short years.

  If you need excuses to ink in the Trump oval, Nikki's got 'em.

  (This item's headline source.)

• It's not dead! It's probably just pining for the fjords! Philip Greenspun, nevertheless, has an autopsy: Why traditional small-government conservatism is dead in the U.S.

  “High Taxes, Big Spending, Low Unemployment: Tim Walz’s Economic Record” (Wall Street Journal, a purportedly conservative newspaper, August 2024):

  [Walz] also pushed through a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill—the largest in state history—that will benefit residents and businesses.

  This is a news article, not opinion. So the Wall Street Journal reports it as an established fact that taking $2.6 billion from individuals who would have invested it or spent it privately and giving it to government contractors “WILL benefit” residents. In other words, the WSJ is certain that the government will spend this money better than individuals would have. Therefore, a Reagan-style appeal to shrink government should be rejected by essentially all American voters (readers of Democrat-affiliated media, such as the NYT, certainly aren’t going to argue that limiting government spending is beneficial).

  Well, at times the WSJ's news coverage has me shaking my head, but I'll plead mitigating context and possible infelicitous phasing. The full paragraph:

  His backers point to the 2023 passage of the nation’s highest state child tax credit, which reduced taxes for lower-income Minnesota families. He also pushed through a $2.6 billion infrastructure bill—the largest in state history—that will benefit residents and businesses.

  So (arguably) the article meant to say the alleged "benefit" is something "his backers point to", not as established fact.

  Although (admittedly) if that's what the writer was trying to convey, he could have been clearer about it.

  (I also left a comment on Mr. Greenspun's blog to this effect.)

• I'll take whatever arguments I can get at this point. At City Journal, Gregory Conti provides A More Practical Argument for Free Speech.

  One of the most persistent pitfalls in political argumentation is a version of the fallacy of false equivalence. A friend dubs it the fallacy of ripe apples and rotten oranges. In a political context, it's when an advocate compares an idealized or best-case version of his preferred position with a realistic—or perhaps even exaggeratedly negative—version of his opponent’s. We see this often in debates over grand economic models. Capitalists accuse socialists of overlooking the actual record of socialist regimes and judging capitalism’s inadequacies not against a probable alternative but a utopian image. Socialists are charged with setting up a target that is always moving; if objectors point to the defects of, e.g., Maduro’s Venezuela, the reply that “that’s not true socialism” is sure to come. Likewise, libertarians often find themselves criticized by everyone from centrists to Communists for holding up an idealized, unfalsifiable characterization of the benignity of exchange and the free market and then criticizing the regulations and redistribution that characterize the modern state for falling short of this condition. Every social ill, their critics charge, is thereby allowed to be traced back to our not having a really free market, while the real-life deficiencies of markets go unexamined.

  As the broad American consensus in favor of free speech erodes, we have seen a similar unsatisfactory form of disputation proliferate. Critics of “free speech absolutism,” as it is condescendingly dubbed—we don’t refer to “rule of law absolutists” or “separations of powers absolutists,” for example—highlight all manner of alleged deficiencies with the status quo and trace them to an alleged excess of free speech. If we could just get rid of free speech, then the ills associated with this “unmitigated disaster,” as one dyspeptic left-wing journalist calls it, would vanish, with apparently none of the good things we might wish to retain being threatened.

  Conti has a good point. Some people are not persuaded by arguments from lofty principles. For example, in the tweet he links to:

  “Free speech” was, and is, an unmitigated disaster.
  
  I know it sounds inflammatory, but every piece of evidence points to the fact that we need really aggressive government regulation of speech platforms. The free market doesn’t work and it never will. https://t.co/S2bfDHoE4y pic.twitter.com/IWYLmZDECQ

  — Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) October 11, 2024

  ... the claim is a "practical" one. And the "practical" response to "The free market doesn’t work and it never will." is something like "It works far better than anything we've seen in the past, and that will likely continue into the future."

  Or: "Any cure you advocate is almost certainly gonna be worse than the disease you imagine."

• A timeless reminder. A warning from Nathan J. Robinson Beware Government Bullshit. (Originally published in February, but it's new to me.)

  “All governments lie,” I.F. Stone said, and he was right. But they also do an awful lot of bullshitting.

  Harry Frankfurt’s famous difference between the “liar” and the “bullshitter” is that a liar knows they’re saying something untrue, while a bullshitter simply doesn’t care whether what they’re saying is true. That’s an interesting distinction, but when it comes to government bullshit, we’re dealing with something slightly different: statements that may be technically true but are totally useless, evasive, and meaningless. In fact, government spokespeople are often extremely concerned with not saying anything provably false, which is why they end up using mountains of words that don’t say anything at all. 

  Everyone should watch a few government press conferences to see this in action. Interestingly, in 2024 we’ve actually come a long way from the Bush years, when journalists were insufficiently skeptical toward government claims. In White House, Pentagon, and State Department press conferences, journalists like Matt Lee of the Associated Press and Ryan Grim of the Intercept actually do a very good job of pressing spokespeople. But sometimes the response from the Biden administration’s press liaisons is such empty bullshit that it’s hard to see why the reporters even bother.

  Robinson goes on to analyze some bullshit emanating from John Kirby, Coordinator for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. He may be criticizing them from the left, but that doesn't make him wrong.

  And I'm pretty sure Kamala also attended the seminar where Kirby and Jean-Pierre learned their bullshitting tactics.

• It's not me, is it? Please say it's not me. John Tierney wonders about the F-word: Who’s the Fascist? He has a likely candidate:

  For an alleged wannabe dictator, Trump badly blundered in his choices for the Supreme Court. Those three conservative justices went on to help form majorities in landmark decisions limiting the power of the federal government and the president. The rulings shifted authority back to the states and severely curtailed the power of the executive branch—much to the dismay of Harris. In her criticism of the court’s decision last June overturning its 1984 Chevron decision, which makes it easier for citizens to challenge regulations by federal agencies, she warned that it would limit the power of “federal experts” to issue “commonsense rules.”

  Harris’s idea of commonsense rules presumably includes mandates from the Green New Deal, which she co-sponsored in the Senate. The plan to eliminate fossil fuels never had any chance of being passed by Congress, but the Biden administration has quietly advanced this agenda by creatively using federal agencies to promote and subsidize “sustainable energy,” stymie oil and gas production, and force automakers to switch to electric vehicles. Harris is firmly committed to the goal of achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, which would be the most costly project in history and give central planners vast new powers to manage the economy and the lives of citizens.

  Whether or not you want to call that fascism or just plain old authoritarianism, it would probably appeal to Mussolini.

  Whew, it's not me. Not this time.