Wednesday, November 20, 2024

The Wovles in the White House

The wolves have been in the government chambers, including the White House, since the founding. It's one of the most common threads of history. 

Some 250 years ago on the east coast of what is now the USA, a group of the wolves got together and agreed to a new form of détente. Instead of trying to get rid of the wolves, they accepted that they themselves were wolves to a large sector of the citizenry, and they agreed to a set of rules that did _not_ make the citizenry free. 

There is no way to force people to be free. 

The new rules they set rather support a people that is willing to be free in their freedom by keeping any of the various factions -- the wolves -- from getting an upper hand. 

Partisan politics (DNC, RNC, any other party that might develop long-term viability) is the result of certain factions collaborating to break the rules of détente -- factions within the party. That's why you have extremists along with moderates, and various flavors within the parties.

This is one of the things everyone who wants to be free needs to understand. The very existence of only two controlling parties is because most of the factions have agreed to try to break the détente. They think they will somehow win in the resulting power struggle.

The constant veering back and forth from left to right, liberal to conservative, etc. is a necessary adjustment in keeping any one faction of the wolves from taking control. 

That's why the leaders of the parties don't like a loose cannon, except when they are the ones who haven't been in control. 

That's why I'm really upset with the DNC for pushing RFKjr out of the contest this time. The two ruling parties have gotten too good at colluding with each other, and a win -- or even a serious challenge -- from a third party will force them back into détente. 

Moderates are generally politicians who are willing to keep the détente. Biden was a good moderate until part way through his first term, when he ran out of energy to keep his party hacks -- his support team -- in check, and they took over. 

Harris, as I say, is a loose cannon, too. She's good at hiding it. But if she had been elected, there would have been a lot of surprise and cries of betrayal from within the party that was hoping for another president they could manipulate.

Freedom is not free

 

Friday, November 15, 2024

Affirming for Real

(This is another of those
"deep" ideas I get while
taking a shower.)
 
 

A thought about affirmative action --

If you want people to be productive, you want them to produce things of value. If you want people to produce things of value you have to believe that they can produce things of value.

If you want to believe that people can produce things of value, you must believe that they have value -- intrinsic value.

But if you don't show that belief in your actions, you are essentially refusing to believe the thing you want to believe.

But affirmative action seems to put unqualified people in positions they aren't qualified for.

Wait. I said "not qualified" twice. Let's take one of those away.

But affirmative action puts people in positions they are not qualified for.

You get why I made those changes, don't you?

How do we demonstrate our belief in people without putting them in positions they aren't yet qualified for?

"... aren't _yet_ qualified ..."

It's impossible to get qualified without experience, and it's impossible to get experience without being in a position you aren't qualified for.

So what do we do to reduce the damage unqualified people do while they are getting experience and getting qualified?

How about letting the people who are qualified stick around?

Not so close as to prevent the new guy on the job from learning things the hard way (which is the only way to get experience), but not so far away that when the inevitable troubles ensue they can't help.

This is what seems to me to be missing in our current efforts at affirmative action.

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Wealth Caps?

(This is another of those
"deep" ideas I get while
taking a shower.)
 

I consider myself conservative. 

I consider myself to respect the concept of natural stewardship. I understand how artificial restraints on wages can strangle creativity.

But there comes a point -- or two or three -- where ... 

If you've already amassed enough personal wealth to retire comfortably ten times over, it's time to do so, to move over and let someone fresh join the fight. No, those who have gotten wealthy shouldn't just go on vacation, there are plenty of service projects that have no way of generating monetary value that a person can get involved in, to keep a person competitive, sharp, and alive.  

And, really, service itself should be considered a higher value than money. 

Having enough money to retire a hundred times over gives an individual the sort of personal power that minor nobility have in nobility systems of government, and if the national government is involving itself in taxing personal income, if it fails to set some boundaries on that kind of wealth, it is effectively setting up a modern version of nobility.  

In the US, that should be a Constitutional issue -- and should be held up as evidence that the national income tax itself, amendment notwithstanding, is a breach of the Constitution.  

Somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times the amount of money that enables a comfortable retirement, there's a point where the government should have a right to step in and say that that much wealth is on the face of it evidence of business malpractice, and force early retirement. I mean, if the government can force retirement at 65 or 70, under whatever untested assumptions, surely the government can force retirement at, say, 650 MUSD or so, to borrow an arbitrary number.  

[JMR202411200736 note:] 

(I should emphasize that I am speaking strictly in the loose theoretical -- I haven't thought this through to the consequences, and I am confident that, like all other good ideas, there will likely be negative effects and more loopholes for the lawyers and the rich who can afford lawyers.)

[JMR202411200736 note end.] 

I'm sure that finding indirect holdings would become a problem for the regulatory agencies. I could guess that some of the very rich would find tricks like paying people to hold holdings for them -- but even that would require them to dilute the power they can exercise. 

Getting the national government out of the income tax business would definitely help reduce the special interest involvement at national level, and spread them out at the state level enough to dilute their power -- assuming that states would completely take over the individual income tax function.  

I suspect that simply pushing the income tax function down to the state level would pretty much force most national corporations to split up on state lines, and significantly limit monopolies and the insane levels of personal wealth.

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

I Have a Dream (about Tomorrow)

Well, I suppose it's a fantasy.

Tomorrow morning, everybody wakes up and realizes that they just don't want to vote against their conscience and 3rd party candidates take every state that has any.

And RFKjr/Shanahan win the election, despite being on record as having withdrawn.

And every mountain shall be made low, ...

Sunday, November 3, 2024

My Wife's Suggestion for US President

My wife is listening to the US election reports on NHK news.

She thinks Harris is ahead by ten points or more. 

But she thinks neither should win, and suggests that the US should learn to get along without a president.

I'm not completely averse to the idea, but I asked her who we should send to all the international summits and such.

派遣。 Just hire a temp.

派遣会社 (haken gaisha) are a particular type of temporary staffing agency here in Japan.

I'm amused, but I'm also not sure it's a bad idea.

I also asked her who would keep Congress in check.

She suggested having elementary school teachers do that job -- by rotation.

There are some problems hiding in the details, but I love my wife's imagination.


Tuesday, October 29, 2024

A Vote for a 3rd Party Candidate is a Vote against Their Candidate!!!!!

Well, duh, as we used to say forty years ago.

But every vote for the entrenched parties is one more excuse they will take for not changing.

Saturday, April 6, 2024

Consideration of Trans-women and Women's Spaces

I'll try to be circumspect, but this is  going to be a little graphic.

eXTwitter user @country_spaces posted about how consent for men in women's spaces cannot be given by men to other men, nor can any woman give consent in the stead of another woman for men to be in women's spaces. If one woman in a group says no, it does not matter what the rest say. It isn't a majority-decides argument. @country_spaces says the answer for that group must be no.

But trans-women are women, according to certain trans-women, and the question should therefore not be raised for trans-women, according to their argument.

What's wrong with their argument? 

Such spaces are only partially relative to sex/gender, anyway.

Well, ...

Among civilized people and even among most less-than-civil people, private spaces are private spaces because of the right of refusal.

Said another way, without the right of refusal, there is no such thing as a private space.

If I can't tell you to get out of my private space, my private space is not private, and it is not mine.

This principle applies regardless of sex or gender.

Doesn't matter if we are both men, if we are both women, or if one of us is a man and another is a woman, or if you are some alien of a thirty-third gender and I am some alien of no gender at all. Without right of refusal, there is no privacy.

In certain public spaces, physiological realities require us to provide private spaces within those public spaces.

Without such private spaces, personal assault, including sexual assault, becomes a statistical problem. Why? Because the whole purpose for these spaces is so that we can let our guard down to take care of private business. And people looking for people to assault will assault people whose guard is down.

We can make rules and laws, but there will always be in any large enough group (large enough meaning more than one hundred in some cases, but more than just one in others), certain individuals who will not exercise self-control in another person's extremity.

So in civilized society, we try to provide those private spaces within public spaces, to the extent that we can.

But logistic realities mean that these private spaces within public spaces cannot be made perfectly private. So we compromise by providing shared semi-private spaces. Not perfectly private, but better than nothing.

in other words, we set up the sharing according to certain statistical realities.

Statistically speaking, women do not assault other women as frequently as men assault women. It happens, but much less frequently than men assaulting women. 

Women tend to respect each other's privacy more than men tend to respect women's privacy.

Also, men do not assault other men as much as they assault women. It does happen, but men tend to be more conscious of men being able to fight back. 

Do women tend to assault men in semi-private spaces? It's not a question we need to ask, if men and women do not share these semi-private spaces.

The difference is significant, and usually is sufficient to make a division of these semi-private spaces based on sex/gender a meaningful protection of both women and men.

Are these shared spaces really safe?

Not perfectly. If there is a rumor that some man has hidden cameras in the stalls of a restroom at a certain venue, women will go to significant personal pain to avoid using those restrooms. (And avoid the venue if possible, as well.)

Men, too, but not so much, since men are less vulnerable in their extremities than women.

So what about trans-women? If they are women, the same should hold for them.

Except, if a woman sees a trans-woman and suspects that the trans-woman is actually just a man pretending, the woman is not going to feel safe in letting down her guard. That, all by itself, nullifies the semi-private nature of women's spaces.

Moreover, we do not have sufficient statistical data to actually agree with the assertions of trans-women that they are women in this sense. There are reports of trans-women in prisons assaulting non-trans women at rates significantly above the rates of women assaulting women, and until these reports are proven false, women in shared prisons have no private spaces at all.

And above that, when a trans-woman sexually assaults a non-trans woman, there is a probability of pregnancy that requires much stricter considerations than the possibilities of women assaulting women. 

(Sexually transmitted diseases might be assumed not to have a sexual bias in infection frequencies? Maybe, maybe not. Until we have proof otherwise, we should rather assume that there is more of a tendency for transmission of disease as well when physiological males assault physiological females.)

And what about trans-men?

Careful. Discussion of the concept of shared private spaces in the context of trans-men is way too likely to shine too much light on the whole theory of gender affirmation.

What about the poor intersex people?

I'm going to suggest that letting people self-identify, and supporting insurance-paid gender-affirming surgeries is actually making it harder for true intersex people to have their private spaces. 

Twenty years ago, if a woman entered a men's restroom in an emergency, nobody got too excited -- other than certain men with no sense of self-control who complained that it never happened while they were in the loo. 

And, likewise, if a man apologized for entering a women's restroom in an emergency, he knew he had no right to be there. If he was allowed, he took care of his business and got out. And took a lot of ribbing from his buddies for letting himself get caught in such an extremity.

Very few trans-women apologize. Many seem to actually deliberately take way more time in restroom facilities than necessary.

Twenty years ago, intersex people could usually slip in under the radar. Now it's much harder.

If trans-women insist on unreasonable rights relative to women's spaces, it destroys the privacy of those women's spaces. Society may have no recourse other than to do completely away with shared private spaces in public spaces.

And that would drastically alter our ability to assemble freely, since most venues would have to just shut down completely.