Category Archives: society

The state problem and the issue of defense

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I’ve been listening to the arguments against state power and, for the most part, I think they are perfectly valid and reasonable. Unfortunately, I think there is one serious issue with them that makes all such theories moot. In order to explain that, I will use the example of the ancient Rome.

You see, the reason why Rome became powerful and why it spread across the known world is that it had an organized state that could maintain a steady army that was well organized and could indulge in prolonged military campaigns. Other nations, that didn’t have an organized state, that didn’t have an organized government that could implement laws and levy taxes, they simply didn’t have a chance against a country that did those things. Their army needed to disband quickly in order to work for a living. There was no state infrastructure that could support prolonged campaigns of a large standing army.

So, let’s say that America returns to its small-state origins. One of its main problems during those times was that its military was very small and unable to wage major wars. Essentially, Mexico had a better organized army. It’s perfectly understandable why – in a capitalist, market-oriented society, military is an unwarranted expense, and could make sense only if you want to make your country into a predator that robs other countries of their resources and you finance yourself that way, as Islam did from the days of Mohammad, for instance. Otherwise it’s a dead expense. But if you don’t have a well organized modern army, you are defenseless against countries that do.

So, want it or not, you need to increase the state in order to arm your country, but then you empower the military industry and the people who decide where the money goes. You also incentivize borrowing or printing money, because this way you delay and defer the financial impact of war. Once you get defense as a valid reason for taxation, some people will come up with ideas about better ways of spending all that money, such as fighting poverty instead of waging war. So, essentially, in a few logical steps you get where you are now.

But is there really an alternative? I certainly don’t see how a civilization could shun defense and survive – the imperial China and its fall under the Mongols is a great warning. Wealth attracts predators. You need to have defense. In a modern world this doesn’t mean pitchforks and swords, it means intercontinental nukes and strategic submarines, networks of satellites and a conventional armed force. Someone, of course, needs to pay for this. You can say, let’s make them mercenaries. Yeah, that went well historically. So keeping a democratic control over the military is preferable, and this means government, which means either taxes, borrowing/printing money, or simply invading and robbing other countries in order to pay for your army.

Essentially, if you want to have a modern army you need to dedicate a significant portion of the GDP to that, and you need to dedicate a significant portion of the industry to military production. You can avoid financing this with taxes if you simply invade and rob other nations, but sooner or later you’ll run out of countries to invade, like Rome did, and then the cost of the military will be directed inwards, in form of taxes and government regulations, or inflation. This will very quickly result in destruction. An alternative is to do what the Imperial China did, to demilitarize to the point of only having a small mercenary force at the borders for token defense. Then the invaders come and make the mercenaries a better offer: “Let’s kill all those wealthy folks, take all their gold and divide it between us”. We know what happened to imperial China at that point.

So basically, you either have a country that collapses under the foreign invaders or under the burden of the expense of its own military. The state does seem to be part of the problem, but there are no obvious ways of getting around it in a way that doesn’t result in the other extreme, of having no borders and protections against invaders.

The situation is a direct consequence of the equality of all men in power. From this, it follows that the only way to get greater power is to organize men into larger groups and/or arm them with better weapons. Other human groups are then forced to respond with symmetric measures or risk being violently conquered; basically, when one human group invents the state, other human groups need to organize into states as well, in order to be able to deal with external pressure. It’s like the nukes: when one nation invents them, everyone else also needs to invent them or be bullied, invaded or destroyed. If anything is to be done, those basic parameters need to change.

False dichotomies: racism

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There is an interesting type of a logical error, called ad hominem. I say “interesting” because it’s frequently misunderstood. Let me demonstrate.

A: The fundamental constants of the Universe appear to be finely tuned, because any variance would preclude the existence of the kind of Universe that would make our existence possible. Since this is too unlikely to be the result of chance, the explanation that the Universe was deliberately created with those properties and with a goal of producing us, is actually the most probable one.

B: This is all religious bullshit, you believe in a talking snake and therefore nothing you say should be taken seriously.

This is argumentum ad hominem, a logical fallacy that attempts to refute the argument by attacking the person that makes the argument. Since credibility of the person making the argument is irrelevant (if a known criminal says that 2+2=4, this is not false), the argument stands. But let me show a different example.

A1: There can’t be a space station in orbit because the Earth is flat.

B1: You can take an amateur telescope and observe the space station in orbit. You can also use a parabolic satellite antenna to narrowly constrain the position of telecommunication satellites in orbit.

A2: That doesn’t prove anything.

B2: You’re an idiot and further discussion with you is pointless.

This is not argumentum ad hominem, because it isn’t an argument, it’s the conclusion based on the displayed properties of the other party. If instead of B1 one immediately wrote B2, it would be ad hominem. However, since A1 was refuted by B1, this essentially concludes the argumentation loop – an argument was offered and it was decisively refuted. Since A doesn’t concede this, B2 is no longer an attempt to disprove A’s argument (because none remains), it is a conclusion about the state of affairs and is perfectly legitimate. For instance, if a person desires admittance into MENSA, is rejected because his IQ is tested to be 80, and someone tells him he’s too fucking stupid to join, that’s not ad hominem. That’s a legitimate conclusion that was expressed in a way he might find unpleasant, but is valid nevertheless. When you tell someone he failed at mathematics because he spent all free time playing Call of Duty on his gaming console instead of learning maths, and he responds that you’re fat and ugly and therefore your argument is false, that is ad hominem.

And that brings us to our false dichotomy: are you an egalitarian or a racist?

Do you believe that races are irrelevant and people are basically the same, or do you believe that racial origin decisively determines one’s properties?

My position is that I don’t know. People are obviously not all the same, or you wouldn’t have qualification exams at colleges and job requirements and interviews later on. It is obvious that if there is a bar defining qualifications, some will pass and some will fail. So, believing that this is right and proper, I am obviously not an egalitarian, but a meritocrat. In my opinion, all privileges are derived from personal qualities and contributions. In my opinion, if you have a difficult entrance exam, which consists of mathematics and physics problems, and the only students who pass on merit are Koreans, Chinese and Europeans, this is not racist against the Africans. It would be racist against the Africans if you’re disqualified from even taking the test if you’re black, or if you have points deducted from the final result if black. But if the test is same for all, and one race consistently fails, this is not racist. Furthermore, making conclusions about that race based on the displayed results isn’t racist either. If it’s OK to praise the Asians for demolishing the test, it’s perfectly OK to ridicule the Africans for failing miserably. What actually is racist is to make easier admittance conditions for the Africans, because it is assumed that they are too stupid to qualify on merit. This essentially amounts to conceding that they are inferior as a race, but saying that both superior and inferior races should be equally distributed among the students because then it’s somehow not racist.

Any kind of quota for employment or admittance into any kind of institution, based on criteria such as race, sex, sexual orientation or similar things, is racism (or sexism or whatever-ism). There is no difference between preferential quotas for blacks and “no niggers allowed here” rule. If you think blacks are equal, make equal rules for all. If you advocate preferential rules for blacks, it means you think they are inferior as a race but you happen to have a pet race and you want it to succeed. This just happened to be Hitler’s motive for committing all sorts of crimes – he had a pet race, aryan, and wanted it to succeed. Since it seemed to fail compared to the Jews, he decided to clear the way for the aryans by introducing the rules that closed the doors for Jews and opened them for aryans. The way to solve this is not to hate Hitler, it is to abandon the idea of trying to help some failing group by introducing special rules. Instead, we should make sure that the rules are just, and if someone consistently fails, allow him to. Don’t make rulings that define if races are equal or different. Make fair rules and allow people to either win or lose. You don’t even have to introduce preferential criteria for the particularly capable or talented individuals – if they are capable, they’ll manage just fine on their own. But certainly don’t try to prevent those on the bottom from failing, because that’s the worst thing you can possibly do. That’s the kind of thing that destroys societies, states and civilizations. In fact, if there’s anything we can learn from nature, it’s that a species thrives if a predator consistently kills the least fit specimen. You don’t actually have to reward the most capable ones – just kill the worst ones, and the species will thrive. Capitalism is actually the opposite – it has special rewards for being the most capable specimen, and that seems to work better for human societies. If a society allows the poor to simply die off, it creates a great incentive to not be poor, which creates incentive to master marketable skills, which then creates competition for the top places in everything, resulting in general improvement of the society. If there’s any lesson to be learned from history, it’s that providing free bread for the poor creates an attitude that it’s a perfectly acceptable option to be poor, and then the society dies. So yeah, if introduction of meritocracy shows that race and gender are irrelevant, great. If they show that races and genders are good at different things, great. If it shows that some group is consistently inferior, let it die off.

I have no problem with Jews ruling in finances, Africans ruling in basketball, Whites ruling in science, or Asians ruling in engineering. It’s not some racist conspiracy, it’s what happens when you allow people to succeed on merit – you learn that there actually may be a difference between the races, or you learn that there isn’t any. If there happens to be a master race that will consistently outcompete others, so what? I don’t see anyone objecting to our species out-competing the Neanderthals. I don’t see anyone objecting to the fact that those who were able to digest grains and milk survived better in the early Holocene than those who weren’t. So suck it up.

False dichotomies: abortion

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The next false dichotomy is abortion, with “pro-life” and “pro-choice” options, and I will now show why I think it’s deceptive.

The pro-choice argument says that it’s woman’s body, she gets to choose what happens with it, if she doesn’t want to be pregnant and give birth, she can have an abortion.

The pro-life argument says that a fetus is a human being from conception, it has human rights, and you can’t kill a human being legally, so its right to life takes precedence over any other consideration.

So basically the false dichotomy is whether you believe the fetus is a human being or not. If it is, the concept of human rights applies. If it is not, when does it become one? At the time of birth? When is that, considering all the premature births that survive in an incubator? The pro-choice option really has a problem there. The pro-life option has a problem of trying to ban abortion outright, and most people intuitively agree that this might not be the best idea, although it’s difficult for them to argue why exactly without sounding like monsters.

So here’s my take on this. A fetus is a human being since conception. However, humans don’t have any intrinsic rights, whatsoever. There are only duties and privileges. Privileges are derived from contributions; since the mother contributes her body for a parasitic entity to use for its growth and to deform her in the process, and demand her resources and sacrifices for decades to come, any privileges of the fetus, including its privilege of life, are realized at her expense. This gives her the right to simply refuse to donate her body as a host for the fetus. The father, too, has rights, or should I say privileges, considering how he provides for the woman with his resources. Since having a baby is also realized at his expense, and might pose a serious burden on him, he also has a voice in the matter. So, what exactly is the position of the fetus in all this? The fetus is a guest, who was invited into the family by the act of them having sex. It’s a soul that started the process of incarnation based on that invitation. The invitation can be rescinded, but that is done at the soul’s great inconvenience, is very traumatic to all sides and they better have a valid reason for that, because it’s definitely an action that goes against both nature and common decency, because if you tell someone that he’s so unwelcome and such a burden that you’d rather kill him than suffer his presence, that’s a really serious message. So, nobody has rights, but there are other things that are actually much more binding than the concept of rights. One of those things is basic decency and goodness, out of which you simply don’t kill your child unless your life is threatened, or its body is diagnosed to be deformed, in which case you destroy the body in order not to force the soul to endure life in the trap of a deformed body. So yes, in theory the mother has almost unlimited rights to do whatever she wants with the fetus, because all its rights are derived from her personal contributions and sacrifices, and it is her option to decline. The father, too, has rights, because it is expected of him to support the family. The child, in theory, merely consumes resources and is an inconvenience, and has no rights whatsoever. In practice, the child is a guest, who came into the mother’s body by invitation, and if that is so, its protection is a great ethical priority and an obligation. If the child was conceived by carelessness, the mother can rescind invitation, but it always comes at great spiritual cost, because she basically not only made a mistake, she also forced someone completely innocent to suffer for her mistake. If the pregnancy is the result of rape, she is perfectly justified in doing whatever she wants with it. She can have an abortion at no moral or spiritual expense, or she can shrug and decide that she wanted a baby anyway and simply keep it, taking ownership of the situation.

So, in theory I advocate a purely pro-choice position, but in practice, I am almost as extreme in the anti-abortion stance as the most ardent pro-life advocates. That is because I don’t base my moral stance on the concept of human rights or liberties, but on the concept of having God, who is the absolute goodness, as a role model, and not wanting to live my life in a way God would find objectionable. This is the crux of the pro-choice position: you choose not only what to do, but what you will become as you do it, and not all outcomes are equally desirable.

False dichotomies: global warming

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I dislike the fact that the public intellectual space and discourse is defined by the false dichotomies.

You are either for global warming (they call it climate change now because there was no warming) or against it. You are either pro choice or pro life. You are either an antifascist or a fascist. You are either an atheist or you believe in one of the middle-Eastern bronze-age theologies. You either believe that all people are the same or you are a racist.

I think the cause of this is the fact that people are not very good at thinking and having coherent opinions, but they are far better at forming groups around simplistic concepts. If you can reduce an issue to being for or against something, then you can politically exploit idiots who are unable to think in more complex terms.

Let me explain what I think, using issues of global warming, abortion, fascism and religion as an example. Let’s start with global warming in this article, and go on from there.

I see Earth as a complex thermodynamic system; it seems to be the only place in the Solar system other than the Sun, that derives a significant portion of its warmth from nuclear energy. I shit you not – more than 80% of the energy that keeps the Earth’s core in a molten state is derived from either nuclear fission or radioactive decay. This is the reason why we have such a powerful electromagnetic field, unlike Venus and Mars. Earth has a magnetic field on par with the gas giants. This is because the Theia impact, some 4.31 BY ago, gave Earth enough heavy elements for two planets, while expelling the light elements into what later became the Moon. As a result, Earth has its own nuclear furnace that keeps the inner core spinning within the outer core and the mantle, producing a strong magnetic field. This heat emanates from the core and eventually into space.

The second source of Earth’s energy is the Sun, which, obviously, heats up the atmosphere, the oceans and the crust during the day, and this energy radiates into space during the night. The speed of this release of energy can be moderated by the buffers, also called the glasshouse gasses. Also, since the equatorial areas absorb more solar energy than the poles, there is a thermal gradient between those. Depending on the amount of buffers in the atmosphere and the layout of the continents and the oceans, there is a certain variability to this thermal gradient between the equator and the poles; if the oceans can’t bring the energy from the equator to the poles quickly enough, the Earth starts warming up.

As it warms up, the oceans release carbon dioxide, one of the important buffers, into the atmosphere, because it is more easily soluble in cold water (which is easy to demonstrate by warming up carbonated soda). This then contributes to the moderation of the equatorial-polar thermal gradient, essentially smoothing the seasonal transitions and increasing the habitable area of the Earth’s crust. If it goes too far, it can make the equatorial areas very hot, but habitability of those areas is already questionable today, because they aren’t actually a pleasant place for humans. On the other hand, thawing of the polar regions would more than make up for the loss of equatorial habitability by opening up the currently inaccessible areas for human habitation. Another issue are the coastal areas, that would be flooded by the melt-water resulting from the polar ice. This would result in the gradual loss of the very densely populated coastal areas, but I see no cause for panic, since the gradual increase of the water levels would force people to simply migrate to a safer area. Of course, you can never eliminate the possibility of a sudden event, something of a Dansgaard-Oeschger variety, that would seriously threaten mankind, but those occur with some regularity in any case.

So, what is my long-term prognosis? First of all, I take my data from a vastly longer time-span than is the case with most climatologists; I work with the last billion years of climate. This includes several pre-Cambrian global glaciations, the Cambrian melt, warm period that started subsiding some 65 MY ago, entering a drier, cooler climate, increasing the thermal gradient between the equator and the poles, starting the formation of polar ice, and gradually absorbing the carbon dioxide gas in increasingly colder water, reducing the amount of atmospheric buffers. The polar ice on the other hand increased the Earth’s albedo, thus contributing to the situation by reflecting more sunlight into space. Eventually, this reached extremes somewhere in the late Pliocene, early Pleistocene, some 2.6MY ago, when the amount of atmospheric buffers declined to dangerous levels, where even the minor orbital and axial variations started throwing the climate out of whack. These are called the Milankovitch cycles, and the interesting thing about them is that they exist only in the Pleistocene; I heard about that once and it made me wonder so I looked into it and now I know why that happens. Basically, if the CO2 levels fall below the Pliocene levels, the Earth starts to balance on a very precarious edge of a runaway glaciation, where due to the lack of buffers in the atmosphere it becomes possible for more ice to accumulate on the polar areas than can be removed in the summer. Due to the albedo effect of the ice, this increases the problem in the next season, and so on. If left unhindered, this process will eventually and quite certainly result in a full global glaciation, poetically known as the snowball Earth, and that is game over for most forms of life on land, including humans. That’s the tricky part – the thermal curve of the last 65 MY has a clear downwards-pointing trend, and it’s because of the ring of seawater that formed around Antarctica, enabling the Coriolis force powered sea currents to quickly dissipate energy, de facto working like an air conditioner or a fridge, powered by Earth’s rotation and convection.

What humans did here with their industrial revolution and combustion of fossil fuels is to raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration to either early Pleistocene or even early Pliocene levels; the data isn’t clear enough. But what does that mean, exactly? Is it a bad thing, in a sense that the climate will undergo a dramatic change, destructive to human civilization, before it re-establishes itself on the Pliocene levels? Is it a good thing, in a sense that it either delayed or completely prevented the onset of the next glacial maximum, and possibly even brought us out of Pleistocene ice age altogether? I don’t know. Earth is such a complex thermodynamic system, I’m simply unable to make a precise enough simulation in my head to account for all the factors and variables. What I do know, with absolute certainty that comes from looking at the last billion years of climate data, is that without this increase of CO2 levels this glacial minimum that we call Holocene would ultimately come to an end, and we would sink into a glacial maximum, colloquially known as the ice age. Also, since the circumantarctic air conditioner keeps on pumping heat out into space, one glacial maximum will eventually cross the threshold of runaway glaciation where even the equator would freeze over, and that will last until the continental drift eventually breaks the heat pump of sea currents, some hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the future. Basically, this means it’s game over for life on Earth as we know it, and since the Pleistocene itself with its climatic instability means the process has already started, it is unlikely to take more than a few millions of years before the Earth cools down so much that Milankovitch cycles will no longer be able to bring it into a glacial minimum. So, without that evil beast of global warming, we are not safe in the bosom of Mother Earth with its perfect balance of climate and whatever bullshit the tree-huggers want you to believe. On the contrary, we live in a climate that is so viciously unstable, it forced animals to evolve hibernation and seasonal migration in order to survive the seasonal extremes. Earth is in its death throes, and it’s called Pleistocene. It’s only because our lifespan is so insignificant that we don’t perceive it as a terrible train wreck that it is. The only event in the last 65 MY that went contrary to the trend of gradual cooling and the eventual death in ice is our industrial carbon dioxide release.

But if you expect my prognosis to be bright, you’re wrong. I actually think our CO2 release is merely a “blip”. The circumantarctic current is a vast, unstoppable global force. With our pumping CO2 into the atmosphere we might actually trigger a Dansgaard-Oeschger event by melting too much polar ice at once, breaking the thermohaline circulation and resulting in some violent climatic extreme that might cool the planet down in one instant to simply sink all our CO2 into the oceans and resume the cooling trend, maybe even accelerating it. That’s what you have when you work with complex thermodynamic systems – it’s always chaos, and in chaos the scale can tip both ways in unpredictable ways. So yes, our CO2 release is the best news that life on Earth got since the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s the only thing that could possibly delay or even prevent the runaway glaciation. It could also wreck the climate enough to wipe us out. But our prognosis was never bright, to begin with. We have our extinction event sometime in the future, in a runaway glaciation. It’s a certainty. What we did with our industrial civilization might delay it or prevent it altogether. It could also kill us more quickly. The thing is, I don’t know what will happen, because the thermodynamics of it all is too complex for me to simulate, and from what you’ve read so far you can see that I’m actually quite a bit ahead of the general trends in climate science.

And now we come to the conclusion: why the question “do you believe in global warming” makes me facepalm and despair to the point of tears. It’s because I know the level of superficiality and ignorance that lies beneath that question. It’s because I know I’d have to write this article in order to explain what I really think about it, and because I rarely think in yes/no dichotomies, that so rarely function beyond the level of elementary mathematics, where you have simple questions such as “is n, an element of N, an odd or an even number”, and all elements of the set result in unequivocal Boolean answers. The real world is more like the R set, in which such a question would apply only to an insignificantly small subset, making no sense whatsoever outside that range.