‘Sir, You Are Recreating’

'Gestapo' tactics meet senior citizens at Yellowstone

By John Macone

Pat Vaillancourt went on a trip last week that was intended to showcase some of America’s greatest treasures.

Instead, the Salisbury resident said she and others on her tour bus witnessed an ugly spectacle that made her embarrassed, angry and heartbroken for her country.

Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.

The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.

When finally allowed to leave, the bus was not allowed to halt at all along the 2.5-hour trip out of the park, not even to stop at private bathrooms that were open along the route.

“We’ve become a country of fear, guns and control,” said Vaillancourt, who grew up in Lawrence. “It was like they brought out the armed forces. Nobody was saying, ‘we’re sorry,’ it was all like — ” as she clenched her fist and banged it against her forearm.

Vaillancourt took part in a nine-day tour of western parks and sites along with about four dozen senior citizen tourists. One of the highlights of the tour was to be Yellowstone, where they arrived just as the shutdown went into effect.

Rangers systematically sent visitors out of the park, though some groups that had hotel reservations — such as Vaillancourt’s — were allowed to stay for two days. Those two days started out on a sour note, she said.

The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.

“She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.

The seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door.

There Is Life after Default

Treasuries are bonds just like any other bonds. There’s nothing magic, mythical, or sacred about them.

by Peter G. Klein

In following the debates over raising the US debt ceiling, I’m struck by the frequent claim that defaulting on public debt is unthinkable because of the “signal” that would send. If you can’t rely on the T-bill, what can you rely on? Debt instruments backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States are supposed to be risk-free — almost magically so — somehow transcending the vagaries of ordinary debt markets. The Treasury bill, in other words, has become a myth and symbol, just like the US Constitution.

I find this line of reasoning unpersuasive. A T-bill is a bond just like any other bond. Corporations, municipalities, and other issuers default on bonds all the time, and the results are hardly catastrophic.

Financial markets have been restructuring debt for many centuries, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. From the discussion regarding T-bills, you’d think no one had ever heard of default-risk premiums before. (Interestingly, this seems to be a case of American exceptionalism: people aren’t particularly happy about Greek, Irish, and Portuguese defaults, but no one thinks the world will end because of them.)

So, isn’t it time to demythologize all of this? Treasuries are bonds just like any other bonds. There’s nothing magic, mythical, or sacred about them. A default on US government debt is no more or less radical than a default on any other kind of debt.

Detroit Mayor Gets 28 Year Sentence For Corruption

The Politics of Crime in Detroit

Following his "years long scheme to shakedown contractors and reward allies," Kwame Kilpatrick - who served as Detroit Mayor from 2002 to 2008 - was this morning sentenced to 28 years in prison for corruption. Regarded by many as a key contributor to Detroit's eventual downfall, it seems Kilpatrick is somewhat repentant, stating, "the people here are suffering, they're hurting. A great deal of that hurt I accept responsibility for." Agents who pored over bank accounts and credit cards said Kilpatrick spent $840,000 beyond his salary during his time as mayor. Having resigned in 2008 over a sexting scandal, the scale of his corruption, prosecutors added, "exacerbated the crisis." 

Via Fox News (AP),

Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced Thursday to 28 years in prison for corruption, the apparent last step after a series of scandals destroyed his political career and helped steer a crisis-laden city even deeper into trouble. 

Kilpatrick, who served as mayor from 2002 until fall 2008, fattened his bank account by tens of thousands of dollars, traveled the country in private planes and even strong-armed his campaign fundraiser for stacks of cash hidden in her bra, according to evidence at trial. 

"I'm ready to go so the city can move on," Kilpatrick told the judge. "The people here are suffering, they're hurting. A great deal of that hurt I accept responsibility for." 

In March, Kilpatrick, 43, was convicted of racketeering conspiracy, fraud, extortion and tax crimes. The government called it the "Kilpatrick enterprise," a yearslong scheme to shake down contractors and reward allies. He was doomed by his own text messages, which revealed efforts to fix deals for a pal, Bobby Ferguson, an excavator who got millions of dollars in city work through the water department. 

... 

Agents who pored over bank accounts and credit cards said Kilpatrick spent $840,000 beyond his salary during his time as mayor. Defense attorneys tried to portray the money as generous gifts from political supporters who opened their wallets for birthdays or holidays. 

...

Kilpatrick, a Democrat, quit office in 2008 in a different scandal that was extraordinary at the time but seems smaller compared with the sweeping federal probe that has led to the convictions of more than 30 people. Sexually explicit text messages revealed that Kilpatrick had lied during a trial to cover up an affair with his top aide, Christine Beatty, and to hide the reasons for demoting or firing police officers who suspected wrongdoing at city hall. 

... 

"Kilpatrick is not the main culprit of the city's historic bankruptcy, which is the result of larger social and economic forces at work for decades. But his corrupt administration exacerbated the crisis," prosecutors said in a court filing last week.

The breakup of the US leviathan

Is Red State America Seceding?

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In the last decade of the 20th century, as the Soviet Empire disintegrated so, too, did that prison house of nations, the USSR.

Out of the decomposing carcass came Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova, all in Europe; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus; and Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

Transnistria then broke free of Moldova, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia fought free of Georgia.

Yugoslavia dissolved far more violently into the nations of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo.

The Slovaks seceded from Czechoslovakia. Yet a Europe that plunged straight to war after the last breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 this time only yawned. Let them go, all agreed.

The spirit of secession, the desire of peoples to sever ties to nations to which they have belonged for generations, sometimes for centuries, and to seek out their own kind, is a spreading phenomenon.

Scotland is moving toward a referendum on independence from England, three centuries after the Acts of Union. Catalonia pushes to be free of Madrid. Milanese and Venetians see themselves as a European people apart from Sicilians, Neapolitans and Romans.

Dutch-speaking Flanders wants to cut loose of French-speaking Wallonia in Belgium. Francophone Quebec, with immigrants from Asia and the Third World tilting the balance in favor of union, appears to have lost its historic moment to secede from Canada.

What are the forces pulling nations apart? Ethnicity, culture, history and language — but now also economics. And separatist and secessionist movements are cropping up here in the United States.

Watch Glenn Greenwald Tear a BBC Presstitute to pieces

Glenn Greenwald Full Interview on Snowden, NSA, GCHQ and Spying

Emjoy Glenn Greenwald ripping apart the comrade from English Pravda

BBC Newsnight Oct 03, 2013

Pauline Neville Jones in debate with Glenn Greenwald

My Marxist father was wrong, too

Memo to Ed Miliband

Eric Hobsbawm could not admit that supporting an ideology behind the deaths of scores of millions was an error of judgment

By Theodore Dalrymple

Edward Miliband and I have something (not much) in common: we both had Marxist fathers. In my case, however, it turned me against all that my father stood, or pretended to stand, for. I saw that his concern for the fate of humanity in general was inconsistent with his contempt for the actual people by whom he was surrounded, and his inability to support relations of equality with others. I concluded that the humanitarian protestations of Marxists were a mask for an urge to domination.

In addition to the emotional dishonesty of Marxism, I was impressed by its limitless resources of intellectual dishonesty. Having grown up with the Little Lenin Library and (God help us!) the Little Stalin Library, I quickly grasped that the dialectic could prove anything you wanted it to prove, for example, that killing whole categories of people was a requirement of elementary decency.

My father only followed the intellectual fashion of his youth, when the catastrophe of the Great War had been followed by economic problems on a vast scale. That the world urgently needed improvement was obvious. But Marxism was not just an economic doctrine showing the right policy to follow in hard circumstances; it was a religion. The crisis of the Twenties and Thirties was an apocalypse that would finally lead Man, after the revolution, to a heaven on earth, in which all Man’s contradictory desires would be resolved in eternal bliss. No more hatred, no more jostling for position: Man would become selfless as well as permanently contented. Compared with this, the Book of Revelation is pure social realism.

Marxism was also replete with heresies and excommunications that tended to become fatal whenever its adherents reached power. There was a reason for this. Marx said that it is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness. In other words, ideas do not have to be argued against in a civilised way, but rather the social and economic position of those who hold them must be analysed. So, disagreement is the same as class enmity – and we all know what should be done with class enemies.

No field of intellectual life in Britain was untouched by it. The great crystallographer, JD Bernal, the biochemist, Joseph Needham, the historian of the English civil war, Christopher Hill, the economist Maurice Dobb, the art historian Anthony Blunt, were all Marxists. The barrister, DN Pritt, ferociously defended the judicial rectitude of the Moscow show trials, a defence that would be comic were it not so vile.

Iceland – the Dark Side of Devaluation

Devaluing Oneself to Prosperity Proves Harder than Expected

by Pater Tenebrarum

Readers may recall that we have always argued that the mere fact that a number of countries in the euro area use a common medium of exchange is not the region's major problem. It should be easy to see why this cannot be the case. For a very long time almost the whole world used a common medium exchange, namely gold. During that time both the world's economies and trade between them were growing at very high rates (today such growth rates are but a distant dream).

The euro area's problem is rather that the euro is a centrally planned fiat currency and that the central bank aided and abetted a credit bubble of stunning proportions. The European cocktail of socialism and easy money proved unsustainable and the boom has undoubtedly caused capital consumption on a grand scale. The reaction to this discovery was that ways were sought to cover this fact up by engaging in a raft of interventionist measures that will eventually come back to haunt Europe. 

Anyway, the purveyors of the idea that the best way back to riches was to impoverish oneself by devaluation have often held Iceland up as a shining example of the miracles this strategy would produce. It turns out that things are not that easy, as many Icelandic companies now find themselves with their backs to the wall as they are unable to service their foreign currency denominated debts: 

“Iceland’s private sector is running out of cash to repay its foreign currency debt, according to the nation’s central bank.

Non-krona debt owed by entities besides the Treasury and the central bank due through 2018 totals about 700 billion kronur ($5.8 billion), the bank said yesterday. The projected current account surpluses over the next five years aren’t estimated to reach even half of that and will equal a shortfall of about 20 percent of gross domestic product.

The nation faces a “repayment risk of foreign debt by private entities in the economy, who don’t have access to foreign financial markets,” Sigridur Benediktsdottir, head of financial stability at the Reykjavik-based central bank, said yesterday in an interview. “We view this as being exacerbated or made worse by the fact that our current account is actually declining.” 

(Emphasis added)

'Access to foreign financial markets' means access to debt rollovers in the same currencies the debts were incurred in. This access is lacking precisely because Iceland has adopted capital controls. Iceland is certainly a good example for the utter ruination a credit boom can bring. There is one additional reason foreign creditors have no interest in rolling over loans: they simply no longer believe that Iceland's wealth creation ability will suffice to service or repay them – too much wealth has been decimated by the boom. Unless there's a sudden jump in the price of codfish, that is likely to remain the case for a while yet, as it will take time to rebuild the wealth that was lost. 

Hannah Arendt: battling the banality of evil

A new biopic explores the power of ideas and the courage required to challenge orthodoxy

By Neil Davenport

Hannah Arendt was a political thinker famous for coining the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the Nazis’ faceless bureaucrats who planned and carried out industrial-scale genocide. To Arendt, it seemed that evil resided, not in psychopathic monsters, but in unthinking administrators carrying out routine tasks. The phrase evolved from Arendt’s reporting at the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of one of the putative architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann.

Director Margarethe von Trotta focuses the bulk of Hannah Arendt - a solid, if a little staid, film - on Arendt’s reporting of the trial and the subsequent fallout from her controversial articles for the New Yorker (which later became the book,Eichmann in Jerusalem). As demonstrated in her classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt often displayed a dazzling intellect and a talent for unpicking how malignant social forces can develop and engulf normality. She applied this line of thinking to Eichmann and argued that, with the collapse of any moral order in Europe, a paper-thin line developed between victim and persecutor. Shockingly for survivors of the Holocaust, Arendt implied that, as with so many other major figures during Europe’s darkest hour, Jewish leaders had become passive collaborators in their own community’s destruction.

The film dwells on the genesis of her ideas and the explosive impact her articles had afterwards. In the film, the New Yorker receives mountains of hate mail and hate calls. The principals of the New School of Social Research, where Arendt worked, attempt to bar her from lecturing. Neighbours in her swish Manhattan apartment send notes saying ‘die, you Nazi-loving whore’ while lifelong friends denounce and desert her one by one. In the film’s closing scenes, Arendt publicly defends herself by saying that her writing was a serious attempt to understand exactly what happened. She was determined to unearth the unthinkable process of the Holocaust by rational means, even if that meant causing upset along the way.

The Two-Party Swindle

Once a politician gets you to identify with them, they pretty much own you

By Eliezer_Yudkowsky

The Robbers Cave Experiment had as its subject 22 twelve-year-old boys, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, all doing well in school, all from stable middle-class Protestant families.  In short, the boys were as similar to each other as the experimenters could arrange, though none started out knowing any of the others.  The experiment, conducted in the aftermath of WWII, was meant to investigate conflicts between groups. How would the scientists spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the first step was to divide the 22 boys into two groups of 11 campers -

- and that was quite sufficient.  There was hostility almost from the moment each group became aware of the other group's existence. Though they had not needed any name for themselves before, they named themselves the Eagles and the Rattlers.  After the researchers (disguised as camp counselors) instigated contests for prizes, rivalry reached a fever pitch and all traces of good sportsmanship disintegrated.  The Eagles stole the Rattlers' flag and burned it; the Rattlers raided the Eagles' cabin and stole the blue jeans of the group leader and painted it orange and carried it as a flag the next day.

Each group developed a stereotype of itself and a contrasting stereotype of the opposing group (though the boys had been initially selected to be as similar as possible).  The Rattlers swore heavily and regarded themselves as rough-and-tough.  The Eagles swore off swearing, and developed an image of themselves as proper-and-moral.

Consider, in this light, the episode of the Blues and the Greens in the days of Rome.  Since the time of the ancient Romans, and continuing into the era of Byzantium and the Roman Empire, the Roman populace had been divided into the warring Blue and Green factions.  Blues murdered Greens and Greens murdered Blues, despite all attempts at policing. They died in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots.

From Procopius, History of the Wars, I:

In every city the population has been divided for a long time past into the Blue and the Green factions [...] And they fight against their opponents knowing not for what end they imperil themselves [...] So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colours be brothers or any other kin.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or ecclesiastical honors.

Who were the Blues and the Greens?

They were sports fans - the partisans of the blue and green chariot-racing teams.

Quote of the Day

Democracy, Fascism and Private Definitions

George Orwell noticed that political writing tended to be vague and wrote Politics and the English Language.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Meanwhile, in Europe...

Europe is an ageing, moribund continent and the sh*t will hit the fan sooner rather than later

For years, since the onset of the euro crisis, we have heard that the crisis is over. Every year, politicians keep on telling us that the worst is over, but that next year will be so much better. Do you really think so? Here are some hard facts & figures instead of wishful thinking of lying politicians showing that the euro crisis is not over. On the contrary, things are getting worse.

Italy

La Dolce Vita, the good life, is no longer achievable for millions of Italians. Italy is the third largest Eurozone country and is in dire straits. Public debt has ballooned to well over 130 percent! Is this money ever going to be repaid? Who is going to do that? The country has one of the fastest aging populations in the world. Italian women, when having any children at all, prefer to have just one child. In order for a society to maintain a healthy demographic balance, they should have at least two. Nonetheless, unemployment, from a European perspective, is relatively low at 12 percent. But wait, youth unemployment is virtually at 40 percent. So there are no jobs in Italy, public debt is out of control and its aging population lays a heavy burden on both income taxes and Social Security payments.

Spain

Spain is one of the Eurozone’s largest countries. It is not in a recession, but in a downright depression. Do you need some figures? Unemployment stands at 26.3 percent?. That means more than one out of every four workers is idling and receiving benefits from government and waiting for better days. Even worse, youth unemployment is a staggering 57 percent. Indeed, more than one out of every two youngsters is out of work or is not expected to find one soon. Do you need more proof? Spanish government is spending billions on Social Security, money it simply does not have. Public debt has gone from a fairly modest 30 percent in 2007 to well over 90 percent this year and will soon move to 100 percent and beyond.

Portugal

Portugal is one of the smaller Eurozone countries in the Mediterranean Sea with an economy that is in shambles. The country had to be bailed out by the rest of the Eurozone to the tune of €78 billion. Public debt is around 128 percent, hardly lower than Italy’s. Unemployment hovers around 16.5 percent, which is unsustainable in the medium term. Youth unemployment stands at a depressing h 42 percent.

Although it seems that Portugal has lived up to its promises as part of the bail-out programme, the country will need a second bail-out coming 2014. Of course, it will be paid by other Eurozone members having a healthier economy.

Europe in shambles

Politicians babble about the worst of the crisis being behind us, or even ‘fixed.’ That is just cheap talk. The hard facts & figures prove them wrong. Europe is on the verge of a genuine collapse. On the one hand, this is because the Euro simply does not work, but makes things worse instead. On the other hand, Eurozone member states are simply unable to devaluate their currencies as they are part of the single currency bloc. As long as this flawed monetary currency, or rather political currency, is kept afloat, less well-off countries within the Eurozone will continue to suffer.

Baby Ounces

Struggling for survival in Havana

By Yoanni Sánchez

He has sewn a double lining into the bottom of his pants. Big enough to hold the milk powder he sneaks out of the factory. So far he’s never had any problems, but every now and then they bring in a new guard and he avoids taking anything home for a few days. His work at the Dairy Complex has never been professionally interesting to him, but he wouldn’t exchange it for any other. To his place as a packer he owes his daughter’s quinceañero celebration, the new roof on his house, the motorbike he rides around the city. He has a job envied by many. An occupation someone with just a sixth grade education can do, but one coveted by academics, experts and even scientists. It’s a workplace where you can steal something.

Ingenuity and illegality are combined when it comes time to make a living. Hoses rolled up under a shirt carry alcohol out of the distilleries. Cigar rollers calculate when the security camera looks away to slip a cigar under the desk. Bakers add extra yeast to make the dough rise disproportionately so they can resell the flour. Taxi drivers are experts in fiddling with the meter; clerks steal a little bit from each tube of liquid detergent; farmers add a few small stones to each bag of beans… so they weigh more. Creativity in the quest of embezzling the State and the customer stretches across the island.

However, of all the elaborate and clever ways to “struggle” that I have known, there is one that stands out as remarkable. I heard it from a friend who gave birth to an underweight baby at the Havana maternity hospital. Both the child and the mother had to stay in the medical center until the baby gained almost a pound. The process was slow and the new mother was desperate to go home. The bathroom had no water, the food was terrible, and every day her family had to make great sacrifices to bring her meals and clean clothes. To top it off, my friend looked at the other low birthweight babies and they were putting on ounces rapidly. She expressed her desperation to another patient who responded, laughing, “Boy, are you stupid! You don’t know that the nurse sells the ounces?” That lady in the white coat who walked the halls every morning charged for entering a higher weight into the medical record. She was selling non-existent baby ounces. What a business!

After hearing that story, nothing surprises me anymore, I am never shocked by the many ways in which Cubans “struggle” for survival. 

The Educational Octopus

Why do public school teachers send their own children to private schools at double the rate of the national average?

By Mark J. Perry 

In his latest weekly column, economist and GMU professor Walter E. Williams presents these facts about where various groups of parents send their own children – private or public schools:

General public: Nationally, 11% of all parents enroll their children in private schools, and 89% of American students attend public schools.

Public School Teachers: Nationally, more than 20% of public school teachers with school-age children enroll them in private schools, or almost twice the 11% rate for the general public.

Philadelphia Public School Teachers: 44% enroll their own children in private schools, or four times the national average.

Cincinnati Public School Teachers: 41% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national rate.

Chicago Public School Teachers: 39% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national average.

Rochester, NY Public School Teachers: 38% enroll their own children in private schools, or more than three times the national rate.

San Francisco-Oakland Public School Teachers: 34% enroll their own children in private schools, slightly more than three times the national average.

New York City Public School Teachers: 33% enroll their own children in private schools, three times the national rate.

Members of Congress: 33% to 44% enroll their children in private schools, three to four times the national average.

Walter concludes that:

The fact that so many public school teachers enroll their own children in private schools ought to raise questions. After all, what would you think, after having accepted a dinner invitation, if you discovered that the owner, chef, waiters and busboys at the restaurant to which you were being taken don’t eat there? That would suggest they have some inside information from which you might benefit.

In a 1995 article in The Freeman called the “Educational Octopus” I wrote:

What would you conclude about the quality of product or service X under the following circumstances?

1. The employees of Airline X and their families are offered free airline tickets as an employee benefit. The employees refuse to travel with their families on Airline X and instead pay full fare on Airline Y when flying.

2. The employees of Automaker X are offered a company car at a substantial discount and they instead buy a car at full price from Automaker Y.

3. Employees at Health Clinic X and their families are offered medical care at no additional cost as a benefit and yet most employees of Clinic X pay out-of-pocket for medical services at Clinic Y.

Universities: bastions of conformism

Students have become ban-happy self-regulators afraid of growing up.

By Joanna Williams

When news emerged last week that two students from the London School of Economics had been banned from wearing ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoon t-shirts on a stall at the university’s freshers’ fair, it was only the most recent act of censorship carried out by students’ unions.

At the latest count, the students’ unions at six universities have banned the song ‘Blurred Lines’ from being played in their buildings. In the past few months alone, Derby University students have banned the UKIP candidate for Derbyshire police and crime commissioner from speaking in debates; the University of East Anglia has banned the showing of rugby and cricket matches sponsored by NatWest bank in the union bar; Lancaster University students’ union has banned ‘lads’ mags’ from the campus shop; and students at Essex University look set to ban Starbucks from their campus.

While a few students may challenge what has been termed a ‘war against free speech on campus’, or argue that students’ unions are not meant to be the moral arbiters of their members, what’s really noticeable is the louder clamour for more bans and increased censorship. The outgoing president of a consortium of students’ unions based in Medway in Kent has criticised the absence of a ban on political and religious extremists; and the Lancaster ban on lads’ mags has been labelled as not going nearly far enough in the perceived battle against sexism on campus.

It seems that far from revelling in the freedom of having left school and home behind, students are quick to impose new sets of restrictions upon themselves. This goes beyond socialising and shopping and impacts upon the academic realm too: research conducted at one university suggests 88 per cent of students were in favour of a requirement to make all students abide by a code of conduct and 82 per cent supported minimum attendance requirements with all the associated form-filling and register-taking.  It seems that students want external monitoring and regulation because they don’t trust themselves to withstand the temptation to miss seminars or behave inappropriately in the lecture theatre.  This lack of trust in themselves and each other is one reason why songs such as ‘Blurred Lines’ and ‘lads’ mags’ are described as ‘dangerous’ by those campaigning for bans: one can only assume that in their fevered imaginations it is only a ‘brave’ ban on such incendiary material that prevents mass rape on campus.

The Simple Truth

Restoring a naive view of truth

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

"I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth."

—                           Danielle Egan (journalist)

Someone says to you: “My miracle snake oil can rid you of lung cancer in just three weeks.” You reply: “Didn’t a clinical study show this claim to be untrue?” The one returns: “This notion of ‘truth’ is quite naive; what do you mean by ‘true’?”

Many people, so questioned, don’t know how to answer in exquisitely rigorous detail. Nonetheless they would not be wise to abandon the concept of ‘truth’. There was a time when no one knew the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, yet if you walked off a cliff, you would fall.

Often I have seen – especially on Internet mailing lists – that amidst other conversation, someone says “X is true”, and then an argument breaks out over the use of the word ‘true’. This essay is not meant as an encyclopedic reference for that argument. Rather, I hope the arguers will read this essay, and then go back to whatever they were discussing before someone questioned the nature of truth.

In this essay I pose questions. If you see what seems like a really obvious answer, it’s probably the answer I intend. The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it. Oh, sure, everyone thinks two plus two is four, everyone says two plus two is four, and in the mere mundane drudgery of everyday life everyone behaves as if two plus two is four, but what does two plus two really, ultimately equal? As near as I can figure, four. It’s still four even if I intone the question in a solemn, portentous tone of voice. Too simple, you say? Maybe, on this occasion, life doesn’t need to be complicated. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

If you are one of those fortunate folk to whom the question seems trivial at the outset, I hope it still seems trivial at the finish. If you find yourself stumped by deep and meaningful questions, remember that if you know exactly how a system works, and could build one yourself out of buckets and pebbles, it should not be a mystery to you.

If confusion threatens when you interpret a metaphor as a metaphor, try taking everything completely literally.

Imagine that in an era before recorded history or formal mathematics, I am a shepherd and I have trouble tracking my sheep. My sheep sleep in an enclosure, a fold; and the enclosure is high enough to guard my sheep from wolves that roam by night. Each day I must release my sheep from the fold to pasture and graze; each night I must find my sheep and return them to the fold. If a sheep is left outside, I will find its body the next morning, killed and half-eaten by wolves. But it is so discouraging, to scour the fields for hours, looking for one last sheep, when I know that probably all the sheep are in the fold. Sometimes I give up early, and usually I get away with it; but around a tenth of the time there is a dead sheep the next morning.