These gems were created while I was making my late music blog musicrefinery. I plan on making a new music blog and remembered how great it was to see George W. Bush wearing something that matches the crazy ass things he says. I also like to see what Castro looks like without his green fatigues.

shicereal : genric cereals that consist mostly of cardboard shavings and artificial sweeteners, often fortified with 1693 vitamins, minerals and other whackass additives.

whackass : Things concocted by man that never should have. i.e. American Idol, the Newton, or reality A.V.
(also what football players do when someone has done something great, although this has been deprecated for the less gay looking hugs and choreographed dances.)

A.V. : Assvision. Television that was pulled out of some ethicless network executives A.

ethicless : Any number of individuals or corporations whose sole purpose is to exploit others. Disney has been a long time examples of exploiting children for money and now that they own the Muppets, the Muppets are also in the shistern.

shistern : A potty. Or a turn that makes you wish you were near to one so you could throw up in disgust.
sample usage: “I don’t want a shisturn playing your overpriced playstationwii and I don’t want any of your shicereal. I’m going home to watch cartoons.”

Why I found this particularly poignant is a mystery. Maybe it’s because I am not a libertarian either, but I am fed up with our two current political choices. However, the following portion of the treatise has nothing to do with any of that.

I like the idea that “the more of us we involve in the decision-making the more likely it is that we will make a decision reflecting [our] common values.” (emphasis mine)

Libertarianism and the Tragedy of the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is a first-rate device for testing the efficiency of any human proposal for governing ourselves.

The tragedy of the commons is essentially a parable with a moral, like an Aesop’s Fable. In the parable, we all live in a village that shares a commons on which we, farmers all, graze our sheep. The moral of the story is that left to our own devices, we will each decide to add one sheep too many to the commons, destroying it for ourselves and for future generations. The short term benefit to each of us of an additional sheep outweighs the intangible gain of preserving the commons for our grandchildren.

David Boaz gives us the libertarian take on the “tragedy of the commons”:

When resources–such as a common grazing area, forest or lake–are “owned” by everyone, they are effectively owned by no-one. No one has an incentive to maintain the value of the asset or use it on a sustainable basis.

In other words, the libertarian answer to the tragedy of the commons is to eliminate the commons. No commons, no tragedy. If the commons was owned by a single individual who charged everyone else grazing fees, he would be more committed to preserving it for the future than a village of farmers.

But why is this necessarily so? I could argue the converse, that a village acting collectively is more likely to avoid short-term thinking than one man responsible only to himself.

Hume made the point that in most moral philosophizing, we carry on talking about the “is” until, suddenly, in mid-paragraph, we encounter an “ought”. There is no real-world bridge from the “is” to the “ought”; all such bridges are fantasies based on optimism and self-deception.

Where libertarianism crosses this chasm is when it passes from selfishness to enlightened self-interest. A human being who owns the Pennekamp coral reef in Key Largo is entitled to break up the reefs and sell the pieces to gift shops (in the absence of a government expressing the will of the majority and telling him he can’t.) He ought to realize that there is more gain in selling tickets to Pennekamp over many generations–that way, it will support his children and grandchildren as well. But most human beings, left in complete freedom to act, will select the short-term gain. This is what the Prisoner’s Dilemma teaches: we will select betrayal over cooperation because it grants an immediate benefit more tangible to us than the repetitive, long-term benefits of cooperation.

Individuals and groups

An apparent paradox of libertarianism is that humans can be trusted individually but not in groups.

A democratic government consists of humans acting as a group. The government carries out the will of the group. In Rousseau’s terms, it carries out not only the will of the majority, but in a sense, even of the dissenting minority, who despite their disagreement with the particular action, endorse the majority will by continuing to participate in the society.

Libertarians believe, therefore, that we are singularly inept as a group. Assuming for a moment that the proposition is true– there is a lot of evidence for it–a cynic would propose that the reason we are collectively incompetent is that we are individually incompetent as well.

Libertarians, however, are optimists. I cannot fault them for this; I have written elsewhere about the importance of optimism in any human scheme, even to the point of self-deception. Nonetheless, libertarians assume, as most people do, that there is a way out of any given dilemma; their self-deception may consist of believing that what we cannot accomplish collectively, we can more effectively do individually.

Let’s take a look again at the Pennekamp reef example. Testing the proposition that commons should not exist because they will always be mismanaged, let’s try a thought experiment. Who would you rather have manage the Pennekamp coral reef so that it will remain alive, clean and available for future generations: fifty randomly picked people, or one?

Libertarians would say that fifty people, if they were acting as a government, will inevitably destroy Pennekamp, while one person, following a profit motive, is more likely to regard it as being in his self-interest to preserve it for the long term. But I think there is substantial reason to look at this the other way. Any one person you pick from the street may wish to break up the coral and sell it to souvenir shops, make a quick million and retire. If you randomly pick fifty people, chances are much greater that most of them will appreciate the benefits of preserving Pennekamp for the future. Thus, acting collectively has a smoothing effect: recognizing that we really do share some agreements as a culture which we may call values, the more of us we involve in the Pennekamp decision-making the more likely it is that we will make a decision reflecting these common values. In fact, in the classic tragedy of the commons, the tragedy happens because the villagers are not deciding collectively how many sheep to add. The tragedy happens because each individual using the commons has the right to think selfishly–exactly as an individual who owned the land might do.

It is true that Islam constitutes a systematic and coherent ideology, just like liberalism and communism, with its own code of morality and doctrine of political justice. The appeal of Islam is potentially universal, reaching out to all men as men, and not just members of a particular ethnic or national group. And Islam has indeed defeated liberal democracy in many parts of the Islamic world, posing a grave threat to liberal practices even in countries where it has not achieved political power directly. The end of the Cold War in Europe was followed by a challange to the west from Iraq, in which islam was arguably a factor.

Despite the power demonstrated by Islam in its current revival, however, it remains the case that this religion has virtually no appeal outside those areas that were culturally Islamic to begin with. The days of Islam’s cultural conquests, it would seem, are over: it can win back lapsed adherents, but has no resonance for young people in Berlin, Tokyo, or Moscow. And while nearly a billion people are Islamic -one fifth the worlds population- they cannot challenge liberal democracy on its own territory on the level of ideas. Indeed, the Islamic world would seem more vulnerable to liberal ideas in the long run than the reverse, since such liberalism has attracted numerous and powerful Muslim adherents over the past century and a half. Part of the reason for the current, fundamentalist revival is the strength of the perceived threat from liberal, Western values to traditional Islamic societies.

- Francis Fukuyama 1992

Politicians, heads of states, are all generally worthless jackasses, hatching asanine schemes and mustering all of their political power to create new jackassery. It has come to my attention that they are always wearing suits. Suits are too stuffy for their monkeyshining and moronery.

I’ve been elected to rock their asses til midnight. By rocking I mean replacing their suits with silly wallpaper in a beautifully crafted design.

If you recognize all of them without looking at the image names and alternate texts, then you win a prize. Possibly a sandwich to the face for being overtly involved in politics and probably stuffy.