Well of Mimir

I’ve decided to move to five separate blogs. Mostly this is to minimize worry on my own part as well as to minimize personal administrative overhead, as well as to do better personal branding. They look pretty rough right now, hopefully I’ll work on them a bit in the future.

Anyhow, I have them up, now. They are:
Out and About
Herding Anecdotes
Tethered Roc
Theo’s Seattle Events
Working Through the Book Log

Nerd Heaven.

I’ve met tons and tons of awesome people

… and a possible internship offer at Microsoft.

The talks differed vastly in quality, but the good ones were good and I wasn’t afraid of walking out on the bad ones.

The most valuable part really is in the hallway.

I think I’m going to take this site off line in the indeterminate future for a bit… and retool things. Probably re-jigger urls, etc. Just a warning.

In other news, 3G iPhone is $200. Hopefully 2G iPhones will start to go for < $150 on craigslist. If so, I’ll probably get one.

Politics is what happens when you don’t have property.

How well are emotion and politics correlated? How about a person’s Meyers-Briggs personality type?

This is an open question. I don’t have any answers. I would suspect, though, that politics is almost entirely driven by emotion.

For example, my gut tells me that liberals and libertarians differ primarily by the degree of empathy they express and their tolerance for uncertainty and disorder.

Can these dispositions be changed?

Food for thought.

I was talking with my sister a few hours ago; I was trying to get her to explain the difference between social entrepreneurship and regular entrepreneurship was. I was accused of being a dick, but she was entirely unsuccessful (at least to my mind, as I kept on coming up with valid counter examples to her definitions). On the way home, I actually came up with a definition that I think is perfect (and also encompasses social entrepreneurship, if it is clarified as entrepreneurship that furthers the liberal agenda). The definition is quite simple:

The liberal agenda is to equalize relative wealth by placing into stasis absolute wealth.

In order for this definition to make sense, one has to understand that economics extends to all facets of human action, not just those that are denominated in dollars, and that wealth is anything that is valuable (including political power). It is also important to note (although I tried to make this clear via the construction) that the second half is always subordinate to the first.

The second part of the definition is very important, for while it is implicit in the first part (if one doesn’t hold absolute wealth in stasis, one can’t equalize it), it doesn’t capture the whole picture. Liberals, in general, constantly work to fix in place the world even when it will have a negligible impact on the relative distribution of wealth. The remarkable uptake of the crusade, first against global cooling and now against global warming are great cases in point, although hardly aberrations. The curious non-decision to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (instead of say… giving all the evacuated residents 1/x of the rebuilding funds and saying “best of luck”) is another.

Libertarianism, then, makes perfect sense to me as a political movement. It occurred at a time when liberalism was extremely weak. Most countries were governed by Monarchs in concert with Nobles. The liberals who were libertarians at the time were perfectly willing to give up the second part of the agenda (which is always subordinate) to achieve more of the first.

I want to make clear that this is a description of the actions of liberalism as a whole, not the mindset or arguments backing any particular person who claims to be liberal (or libertarian for that matter).

Update: There is one curious aberration to the rule that the means suborn the ends, and that is Walmart in particular and to their support of Union type movements in general. This is an aberration because Walmart does more for the poor than any other organization I know of, by simultaneously providing low wage jobs and by dramatically increasing buying power at the low end of the economy. My first impulse is to chalk it up to history and sentimentality, but I think there is something even more devious going on here. One of the interesting aspects of liberalism is that it constantly promotes democracy even though everyone hates it (thanks Mencius). The reason this works for liberalism is because liberalism wins when it comes to politics. There is simply no other political organism which can compete. Unions, then, are a way to grow the sphere of politics and shrink the market. Walmart’s crime is to be so efficient that it makes Unions economically impossible - essentially it out competes a limited (and extraneous) form of government.

A revised description of liberalism is:

Liberalism seeks to increase the scope of politics by placing into stasis absolute wealth in order to equalize relative wealth.

The clause-order of priority is then one, three, two.

Update 2: One of the interesting things that falls out from this is that the key liberal value - the thing that liberalism seeks above all else - is death. This really shouldn’t be very controversial as death is another name for economic stagnation. It is interesting to me that this makes me much more confident of my analysis because it follows the same pattern that pathogens that do when they share the same niche - the most virulent (and hence damaging for the host) out competes all the other ones.

I had this post already conceived before my just published post, so I thought I’d post it in case my conversion really is permanent.

For the last few years, I have been searching for something, anything that I could pin my hopes for a better future on. There is literally nothing. The landscape is bare. Let me explain.

One of my most predominating concerns is the continual advance of the progressive agenda (see: I’m even beginning to use his vocabulary). It seems like there is no stopping the onset of socialism. The more I look around, the less I believe Ayn Rand is speaking metaphorically and the more I believe she is literally predicting what will occur. And those predictions are becoming scarily true.

As I’d rather not experience the equivalent of the decent of the Roman Empire into the Dark Ages, I’ve been casually casting about, looking for a horse to bet on. I think I might have found one.

As I’ve said earlier, the right to leave is critical to the preservation of liberty. The problem is that there is really no where to go. Almost all of the arable land, and quite a bit of the barren land is already inhabited by people who don’t seem to be too keen on giving it up. That’s where scientific pioneers come in. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps industry can be accelerated sufficiently where it could make economic sense to live at sea, or in Outer Space. I see the credible threat to leave as the only real deterrent to encroaching socialism, and even then, not a very strong one.

Many times, I have said what I really want is someone who is smart enough and who has a good enough case that he can change my mind on things that I deeply care about - the bigger and more important the subject the better.

I think I have been violated in the deepest and most successful way possible.

I may no longer be a libertarian.

It has been a long week, and I want to let the dust settle first and have a chance to mull over the used car before I make a down payment, but wow…

I have to admit, that for a while, I had had my doubts. Even as I presented an outwardly confident face, I had had niggling doubts that ate at me from time to time. Perhaps the ediface was weakened to the point where a decent argument could cause it to collapse on its own. I’d like to think, though, that I was simply conquered over the course of 8 (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8) long, devastating articles.

Just as a side-note: I will always have a place in my heart for small-l libertarianism. Even if I decide to leave it behind for practical reasons, I will always remember it as a beautifully pure ethical system.

As a side, side note: the last article was so shocking to me that I couldn’t stop nervously giggling for minutes. Reverse irony is perhaps the most powerful literary device ever.

Update: A more susinct version of the 8 part lecture series exists here.

I’m afraid that I forgot a good part of what William Gibson said in his Reading/Q&A/Signing; these tidbits are the most memorable parts of what I do remember, paraphrased.

On The Singularity:

Geek Rapture.

On his writing process:

Do you remember making rubberband balls when you were a kid? When they are finished they look great, they’re big and round and largely symmetrical. That hard part in the whole process is the very beginning, where you have to tie a few rubberbands into knots and they’re lumpy and lopsided and the whole thing is deeply unsatisfying. As more and more rubber bands get put on, though, the thing sort of sorts itself out until at the end everything looks wonderful.

I am a big fan of continuous revision. I don’t do drafts; I continuously revise my text - I kind of look at everything all at once and revise the whole thing as I write. By the time I get to the end of the book, the beginning is usually pretty well cooked, so things aren’t as crazy as you might imagine.

One thing that I can always tell is where to end chapters. The first chapter might start out as the second chapter and then spend a bit of time as the third chapter before settling into its place, I can tell where things need to break.

Update: I almost forgot the most important part.

On Science Fiction:

There is a polite fiction that most people participate in that Science Fiction is about the future. It is not. This is true for a very simple reason; the future is not here yet, so we can’t write about it. In reality, Science Fiction, the best Science Fiction is about the present and the past. This is in part because quite literally, there is nothing else for the author to talk about. 1984 is one of the very best books about 1948.

A while back, Ryan and I were talking about who to vote for for president. At the time I couldn’t remember why I preferred Obama over McCain. I don’t know if I was recalling these examples, but McCain’s deep and principled support of National Service and perhaps less deep, although still principled support of warantless wiretaps are total deal-breakers for me. Of all of the elections I can recall, this one seems to have the worst candidates; Obama is my choice for worst-case hedging.