Pearls ...

I was approached by a young person on the street the other day with the stereotypical clipboard and that "hungry but not yet hungry enough to work at McDonald's" look in his eye. He suggested I sponsor a child in some far flung country. Millions of children go without food and healthcare all over the world, he said. Of course, trying to "do unto others", I gave his pitch a respectful listen and when he paused, informed him that I would not become such a sponsor. I thanked him for the opportunity and, after a couple more attempts to disengage, went on my way.

I consider myself a generous person. I tip >= 20%. I regularly pass out money to the homeless. I donate money to about 5 charities every year. Hell, one of my ex- business partners still owes me ~$30k; but I figure he needs it more than I do, given his penchant for limosines, fancy food, and his heart condition.

So, this leads me to try to resolve the apparent contradiction. Why do I consider myself generous when I won't give, like $0.50 a week, to some starving kid halfway across the globe?

My conclusion is that I am locally altruistic and globally self-interested. I don't like bureaucracy. So, if the actual person who needs (or merely wants) my charity asks me himself, then I tend to give it. If some bureaucrat or agent asks me on behalf of someone else, I tend to keep my money. (After all, if those starving people have an agent, they can't be that poor. I'd love to have an agent go out and market my services or advertise my plights. ;-)

The same is true of the businesses I patronize (funny word "patronize", when talking in the context of fair trade). I try not to shop at Home Depot or buy Anheuser-Busch beers. I try to buy from small businesses and drink beer produced by small breweries.

So, having settled on that rationale, the issue was again stirred up by this article.

Now, to provide a little more background, I managed to read this book, which extolls the benefits of liberalization and financial infrastructure. The only interesting objection I have to the gist of that book is that globalism is efficient if and only if the price of energy is low. Moving goods and electrons across enormous distances is only efficient when energy is cheap. Hence, various types of globalism, e.g. spreading assembly over long distances, are wasteful when energy becomes scarce. Some types of globalism, investment and borrowing, might remain efficient, of course.

I've long had a philosophical objection to globalism in that if we outsource all our work, then we'll forget how to make things, which abstracts us away from the act of making things, which turns us into ignorant ivory tower types. But, that flaw in globalism is nowhere near as critical as its dependence on cheap energy.

Putting the three issues together: 1) local altruism, global self-interest, 2) self-interest built the USA (from the article), and 3) globalism requires cheap energy, it should be quite clear that the balance between altruistic versus self-interested behavior should track closely with exploitative versus exploratory distributed processing.

When resources are plenty, it makes sense to spread out and explore the whole territory. Each individual or small cluster can, at least, survive on whatever they find because resources are plenty, even if the individual or small cluster is inefficient and wastes a lot. But when resources become scarce, it makes more sense to move into an exploitative mode and spend serious effort maximizing the efficiency for processing what few resources remain.

Now that the USA has squandered much of its resources (selling it to foreign interests, printing massive amounts of money, selling off drilling rights, extracting all the nutrient from the soil, over-fishing the coasts, trading blue- for white-collar skills, pushing out wildlife by filling every nook and cranny with humans, etc), it is time for the USA to shift from an exploratory mode to an exploitative mode. And that means a shift from mostly self-interested, libertarian behavior to a more altruistic conservative behavior.

When and if we find a new frontier rich with resources like the "new world" was, then we can afford to switch back into exploratory mode and individualism and self-interest will again dominate, as well it should.

But for this stage in the development of the USA, working for and encouraging others to work for the common good is the right approach, the exploitative approach. We need to squeeze the maximum benefit from each unit of resource left available to us.

This article brings up a point I've long wondered about.

A bit of background. As a kid living in Texas, the Confederate battle flag always seemed to me to be a symbol of confederacy and independence, not the Confederacy, not racism, not secession, not agrarian economics, etc. It always seemed to me like it was a symbol that meant loosely coupled, minimal, non-local government and placed an emphasis on local government and personal responsibility.

Sure, there were hicks and idiots who flew the flag and held racist and anti-government sentiments. But, I always thought that was not a causal dependence but a coincidental correlation. Those hicks and idiots, just like more rational people, honestly felt like they were responsible for their own life ... i.e. they were largely independent. It just so happened that some of these people were also racist and stupid.

Growing up in Texas, hanging a Confederate battle flag in your room or in your truck was no big deal. Even my friends who didn't share my opinion of the symbol didn't care one way or the other. It was just a fact of life that many people had those flags.

As I grew older, however, it was made clear to me that my opinion of what the symbol means is an extreme minority opinion. And most people regard it definitely as a purposeful expression of hatred and oppression. Hence, regardless of what I think the symbol means to me privately, I decided that there were too many opportunities for people to misunderstand what I was saying if I flew that flag. So, I don't fly it even though, to me, it's not at all a symbol of hatred or oppression.

With that background, I can talk clearly about this episode where a girl and her mother inked a swastika on the girl's arm and the government forcibly removed the child from the mother's custody.

My initial tendency is to say that such government intervention is tantamount to the thought police and a clear human rights violation. I don't care what symbol you ink into your arm, wear around your neck, or hang on your wall, as long as you're not committing a crime, the government should not take such extreme measures. The "slippery slope" mentioned in the article is inapplicable because a slippery slope starts with something acceptable and slides down to something unacceptable. Removing a child from its parents' custody when no laws have been violated is not acceptable, even if the beliefs of the parents might bias the child toward pathological behavior.

Now, I wouldn't object to some attempts to educate the mother and (especially) the daughter (since there are some belief systems that will only go away when those idiots that believe them die off).

Another issue might crop up. Perhaps the swastika has been banned in Winnipeg as it is in Germany. If that's the case, then the mother and daughter did violate a law and should be punished accordingly. However, laws like that are just fundamentally stupid. (No offense intended to the German government and people; but come on. If you ban the symbol, you give it more power than it already had. Don't you know that?)

The real question is: Is there a relatively objective method for distinguishing between distasteful but largely benign symbolism and dangerous instigation or advocation of violence or sedition?

The reason this article brings that up is because the mother is willing to facetiously deny her beliefs if the government will allow her to take custody of her daughter. But, in defense of the state, a facetious denial of nazism just to get her daughter back would indicate to the government that this woman has no intention of caring for the well-being of her daughter at all! In fact, as a mother, that facetious denial would indicate that she is willing to martyr her child to those nazi beliefs.

Such a predisposition to sacrifice her child's well-being for the sake of a set of beliefs might well mean that the mother really isn't a fit mother and (practically) the rest of society will end up suffering if she regains custody of the child.

A better response from the mother would be to clearly explain that her nazi symbolism, in fact, is a purely rhetorical political statement rather than an accurate indication of the type of government she wants, expects, and will work towards. This is most often the case, anyway, whether the advocate knows it or not. Advocates of stupidity like nazism (or any -ism, to be honest, because all -isms are idealist nonsense) are usually so ignorant of what they're actually advocating that they really could not possibly want, expect, or work towards such a non-existent, platonic ideal.

If she were to fully explain this to some court and make a serious attempt to educate herself and her child on how the symbols are perceived to the population at large, then I suspect we could regard her as a fit mother even if her beliefs lie very far to the right.

Good communication is the responsibility of both the speaker and the audience. I once had a mentor who said I left too much of the communication burden on those to whom I spoke. I continually disagreed and held firm to my belief that communication is precisely and evenly spread across all the participants. If a listener is lazy and doesn't commit, then they should be held accountable. Likewise, if a speaker is lazy and doesn't commit, then they should be held accountable.

So, it seems to me that the state, the aggressor in this case, has the responsibility to listen to the mother, find out whether she really is a dangerous right-winger willing to martyr her daughter, and if not, actively participate in the communication by making it clear to the mother and daughter what these symbols have come to mean.