Something else that popped up in the news today, which I thought you might at least get a laugh out of.
Meet Jeff Barth, county commissioner for Minnehaha in South Dakota, who is running this year for Congress. A straight-forward man with a straight-forward message. And apparently, an extremely limited campaign budget. I love it!
I reckon Brucker Bummer should ditch that Axelrod character, or whoever the hell he’s hired to run his 2012 re-election campaign, and sign up this bloke. He’ll save money, and reach a lot more people than his current B.S. does.
On second thoughts, no: let him bury himself with his own mouth.
Now, on a more serious note: Have any of you heard about this new movie 2016, due for release this American summer? It’s based on a book of the same title, an in-depth look at Obama’s real motivations, and what America might look like in four years’ time, were he to be re-elected in November. Here’s the author, Indian-born Dinesh D’Souza, speaking to a Conservative activist group about the film. Well worth 14 minutes of your time to watch:
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
Same worn-out rent seeking “populist” message (government should be out there gouging other people for you!) as that of “Kingfish” Huey Long.
Nope.
In the words of French economist Frederic Bastiat:
G’day Tucci,
I did note the absence of any policy detail; so I’m not saying vote for the man if you live in his Congressional district; it’s the style I love. Also, I must have missed the bit where he suggested gouging others; the whole ad was themed around what a swell guy he was – Oz
Would you elect this old fart (who plays chess by the way) over the hottest babe in Congress?
@- Tucci78
“In the words of French economist Frederic Bastiat:
“Government is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Its cute rhetoric, not much worth as economics…
There are costs to collective social governance, and benefits.
Bastiat often fails to include, never mind add up the benefits.
Utile or moral.
But collective organisation is an evolutionarily inevitable aspect of social organisation. It emerges because it is the most efficient means of ensuring mutual benefit – as well as expense. That the relative distributions of benefit and cost can be open to ethical criticism is inevitable.
But eliminating the collective cooperation that confers the benefits as a way of removing the ‘imorality’ of its costs is definitely a ‘neonate jettisoned with the ablutive medium’ situation….
Click to access O%26I0604JTB.pdf
The leading eight: Social norms that can maintain cooperation by indirect reciprocity
…We then examined all the possible reputation dynamics, and found that there exist only eight reputation dynamics named ‘‘leading eight’’ that can maintain the ESS with a high level of cooperation, even if errors are included in executing intended cooperation and in reporting the observation to the public. In this paper, we study the nature of these successful social norms.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~axe/research/Evol_of_Coop_Bibliography.htm
{in the jargon of the subject, ESS stands for evolutionary stable stratergy – with quite specific mathematical criteria to test for this.}
OK, here’s a Democrat you certainly shouldn’t vote for – but 40% of West Virginia’s registered Democrats would sooner see this bloke in the Oval Office than Bummer. Simple racism (as some Dems are spinning today), or a whole lot more?
That a convicted felon serving a long prison term in a federal penitentiary could give the incumbent such a close run says a lot about the breadth of his support. I think a lot of people who were prepared to give the guy a chance in 2008 have made up their minds already about November. They’ll either stay away, or vote for the other guy; whoever it is.
Hmmm…
It occurs to me that the obvious connection between democracy, candidates and game-theoretic analysis of indirect reciprocal altruism may not be obvious to those not into the subject.
I have been trying to get back up to speed after taking an interest in this area about a decade ago and then getting distracted… Its moved on with greater computing power and new insights into emergent chaotic complex systems.
But the short version is –
Voting = indirect reciprocal cooperation based on reputation.
To expand slightly… It is trivial to show that tit-for-tat is the most effective strategy for repeated transactions between individuals. Mutual cooperation or reciprocal altruism wins over self-interest because the collective benefit is higher.
Voting however is a good example of a one-off transaction between people with one person asking for the cooperation {vote} of many others. They can only command is cooperation by having a reputation for mutual cooperation, reciprocal altruism and ‘fairness’.
Ozboy likes the first candidate perhaps because he trusts him based, dare I say, on a little self-identification!
Tucci dislikes him because he fails the Purity Of Essence test of implacable opposition to any and all government regulation.
Dr Dave prefers to place his trust in ‘hotness’….
{grin}
Awww… a bit of Izenistic over-analysis, I’d say.
Do I identify with Mr Barth? Er, no… but I do like the simplicity and directness of his message, as I said above.
You (not so) obliquely associate Tucci with Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack D. Ripper. That’s a bit of a stretch, but an amusing reference to popular culture:
Dr Dave basing his vote on “hotness”?… undoubtedly! – Oz 😆
There’s a bit more to know about Rep. Kristi Noem. She’s a 40 y.o. wife and mother o three and is a rancher, farmer and small business owner. She had to leave school at 22 when her father was killed in a farming accident. She ran the farm and worked to keep it solvent. She eventually went back to school and earned her degree. She holds (mostly) conservative values. She does however support corn ethanol because it’s important for the State she represents. The fact that she’s good looking just classes up the halls of Congress.
I looked up her bio after your earlier comment; pretty impressive CV. I’d say Barth’s is even more so, but open to debate. The real issue is voting records and intentions; Barth, for example, doesn’t like the Tea Party, claims Noem is unrepresentative (but doesn’t explain how she got elected); from his website’s media page:
He also doesn’t have too much problem with government debt:
Hmmm… I’m starting to see Tucci’s point – Oz 😮
.
Rep. Kristi Noem may be a nice change from the Q-tips that inhabit the senate and congress visually, but politically she is another BIG business/small government advocate. Anti-individual, pro corporate stances seem to be the order of the day for the Reps. She may not be a fully paid up member of the Tea-Bags, but judged on hee actions insupport or opposition to various legislation….
Her support for subsidies for corn ethanol is support for big agribusiness that dominates that industry, and her support for continuing subsidies to the multinational oil industry makes it look like she has suffered regulatory capture. Her support for cuts to the EPA and MEDICAID both of which are government functions that benefit the individual at the expense of the industrial interests.
I can see why big corporations might vote for her, but for the ordinary citizen on the median wage…. I guess being hot helps!
I rather like the Ozboy neologism of ‘izenistic’…
The Dr Strangelove reference is not mine, I am trying to tease Tucci by echoing other comments. He is being used as the stick to beat Judith Curry at climate-etc after he made some ‘inflammatory remarks’. Gen Jack Kipper is the least of his epiphets as much concern is expressed on the ‘warmist’ sites about the ‘tone’ of his comments and Currys failure to sanction them!
{grin}
izen,
Almost everything you don’t like about Kristi Noem are reasons I like her. Her support for corn for ethanol is my one sticking point. But virtually every Congressperson in corn producing states supports this idiotic boondoggle. At least they let the ethanol subsidies expire but the market manipulation of mandated use remains in effect (signed into law by George W. Bush, by the way). The net effect is that the price of corn has tripled in the last 5 or 6 years, food prices have increased (all around the world) and we’re burning a less efficient, lower mileage motor fuel that offers no net benefit for the country (except for a few well connected special interests). I’m a big fan of ethanol in beer but I despise it in my vehicles or motorized lawn and garden equipment.
The TEA party is all about smaller government and increased personal responsibility…so is Kristi Noem. I’m even in favor of big businesses as they spawn small businesses and actually grow the economy. I actually agree with you one point, I think ALL subsidies for for commercial electricity should be eliminated. They are unnecessary. The highly vaunted $4B in subsidies for BigOil is largely a myth. They are NOT subsidies in the manner that wind and solar receive, they are tax breaks given to virtually every large business (e.g. mining, manufacture, etc.). This Obama’s attempt to contrive a “villain”. What the idiot doesn’t understand is that lost tax break will simply translate to higher prices at the pump.
You obviously don’t understand how Medicaid works. The federal government ponies up about half, the states are on the hook for the rest. If you expand the ranks of Medicaid recipients you place unsustainable burdens on the states. The EPA is utterly out of control and needs to be severely reined.
But you she see the video of Kristi Noem at home wearing jeans and riding a horse. Very hot! But at the same time you should check who she defeated in the last election. Democrat Stephanie Hereth Sandlin was no slouch, either.
http://stephanieforsouthdakota.blogspot.com/
Speaking of voting, Mitt Romney has now completed the formality of securing the Republican nomination, following a big win in the Texas primary, taking him beyond the 1144 delegates he needs. I’m not sure whether Ron Paul will keep his name on the ballot, but he ceased actively campaigning two weeks ago.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/romney-clinches-republican-nomination-20120530-1zidd.html
Dr Dave
You comment that just about all politicians from both sides of the ‘divide’ support bio-ethanol if they represent an agricultural area.
We can both agree that ethanol as a transport fuel is not just thermodynamically inefficient, but actively deleterious on many levels.
It is a shadow solution. It has very little effect on carbon emissions from fossil fuels because it has NOT been used to replace fossil fuel use. Without strong, specific commitments to use ethanol to replace fossil fuel just adding it to the available fuels does nothing but increase consumption. That has still increased along with the CO2 emissions. So it is failing to provide the benefit which is its ostensible and claimed purpose.
It damages food production, diverting efforts from calorie production into fuel manufacture. Bio-diesel from plant waste has some justification, but fuel from food is a moral calamity in a world with rampant malnutrition….
It does little or nothing to support the traditional farming community. The manufacturing process favors large scale production by big agri-businesses so it actively discourages and damages traditional farming communities.
Given these, and other negative aspects of the policy it might be asked WHY it is so popular with politicians. The answer I think is because it appeases two constituencies. The less well informed, but concerned citizen is placated with the APPEARANCE of engagement with CO2 emissions while subsidising big agribusiness.
I don’t think that eliminating subsidies for the energy industry would have much effect on fuel prices, the pump price is dominated by the world market in crude, and that in turn is dominated by supply-demand constraints. The inability to increase supply in the face of increasing demand is what has kept oil prices high even during a global recession.
This goes back to the democracy/voting for our betters thread. We elect {or fund} representatives who we trust to do what we think is right. For big business that is subsidies and concessions, for the individual it may be a promise of policies that would be of direct benefit, or just an ideology that we share. The reputation a politician has is the basis on which we vote. But that reputation may be underserved, or specifically crafted.
The support of bio-ethanol is a classic example of the sort of fake policy that engages voters but has no beneficial outcomes, except for the short-term interests of large corporations. It is a gross moral hazard that causes far more problems than it solves, and yet garners the politicians that pursue it a double benefit.
It is enough to prompt the sort of violent antipathy that has got Tucci such a bad reputation recently !
{grin}
At 11:04 PM on 30 May, izen addresses Dr. Dave’s observation about politicians on both sides of America’s great Boot On Your Neck Party in the farming states pushing the “green, renewable, eco-friendly!” corn ethanol fuel rip-off as these prostitutes are sent by their constituents to spread their legs in Washington’s red light district, thereby instantiating yet again Frédéric Bastiat’s great truth about how “Government is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else,” writing:
Hm. Define “bad,” izen.
Well, izen,
Once again I find myself in agreement with you – this time about ethanol. There are lots of good reasons to hate ethanol as a motor fuel. I agree that turning food into fuel is immoral. A while back Tucci wrote a wonderful comment linking corn ethanol to the Arab Spring. Ethanol is a nearly perfect example of pure crony capitalism.
Ethanol, wind power and solar are some of my favorite topics on WUWT. In each case there are acolytes for each of these energy failures and they are prolific threadjackers.
“Threadjackers!”
Thanks Dave for increasing my vocabulary by one word. I’m going to file that one away under the “really useful words” category – Oz
@- Tucci78
“Hm. Define “bad,”
Well it is not expressing an unwelcome truth, it is expressing what you may believe to be the truth in a manner, however metaphorical, that condones physical violenece against individuals.
At 6:00 PM on 1 June, when asked to “Define ‘bad,'” izen writes:
Bullpuckey. Here’s “an unwelcome trurth” for you, izen:
All government action employs and also “…condones physical violence against individuals.”
Government is the agency in civil society with the police power, by which is meant the accepted legal authority – delegated in a republic by the private citizen (who is the source of all sovereign power power) – to “break things and kill people.” in the preservation of individual human rights.
What the hell is there about this plain fact that escapes you, izen?
Every damned thing that the agents of government do in their dealings with “individuals” (i.e., us private citizens) is predicated upon their ability to aggressively attack and kill us if we refuse to obey. Even matters like how you keep your front lawn are enforced by government thugs with the ability – hell, the duty – to threaten and use lethal violent force in “retaliation” against the obstinate private person resisting the laws and regulations ordained by our permanent political class “for the public good.”
With that in mind as the inescapable element in all government action, I’m supposed to oblige the squeamishness of people like you, who go through their lives in willful denial of the fact that each private citizen in every nation continues to breathe only under a deferred death sentence uttered against him by government goons long before they issued his birth certificate?
When leaving Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the close of the constitutional convention on 18 September 1787, Benjamin Franklin was accosted by one of those “individuals” – a Mrs. Powel – who had been anxiously awaiting the results. She asked: “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin’s response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The distinguishing characteristic of government (as opposed to simple brigandage) is that officers of government may only take action lawfully as the agents of the sovereign power. In a republic, the sovereign power is the individual citizen. In a republic, the citizen – the sovereign – delegates the exercise of his lawful powers in right to the “public servants” who make up his government, but retains in law all such rights.
What it is lawful for “individuals” to do may be delegated to their hired government thugs. What is not lawful for “individuals” to do (i.e., that which is in criminal violation of other “individuals” rights) is also criminal for agents of the government to do.
You getting this yet, izen?
Okay, so to speak of deadly force employed by “individuals” in defensive retaliation against violently aggressive “individuals” (whether they’re malfeasant government officers or not) undertaking the criminal violation of any particular “individuals'” inalienable human rights is merely to acknowledge a critically important control mechanism in the maintenance of civil society itself.
No “individuals” would ever come in “out of the state of nature” to live in peace with other “individuals” were there not such implicit and explicit control mechanisms in place to mitigate the threats of theft, enslavement, rape, and the various other forms of “man’s inhumanity to man” so commonplace among species H. sapiens.
Jeez, just go back to the Enlightenment philosophers upon whose writings the Founders depended for their intellectual guidance in devising the purpose and form of the republic they created in the years running up to the American Revolution and the ratification process by which these United States got our Constitution.
Perhaps better yet, look to the popular expression of that philosophy in Thoma Paine’s Common Sense (1776), where he starts out with:
Those who wish to evade acknowledgement of the inescapably violently aggressive nature of civil government in all aspects of operation – like you, izen – desperately need a brisk nose-rubbing in your own crap.
The reason for my profound hatred of las warmistas (and like the late Murray Rothbard, “Hatred is my muse”) is that in every one of their “carbon pollution” propositions, they are pushing for government thugs to take aggressively violent action against “individuals” in the private sector.
izen, you whine about how what I write allegedly “condones physical violenece against individuals” while cement-headedly refusing to consider that what our Watermelon leftie-luser sons of canine parentage are demanding as matters of government policy in violence against the lives, liberties, and property of millions upon millions of utterly innocent “individuals” to no public (general) material benefit whatsoever, all of this to be undertaken at gunpoint.
Tsk. I simply observe that should a few of these warmistas wind up spectacularly dead in acts of lethal retaliation undertaken by their injured victims (and those victims number in the millions), it would serve wonderfully pour encourager les autres to quit their political machinations aimed at the plunder and impoverishment of such “individuals” in the name of the preposterous bogosity that is the AGW fraud. Moreover, it might also cause the remainder of las warmistas to quit their explicit advocacies of “violence against individuals” uttered in their enraged frustration with us skeptics and “deniers.”
In response, izen gets his panties all in a bunch. Pitiful.
Sorry for the delay in the next article, it’s now looking Thursday (7th) at the earliest. Work has to take priority. Anyway, this is an interesting discussion developing on this page in the meantime.
Yeah, the discussion seems to get [i]”interesting”[/i] for me to the same extent that my computer glitches, precipitating typographical errors. Sheesh.
Try composing into a HTML editor before firing it off here. That, or e-mail me with any typos which I’ll update ASAP – Oz
@- Tucci78
All government action employs and also “…condones physical violence against individuals.”
Government is the agency in civil society with the police power, by which is meant the accepted legal authority – delegated in a republic by the private citizen (who is the source of all sovereign power power) – to “break things and kill people.” in the preservation of individual human rights.
What the hell is there about this plain fact that escapes you, izen?
It does not escape me, but seems to eludes you, that the reciprocal cooperation and mutual coercion that emerges and sustains large scale society is not rooted in the threat of intpersonal violence, but the inherent utility {ESS} of such behaviour.
We avoid your Hobbesian war of all against all by establishing collective agreement.
Perhaps you need to assimilate the information in my first post including the linked paper.
Syria is the obvious topical example of how imposing control by breaking things and killing people is not an effective means of establishing or maintaing a large scale society.
@- Tucci78
“Tsk. I simply observe that should a few of these warmistas wind up spectacularly dead in acts of lethal retaliation undertaken by their injured victims ……. in the name of the preposterous bogosity that is the AGW fraud. Moreover, it might also cause the remainder of las warmistas to quit their explicit advocacies of “violence against individuals” uttered in their enraged frustration with us skeptics and “deniers.”
In response, izen gets his panties all in a bunch. Pitiful.”
I’ve been an amused onlooker at the recent Heartland problems, its the froth on the top of the issue, but much effort seems to be expended on the minute shifts in the Overton window.
I think I largely go along with Judith Curry’s take on your contribution, entertained by the presentation rather than convinced by the content. I would disagree with another poster who accused you of using too many adjectives. I like that thesaurus-pack style and neo-victorian grammar and fully intend to steal it for personal use when the opportunity arises. There is a certain amusement in seeing the tit-for-tat accusations of degeneracy.
Each side clambers up to claim the moral high ground in the debate… As if that has any influence on the material reality! Its entertaing, but hardly pertinent.
I hope you are reassured that no underwear was bunched while watching the responses to your hot contributions to Curry! {grin}.
I had to look up “Overton window”; what a marvellously descriptive concept… Oz
Utterly OT but too funny not to share. The joys of being a freelancer, and the story of my life (H/T Magilla):
http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p2.html
@-Ozboy
Very droll. Having once dabbled in doing web graphics in the early days when an animated Gif was ‘cool’ and encountered the attitude that once you had done one graphic, infinitely modifying it was of course include in the price… Ended up reading most of his blog! {grin}
Here is a link to another article, it isn’t funny, but it does perhaps link the subject of this thread, the ideology and aspects of a politician that make them electable, with the threadjacking I committed in teasing Tucci. Its by Micheal Fumento, a journalist on the right of some standing in the field of science and health writing. Up until now he has been affiliated with the alphabet soup of institutes and foundations that astro-turf the frontline between industry and government regulation…
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/my_break_with_the_extreme_right/
Civility and respect for order – nay, demand for order – have always been tenets of conservatism. The most prominent work of history’s most prominent conservative, Edmund Burke, was a reaction to the anger and hatred that swept France during the revolution. It would eventually rip the country apart and plunge all of Europe into decades of war. Such is the rotted fruit of mass-produced hate and rage. …
All of today’s right-wing darlings got there by mastering what Burke feared most: screaming “J’accuse! J’accuse!” Turning people against each other. Taking seeds of fear, anger and hatred and planting them to grow a new crop.
G’day Izen, and I fear you will be the last one about. I’ll put up another thread within 48 hours, even if it’s short.
Right wing darlings? I couldn’t say. Genuine Libertarians are out there enunciating a very definite principle, not aiming at divisiveness. Perhaps their limited appeal is a function of how blasé people have become about the freedoms they enjoy today, and the lack of understanding of just how tenuous those freedoms really are, and how we are always only a crisis or two (real or manufactured) away from totalitarianism – if we don’t arrive there by stealth in the meantime – Oz
At the risk of being the last man standing…..g
@- Tucci78
“Every damned thing that the agents of government do in their dealings with “individuals” (i.e., us private citizens) is predicated upon their ability to aggressively attack and kill us if we refuse to obey. ….
With that in mind as the inescapable element in all government action, I’m supposed to oblige the squeamishness of people like you, who go through their lives in willful denial of the fact that each private citizen in every nation continues to breathe only under a deferred death sentence uttered against him by government goons long before they issued his birth certificate?…
What it is lawful for “individuals” to do may be delegated to their hired government thugs. What is not lawful for “individuals” to do (i.e., that which is in criminal violation of other “individuals” rights) is also criminal for agents of the government to do.”
Judging from the heavy repetition of this point I suspect you regard it as a foundational principle in your understanding of the ethics of human society.
I suspect it is arbitrary nonsense. It may be a useful ethos, {in the technical definition of ethos as an absolute set of beliefs and practises that can be used as a fixed point to measure how much real behavior diverges from it} a defence against the excesses of governance, but it then falls under the T4T rule and is more to do with the payoff networks of benefit and cost. The ratio of how much you reward cooperation and how much you punish defection by mutually agreed coercion.
It is evident we hold different views about how human societies work and what moral philosophy has to say about them.
I suspect we also hold our different worldviews in different ways.
At the moment I find the developments of the game-theory approach with systems analysis interesting in their emprical approach, and intriguing in the interactional modeling. It looks like a useful tool to understand what happens in large social systems. I use the insights and explanations from this approach to understanding human societies because I find it persuasive. But I do NOT consider it to be an exclusive or necessarily comprehensive explanatory theory. Part of the reason I am using it is to test how robust it is in the face of divergent or contradictory views.
I often find that the fixed moral principles of the sort you expound about the absolute equivalence of individuals and government such that what is always immoral for an individual is inevitably immoral for a government are often held as core beliefs. They are more than just useful tools for understanding, or shaping society, they are essential ethical concepts that are deeply tied into all that a person considers gives life deeper significance or a personal sense of meaning. The idea that they could be refuted by empirical evidence, or replaced by a better set of conceptual tools for understanding social systems is rejected, absolutely.
They are not open to any form of skepticism or variance in many people.
I find it difficult to discover clearly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty in the realm of the hard sciences. The grounds for any credibility are even shakier for the sentient ambiguities of social structures. Building ethical principles on such shifting sands would seem…. Ozymandian?! {grin}
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/ozymandias
Until I followed the link I thought your last remark was somehow having a dig at me (in retaliation for “Izenistic”?) But I now see otherwise. I like Shelley, but have never read that one. How many layers of meaning beneath the obvious?
If you really want to, you will certainly get the opportunity to road-test game theory in the next thread. I personally think it’s the wrong approach, though I do understand your rationale for employing it. More later – Oz