There are two books I’ve been reading this year which kept me from even seriously considering voting for McCain. Both books are about the Bush administration. The books are Fiasco and The Dark Side.

Fiasco is a history of the first year or so of the Iraq War, with a focus on the US military. Over and over, it shows how ineptly the Iraq occupation was planned and executed. I supported the war until some point after the 2004 elections, but that support was based in ignorance. If I had understood that the war could not possibly have possibly been liberating due to the complete incompetence of it, I would not have wanted it. I now doubt that any war could be one of liberation, but I am certain that the Republican party of today can not manage military affairs with any effectiveness.

The Dark Side is the story of what might be called a Bush shadow government, made up of mid-level appointees and bureaucrats, who undercut higher level government officials to create laws, regulations, and processes to increase executive power in particular, and state power in general, in almost every way. They systematically deceived other parts of government, and even other parts of the executive branch, in order to weaken traditional rights and privileges of American citizens and even non-Americans. While Bush campaigned as a conservative, he conserved almost nothing and had his underlings shred the fabric of American government. It’s not entirely clear who should be held responsible for all this (Bush or Cheney or Who Knows?), but one thing is certain: if the Republicans win in 2008, they will draw from the same groups of people to staff a new administration. McCain may diverge from some parts of the GOP, but the republican candidate for president can be only so independent from his party.

In my opinion, McCain would not fix the problems Bush caused. I’m not sure he knows what the problems are and I have a feeling he might not consider them problems at all. McCain seems like a centralizer at heart, a military-style command and control guy. But, at the same time, he also seems to frequently not bother to either command or control his own campaign, with which he frequently publicly disagrees. Which sounds like exactly the same leadership style that resulted in the problems discussed in the two books.

McCain, I think, is not a source of any hope. He would not improve anything as president. Obama, in my opinion, would probably not fix anything either. He would probably worsen many of America’s problems. But, at least Obama would be a slight repudiation of the Bush years, which I think we’ll rue for the rest of our lives.

While the very act of voting presents certain problems for liberty, I voted for Barr this year. I can’t think of any candidate or party for which a vote is a more complete repudiation of Bush. If there is anything that America needs, I think it is to put these last two presidential terms behind us.

I think that opposition to ethical egoism and evolution have at least one feature in common. Both creationism/”intelligent design” and anti-egoists tend to argue without really discussing the actual truth value of the ideas they are opposing. Often, a creationist will argue that belief in evolution will bring with it bad social effects. In fact, there is a vital sub-group of creationists who spend a lot of time trying to tie Hitler to Darwin. That’s hardly a scientific argument against evolution, but it is meant to persuade. Of course, creationism isn’t really any sort of scientific enterprise, and so its indifference to truth is somewhat to be expected.

In the case of egoism, the arguments against it typically try to imagine some sort of scenario where failing to follow non-egoist principles results in some sort of morally disgusting result. This type of argument is fairly common in ethical reasoning, as well as any other field where you’re prefer to not reason from first principles. But it’s a type of arguments that, by its design, fails to even notice that there may be some positive argument for the principle in question. In fact, the argument type I mention really just results in begging the question, as the “morally disgusting result” is typically evaluable as morally disgusting from non-egoist principles. One rarely comes across an anti-egoism argument that actually engages the egoist argument on egoist terms. Anti-egoists, like anti-Darwinian, prefer to stay within their own premises and then show that, by golly, you can’t be both a creationist and a Darwinian, so Darwinism must go (you can’t be both an anti-egoist and an egoist, so egoism must go).

As it turns out, there isn’t a coherent alternative to either neo-darwinism or ethical egoism. Additionally, neither evolution or ethical egoism result in morally disgusting situations. Evolution, so far, results in humanity, among other things. Ethical egoism, as I live it, is full of creativity, co-operation, compassion, and love.

I suppose that if it were true that ethical egoism required me to violently subjugate every person I encountered and that I could only feel true happiness when sunbathing by the side of a river of human blood…well, I would probably reconsider ethical egoism. In this vein, if everyone shit ice cream, then restrooms would be restaurants. But, as things actually stand, ethical egoism has made me a decent person and nobody is eating out of their toilet.

Or: Why It Is Reasonable To Be An Economic Conservative, But Not Reasonable To Be A Social Conservative

Over the last century, we’ve accumulated lots of data on the effect of economic freedom and a lack thereof. We’ve seen the utter ruination of economies in the cases of the Soviets and the Maoists. We’ve seen generally slower economic growth in more social democratic western European countries like Germany and France than in the more “economically conservative” US. We’ve seen some third world economies become first world nations through trade-friendly policies, as in South Korea. We’ve also seen regional leaders regress economically, like Cuba or Argentina, through poor property protection and corruption.

Basically, we’ve seen an awful lot of experiments run on what effects different kinds of economic policies have. The more prominent fact that emerges is that economic freedom is more productive. The more free the market, the better property is protected, the less corruption in the government, the lower the taxes (to a large extent), the richer the country. You can argue that some statistics come out better in less free countries (as in the perennial examples of health-care and literacy in Cuba). But you cannot argue that less free societies outproduce more free societies. Wealth matters to the quality of life of all citizens of a country, and freer countries are wealthier.

And that, basically, is the most reasonable case for what is sometimes called “economic conservatism” in US politics. The data supports staying pretty close to the traditional American economic system, or even becoming more free. Lots of countries did us a favor and showed how painful lack of economic freedom can be.

Now, that said, there is no such sad history of countries that legalize gay marriage. Nor is there a sad history of countries that legalize abortion. Nor is there a sad history of countries that fully embrace biomedical research. Nor is there a sad history of countries that become more accepting of human sexuality in all its variety. Nor is there a sad history of countries that adopt more humane laws regarding drug use and abuse (quite the opposite, even here in the US!).

“Conservative” opposition to social progress is generally entirely theoretical and is mostly made up of scary stories of what might happen. These scary stories, well, they don’t come true. The one exception that comes to mind is that conservatives are largely right about urban crime and the need for consistent enforcement as the way to preserve civil harmony. Here, though, they are able to point to real experience in the US from the 60’s through the 90’s to make the case. But when they move from real lessons derived from real experience, they always seem to go wrong.

I’m still in love with the Kindle, but I have to admit that I have more complaints. Really, though, I have one compaint again the Kindle that leads to any other issues. Kindle books are not on the web. I’m not sure what else could be worse to say about text today.

There’s a ton of text, among other things, on the web today and that has given rise to new cultural forms in order to deal with it. Linkblogs, del.icio.us, RSS, Google Reader, etc. have all come about as guides and tools for dealing with all the content on the web and they are now just great unto themselves. I like to share what I read and comment on it. I like to read what other people had to say about things on the web. It’s a huge value to be able to read within a community. Filtering, commentary, and participation in general are all part of reading now. And the Kindle is completely cut off from all that, basically because of DRM.

That said, the Kindle is still probably the best way to read a book today. But it’s not the best way to read text today and it is probably not going to be the best way to read books someday soon, at least not unless the Kindle becomes radically different. I can’t wait for the day when I can read books through some sort of a general-reader version of O’Reilly Safari on an iPhone-like Mac Tablet. I don’t mind paying for content, but I do mind being cut off from the web and community.

I got a chance to resume my quest to try every Jamba Juice today. Things were dicey for a while there, as it seemed like they changed the menu every time I visited. But I’m ready to get back into things, and I tried the Strawbery Whirl this afternoon.

At first I thought it was going to be toor sour, like the Strawberry Surf Rider, but that turned out to not be the case. Becasue this smoothie only has banana, strawberry, and apple in it, it’s not nearly as strong a taste as my usual drink, the Protein Berry Workout. But, that said, the naturalness of this drink is a very welcome change from the PBW’s somewhat industrial-food flavor. I can’t really detect any of the banana, but the apple and strawberry flavors are terrific. The texture is both smoother and more substantial than I expected, which are good things, in my opinion.

This is probably the first smoothie in this project to really impress me. I can easily imagine this becoming an alternate for me when I’m not in the mood for the soy milk and protein powder they put in the PBW.

One of the best purchases I’ve made in the last year was my Kindle. As I’ve mentioned, I tend to buy too many books. And they sat in my house, crowding us out. Over the course of 2008, we got rid of almost all of our books and got two Kindles. And things have been different.

First, I actually read more now. The Kindle is really fun to read, compared to the average book. The text is clear (and can be adjusted to be larger or smaller), the book selection is ok, and I can let it sit on my lap without having to hold it open.

Second, it obviously saves an awful lot of space. I must have bought at least a shelf’s worth of books for the device, but it remains tiny. I haven’t had to think about where to put a single one of the books I bought, because they are all stored either on my Kindle or in the cloud by Amazon.

Those two things combined actually made a difference in how we approached buying our next house. We didn’t need to be overly concerned with having tons of room for bookshelves, as we default to buying books on the Kindles when they’re available. An unexpected change was that we’re considering going without a TV altogether, as we spend so much more time reading that the cost of a TV, and the space it would require, are on the edge of not being worth it. As a result, we could shop for a smaller house, relative to what we would have wanted if we were going to fill the house with books and a TV.

The Kindle is fairly expensive, but it may have saved my wife and I hundreds of thousands of dollars in a house.

I do have one criticism of the Kindle, which they are already addressing. The book selection is still nowhere near what I would need for a complete replacement for paper books. Lots of old books are missing, and even some recently released books don’t go on the Kindle (such as Nixonland, which I bought in hardcover recently). When I got my Kindle I think Amazon was advertising that they had over 90K books on the Kindle and it is now over 120K, which is great progress. But I don’t think I’ll be really happy with it until it hits several multiples of where it is now.

We’re getting ready to move these days and I’m learning a lesson I bet lots of people learn when they do this. That lesson is that I have a lot of shit. This shit I have, it’s not actually all that shitty. It’s relatively nice things like an HDTV, or an extra computer (or two). It’s a shelf or two (or ten) of books I like to believe I might read one day. But mostly what it all ends up as is a burden.

It turns out, if you own enough books, you have to figure them into your future housing plans. As in, if you buy enough books, you’re buying a bigger house than you otherwise would. Luckily, we were able to notice that TVs, excess electronics, and even excess books were warping our plans before we bought a house. As a result, we were able to decide to get rid of an awful lot of our stuff, and now we’re moving into a much better neighborhood and smaller house than we expected to at the beginning.

Also, we will now have a few additional benefits. For one, we will live in an urban enough area that we can walk to the grocery, several restaurants, and possibly even downtown if we were ambitious. If we continued our devotion to our stuff, we would be looking at lots and lots of driving.

For another, when we move to our next house we won’t start life there already buried under our possessions. We can take our time and get new stuff and that stuff will be much better suited to the people we are now. In this case, it seems like there’s not enough room for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our stuff was yesterday and now we have room for today and tomorrow. That sounds like a nice start.

I was born in Boston and lived there for the first 26 years or so of my life and I know virtually nothing about Roxbury or its history. My Dad grew up there, and I doubt that I’ve set foot in Roxbury more than 4 or 5 times. I think I’m going to go out of my way to visit over the next few years.

As I slowly make my workflow more efficient, I’m incorporating more command line technologies in my day to day life. Examples include shifting more text editing away from Textmate and toward emacs and declining to use Time Machine and using a combination of git and rsync for version control and backup. I’m not sure where it’s all going, and what might be next in this transition, but I definitely seem to be happier using more bare-bones tools as I better understand what, exactly, I’m doing with this machine.