There were over 60,000 spam messages in the comments on this blog.

Instead of killing them one-by-one, I destroyed all the comments, including the good ones.

Sorry, but I just wasn't going to do all the work required.

Now, I hope sometime this week I can find time to upgrade the software to preclude spammers from taking over my site.

A lot of people get worked up over email spam; I don't. It's easy to kill. But Web spam is harder to kill, and I do get upset about that. People who construct programs and robots to litter other people's sites with extraneous, off-topic links and messages won't get defense from me.

I've been sick this week, and have busy for longer. So: almost no blogging. What have I been up to? Well . . .

I just ate a really good banana.

Oddly, it took me several minutes before I realized that some people would make a joke out of this fact. (One shouldn't hazard, under normal circumstances, to admit of eating a very good banana. Orange, yes. Mango, yes. Persimmon, surely. But not a banana!) But what would Yoda say, had he eaten a good banana?

A really good banana, I just ate.

Today is the 188th anniversary of Gustave de Molinari's birth, making this 188 A.G. (in the Year Of Our Gustave). Ag is also the chemical symbol for silver. To my mind, Gustave de Molinari represents the silver standard of radical individualist liberal in the 19th century. (Herbert Spencer's the gold.)

Murray Rothbard's birthday was yesterday.

This is still what I want, except that it need not be quite so big. A true Mac book . . . a book that is a window into the world-wide web of information.

Of course, a keyboard should be attachable!

But a touch-user-interface should be the basic unit. All other peripherals (music keyboards, cameras, pens, etc.) would be add-ons. Some people may never wish to put an alphanumeric keyboard onto their portable knowledge navigator.

One should be able to use a pen on the right side, and see what you draw on that right side . . . and on the left, perhaps superimposed onto another image.

A super-Newton, or PDA. Since it's a tablet, I'd call it iCodex.

There are two types of education:

1. Education for exposure




2. Education to mastery

Both have their place. In my opinion, in junior high and high school schooling, each student should select a curriculum designed for his or her future. If the student chooses the Liberal Arts Track, then he/she would choose, say, English, History, Foreign Language, Typing, Music as Graded classes, and, say, Physical Education, Math, and Wood Shop as Pass/Fail. The Graded classes correspond to Education to mastery, and the Pass/Fail classes are Education to Exposure.

Similarly, if one excels at sports, or hopes to go into the military, or some other more physically demanding profession, then Physical Education would be a graded class, and, say, History Pass/Fail.

I suspect that some schools do this already; it's common practice in many colleges. It makes a great deal of sense to me. Why not extend the practice to lower grades?

I remember taking P.E. (as we called Physical Education) in high school, and getting high grades. I didn't deserve them. I was no athlete. I was there because the classes were required, and because it was thought (correctly) that kids should learn how to use their bodies, and exercise, etc.

But my getting high grades in P.E. was a mockery of the idea of mastery. Surely the real athletes deserved their A grades. I didn't.

But some of those athletes, they did pretty poorly in some more academic subjects. And surely they should have been able to take them as Pass/Fail as I should have taken P.E.

Education to Exposure remains important, whether one is self-taught, home-taught, or school-taught. But we shouldn't expect mastery from everybody at everything.

And the idea of penalizing a brain with low grades for P.E. is ridiculous.

Just so, penalizing some athletes for not being able to master calculus is idiotic, too. Or even geometry.

In the future, we should expect of elementary school graduates of being able to do basic language and mathematics. Of high school grads? Well, that would get a bit more complicated. We'd have to ask what kind of a track the graduate was on.

Basically, we should allow for Education for Exposure, but make it quite clear when someone has been graded on grounds of Mastery.

These are the triumphal days of actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, he of Borat fame. I'm more interested in his cousin, Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, a research psychologist who has done interesting work regarding the differences between male and female brains. His theory of autism is that the brain is too male, too geared towards characteristically male system-building at the expense of characteristically female empathy.

Why is this on my mind? For one, I just met a little autistic boy in the hall outside my office. He said Hi. His mother was pleased.

Also, I've a friend who often speaks of libertarian autism, the self-inflicted, late-onset psychological disorder that puts the atomism back in individualism. There are some libertarians who use libertarian ideas to insulate themselves from ordinary civility, manners, empathic interaction, and anything complex and hard-to-understand in everyday life. A contract they can understand. And they pretend that, once a contract is made, anything is open. Hire somebody to work as a clerk? Fine. Then tell him to clean up an overflooded toilet in a rental unit in another enterprise of yours altogether.

That's a good example of libertarian autism. Basically, it's fraud. But you can pretend that once you hire someone, you can instruct that person to do anything. He has a right to quit, right? So by not honoring the terms of an original wage contract, you make an employee have to give up his whole investment in that job if he doesn't like your latest whim.

There are many other examples. Many libertarians are real orifices to work for, or with. Many, I'm told, have a caveat emptor approach to negotiations. Many, even in their ideology, don't believe that their can be any complexity to social life.

(Still, most libertarians I've met are not like this at all.)

I actually had one person tell me that verbal abuse by a stranger in a public place is morally equivalent to a fart. Well, no. One has minimal control over farting. But I've seen people heap verbal abuse on other people in public, and that amounted to aggression. The libertarian idea (if it may be so called) that words cannot be aggressive is idiotic on the face of it.

There are some fighting words. The appropriate way to react is with a fight.

Or call the police.

Of course, autism is a hyperbole. But there are similiarities. Autistic children don't really have much empathy. They can't deal well or interpret the subtle clues in the human face, or in human behavior.

Frankly, Murray Rothbard's dichotomy of social relations is rather autistic, in that it rules out many complex social relations, simply doesn't even consider them. Remember his dichotomy? There are peaceful, voluntary EXCHANGES and there is FORCE.

But that's just not the case. He should have read Herbert Spencer's Principles of Ethics: Part I, The Data of Ethics, the chapter on The Sociological View. There, in the space of several pages, Spencer laid out a complicated view of co-operation, with simple exchanges of the Rothbardian variety as only one form of co-operation. There are others. Even more basic. And they are the basis for much of human co-operation in tribal life, for example.

Of course, Rothbard was a dualist in temperament, and didn't like complexities. (In this I argue contra Chris Sciabarra.) By defining out of existence an empire of social complexities, Rothbard shielding himself from those complexities. Like an autist who doesn't want to be touched. Who doesn't want to listen. Who doesn't want to feel.

So, Rothbard never really grasped the nature of communal co-operation, or even language, both of which are based on non-market co-operation. Not exchange.

There is a tradition in economics, the catallactic tradition, which does what Rothbard did. But the error is easiest to see in a less dogmatic theorist, Destutt de Tracy. The errors of catallactic imperialism (and even Gary Becker and other contemporary economists sometimes succumb to this) are pretty easy to see when spelled out by the august French theorist, friend to his translator, Thomas Jefferson.

This is far from Simon Baron-Cohen, though, with whom I started this quasi-discussion.

I don't think the idea of liberty is tied inextricably to the excesses characteristic of one sex. It transcends such trivialities. The fact that too many libertarians are characteristically male in orientation doesn't mean that adding a feminine touch will kill the concept of equal freedom. It just means that some expansion of the ideology will probably ensue.

It is interesting, though, that what Baron-Cohen identifies as a chief characteristic of the male mind, system building and (hyper?)rationality, is close to what I regard as one of the three self-regarding cardinal virtues, wisdom. And what he identifies as a chief characteristic of the female mind, empathy, I regard as one of the three other-regarding cardinal virtues.

Both are virtues. And ones that all should strive for, male or female. It may be that the self-regarding ability to order one's thoughts to make sense of the external world is weighted towards males, and that the other-regarding ability to imagine others' feelings and situations is easier for females than males. But integrated, virtuous people of either sex must cultivate both characteristics as habits.

But is it characteristically male to build systems that don't include empathy, or the due recognition of others' feelings and perceptions and interests? And is it characteristically female to think mushily while waxing eloquent on the plight of others?

I'm not sure if I'd go that far. But as I see it, men who build systems that rule out whole aspects of human life are simply fools. And women who can't think their way out of a paper sack, but insist on helping others regardless of consequences, are dangerous and unjust.

That is, conceptual autism, atomism, may be something males are more prone to than women. And it is a fault. It is a fault because it rules out of consideration empathy, and because it doesn't track the complexities of reality.

And mushy, muddle-headed altruism may be more common amongst women than in men. But it is a fault, too, whether women fall for it, or men do. It is a fault because it shows a lack of clarity in concepts, in distinguishing one thing from another, the sine qua non of rational thought. And it overweighs the value of others to oneself, and tips away from any sense of balance between the other-regarding and self-regarding virtues.

Last night on television, the local PBS station presented Wayne W. Dyer and The Power of Intention. What little I could take of this man's blather is that he has deliberately abandoned clear thought for mushy, empathic, mystical nonsense. For him the beginning of wisdom is the alleged insight that there is no real difference between yourself and the object of your thought.

What idiocy. This is the oppposite of autism, surely. It is the loss of self in the shotgun marriage of disparate things into unity.

Dyer seems to be a nice man. He'd probably be a good neighbor. But frankly, I'd rather talk to a libertarian atomist. At least I can argue with them. At least they realize that wisdom begins in the making of distinctions. The eradication of distinctions? That is the extinguishing of thought as such, and leads to the heat death of rationality.

Here is a man who's committed himself to what Baron-Cohen might consider a characteristically feminine error.

He's the antithesis of Ayn Rand, who went the other direction, committing a characteristically male hyperbole in philosophy, and coming up with error upon error. Masculine (she was a man worshiper, after all!) but wrong.

I wouldn't want her as a neighbor, but I might have enjoyed arguing with her. Though I know she would have lashed out at me for being EVIL pretty damn quickly.

Oh, well.

Ah, David Lynch. I'm no smoker, but I can sympathize:

You were a defender of Ronald Reagan in the '80s —
No, no, no. You know, we live in a time where everything that anyone has ever said, or that someone else has said that they said, goes on some site. It's kind of cool in some ways, but then you need to explain certain things.

Well, let's get this one correct for all time.
Reagan cleared brush. That's what I liked about him. My father grew up on a ranch in Montana, and I grew up in Western American thinking, sort of like cowboys in the past on my father's side. So I liked him for that, and I liked this one speech he read early on, at some convention. But at that time, I thought of myself as a libertarian. I believed in next to zero government. And I still would lean toward no government and not so many rules, except for traffic lights and things like this. I really believe in traffic regulations [pause]. Some stop signs are really absurd. Like at night, at two a.m., I come to a stop sign, obviously, no cars are coming. And when I stop at that stop sign, I feel like a fool. It's so ridiculous. And other times, when it's heavy traffic, and the light turns yellow, I really have a strong desire to stop, and to keep the car stopped until the light turns, and then to look both ways before going forward. A lot of situations are a matter of life and death. So I believe in traffic rules.

Uh-huh.
But now, I don't know if there even is a Libertarian party. They wouldn't have a prayer of getting anywhere. So I'm a Democrat now. And I've always been a Democrat, really. But I don't like the Democrats a lot, either, because I'm a smoker, and I think a lot of the Democrats have come up with these rules for non-smoking. And I don't think that that's necessarily so bad, but they have to give the smokers a place. You're just like an animal now. Not a clean animal, but a mangy, soiled, urine-soaked animal with remnants, and you're sent outdoors. Animals on my dad's ranch were always kept outdoors, because they weren't like house pets. Now, house pets are treated way better than smokers.

I have two cats.
They're beautiful, they're brought inside, it's warm, and there're all these little toys for them. I saw on TV that there're even little steps you can get so they can crawl up on the bed in your room. And you can get two steps for the price of one if you order real soon. There are no fuckin' steps for any smokers. There is no way to crawl up into bed to have a smoke. You're sent outdoors. And they don't give a shit what the temperature is. Or if it's raining. It's beyond the beyond. And no one even spoke to me about this. I wake up one morning and it's reality.

I shouldn't have asked!
It's. . . I don't know. It's a democracy, but I don't know. . . it's a weird time.

Great Lynch interview. I've thought about building some stairs to my bed for my old cat. But she still manages, though sometimes with a struggle. But if someone wants to smoke in my bedroom . . . I'd treat that person worse than my pet.

I understand Lynch's attitude towards the state. My problem, personally, with traffic laws is that, well, police seem only to seek out speeders, when it is people who don't turn on their blinkers who cause the most damage. Oh, well. So what if statecraft is leachcraft, and troopers are leaches?