New kiwi blog

Three Point Turn - "Because what NZ needs is another irrelevant weblog". And none of them have ever worked for bFM (neither have I for that matter...)

Now, if only they had some content...

Fresh Python

Terry Jones: Why are there no fundraisers for the Iraqi dead?

Disingenuous Hide

Dog Biting Men are back from holiday, with a vicious dismantling of Rodney Hide's latest employment law "sob story". A company was ordered to pay $10,000 for summarily dismissing a troublesome employee, despite following correct procedures. But digging deeper, DBM finds that the reason they were ordered to pay was because they didn't bother to contest the case. This would have happened under the ECA, or any other even remotely fair legislative regime, and the "victims" really have no-one to blame but themselves. Not that Rodney mentioned that vital fact of course, as it would have detracted from his argument somewhat. Maybe he's been taking disingenuousness lessons from Stephen Franks?

More on altruism, genes and selfishness

My previous post on space for altruism attracted some criticism from Philosophy etc, who points out in an update that the idea that "we are selfish because our genes are" is deeply confused, conflating the metaphorical motives of the genes with the real motives of people. I agree; un fortunately I couldn't get the stuff I wanted to say about it into my original post. Fortunately, though, Sock Thief has given me a perfect opportunity:

I don't agree with Philosophy, et cetera's distinction between Biology and Psychology. Although it is wrong to ascribe psychological motives to genes, it is our biology that provides the foundation of the cognitive abilities of belief, desire and motivation. Individuals can, and often do, have different goals from those of their genes but that does not mean that our psychology is free from their influence.

But it's not about freedom from influence - it's about different levels of explanation.

There is no question that our genes strongly influence our psychology. The logic of kin selection and reciprocal altruism applies to humans as well as ants, and these concepts provide a good explanation for parts of our psychological makeup - our concern for family, our sympathy for other human beings, our outrage at those who cheat. The rest of our basic psychology - things like our desire for revenge, flight or fight reactions, and pursuit of status - also exist for adaptive reasons. As evolved organisms, we must also have evolved minds. This makes adaptationism a powerful method for explaining why we think the way we do - but it does not mean that it is the only way of explaining it, or that it should be the preferred one.

Philosophy, etc has pointed out that there is another level of explanation available: psychology. This is ultimately grounded in genetics and in chemistry - but that does not mean that its theoretical entities don't exist. The fact that happiness is just a chemical concentration in the brain does not make it any less real. And the fact that altruism is ultimately caused by the genes doesn't make it any less real either.

The question then is which explanation we should prefer. And the answer is "whichever is most useful". And in explaining altruistic behaviour, it is far simpler and more useful to talk about altruism than about the strategies of the far-off genes.

As for the argument that we should reinterpret human motives in light of the genes as those motivations ultimately have a genetic origin, I think that the compatibilist argument for free will is informative here. Compatibilists believe that we are meaningfully free despite the fact that our brains are deterministic and therefore our actions are ultimately caused by events beyond our control; we are free insofar as our actions stem from our beliefs and desires. It's about ownership, in other words. A similar argument can be made with respect to motivations. Yes, many of our motivations are genetically caused - but that does not mean that they are not ours, or that we should usurp them in favour of their ultimate causes.

Failed

The wowser's bid for a referendum on prostitution law reform has failed, falling 70,000 signatures short.

Hopefully the same will happen with their efforts on civil unions (assuming they try).

The pissing contest goes local

Don Brash thinks the government hasn't given enough to tsunami victims - and he's right. While I don't think we can come even close to matching the sheer generosity of the Australians, we can do a lot better than we have. Our self-image is one of a generous country which digs deeply for this kind of thing. Shouldn't we live up to it a little more?

And, as obligatory political points scoring, I look forward to seeing Dr Brash supporting a substantial increase in our aid budget this year.

Update: It looks as if I blogged too soon. The government is apparently considering a NZ$60 - 100 million aid package spread over three to five years. This doesn't come close to Australia, but it is a very respectable contribution, and one far more in keeping with New Zealanders' idea of who we want to be.

Sadly unsurprising

NZPundit thinks that death-squads are an "excellent idea". Unpacking that a little, he thinks its fine to murder innocent civilians to terrorise others into politically supporting the murderer's chosen cause. And yet, he claims to disapprove of terrorism...

Alternative coalitions

In a comment on my post on forcing Labour's hand, Jordan Carter of Just Left raises some interesting points:

[A] Labour/Green coalition would have been ok 02-05 with the transfer of votes you discuss. If that had been the government, though, what would politics look like now? Would Labour, hijacked to the left, have been in contention for a third term?

The lesson Labour's current leadership has taken is that progress needs to be slow to endure, and that the failure to be patient destroyed the second and third Labour governments. Going in the wrong direction destroyed the fourth.

What would the politics look like if Labour had gone the other way? I'd have expected a greater commitment to civil and human rights and a restraint on Phil Goff, also less pissing about over Civil Unions. Economically, I think Cullen would have acted as a brake on the Greens just as he acts as a break on the tax-cutting impulses of United Future. Possibly a little more money and a slightly smaller surplus, possibly a quicker implementation of Working for Families, but not really a hell of a lot of change on that front. Labour is clearly delivering

I'm not sure about progress having to be slow to endure. How slow was the first Labour government to implement its programme? And how much of the fourth Labour government's blitzkreiged "reforms" have been rolled back? It's lasting more than one term so that things have a bit of time to settle down that seems to be important - but that's a matter of choosing which reforms to push through, and maintaining a public consensus behind the changes. The current government has one behind working for families, and seems to have one on the Cullen Fund as well; if it is re-elected, then both these policies will become the status quo, and the political cost of reversing them will be substantially higher. (I should also note that you can't maintain a public consensus if you make no attempt to build one. Labour's cravenness in justice policy is thus something of a self-fulfilling prophecy; they claim there's no public support for opposing the "hang 'em high" brigade, but part of the reason there is no public support is that sensible, mainstream voices like Labour haven't taken a stand. It's the same reason British (and NZ) food used to be so bad...)

Do New Zealanders want a more left-wing government? I think the consistent strength of Labour and the Greens in the polls show that they do. If we don't get one, it will be because Labour has abandoned its roots again, not because there is no public demand.

Trigger-happy

Another day, another group of innocent Iraqis dead, killed by trigger-happy US soldiers who seem to regard any Iraqi near the site of a roadside bombing as a legitimate target. Even when they're wearing a police uniform. No-one will face charges or be discliplined in any way, of course; killing bystanders is perfectly within the rules of engagement.

And they wonder why people hate them...

Against judicial recalls

In an opinion-piece in the Dominion-Post on Friday, Stephen Franks suggested allowing voters to vote out judges. It sounds like a good idea, until you realise what it actually means: the demise of an impartial and independent judiciary.

Perhaps a history lesson is in order. Once upon a time, judges served at the pleasure of the monarch. Their judgements therefore had to conform to monarchical prejudice, or else they would find themselves removed from office (as Sir Edward Coke was removed by James I). This was understandably bad for justice, which is why we have lifetime appointments with Parliament able to remove judges only for "misbehaviour" or incapacity.

Introducing judical recalls will simply replicate this seventeenth century problem, only with the people in the place of the king. Judges will ensure that their decisions conform to popular prejudice - regardless of what the law says - in order to avoid being voted out of office. This will undermine the core purpose of the judiciary - providing impartial justice.

Our present system is by no means perfect - it makes it very difficult to hold a judge who consistently ignores precedent to account - but it is far better than the alternative. Introducing judicial recalls will result in partial and compromised decisions. if we care about justice, we should reject them.

Palestine votes

It's not going to be anywhere near a perfect election, not with the Israeli military standing by with guns and the Israeli government restricting the movements of candidates it doesn't like, but it'll probably work out OK. And it will make it far more difficult for Israel to try and sideline the winner and negotiate with someone else. As Mahmoud Abbas, the frontruner, said on friday,

"Mr Prime Minister Sharon was elected by his people. We have no right to ask for that to be changed," he said. "We have no other choice but to sit with him..."

The same applies from the other direction. Whoever wins this election will have been elected by their people, and it is only they - rather than the government of Israel - who have the right to choose their leader. Hopefully the Israelis will remember that.

Bad company

Further to the below, the Wikipedia article on death squads gives a good picture of the sorts of monsters who use these tactics. It's basically a rundown of the twentieth century's worst genocidal maniacs: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, the Rwandans, Milosovic, and of course Saddam Hussein, who used his Fedayeen Saddam to murder rebellious Shiites, Kurds and Marsh Arabs.

Such tactics are sadly not new to the US. In Vietnam, there was a little thing called the Phoenix Program, a campaign of indiscriminate murder aimed at qwelling the Viet Cong insurgency and eliminating possible leaders and supporters. And in Latin America, the US armed and trained death squads in Honduras, Guatamala and El Salvador, resulting in thousands of murders of leftists, trade unionists, and religious leaders.

If the US uses such tactics on the Sunni, Iraq really will have come full circle. Rather than ending Saddam's reign of torture and terror, the US will have simply installed an equally monstrous replacement, who will carry on exactly where Saddam left off. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

I really do wonder what Sock Thief and his "decent left" friends will think of this - whether they'll somehow manage to doublethink it away, or whether they'll finally see where their "humanitarian" intervention has taken them.

Death squads for Iraq

According to Newsweek, the US is considering a radical new measure to qwell the popular uprising in Iraq: death squads.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success - despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Why are they proposing an outright campaign of murder? Because the insurgency has broad support. According to one source quote in the article,

"The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

By murdering them in cold blood to terrorise them into backing the government. A tactic which was, incidentally, used by Saddam Hussein to maintain power. The "new" Iraq is looking more and more like the old Iraq every day; only the names have changed.

How bad does the US's behaviour in Iraq have to get before people admit that it has lost its soul?

Updated

In response to nagging I've finally updated the NZ blog spectrum graphs. Links on the sidebar to your left.

Note that if you've linked to them, you'll need to update the URL, as it will point to the version on the now out-of-date weekly archive pages.

New Fisk

A routine tale of our times: abuse, beatings, imprisonment and injustice
Suddenly, there is debate in Beirut: how can Syria keep Lebanon while condemning Israel?

Jared Diamond's latest

Salon interviews Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, about his latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It's history from an ecological perspective, looking at how the success of civilisations has been influenced by their environment. The Guardian also has an extract from the book (with topical lead-in about the tsunami), which points out the striking agreement between a list of countries facing serious environmental stress and those considered the world's "trouble spots" and breeding grounds for war, revolution and terrorism. And the link is fairly obvious when you think about it: serious environmental stress encourages political instability because

[w]hen people are desperate, undernourished, and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.

ObservatioNZ attacks this idea as "stuff and nonsense", but this relies on a crude equation of environmental stress with population density, with no conception of carrying capacities. At the same time, it needs to be pointed out that environmental stress is not the only story, and in fact a key focus of Diamond's book is on how societies react (or fail to react) to environmental problems.

Anyway, after GG&S, I'm going to have to buy this one too...

New kiwi blog

Bertrand Bargolias, by Michael Wood, the Labour candidate for Pakuranga.

Thinking long-term

At the moment the US posesses unrivalled hegemony; they're top dog, and many Americans (including their President) seem to revel in rubbing it in. The problem is that it isn't going to last. A quick analysis by MaxSpeak shows that the "unilateral moment" is likely to pass sooner rather than later as the Chinese economy grows. Matthew Yglesias looks at this and concludes that

The policy goal of indefinite American military hegemony is simply incompatible with the goal of continued growth in Chinese and Indian prosperity. A policy of trying to deliberately perpetuate the impoverishment of 3 billion human beings would be morally problematic, as well as pragmatically hard to pull off. Thus, no indefinite American military hegemony.

Right-wingers like to pooh-pooh the Chinese economy, claiming that growth rates are overstated, that it's all just flash in the pan, and that China will inevitably collapse - meaning no threat to American dominance (at the same time they're usually frothing at the mouth about the "ChiCom" danger - which is a great example of doublethink in action). But even if they're right, and if China descends into civil war again (as it did for half the twentieth century), the underlying point remains: nothing lasts forever. America's empire, like all empires, will eventually fall. America would be wise to plan for this eventuality. Yglesias again:

we really should be spending the next five (and ten, and fifteen) years on trying to make sure that the global system is on a trajectory such that we can continue to be comfortable with that trajectory once we are no longer hegemonic.

Instead though, the US is trying to undermine the present international system in favour of a "winner take all" model. But if they succeed in this, they are going to be very uncomfortable indeed when someone else is eventually the winner...

2005 bloggies

Nominations for the 2005 bloggies are open. There is a best Australian and NZ category, so why not nominate some of your favourite NZ blogs?

Space for altruism

In light of the world's outpouring of aid, Philosophy etc considers the old problem of altruism. But as Sock Thief points out, from an evolutionary perspective, there is no such thing as altruism, only a higher form of selfishness. Biologists examining the problem quickly realised that altruistic organisms would be less fit than selfish ones which invested all their resources in themselves rather than sharing with others. But at the same time, "altruistic" behaviour was widespread in nature, ranging from food-sharing in numerous species of animal, the complex social structures of the social insects, and wealthy humans assisting both members of their own communities and others in far-off countries struck by natural disasters. How can this be explained?

One explanation revolves around the genes and the concept of inclusive fitness. One gene is more "fit" than another if more copies of it are present in the next generation. The conceptual breakthrough behind inclusive fitness was realising that those copies need not be present solely in the genomes of direct descendants, but could be anywhere; all copies are equal as far as the genes are concerned. The fitness of an individual organism therefore depends not just on the survival of its descendants, but also on the survival of its close relatives and their descendants, who are statistically likely to share its genes. This leads directly to the idea of kin selection - that organisms will help their relatives because doing so is (to some extent) helping themselves.

These two ideas have been remarkably powerful in explaining animal behaviour, particularly that of the social insects (and their creepy mammalian mimics, the naked mole rats). But they're by no means the whole story; animals do not limit altruistic behaviour to their close relatives, but help non-relatives as well. Here biologists fall back on game theory. It's intuitively obvious that a strategy of undiscriminating altruism will be beaten by a strategy of exploitation or cheating (accepting help and giving none in return). But once you add discrimination into the mix, then everything changes. In particular, a strategy of discriminating strongly against people who have cheated you in the past - holding grudges, in other words - can outcompete both (it is what is known by biologists as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy, or "ESS"). And once you add communication, allowing individuals to share information about who the cheats are<, the balance tips even further. This explains the leftover altruism in higher animals (those capable of distinguishing different individuals and tracking past behaviour).

So according to biologists, we're not really altruistic. All that money is being contributed not because we genuinely care for the victims of the tsunami, but because we expect them to one day pay us back.

Does this leave any space for altruism? Yes. The important thing to remember is that we are not our genes. Instead, we are "survival machines" built by them to assist in their replication. And most importantly, we are survival machines with minds of our own. Yes, those minds are shaped by our genes - but beyond establishing some broad personality traits and default desires to guide us in the right direction, we are on our own. Those broad personality traits include some designed to promote kin selection and reciprocation - concern for close relatives, sympathy for those in need, and anger at those who cheat us - but they certainly don't dictate, and they certainly don't rule out altruistic behaviour. Our genes may be selfish, but we don't have to be.