How PZ Myers can contribute to diversity

Science and atheism blogger PZ Myers is in the camp that wants to make promoting diversity in scientific skepticism and the secular community a high priority, higher than some people are willing to go.

I think it's good to recruit more people from any background. I'd be happy to have more women, minorities, religious people or conservatives in skepticism. Myers and his minions aren't exactly gung-ho about the last two, seeing as how he doesn't want people like me in the secular community.

Unfortunately, this quest for diversity has taken the form of propping up unaccomplished token female and minority members as speakers at conferences, and in order to make room for them, established speakers have to be cut.

So what I don't understand is why did PZ Myers, a pasty white male, agree to be a speaker at TAM 9 and now the upcoming secular Reason Rally.

If Myers wants to make sure there are less white males on stage, he can lead by example and stop accepting invitations to speak.
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Libertarian tolerance and progressive acceptance

I know I'm not the first person to mark the distinction between tolerance and acceptance. The two are often jumbled together, but tolerance is the weaker of the two. Acceptance means to fully respect and approve of something, while tolerance means to allow it to occur with or without accepting it.

That important distinction also demonstrates why libertarians and progressives can vote the same way on an issue, but completely disagree on why someone should support a policy. Libertarians are willing to tolerate more, as progressives need full acceptance before they will support something.

Drug legalization is a perfect example. As a libertarian, most of my arguments are about about how it's wrong for the government to stop an adult from putting something into their own body.

My friends on the left, however, will instead argue that marijuana is not very harmful and carries a lot of benefits for society. Those are very different philosophies being expressed.

For the left, they have to be convinced that it's a good decision for people to use drugs. For libertarians, we instead leave that choice up to people and let them draw their own conclusions.

The same thing happens with gay adoption. My friends on the left are forced to prove that gays make caring, trustworthy parents, where my fellow classic liberals simply have to say it's not the governments place to regulate who can be a mom or dad.

Tolerance has taken me to the opposite side of a recent issues. Lefties are rallying behind President Obama's requirement that all health insurance plans must include birth control pills for women with no co-payments, including plans from Catholic groups that are morally opposed to birth control.

Now neither of us accept the Catholic church's stance against condoms and the pill. I don't think it's a legitimate, reasonable stance to take. However, I'm willing to tolerate it and they aren't.

My real issue with the mandate, of course, has nothing to do with religious tolerance. I'm against any and all mandatory health care requirements. This mandate is not a form of insurance, and will drive up the costs of health care and birth control, guaranteeing less people will end up with coverage.

At it's worse, tolerance is a form of apathy. But when it comes to official mandatory policy with the power of the police force behind it in a nation with a diverse set of values, needs and incomes, I find tolerance a much more realistic and reliable standard than acceptance.
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Return of the Master

I'm more excited about this than the new season of Spartacus.



Bryan Caplan, Walter Williams, Amity Shlaes, Brad Delong, Mathew Yglesias and Austen Goolsbee. I don't know much about Raghuram Rajan or Shikha Dalmia, but I look forward to learning more about them in the three-part series.

The only way it could be better was if Tyler Cowen or Mike Munger was onboard, but I will be more than happy to settle for Delong.
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President George W. Obama

I have a lot of fun mocking the dishonest, loony left like Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Cynthia McKinney. I also think it's important to give back occasionally and honor members of the left who are fair, intelligent and thought provoking, such as Matthew Yglesias.

Let me add another name to the list of honest outspoken leftists and reveal my respect for Rachel Maddow. Just look at this clip from last month where she took President Obama to task for his embrace of imprisoning people without due process:



Psychologically, it's very difficult for people to distance themselves from an idea, cause or politician once embraced. With all the broken promises of the current administration, I can see the people who vote for in 2012 divided into two camps.

The first camp is people who believe the Republicans are worse. They like a few things he's done or stands for and have some major reservations about some of his other actions, but think a republican president would make worse mistakes. I don't agree with these people, but I respect them.

The other is people who still look at him like it's 2008. They can easily be identified when they make excuses for his failures like "he inherited a mess."

He did indeed inherit a mess, but can anyone find the speech where candidate Obama said the country is too screwed up to turn it around in the next few years? I've never heard this speech, but a lot of his supports reference it a lot.

President Obama is in over his head. He did not know what he was getting in to and has had to abandon a lot of his positions and goals, and that has lead him to make the same decisions George W. Bush made. Kudos to lefties like Maddow for not turning a blind eye.
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Name that documentary

I'm trying to find the name of a documentary on eco-friendly efforts in Portland, Oregon.

In this week's episode of Econtalk, guest David Owen mentions such a documentary, but does not mention it by name. Here's what he wrote in his book, as read during the podcast:

A recent documentary about Portland's Green consciousness shows a concerned resident driving her minivan 25 miles to buy two bags of fresh produce from a farmer on the other side of the city's urban growth boundary. And it shows the same farmer in a pickup truck transporting a larger but still very small selection of produce into the city to sell it in an urban farmer's market. Both trips are presented as virtuous acts, but neither makes environmental sense...

If all the worlds groceries traveled from farm to fork in minivans two bags at a time, we'd have exhausted many of the world's resources long ago. Locavorism is appealing because like many of the most popular green strategies, it feels enlightened, yet entails no actual sacrifice even if you don't grant yourself exemptions for coffee and out-of-season fruit.

I haven't had much luck finding the documentary with a Google search, as Portland has a lot of environmentally-focused actions and documentary viewings that cloud the search results. Owen mentioned this same documentary in a 2009 interview, so it must predate that interview, which eliminates the documentary Deep Green.

Do any readers have any ideas? I'd love to view this scene and use it to reference the absurdity of locavorism.
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Trade can't hurt both partners, can it?

Robin Hanson posed a good question this week after turning up a news article about Congress interfering with not only Americans buying from China, but selling to China as well.

Presumably this stupidity is due to some sort of psychology, but what? Why object to both buying and selling to foreigners? Can people really think both sides are hurt by a trade?

My guess: because firms are larger than customers and employees, we see the firm as dominant in both firm-customer and firm-employee relations. So buying into ownership of a firm is buying into a position of dominance. Thus people object both to locals buying stuff from foreign firms, and to foreigners buying into local firms, because they object to locals being submissive to foreigners.

For my explanation, the focus is on the "Buy Local" movement instead of international trade.

People who don't understand economics have no reason to establish a consistent model of how trade works. They believe that buying goods from someone outside the cherished community "leaks" wealth outside of the community, and they don't bother to work out the details and assume selling outside the community leaks wealth out as well, if they have a limited supply and could instead sell to someone from inside the community.

Hanson is making the same mistake that biologists make when they visit the Creation Museum in Kentucky: they expect to see a cohesive, well-developed (yet fundamentally flawed) argument, but instead find a plastic dinosaur with a saddle.
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Burning Man doesn't scale

The Burning Man festival, where artsy pyromaniacs, techno-hippies and wealthy hipsters converge in a faux-counterculture desert festival each year in Nevada.

But as the event has attracted more attention, it's run into a major problem on how to choose who gets in. Emphasis added in bold:

The problem has left perhaps 75 percent of the longtime participants who traditionally provide the creative spark for displays and activities without a ticket. The event is held annually at a remote site in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada.

The crisis resulted from attempts to solve issues from last year, when, in addition to the normal problem of computer servers crashing as thousands of people rush to buy tickets online, the event sold out for the first time.

With the event increasingly becoming a bucket-list activity, organizer Black Rock City LLC set out to create a more egalitarian method for distributing tickets and thwarting scalpers.

Black Rock's solution was to distribute 40,000 of the 58,000 tickets through a lottery. Applicants had two weeks to apply for up to two tickets. Demand far outpaced supply.

The result: "A full-on fiasco," said Steve Jones, author of "The Tribes of Burning Man."

The new system made it easier for folks not willing or able to sit at a computer for hours. But many say that same convenience also made it easy pickings for scalpers...

It's unclear how many tickets are in the hands of scalpers and how many are in the hands of new participants. What is clear is that many longtime participants, or burners, are ticketless.

"Nobody knows where all these tickets went. But since they didn't go to regular burners, the thought is they must have gone to professional scalpers," said Jim Bowers, who spearheads the Placer County-based collective of burners called The Tribe.

"It's a fiasco. They don't have any idea what they are going to do," said Bowers.

"Of the 80 people in our theme camp, five got tickets. Everyone else got rejection letters," said Bowers, whose group helped build a precision laser light clock tower and decorative hour markers last year.

Unlike music festivals like Coachella, Outside Lands or South By Southwest, Burning Man depends on participants to provide the entertainment, erect the art projects, operate free bars, lead parades and host forums. Most of the major offerings are created by clusters of people called "theme camps" or "tribes..."

The organizers' published plan is to sell the final lot of 10,000 tickets through an open sale (first-come, first-served) in March, but there are rumblings that they will give the leaders of major theme camps, artist groups and performers first crack.

That would be welcomed by established groups, but would likely infuriate participants who attend regularly but aren't part of a group.

"It would be essentially saying they value one type of Black Rock citizen over another," Jones said.

What's happening here is that tickets to Burning Man are priced too cheaply. The lottery winners paid $420 and the open sale tickets go for $390, but they're already listed on eBay for $700 to $5,500.

Burning Man didn't have a problem when only a few people wanted to attend, but now that it's become such a trendy destination, organizers have to choose between several possible solutions to distribute the limited admission slots. Lotteries are never a good solution, and organizers seem too stubborn to consider raising prices to reflect the true value.
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