The American left has carefully chosen to word "access" to blur the distinction between legality and public funding for various issues.
Take the recent quagmire over a federal law forcing insurance companies cover birth control. The talking point was not that birth control would now be provided. Instead, activists went to great lengths to state it as "improving access" to birth control. As if birth control had been illegal or out of reach for the entire populace.
The same misleading wording is used to sell abortion funding and higher education. The simple spin is to present people like me who oppose the funding strategy as if we want to make it illegal. This false dichotomy is used to bogusly present moderate political opponents as extremists.
I don't think it would be appropriate for the government to spend taxpayer money designing and purchasing video games for the public. That doesn't mean I want to see video games banned, I happen to enjoy a good video game, but I think they should be funded entirely through private expenditures. We already have access to them thanks to capitalism.
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Showing posts with label False Dichotomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label False Dichotomy. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Can food ever be sustainable?
It's been more than two years since historian James McWilliams inspired a post here. This time McWilliams has declared that not only is factory farming unsustainable, but all the small-scale locally-produced meat production niches are unsustainable too:
By that logic, he might as well say that food production can never be sustainable.
The critics of "factory farming" have a history of exaggerations, but suppose they are accurate and we shouldn't produce food on a large scale the way we do now. That's simple enough to fix; we follow agricultural economist William A. Masters suggestion and revamp large-scale food production.
There's nothing preventing us from producing an industrial system for food production that deals with the legitimate problems raised by critics, like run-off and animal welfare. If sustainability is a legitimate hurdle to overcome, then we have to make smart changes. Inefficient, wasteful and expensive small farms are not the solution.
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Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable...He also thwarts the claim that these systems are more natural because the animal breeds farmers raise are either far removed from nature or their animal urges and life cycles require interference.
...Rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.Still, I disagree with his thesis. He takes the position that our current "factory farming" system is unsustainable and the small-scale alternatives are unsustainable, therefore eating meat and animal products is unsustainable.
By that logic, he might as well say that food production can never be sustainable.
The critics of "factory farming" have a history of exaggerations, but suppose they are accurate and we shouldn't produce food on a large scale the way we do now. That's simple enough to fix; we follow agricultural economist William A. Masters suggestion and revamp large-scale food production.
There's nothing preventing us from producing an industrial system for food production that deals with the legitimate problems raised by critics, like run-off and animal welfare. If sustainability is a legitimate hurdle to overcome, then we have to make smart changes. Inefficient, wasteful and expensive small farms are not the solution.
Read more...
Monday, March 5, 2012
Utilitarianism for the greater evil
Good ideas have a tendency to crash and burn when they move from the textbook to the streets.
Like every former Philosophy 101 student, I accepted utilitarianism's call to commit a limited amount of evil in order to vanquish a larger evil. The classic case is the "innocent fat man" where a group of people are stuck in a cave that is starting to flood from high tide. An innocent fat man becomes stuck in the only exit, and the only way to save the lives of the innocent people is to dynamite porky.
There's also the trolley problem, where five people standing on railroad tracks are oblivious to a speeding train, and the only way to save them is to throw the switch and redirect the train to another track where it will kill one person instead of five.
Of course, it's never that simple in real life. These fables assume godlike knowledge of the situation. What if the cave was only going to flood knee-deep levels and there were small holes to breath from? What if the five people on the train tracks weren't oblivious to the train or were planting a bomb?
They also assume a dichotomy of actions. Do nothing, or kill. There's no option to swim out of the cave, wait for rescuers or warn the people on the tracks.
Case in point a video posted this morning of far-left leaders discussing rioting and violence as ways to achieve their goals. This wasn't a collection of ground level recruits who said something idiotic or atypical. This was a public meeting last month at the New School in New York City about what the goals and tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement should be. After some generic anti-capitalist nonsense, activist leader Yotam Marom said:
If there's one lesson we can take from the Soviet Union, it should be how much evil can be heaped upon the innocent in a bloody quest to rid the world of an imagined devil. There is no one alive who can evaluate the suffering caused by murderers like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and say that was a better society than one that would have existed under capitalism.
And just like those communist murderers, the violent far-left is eager to spill blood to fight capitalism because they believe it causes more evil. This is what utilitarianism has brought the world.
This is the secular version of holy genocides carried out by religious men who committed atrocities in the name of a peaceful god. Every religious war is an exercise in utilitarianism. People who consider themselves good and just will become butchers when fooled into believing their actions are justified because of words written in a book, be it the Bible, the Quran or Mao's Little Red Book.
These utilitarian thugs assume they understand how the world works perfectly. People like Marom are so confident that capitalism is an evil that they are willing to injure or even kill people. Utilitarianism plus ignorance equals innocent victims.
When you ask people if a violent action would be justified to stop the Nazi war machine in World War II, and then turn that logic to stopping a peaceful system like capitalism, you end up creating evil in the name of a greater evil.
Utilitarianism also assumes false dichotomies, such as violent actions or peaceful protests are the only options. They think their violence will be more effective than peaceful actions and haven't considered that there is a world of other ways to reach their goals.
The same fallacies apply to the few cases of abortion doctor assassinations and the idea that we should torture a suspected terrorist to prevent a future attack. How do you know for sure he's a terrorist and that he can provide information to stop an attack? Torture use sounds great on paper, but it gets murky when you factor in the potential innocence of the suspect.
In theory, utilitarianism is a compromise for the greater good. It can do good things like help the poor and save lives. But in practice, it becomes the ultimate act of hubris. It justifies human sacrifices in the names of false gods. We are all flawed thinkers, but it assumes perfect information.
Utilitarianism carries a great potential for evil and should be handled like plutonium. It can improve things when used responsibly, but when combined with ignorance it makes the world far worse.
Read more...
Like every former Philosophy 101 student, I accepted utilitarianism's call to commit a limited amount of evil in order to vanquish a larger evil. The classic case is the "innocent fat man" where a group of people are stuck in a cave that is starting to flood from high tide. An innocent fat man becomes stuck in the only exit, and the only way to save the lives of the innocent people is to dynamite porky.
There's also the trolley problem, where five people standing on railroad tracks are oblivious to a speeding train, and the only way to save them is to throw the switch and redirect the train to another track where it will kill one person instead of five.
Of course, it's never that simple in real life. These fables assume godlike knowledge of the situation. What if the cave was only going to flood knee-deep levels and there were small holes to breath from? What if the five people on the train tracks weren't oblivious to the train or were planting a bomb?
They also assume a dichotomy of actions. Do nothing, or kill. There's no option to swim out of the cave, wait for rescuers or warn the people on the tracks.
Case in point a video posted this morning of far-left leaders discussing rioting and violence as ways to achieve their goals. This wasn't a collection of ground level recruits who said something idiotic or atypical. This was a public meeting last month at the New School in New York City about what the goals and tactics of the Occupy Wall Street movement should be. After some generic anti-capitalist nonsense, activist leader Yotam Marom said:
Why are we, like harassing ourselves about broken windows and bombs when we should be talking about police brutality... I don't even want to get into the questions of whether it's ethical or not ethical to use violence in such and such. That's why I said earlier that it's about context... This system is incredibly violent and no amount of broken windows will ever add up to the misery of loss of human potential that these systems of oppression have yielded.Marom and several other speakers at the summit invoked utilitarianism as a justification for violence. They believe that the system, man is so evil that it's excusable to use violence to reach their political goals.
If there's one lesson we can take from the Soviet Union, it should be how much evil can be heaped upon the innocent in a bloody quest to rid the world of an imagined devil. There is no one alive who can evaluate the suffering caused by murderers like Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and say that was a better society than one that would have existed under capitalism.
And just like those communist murderers, the violent far-left is eager to spill blood to fight capitalism because they believe it causes more evil. This is what utilitarianism has brought the world.
This is the secular version of holy genocides carried out by religious men who committed atrocities in the name of a peaceful god. Every religious war is an exercise in utilitarianism. People who consider themselves good and just will become butchers when fooled into believing their actions are justified because of words written in a book, be it the Bible, the Quran or Mao's Little Red Book.
These utilitarian thugs assume they understand how the world works perfectly. People like Marom are so confident that capitalism is an evil that they are willing to injure or even kill people. Utilitarianism plus ignorance equals innocent victims.
When you ask people if a violent action would be justified to stop the Nazi war machine in World War II, and then turn that logic to stopping a peaceful system like capitalism, you end up creating evil in the name of a greater evil.
Utilitarianism also assumes false dichotomies, such as violent actions or peaceful protests are the only options. They think their violence will be more effective than peaceful actions and haven't considered that there is a world of other ways to reach their goals.
The same fallacies apply to the few cases of abortion doctor assassinations and the idea that we should torture a suspected terrorist to prevent a future attack. How do you know for sure he's a terrorist and that he can provide information to stop an attack? Torture use sounds great on paper, but it gets murky when you factor in the potential innocence of the suspect.
In theory, utilitarianism is a compromise for the greater good. It can do good things like help the poor and save lives. But in practice, it becomes the ultimate act of hubris. It justifies human sacrifices in the names of false gods. We are all flawed thinkers, but it assumes perfect information.
Utilitarianism carries a great potential for evil and should be handled like plutonium. It can improve things when used responsibly, but when combined with ignorance it makes the world far worse.
Read more...
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