Evil is not the absence of good.

 It’s important to know what evil is, so it can be detected and avoided, both in other people and in your own actions.  So I’m going to debunk the idea that evil is the absence of good.  For this I require some characters that are unquestionably evil. Let’s start with Tony Soprano.

Tony of course both kills people and willingly benefits from an organization that orders people killed.  In addition much of his activities causes non-lethal harm, such as providing gambling services to known gambling addicts without the benefit of bankruptcy protection.  It also costs money and quality of life for pretty much everyone in New Jersey.  These are the absence of good, the little voice that says “This is wrong, you’re hurting people” is clearly not listened to.  But this is just his professional life, how about his personal life?

Tony goes out of his way to cause pain even if it could cost him money, power or even potentially expose him to danger.  He beats up a corrupt assemblyman who he is making good money off, simply because a woman chose him over Tony.  He humiliates a high member of his “family” by talking about Bobby’s wife’s sexual history in front of him.  He even makes a song about it.  This is a massive taboo in the mafia, yet he does it, simply to annoy and dominate his sister.  Now admittedly Janice deserves no better, but no significant goal was achieved, just causing someone he dislikes pain.  These doesn’t just require an absence of good, it requires an active desire to hurt.  A prioritization not of benefit to self, but damage to others. 

Walter White is another great villain and he’s not driven by an absence of good. True if there was significant good in him he would stop when murders happened, or when children started to be killed, or a dozen other red flags appeared.  But he also could have stopped when he was given a free out.  The Shwartzs offered him a high paying job that could provide for his family as he claims he wants, and provide the health care that he needs.  He rejects them because nothing is worse for Walt than damaging his pride.   He at this point knows that engaging in the drug trade probably means more murders.  He has an out, but the important thing is him feeling in control.  Him dominating the situation, even for no practical benefit, is what’s important.  It’s more important to control Jesse Pinkman than to control what happens to his family.  Because deep down Walter White wants to be “the one who knocks”, i.e. the one who doesn’t fear, but is feared.

So if it’s not just the absence of good that makes evil, what makes evil?  It is a desire for others to lose, not just for you to win.  It’s like a game where achieving your goals is good, but preventing other players from achieving theirs is just as vital to winning.  Imagine if you were competing for a prize for “Best Marriage” with another couple and you knew cheating with one of the other couple would hurt their marriage more than it hurts yours.  To a sensible person this behaviour is psychotic.  It’s clearly going to hurt you and those you “love” (if you loved them you wouldn’t do it).  But to someone evil the harm to others is more important than the benefit to themselves.  

Serial killers are the extreme of this, they value the harm to people so much that they risk death and life imprisonment  They gain nothing from their evil but the knowledge that they can be evil and get away with it.  That they can impose their will in the most extreme way. Not being good doesn’t cause this.  A hitman could of course kill similar numbers of people simply because he lacks the morality to value other human life above his pocketbook.  In theory such a man could not be “evil”.  But such men always had other options to earn money.  There is a good chance that a hitman is just a serial killer with an excuse.  

This essay was inspired by a video about modern fictional villains.  “Modern Villains are Pitiful and Impotent” by The Second Story in which she claimed evil is the absence of good.  But I think you can write a villain that isn’t truly evil.  There are system that create incentives to hurt others.  Systems where amorality not immorality is the rule.  Consider the choice to plunge a country into civil war, with tens of thousands of people killed, a similar number raped, and maybe a million man-years of economic production destroyed, just for personal survival.  That’s the absence of good, not doubt about it.  But is it evil? Because if it is then the Starks are just as big a villain as the Lannisters in “A song of Ice and Fire”.  But they aren’t. 

Consider a villain who is partway up the command structure of an empire like Rome.  He has no power to make that system non-abusive.  Nobody does.  It’s exploitative by violence from it’s roots.  He has no power to leave the system in a way that makes it better.  At most someone slightly less competent at coercion would take his place, at worse someone less willing to compromise will, and in any case it would be personally dangerous.  This could be a sympathetic villain in a sense, he’s not trying to make your life worse.  He’s trying to survive in a system that eats it’s own.  The day he killed your family wasn’t Tuesday for him, it was the day his boss almost found out about his screwup and he had to cover.  

Midwits and Mentiswave.

Midwits are people of approximately average intelligence that back the consensus in almost all subjects, regardless of the evidence for the consensus.  Mentiswave  in his video  "Why 'Educated' People Fall for Stupid Narratives: Midwits VS Propaganda." asked us to imagine a Las Vegas game where you could be on the an expert being right or some crackpot off the street being right.  He claimed that the majority of the time the expert would be the one to bet on.  That's true but with a caveat.  This assumes that the expert is effectively paid to be right.  In the hard sciences and engineering that's the case, but in things like sociology, economics and foreign affairs saying things that appeal to The Cathedral may be more beneficial in terms of prestige, money and career.  

Of course you don't have to go to Vegas to bet on whether an expert or a crackpot is right.  The financial markets provide that opportunity every day, hell every second in an enormous variety of contexts.   In financial markets accepting non-consensus opinions is more profitable if true, since the perceived probability is part of the price.  But being right and against the consensus is always a bigger win.  It shows you are capable of making your own correct decisions better than consensus leaders. 

So why don't midwits at least occasionally back the non-consensus view? This is because it costs less to accept a consensus mistake than a non-consensus one.  Someone who accepts a consensus view and is wrong is no more wrong than the vast majority of people.  If they are in the field they are no more wrong than the majority in the field.  Suppose 90% of people think the COVID vaccines are safe, and 10% think not.  Stating they are safe at worst puts you in the dumbest 90% of people.  Stating that they are unsafe could put you in the dumbest 10%.    The later almost certainly means you will lose considerable influence, career opportunities or respect if these were in contention.  The former is unlikely to lose you anything, as anyone you're competing with almost certainly stated the same beliefs.  Note how often members of the Cathedral have been disastrously wrong and nothing happened to them.  Nobody lost their jobs over Russiagate, the Iraq war, the Biden laptop, the CIA connection to cocaine smuggling need I go on?

Also of course the very power of the Cathedral depends on near complete unanimity so they punish disagreement more than error.  

The State of Assassination

Recently there was an attempt on the life of President Donald Trump and I want to explore why that happened.  Now the answer might seem obvious, people think his election would be a disaster for the United States and the world.  But there is a deeper level that needs to be examined, why did they believe this, was it credible and what can be done, besides assassination to solve the problem, if any.

Firstly let's assume that the motive for the attempted murder was what people think it was, to prevent him becoming President again.   This is not a certainty but it's highly likely.  So what does preventing him becoming President accomplish?  It effectively transfers control of the organization of coercion into hands other than his, presumably those of Kamala Harris.  When looked at this way, as the transfer of the control of millions of troops, trillions of dollars worth of military equipment, trillions more of surveillance equipment, tens of thousands of prison cells, hundreds of thousands of regulatory bureaucrats and trillions of pieces of information on US citizens and others, it's a wonder it doesn't happen more often.

How not to argue against the Economic Calculation Problem

The Economic Calculation Problem is a serious, possibly fatal, problem for claims that socialism can increase well-being.  It posits that planners cannot make rational decisions about resource management without prices formed by profit maximization by private owners of factors of production.  So in other words you need a free market, at least in capital, land and labor to maximize the accomplishment of goals, even socialist goals like good houses for everyone.

The first false counterargument is to attack the word “rational” and assume it means a false assumption of what goals are rational.  It does not.  It merely means the ability to reason about how to achieve those goals.  The original article was called “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” but it equally applies to a theocratic commonwealth, a feudal imperialistic state, or any other area where a planner seeks to maximize something through control of the economy.  The question isn't “Is this a smart thing to try to do?”, it's “Can we find the best way to do it, given current resources?”.  This means rationality is always possible and required, because trying to achieve your goals irrationally is stupid. 

Similarly just because socialists aren't trying to maximize money but the provision of needs that doesn't mean you don't need  to plan rationally.  The ECP isn't about trying to be rich, it's about trying to achieve the goals planners are trying to achieve with the limited means available.   It doesn't matter if the planner is trying to maximize yachts and private planes for his employers as possible or food and shelter for the hungry.  Optimization is still possible and desirable.  

Imagine a world where everyone agrees everyone can have anything, and work is strictly voluntary but they recognize a social duty of the able to create more than they consume.  How do you decide whether to use create more solar panels or increase transmission efficiency to get more power?  Or should you discourage people from doing the activities that consume power?  All approaches reduce total utility, the first two by diverting resources from other useful endeavors the last by reducing the enjoyment of the people, that enjoyment being the goal of the whole thing.  Without factor prices you can't tell what's more expensive OR what's more valuable, and they are different things.  If you increased solar power when reducing transmission losses would be use less valuable resources or vice versa people have less access to goods.  If you encouraged people to use less electricity when generating more is the most efficient way to produce more happiness again, you're failing to optimize what you're trying to optimize.   

Using engineers and experts to try and overcome this problem won't work either.  Yes, the optimization of resources will involve engineers, agronomists, chemists etc. but they are not specialists in optimizing resources.  They all rely on outside price signals to tell them what tasks are worthy of their attention, what is worth doing and what isn't.  Consider whether to build a mine to extract a potentially valuable ore.  To know whether to do this one must know how much more valued things will happen if you have the ore.  But to know this you must know what other means could be substituted for this ore, what those means would otherwise be used for and how valuable that is.  It's true that engineers routinely include budget estimates for projects that allow planners to assess the viability of a  project.  But these budgets don't set their own prices, they observe prices established outside the project.  Even if it were possible to establish correct prices in the absence of a private market in factors of production, engineers/chemists/designers don't have that skill. In addition you must know how valuable goals are relative to each other.     

Another non-starter of an argument is that prices could be set by a central authority.  Prices are there to express the desirability of not using the factors of production.  They only work if they indicate the actual utility and difficulty of replacing the factor.  The planner doesn't know this, and can't know this. To know enough to set the price of a resource he would have to know the relative scarcity of every resource that could be substituted for it, partly or wholly and the interactions of that substitution with other resources and projects.  This is impossible.  You can't know everything about every transport route, every mine, every factory, let alone every worker or every technical subject.  That's the whole problem.

Profit-maximisers however know enough to quote a price, which is all you need to assess whether to use this resource or another.  Profit-maximisers will not price perfectly of course, that's why losses happen, but they have both the information and the incentive to make a good estimation of actual value.

Another thought was to make decisions on resource use without using prices and just account for each resource separately.  So a project would use X amount of steel, Y amount of concrete, Z amount of skilled labor etc.  But this involves tracking literally thousands of different resources (or even hundreds of thousands depending on how you define categories) and comparing the billions of ways they could be combined.  Even if this could be done theoretically with perfect inputs, you don't have perfect inputs.  You would have to know the disposition and condition of every useful resource in the economy, including workers, who are not fungible or identical and then run billions of  simultaneous equations hoping nobody put in false information.  They did.  

Speaking of computers, no they don't help.  The big problem is not the lack of information processing, it's the amount of information that would have be conveyed to the planner, much of it subjective, possessed by an enormous number of people and/or hard to communicate to a formal body in real time. Only by summarizing the information in a price can it be made simple enough to communicate efficiently.  The ECP could just as easily be called the economic communication problem.  Imagine spending half your life typing answers into a computer, and then realizing they didn't ask the important question they had no idea even existed. That's how computer would “solve” this problem.  

So how serious is the ECP?  Some planning can occur under socialist systems.  Just because you can't find a precise number for how much more resource approach A would cost versus approach B doesn't mean you can't make decisions.  They just won't be very good ones.  Resources will be expended to achieve goals that should have gone to other goals, and resources that went to the first goal go to the others.  Now there will be cases where the correct choice is obvious. Nobody makes rail tracks out of titanium but the cost is enormous for the more marginal cases.  It is not a financial cost but a cost in results.  One hospital instead of two, 90 KPH trains instead of 120, cancer deaths reduced by 20% instead of 50%, that sort of thing.  It is not trivial.

A better measure than the Bechdel test.

The Bechdel test[1] is seen as a marker of feminism, if a work passes it it's implied that somehow that means it good for women, or their rights or something. But a work that passes this test need not be feminist or not anti-feminist or even not misogynistic. I propose the Asexual Alien Test (AAT) as a better test for feminism, misogyny, misandry and other things you might want to know. The AAT imagines that a extraterrestrial from a species without distinct sexes (e.g. hetromorphic) watches a film or consumes another work with the sexes of characters pointed out to them. Based on their viewing what would they conclude about males and females? For instance viewing "Star Wars" would lead them to believe that females were rare, usually in leadership positions, brave, intelligent and often combat capable. [1] From wikipedia: The movie has to have at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than a man.

Uber, price gouging and class warfare.

Uber's was price gouging in Sydney in the wake of the Cityrail delays on March 8.  For the sake of the working class I hope they continue to do so.  Price gouging is generally seen as evil businessmen taking advantage of poor, hapless, consumers.  In the case of Uber however almost 3/4 of the benefit of "price gouging" goes to the working man.  Or possibly the working woman, the Uber computers are not clear on the difference.  Given the prices allegedly paid for Uber trips clearly those "price gouged" were relatively rich.  Poor people don't generally pay $500 for a trip from the city to Mount Annan.  According to google maps that should take a bit over an hour.  So some worker got 72.5%*$500 = $362.50 AUD for the trip. This is a good thing for the working class. 

But Credible, I hear you cry, you're an anarcho-capitalist, you love rich people and hate the poor right?  Wrong.  What I love is humans getting what they want, provided it doesn't infringe anyone's rights.  Charging a rich person more when something is in short supply doesn't infringe anyone's rights.  While in an ideal world neither rich nor poor would have suffered hours-long delays at least because of Uber the rich can get home.  This benefitted not just the rich Uber passengers but also bus riders who had less crowding and delays than otherwise would be the case.  

Also the voluntary transfer of wealth from rich to poor served the interests of both.  The Law of Returns says the marginal utility of money to poor people is greater than to rich people. So a transfer of money from poor to rich would theoretically raise total utility.  This is a far better argument for socialism than "fairness" arguments.  However obviously a coercive transfers are unlikely raise total utility as history has proven time and time again.  Here however the transfer was voluntary, the rich trading time for money at a rate the poor were more than happy with.  The higher prices available obviously would have caused some Uber drivers to clock on who otherwise would not have, which didn't happen with traditional taxis to the same extent.  Increased supply of useful services and their distribution to those who valued them highest were achieved. Both money and time ended up with the people who wanted them most.  Which isn't surprising since getting things to the people who are prepared to trade most for them is what capitalism does.

But didn't the workers and Uber management take unfair advantage of the consumers?  Well what makes it unfair?  The passengers have no right to have Uber drivers give them a ride.  They have no right to get a ride ahead of other passengers.  If they were treated unfairly they should be able to point to something they should have been given that they weren't.  But they were given everything they were requested.  They wanted a ride and they got it.  They preference over hundreds of other potential customers and they got it. So what weren't they given?  Oh, yeah, all of that for no additional money.  That's not a rights violation, that's a reality check.  The people complaining about the high prices they were charged didn't complain that they got home ahead of people who weren't prepared to pay as much.  So they wanted the benefits of a system that charges high prices, but not to pay the actual high prices.  Frankly it's upper class arrogance at it's worst.

If black lives matter, why do we still have communism?

This essay isn't what you think it is.  You probably think that a right-winger is comparing the vast slaughter communism creates with the relatively modest number of killings by police of black men.  No I'm saying modest number of killings by police of black men is part of the vast slaughter communism creates.  

Some might be skeptical of police communism but they do provide service to citizens "according to their needs" and it gets funded by income tax i.e. "according to their abilities".  Don't bring up that they don't actually provide service completely according to need.  No communist does and we're not having the "it's not real communism" argument.   

But surely racism is the cause not communism, right?  Nope.  At worst 60% of black deaths at the hands of US police are due to racism.  This is assuming that all of the disproportionate black deaths are due to racism.  The greater violence of US police compared to UK police is responsible for well over 90% such deaths.   This is because the UK has much less than 10% of US police deaths per capita.  So even compared to other police services organized on communist lines the US is far more lethal to blacks than it would be if simple racism were the problem.  

So why would removing the communist system largely solve the problem?  Because the problem is one of incentives and accountability, and communism does both badly.  Consider what has to happen for a police officer to be punished for killing someone.  The body that employs him, the government, has to admit it's at fault.  The people who have to cooperate with the cops to help their prosecutions have to   act against them.  Fundamentally the system has to decide to inflict harm on it's own support.  The only reason this would happen is if the political cost of not punishing the cop is greater than not doing so.  This removes accountability but crucially it removes it both ways.  If a cop isn't punished when public perception says he should be it's blamed on political efforts to protect him, even if that is not the case.  

Privatizing police would remove both problems.  The government wouldn't control the private police, so they can't be blamed for their actions.  Because there would be multiple competing private police forces any police officer would be investigated by one (or more) independent organizations.  His buddies couldn't have his back even if they wanted to.  As a private citizen doing a private job he would have no special privileges like "qualified immunity".  The government decision to prosecute or not a private cop would not be seen as a political decision, any more than prosecuting any private citizen would be.  No interest group would see it as enabling abuse if cops didn't get charged.  A failed prosecution wouldn't be seen as a political blow either, merely incompetence. 

Lawsuits against private cops would also be more just because they would not be political.  It would not be a political matter whether a police organization settles a case of supposed police brutality.  There might be accusations of racial injustice, but those accusations wouldn't be used to win elections.  They would be a matter of corporate PR.  

Speaking of corporate PR the cops would have a great incentive to behave and to hire people who will behave.  Even ignoring lawsuits there's the problem that people hire people that protect them, not shoot them.  An officer that can't be trusted to refrain from homicide is not an asset to someone trying to compete in a market.  What is an asset is an officer that will respond to things that hurt their clients, and only those things.  Enforcing drug laws, arresting people who braid hair without a license won't get new clients.    

If government provided funds to individuals to buy their own police protection the poor would still have protection.  Possibly they would have more protection than they currently have since a private firm would have to protect their clients to avoid losing them.   In some cases police forces have failed to protect some minorities for decades, effectively leaving them with no police force (although they still get taxed).  In the event of widescale violence against a group police firms would have incentives to protect, rather than abandon, the oppressed.  

All problems with police, past and present, ranging from race-based oppression, political spying and intimidation, selective enforcement depending on victim or offender, repression of sexual and religious minorities etc. all stem from the police being part of the State's monopoly of force.  All stem from the Marxist mantra being applied to policing.  It's time to use the best method for producing cars, holidays, and insulin to producing security.  It's time to say no to communism, if you really want to protect black people, or anyone.