Tag Archives: Ayn Rand

Driverless Cars and Predicting the Future

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Tim Hall

There is a lot of hype about driverless cars swirling around the interwebs at the moment, but this piece of pseudo-utopian nonsense is ridiculous by any standards.

When he simultaneously talks about wholesale destruction of industries employing millions of people while declaring it’s a great time to be alive, it really does speak volumes about the combination of utopianism and sociopathy that Silicon Valley is notorious for. He does come over as someone who’s read way too much Ayn Rand.

For starters, the idea that driverless cars will make existing mass-transit obsolete and “release the prime real-estate occupied by bus stations for other purposes” suggests the author has not experienced any kind of urban environment other than the low-density suburban sprawls typical of much of North America.

The truth is that nobody really knows how soon this technology will be mature enough for widespread adoption, and what sort of economic impact it might have. We’ve had the technology for fully-automated trains for almost half a century now, but it’s not been adopted beyond a very small number of closed systems. Perhaps the evangelists for self-driving cars ought to investigate why?

Predictions of the future when potentially disruptive new technologies emerge usually turn out to be wrong.

The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read on the subject has to be the idea that driverless vehicles will open up the industrialisation of sub-Saharan Africa through columns of automated trucks trundling across the Sahara delivering African-made goods to Europe. It never seemed to occur to them it would merely replicate what was feasible using 19th century technology in the shape of a railway. But no trans-Saharan railway has ever been built or seriously proposed, because there’s never been enough economic demand for one. It’s far easier to ship goods from Africa to to the nearest port and send it by sea.

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Wingnuts to the right of me, wingnuts to the left of me

Posted on November 9, 2014 by Tim Hall

A thought brought on by the Requires Hate saga.

Years ago, the most unpleasant and intolerant Internet wingnuts tended to come from the hard right of the political spectrum, typically motivated by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, reactionary forms of religion, or old-fashioned racism. But in recent years more and more of the worst wingnuts seem to come from the authoritarian left, using the rhetoric of social justice to demand censorship of art and media, and ostracism of people that they don’t like.

Is this is a consequence of positive social change, in that things like gay rights and feminism have become increasingly mainstream, and have attracted the sorts of people who, had they been born a generation earlier, would have gravitated towards cultural conservatism?

Or is it just an illusion, a consequence of social media filter bubbles? Does the shift from subject-specific forums to people-specific social media platforms means that there are just as many conservative wingnuts out there, but they are no longer as visible on an impossible-to-ignore basis? Have the leftist wingnuts always been as common, but just never had much of a presence in online spaces I used to inhabit a decade ago?

Or am I just getting more conservative with age?

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“The End of Britain”

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Tim Hall

The End of BritainYou can’t go anywhere on the web without seeing doom-laden ads talking about “The End of Britain” telling you “How to survive the coming financial apocalypse”. I know better than to click on such obvious link-bait, but eventually curiosity got the better of me. So I put the phrase into Google to see what came up. What came up was this lengthy blog post from Another Angry Voice.

And the whole thing turns out to be much as I thought it was. The End of Britain is a lengthy screed written by obvious free-market fundamentalists followed by a sales pitch for a “high-yield” investments that sound suspiciously like some kind of Ponzi scheme. Their version of post-war economic history is full of misuse of statistics, distortions, deliberate omissions and complete lies, but it’s what you’d expect from people who have read too much Ayn Rand and think public spending on welfare is the root of all evil.

And Another Angry Voice does a thorough demolition job on the whole thing.

Which all makes me wonder, why is so much internet advertising for transparently obvious scams? I’m thinking of these “One weird trick” belly-fat and anti-wrinkle treatments, all of which are essentially con tricks. Is separating fools from their money the only really profitable business on the interweb?

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Google, Ayn Rand, and The Singularity

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Tim Hall

Bryan Appleyard asks Google’s Eric Schmidt some questions, and doesn’t like the sound of the answers. They raise some uncomfortable questions about Silicon Valley’s attitude towards law, privacy, the “excremental novelist and infantile philosopher Ayn Rand“, and the quasi-religious belief in The Singularity.

The Singularity, Ayn Rand, the elitism, the moral pretensions and the dreams of island states are all sending the same message – that Silicon Valley is a small, highly intelligent, obsessive, hubristic and deluded community. Its values are not ours. We should, of course, embrace its ingenuity and the gadgets it showers upon us, but we should be wary of the ‘terms and conditions’ attached. These include not just the inane legalisms that come with the software, but also the ideology, the rhetoric, the world-dominating fantasies and, of course, the tax avoidance.

Google is just another company with just another bottom line. We should take note of it but we should not demean ourselves by ushering it into our centres of democratic power and we should certainly not succumb to its delusions. We should merely, if the occasion arises, scrounge an invite to Loulou’s and have a good laugh.

Which all seems to suggest Google’s attitude towards tax-dodging is just the tip of the iceberg. As one commenter points out, not everyone in Silicon Valley shares these crackpot beliefs.It’s also true that the sociopathic values of Ayn Rand are commonplace amongst the elites. But it ought to make is question whether these are the sorts of people we want to trust with out future.

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If Karl Marx and Ayn Rand are the Gods of Economics (to whom we sacrifice George Osborne at dawn tomorrow), who else is in the pantheon? I get the feeling Marilyn Monroe and Elvis ought to be in there somewhere. Who should be in the 19th/20th century pantheon of gods and goddesses, and what portfolios should each of them have?

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Tim Hall | 4 Comments

The Christian Right – Neither Christian nor right?

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Tim Hall

I’ve often thought that large sections of the US religious right were about as Christian as the fictional “Golden Promise Ministries” in Charles Stross’ recent novel “The Apocalypse Codex“. No spoilers, but given that the novel is set in a world influence by H.P.Lovecraft I think you can fill in the blanks…

This quote from commenter “mds” in a very long post-election thread in Making Light. discussing the meltdowns of so many people on the American right seems to confirm at lot of this:

There are currently large swathes of fundamentalist Christianity who now embrace the Tim LaHaye-esque view that the Sermon on the Mount is only a description of the Millenial Kingdom, not a prescription for current Christian behavior. Most of the Gospels are largely ignored by my own fundamentalist family members, who are almost exclusive concerned with that one infamous verse from Leviticus; a patchwork quilt of prophetic material from Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation; the most odious excerpts from Paul’s epistles; and an utterly unsourced hysteria about abortion, which fundamentalist Protestants didn’t give two shits about until the late seventies at the earliest. Heck, the only part of 1 Corinthians 13 they seem to have taken to heart is a little piece of verse 7: “believeth all things.” The motto of a Fox News viewer.

So to me, the current substantial overlap between Birchers, Objectivists and fundamentalist Christians is explained by the fact that too many fundamentalist “Christians” aren’t actually Christians any more, in any meaningful sense of the term. It’s been reduced purely to a tribal marker.

Ah yes, Tim LaHaye. If you’ve read any of Fred Clark’s extensive dissection of “Left Behind” you’ll realise this best-selling series of terribly-written hack novels not only preaches something far removed from orthodox mainstream Christianity, but has a malign grip on America’s religious and political life. LaHaye and the writers and preachers that influenced him, such as Hal Lindsay, Cyrus Scofield and John Darby have constructed a theology of their own out of the whole cloth that has little or nothing to do with traditional Christian belief at all. As Teresa Neilsen Hayden points out further down the comment thread:

It’s stupendously heretical — a break with almost all previous Christian belief and interpretation — but it does explain a lot.

More liberal Christians are reluctant to use the word “Heresy”. It’s been too often used as a term of abuse by fundamentalists aimed at anyone that disagrees with their sometimes over-literalist reading of scripture. But for any dogma that ignores Christ’s teachings in the Gospels entirely, let alone invents an entirely imaginary Gospel According to Ayn Rand, there’s really no other word to use.

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When I hear the words “Laffer Curve” I reach for my revolver

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Tim Hall

Warning, this is a political post. If you don’t want to read about politics, click on one of the other subjects on the menu bar…

In the context of what may or may not be in George Osborne’s budget later this week, I’m hearing a lot of mentions of the infamous Laffer Curve.

The Laffer Curve is a somewhat questionable piece of economic thinking which states, in it’s commonly-used form, that if taxation is raised to a level higher than the rich would really like to pay, then overall revenue will fall because the rich then won’t work as hard. Such an idea has obvious appeal to the types that take Ayn Rand seriously – Indeed, I always associate the term with a particularly noxious right-libertarian troll on the Pyramid Online forums a decade or so ago.

Yes, I can appreciate the hypothesis that there is a point of diminishing returns if a taxation rate is ridiculously high. It’s why nobody today is suggesting a return to Denis Healey’s 98% taxes of the 1970s. But the Lafferites go further than that. They give every appearance of insisting on a completely arbitrary figure as the threshold of diminishing returns, and expect you to accept this in the complete absence of any empirical evidence to support it.

Not that the hard right are any bigger fans of evidence-based economics as they are of evidence-based science. You can see this in their climate change denial. And don’t even get me started on young-earth creationism. This is the sort of intellectual company the Laffer Curve keeps. So why should we take it seriously?

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The Potemkin Suburb of the “53%”.

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Tim Hall

I’m really not sure what to make of these forelock-tugging serfs. Are they inhabitants of some Potemkin suburb? Do they have such a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome they’re incapable of thinking out of the box the wealthy elites have put them in?

Among the smug-looking posts, there’s one woman who lists a load of crappy low-paid freelance jobs, and insists she feels empowered, not exploited. And her entire income depends on the amount the super-rich have left after taxes.  Another claims her poverty is entirely the fault of her own bad decisions, and is all in favour of “free markets not handouts”. Except for handouts to the rich, of course. They don’t count.

I realise of course that the entire site is a probably some sort of Astroturf job, hastily put together by a few frightened right-wingers as a reaction against the increasingly large scale demonstrations in Washington demanding that the rich pay slightly higher taxes and the financial sector needs to be regulated a bit. It actually reads so  clumsily as propaganda that it’s entirely possible that it’s actually a left-wing parody of tea-party types.

Assuming it is for real, it evidently hasn’t occurred to these people that a much larger middle class who earn most of their living providing goods and services to each other will deliver far greater prosperity to a far greater number of people than their limited vision of a small middle class who survive by supplying goods and services to the elites. Certainly I know of few entrepreneurial types whose businesses depend on ordinary working people having the money to spend on the goods and services their businesses provide.

One day, the more extreme versions of supply-side economics these people have been conned into buying will be as discredited as Communism. Sure, it works for the wealthy elites, just as Communism worked for the apparatchiks. Perhaps one day, expressing an admiration for Ayn Rand will kill a career in business or politics as surely as admiring Hitler or Stalin does today.

 

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