Power corrupts, and great power kills.

When I saw "Schindler's List", I was deeply moved. I asked Mike B. what can we do to prevent such genocide from happening again. Mike suggested raising my children right and treating my neighbor justly. I do try to live up to that.

I got excited when I came across some research that might drastically reduce wars AND genocides and other kinds of internal governmentally-approved mass execution.

A CIA researcher discovered that "being a democracy" has a very strong correlation with "not going to war with a democracy" and with "not killing huge numbers of its own citizens."

That claim of his is somewhat in dispute, according to the wikipedia entry on "the democratic peace." I also found a researcher who said that the correlation is even higher if you replace "being a democracy" with something else. More on that another time.

But in any case, that CIA researcher uncovered a crucial fact. Governments of the 20th century were wildly bloodthirsty. There were even some governments that issued quotas to murder a certain number of citizens per period of time, according to his research.

20th Century Democide


David Oakey

Nocebo is the opposite of Placebo

A placebo is a medicine that has no active ingredients, but which you believe to be effective, and your body either heals itself or (according to a controversial alternative theory) you merely tell the researcher that your body is healing in an unconscious effort to please the researcher. I hope I have described a placebo correctly.

A nocebo is the opposite.

Dr. Dean Edell - 'Nocebo' The Power Of The Mind Can Make You Sick

I should add that I believe Erin Brockovich worsened the nocebo effect on the people in the town her hit movie was about.

Odds of Resembles between Languages / False Cognates

The first rule is, you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool.
--Richard Feynman

On sci.lang we are often presented with lists of resemblances between far-flung languages (e.g. Basque and Ainu, Welsh and Mandan, Hebrew and Quechua, Hebrew and every other language, Basque and every other language), along with the claim that such resemblances "couldn't be due to chance", or are "too many" to be due to chance.

Linguists dismiss these lists, for several reasons. Often a good deal of work has gone into them, but little linguistic knowledge. Borrowings and native compounding are not taken into account; the semantic equivalences proffered are quirky; and there is no attempt to find systematic sound correspondences. And linguists know that chance correspondences do happen.

All this is patiently explained, but it doesn't always convince those with no linguistic training-- especially the last point. Human beings have been designed by evolution to be good pattern matchers, and to trust the patterns they find; as a corollary their intuition about probability is abysmal. Lotteries and Las Vegas wouldn't function if it weren't so.

Odds of Resemblance between languages

David Oakey

Urban Legends: Blinded by the Sun while Stoned

I never took illegal drugs because I didn't want to damage my brain. Though I think one can damage oneself with various substances, I think that it is wrong to lie about what drugs can do in order to scare folks into avoiding them. Honesty is almost always the best policy. I think I've heard well intentioned lies called "pious frauds."

Here's a pious fraud I believed. From a fairly highly reliable urban legends web page (but check everything out for yourself!) comes the debunking of it. Urban Legends (Blinded by the Light)"

David

Is Voting A Moral Duty? Is Voting Worthwhile?

Most people have heard the view that if you don't vote you can't complain. I've also seen a related view on bumper stickers, expressed as, "Don't blame me, I voted for _____" where the blank was whomever had lost a recent election. The implication is that voting for the loser absolved one of responsibility for the outcome. And lots of public service ads have encouraged voting. I think MTV endorsed the view that, "It doesn't matter how you vote, just do it."

But I heard something quite different a few times. One fellow in college said that voting was giving your endorsement of the outcome. He said something like this: if there were a vote between rulership by dictator Pol Pot or rulership by Thomas Jefferson, that if you had voted, and if it turned out that Pol Pot had won, then you had contributed to the legitimacy of Pol Pot's rulership. In essence, he was saying that if you DO vote you can't complain. Another fellow in the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society seemed to hold a similar view.

So the question arises of who is right? I don't have confidence in my answer yet.

For now my view is that non-voting is not immoral. Further, voting for a candidate who would have upheld restrictions on government is voting in self-defense, and one's vote in such a case ought not to be held against the voter.

Thoughts?

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I've never missed a chance to vote. Was it a waste of gas, research time, and driving time? If I had voted for the Democrat every time, no elections outcomes would have changed. If I had voted for the Republican every time, no election outcomes would have changed. If I'd gotten sick every election and been unable to vote, no election outcomes would have changed. Is voting worthwhile?

Here's an effort to analyze the odds.
Don't Vote. It makes more sense to play the lottery.

I hope nobody reads that and says, "But what if everybody thought that way?"

First and most important: that will never happen. People disagree, even on math or whether the earth is flat. "Everybody" will never think the same way. Second, if somehow most people thought that way, and as a result the numbers of voters dropped to one percent of last election's turnout, then the odds change, and it becomes somewhat more sensible to vote.

David

The so-called Wild West wasn't--but does that imply a hands off government works?

The essay below was published in a journal on legal issues where it was reviewed by peers in the legal profession. I don't know what the peers had to say about it, except for two peers (professor of law and economics David Friedman, and economics professor Bruce Benson.)

The second most remarkable thing about the article is that the wild west wasn't wild -- it was more law-abiding than big cities on the east coast of the USA.

But the most remarkable thing about the article is that they draw a conclusion relevant to modern life: we could do with shockingly smaller government than we have now and have less chaos that today.

"The purpose of this paper is to take us from the theoretical world of anarchy to a case study of its application."

The Not So Wild West

Years later the authors went on to write a book on the same issue: The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. I haven't read it.

Here's part of a review of the book I found on Amazon.com.

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Mention of the American West usually evokes images of rough and tumble cowboys, ranchers, and outlaws. In contrast, "The Not So Wild, Wild West" casts America’s frontier history in a new framework that emphasizes the creation of institutions, both formal and informal, that facilitated cooperation rather than conflict. Rather than describing the frontier as a place where heroes met villains, this book argues that everyday people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West.
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David

The essay on the racist roots of drug prohibition

Here is the transcript of the speech that convinced me that racism was a large component of the reason for drug prohibitions being written into law in the first place.

Transcripts of speeches show how a spoken speech is lacking compared to a proofread essay, but I haven't seen an essay online which captured the breadth of lawmaking while under the influence of racism that this speech reveals.

David

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History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States - by Professor Charles Whitebread. This is a fascinating and highly entertaining 20-page summary of the history of the marijuana laws in the United States. Transcribed from a speech by Professor Whitebread before the 1995 California Judges Conference.