War Without Mercy on Syria

by Stephen Lendman Western media misreport what's happening in Syria and why. Propaganda substitutes for truth and full disclosure. Syrians are struggling to prevent Western conquest, exploitation, and control. They're fighting for their lives to stay free. At issue isn't whether Assad's government is democratic, despotic or anything in between. Its sovereign independence made it vulnerable. Washington tolerates no governments it doesn't control. Replacing them with puppet regimes is policy. Whether Assad can hold out and prevail isn't known. Most Syrians depend on him. The longer conflict persists, the greater his support. Who else can Syrians turn to for help? They want no part of becoming another pro-Western vassal state. They know the daily horrors Afghans, Iraqis and Libyans face. Syria was calm and peaceful until Washington unleashed its dogs last year. Daily violence, mass killing and destruction followed. It's the American way. Media scoundrels support it. Syria's conflict isn't an uprising, revolution or civil war. These characterizations distort reality. There's nothing civil about what's ongoing. Washington orchestrated everything. Its bloodstained hands control the conflict. At issue is naked Washington-led Western aggression. Key NATO allies and regional partners are involved. Insurgents are Washington proxies. Protracted violence and bloodshed persist. Imperial wars are called liberating ones. Western end game strategy calls for total war if other methods fail. Washington wages them two ways. In Afghanistan and Iraq, US forces are involved. In Libya, a combination of air assets and ground proxies were used. Protracted conflict persists. Daily violence ravages the country. Media scoundrels ignore it. They report little about Iraq and Afghanistan. They let nightmarish conditions pass beneath their radar. Only wealth, privilege and dominance matter. Charnel house conditions go unacknowledged. So far, Western proxies alone battle Syrian forces. Despite heavy weapons, training and direction, military regulars outmatch them. Expect eventual direct Western intervention. Electoral politics dictates timing. Voltaire Network's Thierry Meyssan is right. Reagan's Contra war 2.0 ravages Syria. Death squads employed are today's Contras. In the 1980s, they battled Nicaragua's Sandinista government. Washington enlisted, armed, trained, funded and directed them. Anastasio Somoza ruled Nicaragua despotically. He ran it like a US colony. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) ousted his regime after years of conflict. In 1981, Reagan authorized covert CIA intervention. Sandinistas were falsely called Moscow puppets. Contrarevolucionarios (Contras) were recruited. Many were former cutthroat Somoza National Guard regulars. They became Washington proxy death squads. Contra wars raged throughout the decade. From Honduran bases they conducted cross-border terrorist raids. Nicaraguans suffered greatly. Many thousands died. Managua's economy was devastated. Resources needed for defense left little for domestic needs. In 1988, A New York Times op-ed headlined "Wrong From the Start; Reagan's Contra War, Reagan's Failure," saying: Reagan's "seven-year record in Nicaragua is a chronicle of deceit and incompetence in pursuit of an unwinnable war." Expect nothing comparable today about Obama's war on Syria. Times correspondents, commentators and editorial writers march in lockstep. They supported Reagan throughout the decade. Perhaps Iran-Contra caused the above change of heart."

"[Jorge Luis] Borges, era un anarcocapitalista"

Martín Krause: "Borges era un anarcocapitalista", La Gazeta "Argentina, su país, siempre ha tenido grandes pensadores liberales que ha combinado con los peores políticos del mundo, ¿por qué esa dualidad? Argentina ha tenido grandes intelectuales liberales, pero también grandes intelectuales socialistas. El progresismo intelectual siempre ha florecido en Argentina y controla el mundo cultural. El último gran liberal que tuvimos en ese campo, y que a la izquierda le costó muchísimo aceptar, fue Borges, que era un anarcocapitalista. Ellos no podían entender cómo la mayor estrella de la literatura nacional pudiera pensar de esa forma. Pero, por regla general, el mundillo cultural argentino siempre ha estado influenciado por el progresismo, que siempre ha mirado a Europa. A este tipo de intelectual le encanta Francia y esos intelectuales franceses que, cuanto más complicado escriba y hable, mejor. Esto ha generado un sistema político perverso, en el que los que llegan, por el mero hecho de llegar muestran que han dejado sus principios en la puerta."

Sobre armas e "lei do mais forte"

Acerca deste assunto, uma história que o meu pai uma vez contou, ocorrida em Moçambique, imagino que por volta de 1970 (não sei se ele assistiu à cena ou se, mais provavelmente, ouviu contar; nem sei se os pormenores são verdadeiros):

Um "chefe de posto" do interior, já idoso e não muito imponente fisicamente, veio passar uns dias de folga à cidade (a então Lourenço Marques); num café ou restaurante ou bar ou coisa assim, uns quantos "matulões" começaram a se meter com ele, ao que ele respondeu:

- Eu vim aqui para me divertir, não para me chatear; se têm algum problema, vamos lá fora, aquele terreno resolver o assunto.

Chegados ao tal terreno, já os outros se preparavam para dar uma "carga de pancada" ao senhor, quando este saca de uma pistola. Perante isto, pediram-lhe desculpa e deixaram-no em paz, após o que este comentou:

- Pois, desde que inventaram estas coisinhas já não há homens fortes.

Só o governo/estado poderia ter criado a Internet?

"Atrios" (Duncan Black) argumenta (ou acha que argumenta) que apenas o governo (ou o Estado? Creio que "government" em american english não é exactamente a mesma coisa que o nosso "governo") poderia ter criado a Internet (via Brad DeLong):

I think the aspect of the "government invented the internet" which isn't emphasized enough is that it isn't just some random fluke that it was born out of various public and publicly financed entities. A private company would not have created it. Before the internet (or www, depending on precisely what we're talking about) we had various pre-internets, which were all cool enough in their own way and offered various applications, information, and services to people. In some ways the were superior to the internet of old, but they weren't the "information superhighway" which we could all just hook into any way we wanted. It wasn't so much the technology, though it was that too, it was the idea, and it isn't an idea a for-profit company would have pursued in nearly the same way.

In some ways we're seeing the return to the pre-internet version, though the actual internet still exists. Facebook polices content, and people expect them to for reasons I can't fathom. Blogger doesn't. Not yet.

Em primeiro lugar, não me parece que ele apresente um argumento convincente que uma "for-profit company" não iria desenvolver a Internet nos moldes em que esta existe; mas, mesmo como isso fosse verdade, como se passa da ideia de que uma "for-profit company" não criaria a Internet para as conclusões de que uma empresa privada não desenvolveria a Internet e de que só o governo o poderia fazer? Afinal, no mundo não existem só Estados e empresas com fins lucrativos.

Aliás, se em vez da "net", estivermos a falar da "web", nem é liquido que tenha sido desenvolvida pelo Estado - sim, Tim Berners-Lee desenvolveu-a enquanto trabalhava no CERN, mas largamente como um projecto pessoal, e parece que parte do trabalho até foi feito em casa.

Armas e violência

Na discussão ali em baixo, acabou por vir à baila um estudo feito por Richard Florida sobre as causas da "gun violence" nos EUA.

Um eventual problema desse estudo é que os dados "include accidental shootings, suicides, even acts of self-defense, as well as crimes", o que me levou a comentar «Seria interessante saber, da tal alta mortalidade por "gun violence" no Alasca, quanta são acidentes de caça.»

Para ver melhor isso, fiz uma comparação, para o ano de 2008, entre os assassínios por estado nos EUA e as tais "mortes por arma de fogo" - claro que os assassínios podem ser feitos à faca ou com estricnina, e haverá muitos casos de "mortes violentas por arma de fogo" que não contam com assassínio; no entanto, é de esperar que haja uma associação significativa entre o nível de assassínios num estado e as mortes violentas por arma de fogo (mesmo incluindo em auto-defesa ou em acções policiais):

 

	assassínios	"gun deaths"
Alabama	7,6	17,6
Alaska	4,1	20,9
Arizona	6,3	14,0
Arkansas	5,7	15,6
California	5,8	8,5
Colorado	3,2	10,3
Connecticut	3,5	5,6
Delaware	6,5	10,9
Florida	6,4	12,4
Georgia	6,6	12,3
Hawaii	1,9	3,1
Idaho	1,5	11,5
Illinois	6,1	8,4
Indiana	5,1	11,3
Iowa	2,5	7,3
Kansas	4,0	9,7
Kentucky	4,6	13,3
Louisiana	11,9	18,5
Maine	2,4	8,5
Maryland	8,8	11,8
Massachusetts	2,6	3,4
Michigan	5,4	10,8
Minnesota	2,1	7,0
Mississippi	8,1	19,4
Missouri	7,7	13,8
Montana	2,4	15,7
Nebraska	3,8	8,4
Nevada	6,3	15,6
New Hampshire	1,0	6,7
New Jersey	4,3	5,0
New Mexico	7,2	14,8
New York	4,3	4,9
North Carolina	6,5	12,5
North Dakota	0,5	8,8
Ohio	4,7	9,7
Oklahoma	5,8	14,1
Oregon	2,2	9,7
Pennsylvania	5,6	10,7
Rhode Island	2,8	3,9
South Carolina	6,8	13,4
South Dakota	3,2	10,5
Tennessee	6,6	15,6
Texas	5,6	10,9
Utah	1,4	9,4
Vermont	2,7	8,1
Virginia	4,7	10,3
Washington	2,9	8,7
West Virginia	3,3	12,7
Wisconsin	2,6	7,7
Wyoming	1,9	17,1

No caso das taxas, o vermelho quer dizer uma taxa de homicídios ou de mortes por arma de fogo significativamente acima (um desvio padrão) da média nacional; verde significativamente abaixo. No caso dos estados, vermelho quer dizer "muitos homicidios e muitas mortes por arma de fogo", verde o contrário, amarelo "poucos homicídios comparativamente ao que seria de esperar face às mortes por arma de fogo" e azul o contrário. Em principio, será nos estados "amarelos" que haverá muitas mortes "não-violentas" por uso de armas (suicídios e acidentes), pelo menos se estiver certa a minha intuição de que a taxa de homicidios será uma boa proxy para o nível geral de violência - e, realmente, muitos desses estados (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, etc - basicamente, as Montanhas Rochosas e sítios parecidos) são os estados em que, à partida, será de esperar mais mortes por acidentes de caça e afins (e, já agora, que as pessoas aproveitam a arma que têm no armário para se suicidar em vez de recorrerem ao veneno ou aos bicos de gás abertos).

Claro que o ideal seria mesmo ter a informação desagregada sobre as componentes das tais mortes por arma de fogo...

Porque o toureiro escolheu voluntaria e conscientemente ser toureiro?

Pergunta o Renato Teixeira - "Qual a ideia, por exemplo, de combater as touradas com imagens do touro a furar o toureiro, como se o show uma vez invertido já tivesse piada? Qual o sentido que alguém que se importa com a dor dos bichos, faça gáudio do sofrimento dos homens?"

Inteligência e desenvolvimento económico

Race, IQ, and Wealth, por Ron Unz, em The American Conservative:

[H]e singled out IQ and the Wealth of Nations, published in 2001 by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, as a particularly extreme and hateful example of this trend. These authors explicitly argue that IQ scores for different populations are largely fixed and hereditary, and that these—rather than economic or governmental structures—tend to determine the long-term wealth of a given country. (...)

Although “intelligence” may be difficult to define precisely, most people have accepted that IQ scores seem to constitute a rough and measurable proxy for this trait, so Lynn and Vanhanen have collected a vast number of national IQ scores from the last 50 or 60 years and compared these to income levels and economic growth rates. Since experts have discovered that nominal IQ scores over the last century or so have tended to rise at a seemingly constant rate—the so-called “Flynn Effect”—the authors adjusted their raw scores accordingly. Having done so, they found a strong correlation of around 0.50–0.75 between the Flynn-adjusted IQ of a nation’s population and its real per capita GDP over the last few decades, seemingly indicating that smarter peoples tend to be wealthier and more successful.


From this statistical fact, Lynn and Vanhanen draw the conclusion that intelligence leads to economic success and—since they argue that intelligence itself is largely innate and genetic—that the relative development ranking of the long list of nations they analyze is unlikely to change much over time, nor will the economic standing of the various groups within ethnically mixed countries, including the United States.

Now this hypothesis might indeed be correct, but it is not necessarily warranted by the empirical data that Lynn and Vanhanen have gathered. After all, if high national IQ scores are correlated with economic success, perhaps the high IQs cause the success, but it seems just as possible that the success might be driving the high IQs, or that both might be due to some third factor. Correlation does not imply causality, let alone the particular direction of the causal arrow. A traditional liberal model positing that socio-economic factors strongly influence performance on academic ability tests would predict exactly the same distribution of international results found by Lynn and Vanhanen. (...)

[L]et us restrict our initial examination to the 60-odd IQ datapoints Lynn and Vanhanen obtained from European countries and their overseas offshoots over the last half-century. Obviously, some of these countries have at times been far poorer than others, but almost none have suffered the extreme poverty found in much of the Third World.

What we immediately notice is a long list of enormous variations in the tested IQs of genetically indistinguishable European peoples across temporal, geographical, and political lines, variations so large as to raise severe doubts about the strongly genetic-deterministic model of IQ favored by Lynn and Vanhanen and perhaps also quietly held by many others. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the IQ data that follow are drawn from their work and incorporate their Flynn adjustments.)

Consider, for example, the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indicate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90, while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 97–99, much closer to the West German numbers.

These results seem anomalous from the perspective of strong genetic determinism for IQ. To a very good approximation, East Germans and West Germans are genetically indistinguishable, and an IQ gap as wide as 17 points between the two groups seems inexplicable, while the recorded rise in East German scores of 7–9 points in just half a generation seems even more difficult to explain. (...)

During this same period, the far richer non-Communist nations of Europe—such as Austria, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and West Germany—all tended to score at or somewhat above 100. The wide IQ gaps between these European peoples and the previous group seem unlikely to have a heavily innate basis, given the considerable genetic and phenotypic similarity across these populations. For example, the borders of Austria and Croatia are just a couple of dozen miles apart, both are Catholic countries that spent centuries as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it is quite difficult to distinguish Austrians from Croatians either by appearance or by genetic testing. Yet the gap between their reported IQ scores—12 points—is nearly as wide as that separating American blacks and whites.

It seems more plausible that most of the large and consistent IQ gaps between Western Europeans and their Balkan cousins are less a cause than a consequence of differences in development and affluence during the era in which these IQs were tested. (...)

If these differences of perhaps 10 or even 15 IQ points between impoverished Balkan Europeans and wealthy Western ones reflected deeply hereditary rather than transitory environmental influences, they surely would have maintained themselves when these groups immigrated to the United States. But there is no evidence of this. As it happens, Americans of Greek and South Slav origins are considerably above most other American whites in both family income and educational level. Since the overwhelming majority of the latter trace their ancestry to Britain and other high IQ countries of Western Europe, this would seem a strange result if the Balkan peoples truly did suffer from an innate ability deficit approaching a full standard deviation.

Similar sharp differences occur in the case of Italian populations separated historically and geographically. Today, Italian-Americans are very close to the national white average in income and education, and the limited data we have seem to put their IQ close to this average as well. This would appear consistent with the IQ figures reported for Italy by Lynn and Vanhanen, which are based on large samples and come in at just above 100. However, there is a notoriously wide economic gap between northern Italy and the south, including Sicily. The overwhelming majority of Italian-Americans trace their ancestry to the latter, quite impoverished regions, and in 2010 Lynn reported new research indicating that the present-day IQ of Italians living in those areas was as low as 89, a figure that places them almost a full standard deviation below either their Northern Italian compatriots or their separated American cousins. Although Lynn attributed this large deficit in Southern Italian IQ to substantial North African or Near Eastern genetic admixture, poverty and cultural deprivation seem more likely explanations. (...)

Similarly, a large 1990 test of South African whites placed their IQ at 94, considerably below that of the Dutch or English peoples from whom they derive, and again this may be connected to their lower level of national income and technological advancement.

Perhaps the strongest evidence supporting this cultural rather than genetic hypothesis comes from the northwestern corner of Europe, namely Celtic Ireland. When the early waves of Catholic Irish immigrants reached America near the middle of the 19th century, they were widely seen as particularly ignorant and uncouth and aroused much hostility from commentators of the era, some of whom suggested that they might be innately deficient in both character and intelligence. But they advanced economically at a reasonable pace, and within less than a century had become wealthier and better educated than the average white American, including those of “old stock” ancestry. The evidence today is that the tested IQ of the typical Irish-American—to the extent it can be distinguished—is somewhat above the national white American average of around 100 and also above that of most German-Americans, who arrived around the same time.

Uma coisa que sempre achei duvidosa nas tais teorias que dizem que o povo A ou B são mais desenvolvidos por serem geneticamente mais inteligentes é como é que eles explicam as viariações que ao longo dos séculos houve entre a hiearquia de desenvolvimento entre diferentes países e regiões - afinal, o Iraque, o Egito e a Grécia já foram dos países mais desenvolvidos do mundo (e os autores gregos e latinos por vezes escreviam textos descrevendo os germanos e celtas - as supostas "raças superiores" dos autores dos séculos XIX e XX - como "raças primitivas"); mesmo que invasões e migrações tenham alterado alguma composição étnica dos habitantes desses territórios, duvido que as qualidades genéticas das suas populações actuais sejam muito diferentes do que na Antiguidade (até porque muitas das invasões foram por povos vizinhos e aparentados, supostamente geneticamente semelhantes).

Controle de armas: o que se vê e o que não se vê

Seen and Unseen, por Roderick T. Long:

Deaths caused by gun use are seen, because they happen. Deaths prevented by gun use are not seen, because they don’t happen. (By “gun use” I mean not just firings but also mere brandishings.) First, preventions are underreported (since few are eager to be victimised twice – first by a freelance attacker and second by the cops), and second, when they are reported, they’re not exciting enough to get much publicity.

People who favour stronger gun control laws focus on the deaths they hope to prevent, but rarely consider the deaths their laws would cause.

O príncipio do fim?

Amanhã?

[Os bancos gregos irão fechar as portas já amanhã, ou ainda aguentarão até ao fim da semana?]

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal:

Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies, by Glenn Greenwald, Cato Istitute.

Monopólios

"Until the 1960s, historians had established the myth that Progressivism was a virtual uprising of workers and farmers who, guided by a new generation of altruistic experts and intellectuals, surmounted fierce big business opposition in order to curb, regulate, and control what had been a system of accelerating monopoly in the late 19th century. A generation of research and scholarship, however, has now exploded that myth for all parts of the American polity, and it has become all too clear that the truth is the reverse of this well-worn fable. In contrast, what actually happened was that business became increasingly competitive during the late 19th century, and that various big-business interests, led by the powerful financial house of J. P. Morgan and Company, tried desperately to establish successful cartels on the free market. The first wave of such cartels was in the first large-scale business — railroads. In every case, the attempt to increase profits — by cutting sales with a quota system — and thereby to raise prices or rates, collapsed quickly from internal competition within the cartel and from external competition by new competitors eager to undercut the cartel. During the 1890s, in the new field of large-scale industrial corporations, big-business interests tried to establish high prices and reduced production via mergers, and again, in every case, the merger collapsed from the winds of new competition. In both sets of cartel attempts, J. P. Morgan and Company had taken the lead, and in both sets of cases, the market, hampered though it was by high protective, tariff walls, managed to nullify these attempts at voluntary cartelization. It then became clear to these big-business interests that the only way to establish a cartelized economy, an economy that would ensure their continued economic dominance and high profits, would be to use the powers of government to establish and maintain cartels by coercion, in other words, to transform the economy from roughly laissez-faire to centralized, coordinated statism. But how could the American people, steeped in a long tradition of fierce opposition to government-imposed monopoly, go along with this program? How could the public's consent to the New Order be engineered? Fortunately for the cartelists, a solution to this vexing problem lay at hand. Monopoly could be put over in the name of opposition to monopoly! In that way, using the rhetoric beloved by Americans, the form of the political economy could be maintained, while the content could be totally reversed. (...) In that way, the regulatory commissions could subsidize, restrict, and cartelize in the name of "opposing monopoly," as well as promoting the general welfare and national security. Once again, it was railroad monopoly that paved the way. For this intellectual shell game, the cartelists needed the support of the nation's intellectuals, the class of professional opinion molders in society. The Morgans needed a smokescreen of ideology, setting forth the rationale and the apologetics for the New Order. Again, fortunately for them, the intellectuals were ready and eager for the new alliance. (...) In return for their serving as apologists for the new statism, the State was prepared to offer not only cartelized occupations, but also ever-increasing and cushier jobs in the bureaucracy to plan and propagandize for the newly statized society. And the intellectuals were ready for it, having learned in graduate schools in Germany the glories of statism and organicist socialism, of a harmonious "middle way" between dog-eat-dog laissez-faire on the one hand and proletarian Marxism on the other. Big government, staffed by intellectuals and technocrats, steered by big business, and aided by unions organizing a subservient labor force, would impose a cooperative commonwealth for the alleged benefit of all." Origins of the Federal Reserve by Murray N. Rothbard

Agitação militar na Coreia do Norte?

Ex-North Korean Military Chief Possibly Dead After Reported Gun Battle (Business Insider).

Hayek e Pinochet (again)

Preventing the “Abuses” of Democracy: Hayek, the “Military Usurper” and Transitional Dictatorship in Chile? [pdf], por Andrew Farrant, Edward McPhail, e Sebastian Berger (American Journal of Economics and Sociology):

ABSTRACT. Hayek famously claimed that he would prefer a “liberal” dictator to “democratic government lacking in liberalism.” While Hayek’s views of the Pinochet regime have generated much controversy, surprisingly little has been written about Hayek’s defense of transitional dictatorship. Making use of previously un-translated foreign language archival material, this paper helps shed light on Hayek’s views of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, transitional dictatorship, and the Pinochet regime as well as helping to separate Hayekian ‘fact’ from Hayekian ‘fiction’.

The Mad Dream of a Libertarian Dictatorship, por Jesse Walker (Reason):

[A] state that tortured its opponents, censored the press, and imprisoned and murdered people for their political views. Hayek may have "prefer[red] to sacrifice democracy" if the alternative was "to do without liberty," but Pinochet restricted liberty in intolerable ways. The general wasn't even consistent in his commitment to economic freedom: He helped bring on a recession by fixing the peso's exchange rates; his regime's record is littered with bailouts, corruption, and other forms of crony capitalism; and he regulated labor tightly. (Pinochet initially banned unions altogether, and after they were legalized he still outlawed sympathy strikes, prohibited voluntary closed-shop contracts, and restricted what issues could be covered when unions negotiated with employers. And then there was his tendency to lock up labor leaders.) Hayek didn't defend those incursions on freedom, but there's no sign he expressed any concern about them either.

Prémios Nobel da Paz que mais crianças mataram?

Less Antman, na Convenção do "Libertarian Party": "[Obama] holds the record for the most children killed by a Nobel Peace Prize winner."

Roderick T. Long:  "I have my doubts about the last statistic, though; remember that Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Mikhail Gorbachev were all winners as well. Admittedly most of their killings were committed before rather than after winning the prize, but Kissinger still got a good score in afterward, though admittedly as an advisor rather than a direct commander."

Eu acrescentaria Menachen Begin (na categoria dos que mataram antes ou depois). De qualquer maneira Obama está numa categoria única - praticamente todas as pessoas que ele, directa ou indirectamente, mandou matar foi depois de ter sido nomeado para o Nobel (recordo que embora tenha recebido o prémio no final de 2009, as propostas ao comité Nobel tiveram que ser apresentadas até aos primeiros meses de 2009, o que quer dizer que ele foi sugerido para Nobel ainda antes ou pouco depois de tomar posse; isso, ou então o Comité violou os seus regulamentos para lhe poder dar o Nobel).

Parques Infantis em Nova Iorque

Reimagining Recreation, por James Trainor (Cabinet Magazine):

 it was one of his playgrounds, one of the safe, drab, battleship-gray ones whose WPA-era design had changed little since Moses assumed power as New York City’s parks commissioner in 1934 (during his twenty-six-year reign, 650 playgrounds were built). The banal swing-set. The bone-jarring seesaw. The galvanized slide. The joyless sprinkler. Each static feature was set far apart from the others, as if to avoid cross-contamination of respective functions, all of it embedded in a vast expanse of summer-blistered asphalt and concrete. I was five years old and with a sizable gash in my forehead, blood streaming down my face (eight stitches, lots of iodine, Roosevelt Hospital emergency room); it was my first and last major mishap in a New York playground, one that instantly implanted a lifelong phobia of pebble-dashed concrete. Along with asphalt (a “resilient” surface, Moses once proudly explained, that prevents children from “digging and eliminates dust”), it was the most unlikely play surface ever concocted by bureaucratic city planners charged with the safety of Gotham’s young. (An artificial agglomerate, it was thought to give traction to little feet running through sprinkler basins, but had the added benefit of acting like a human cheese-grater for unexpectedly airborne kids.) 

The obvious irony in all this was that this standard-issue trauma did not occur in what the kids in my Upper West Side neighborhood fondly nicknamed “the dangerous playground” just up the hill—the one that called out with its siren song of massive timbered ziggurats and stepped pyramids with wide undulating slides, the vertiginous fire-pole plunging though tiered treehouses, the Indiana Jones-style rope bridge, the zip line, the Brutalist-Aztec watercourses, and tunnel networks. There, I received not so much as a scratch. And there wasn’t just one dangerous playground; these so-called adventure playgrounds were sprouting up everywhere, siphoning off, Pied-Piper-like, any kid with a scrap of derring-do suddenly bored to death with the old playgrounds, places that now had all the grim appeal of a municipal parking lot. (...)

Almost overnight, Dattner and Friedberg became the Young Turks of radical urban playground design, a professional discipline that hadn’t even existed until their respective projects somewhat inadvertently invented it. The act of designing for children suddenly gained an urbane, avant-garde hipness. The two men preferred the term playscape, an important distinction auguring the end of play as a series of dull interactions with one isolated object after another and offering a new conception of creative play as a fluid, freeform, open-ended map of imaginative experiences and sets of decisions, outcomes, and strategies—a differentiation that reflected a revolutionized understanding of the vital importance of play in mental and physical development. Inspired by the work of pioneering child psychologists Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, among others, and their theories regarding the connection between cognitive development, adaptive intelligence, and play, Dattner and Friedberg both designed environments to unleash children’s natural instincts to choreograph their own experiences through a non-prescribed network of features enabling individual exploration, social interaction, and a dynamic sense of growing mastery over a variety of challenges. Play, as Friedberg noted in his 1970 book Play and Interplay, was not merely an “expenditure of excess energy,” as previous generations had been accustomed to treating it. (...)

Bold, geometric, and unapologetically monumental, the new playscapes were everything the dull and instantly outmoded playgrounds were not. They were the rebellious New Left’s answer to the authoritarian WPA steamroller approach to public recreation. Like the civic awakening that took place a decade before, the new landscapes were about self-empowerment rather than over-determining, one-size-fits-all behaviors. While each of the new play environments was unique, they were constructed using a budget-conscious inventory of inexpensive and durable materials: cobblestones, bricks, telephone pole timbers, nautical rope, wooden planking, galvanized metal pipes, beach sand, formed concrete. (...)


By the mid-1960s, activist neighborhood groups and politicized residents were flexing newfound muscle, working in parallel to the city and circumventing red-tape to get what they wanted by attracting philanthropists and foundations, raising private funds, rallying supporters, and hiring designers. In preparation for his 67th Street adventure playground, Dattner drew from his own anthropological research on how contemporary children played in New York, both inside and outside defined playgrounds. After consulting with various experts on childhood development, he led multiple workshops and meetings with neighborhood parents to build consensus, support, and a sense of collaborative involvement with the community. While the bulk of the $85,000 budget was underwritten by the Lauder Foundation, the rest was raised over the course of 1965–1966 though block parties, school bake-sales, and, as Dattner fondly recalls, a spirited picnic in the park accompanied by a folk-rock band of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. By the time the formed concrete was dry, the community felt like it had always been there, that it belonged to them.(...)

1990s  

But now it is clear that not everyone loved it, or at least cared enough to stop its destruction. The heyday of utopian playscapes didn’t, in the end, last very long—a little more than a decade. And then it was over. And most traces of the modern landscapes that formed an archipelago of play opportunities from Bed-Stuy to the Bronx were obliterated. Tunnels were bricked up. Volcano hatches welded shut. Water features drained. Play leaders fired. Gates shut.

The adventure playgrounds were undone in part by the social ills they were idealistically created to address. The city’s fiscal implosion in the 1970s led to a withdrawal of funding for adequate maintenance and supervision, and to the somewhat faulty perception among a bewildered public increasingly fearful of a chaotic atmosphere of crime, vandalism, and drug abuse that the playscapes themselves were to blame for their misuse. Innovations once championed were now seen as part of the problem. Every syringe or condom rumored to have been found in a sandbox, every urban legend of molesters and junkies lurking in the tunnels, led to the conviction that the designs themselves had failed and were actively threatening the city’s children. If public space is seen as permissive rather than liberating, then each tumble, bruise, and scrape is symptomatic of an encroaching anarchy. Not coincidentally, by the 1990s the culture of parenting had changed, reflecting a broad shift in expectations about safety and danger. The elimination of risk and chance, not only from play but from nearly every aspect of a child’s lived experience, seemed an attainable societal goal. The subsequent fear of litigation and increasingly stringent federal safety codes tipped the balance and the playgrounds suffered a slow, largely unsung death by closure, “upgrading,” and invasive renovation.

[Via Jesse Walker / Reason Hit and Run]

Secessão- o regresso dos cananeus

via i-online Síria. A criação de um Estado para alauitas está em marcha. De acordo com membros da oposição síria e académicos especialistas na região, a fidelidade ao líder e às crenças é muito bonita mas só quando tudo lhes corre de feição, e o mais provável é que não lutem até à última gota pelo regime. Em vez disso, vão tentar escapar para o noroeste do país, rumo às montanhas de Djebel Ansari e às cidades costeiras de Latakia e Tartus, de onde são originários. Apesar de instalada no poder, pouco se sabe sobre as origens da comunidade alauita. Alguns especialistas acreditam que ela descende dos cananeus (por volta de 1400 a. C.), povo que levava uma vida isolada nas regiões montanhosas e, por isso, preservou antigos rituais pagãos. Em seguida foram influenciados pelo cristianismo e pelo islão, e só na Idade Média é que adoptaram a língua árabe e aderiram à fé muçulmana (xiita), mas nunca se misturando. Com o passar dos tempos e como resultado dessa não integração, os alauitas acabaram, de acordo com Mahmud A. Faksh, autor do ensaio “The Alawi Community of Syria: A New Dominant Political Force”, por se tornar uma seita separada que mantém crenças alegadamente secretas e apenas conhecidas de um círculo de iniciados.(...) Por isso, a única forma de os alauitas sobreviverem na Síria está na “criação de um Estado” independente que, segundo Abdel Halim Khaddam, vice-presidente sírio de 1984 a 2005, se converteu “quase numa certeza”

NATO encouraging unrest in Syria: Webster Tarpley

Crise de dívida? Ou o contrário?

The World Is Experiencing The Opposite Of A Sovereign Debt Crisis, por Joe Weisenthal (Business Insider):

The problems of Spain, Italy, and Greece are often pointed to as being somehow bleeding-edge, canaries in the coalmine that serve as warnings to other governments of what might happen if they don't get their acts together.

But the real story today is just the opposite. The world is experiencing whatever the reverse of a sovereign debt crisis is, as borrowing costs for government are plummeting EVERYWHERE. (...)

You might be tempted to say, well, okay but the Fed is manipulating rates, or that the US is just the "cleanest dirty shirt" but both of these explanations fail when you look at the wide sweep of borrowing costs around the world. (...)

France (which is thought of as a beautiful fiscal model) is seeing its 10-year borrowing costs at 2.228%.
Here are the yields on some other 10-year Treasuries around the world.

Japan: 0.778%
Germany: 1.26%
UK: 1.549%
Sweden: 1.285%
Finland: 1.501%
Canada: 1.635%

(...)

None of this is actually "good" news.

What this essentially means is that there's a lot of money out there that sees no productive investments in the real world, and thus people are willing to stick it with entities that promise them a very meager return.
But it is a good reminder that the crisis is basically the exact opposite of what so many mainstream commenters say it is.

Bruce Springsteen - THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND (audio) - 1980

Woody Guthrie, 100 anos

A direita e a esquerda face ao "poder dos bairros"

 All Power to the Neighborhoods, por Jesse Walker (Reason Hit and Run):

One of the great forgotten left/right/libertarian crossover crusades of the last half-century was the Neighborhood Power movement of the 1960s and '70s, which called for devolving as much power as possible to the most granularly local level. I'm glad to see the alliance attracting attention from a professional historian, in Benjamin Looker's Journal of Urban History article "Visions of Autonomy." Looker is particularly interested in the roles played by Milton Kotler, a man of the left, and Karl Hess, a libertarian. (...)

* When Jimmy Carter's White House wooed the movement, by contrast, parts of the Democratic coalition worried that "community control" was code for "an agenda of aggrieved blue-collar whites who sought to exclude people of color from their local schools and neighborhoods." Back when the Panthers were riding high, the phrase community control had one set of connotations; in the wake of the busing battles, it had another. Indeed, "By 1978, NAACP chief Benjamin Hooks was fretting that the very word neighborhood had come to stand exclusively for white urban districts." (This wasn't a simple black/white split. Looker doesn't mention it, but a 1975 National Opinion Research Center poll found 53 percent of American blacks opposed to busing -- a sign that much of the black community still liked the idea of local control, even if mainline civil rights leaders were warier.)

* The leftist Institute for Policy Studies was deeply interested in these ideas in the 1960s and '70s. Kotler was a fellow there, Hess participated in many of the institute's activities, and the group sponsored a lot of decentralist projects. These days, by contrast, urban devolution hardly seems to be on the IPS radar screen at all. (...)

Elsewhere not in Reason: I discussed some similar issues from an earlier era, including the precursors to the '70s debates about localism and race, when I wrote this piece about Saul Alinsky.

Obama Game of Drones

Footage of Anwar Al-awlaki in October 2001 discussing the deaths of innocent civilians in the U.S. and Middle East.

Awlaki, a U.S. citizen born in New Mexico, was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011. Al-awlaki was on the CIA’s hit list, signed off by the Obama Administration, for 17 months prior to his assassination. No evidence was ever presented against him in court, his citizenship was never revoked, and he was given no opportunity to exercise his constitutionally-guaranteed rights to due process and a fair trial.

Nota: Não fiz uma busca sobre as actividades e opiniões expressas de Anwar Al-awlaki depois desta aparição. Ainda assim é a execução extra-judicial de um cidadão americano que estamos a falar. #change.

Resultados do trabalho pago à peça

A direita (ou, pelo menos, a direita actual) gosta muito de falar em "mérito", "pagamento de acordo com os resultados", etc.

Mas, depois, perante o que acontece com a aplicação prática desses princípios (nomeadamente um sistema posto em prática pelo Ministério da Saúde em que os profissionais são pagos, por operação feita, para operar doentes que não são atendidos a tempo noutros hospitais) ficam escandalizados (via jugular).

[Ainda por cima é um sistema em que acho que o doente recebe um cheque e pode escolher onde quer ser operado - não é a tal "liberdade de escolha" que tanto defendem para a saúde e para a educação?]

De novo, um "personal disclosure": eu trabalho nesse hospital e conheço o clínico referido.

Multiplicadores, deficits, etc.

Alí em baixo, o CN escreve:

Se estamos a falar de "por mais dinheiro a trabalhar que estava parado" voltamos à questão de que dinheiro parado ou a trabalhar só tem efeitos duradouros no nível geral (seja o que isso for) de preços nominais e não na actividade económica.

A grande questão é quanto tempo duram os efeitos não-duradoros de "por dinheiro parado a trabalhar" ou de "parar dinheiro que estava a trabalhar" - a longo prazo é de esperar que isso apenas altere os preços nominais, mantendo na mesma o valor real do dinheiro em circulação; mas até essa mudança de preços ocorrer, essas oscilações entre dinheiro "parado"/"a circular" deverão causar alguns efeitos na economia real.

Ora, quanto tempo é o "não-duradouro"? Dias? Semanas? Meses? Anos? É que "se uma carrada de gente guardar o dinheiro no colchão, os preços descem em poucos dias e a economia volta ao nível normal" não é exactamente a mesma coisa que "se uma carrada de gente guardar o dinheiro no colchão, os preços descem em meia dúzia de anos e a economia volta ao nível normal".

No fundo, a polémica na macroeconomia nos últimos 60 ou 70 anos gira à volta disto - o nível geral de preços ajusta-se quase instantaneamente a choques na procura ou demora uma carrada de tempo, ao nível de anos?

Uma velha discussão sobre "boas" e "más" ditaduras

Dictatorships & Double Standards (1979), por Jean Kirkpatrick, defendendo que os EUA deveriam apoiar os regimes "autoritários" contra os "totalitários, versus The United States and Third World Dictatorships: A Case for Benign Detachment (1985), por Ted Carpenter (do Cato Institute), defendendo uma política de neutralidade face às ditaduras dos Terceiro Mundo (independentemente da sua cor política).

É uma discussão antiga e largamente ultrapassada (se calhar muitos dos leitores nem eram nascidos quando os artigos foram escritos), mas não deixa de ser interessante.

Hayek, Pinochet e Salazar

Hayek von Pinochet, por Corey Robin (via José Pedro Monteiro).

Além do apoio de Hayek a regimes autoritários, o autor chama a atenção a atenção para outro aspecto interessante - como contra as suas próprias teorias da "ordem espontãnea", Hayke acava na prática por ser um construtivista:

But, it seems to me, in the course of defending Pinochet and Salazar—and the whole idea of temporary dictatorship— Hayek was prepared to entertain an even deeper betrayal of his own stated beliefs. As he said to Sallas in 1981, when any “government is in a situation of rupture, and there are no recognized rules, rules have to be created.” That is what a dictator does: create the rules of social and political life. (Again, Hayek is not referring to a situation of civil war or anarchy; he’s talking about a social democracy in which the government pursues “the mirage of social justice” through administrative and increasingly discretionary means.)

Yet Hayek is famous—arguably most famous—for his notion that the rules of social order are neither known nor made; they are tacit and inherited.(...)

Hayek was hardly the first conservative intellectual to write paeans to the slow accumulated wisdom of the ages by day, only to  praise Jacobin interventions of the right by night. Edmund Burke, I’ve argued, did much the same thing. Hayek even went so far as to defend his preferred brand of politics as a kind of dogmatic utopianism.

A successful defence of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concessions to expediency.

Utopia, like ideology, is a bad word today…But an ideal picture of a society which may not be wholly achievable, or a guiding conception of the overall order to be aimed at, is nevertheless not only the indispensable precondition of any rational policy, but also the chief contribution that science can make to the solution of the problems of practical policy.

How one squares Hayek’s praise of dictatorship with his conception of a spontaneous order, I’m not yet sure. But with his vision of an unmoved mover knowingly and forcibly creating rules, by design, from a lawless firmament (not to mention his conception of democratic drift), Hayek puts himself within the orbit of Carl Schmitt, with whom he maintained a running dialogue, and who famously described the moment when a new order is brought into being—a new order of rules and routines—as a “an absolute decision created out of nothingness,” as the moment when “the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism [the democratic state] that has become torpid by repetition.”

Eu acrescentaria que andar a mandar cópias dos seus livros a Salazar e Pinochet acompanhados de notas recomendando que estes modelassem os seus regimes de acordo com os referidos livros é do mais "construtivista" que há.

[Ainda a respeito de "ordem espontânea" e "construtivismo", ver este meu post de 2008]

Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012)

[Em "O Comboio dos Duros"]

Re: Falácias argumentativas no debate sobre o défice II

João Miranda:

Uma crítica muito frequente ao governo é que não é possível reduzir o défice com austeridade porque a receita baixa. O que se alega é que por cada 1000 euros cortados o Estado perde mais de 1000 euros em taxas e impostos.

.

É fácil de perceber que isto é falso. O Estado cobra cerca de 50% de taxas e impostos sobre o PIB. Supondo que cada 1000 euros de despesa geram X vezes de PIB quanto é que tem que ser X para que o Estado perca 1000 euros de receita? A resposta  é 1/0,5.=2. Ou seja,  1000 euros de despesa teriam que gerar 2*1000=2000 euros de PIB para que o Estado perdesse 50%*2000=1000 euros de receita.

.

Este multiplicador de 2 implicaria que se aumentássemos a despesa em 1% seria possível aumentar o PIB em 2%. Se aumentássemos a despesa em 2% seria possível aumentar o PIB em 4%. Qualquer governo conseguiria aumentar o crescimento para valores chineses limitando-se para isso a gastar mais. Como é fácil de ver este multiplicador de 2 é uma miragem, sendo este muito provavelmente inferior a 1.

O João Miranda parece estar a esquecer-se de uma coisa - a teoria que diz que a despesa tem efeitos "multiplicadores" (porque se se gasta 1000 euros em qualquer coisa, a pessoa que ganhou esses 1000 euros vai gastar parte noutra coisa qualquer, e a pessoa que ganhou esses, digamos, 700 euros irá gastar 500 noutra coisa, e que recebe esses 500 vai gastar uns 300 ainda noutra coisa, de forma que temos um aumento de rendimento de 1000 + 700 + 500 + 300 + ....) considera que essas efeitos só se verificam quando a economia está a funcionar abaixo do pleno emprego. Portanto, a tentativa de redução ao absurdo de JM não faz sentido - se a teoria do multiplicador estiver correcta, um governo só conseguiria taxas de crescimento chinesas gastando muito se o desemprego fosse altíssimo (e mesmo assim esse crescimento apenas duraria até ao desemprego ficasse em valores baixos).

Pondo a coisa de outra maneira - há duas formas de fazer crescer uma economia: ou aumentando a produtividade de cada trabalhador, ou pondo mais gente a trabalhar. Os defensores da tese do multiplicador dizem que o que a despesa estimula o crescimento pela via do aumento da mão-de-obra (e dos recursos em geral) empregada, logo é evidente que essa teoria não implica que uma continuada despesa pública elevada leva a um crescimento económico continuado (se o crescimento é suposto ocorrer via diminuição do desemprego, o aumento da despesa só originará cresciment enquanto houver desemprego).

Ideias retorcidas

Após semanas de especulação que talvez o governo se estivesse a perparar para ir ao subsídio de Natal dos privados porque o déficit parece que pouco melhora, o TC delibera, por larga maioria, que o corte dos subsidios aos trabalhadores do Estado será inconstitucional se não for também aplicado aos privados.

Browsers e personalidade

The Big Five Personality Traits and Internet Browser Choice: A Brief Report [pdf]:

 

Será de esperar que os utilizadores do IE gostem mais de cães e os do Firefox de gatos?

O que é exactamente um "funcionário público"?

Palpita-me que parte disto tem a ver com o facto da expressão "funcionário público" não ter um significado bem definido. Conforme os contextos pode significar:

- Trabalhador contratado ao abrigo do RCTFP com vículo de "nomeação" (actualmente, penso que se aplica apenas a policias e militares)

- Trabalhador contratado ao abrigo do RCTFP com vinculo de "nomeação" ou de "contrato sem termo"

- Todos os trabalhadores contratados ao abrigo de RCTFP

- Trabalhador do Estado com "vínculo" (o que engloba os trabalhadores do RCTFP com "nomeação" ou "contrato sem termo" e mais os trabalhadores contratados ao abrigo do Código do Trabalho com "contrato sem termo")

- Todos os trabalhadores do Estado, tanto os contratados ao abrigo do RCTFP como do CT

[Personal disclosure - eu sou um funcionário público de acordo com as duas últimas definições]

Para mais, além dos vários vínculos, parece-me que, em português corrente, a expressão "funcionário público" parece-me associada a grupos profissionais especificos - mais exactamente, desconfio que o significado coloquial da "funcionário público" refere-se, essencialmente, à carreira de "Assistente Técnico" (o nome que no Estado se dá aos empregados de escritório e afins). P.ex, não é raro ler/ouvir-se alguêm a dizer mal dos "funcionários públicos" e depois acrescentar "Com «funcionários públicos» não estou a falar de professores, nem de médicos, nem de enfermeiros, estou a falar do pessoal das repartições".

Mesmo em termos de auto-identificação, isso acontece - quando se pergunta a um professor/médico/enfermeiro/electricista qual a sua profissão, provavelmente ele responde "sou professor/médico/enfermeiro/electricista"; a mesma pergunta feita a um assistente técnico muitas vezes dá como resposta "sou funcionário público" (parte da razão poderá ser porque, fora do contexto da função pública, ninguém iria perceber uma resposta "sou assistente técnico"; aliás, se há um grupo profissional - no Estado ou no privado - que não tem um nome claro para se identificar são os "empregados de escritório"; nas empresas também costumam ter designações rocambolescas que ninguém percebe muito bem o que é - p.ex., na Portugal Telecom já foram "Técnicos de Exploração de Telecomunicações").

[Personal disclosure II - embora não seja assistente técnico, faço mais ou menos o mesmo tipo de trabalho que um assistente técnico, misturado com trabalho de economista e de informático].

Os cortes nos subsidios dos "funcionários públicos"

Há quem (p.ex., o António Lobo Xavier disse isso há minutos na SIC Notícias) diga que não existe nenhuma desigualdade nos cortes dos subsídios de férias e Natal terem sido só sobre os "funcionários públicos", já que estes gozam à partida de "segurança no emprego", ao contrário dos trabalhadores do sector privado.

Independentemente de tudo o mais, convêm lembrar que o referido corte nos subsídios foi aplicada a todos os trabalhadores do Estado e das empresas públicas, independentemente de serem "nomeados", "contratados sem termo", "contratados a termo certo" ou "contratados a termo incerto" (que segurança no emprego por aí além têm os "contratados a termo certo" ou "incerto"?), e, já agora, independentemente de terem sido contratados ao abrigo do "Regime do Contrato de Trabalho em Funções Públicas" [pdf] ou ao abrigo do "Código do Trabalho" (estes últimos, pelo menos legalmente, têm os mesmo direitos que os trabalhadores do sector privado).

[post publicado no Vias de Facto; podem comentar lá]

Os fumadores são um custo para o Estado?

The smoking ban – why it should be repealed, por Tom Winnifrith:

The economic arguments about smoking are not as clear cut as the health Nazis would have us believe. Yes, the NHS spends a lot treating those with smoking related illnesses. But we smokers save the NHS and the State a huge sum by dying earlier than we should. It is the health fascists who linger on into their nineties, requiring ever greater care as Alzheimer’s sets in, who cost the State a packet. Meanwhile, every time I buy another 20 death weeds I am making a large contribution to the State via excise duty. On balance, having a large numbers of smokers is probably good for the State’s finances.

A Irlanda "regressou aos mercados"?

Na sequência disto, começa a dizer-se por aí que "a Irlanda já regressou aos mercados".

Convém notar que o que a Irlanda fez foi, pela primeira vez nos últimos anos, fazer uma venda de dívida a 3 meses (isto é, pedir um empréstimo que irá ser pago daqui a 3 meses), coisa que tanto Portugal como a Grécia têm feito com regularidade.

É verdade que, num sentido mais literal, podemos dizer que a Irlanda "regressou aos mercados", mas então (se formos por esse sentido literal) Portugal e a Grécia se calhar nunca "saíram dos mercados".

Mas no sentido em que a expressão "regressar aos mercados" é regularmente utilizada, nomeadamente em frases do género "Portugal vai regressar aos mercados em 201..." (referindo-se a dívida de longo prazo) a Irlanda continua tão "fora do mercado" como Portugal e a Grécia.

Jornalistas sem deontologia

Exposed: the severe ethical breaches of superhero journalists, por Ed Young:

Clark Kent
When it comes to journalistic ethics, Mr Kent is not so super after all. He regularly reports about himself without disclosing as much. He deceives his employers by moonlighting during working hours as a doer of derring, leaping his contractual obligations in a single bound. Worst of all, he uses the privileged inside information that he gleans as a journalist for his own personal gain during his extracurricular activities. Here is a man who is faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, and about as transparent as either of those.

 Lois Lane
Seemingly strong-willed and single-minded, Ms Lane superficially seems like a role model for aspiring journalists. But closer investigation reveals a troubling tendency to sit on stories that clearly belong in the public domain, especially when it benefits her friends. She has won a Pulitzer for reporting about a source who she has long been romantically involved with – a fact that remains undisclosed. Sympathetic readers will see a journalist torn between personal emotions and professional duty. Others will see a woman who is not just hiding the location of weapons of mass destruction from her readers, but is actually sleeping with one. (...)

Peter Parker
Imbued with the proportional strength, speed and ethical judgment of a spider, Parker has made a career of taking photos of himself in a mask and selling them to his employers. Some might argue that Parker is merely a symptom of the poor wages awarded to photojournalists, and the intense pressures they face (“I want pictures! Pictures of Spider-Man,” his editor regularly exhorts). Amid such a cutthroat environment, this promising talent has clearly learned that with great power comes great ethical lapses.

"É favor não pisar na relva"

No Blasfémias, PMF, a respeito dos casos "Sócrates" e "Relvas", escreve:

 há, apesar de tudo, uma diferença que me parece fundamental entre os casos referidos, para além daquelas que são notadas no post de H. Matos. Ou seja, apesar de ser indiferente que, enquanto político,  A, B ou C seja ou não dr., engº ou arquitecto (por exemplo), que se saiba e que seja plausível, nunca o Ministro (ou o cidadão) Miguel Relvas utilizou o dito título académico para o exercício de actividades cujo pressuposto seja, precisamente, o domínio de conhecimentos técnico-científicos supostamente certificados por esse mesmo título. Até ver e que se saiba – e nem sequer sobre isso foi questionado –  também não mentiu sobre nenhuma circunstância do seu cv académico. Não desenhou ou assinou projectos para licenciamento de casas em Tomar ou noutra localidade qualquer, nem ocupou cargos técnicos ou na administração pública cujos requisitos necessários integrassem uma determinada licenciatura… Digo eu, ou estarei a ver mal as coisas?!

Está a ver mal a coisa - que eu saiba, ninguém põe em causa que Sócrates tenha um bacharelato como "Engenheiro Técnico", que foi o diploma que serviu de base para os projectos que fez e para o seu emprego na câmara da Covilhã; o que é questionado é a validade da sua licenciatura como "Engenheiro", que penso ter sido "obtida" numa altura em que ele já era um político em full-time.

O problema do cálculo económico numa economia planificada (aplicada a um livro de FC...)

Red Plenty debated, por Ken MacLeod:

A lively discussion of Francis Spufford's novel Red Plenty (about which I've enthused before) on the academic blog Crooked Timber has just about wrapped. Participants have looked at the book from many angles. One of the most intriguing contributions was by Cosma Shalizi, on the mathematical feasibility of the linear programming advocated by the book's central character as a solution to the problem of central planning. (Shalizi responds to responses here.)

My take, amended from one of my own comments:

In the 1970s I thought that central planning combined with democratic control along the lines argued for by (e.g.) Ernest Mandel was possible and desirable. Towards the end of the decade I stumbled upon the economic calculation argument, as briefly stated by David Ramsay Steele in a readable pamphlet. I didn’t understand it fully but I kept worrying at the problem it posed. In the 1980s I read Geoffrey Hodgson’s The Democratic Economy, and Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism, which made some socialist sense of the same argument.

Recently I’ve been interested in the more radical market socialism proposed by David Schweickart. The only serious socialist arguments against market socialism are those of Paul Cockshott et al for a democratic, cybernetically planned economy – which I don’t have the mathematics to follow in detail, but which I keep dragging to the attention of anyone who does.

Meanwhile, in my own neck of the woods, the Scottish Socialist Party offers a 12-point plan for a ‘Scottish socialist republic’, one of whose 12 points is:

‘Supermarket prices will be frozen.’

Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

[Apesar do nome, o referido Scottish Socialist Party é o equivalente local do Bloco de Esquerda, não do PS]

Investimentos contra-ciclicos?

The Greek countercyclical asset, por Tyler Cowen:

A clerk said books on economics and do-it-yourself guides were selling briskly, as were escapist thrillers and philosophy, especially works by Arthur Schopenhauer, known for his pessimism and his conviction that human experience is not rational or understandable.

[A passagem é uma citação é de um artigo do New York Times sobre a Grécia]

O PS devia pegar nisto

Miguel Relvas fez licenciatura num ano.

Educação sexual conservadora

When the Right Helps to Write the Sex Education Curriculum, por Jesse Walker (Reason Hit and Run):

Under the standard stereotype, liberals produce the sex ed curriculum and conservatives get alarmed at the things their kids are learning. But in many states today it's the right that's dictating much of the contents of those classes and it's the left that's getting unnerved. Salon staffer Tracy Clark-Flory, for example, is distressed at (...) a Tennessee bill that has the usual aim of abstinence initiatives -- to "exclusively and emphatically" promote abstinence until marriage. (...)

Apparently, public institutions created with one set of values in mind can be captured by people with a different set of values. You may want to bear this in mind the next time you find yourself creating a public institution.

Elsewhere in Reason: Ralph Raico predicted way back in 1974 that sex education would take a turn to the right.

Desemprego e segurança no emprego

Employment protection and jobs, por Chris Dillow:

(...) Empirical work has struggled to find a link between employment protection laws and unemployment. For example, the OECD has found (pdf) that:

There appears to be little or no association between employment protection legislation strictness and overall unemployment

although it did find that such laws raise long-term unemployment.

And Stephen Nickell found (pdf) that employment protection laws were "negligible and completely insignificant” as a cause of cross-country differences in unemployment in 1980s and early 90s.

So, why is Tim’s intuition at odds with the facts?

It’s because there are a couple of mechanisms operating in the other direction.

If there were no employment protection at all, workers would gain less from staying with the same firm for a long time. Ceteris paribus, they would therefore have more incentive to leave. This would have two effects:

1. To retain staff, employers might have to pay more. This would tend to reduce employment. To put this in a way Tim would prefer, the incidence of employment protection laws falls upon workers in the form of lower wages.

2. Workers would have less incentive to invest in firm-specific skills. This would tend to reduce the firm’s efficiency and hence prevent it growing. (...)

Because of these offsetting mechanisms, some research (pdf) has found “an inverse U relationship between employment protection and economic growth”:

From the point of view of per capita growth of GDP…employment protection in the early 1990s was too low in countries like Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland, the UK and the US

Diga-se que o último estudo referido por Dillow (Welfare improving employment protection, por Michele Belot, Jan Booneyand e Jan van Oursz) não faz qualquer referência a Portugal (de forma que não sabemos se eles nos incluiriam nos que têm protecção no emprego de mais ou de menos).

Notícias de Verão

A Irlanda está a sair da crise (por qualquer razão que eu ainda não percebi muito bem, todos os Verões surge esta notícia, desde 2010).

Perfil psicologico de fãs de gatos e cães

Personalities of Self-Identified “Dog People” and “Cat People”, por Gosling, Samuel D.; Sandy, Carson J.; Potter, Jeff (Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals), analisando a personalidade de fãs de gatos e cães à luz dos chamados "5 factores da personalidade":

Alleged personality differences between individuals who self-identify as “dog people” and “cat people” have long been the topic of wide-spread speculation and sporadic research. Yet existing studies offer a rather conflicting picture of what personality differences, if any, exist between the two types of person. Here we build on previous research to examine differences in the Big Five personality dimensions between dog people and cat people. Using a publicly accessible website, 4,565 participants completed the Big Five Inventory and self-identified as a dog person, cat person, both, or neither. Results suggest that dog people are higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, but lower on Neuroticism and Openness than are cat people. These differences remain significant even when controlling for sex differences in pet-ownership rates. Discussion focuses on the possible sources of personality differences between dog people and cat people and identifies key questions for future research.

[O resto do artigo é pago]

Por este estudo (que penso já ter sido referido algures numa discussão n'O Insurgente pelo "Mentat" ), os ailurofilos tenderão a ser introvertidos, nervosos, conflituosos, imaginativos e com ideias invulgares e pouco responsáveis/esforçados; vendo bem, talvez não seja muito diferente disto.

Por outro lado, se fôssemos cruzar este estudo com este, a tendência seria para alguém que goste de cães ser de direita nas questões fracturantes (tanto via alta "Conscienciosidade" como via baixa "Abertura"), e provavelmente também nas económicas, mas de forma menos acentuada (com a "Conscienciosidade", a "Extroversão" e os baixos "Neuroticismo" e "Abertura" a puxar para a direita, e a "Amabilidade" para a esquerda) - talvez um democrata-cristão? De qualquer forma, lança uma nova luz sobre isto.

Outra leitura sobre o assunto: Gatos e Cães (Outubro de 2009)