Thursday, January 29, 2009

Ban censorship

This provocative commercial promoting the vegetarian agenda abandons the arguably moral advantages in favor of the promise of satiating your primal urges. The "racy" ad was originally slated to run on the biggest chicken wing night of the year: the Superbowl. I'm hoping to contribute to the mooting of the censor's decision by making this as popular as I possibly can (which isn't really that popular). Please show this to everyone ever, and their children, and their grandmas. If you're wondering why this video and not another, there's no particular reason. I just feel the need to hate on some censorship right now.

Source: PETA via Huffington Post


'Veggie Love': PETA's Banned Super Bowl Ad

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Certifiable Badass

Neil deGrasse Tyson is, without a doubt, one of the most badass people who have ever walked the earth. He was today's guest on the daily show. He answers questions about Pluto's planetary status and the earth-killing asteroid flying towards us, in a way that minimizes nerdiness and maximizes badditude. To make it even better, I think he looks kind of like Darryl from The Office. Don't take my word for it though, watch this kick ass interview, for it says what words cannot.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

For those late nights...

Last night, my friend Ethan Arave and I found this gem of a video in the comments section of Roger Ebert's mercilessly badass review of Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (an excellent read in and of itself).
It's a debate on the existence of god between God Is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens and I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist co-author Frank Turek.
Both are very well-educated, well-spoken and entertaining.
As a secularist, I tend to think that Hitchens won, but from as unbiased a perspective as I am capable of, I would say that there is no clear winner.
It's about 2 hours long. Grab some buddies and some popcorn and a good time will surely be had by all!

Some thoughts on Healthcare

In an effort to get content on here, I have already sunk to copying and pasting my writing from facebook on here. This is an older note, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't comment.

I've been doing a lot of reading about market-anarchism/free market capitalism vs. a social market democracy recently (it's like a 300 year old debate), and I have to say, they both have compelling arguments.

The philosophy of market anarchism is that the market should remain completely untouched by the government, which only exists to provide protection from force, violence, theft and fraud. In theory, the market will naturally correct itself and reach a Paretol equilibrium which, in economics, simply means that 80% of the wealth will be focused in the richest 20% of the population, which is a much more vertically generous spread than the current distribution of 99% wealth in the top 1%. In a nutshell, market-anarchism says that an economy will 'naturally' evolve to be as efficient as possible (different from obtaining absolute efficiency, which is impossible) by exploiting collective self-interest. Market-anarchists tend to argue that the only real objection to an absolute free market will be a moral or an ethical one.
In a functioning social market democracy, such as Sweden, the role of the government is to ensure an austere socioeconomic condition by providing services and social programs like housing, healthcare, social security, and public education, among others. All of which are paid for by a sharp progressive tax. Despite the large amount of government intervention, an individual can still fulfill capitalist pursuits, although both the risks and the benefits are, arguably, greatly diminished due to the large amount of government interference.
There are plenty of excellent statistical and philosophical arguments as to why neither of these systems would work for a large-scale economy such as ours, but I won't get into those.
I propose instead a marriage of these two seemingly antithetical philosophies, and here's how:
Market-anarchism supposedly works because of a circular supply/demand mentality. I have a demand for money, so I will get a job supplying a service to someone who demands the service. I will then use my supply of money to purchase a service that I demand! Thus the best possible efficiency will be achieved!
This may seem iron-clad (or it might not, but I'm not getting into that) if you can also readily assume that a government will punish at least most corporate criminals, but it's not. There is at least one industry that is an exception to this rule, and that is the health care industry.
The health care industry thrives in a socialized climate because its objective is to serve the populace by doing things like increasing life expectancy, decreasing average hospital visits, curing diseases and practicing preventive medicine, to name a few. In other words, its objective becomes LIMITING demand instead of supplying the demand. This is great for everyone. The surplus that will arise as a result of diminishing demand will help the industry rocket towards the best possible efficiency by funding new medical advances and purchasing better technology.
In a system where hospitals compete with each other, they will lose efficiency because they depend on demand for survival. Take the American pharmaceutical industry for example, which is frequently criticized for its adherence to producing medication that will cure symptoms and not diseases. Curing symptoms is lucrative because it insures that the demand, in this case the disease, will always remain.
Market-anarchists, in my opinion, should start including health care as one of those few things that they're ok with the government controlling, after all if the purpose of the government is to protect against force and violent coercion, shouldn't they also protect the physical and mental faculties of an individual to insure the most efficient self-interest possible?

Why hello

I've got a blog. I will write about stuff. You will (hopefully) comment. It'll just be stuff I find interesting, and stuff I wanna say. Feel free to criticize the content as brutally or as pussily as you think is necessary. The point of this is for me to get better at writing and to hopefully have some fulfilling intellectual discussions about some seriously deep shit. If people like this (and I am totally ready to have no one read this ever) then I will try to produce lots of context. If people don't, then I will probably just spend most of my would-be writing time masturbating instead (that way, everybody wins!).

That's all for now! Ciao