Chris McKenzie Turns Zeno's Paradox Against Itself

The first sections of this post were written by Chris McKenzie and Robert Nasir respectively. I published those sections on March 15, 2016. Below those sections, over time, I added my own thoughts. On Tuesday, May 6, 2025, I added an essay of my own authorship to put everything together.
—Stuart K. Hayashi 

This is Bartolomeo Carduci's fresco of Zeno of Elea (he is the old man leading the young men).

Chris McKenzie explains:

Zeno's Paradox is as follows.  The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno stated that in order to cross a room, one must first cross half the room. In order to cross the remaining half, one must cross half the remaining distance, and so on -- infinitely. Zeno concluded that one can therefore never cross the room.

Let's change Zeno's numbers but keep his intent: In order to cross a room, one must be first cross 99% of the room. In order to cross the remaining 1%, one must cross 99% of the remaining 1%, infinitely.

Zeno has a problem though, and it's one he's smuggled in. Why does Zeno think you can cross 99% of the room? After all, if you treat 99% as a whole, you must first cross 99% of the new whole. The end result is that you can't move at all because in order to move you must first move through 99% of whatever infinitesimally small space you've chosen to move through -- say the first 1% of the distance.

Now to the claim that "nothing is certain" or we can only be 99% certain. It's easy to explode this claim with a single question: Are you sure? However, we can see that the 99% certainty claim suffers from the same problem as Zeno's room: In order to be 99% certain, you must first be 99% of 99% certain. Which is to say, you must be wholly certain of a certain whole (the first 99%).

Or, you could just walk across the room and proudly claim, with 100% certainty, "I did it." 

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Stuart K. Hayashi adds:

As Chris said, we can turn this around on Zeno.

Every fraction is, in another context, one whole. That is, Y may be a fraction of X, but Y is still one whole of Y. If the room is 30 feet across, and I only walk "half that distance," that is 15 feet. But that "half distance" is actually "the entire distance" of another measurement: 15 feet. Therefore, every time you travel a distance, you travel the entirety of that distance. Every measurement is, in at least one context, "100 percent."

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UPDATE  from the Same Day:

Robert Nasir wrote the following comments to me.  I am quoting them here with his permission.

Similarly, if you can travel half the length of a given room, then you can travel what is half of twice the length of the room.

The real issue is the integration of the discrete and the continuous. Everything is discrete. Entities are discrete. The distances they travel (to the extent they're measurable) are discrete.

Mathematics treats space (and time) as continuous. That's fine, it's useful (and arguably necessary) to do so.

But to understand why apparent paradoxes arise, one must never lose sight that math is method, not metaphysics.

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UPDATE: Additional comment from Stuart on January 26, 2018:

I think I have a new way of phrasing this matter:

Zeno's Paradox is based on the false presumption that no measurement can ever be 100 percent.  But the exact opposite is true: every measurement is 100 percent, at least in terms of each measurement being 100 percent of itself.

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UPDATE: Addendum from Stuart on February 9, 2020:

Only today did it occur to me that pointing out that every measurement is “100 percent of itself” is a restatement of “A is A” (here, “1 = 1”).

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UPDATE from Stuart on May 6, 2025 (much longer than the other updates):

After I first published this blog post, I learned that in his Physics, Aristotle himself provided a refutation of Zeno Paradox’s similar to the one I provided above. In fact, the explanation of Zeno’s Paradox in Physics has been, throughout the modern age, an important document through which archaeologists and historians have been aware of this idea having been circulated in ancient Greece.

I will say more explicitly why, years ago, Chris McKenzie started discussing this matter with me over Facebook. The reason is a bromide commonly repeated in the culture, even by scientists and science journalists influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn in the philosophy of science.

The bromide starts by pointing out that when it comes to forming conclusions, we can err. A big reason for this is often that, in forming the conclusion, we had yet to come across a piece of information that would have provided a more-complete understanding. And because we are not omniscient and cannot know everything that can ever be known, it follows there will always be more learn. It then follows that will always be a risk of error in our conclusions. Therefore, concludes the bromide: no principle should be deemed to be absolute, and we can never be a certain of any conclusion. And if we can never be certain of any conclusion, any and every claim to any knowledge is subject to existential doubt, no better than tenuous.

That is what Karl Popper meant in saying, “...we never know what we are talking about.” In Forbes magazine, physics professor and science writer Ethan Siegel insists, “In fact, when it comes to science, proving anything is an impossibility.”

An interpretation such as Siegel’s concedes that scientists do gather evidence, and that, as evidence accumulates for a particular conclusion, we can legitimately grow more confident of that conclusion. However, goes that interpretation, as no one can gain all data ever to exist, complete confidence can never be achieved. In other words, we can never have 100-percent of all information, which means we can never have 100-percent confidence. Ergo, says the argument, even as we can cite additional evidence to become justly more confident in a proposition, actual complete proof of the conclusion will forever elude us.

Being influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, the argument above is often provided in introductory science courses in university. The Forbes writer is far from alone, even among science instructors. I know my introductory biology professor gave lip service to it before moving on to aspects of the lecture — about cells and respiration — that he found more interesting. But when people say, “We can never achieve certainty in the end,” the phrasing is terribly misleading.

When I wrote about this on Facebook in 2016, Chris McKenzie replied to me in a comment post that “We can get more confident, but can never achieve complete confidence” is a variant on Zeno’s Paradox. The same applies to “Something can improve but never reach perfection.” These are variation’s on Zeno’s Paradox because the main message of Zeno’s Paradox is, You can gain increments bringing you closer to 100 percent, but no form of 100 percent shall ever be reached.

Here is how “We can’t be certain” is a variation on Zeno’s Paradox. Isaac Asimov, the famed science-fiction author who was also a trained biochemist, told PBS talk-show host Bill Moyers, “...we can’t be absolutely certain. Science doesn’t purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature.”

Note how Asimov concedes that through science we keep getting closer to the absolute truth. But he warns us that absolute truth itself cannot be reached. Asimov’s statement is a rephrasing of Zeno’s idea that we can get closer to 100 percent but not 100 percent itself. One is “A principle might apply much of the time, but it will never absolute.” Another is “Something can improve, but it will never be perfect.”

Zeno’s Paradox is a fallacy because it is inverse to the truth. The argument is sloppy in terms of how it defines 100 percent, largely conflating 100 percent and completion with infinity. This Paradox is also sloppy in how it treats the meaning of the concept of context.

In reality: in at least one context, every increment is 100 percent. This is because, in at least one context, every quantity is 100 percent. It is 100 percent in that it is 100 percent of itself. That is, “1 = 1.” Phrased differently, “A is A.” That is, every distance traveled is 100 percent of itself. By that same token, a fraction of a Particular Distance C is itself 100 percent of yet another distance, Distance D.

Let us say we are in a room that is 18 feet long (5.4864 meters). And let us revisit Zeno’s Paradox. We want to cross the room from one end to the other. We travel half the distance (9 feet; 2.7432 meters). We then travel half the remaining distance: 4 feet and 6 inches, or 1.3716 meters. Then we travel half the remaining distance again, and again, and so on. We keep inching closer to the desired destination, and yet if in every interval we travel half the remaining distance, we will never reach the desired destination. How, Zeno asked, can we possibly reach the desired end of the room? Again, the point is that we can never reach 100 percent; every distance traveled is a fraction of a distance and not a complete distance. This means we can never attain something that is one whole; we can never attain something that is a single unit; we can only obtain a fraction of that unit.

By now, we see the fallacy. Half the distance of an 18-foot-long room is itself a distance. The nine feet in our first increment (2.7432 meters) may be a mere fraction of the length of the room, but, in another context, it is indeed 100 percent, one whole, and a complete distance — as is any and every quantity. That is why, as quoted above, Robert Nasir cheekily said that if we are allowed only to walk “half a distance,” then he can offer a work-around. It is that we say we will travel half of twice the length of the room. By walking half that distance, we end up walking the entire length of the room.

In Physics, Book 6, Aristotle already spotted this. As he said it, there is no distance traveled “less than itself for it to traverse first...” Hence, any time we travel a distance that is a fraction of another, the distance we have traveled is already a “distance equal to itself.” Yes, “everything that is in motion ... traverses a distance as great as itself.” Hence, every fractional distance we have traveled is, in at least one context, already one “whole.”

The same principle applies to the concepts of certainty, perfection, and absolute. All of those are contextual. By that, I mean that any time we talk rationally of certainty, perfection, and absolute, those are parameters set by a pertinent context. And, within that pertinent context, every one of those can indeed be achieved.

It is a false philosophic presumption that any claim to true knowledge requires infallibility and omniscience. It is the same false philosophic presumption that perfection and absolute are achieved only when not limited to any parameters, so much so that they transcend context. That false presumption can largely be attributed to Plato, who propounded that certainty, perfection, and absolutes could exist only as ideals beyond human capability, with everything observable in human experience necessarily being of inferior stature. In the modern age, Immanuel Kant popularized the presumption that human fallibility precludes certainty and perfection.

Once you toss away the Platonic misconceptions about them, it happens that certainty, absoluteness, and perfection all exist. They exist within their respective proper contexts, and each are defined by that context.

Whether you reach “100 percent” — whether you have a complete unit, as opposed to a fraction of that unit — is determined by the quantity you defined, in the first place, as 100 percent and a complete unit. In his Paradox, Zeno was equivocal about how he defined 100 percent of a particular length. The Paradox’s upshot is that you can never reach 100 percent of any important quantity, but, as we have identified, the half-the-room’s-length you have walked is itself 100 percent of an important quantity.

Zeno’s sloppiness when it comes to his parameters on exactly what quantity is needed to achieve a goal, is mirrored in platitudes about the impossibility of perfection, absoluteness, and certainty. When people say perfection is unachievable, I reply that their interpretation of it is unachievable for the reason that they are talking of a perfection that can be called such only if it transcends all context. Hence, I call this invalid idea one of Platonic perfection, in contrast to what is actually legitimate: contextual perfection. By that, I mean “perfection within a particular practical context” — which is indubitably achievable.

The same applies to absolutes. People say that a principle cannot be absolute because, for it to be absolute, it must apply in any and every context uniformly. That would mean that the principle applies in such a manner that it transcends all context. I call that sort of unachievable absolute the fallacious idea of Platonic absolute. An actual absolute principle is a contextual absolute. It recognizes that a principle applies consistently within its own pertinent context.

Within a particular purview with clearly-defined goals, perfection is attainable. If “perfectly beautiful” and “perfect morally” are defined no more than nebulously, of course those misconceptions of Platonic perfection cannot manifest. As so many people are vague, at best, on what they interpret perfection to be, it is wholly unsurprising that they repeat clichés about how nothing and no one but Jesus is perfect. But suppose your child in school is given an examination of ten math problems. And suppose your child has gotten the correct answer on all ten problems. In that purview, it is entirely legitimate to say that on that exam your child has gotten a score that is perfect.

That every quantity is 100-percent, by the way, is also why people contradict themselves in their proclamation, with implicit certainty — and with the subtext of that this applies as an absolute — that no proclamation should ever be taken as absolutely certain. (Any science-fiction character who shouts, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” must, by his own definition, be a Sith.)

The fallacious idea that we have certainty only through infallibility and omniscience, I identify as the fallacious idea of a Platonic certainty. The foil to that is actual certainty, which is contextual certainty. To achieve a particular life-affirming goal — the pertinent context — we need to have a quantity of knowledge that is sufficient to achieve it. Insofar as applying the pertinent knowledge is consistent in achieving the goal satisfactorily, we are indeed rationally certain of that knowledge. Attaining such rational certainty does not require knowing everything there is to know. It requires only knowing enough that is pertinent to the context and scope in question.

Isaac Asimov elsewhere tells Bill Moyers, “That is really the glory of science. That science is tentative, that it is not certain, that it is subject to change.” Note the conflation of science being “subject to change” with science being uncertain. In light of new information, aspects of scientists’ interpretations are properly subject to change and revision. But that does not preclude contextual certainty. The aspects of conclusions which we gained through rational observation, minding pertinent context — and which continue to withstand challenge repeatedly — are indeed certain.

In the future, we may gain some additional knowledge that provides insight into additional facets of, and nuances regarding, whatever it is we are studying and doing. This new knowledge adds to the knowledge we had already acted upon successfully in the past, and it may give us a new perspective whereby we revise aspects of our prior interpretation. But it does not render, as uncertain, the aspects of our old ideas that we had acted upon successfully in the past and which continue to produce the same results.

Every fraction of Quantity C, is itself one-whole of itself, Quantity D. Perhaps we can imagine a quantity of knowledge that consists of All-Knowledge-That-Can-Be-Had-and-Ever-Can-Be-Had — omniscience — and call that Quantity-of-Knowledge C. And the quantity of knowledge we will accumulate in our lifetimes is only a fraction of that. Ours is Quantity-of-Knowledge D. That Quantity-of-Knowledge D is less than C is not sufficient to render Quantity-of-Knowledge D uncertain. That consideration is the same, in principle, as the fact that our indoor stroll measuring 9 feet, though less than 100 percent of the length of our 18-foot-long room, does not mean that our 9-foot stroll is not 100 percent of any quantity.  

Even if, when it comes to what we think we know at present, in the future we will find aspects mistaken or at least in need of further clarification, that consideration still is not enough to render our Quantity-of-Knowledge D uncertain. The aspects of our Quantity-of-Knowledge D that hold up today, and which continue to hold up in the future, are rationally certain. And insofar as the principles within that knowledge apply consistently within the purview and scope of what we are studying and doing, those principles are absolute.

Thus, the fact that every quantity is 100 percent is something that can be applied to our philosophic guidance over everyday life. For a principle to be absolute in any manner is not contingent upon it applying in every context. It need only be consistent in its own proper context, in its own proper scope. The more dissimilar a new context is from the original, the more it may be that the original principle does not apply to the new context. That does not change the absoluteness of the principle to the original context. Likewise, for you to be legitimately certain in an instance is not contingent upon infallibility of thought and reasoning. Nor is it dependent upon having all knowledge of every pedantic nuance, including knowledge of everything that ever can be discovered. You can legitimately call yourself certain in an instance insofar as your proposition of thought reliably demonstrates itself satisfactorily within, once again, the pertinent context and scope.

Know What's Worse Than Insulting Someone in a Political Argument? Government Force Itself

Stuart K. Hayashi

I sent a pro-immigration tweet to the actor Mark R. Pellegrino, who plays Lucifer on the CW Network's Supernatural.

I typed, "When people whine about Mexicans coming to US w/ gov permission slips, plz show them this doctor:" I meant to type: "When people whine about Mexicans coming to US w/o gov permission slips, plz show them this doctor:" (emphasis added).  I was referring to undocumented immigrants coming to the USA without "government permission slips."  My tweet links to this video about Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, who came to the USA from Mexico illegally as a migrant farm laborer and eventually became a life-saving, world-renowned brain surgeon.

Pellegrino was generous enough to retweet my tweet, and he added his own caption:  "Hey [Donald] Trump. Suck it."

In reply, someone on Twitter lectured Pellegrino to "grow up" based on his "immature comments" concerning Mr. Trump.

Everything else being equal, I would not mind it if, in general, people switched to political rhetoric that was overall less charged, less accusatory, and less altogether insulting. Nonetheless, I think some perspective is in order.

Many impoverished people come to the United States without visas, escaping from drug cartels and kleptocratic governments, and their sole "crime" is the absence of a visa.  And forcibly deporting those people means sending armed men after them.  In comparison, I think Pellegrino telling Trump to "suck it" is quite minor.

Therefore, here is my response:

Humans Stealing Jobs from Robots

Stuart K. Hayashi

In an article titled "Mercedes Boots Robots from the Production Line," Bloomberg Business reports,

Mercedes-Benz offers the S-Class sedan with a growing array of options such as carbon-fiber trim, heated and cooled cupholders and four types of caps for the tire valves, and the carmaker’s robots can’t keep up. 

With customization key to wooing modern consumers, the flexibility and dexterity of human workers is reclaiming space on Mercedes’s assembly lines. . . . 

“Robots can’t deal with the degree of individualization and the many variants that we have today,” Markus Schaefer, the German automaker’s head of production, said at its factory in Sindelfingen, the anchor of the Daimler AG unit’s global manufacturing network. “We’re saving money and safeguarding our future by employing more people.” . . . 

With manufacturing focused around a skilled crew of workers, Mercedes can shift a production line in a weekend instead of the weeks needed in the past to reprogram robots and shift assembly patterns, Schaefer said. During that downtime, production would be at a standstill.

The robots' union is not pleased.

A Right to Privacy Doesn't Extend to Violent Acts, Including Threats of Violence

Any act of violence -- even in self-defense -- has ramifications for everyone in the community. If X threatens violence against Y, there is probable cause to believe X might also be a violent threat to Z as well -- a violent threat to everyone else.   Violence is inherently a public matter, inherently an externality; it cannot properly be privatized and, to use an economics term, the costs of it cannot be fully "internalized."  By that I mean that if X hits Y,and then Y hits X back, it doesn't mean that Y's retaliation has made them both even.  Y's "private" retaliation does not render this a private matter that can be dropped.  No, this remains a public matter because the violence can still escalate.

Anyone who uses violence -- even in self-defense -- is a possible threat to everyone else, and that is why, even when someone uses violence in self-defense, it is right for police and courts to look into the matter and ascertain whether it was indeed self-defense.

And serious threats of violence -- even if not yet acted upon -- are worthy of police attention, as they create probable cause for members of the community to ascertain that the violent threat might be acted upon.  Moreover, if Q goes around falsely accusing R of making a violent threat toward Q, that counts as an initiation of the use of force, as third parties, mistakenly believing they are exercising retaliatory force in defense of Q, may end up being violent toward R, and this would end up being an initiation of the use of force.

Violence and the threat of it are the greatest threat to anyone's liberty; violent threats are what deny someone the freedom of peaceful action.  Moreover, a right to privacy does not extend to someone threatening violence.  That is, if L seriously threatens violence against her own mother, that is something the public has a right to know about, even if L's mother herself tries to dismiss that as something not to be taken seriously.  Even if L's mother dismisses it, other people around L remain potential victims of L if L does not receive proper treatment from mental health professionals or the law.

If you have been threatened with violence, or if it has already been inflicted upon you, you may be justified in fearing that if you come forward to authorities with this information, that it may put you at risk of being subjected to violent reprisals from the assailant.  For that reason, in the short term it may be rational that you tell but a few people about this circumstance and ask them to keep it secret in the foreseeable future.  However, that can only go so far. There is probable cause for the law to inquire as to whether this alleged assailant may pose a violent threat to parties besides you and therefore, in the long run, the protection of every peaceful person's rights requires that this information ultimately be publicly available.  On that basis, a right to privacy does not extend to any credible accusation that you can level about someone either threatening violence or having committed it.

Employee of Anti-GMO Group Writes Article for 'Time'; Doesn't Disclose Affiliation, Doesn't Want to Be Labeled?

Stuart K. Hayashi

As The Corporate Crime Reporter reports rather approvingly, Carey Gillam -- formerly a writer for Reuters -- is presently the research director of the advocacy group U.S. Right to Know.  U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) presses lawmakers to impose GMO labeling laws.  The idea is that if a food product contains ingredients from cultivars that resulted from transgenics (more conventionally known as genetic modification), the food product must be labeled as such.  At present, the absence of such laws has not prevented consumers from finding non-GMO foods; there are food producers who take the initiative to label their own products, voluntarily, "non-GMO" or "organic."

In any case, Time magazine has republished an article by Carey Gillam that repeats a favorite talking point of anti-GMO groups:  that regulatory agencies like the FDA have been too lax on account of their not finding the chemical herbicide glyphosate to be significantly dangerous.  Glyphosate -- better known by Monsanto Corporation's brand name, RoundUp -- is of special interest to anti-GMO groups because of it being used in conjunction with GMO crops:  corn and soybeans that are engineered to be resistant to this herbicide.  These glyphosate-resistant crops are known as RoundUp Ready crops.

RoundUp Ready crops and RoundUp are intended to be a method of addressing the problem of soil erosion.  A major problem farmers face is that of weeds competing against the crops for survival.  Often, weeds take the nutrients in the soil that were intended for the crops.  The result is that the weeds thrive while the crops die.  For much of the twentieth century, farmers fought the weeds through a method called tillage -- they would run tilling machines through the fields that would root out and destroy the weeds as the crops remain firmly planted in the field.  A major drawback to this is that the tilling machines inadvertently erode the soil of much-needed components, making it more difficult to re-use the fields for future planting.

RoundUp (glyphosate) was invented in the late 1900s as an effort at no-till (or less-tilling) agriculture.  If RoundUp is sprayed on weeds, then the weeds can be killed without as much of a need to till the soil, thereby reducing soil erosion.  The drawback of this method is that the glyphosate was not discriminating:  it would often kill both the weeds and crops.  The solution came when genetic engineers invented glyphosate-resistant corn and soy.  If you grow RoundUp Ready corn or soy and spray your fields with glyphosate, you can kill the weeds and reduce soil erosion simultaneously as the crops remain unharmed.

Anti-GMO activists often allege that glyphosate is a toxic carcinogen.  It is true that glyphosate can cause cancer if one is exposed to an inordinately high dosage of it --say,drinking literally a ton of it in one day.  Microscopic doses of it, though, have not been shown to be dangerous.  Even if, over the past 30 years, there has been an increase in the spraying of glyphosate, it happens that, overall, the present standard spraying of chemicals by farmers has been less toxic and less environmentally hazardous than the methods of the early 1900s that the present spraying has replaced.  The older methods consisted of applying much more toxic substances.  Anti-GMO activists wish to convince the public that glyphosate is significantly more toxic and dangerous than the FDA and most crop specialists have let on, which would mean that consumers and farmers should give preference to non-GMO and organic produce.

In any case, Time published an article by an employee of USRTK implying that the FDA has been too laissez-faire toward glyphosate use.  As I type this, there is no disclosure in the article itself about the author's affiliation to an anti-GMO pressure group.

When weed management specialist Andrew Kniss pointed this out, Carey Gillam replied to him over Twitter, "too tough to follow the link to original article and my bio?"

The scientist Karl Haro von Mogel responded to her, "Most people will not click the link to search for that. Advice: Put your industry funded affiliation at bottom"

This is what I have to say about it.

First, how difficult would it be for Time to put one sentence on the bottom disclosing that the article's author is the research director of the group US Right to Know?

Ah, but if the article had a disclaimer mentioning that its author worked for a group demanding GMO labeling, wouldn't that be . . . labeling?  An anti-GMO writer doesn't want to be labeled?

To throw their own rhetoric back at them: "We have a Right to Know™ when an ostensibly objective news article on GMOs is authored by an employee of an anti-GMO group."

It's about ethics in journalism. -_-  . . . Yes, really. :@

New Hampshire Lawmaker Cites 'Onion'-Style Satire Site for GMO Labeling Bill

Stuart K. Hayashi

In the Newbury Port News, New Hampshire lawmaker Max Abramson has a letter to the editor stating,

A 31-year-old Spanish man, Juan Pedro Ramos, died at Madrid hospital from anaphylaxis after eating some recently developed tomatoes containing fish genes, which provoked a violent and lethal allergic reaction in January of last year. Because these genetically engineered foods are not labeled in the U.S., there is no way of knowing why so many Americans suddenly become sick, end up paralyzed, or even die without any known cause. . . . 

In Concord, I have sponsored House Bill 1674 that would require that these products be labeled in order to guarantee that consumers are able to avoid products that have been genetically altered to produce proteins that are not part of the normal human diet. Readers in New Hampshire are asked to email their legislators and ask them to support this important bill.

That sounds serious.  But as Joanna Lidback and the scientist mem_somerville informed me on Twitter (here and here), the story is fake.  It is from a satirical "fake news" website similar to The Onion and Weekly World News, called World News Daily Report.  It has a disclaimer saying,

All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people –  are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.

You can see the fake article here.   It begins, "Doctors of the Carlos III hospital confirmed this morning in a press conference, the first case of human death caused by the ingestion of genetically modified food. Juan Pedro Ramos died from anaphylaxis after eating some recently developed tomatoes containing fish genes, which provoked a violent and lethal allergic reaction."

Snopes confirms the story is fake over here (I learned about that from "intrepid wanders.")

That same World News Daily Report  published "David Rockefeller's Sixth Heart Transplant Successful at Age 99," complete with a spooky/goofy picture of the actually-deceased billionaire. Maybe that can be the inspiration for a health care-related bill?


UPDATE from February 15, 2016.  On State Rep. Max Abramson's Facebook page, the scientist Karl J. Haro von Mogel informed the state representative of his error: "So you are saying that the justification for this bill is 1) A fake news story about fishy tomatoes, and 2) an online forum posting that you cannot find?"

State Rep. Abramson replied directly to Haro von Mogel's comment, but did not directly address the erroneous citation of the fake news story: "No. A lot of people have contacted us personally or by email saying that their health--or their patients' health--has been adversely affected by GMO's."

As I type this update, this is the closest that State Rep. Abramson has come to acknowledging the error: "Correction: The initial story was supposed to be about the woman who was hospitalized for three weeks because of exposure to GMO corn."

WHAT?!!!!!  That's it???????

Then State Rep. Abramson's Facebook page started deriding Rick Berman, a lobbyist for the fast-food and beverage industries and someone involved with the Center for the Consumer Freedom, implying that Rick Berman's circle is trying to discredit him.  To my knowledge, Rick Berman's organizations are not related to State Rep. Abramson's letter to the editor citing a satirical, fake news story.

By the way, State Rep. Abramson's official Facebook page says the man is a "libertarian" for "smaller government" and "local control." How "small government" is it to force vendors that sell GMO foods to have labels? If there is such high demand for foods that are non-GMO that people are willing to choose non-GMO foods over GMO foods, then food vendors can voluntarily choose to label their own products as "non-GMO" or "organic."


UPDATE from February 17, 2016 (since this particular post is generating much more traffic than what this blog usually gets):  This particular blog post relates to biology; another important science is abnormal psychology.  If you are interested in the latter, you can read a spine-chilling memoir relating to abnormal psychology, "Photoshopped to Resemble a Corpse" (the true story comes with a "trigger warning":  it makes reference to childhood abuse and other harrowing, traumatic phenomena).


LATER UPDATE from February 17, 2016 (10:17 p.m. Hawaii Time):  Time magazine published an article on a GMO-related technology, the chemical herbicide glyphosate, without disclosing that the article's author is the research director of the anti-GMO pressure group U.S. Right to Know.  When the weed management specialist Andrew Kniss pointed out that this potential conflict of interest was not disclosed by Time, the author gave a reply conveying that she did not think this was such a big deal.  Does this mean an employee of a group that demands that GMOs be labeled does not want her potential conflict of interest to be . . . labeled?  Readers have a right to know!  I have a separate blog post about that here.

A Critical Eye on the Threat Narrative Claiming Brown-Skinned Immigrant Men Just Want to Rape White Women

Stuart K. Hayashi

...they're not sending you their best. ... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems [to] us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Those are Donald Trump's words from June 2015 about Mexican immigrants.  But the same accusations were applied to Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s.  They were accused of being criminals. They were accused of bringing in drugs -- specifically, opium. And they were called rapists.

Many right-wingers who agitate for the curtailing of immigration repeat a threat narrative.  They claim that brown-skinned immigrant men have caused an epidemic of raping (white) women in northern Europe and that, if immigration is not curbed, this trend will manifest in Canada and the United States as well.

That was actually a common accusation leveled against Chinese men in the 1800s. You can find many racist newspaper cartoons online from the period that say that the sinister Chinaman just wants to lure white women into his opium den. Then, supposedly, he will get her doped up on opium and ravish her against her will. Then, as they do presently, immigration's critics implied that that's what immigration was for. 

From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 12 May 1883

I suppose the common rejoinder would be:

OK, maybe it was true, back then, that people were wrong to say Chinese men wanted to enter the USA just to rape white women. But, in our day and age, there are brown-skinned men from a genuinely misogynistic rape culture coming into Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Why, everyone knows that mass migration from north Africa has made Sweden into the rape capital of the world!

I think that when people say Sweden is the rape capital, that is misleading, because Sweden records rape differently than other countries (even other First-World countries) do. In most countries, if a man kidnapped a woman and raped her every day of the year, crime statistics would list that as a single record of rape. By contrast, Sweden would make 365 separate records of rape for that. That's the reason why Sweden counts more rapes than other countries; it's not necessarily because foreign-born men in Sweden have gone on a raping spree. Comparisons of the rape rate in Sweden versus other countries are not very reliable because they are applying different standards.

The New Year's incidents in Germany and Sweden definitely have to be taken seriously and the perpetrators must be punished. I do think people should be cautioned against the assumption that foreigners all just want to go around raping white women, or that the rape rate would necessarily drop if immigration were curtailed.

Here is a thought experiment: Illiberal, misogynistic Islamists commit both rape and murder. Therefore, if rapacious, murderous Islamists coming to Western Europe increases the rape rate, it would follow that they would increase the murder rate as well (committing honor killings, etc.). The murder rate is a reliable proxy for the rape rate in this context. Even if they are not as stigmatized today as they were in the 1960s, to a large extent rape victims are still stigmatized and are therefore reluctant to come forward. This is why rape victims often tacitly participate in covering up that they were raped (I even know personally of instances of this, including possible instances in northern Europe). But murder is not so easily covered up. Were it the case that Muslims coming into Sweden were significantly increasing the rape rate, it would follow that they would significantly increase the murder rate as well, and we have yet to see that.


As he has in other matters, Frederick Douglass provides wise words here:

There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity….

Not the least among the arguments whose consideration should dispose to welcome among us the peoples of all countries, nationalities and color, is the fact that all races and varieties of men are improvable.

He was right then as he is now.

The Free-Market Position Is to Support Open Immigration Even If There's a Welfare State

Stuart K. Hayashi

It's February 2, 2016 -- the 111-year anniversary of the birth of Ayn Rand.

And remember that we have a tradition in the United States.  Today, if a politician crawls out of his hole and sees his shadow, we will have 60 more years of federal farm subsidies.

Anyhow, I defend open immigration.

Many people who claim to support the free market proclaim the following, "If there were no welfare state, I would be on board with open immigration. But the fact is, we do have a welfare state, and therefore there must be immigration controls. If not for those controls, immigrants will come to our country and drain government coffers."

In the videos below, I explain why a principled adherence to free enterprise leads to supporting a policy of open immigration even when the welfare state remains in place.

The first video is only 2 hours and 22 minutes long.



I forgot to include an important point in the first video, and therefore I did this 7-minute follow-up:

Clarifying Jeff Jacoby's Misrepresentation of Ayn Rand's Position on Charity

Stuart K. Hayashi

I have long admired Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe as a scrupulous columnist; I have often recommended his columns, particularly his standing up for open immigration against the rest of the political Right.

Unfortunately, he has come out with a column on voluntary charity and philanthropy which grossly misrepresents Ayn Rand's view on this topic.  While many of the figures on American generosity are interesting, the inaccurate impression given of Rand taints this work.

For those raised to regard charitable giving as indispensable to meaningful lives and healthy societies, it can come as a jolt to discover not just that some people give little or nothing to charity, but that there are those who actually disparage charitable giving itself. In a 1964 interview, Ayn Rand said that her views on charity were “very simple: I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty.” John Steinbeck, whose political views were as far to the left as Rand’s were to the right, also disdained philanthropy. “Giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases is a downright destructive and evil thing,” he railed.

Rationalizations for not donating certainly aren’t hard to find.

One would glean from those paragraphs that Rand was one to "disparage charitable giving itself."

The quotation of Rand omitted additional sentences clarifying Rand's position.  Here is a more complete version of the exchange between Ayn Rand and the author Alvin Toffler (who would later go on to write many bestsellers of his own, such as Future Shock) for Playboy magazine:

Toffler: "Do you consider wealthy businessmen like the Fords and the Rockefellers immoral because they use their wealth to support charity?" 

Rand: "No. That is their privilege, if they want to. My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue." 

Toffler: "What is the place of compassion in your philosophical system?" 

 Rand: "I regard compassion as proper only toward those who are innocent victims, but not toward those who are morally guilty. If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims."

Free-marketers often talk about how, prior to the New Deal, voluntary charity proliferated in the United States in the form of mutual-aid societies.  The idea was that many poor people (usually immigrants) would form organizations together. If one member of the mutual aid society fell on especially hard times, other members would help out that person.  You might be interested to learn that when she lived in California in her twenties, Ayn Rand was a member of a mutual aid society:  the Hollywood Studio Club, which was started by the YWCA.

People with only a straw-man understanding of Rand's philosophy might assume that the young Rand joining a mutual aid society was hypocrisy on her part. For those who recognize that Rand had no quibble with voluntary charity -- which she regarded not as a duty, but as benevolent generosity -- there is no conflict in the young Rand's actions on this matter with respect to her later writings.

Charles Murray's Disingenuous Denial About Advocating Restriction of Immigration Based on IQ or Race

Stuart K. Hayashi


With the late Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray co-authored The Bell Curve.  To my astonishment, some of my fellow Objectivists have arbitrarily denied to me that the book provides a racist and eugenicist argument.  It takes some mental contortions for someone who has read the book to deny its eugenicism, but I can understand how such a rationalization can be made.  The book does not say outright, "Blacks and Hispanics are inferior."  However, the book offers several premises that it purports to prove through rather turgid figures and terminology.  Then, based on those premises, the reader is intended to deduce specific conclusions.  One who follows the deductive chain of reasoning can discern that the book's conclusion does advocate what is, in practice, governmental discrimination against specific people based on their race.  The deductive chain of reasoning is as follows.

1. IQ is genetically inheritable -- between 40 percent and 80 percent.
2. IQ is fixed and congenital -- environmental conditioning and choices cannot reliably change it over time.  [A pedantic reply is offered to the Flynn Effect.]
3. IQ is the main predictor of competency -- that is, people's successes or failures in life.  High IQ directly correlates with high economic productivity.  IQ is inversely proportional to criminality -- lower-IQ people are prone to violent criminality.
4. IQ tests show disparities in races.  Jews and Asians receive the highest IQ scores.  In the middle are most whites.  Lowest IQ scorers are, respectively, Hispanics and then Africans. [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

If you follow the deductive chain of reasoning, what conclusion do the authors expect you, as the reader, to deduce?  The authors expect you to deduce that if blacks and Hispanics have low IQs, and if IQs are fixed over time, and if IQ numbers are congenital determinants of economic productivity or violent criminality, then:

5. The implicit, deductive conclusion of the book: blacks and Hispanics, in aggregate, are doomed to be less economically productive and more criminally violent than other ethnic groups. [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

Then the book puts forth [my phrasing, not the book's]:

6. Immigration policy should be determined by IQ.  The authors recommend that the system of family visas be replaced with a system where those with higher IQs get into the USA more easily and those with lower IQs face more hurdles.  This is not a complete replacement, though, merely a re-orienting, orienting away from the family-visa system and orienting toward an IQ-number-based system. [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

What is the deductive conclusion to draw from this?

7. If points 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6 are true -- if the authors recommend that lower-IQ people be impeded by Government Force from entering the USA, and blacks and Hispanics have lower IQs than other groups, then, in practice, implementation of the policy will necessarily result in an immigration system that becomes more implicitly discriminatory against black immigrants and Hispanic immigrants.  [This is Stuart's paraphrasing of the book's arguments.]

Concerning his protege Jason Richwine -- who makes similar rationalizations about IQ/Race Eugenics -- Charles Murray writes in National Review,

On Wednesday, the Washington Post revealed that Richwine’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard’s Kennedy School had said that, on average, Latinos have lower IQs than do non-Latino white Americans and the nation should consider incorporating IQ into immigration decisions. . . I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations, but not about the empirical accuracy of his research or the scholarly integrity of the interpretations with which I disagreed [emphasis added].

Really?  Richwine's policy recommendation, in Charles Murray's phrasing, is that "nations should consider incorporating IQ into immigration decisions."  If they incorporate IQ into those decisions, and if they believe "Latinos have lower IQs than do non-native Latino white Americans," the result will be an immigration policy that does even more to exclude Latino immigration.    Then Murray says, "I had disagreements then and now about his policy recommendations..." meaning Murray is saying he does not agree with an immigration policy that would block immigrants with supposedly lower IQs, which would, in practice, result in immigration policy being even more stubborn in blocking Latino immigration.


What do Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein themselves say on this in The Bell Curve?  This is from page 549:

...we believe the main purpose of immigration law is to serve America's interests [America meaning Americans already in the USA; not those trying to get in --S.H.].  It should be among the goals of public policy to shift the flow of immigrants away from those admitted under the nepotistic rules (which broadly encourages the reunification of relatives) [these are family visas --S.H.]and toward those admitted under competency rules [meaning higher-IQ groups are favored and lower-IQ groups are disfavored; one who agrees with The Bell Curve about specific races being associated with low IQs would deduce that competency rules would, in practice, result in fewer members of specific races entering the USA --S.H.] -- not to the total exclusion of nepotistic and humanitarian criteria but a shift. [Emphasis added.]

The Bell Curve argues that IQ is what determines competency, and some races outrank others in terms of IQ -- meaning some races outrank others in terms of competency.  Insofar as Jason Richwine's Ph.D. dissertation concludes that IQ should be incorporated into the federal government's decisions on who enters the USA and who does not, The Bell Curve is making essentially the same policy recommendation.  Charles Murray's denial does not make sense.

Thomas Sowell's Double Standard Regarding Mexican Workers and the 'Race to the Bottom' Argument

Stuart K. Hayashi


This is a re-post of a section a much longer post found here.


There is an argument against open immigration that doubles as an argument against free international trade.  First we hear that if we allow open immigration, that is bad because big companies will choose to hire Mexicans within U.S. borders; they will hire the Mexicans for low wages and leave native-born Americans without work.  Secondly, we hear that if we allow free international trade, that is bad because big companies will choose to hire Mexicans still in Mexico; they will hire the Mexicans for low wages and leave native-born Americans without work.  Both accusations stress that big companies will choose to hire Mexicans for low wages and leave native-born Americans without work; the only difference between the two allegations is that in one, the Mexicans are still in Mexico whereas, in the other, the Mexicans are in the USA.

Thomas Sowell shows a double standard here.  He says that in the case of free international trade, there is nothing to fear when it comes to the idea that big companies will hire Mexicans in Mexico for low wages.  In his book Basic Economics (see page 218 here), Sowell correctly states,

As for jobs, before the free-trade agreement was passed, there were dire predictions of a "giant sucking sound" as jobs would be sucked out of the United States to Mexico and other countries with lower wage rates after the free-trade agreement went into effect.  In reality, the number of [native-born] American jobs increased after the agreement and the unemployment rate in the United States fell over the next seven years from more than seven percent down to four percent, the lowest level seen in decades.  . . . What happens when a given country, in isolation, becomes more prosperous?  It tends to buy more because it has more to buy with.  And what happens when it buys more?  There are more jobs created for workers producing the additional goods and services.

That argument is correct.  But, bizarrely, Sowell seems not to notice that it is applicable when native-born Americans reduce their own costs by hiring Mexican immigrants (presently inside the USA!) for low wages.  He makes a frighteningly protectionist argument against allowing U.S. firms to hire Mexican immigrants for low wages:

How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.

Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.

If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.

This is odd, because the same "cost savings" argument that Sowell used to defend the hiring of low-wage Mexicans in Mexico equally applies to the hiring of low-wage Mexicans in the USA.

First, let's observe how Sowell's own retort against hiring low-wage Mexicans in the USA can also be used against his defense of hiring low-wage Mexicans in Mexico.

How often have we heard that, thanks to the free-agreements that Sowell supports, Mexicans in Mexico and Indians in India "take jobs from Americans"?  What is missing from Sowell's argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.

Americans will not take many jobs at their current price levels -- and those pay levels will not rise as long as poverty-stricken Mexicans in Mexico are willing to take those jobs.

If U.S. firms were outsourcing information-technology jobs to Mexico and India, and those Mexicans and Indians were earning half the pay that would be expected by American information-technology workers, maybe economists would understand why it's nonsense to let U.S. firms outsource information-technology jobs abroad.

The same defense that Sowell provides to hiring low-wage Mexicans in Mexico applies to hiring low-wage Mexicans in the USA.

Sowell says this is the reason why it's OK if U.S. firms can hire Mexicans in Mexico for low wages, rather than giving those jobs to native-born Americans:  when those U.S. firms save money by hiring Mexicans in Mexico for low wages, they benefit from cost savings. It's not as if the U.S. firms will just sit on that money.  All money is spent in the long run:  either it is spent for immediate needs or it is saved for a future expenditure.  Those U.S. firms then use that cost savings to invest in new economic activities, or they spend it for immediate use.  Either form of expenditure produces demand for more goods and services.  The increase in demand for more goods and services sends a signal to would-be entrepreneurs that they will profit by supplying such goods and services.  These would-be entrepreneurs then hire native-born Americans.  True, when the USA and Mexico trade freely, this expands the market so that there is an increased supply of would-be employees.  But this is balanced out by a commensurate increase in demand for would-be employees.  That is why, everything else being equal, there is not an increase in unemployment.

Now observe how this argument applies to the labor market within U.S. borders.  When immigrants come to the USA and work for low wages, they increase the supply of available would-be employees.  However, these same immigrants must also consume goods and services.  Thus, the presence of these immigrants also increases consumer demand for goods and services.  And this increase in consumer demand signals to would-be entrepreneurs (native-born and immigrant alike) that they can profit by supplying such goods and services.  These would-be entrepreneurs then hire native-born Americans to assist them in that enterprise.

This is the reason why I say it's OK if U.S. firms can hire Mexicans in the USA for low wages, rather than giving those jobs to native-born Americans:  when those U.S. firms save money by hiring Mexicans in Mexico for low wages, they realize cost savings. It's not as if the U.S. firms will just sit on that money.

All money is spent in the long run:  either it is spent for immediate needs or it is saved for a future expenditure.  Those U.S. firms then use that cost savings to invest in new economic activities, or they spend it for immediate use.  Either form of expenditure produces demand for more goods and services.   The immigrant population earning the low wages also produce consumer demand for such goods and services. The increase in demand for more goods and services sends a signal to would-be entrepreneurs that they will profit by supplying such goods and services. These would-be entrepreneurs then hire native-born Americans.

True, when native-born Americans and illegal aliens trade freely, this expands the market so that there is an increased supply of would-be employees.  But this is balanced out by a commensurate increase in demand for would-be employees.  That is why, everything else being equal, there is not an increase in unemployment.

The same principle also applies to wages.  It explains why, when U.S. firms save money by hiring people for allegedly low wages, that does not necessarily bid down the average wage in the long run.

On September 4, 2017, I changed the word "incur" to "benefit from," and I replaced the old infographic about Say's Law with an updated one citing Orn B. Bodvarsson's team of economists.

Ayn Rand Got Social Security? Welfare State As a Prison Manipulating You to Accept It

A common rationalization for the welfare state is that even Ayn Rand had to accept Social Security payments. This is intended to discredit her and all other critics of the welfare state. Indeed, I regularly attend a taxpayer-funded city library. I drive on government roads that taxes pay for. Upon retirement, I intend to collect Social(ist In)Security money. We are then told that if not for the welfare state, we critics of the welfare state would be starving, homeless, and naked. I am told that if we had a liberal republican Night Watchman State without taxpayer funding for social services, I would have no public library for reading and no roads to drive on.   Therefore, it is said, we free-marketers are ingrates.

That entire argument is based on a fallacy. The reason why we free-marketers use taxpayer-funded government services is that the welfare state has manipulated the system in such a way that privately funded alternatives (including private charity) become less readily available -- so much so that, to survive, we free-marketers resort to using the government monopolies.  It does not follow that if the welfare state were replaced with a liberal republican Night Watchman State, there would be no consensually-funded public library for me to attend.

Here I am in a YouTube video explaining this.




And by the way, Happy Stu Year! ^_^
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Clarification of what I said about Noam Chomsky's "libertarian socialism":  It is claimed that what Chomsky wants, in the long run, is a system of limited government, wherein people live on collectivist communes voluntarily, not forced to do so by the State.  In the present, though, Chomsky does advocate expansions of government power, including his praise for the graduated income tax.  I think Chomsky reconciles the two positions as Karl Marx did:  Like Marx, Chomsky would prefer that the State forcibly establish a collectivist lifestyle in which people selflessly toil for the collective community.  As Marx said, it is only after people become accustomed to this collectivist lifestyle that the State can be allowed to wither away.

Also, when I referred to the politician who was the godfather of William Ewart Gladstone, I mistakenly referred to the man as "Thomas Ewart."  The man's name was William Ewart -- William Ewart Gladstone was named after him.

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UPDATE from Tuesday, February 2, 2016: I am told that when people throw around that accusation about Ayn Rand, I should give them this link.

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UPDATE from Friday, February 6, 2016:

I have seen this cartoon circulating on Facebook.

That is intended to ridicule critics of socialism.  Let us examine its points.

Roads. Back in the early 1800s, the USA had an impressive system of roads whose construction and maintenance relied on consensual funding. These consensually funded tunrpikes extended thousands of miles and connected entire cities to one another, such as from Lancaster to Philadelphia and back. These roads were owned and constructed by merchants who wished to make their wares more accessible to customers from outside their neighborhoods. When you look at the books of the road companies alone, it appears the return on investment was only 2 percent. But when you look at the revenues and profits of the other businesses owned by the road companies' owners -- when you look at how much money they were making both before and after the roads were completed and in operation -- the return on investment is greater. What happened, though, is that these merchants wanted to rent-seek: if they could persuade the government to tax everyone to finance roads, that would reduce the costs of the merchants relying on roads. When taxes funded the construction and maintenance of roads, that disincentvized parties to build and maintain roads through consensual funding, as they would "pay double." That is the reason why roads were socialized in the USA.  It is not because there would be no roads if not for the State taxing people to finance their construction and maintenance.

Social(ist In)Security. If not for this system taking money out of our paychecks, we millennials could keep our own money to save for our own retirements.

Veterans' Administration (VA). Have the news headlines over the past three years shown you that the VA has made health care readily accessible for veterans?

GI Bill. That was one of the first programs where the government provided prospective students with capital for funding their higher education. And that's what actually created the present mess with higher education. The more the State helps pay for people's university educations, the more that drives up demand for higher education. That's why tuitions have gone up and millennials are burdened with student debt. And making university education "free" will not reduce those costs. The only way for tuition to go down in the long run is for demand to go down.

40-Hour Workweek. The reason why people enjoy a higher living standard today even as they have shorter working hours is that every input of one hour's worth of human labor has gained in productivity. That actually has to do with machinery and technology making economic production more efficient. For that, we have profit-driven inventors and profit-driven engineers to thank, not labor unions attempting to restrict the output of laborers.


UPDATE from Sunday, March 13, 2016:

Scott Hampton made this meme:

Anarchist Stefan Molyneux and His 'Freedomain Radio' Program Going in a Disturbing Eugenicist/Racial Separatist Direction

There is a rather popular, Murray Rothbard-influenced, Canada-based anarchist podcaster named Stefan Molyneux. This man -- the founder of a series of podcasts called Freedomain Radio (FDR) -- was popular enough to have been interviewed twice on The Joe Rogan Experience. The second time around, though, Rogan caught Molyneux telling several lies, and, since then, Rogan has expressed strong reservations about Mr. Molyneux's ideology and persuasion techniques. Still, Molyneux remains quite influential.

I had already been troubled by Molyneux since 2007. In many of his podcasts, he would be quick to manipulate his callers, attempting to get them to re-interpret relatively minor slights on the parts of their parents as abuse. He would then urge, with the utmost seriousness, that they disown their parents and siblings.

That remains a concern for me, but I want to address something else. Molyneux increasingly calls for separation among races and promotes the eugenicist ideas of Richard Herrnstein's (1) that IQ is the main determinant of people's productivity or violent tendencies, (2) that genetics, including racial background, is a significant factor influencing IQ, and therefore (3) one's race-related genetic background influences the degree to which someone is economically productive or has violent criminal tendencies. This argument is used by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve to rationalize new restrictions on immigration. It is the old, early-twentieth-century eugenics in a new guise. And Molyneux is advancing this.

At the 0:01:26 mark of his YouTube video "The Death of Europe | European Migrant Crisis," Molyneux asserts,

Looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid. We are a variety of subspecies -- politically, definitely ethnically, sometimes gender, in terms of IQ, in terms of culture. These produce differences that are physical but hard to remediate [remedy?] as you get older. So we are a cluster of genetics getting ready to reproduce their own particular genetics.

Throughout this blog post, the boldface is emphases I have added.

At the 0:22:47 mark of the same video, he says,

And all of this [saving Europe from destruction] requires that the IQ can be raised. The [average] IQ of a lot of these countries [that Muslim immigrants are from] is 85. That is a full standard deviation below the [average] IQ of Europe. Now, if there's any genetic component to that, and I believe that there is -- nobody knows for sure; it's just a belief, but it's a belief with quite a bit of data and we're just about to put out an interview with Dr. Jason Richwine about this -- but if there's any genetic components, or if the culture is so insular that it's equivalent to genetics in the transmission of low intelligence, then you cannot run a high-IQ society with low-IQ people. [ . . . ]

Now, if there are genetic components to the low IQ of the people coming in [to the West, from non-Western countries], I will tell you exactly what's going to happen, and it's really obvious.  And if it is genetic or equivalent to genetic -- their low IQ -- I can tell you exactly what's going to happen:  they're gonna fail.  These immigrants are going to fail, and they're not gonna just fail a little bit; they're gonna fail hard.  You are importing a radicalized, low-IQ population into a high-IQ society, and capitalism pays for intelligence. That's what it does; you get paid for your intelligence. And so you are importing a huge bunch of people into Europe, who are going to fail. They're not staying on welfare because they're lazy; they're not. That's like saying somebody with an IQ of 80 hasn't applied to graduate school because they're [sic] lazy.  No!  They're doing what is economically the best option for them. . . . But you are importing a gene set that is incompatible with success in a free-market economy. Now, because no one can talk about IQ and no one can talk about any potential genetic relationship between ethnic communities and IQ, what that means is that the only way that anyone will ever explain the failures of these Africans in European society -- you know as well as I do -- how is anyone going to explain that? . . . [Mockingly, here:]  White racism.

Near the end of his video, "The Impending Collapse of Western Civilization," Molyneux touts racial separatism as a solution to what he judges to be the self-destruction of the welfare state.

From the 0:32:45 mark:

When you have a largely homogeneous society -- right, let's say Haiti; Haiti has a lot of blacks and so on, right? -- if there's a big change in society, say, Haiti runs out of money, or, as you said, right, New Zealand ran out of money [some joke about The Hobbit and 'Peter Jackson money bombs'] -- if you have a largely ethnically homogeneous society, when the shit hits the wall an people gotta change, there isn't really that much in-fighting. There's a sense of, 'OK, we've all got to pull together. We all kind of have the same color eyes and there's no point turning on each other, because we all kind of got into this together, and so we've got to pull together to get out of it together.'; When you have an ethnically homogeneous society, when the shit hits the wall, you don't dissolve into massive race-baiting wars, which is a problem that happens because skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by Mother Nature among various ethnicities, and what that means is that when the shit hits the wall, it hits some ethnicities a lot harder than others, you get endless screams of 'racism!';. This is one fundamental reason why America is having a hard time solving these problems. If you cut spending, which [racial] community is it going to hit the hardest? Hint: it's not Korean. If you cut spending in America, it's the black community it will hit the hardest.

The 0:35:05 mark:

This is another reason why multi-ethnic societies is a problem. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if all ethnicities acted the same, roughly. . . . The Germans came over, the Irish came over, and they kind of ended up acting pretty much the same after a certain amount of time -- a generation or two. But the problem is that among the blacks and the Hispanics, they don't end up acting the same as the white population or the Asian population, and the white population doesn't even act as well as the Asian population in terms of murder rates and income and unemployment and so on and single motherhood and family stability and so on. So we all need to turn Japanese; that's my first point. [Joke.] My second point is that when the shit hits the wall and the government runs out of money, it doesn't end up affecting ethnicites in the same way.

The 0:37:17 mark:

Because you've got the Racist-in-Chief [President Obama] currently manning the helm, and the media, of course, compliant, and willing to scream 'racist' at anyone who points out basic fact-based differences between ethnicities, you've got a problem. You can't deal with the situation until Obama's out, or until people understand ethnicities in America and all around the world tend to act differently collectively -- individuals are always different -- but collectively ethnicities around the world tend to act differently. They tend to have different incomes, they have different rates of marital stability, they have different rates of criminality, they tend to have different rates of accumulations of assets, they have different levels of education. Go on and on and on. Until people accept that and say, "OK, if we cut spending, government spending, it's going to affect the black community the worst, it's going to affect the Hispanic community the second worst, it's going to affect the white community the third worst, and I think Asians will heave up a giant sigh of relief at not being taxed with a giant suction hole through the butt'; Until these facts are either dealt with, or until people give up race-baiting -- I'm not sure which one I consider more likely -- trying to deal with these problems is a real challenge. And because you have a Race-Baiter-in-Chief in charge of the White House, the Republicans, I think, have been very loathe to cut spending, because it will hit the black community and you've got this giant klaxon who will amplify it through the mainstream media to the point where society will probably hit a revolution.

I am familiar with the argument that people have an easier time getting along when they're all the same ethnicity; I think there might be an empirical basis for that descriptive evaluation. What worries me, though, is Molyneux repeatedly conveying that as long as there's a welfare state, different ethnicities pretty much should just give up trying to live together. And when he says human beings are not all one species, that isn't him being facetious; that part is intended to be taken seriously.

There is no delicate way to put this: the degree to which people follow and transmit Molyneux's race rhetoric is the degree to which they imperil Western society.



UPDATE from April 21, 2017:  Upon further gathering of data, I retract part of the above sentence, the part following the semicolon: "I am familiar with the argument that people have an easier time getting along when they're all the same ethnicity; I think there might be an empirical basis for that descriptive evaluation" (emphasis added).  As I have written in the newer post over here, Patrick Sturgis and his team have found that, adjusting for financial deprivation and everything else being equal, an increase in ethnic diversity in a neighborhood does not contribute to a loss of trust among that neighborhood's denizens. This whole time, Robert D. Putnam and Frank Salter were wrong to proclaim that ethnic diversity causes social turmoil -- and so was Molyneux in citing them to advance his agenda.

There Is No 'Intentions Vs. Results': Debunking the Conservative Cliche of 'Liberal Intentions Vs. Conservative Results'

Stuart K. Hayashi

I reject the conservative cliche that says, "Liberals only care about good intentions; they don't care about getting good results." This is false and it reflects the Platonic mind-matter dichotomy in conservatives. It pits the mind (“intentions”) against body/matter (“results”), as if they can be separated in the long run.

As one man on Twitter put it to Ashe Schow, “results are for Republicans, intentions are for Democrats.”

More verbose, Bob Funk writes in the Wall Street Journal,

Too many policy makers evaluate new interventions -- labor rules, wage laws, environmental regulations -- only by what they hope to accomplish. They do not consider the consequences, the unintended effects, and the trouble that their policies will cause for employers and workers, especially when the burdens are placed one on top of another [emphases added].

But recognizing the unity of mind and body means recognizing that an honest intention is about nothing more than remaining committed to achieving the explicitly desired result. The extent to which someone ignores the results of his methods in a project is the extent to which he is disingenuous about intending to make a success of that project. 

President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty in the 1960s, claiming that the intention was to reduce poverty. After more than 40 years of these programs, we see they have largely failed to reduce poverty. Many apologists for the welfare state acknowledge this failure, but they claim it is simply because the programs do not go far enough -- more tax money needs to be spent on such programs, and such programs should be expanded in complexity. 

And then conservatives issue their cliche, "See? Liberals are lofty idealists who care about intentions to help but are too naive to care when the results are poor. By contrast, we hard-nosed conservatives look to results, because we're so realistic!" 

 I reject this notion. Moreover, the degree to which anyone actually believe this assessment is the degree to which this person is not being realistic. Being realistic entails that one recognize that there isn't a disconnect between results and intention. 

If I say that I I intend to achieve result Y, that means that my priority is achieving a good result, result Y. Suppose I say, "My intention is to build a house that lasts -- the house lasting for decades is the desired result." I plan to go about this through Procedure C -- a haphazard procedure. I merely go through the motions of building the house. When I need a contractor, I hire the first one I come across, without examining the alternatives with respect to price or quality; nor do I look at the reviews of different contractors online. A year after the house is built, it collapses, because it is so shoddy. Then I shrug and say, "The results were poor, but it was nevertheless my sincere intention to build a house that lasts. I will try to rebuild the house. But instead of adopting new methods -- Procedure D -- to build the house, I will do everything exactly the same, Procedure C. My sincere intention is still to build a house that lasts for decades.” 

Would you judge that intention to be sincere? No, you would say that if I am, at most, half-hearted about achieving the desired result, then I am not honest about achieving the desired result being my intention. My saying that I want to build a strong house that lasts for decades is "all talk"; what I do in practice is what tells you whether my stated goal is my honest intention. 

The same logic applies to the welfare state. Advocates of the welfare state claimed in the 1960s that they wanted to achieve result Y, the eradication of poverty. They would go about it through Procedure C -- their welfare programs. More than forty years later, they have not achieved result Y. Someone honest about intending to achieve result Y would say, "Procedure C clearly isn't the means to achieve result Y. Therefore, let us try something new, Procedure D." Procedure D would simply be allowing the poor more freedom to lift themselves out poverty, not with the welfare programs that have failed. Instead, after more than four decades, apologists for the welfare state stick to Procedure C. When we judge people by their actions more than by what they say, we see that sticking to Procedure C is therefore a higher priority to these politicians and activists than is achieving result Y. 

But if Procedure C clearly won't achieve result Y, then there isn't an honest intention to achieve result Y -- there isn't an honest intention to reduce poverty. 

 And yet conservatives issue the cliche that advocates of the welfare state "honestly intend to reduce poverty; their problem is that they don't look to the results." For me to believe that, I would have to believe that somehow intent and result are not connected. But they are. By definition, sincerely intending to achieve result Y means one cares about results -- without concern for results, there is no honest intention. 

One might reply that advocates of the welfare state do sincerely hope that Procedure C  -- welfare programs -- alleviate poverty, but it is just that they are too blinkered and set in their ways to consider evidence that Procedure C has failed.  According to that argument, the intentions are sincere and welfare statists remain committed to Procedure C on account of errors in thinking and psychology. Should we concede that argument, though, that still would not bring coherence to the cliche "They care about intentions but not results."  Were this a matter of political leftists wanting to eliminate poverty but not having the evidence resonate with them so strongly, then their fault would not be that attaining practical results is of no interest to them.  The connection between results and honest intent would remain inextricable.

 Let's say that for ten years I go through Procedure C to attain result Y, and I fail repeatedly.  Upon consideration of the evidence, I switch to Procedure D and attain result Y at last.  In such a case, you could plausibly judge that even in the entire duration wherein I opted for Procedure C, I was indeed honest in intending to bring about result Y.  But if I remain beholden to Procedure C for forty years amid such horrid failures to induce result Y, it is sheer implausibility for others to entertain the notion that I mainly intended for result Y to come to fruition.

If you don't care to change your methods to achieve the stated desired result, then you do not honestly intend to achieve the stated desired result.

If you don’t care about results, then you don’t care about intentions.

Two Interpretations of Hume's Is-Ought Dictum, and a Reply to Each

Stuart K. Hayashi

In moral debate, participants frequently bring up David Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum. It can be summarized as follows:

Truths or facts cannot be where proper prescriptive rules of human conduct come from. That a truth or fact Is (meaning, is a truth or fact already validated) cannot tell you what you Ought or Ought Not to do. The simpler statement of this is: “You cannot get Ought-to-Do or Ought-Not-to-Do from that which Is.”

There are two possible interpretations for this:

1. The Contextualist Interpretation: Truths or facts, by themselves and out-of-context, are not sufficient to indicate what you ought or ought not to do. Yet, that an out-of-context datum, by itself, is not sufficient to tell you what you ought or ought not to do, does not properly preclude you from taking facts into consideration of what you ought to do upon already having chosen the proper standard of value.
2. The Nihilist Interpretation: Truths and facts do not properly tell you what you ought or ought not to do; period. It is indeed possible for you to take pertinent truths and facts into consideration for the purpose of accomplishing some goal, but there is still no objective reason why you ought or ought not to strive for that particular goal. Since truths and facts do not tell you what your goals ought or ought not to be, it follows that truths and facts have zero bearing on what you ought or ought not to do. In sum, truths and facts are ultimately irrelevant in judging, in the grand scheme of everything, whether your past actions were were objectively moral or not.

The first interpretation is partially true, and, even in conceding its partial truthfulness, it must be qualified. Insofar as the first interpretation is true, it is as much indubitably because it gives us some wiggle room whereby we can still get Ought from that which Is. By contrast, the second interpretation is wholly false and nihilistic. More than that, any time someone invokes Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum in an effort to get your to accept the second interpretation and thereby influence your thinking, it is implicitly self-refuting.

Interpretation 1 Meets Objectivist Metaethics

Again, Interpretation 1 (the Contextualist Interpretation) is correct inasmuch as it gives us room to get Ought from that which Is, provided that it is in the proper context. My standard of value is my life, meaning that my main goal -- and thus the source of every subsequent goal -- is to live life to the fullest. Note that this must be distinguished from mere physical survival. If I die at 121 years of age and was in consistent misery before then, that was physical survival but it was not living to the fullest. The to the fullest refers to quality of existing being the utmost within that duration, maximizing life not merely in terms of time span but also in terms of comfort and enjoyment.

 Truths and facts, by themselves -- outside of the context of how they affect my life -- are not enough to tell me what I ought or ought not to do. When the fact of gravity, the fact that [momentum] = [mass] x [velocity], and the fact that [final velocity] = [initial velocity] + [ (acceleration) x (time)], are isolated from any context pertaining to living my life to the fullest, such facts remain irrelevant.

Portrait of David Hume by Allan Ramsay, 1766.

Once we introduce the context of my goal to live my life to the fullest, though, such facts become pertinent. As my main goal is to live my life to the fullest, it follows that it would be contrary to this main goal for me, as a young man, to die painfully, violently, and quickly, based on some accident or misjudgment. In line with my goal, the facts about gravity and momentum and mass and human physiology do tell me that I ought not to jump out of a skyscraper’s fifth-story window; that would kill me.

Once I have chosen living life to the fullest as my primary goal, I can assess truths and facts to ascertain what my other goals ought or ought not to be, in direct contradiction to the nihilism of the second interpretation of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum. With my primary goal of life maximization in mind, I assess facts to determine what priorities I select as my secondary goals -- the secondary goals being intended to serve the first goal.

1. Primary goal: Live life to the fullest, which requires that I not die in the next few weeks.
2. Truth or fact: I will die if I do not eat anything within the next few weeks.
3. Conclusion: I ought to eat within the next few weeks. As a corollary to that, my secondary goal is to find suitable food to eat.

Thus, we can form some agreement with Interpretation 1 of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum though, as I shall explain in the section directly below, there is one primary Is that is sufficient to validate the subsequent Ought’s. Truths and facts, out of context, remain insufficient to guide me on what I ought or ought not to do. However, when we introduce the primary goal of maximizing life, truths and facts are precisely what we evaluate to instruct us on what we ought or ought not to do.

What the Most Important ‘IS’ Is
Yes, Interpretation 1 of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum is true, insofar as truths and facts -- separated from the context of maximizing your life -- are not enough to convey to you what your secondary goals ought to be or ought not to be. In one important respect, though, there is one singular fact or truth -- one singular Is -- that provides the basis for every Ought-to-Do and Ought-not-to-Do in your life. That truth and fact -- that most important Is -- is the fact that you live, the fact of your very existence. Once you accept that fact and accordingly opt to push for life to the fullest, at least in practice if not in conscious and explicit philosophizing, you end up considering the truths and the facts -- everything that Is, pertinent to you -- in ascertaining what you Ought and Ought Not to do in reaching the secondary goals that maintain and improve your life. That one Is -- your life -- is the foundation for everything you Ought and Ought Not to do. In that respect, even Interpretation 1 is misleading. One grand truth and fact -- your existence -- ultimately justifies every ethical prescriptive. You are the Is that justifies Ought.

Here is another manner in which it can be phrased. Your life is the fact which gives meaning to value; your life is the "Is" that gives meaning to Ought and Ought Not.

Hence, it is facts and truths -- the Is -- that properly give rise to Ought-to-Do and Ought-Not-to-Do. On that understanding, Ought-to-Do and Ought-Not-to-Do NECESSARILY come from Is.

Interpretation 2: The Nihilistic Interpretation
In his arguments, the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick implicitly accepts Interpretation 2 of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum. In direct rebuttal to Objectivism, Nozick proclaims that there is no reason why you ought to choose a full life as your primary goal. And, he adds, if there is no out-of-context Is -- no out-of-context truth or out-of-context fact -- that commands you to choose a full life as your primary goal, then it follows that is no objective reason, in the grand scheme of everything, why you Ought-to-Do or Ought-Not-to-Do anything.

Thus, what can be inferred from Nozick’s argument is that facts and truths can never provide any input in helping you consider what you ought or ought not to do. That is, Nozick’s argument is that it is not merely the case that out-of-context truths and out-of-context facts -- separated from the goal of a full life -- are unable to provide a guide for ethical prescription. Rather, Nozick goes as far as saying that in any and every context, truths and facts will never have any bearing on what you should or should not do.

This is not to say that Nozick explicitly denies there is any morality, though. Explicitly influenced by Immanuel Kant, Nozick puts forth what he proclaims to be absolute objective moral principles, and then adds that such allegedly absolute objective moral principles did not and cannot come from observation-based reasoning. (That is, though Kant and Nozick would not put it in such explicit terms, this really comes down to their allegedly absolute and objective principles being unsubstantiated and arbitrary.)

My answer to Nozick is the same one that Ronald E. Merrill gave him. I entirely concede that there is nothing I can say or cite to make you choose full living as your primary goal. But unlike Nozick, I do not see this as any sort of dilemma for Objectivism. Anyone who does not want to live fully is free to go somewhere and die. It is for those of us who choose maximal living -- at least, choose it in practice if not by conscious explication -- that secondary goals become pertinent. And to reach those secondary goals, we must consider the facts and act in accordance with them, and that is where Is becomes a guide for what we Ought and Ought Not to do.

Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum Is Truth, So You Ought Not...
Now I want to address the internal contradiction of anyone in an ethical debate, such as Nozick, invoking Interpretation 2 of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum in order to influence the thinking and debate behavior of his debate interlocutor. Anytime someone in an ethical debate cites Interpretation 2 of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum to you, there is an implicit imparting to you that there is something you Ought-to-Do or Ought-Not-to-Do in ethical debates, based on the premise that Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum is itself a truthful Is.

The reasoning is as follows.

• Explicit Statement 1: Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum is that you cannot properly learn what you Ought or Ought Not to do, based on truths or facts, based on what Is.
• Explicit Statement 2: Hume’s Is-Ought-Dictum is the truth. Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum is a truthful Is.
• Implicit Conclusion You Are Supposed to Draw From This: Based on the truthful Is that is Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum, you Ought Not to derive any Ought-Not from any truthful Is.

You see the internal contradiction there? Someone tells me that Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum is a fact or, at minimum, an objective truth. Based on acceptance of this objective truth -- this objective Is -- that is Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum, I Ought to stop making these ridiculous attempts to argue that Ought-to does come from Is.

“Cannot Do It” Vs. “Ought Not to Try It”?
In response to my pointing out this internal contradiction, one apologist for Interpretation 2 of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum (who claims to be an Objectivist!), replied along these lines:

No, no, no, no, no! You Ought to [why should I Ought-to, silly?!! --S.H.] pay heed to the distinction between my saying you are forever unable to do something versus my saying you ought not to try to do it. When I cite Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum, I am not telling you that you Ought or Ought Not to pay heed to it; I am not telling you that you Ought Not to try to get your Ought -Not rules from that which Is. I am merely saying that if you do attempt such an effort, you will always fail, because it is logically impossible.

I do not buy into that rebuttal, because it slyly obfuscates the implicit purpose behind telling anyone that any proposition is impossible to accomplish.

Suppose I know someone named Bob. Bob seriously believes that if he keeps flapping his arms hard enough, there will come day in the years ahead when flapping his arms will enable him to fly. I tell him, “Bob, it is impossible for you to fly, ever, by flapping your arms.” What is the point in my telling Bob this? The implicit message behind telling anyone that a proposition is impossible to accomplish is that that person ought not to act on that proposition.

If it is logically impossible for me to acquire Ought-Not-to from that which Is, then -- because living a full life is my implicit primary goal -- it logically follows I Ought Not to try to acquire an Ought-Not-to from that which Is, does it not? The point in telling someone that he is forever unable to accomplish a specific task is to convey that he ought not to expend any more effort at that specific task. Therefore, the rebuttal from that nihilistic apologist for Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum does not hold up; any citation of Interpretation 2 of Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum in philosophic debate remains implicitly self-contradictory and hypocritical, because it conveys that, in consideration of the allegedly truthful Is that is Hume’s Is-Ought Dictum, I Ought Not to do something.