Why Occupy Wall Street is a Legitimate Movement

In this short post I am going to argue that some of the grievances of the Occupy Wall Street movement are legitimate. In particular those having to do with economic inequality and the role of money in government. These two issues are quite similar. By legitimate I mean that the concerns of the protestors are at the very least morally permissible. Even more so they are in the moral right.

Economic Inequality
The wealthiest 1% of Americans own somewhere between 30-45%  of the wealth in America. The wealthiest 10% own something like 60-70% of the wealth in the USA. This is one of the central concerns of the OWS signified by the "we are the 99%" slogan.

Why is this wrong? Perhaps first we should consider why some believe it isn't wrong. The thought would go something like this: the wealthy worked for their money, they earned it, they are completely responsible for their wealth. The reason for thinking that it is wrong is opposite: the wealthy are not completely responsible for their wealth, in fact a large part of their prosperity is due to luck (or perhaps by cheating--this is not what I will argue here though). I think the sciences support the latter proposition much more so then they do the second. Sciences, such as, psychology show that humans are strongly influenced by their genetics and environment. For example people are much more likely to help strangers if there is a nice smell of bread as opposed to a more murky location. If such weak environmental factors as smell influence persons, how much more so does the home and community a child is raised in? If the sciences don't give reason to doubt freewill all together, at the very least they establish that it plays a relatively small role. So here is the argument,

1. The economic status in the United States is determined by chance
2. If something is determined by largely by chance and it's consequence is unequal then it is unfair
3. The economic situation in the United States is unequal
4. Hence, The economic situation in the United States is unfair

The argument appears to me to be logically valid. If the premises are true then the conclusion must follow. I do not think p2 or p3 will be denied. Premise one will be slightly controversial. But surely everyone agrees that persons are strongly influenced by factors outside of themselves. These factors are environment and genetics. The sciences show that these factors determine a persons future life immensely. A person who comes from a troubled household will usually not be as economically successful as other persons who come from stable homes, since due to resources they probably won't be as intelligent  etc.This is common knowledge which is empirically confirmed.

Thus it can be confirmed that the United States of America is unequal as well as unfair. Protesting this is right. Another consideration which is even more so morally relevant is economic global inequality. Anything which brings into question the global inequality is also in the right insofar as it brings the scale inequality into question. By attacking the economic inequality in the States the OWS movement also attacks inequality on a global scale. Although it could certainly do this more so.





Democracy and the 1% aka Banks "Frankly Own the place!"

Money plays a extraordinarily large role in American politics. In order to get be elected a politician must raise an enormous amount of money. Media commentators/actors constantly analyze how much politicians rage during election seasons as sports commentators/actors would analyze the trends of a given player's performance. This isn't to say doing so is wrong, just to emphasize how large a role finance plays in election. Obviously, the largest donations come from the richest persons, as such politicians are more likely to follow the desires of their richer donors. Further rich donors have much more power then the average voter in deciding who will actually run in an election, and then who will win. This process doesn't stop after the election, it merely continues through lobbyists and other means. Taking this into consideration one can conclude that the political power of the 99% is (generously) something like 1/100 of the power of the 1%, and then 1/1000 the political power of the .01%. Is this democracy? Rather it's government of some of the people,  by some of the people, for some of the people. If it is democracy it is a primitive, hierarchical version of such a thing. Insofar as democracy is a good thing, the occupy movement is right in criticizing the role of money in politics. One way to begin to solve this issue, would be to increase economic equality. This could be done in many ways, by increasingly increasing the quality of education (particularly in poorer areas since there is a direct correlation between educational achievement and income, as shown by this map), abolish the Bush tax cuts, granting universal healthcare, reversing the trends of what is increasingly proving to be a two-tiered justice system, creating a livable wage, implementing the Robin Hood Tax and so on...

There are of course some different morally issues that can be discussed such as: are Occupy's means of protest effective? Where should occupy go from here? Is it really worth protesting the woes of America in the face of much more grievous global issues? And so on.

However I take it that the central message of Occupy Wall Street is a legitimate on for the reasons given. Now go forth and consider Occupying!

As a side note Paul Krugman has a decent article on this subject which can be read here: Oligarchy, American Style

Ambient Mini Album: Free Download!

I recently made a few ambient/experimental tracks and compiled them into a mini-album. It is good for naps. Some of the pieces are quite nice if I say so myself (my personal favorites are asign, chimes, and choir). There are 7 total tracks, which I decided to reverse making the album a total of 14 tracks. The track list is as follows:

1.  asign
2. chimes
3. clock water
4. a bit dif
5. fith
6. choir
7. low e
8. e wol
9. riohc
10. htif
11. fid tib a
12. retaw kcolc
13. semihc
14. ngisa

You can download all the tracks at http://hulkshare.com/4l083ez2dsex.

Christopher Hitchens: a nincompoop?

For some reason I feel like writing about the "New Atheist" journalist Christopher Hitchens. He has been something of an inspiration for me: he is devastatingly eloquent, brilliantly funny, and is very outspoken. However his speaking style is very rhetorical, not always entirely logical, and he has held some puzzling positions in his lifetime. This post will surprisingly contain mostly criticism.

God is Not Great

Hitchen's book God is Not Great is really quite bad. Through a few antidotes he falls terribly short of showing that "religion poisons everything." He provides a few weak inductive arguments against God's existence that I might explore later, but for the most part I was quite disappointed. At one point he states that Kant had demolished the cosmological and teleological arguments by showing that they reduce to the ontological argument. He left that statement asserted and unexpanded. In his debates he never argued (as far as I know) for this conclusion that Kant had "proved" which leads me to think he doesn't quite understand Kant's line of thinking. On the topic of understanding philosophers, Hitchen's includes the conclusion of Mackie's The Miracle of Theism (which is a very good book, but a bit dry, heavy, and at times dull) in The Portable Athiest. Mackie expands quite nicely on Kant's arguments, but again Hitchens didn't feel like bringing Mackies arguments into debates--perhaps he only read Mackie's conclusion?

All this being said God is Not Great is still probably better then many popular books arguing for theism or Christianity but that is not saying much (D'souza and Strobel, now there are two nincompoops).

Simply evil

In this piece Hitchen's nicely lays out his neoconservative views. Many, including myself, have found these views quite confusing from the former left Marxist. At any rate he argues that 9/11 was "simply evil" and as such demanded a response.

"The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either."

What was so obvious about the 9/11 attacks?

“To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.”

And he continues:

"To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters...Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce "complexity" into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.)"

The problem with this is that the 9/11 attacks were hardly random, insofar as random events do not have reasons. Osama bin Laden was also terribly explicit about the reasons for 9/11, there was his fanatical Muslim aspirations but there was also his desire to change American policy towards the Middle East. Specifically the murderous embargo against Iraq (which to Hitchen's credit, he criticized), the support of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and primarily the United States military presence in Saudi Arabia. Hardly random. This is of course not to say that  9/11 was justified, but that there were legitimate grievances behind it. As such we should have both resisted Al Qaeda (Maybe start by accepting the Taliban's offer of Bin Laden?) and the causes behind it. Instead we have accentuated and surged the causes of terrorism: immensely popular bombing campaigns and wars, the support of dictators in the region, the continual military presence, and mindless support of Israel's policies. There will probably be a blow back to these policies. This of course will be random violence by pure evil monsters whose motivations we should not investigate.

Have I established that Hitchens is a nincompoop? Hardly, this piece is quite short and perhaps too poorly and quickly written to establish that conclusion. Hopefully though I have given some reasons for supposing that at least some of his views are false.

Update?

School starts tomorrow. Because of this my blogging future is an absolutely open mystery....................

New Music!

I, for those of you who do not know, also make music. I recently “released” an album called The Completely Planned Mixtape. 

The Completely Planned Mixtape is a collection of new and old tracks mostly in the trance/electronica genre. You can listen to some of the tracks here and download it here. The highlighted tracks down below can also be downloaded individually.

Here is the tracklist:

1. A New Breed of Blue

2. Sunrays of Epic Proportions

3. Blue on the Rebound

4. Triangles

5. Electric Leaf (Edit)

6. The Sky's the Limit

7. District 6

8. Landscape

9. ANGPS

10. Peculiarity

11. Blue are Everywhere

12. Different Adagio

The Download link: http://hulkshare.com/r5322nad3sx8

Update

School will be starting up again soon, this probably means that I will be blogging less frequently then I already am. I have essentially finished with the Common Sense Atheism Challenge, this is not to say I finished it. For it I read, as well as blogged on these books:

Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig

The Christian Delusion by John W. Loftus

Scaling Secular City by J. P. Moreland

Arguing for Atheism by Le Poidevin

The Miracle of Theism by Mackie

The Existence of God by Swinburne

Arguing About Gods by Oppy

I was planning to read Warranted Christian Belief by Plantinga but that will have to wait for the future. On that note it is really not fair to say that I read Arguing About Gods, because I only read about half of the book and managed to understand less then that. I also did not read portions of the books that dealt with the evidence of (or lack of) the resurrection of Jesus, at least not in detail. At some point in time I will have a quick post on some of my "concluding" thoughts which will do absolutely no justice to the arguments that I have covered. Nevertheless perhaps it will showcase  how much I have learned and thought on the subject--as well as how much more I have to learn and think on the issue.

I would also like to blog a bit summarizing other books I have read: The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder and The Case Against Israel

Finally it would be nice to write a bit about music as well...

A quick case against the existence of the US military

Here is a sketch of an argument against the existence of the US military. It is quite presumptuous, it may be safer to argue for a weaker proposition; that most of the US military should not exist (or perhaps some military operations should not exist); but I will ignore that issue and assume that the argument that I am putting forward--even if not completely convincing will support the weaker proposition. This argument will deal with the ethics of the existence of the military but it will not be an a priori argument; it will deal with empirical data. I will argue that the data supports the following proposition:

it is true that at this point in time the military ought not to exist and that the structures and resources that sustain it shall be redirected for more effective and ethical purposes; to combat the mortal threat of poverty.

At the most basic level the US military M exists for the self defense of  American Citizens. It is concerned with saving lives and combating mortal threats. Thus it follows that if something x saves more peoples lives in more efficient way then the military M we ought to eliminate and change M insofar as the elimination of M supports x. It also follows that if there is a more grave mortal threat x to American Citizens (a more grave mortal threat either takes more lives or threatens to take more lives then then another mortal threat) that M ought to engage with decreasing x.

One of the primary catalysts of the US military operations was the terrorist attack of 9/11. In this attack about 3,000 people died. Let us suppose that the military did not respond to the terrorist attacks but instead completely eliminated itself and poured all the financial prowess of the military-industrial complex into other means of saving lives. Because of this the US was struck with 50 attacks in the year 2001 and each attack caused the death of 3,000 people. In this hypothetical situation 150,000 people died because of the military's non-existence.

What did the military (in this hypothetical situation of course) pour it's energies into? It poured it's energy into reducing poverty. Because more people die due to poverty then they do due to terrorism. As this recent study in the American Journal of Public Health reports in  2000:

162,000 people died due to low social support
133,000 people died due to individual-level poverty
119,000 people died due to income inequality
39,000 people died due to area-level poverty

This study calculated that "4.5% of U.S. deaths were found to be attributable to poverty -- midway between previous estimates of 6% and 2.3%." The total number of deaths were 453,000. Supposing that the study is wrong and that instead of 4.5% of U.S. deaths attributable to poverty, the correct number is 2.3%. This would change the total to 231,533 (100/4.5*453,000*.023). So 81,533 more people die due to poverty then do because of terrorism in this hypothetical situation. Poverty forms a much greater mortal threat then the "war on terrorism." Introducing the assumption that the resources and structure of the US military could significantly reduce deaths attributable to poverty and the case is completely sketched.


I have formulated two basic syllogisms, whether it is necessary that there are two arguments as opposed to one is not a question I will pursue now.

1. The US military exists in order to defend the lives of US citizens.
2. If the US Military redirected it's resources to combating poverty, it would save more US citizen lives then doing otherwise.
3. In order to save more citizens the US military ought to be eliminated and redirected toward combating poverty.

4. The US military exists in order to combat the most grave mortal threats to US citizens.
5. The most grave mortal threat is the existence of poverty.
6. The US military ought to eliminate and change itself insofar as that allows for decreasing the existence of poverty.


Premise 2 and 5 are probably the most questionable. 2 could certainly use more support, unfortunately their is limited empirical examples of what I am proposing. Concerning 5, I may not have done all the research to proclaim that "the most grave mortal threat is the existence of poverty" but I think I have certainly shown that concerns over poverty are more legitimate then concerns over terror. I may pursue the validity of these arguments, as well as weaker arguments on this subject later. What is absolutely true is 2'" If the US military redirected it's resources to combating poverty it would save more lives then doing otherwise." 2' is not restricted to the lives of American Citizens, but instead to all human lives. Certain NGO's save the lives of 3rd world peoples successfully and much more cheaply then they would1st world peoples. So if the US Military doesn't discriminate in the value of American Citizen lives to 3rd world lives it follows that it really ought to be redirected toward combating global poverty. (Not to say that this discrimination is unjustified, though it may be)