Salmonella, Egg-laying Cages, and Prop 2

There is something to be said about the role that agricultural subsidies have in the scale of farming, and thus in the existence of factory farms where cramped conditions can lead to higher risks of infection. But the most you'll hear about it is the cursory comment in a documentary or at a book talk. The policy proposals made by food justice advocates always include subsidies for local and urban small-scale organic farms and gardens; they never talk about getting rid of agricultural subsidies all together, and I personally have never seen or heard any support in the food justice movement for even slightly cutting federal spending on big ag (if any of you have, please send me a link!). Guess it's less of an uphill battle to get pork for the good guys than it is to get rid of bad guys' pork. This is a problem that both sides of the aisle face. Even Tea Party candidates would be reluctant to propose slashing Big Ag welfare (this isn't to suggest that Tea Party candidates would ever propose federal subsidies for urban agriculture).

So I'm not surprised, or even all that disappointed, that tax subsidies for Big Ag weren't mentioned in the Chronicle's article on inhumane farming and the egg recall.

Now, a few words on Prop 2, since that's what I originally wanted to write about in this post:

The Chronicle's article linked to above mentions that animal rights/welfare advocates, including the head of the Humane Society's anti-factory farming campaign, are under the impression that Prop 2 will prohibit egg-laying cages completely. But that's not what I get when I read the text of the new law. Prop 2 mandates that farm animals including egg-laying hens be allowed to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs, and turn "in a complete circle without any impediment...and without touching the side of an enclosure." There isn't a single word in the entire poposition even suggesting a prohibition of all egg-laying cages. A plain, straightforward reading of the new law shows that come 2015, egg-laying cages that are packed in a way that hens have enough room to lie down, stand up, and turn in a complete circle without any impediment and without touching the side of the cage would be perfectly legal (assuming a more strict law doesn't get passed and come into effect before then).

Granted, those cages would probably still be inhumane by most animal welfare advocates' standards (and by my standards). Instead of standing flat on a floor, the hens would probably have to constantly cling to wires below them, and foot and joint problems might still be a normal fact of an egg-laying hen's life. But Prop 2 doesn't say anything about being able to stand on a flat, solid surface. If the Humane Society wants to make a court case out of this, they would have to be doing some legal gymnastics to get a prohibition of all egg-laying cages out of Prop 2.

Let me be clear that I'm not defending bigger egg-laying cages as an alternative to battery cages. I oppose all egg-laying cages. I oppose animal agriculture. I don't think sentient beings can legitimately be owned as property. I just think that Prop 2 is a small step forward (some abolitionists disagree) which does not ban all kinds of animal abuse, and one of those kinds of abuse it doesn't ban is egg-laying cages.

And while we're on eggs and salmonella, here's a neat post by David D. Friedman on voluntary certification and safety measures in egg production in the UK.

Censorship of Certain Acts in the UK

This article is almost a year old now, but I hadn't realized that this small step forward was made in the UK.

Last week, female porn director Anna Span triumphantly announced that as a
result of her intervention the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) had
over-turned a long-standing ban and allowed a film that included images of this
phenomenon—also known as "squirting" or "gushing"—to go on general release.

I thought I should post the link to the article here, since posting this link directly onto my Facebook wall would be inappropriate in the eyes of my more conservative Facebook friends (and probably in the eyes of "the law", who might not take too kindly to me making an article about sex and porn openly available to my friends who are younger than 18). So if you're under 18, don't click on this link. If your parents catch you reading this and then have a cow about it, just know that I warned you.

And parents: if your kids are growing some adult anatomical features, they probably already have some adult desires, and the best way for you to react to that is not to construct some little cardboard cut-out world for them where everyone pretends they don't have any inborn curiosities. (And kids! This does not mean you should disobey your parents!)

Rating Websites

For quite some time I considered rating websites to be a very feasible path to incentivize socially-expected behavior in a complex society. Some of my readers know that I have an arm-chair interest in gift economies, and anyone who thinks for 2 minutes about gift economies knows that the success of deferred non-explicit reciprocity depends on peer pressure - there have to be ways people can share not only their expectations of how productive and generous people should be, but also their assessment of each other regarding their productivity and generosity. In short, you typically need face-to-face interaction for gift to go well, and in a large urban or suburban community you need a way to openly and instantly praise good behavior and reproove bad behavior.

That's what I thought something like Yelp could do - until some really lame daycare moms who got pissed off at my mom for kicking them out of her daycare went ahead and made incorrect allegations about her online. One of the ladies first did it on yellowbot - which I was unable to give two shits about, given that pretty much nobody uses it. Then she did it on Yelp, and a second lady who got kicked out of my mom's daycare went and seconded everything that the first lady wrote. That's when I got really agitated. I use Yelp. And I take it very seriously. I do have my ways of telling how descriptive a rating is, but this still worries me. If I hadn't known my mom, I don't know if I would be able to tell whether the first lady's allegations could hold any water. And that's a threat to the usefullness of credit rating websites.

Part of the problem, I think, is that while there is an openly-known target of criticism, the criticizer is more or less anonymous. Were the criticizers subject to the same standards to which they are subjecting their targets, would people be as willing to post untrue statements about their targets?

There might be another issue besides that. Even if everyone were required to state their whole name and post a picture of themselves on their user profiles as a condition of use, there's still the possibility that they might not feel any negative repurcussions for making untrue statements on the rating website. This might be especially true for people who have no vested interest in the accuracy of their ratings - people who post to the website for the sole purpose of shit-talking my mom, and have next to nothing to do with it after that.

For that reason, I have three suggestions for rating websites (and especially for whoever makes a rating website for a network of gift circles):

1. No anonymous posting - everyone who wants to post should be required to complete an accurate user profile, with a picture of themselves, and any comment completed through an account that lacks a complete and accurate profile should be deleted;
2. Possession of a user profile should be conditioned by long-term contribution to an individual or group effort which is itself subject to ratings in the website;
3. Users themselves should be subject to ratings regarding the helpfullness of their reviews (Yelp already allows users to rate each other's comments, but I don't think it allows users to rate each other).

I'll probably come up with more, but I just had to get this off my chest for now.

And for the curious, here's what a Yelp user profile looks like.

From an email to a friend

Me: ...And yes, I have come accross agorism and mutualism before. I am to the left of agorism and both to the right and to the left of mutualism.

Him: You mean, to the right of some aspects of mutualism, and to the left of others?

Me: I guess so. From what I've seen, most mutualists (or at least the most popular contemporary mutualist writer, Kevin Carson) see primitive accumulation as a problem that can be caused only by government intervention into the economy. I personally believe that primitive accumulation in land can very much be a problem on its own, and I don't think it needs a government to cause and sustain it. So in this sense I'm to the left of mutualism. I think there should be an "upward limit" on how much contiguous land people can legitimately be allowed to accumulte and keep. I should actually phrase it this way - I think there IS an upward limit on how much contiguous land some individual or entitiy can legitimately own - any landholding bigger than a certain size is a state, and states are illegitimate in my book.

I'm also to the right of mutualism in that I'm okay with rent, interest, and profit. I don't see them as dependent on the state, and I don't see them as violations of individual freedom.

Freedom of Religion is Freedom to Offend

People who support using the government to prevent the building of the Cordoba House, also known as the Ground Zero Mosque, speak as if all of Islam now is some special category where the freedom to peacefully gather and worship on one's own property is now qualified by sensitivity to mainstream America. As if freedom of religion is merely the freedom to choose between the little white church on the green grassy hill and the megachurch in the suburbs. Freedom of religion is not just for the wholesome, the familiar, and the unoffensive. Freedom of religion is for the ones who feel called to be different. It's for the peculiar people. It's for the ones who think everyone else is going to hell. It's for the ones who go door to door asking people how they know they're not going to hell. It's for the ones who won't entrust broader society with the education of their children, and who teach their kids at home or in private schools where they assign them weird science books with unorthodox slants on natural history. It's for the girls who insist on wearing long skirts and maybe even bonnets in public. And it's for the girls who want to wear veils too. It's not just for people who want to burn candles or refrain from burning candles; it's also for the ones who want to grow long black beards and bow down and touch their faces to the ground. Freedom of religion is not for the followers of familiar and unoffensive paths. Those people have social nostalgia on their side. Freedom of religion is for the weird, the awkward, and the offensive. If the freedom of religion you believe in is to make any sense, then you have to be willing to be offended. And if you're unwilling to be offended by a religious practice that violates no one's rights, then you don't deserve to be called a patriot, or even an American.

While we're on Youtube...

The Insight tab on the youtube account is just amazing. It lets me know so much about the kind of audience I get.

For instance, I now know that 86% of my viewership is male, while only 14% is female - going along with the idea that libertarianism today is a man's ideology. (I also talk about philosophy of religion and sociolgy of religion on my youtube channel, so this might not represent the popularity of just libertarianism.)

A little more than 40% of my viewers are between 25 and 35 yrs. old, and almost 40% are between 18 and 25. This might have more to do with who uses what medium, than with what age groups are attracted to which viewpoints. But there is the idea that libertarianim appeals to younger people, and this does correlate with it. What strikes me, though, is that I have more viewers who are older than me than I do who are my age or younger than me. Of course, I would be just as puzzled (and maybe disappointed) if most of my viewers were younger than me.

My videos are being most viewed in the United States. Canada comes in at a close second, and the United Kingdom takes third place. This might have a bit to do with language - I think only two of my videos have ever been viewed in Mexico, and that was a while back. It might also be explained by the idea that libertarianism is very much an American ideology. Of course, I'm not a hub of libertarian mingling, so I wouldn't know. I think I could say, though, that of all the English speaking regions, I have regular viewers in only North America and the UK. I have no regular viewers in Australasia or South Africa. Again, I'm not the hub of libertarian mingling, but is it safe for me to suppose that there are no left-leaning market anarchists Down Under? (Watch, by tomorrow morning I'm going to learn about some Australian cooperative village with its own alternative currency, or something like that...)

I also seem to have a bit of a viewership in Argentina. This has a bit to do with my Falklands video, but my Falklands video isn't the only one of my videos being viewed in Argentina - which is curious, and encouraging.

Marketable Aggression

I'm making a rambling and (I hope) constructive critique of market anarchism. Right now it's two little videos where I argue that free markets depend on "religious" presumptions of individual freedom. On my last entry, a youtube user left a comment asking how I think people in a market anarchist society would be able to respond to violent invasion if "we exclude the possibility of selective market-based violation of individual autonomy". I responded that I do believe that some violent retaliation can be legitimate (and thus shouldn't be called a "violation"), but that that retaliation must be proportional and discriminate, and that non-discriminate or non-proportional retaliation is illegitimate regardless of the market demand for it. I thought it was a fairly tight response. But maybe it was too focused.

I didn't have to concentrate on proportionality. I could have just mentioned what a lot of people today think should count as crimes. Most people I know think pedophiles should be thrown behind bars - even the non-violent pedophiles. Most people I know think the producers, sellers, and users of heavy drugs should be thrown in prison. Most people I know think the practice of keeping more than one spouse at a time is an affront to the natural order of things, and that it is within the "public interest" to legally forbid such abominations.

The policies mentioned above are all violent actions that many people would willingly demand in order to get what they believe would be a more secure environment. And all these marketable uses of violence are initiations of violence, which should go against any libertarian's code.

Then there's other kinds of marketable violence. Most people I know think it's okay to force kids to go to school - that is, to confine a non-aggressing child in a particular place regardless of his or her saying "no". Most people I know think it's okay to give kids shots against their will. Most people I know aren't disturbed in the least bit by infant genitle mutilation. Most people I know think spanking is as good and right as little league baseball.

It's easy to imagine that, if we were to get competition in governance today, our legal systems would not be libertarian (it might be better in some regards than the statist system we have now, but it wouldn't be libertarian). A market "anarchist" society without widely-shared and firmly-held beliefs about the sovereignty of the individual, and without widely-shared and firmly-held condemnations of encroachment onto the individual, would be little more than a bundle of all the worst things about democracy tightly wrapped together with all the worst things about capitalism. The political rules of a society are deeply intertwined with the prevailing sentiments of it. If we wish to ever see a world where we are free to choose otherwise, then the freedom to choose has to be something like a dogma.