Henrik Johnson's Blog

Having a working democracy

2009-08-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

Most people would probably say that having free elections where everyone is allowed to run and everybody (Within reason) is allowed to vote and that each vote should count more or less the same.

I've been thinking a bit about this and I think there is one more thing missing from the list above and that is that you need to have more than one plausible choice. There has to be a working opposition. When a country has a working opposition that implies that power will need to transfer every once in a while between the different available choices.

Looking at it through those eyes the democratic countries of the world all of a sudden becomes a lot less. For instance Japan has definitely never had a working democracy. Although they might actually be joining the club with the upcoming election where for the first time ever the ruling party is looking like it will be voted out of power (Not counting a brief one year stint where the opposition was in power several decades ago). Most countries of Western Europe pass with flying colors.

One country which is dangerously close to failing this test though is the United States of America. On the local level it definitely has a great working democracy when it comes to electing public officials, almost to the point of it being stupid what an amazing amount of people have to run for their seats (Seriously why do you have elections for judges, would you not want the most qualified for that job instead of the most popular candidate). However on the national stage you have only two even plausible parties. Both of which is so ridiculously similar in their policies that it is very hard to tell them apart. For instance can someone explain the difference between a Fiscal Conservative Democrat and a Compassionate Conservative? I sure can't do it even though I like to think I am pretty interested in politics.

That's why it's so funny to me to look at US news outlets completely vilifying the "other side" even though to me they basically want exactly the same thing. I think this is also why news in the US has a tendency to get bogged down in such an amazing amount of inconsequential nonsense instead of actually reporting issues. There is really very little to report where it comes to issues because everybody in politics basically agrees on the big picture. It's also probably why the most stupid fringe issues have a tendency to take such a center stage in a lot of elections (Gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research springs to mind), simply because that's the only issues that the candidates disagree on.

It would be great if instead of Democrats and Republicans we could have a couple of more parties that actually had some beliefs except just getting elected. For instance it would be very easy to split the republicans into fiscal conservatives and moral conservatives. Same thing with the democrats it seems very easy to divide them into liberals (Not the US definition of the term, but as in following liberalist ideals) and socialists (The people now called left wing liberals here).

The problem with the US democracy is that every single seat is a winner take all contest which means that anything less than 50% will loose which means that for the foreseeable future until the US changes its constitution it will probably not have a great working democracy because everybody who wants to get elected have to place their feet firmly in the middle of the trough to have a chance and that's why it is so crowded there now here. I realize that there really isn't any way of getting around this issue for presidential (And governor elections as well). But for the legislative assemblies, especially the house of representatives I see no problem with having fractional elections from each state (They do it in the European Parliament).

I don't see this happening anytime soon, but one can always hope that at some point we could get a working democracy here in the United States too at some point.

Culture, Corporations and Big Brother

2009-02-25T23:47:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of discussion in Sweden right now about how the internet in general and peer to peer networking in particular effects the production of culture. There are two things that make this especially current in Sweden right now. The first is the trial against The Pirate Bay (TPB) which is probably the biggest bit-torrent tracker in the world. The second is a new law called IPRED which is a law based on a new EU directive to help the music and film business fighting piracy online.

I'm not going to go that much into the trial against TPB except to note that it is weird how one of the biggest police actions in modern time is done against a handful of people doing something that isn't entirely obviously illegal (At least under Swedish law). The IPRED directive though is dangerous because it mandates that the producers of culture (Read MPAA, RIAA and their equivalents) can demand the identity of IP addresses directly from ISP:s instead of as now needing to go through the police. The weird thing is that in Sweden (And soon I assume the rest of the EU will follow) this means that the record industry now has better legal means than the actual police to get this information. For police to be able to get the identity of an IP number requires that there is a suspicion of a crime punishable by at least 2 years in prison (And fortunately sharing copyrighted material is not that bad yet). The record industry now has no such requirement. I find it very disturbing that the corporations now have better legal tools to dig into my personal life than the government. I generally don't trust the government, but I trust corporations even less.

In the discussion about this I keep hearing that without changes like these to protect copyright the entire industry based on it will collapse. And here is the key point I want to make. Why is this necessarily a bad thing? The industry tries to make this out as culture will go away if they are not around to distribute it. I hold that this is completely false. The people who are actually producing this will still do fine. Musicians will still do music. And they will still be able to live from it.

Imagine a world where musicians made about as much of the total profit selling their music as software developers do when selling their software. That world is here today with the internet. When you sell software online the processing of the sale usually costs around 10% in fees. From what I've read normally a musician today will get around 10% of the total proceeds of their music when under a recording contract. A good site selling music for around $1 to $2 a record or 10 to 20 cents a song would then actually produce about as much income for the musician per sold record or song as they do today charging 10 times as much when the music is distributed through the recording industry. Even weirder is that for some reason when the music is distributed digitally artists get even less than when a regular CD is sold. I have no idea why since the cost of distributing music digitally should be very close to zero when the infrastructure is created.

Other types of culture are not affected at all. Almost all forms of art still requires to be experienced first hand to really enjoy it (Think paintings and statues). Books are still nicer to experience flipping through the dead tree version even though technology is making inroads here with readers like The Kindle. But they are still way to expensive and the selection of books to read on them too limited.

The only industry that I think is pretty much doomed to fail is the movie industry. The problem is that you usually only see a movie once so that if you download a movie and watch it illegally (Perhaps because it is available sooner that way) the chance of you paying any way for it is pretty much zero. I foresee this industry basically heading towards the TV movie format where it will be financed by commercials or subscriptions.

My point is that I have a lot of friends who are both musicians and artists and I am pretty sure that they would all still keep doing their art (Whether it be music, painting or sculpting) regardless of if they would get paid for it. So I understand how the music industry is fighting for it's survival, but we must not confuse the music industry with the actual creation of music. Because the actual creation of music was around long before the music industry was created and it will be around long after the music industry is gone.

Copyright was originally created so that artists would be able to live off their work so that they could concentrate on their art and thus all of society would gain from it. That is a laudable goal, however it has very little to do with what copyright has turned into in modern times where copyright is retained 75 years after the death of the artists. What started out as a means to enrich the culture of our society has now become a tool to stifle it. It is depressing how little of the cultural work of the 20th and 21st century that has passed into the public domain due to the changes in copyright law. I get very upset that we are now signing away our privacy at the bidding of an industry that in my opinion is already doomed regardless and which have already robbed society as a whole of so much.

We have already lost our privacy to the government in the war against terror, we should not lose it to corporations as well.

PS. The conspiracy theorist in me can't help to note that the coverage of the voting on the IPRED law would have been a lot better if media hadn't been swamped with the coverage of the engagement of the crown princess of Sweden which was announced the day before the vote. DS

Not the end of the world

2009-01-28T21:15:00.000-08:00

I wish people who didn't know what they were talking about would just shut up about Large Hadron Collider (LHC) going to be the end of the world. One of the latest is from a fairly believable source Oxford University who published this study. The argument is basically that since they were able to find errors in the calculations they've done to reassure us how can we possibly trust anything the people from LHC says.

Here is the scoop though, everybody can just chill. The reason for this is that the energies that shows up when using the LHC exists in the natural universe. They aren't common, or speaking quantum speak they are very improbable. However, if you take the volume of the Earth and a couple of eons they will have occurred tons of times during our history. And if all it took were a couple of freak super heavy particles to be created to swallow up a body like the earth there wouldn't be anything left but black holes anywhere in the universe.

So basically, since we are here now, there isn't anything to worry about with the LHC. All it is doing is making events that occur naturally (even though very rarely) occur in a more predictable fashion so that they can be more easily studied.

The only argument against the LHC I can think of that actually have some merit is if it is worth the cost. I think that in the long run it probably is, a lot of basic research on particle physics seemed pretty useless at the time it was done and is now providing us such neat things as faster computers, faster networks and more energy efficient technology.

Can we? Are you sure?

2009-01-22T22:56:00.000-08:00

Watching the inauguration of Obama earlier this week and the near hysteria that seems to surround everything he does and says these days I can't help but think that most people who like him are in for a huge disappointment. Don't get me wrong, I like Obama. I also think from what I've seem so far of what he has done since getting elected he is showing promise of becoming a great president too. The problem is just that it seems that expectations of what he can accomplish are just completely out of proportion.

The amount of inertia in the whole Washington establishment is just too big for any one man to make that much of a difference. Just look at the most recent election to the senate where in two cases only by the narrowest of margins two convicted felons just barely were not reelected (One republican and one democrat). How can a body so badly out of order that you can almost coast to reelection even when you have been proven to be corrupt be expected to get anything sensible done. On that note I find it ironic that in most states you are not allowed to vote when you are a convicted felon, but apparently there is no problem to run for office.

There is also way to much money being spent on legislation everywhere in the US. Lets face it special interests are the ones who set the legislative agenda. The line "By the people for the people" is just a bad joke these days. I don't really have any good way of solving the problem though. I would love it if they passed a law that only allowed people to donate to political campaigns (No corporations), but since the people who are getting rich from the systems are the ones that need to abolish it this change will probably never happen.

There are a few things things that I do think Obama can probably fix pretty fast though. For instance the most egregious violations of human rights and the constitution can probably be stopped pretty fast (Guantanamo Bay and large scale domestic wiretapping for instance). I also think the time might have come for public health care in some sort. I don't think there is going to be any major shift in how stuff gets done (Or not done) in Washington though unfortunately.

Can you prove me wrong?

...

You now need to pre-apply for a Visa when travelling to the USA

2009-01-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

I got a slight shock today as I read online that starting today new rules apply to traveling to the US. According to the new rules if you intend to go to the US under the "Visa Waiver" program you now have to apply before hand at least 72 hours prior to departure (And up to 2 years).

You apply by going to this US Customs & Border Protection site. If for some reason you are denied you then need to apply for a normal Visa at the US Embassy.

The reason why I was so shocked when reading this is that it is today around 40 hours left until I am about to board a flight to the US and this was the first time I've heard about it (You would think that the airline would have told you about it). Fortunately though after a frantic call to the US embassy here in Stockholm I was assured that since I have a work visa this doesn't apply to me.

All you people planning on coming to visit though, don't forget to register in advance.

Swedes, marriage and divorce

2008-12-26T02:49:00.000-08:00

I have heard more than once that Swedes were supposed to have a really high divorce rate from Americans. This seemed odd to me from my personal experiences of my friends. In general, it has seemed to me that Americans are way more prone to be divorced than people in Sweden. However, it could just have been that the people I met tended to be divorced in the USA and not in Sweden so I decided to look it up.

I already know that in the US the divorce rate is between 43% to 50% depending on how you count it because I researched that for another blog entry on gay marriage. I found the statistics on the Swedish data on this site about regional Swedish statistics. In Sweden the divorce rate varies a lot between around 15% to almost 30%. The national average is 22.4% though. So in short if you get married in the USA you are about twice as likely to get divorced than you are in Sweden. This corresponds pretty well to my personal experience on this issue as well.

I think one of the main reasons for this difference is that in Sweden people tend to date a lot longer before they get married. I would say the average among my friends is somewhere around 7 years. And critically almost everybody have lived together for a few years before getting married. You just don't know that you can stand someone for the rest of your life until you have cohabited in my opinion. Also most people tend to change and grow a lot between the age of 20 to 30 and the chance of you wanting to spend your life with the same person when you are around 20 as when you are around 30 is pretty slim (I am not saying it doesn't happen, but it is by sense a certainty). After 30 I think most people have found out who they are and change a lot less than when you are younger. If you tend to date longer the chance of you getting married before you have finished growing (Personality wise, not physically) is smaller.

Why are we even discussing bailing out the car industry?

2008-12-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

By the time I post this the car industry bail out is probably already done. I don't understand why we are even discussing it. We're supposed to be living under a capitalist system aren't we? If the United States can't manufacture cars that people want to buy, why would we collectively keep paying companies to do it. I don't see any kind of "strategic homeland security" advantages to have a domestic car industry. And it isn't like there won't be any cars to buy, it's just that the country that makes them will not be American unless they can clean up their mess.

True there are a lot of people employed by the car industry but it isn't that many. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics around 850 thousand people are currently employed by the car and part manufacturing industry. There are also a little bit less than 2 million people involved in the retail and whole sale distribution of cars.

Granted if over 2.5 million people over night lost their work that would probably be truly catastrophic. However it is not that bad if you look closer. First of all, people would probably keep buying and repairing about the same amount of cars (People still use a lot of cars, just not American cars) which means that most of the 2 million people mentioned above will probably still be able to keep trading and repairing cars. Secondly the 850 thousand number includes US employees of non US car companies. Most of these companies are still doing fine and will not be affected. Thirdly, it isn't like all the US car companies will go defunct over night even in the worst case scenario so the immediate impact would be spread out over at least a few years. To put this in perspective we already lost over 500 thousand jobs in just the month of November here in the US also according to the same web site above.

I would argue that one of the biggest problems that the US car industry has to deal with is that a worker here costs almost 3 times as much as a Japanese car worked (And Japan is generally considered more expensive to live in than the US). Why not let the car companies go into chapter 11 bankruptcy and renegotiate their labor contracts and debt. Isn't that exactly what chapter 11 is created for. I have read somewhere that this would be very risky because car companies might not be able to get the bridge financing required to go through the restructuring process (If you can't do that you would be immediately forced into liquidation). However, if that is the case then by all means let the government guarantee that. This kind of financing is senior debt so it is what is repaid first if the restructuring fails and the company is liquidated so the government will almost certainly get it's money back.

If the government just hands over more money to the car industry now, none of the fundamental problems that the industry has would have been fixed and we would be right back to where we are now in another couple of years again. However if we do let the companies go into chapter 11 and they succeed in restructuring they might actually emerge as entities that are able to compete in the global market. And if they don't, why should we spend money trying to keep this dying industry alive any longer than necessary?

Why is Laguna Beach so unfriendly to pedestrians?

2008-11-30T09:48:00.000-08:00

Laguna Beach is fairly unique in the Los Angeles area in that you can walk pretty much everywhere in town. At least if you live in the downtown area as I do. I've also always liked to stroll around (I've never even owned a car until I moved to California a few years ago). What I don't understand is why the city doesn't do more to actually encourage people to walk. It's fairly obvious to anybody who looks that city planning only considers pedestrians as an afterthought to car traffic.

Why don't the traffic lights always turn green for people who walk as well as for the cars. You always need to press the button and you need to press it before the light would have turned green or otherwise you need to wait until the next cycle. Furthermore, why isn't it green for the entire time it is green for the cars going in that direction (Not counting explicit turn signals of course)? Currently you are only allowed to walk for a few seconds as the light turns green in one direction while the cars gets to go for a lot longer. I know people will say that this will congest traffic too much to which I have to say that if they can do it in downtown San Francisco and New York they can do it here too.

Second issue is that we don't have enough crosswalks. If you look at the picture on the right, the red markers indicates obvious crosswalks that are missing. Just in the small section of downtown shown in the picture there are over 10 missing crosswalks. If you then consider that in connection with that the lights are almost never green it can take a lot of extra time to get where you are going since you are forced to cross the street twice instead of one.

Finally you have sidewalks which are missing almost everywhere. Especially heavy trafficked streets like Cyprus Drive feel very dangerous to walk on even during the day. At night it verges on being suicidal to walk them. Not even South Coast Highway have sidewalks on both sides of the street around the area of Upland Road and there are no crosswalks to cross the street anywhere close to where the sidewalk ends. Also in intersections people turning right in cars never ever look right before turning to see if anybody is crossing the street on foot. I don't know how many times I've heard screeching car tires as people finally notice me 5 feet from their front bumpers and since there are no sidewalks I have nowhere to jump out of the way.

I have several friends around town (and I am sure they aren't the only ones) who regularly use cars to drive just a few blocks up or down PCH. Perhaps if we make it easier to walk they could be persuaded to walk instead. This would ease parking and in these days of global warming lead to less green house gasses too. Every little bit helps.

The case for universal health care

2008-11-28T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'm a huge believer in capitalism and "the market". However when it comes to health care I've realized that it simply doesn't work. At least not in the form we have it here in the United States. The reason why it doesn't work here is that in order for capitalism to work there has to be a way to actually shop around. Health care is a bad fit for the market because of several reasons.

Health care is usually a necessity. It is only in unusual cases that you can choose whether you want to get medicine or have a procedure done.
It is hard to even get a price list when you go to a doctor. And if you start asking about prices of what a blood test or other "bundled" services it gets even harder. How are you supposed to shop around to find the best price performance if you can't even know what the price is before you have done something.
In a lot of cases the person that makes purchasing decision is not the same as the person that is footing the bill. In a lot of cases your doctor is the one who decides which medication you are supposed to take even though you are the one who is paying for it.

All in all these all sums up to the simple fact that letting the market handling health care is a really bad fit. And if you look at the current state of health care here in the USA it is also fairly obvious. First of all the US spends way more money on health care than anybody else. According to a World Health Organization report in 2000 the US spent 13.7% of GDP on health care in 1997. The second country in the study is Germany which spend 10.5% of GDP. Most of 1st world countries seem to spent somewhere between 6% and 10% of GDP. The difference between all those countries and the USA is that everybody else has universal health care and somehow here we succeed in paying way more than everybody else and yet not have it.

Even if you just count government spending on health care the USA ends up around the middle of the pack of the first world countries (This according to an article in The Economist from a few years ago). And again everyone else have universal health care and here we don't. The same article also made the point that one of the reasons that the USA manages to pay so much and get so little out of it is that in effect the USA is paying the development costs of new treatments and technology for the rest of the world. The question is if we think it is worth it?

Interestingly enough the system we have right now doesn't even work for people who are well off in all cases. For instance a friend of mine who work in the tech industry and which I assume makes a pretty decent living recently got laid off. It didn't take long for him to find a new job and he was back on track. However during the time without a job he lost his health insurance and when he got his new job he had a preexisting condition. So now, he can not get new health insurance that will cover the preexisting condition he had so he is completely screwed. It is through him that I have learned a lot about trying to use health services in this country without health insurance.

One thing I hear often from friends who are against "socialized medicine" (The phrase preferred by people against universal health care) is that they can afford great health care and don't want to be forced to be accept a lowering of the standard of their health care. However that doesn't have to be the case. I would propose the government would provide a minimum level of health care and if you want better care you can still get health insurance and get better care. This is how it works in Sweden (The only other country have a pretty intimate knowledge of) and I think it that is actually a great system.

Then of course the thing I keep hearing is that we can't afford it. I would like to make the argument that we can't keep going like we are now. We are already paying way more than anybody else and we are getting less (The WHO report above ranked the overall performance of our health care system at 37th and at 72nd of overall health out of 191 countries in the study. Basically, we are one of the worst country of the industrialized world when it comes to health care). Given the amount of money we spend on health care we should be able to figure out a way to get universal health care without spending any more money than we already are. Even if the universal health care we get is crappy at first (Which is then improved by health insurance by those who can afford it) it would still be a great first step.

Gay marriage by the numbers

2008-11-16T12:36:00.000-08:00

During the whole "prop 8 hoopla" here in California I've heard a lot of seemingly wrong numbers to justify either position and I just thought I'd go through a couple of the numbers and go through where they come from (If I have been able to figure it out) and which are obviously wrong.

Gay marriages only last an average of 18 months

This is the biggest most obvious lie. As far as I could track it down this data comes from a Study performed in Holland. The study was on the relationships of HIV positive homosexuals and refers to their average relationship length. There are two obvious distortions here. First of all if you start out with a sample of HIV positives you will probably end up with a selection that is more promiscuous that the average. Secondly, it refers to relationship length. It has nothing to do with marriage length. Taking that into account I would have to say 18 months is actually pretty good. The fact is that since gay marriage is such a new occurrence there really isn't anywhere in the world where it has been around for long enough time to get statistics on this.

The divorce rate in the USA is 60%

This number is too high as far as I have been able to find it. The US Census Bureau has data on this and also the National Center for Health Statistics makes projections on the data. Depending on how you measure it they give estimates somewhere between 43% and 50%. The National Center for Health Statistics estimate found that 43% of first marriages end in separation or divorce within 15 years. The 50% estimate is based on just measuring the number of marriages and divorces for each year and dividing the two.

Gay people don't have enduring relationships

There have been tons of studies on this which indicate that between 40% and 80% (With lesbian women being slightly better at this than gay men) of interviewees at any given point are in a stable relationship. According to the information I've found it seems that this corresponds pretty well to the statistics of heterosexual people as well.

When gay marriage is allowed less heterosexuals tend to get married

This is the weirdest one and I have to say I have simply found nothing to back this up or debunk it (I'm guessing it is just so off the wall that nobody who actually does studies like this has found it worthwhile to investigate). I can sort of guess that it refers to the increasing tendency in certain parts of Europe for people to not get married even though a couple live together and have children. This was a tendency that started long before gay marriage has been allowed (For instance it is very common in Sweden and they don't have legal gay marriage yet). I know several of these couples at home and I usually the reason I hear for it is that the people involved in them just feel that marriage is just a piece of paper so why would they bother. I have never heard anybody use the reason that if gay people can get married they don't want it.

Domestic partnership is the same as marriage

This obviously varies from state to state but here are the major differences int the state of California as far as I've figured it out.

The biggest area of inequality was in regards to employment benefits for spouses. Many employers refused to offer same-sex couples the same health insurance benefits as married couples.
It is a lot easier to dissolve a domestic partnership than a marriage. Specifically to dissolve a marriage at least on of the two people involved need to have been living in California for at least 6 months.
You don't need witnesses to create a domestic partnership (You do to form a marriage).

Free trade and why government should subsidize education

2008-11-12T00:06:00.000-08:00

If you know me you probably know that you would find few stauncher proponents of free trade than me. Basically if you would ask me if any country should remove a barrier for the movement of any kind of commodity the answer will always be yes. This includes raw materials, products, people and money. If someone said that the US would unilaterally remove all trade barriers tomorrow and allow everybody who wanted to migrate here do so my response would be that it's about time. You still need to keep customs around because stuff that is actually illegal here should still be kept out regardless of if it is baby killing formula, drugs or criminals.

If you read economic theory about free trade it will almost always lead to an increased economy. The beauty of having a growing economy is that even though there are winners there doesn't need to be losers (Since what happens is that instead of someone getting a bigger slice of the pie the pie actually gets bigger). The reason that I do not fear free trade is that I feel comfortable that I myself don't really have a problem to compete with anybody doing what I do no matter where in the world they live. If I was working in a job where little training was needed like for instance in a call center or flipping burgers at McDonald's I should probably be worried because there is most likely going to be someone around from a lower wage country that would do it cheaper than you want to.

Usually what happens when you open up trade is that you get to specialize on what you are good at. So basically if you are a country that keep people well educated that means that instead of having a bunch of people working low level tech support or the aforementioned call centers they can be senior tech support or managers. The jobs requiring little training will still need to be done but instead of wasting your countries labor force on that you can have others handle that for you and you instead can export the know how of higher level jobs. The country providing the "low wage" work force will also gain from this because they will be able to take advantage of know how not available to them domestically.

Here is where education comes in. Even though both countries involved above gain you probably want to be the one providing the high level services. The way to become that one is to make sure that you have a well educated population. How do you get that? You make sure that nobody is denied going as far as they can in the education system regardless of their economic situation. This is definitely not the case here in the US. Even though there are a lot of scholarships and stuff available a college education is not something that is available to anybody who could pass it.

I'm not saying that we should keep everybody in school until after college. You still need to keep entrance standards and make sure that you don't let too many people in that will probably not graduate. All I'm saying is that we should let everybody who could pass college do it regardless of if they have the economic means to do it or not. Even if this means that we as a society have to pay for this in the short term it is something that will be paid back many times over counting over the life time of the person even if you just count the increased income that the extra education will generate (Higher pay will lead to higher taxes).

One thing you need to be careful about though is to not make it too cheap. Taking Sweden as an example where education is basically free all the up through post grad (You also get a monthly stipend to live on). The problem with that is that I know a bunch of people who just go to school because they don't have anything better to do (Or they don't feel like working). You should need to pay at least a little so you make sure that there is at least a little bit of thought going into the choice of education as a way of gaining an occupation instead of just personal growth. One example would be to make the college free, but not providing the stipend. This would still make college something that takes a little bit of investment, but it probably would not be out of reach of someone who really wanted it.

Higher education means that everybody are better suited in an increasingly global society (It's coming regardless of if we want it or not). Also over the long term this will make us money because people will get increased wages (And keep in mind that you would no longer need to save for your children s college fund anymore or at least nowhere near as much). There are also other savings coming from the fact well educated people with good paying jobs are probably less likely become criminals, end up on well fare or otherwise end up being a burden on society. And finally there is also the individual gain of people with high education usually having more oportunities available to them and hopefully being able to lead more rewarding lives.

Government and marriage

2008-10-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

Here in California one of the propositions (Same as a referendum, something they have tons of here in the USA) that is generating the most discussion is Proposition 8. This is a proposition to ban gay marriage. It gets confusing since if you are for gay marriage you should vote no to proposition 8 (Since gay marriage is already legal in the state of California). I've discussed this quite a lot with some friends around here and the more I think of it the more I think that marriage simply shouldn't be anything that government should care about at all.

Why not simply have government not care at all whether you are married or not. Instead of having a bunch of laws that change how you are taxed, what kind of benefits you can use when married and what happens when you dissolve it why not make the marriage itself simply be a contract you sign in the same as if you were forming a business venture with someone. This contract would simply relate how to resolve conflicts during the marriage (And specifically when you want to dissolve the partnership and get a divorce).

In regards to the benefits you get today, instead of having them being tied to being married make them tied to the actual situation that you want to help out with. Examples of this would be to increase subsidies for having children or giving tax breaks when people share a place to live. Religions would still get to decide whatever they want to endorse as calling a marriage, but whether or not the marriage is sponsored by your religion of choice wouldn't in any way influence what the government treats you.

I'll just go through some arguments I've heard against it. First of all the obvious that this would make more people get a divorce. My answer to that is that if the only reason a couple doesn't get a divorce is that they can't deal with the paperwork they probably should have gotten a divorce regardless.

Another argument against it is that if you allow gay marriage, what's next polygamy? I have to say that as long as it is amongst consenting adults I have no problem with that either. The only unions I have problems with are the ones where one of the participants are not consenting adults (Children are out) or if there are medical reasons (So no brothers and sisters).

Finally I've heard the reason that it is hard for parents to explain to their children why some of their class mates have two fathers or two mothers. My only comment to this is that this is a problem they already have regardless of if gay marriage is legal or not. Gay people will not stop being gay just because they can or can't get married. If that was the case there wouldn't have been any gay people until the last couple of years and even now in very few places in the world.

Off course all of this is just a pipe dream and it will never get to pass sine the norm is still that people get married and why would a privileged majority ever give up privileges they already have in a democracy. It is unfortunately not the way the world works.

Good site if you still don't know who to vote for

2008-10-18T15:43:00.000-07:00

The Electoral Compass seems like a really good site for the one who has still not made up his or her mind in regards to the US election coming up soon. Basically it will ask your position on about 40 questions and then plot how well your views correspond with the current candidates. It was pretty spot on with my own opinions of the current election at least so hopefully it could be helpful.

Swedish coverage of the American Election

2008-10-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

It's been interesting following how Swedish news portrays the USA election compared to here in the USA. Even though here in the USA there has been a lot of stuff being thrown around in regards weird allegations and other miss information. In Sweden it seems like that is the only stuff being reported.

It's also very annoying to see everything being so ridiculously tilted towards one candidate. When I read news I tend to prefer it when it is as unbiased as possible. It's very hard to find any article at all in Swedish newspapers that says anything positive about McCain the last couple of months. For instance I read this article, now the article isn't that bad (It is about the Irish Bookie calling the election early). But the picture that went with the picture was the one to the right here. For some reason Aftonbladet in their infinite wisdom saw that this pictures which makes McCain look like some kind of grabbing lizard was the right picture to accompany an article that was about an Irish bookie. It would make a better sense with a picture of the bookie (Which is what the US news agencies I've seen ran with).

Also reading the readers comments on these articles are scary. It seems like people think Obama is some sort of second coming. However, I seriously doubt that almost anybody in Sweden can recite accurately any specific policy that either candidate is promoting. One of the comments I read was that the economy in Sweden would probably be better if Obama won. I would highly doubt that myself since Obama is the one of the two candidates which is against free trade.

In full disclosure I am leaning towards Obama myself (Although since I'm not allowed to vote who cares) but it is not with any vehement conviction. The main thing that tilted me over to his side actually is the running mate of McCain who frankly scares me. It's not because I'm sexist (I had very little against Clinton except she seemed a little too calculating). It's just that Palin seems like an idiot talking head and I don't want people like that to lead regardless of their gender.

Conservatism and liberalism

2005-09-25T00:55:00.000-07:00

I have realized something interesting regarding American politics. The two biggest parties in America being Republicans saying they are conservative and Democrats who are mostly liberals. Interesting enough if you look at the two ideologies of these two movements they really have nothing to do with what the American politicians say it means. I'll start off with a description of the two (Mostly gotten from the excellent site Wikipedia).

Conservatism

Conservatism is a universal ideology or philosophy: conservatives consider their values to be valid for all persons, not just for themselves. Consequently, there is no great tradition of conservative separatism, and conservatism is a political force, seeking to implement policy. Since not everyone is a conservative, now or in the past, conservatism is historically associated with repression of non-conservatives. In Europe the catholic-nationalist-conservative regimes of Salazar and Franco are notorious examples. The Franco regime came to power in the Spanish Civil War and executed thousands of its political opponents, tortured and persecuted many others, imposed rigid censorship, and promoted a mono cultural Spanish identity.

Conservatives have a strong orientation to values, which they consider universal. Consequently, they tend to reject the validity of other political ideologies. Conservatives don't see anarchism, for instance, as different: they see it as wrong. The formal presumption of ideological neutrality, in liberal-democracies, is a source of friction with conservative groups, who believe that their values precede or override the political process. Conservatives often claim that their values are the 'national values' or 'community values', which are beyond political discussion and must be enforced. This belief in shared, and inherently necessary, constitutive values is a feature of communitarianism, but that is not a synonym for conservatism.

Different forms of conservatism emphasize different values, including among others these value preferences

Order over chaos
Orientation toward the past rather than the future
The rural over the urban
Unity and homogeneity, over discord and fragmentation
The natural over the artificial and technological
Existence over possibility
Slow and incremental change over Utopian projects
Hierarchy over egalitarianism
Acceptance of inequality over redistribution

Liberalism

Under liberal principles, the form of society is determined by the outcome of competitive processes in a defined framework. The state, according to liberal ideology, should guarantee the process, but not interfere with the outcome: most liberals therefore see a limited role for government. However, liberal political parties also seek to use the state to impose liberal principles on non-liberals, for instance by liberalization of economic policy. In the economic sphere, liberalism advocates the free market as the ordering principle, and the production of goods and services by competing entrepreneurs. Liberal societies assign social status and advantage, by competition among talents. In politics, the early liberal principles of free expression and religious tolerance have evolved into the liberal-democratic principle of competitive multi-party political pluralism. Pluralism, in this context, is restricted to those who respect democracy and human rights. The rise of militant Islamism in western Europe - which often rejects both - illustrated the limits to liberal pluralism.

Liberalism is inevitably in conflict with non-liberal philosophies and ideologies, and to a certain extent with non-liberal societies. Most liberals believe that liberal democracy is superior to all other systems, and consider illiberal governments "unfree". The liberal idea of freedom is usually expressed in the form of fundamental rights, although it can be expressed directly as liberties. Some liberals think that no person can be free in a non-liberal society, and that there is a moral imperative for global 'liberalization'. Early European liberalism was a revolutionary movement, which sometimes brutally repressed its opponents, especially the Roman Catholic Church. The revolutionary liberal tradition - sometimes referred to as neo-Jacobin - never disappeared in Europe, and has recently re-emerged to confront Islamism. Liberal revolutions, however, are now primarily expected in non-western countries, in the form of concurrent regime change, democratization and liberalization. Some liberal thinkers see a historically inevitable global triumph of liberalism - the end of history thesis.

So what's wrong with this picture

Let's start with conservatism. It seems strange that such a huge part of the biggest democracy in the world would prefer "Unity and homogeneity, over discord and fragmentation", especial since the US is such a very heterogenous country. The ideal of the "The natural over the artificial and technological" also seems to cling very strange for the ruling party of such a dynamic and high tech country in as the US. But on the other hand, you do have the natural human instinct of always fearing any kind of change which is probably why this has always been so popular pretty much everywhere in the world.

Then we come to liberalism. Interestingly enough here you have the phrase "Bleeding heart liberals" which is usually used to refer to people who want to raise taxes and improve social services here. Nothing could be further from liberalism. Liberalism taking to its extreme means that the goverment only have one thing to do: They should excercise a monopoly of using violence to implement its laws and politics. That's it. You can't get a smaller government than what liberalism states. Here in the states Republicans are suposedly the party for small government (Even though it has never increased at a more breakneck speed than since George Bush took office, but that's a different issue), and nobody preaches bigger government than the suposed Liberals (Well, the Socialists would be even bigger but they are so marginalised they hardly even count.

American Values

2005-08-10T07:33:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a few moments to write about something different than what I am up to and just thought I'd share a few thoughts about my perception of some controversial US subjects who as usual I can't really understand what the whole hoopla is about.

Burning of the American flag

There has been a lot of discussion about making it illegal to burn an American flag here in the United States.

First of all it is interesting to note that according to the U.S. Flag Code the correct way to dispose of a flag is, and I quote: "The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning".

Jokes aside, the case for making it illegal is that the American flag is the most important symbol of American values (Being the freedom and pursuit of happiness). I can understand how some people can find it offensive that someone so blatantly express their displeasure and disrespect of something that most people here (Me included most of the time) agrees with.

However, I find it interesting that in order to protect the symbol of American values they think it is ok to betray those values (In this case limit freedom). In short the way I see it, the people who are for making it illegal to burn the American flag find that the symbol itself is more important than the values it represent.

The US strategy of preemption

With this I mean the new way that America has decided that it has the right to go to war in the world. That is basically if it feels threatened by any other state it has the right to go after that state, regardless of if any other country in the world agrees with the US or not.

To start off and to set the record straight, I was for the war in Iraq (Although not the way America went about to do it). The way Saddam Hussein behaved before the war was just so bizarre if he did not possess weapons of mass destruction I just couldn't understand why he behaved the way he did. With that I mean that he cooperated so badly with the UN inspectors even though he apparently had no WMD:s.

I just find it this new way of thinking very dangerous. To explain why I think so I would like to start out with claiming that I think pretty much every country in the world think that it is righteous (I'm going to intentionally leave out North Korea, because Kim Jong Il just seems to behave so erratically).

To illustrate my point I'm going to choose the country of Iran. I am fairly certain that the people who rule Iran are convinced that they are working as a force for good (Something you usually get from very religious people). Let us assume that Iran adopted the same foreign policy as the US. That is if they feel they are in danger of being attacked by another forreign country they have the right to preemptively strike at that country, what would they do? And before we even go there take a moment to think of who is in the most danger of being attacked by the other Iran or the USA. My bet is that Iran has a lot bigger chance of being attacked (And much more severely) than USA. So according to the same reasoning as the US used to attack Iraq (I'm not going to include Afghanistan because in that case they actually did strike first, and I seem to recall that the US did have UN approval for that), Iraq would be just as justified (Or even more because I seriosly think the US could do a lot more damage in Iran than vice verse) to preemptively attack the United States.

That is the reason that in the past a country usually had to go to the UN Securities Council and convince them that they were in the right. And thus by doing this the country in question could go forward with the good eye of the international community (And usually their considerable support, remember Gulf War 1). When each country can decide by them self it is OK to go and invade another country is just very dangerous. The only reason the US got away with it is that they are the "biggest bully in the schoolyard", regardless if they were in the right to invade a country (Which I agree with that they were in the case of Iraq) or if they weren't.

That's it for this time. I have more to say on this subject with the whole "non combatant issue", but I don't have the energy for it right now. Mayby in a future post.