Fra selvangivelsen

1.5.11 Har du eid kraftverk i 2007?

Hjelpetekst:
1.5.11
Eier du eget kraftverk svarer du ja på spørsmålet.

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1.6.2
I denne posten fører du beregnet positiv personinntekt fra enmannsforetak hvis du driver annen virksomhet enn fiske, dagmamma¹ eller deltakerliknet foretak.

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Lønnsoppgavekode.

[401] Positivt ber. pers.innt. - annen næring
[402] Positivt ber. pers.innt. - annen næring

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3.2.17 Fyll ut Tilleggsskjema for næringsdrivende innen jordbruk/gartneri, skogbruk, reindrift, pelsdyrnæring og skiferproduksjon i Nord-Troms og Finnmark (RF-1177), og beløpet blir overført til denne posten.

1. Jeg foretrekker termen "dagperson".

In other news: no more death, all taxes repealed

I can't leave you people alone for five minutes, can I? I leave the computer to take a walk, and lo and behold:
The Australians apologize to their Aboriginals and Fidel Castro retires.

I am very happy that Australia finally apologized. When John Howard was prime minister, he reminded me of that scene in A Fish Called Wanda where Otto (Kevin Kline) knows he has to apologize to Archie (John Cleese) and practices, while sitting in a lotus position: "I'm so ssssss. I'm so very very ssshh. I'm so very very FUCK YOU."

And Castro? Well, there's a discussion over at Crooked Timber which is very... old. And to anyone who wishes to engage in this debate, or the many many many like it which will no doubt follow in the course of the next few days, I have this to ask, nay, beg:

T₀ *
Brothers, sisters, comrades: can't we just all come together as one and agree that while Fidel Castro's Cuba was (and is) a totalitarian dictatorship responsible for human rights abuses, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, they also managed to pull off some remarkable feats of humanism and social development in areas such as literacy, health care, etc.?

And since I'm rereading Arne Næss' philosophy of debate these days in my copious free time, I feel obliged to tell you that if we call the statement in the paragraph above T₀, a completely accurate rewording of that statement is T₁, which is as follows:

T₁ *
Can't we just all come together as one and agree that while Fidel Castro's Cuba has managed to pull off some remarkable feats of humanism and social development in areas such as literacy, health care, etc., it was (and is) a totalitarian dictatorship responsible for some terrible human rights abuses and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms?

See? See? It doesn't matter which order you say it in! It's the same statement.

I call it the "a plague on both your houses"¹ school of political debate.

¹ Not to be confused with the "a plaQue on both your houses" school of debate. That stuff is mostly for the historical societies.

You Do the Math

Since it's been 6 years since the WTC attacks, I thought I'd repost this thing I wrote back then. I'd have redone the math, but honestly, it hasn't changed at all. At this point it's just a simple matter of attrition and addition. Multiplication, really.

5 years

5 years.
1825 days.
That's 5 long, long years.
On the other hand, Bush only has 861 days left in office.
861 days, 8 hours and 6 minutes.
And 52 seconds (but who's counting).

2973 people died in the September 11th attacks (oh, and the 19 hijackers, but who is counting them? And incidentally, why aren't we counting them?).

2973. That's a lot of people dead for no reason.

Every single one of those one thousand eight hundred and twentyfive days since those 2973 people, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes.

Jeepers, if we were counting, that would be 53 million children. Put it another way: think about that really big class you were in when you were a kid? 30 kids, far too many for the overworked teacher. You're dead. You are all dead, and a thousand other classrooms like the one you were in. Every day for five years.

On the day that those 2973 people died, roughly 30.000 children died from easily preventable causes. That number of children also died the day before and the day after. That's like 60 crammed-full jumbo jets crashing every day.

Somewhere between 62.000 and 180.000 people have died thus far in the war "on" terror, according to the Independent. That's at least 33 people every day = roughly 1/1.000th of the WTC disaster, or roughly 1/10.000th of the children who died that day.

The thing we spend the most money on around the world is weapons that enable us to kill other people. We spend $950 billion on this. The US alone spends $441.6 billion on this.

If you take what the US spends every single year on being able to kill other people, and had put it into food distribution, sustainable development, clothes and medicine for those 53 million children (they mostly die from things like diarrhoea, pneumonia, measles and malaria), you could have saved every last one of those children about 200 times over, and still have money left to put them through school for five to eight years.

Also, 2.9 million people died from AIDS last year. Somebody should really be looking into that.

We like to focus on big, dramatic dangers, and because of that, we're less focused on actual problems that are actually killing us. Unlike September 11th, life is mostly not like Hollywood movies. Statistics are realer than anything to the people doing the dying, and there are 30.000 good reasons every day to stop being idiots.

I have a suggestion. It's a really simple and easy suggestion. My suggestion is based on the fact that a) I consider myself as being strongly opposed to human beings, both children and adults dying unnecessarily. b) I think that we are vastly overestimating our need for killing each other.

1) Maybe we can all get together on the children not dying, and the not killing each other unnecessarily?

2) Then we could funnel some if not all of the money and work skills used for the military into non-military work around the world.

3) Maybe we could all get together on the not occupying other countries and killing people there.

4) Points 1, 2 and 3 would lead to other people maybe feeling less inclined to coming over to our place and killing people over here, or having their cousins who already live here not killing people over here. It might even lead to people over there killing each other less, and people over here killing each other less.

5) It would also lead to less dying in general from easily preventable cause, like hunger, AIDS, malaria, diahrroea, pneumonia, infections, terrorism and laser-guided smart bombs.

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Richard Rorty died yesterday from pancreatic cancer.

I don't really know what to say. Rorty is probably the thinker who has influenced me the most. I first read him in Ralph Jewell's amazing seminars on the poetics of science when I took a grunnfag in philosophy. When I was re-reading him for my MA thesis, I became acutely aware of how much his thinking had seeped into the foundations of my world-view.

For more about Rorty, you can actually just check out the last couple of paragraphs of the previous post.

Update:

Some places to start with Rorty.

First, try reading this introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism from 1981. Here, Rorty gives a brief outline of how pragmatists think, and what the consequences of that position is. It's a good place to begin, and it's a way of determining if you like Rorty's whole approach to philosophy. I think one should not completely assimilate Rorty, and take all things which he say to heart. He is fuzzy on a lot of practical issues, and simplifies a lot of problems (possibly for rhetorical reasons - he is an eminently rhetorical philosopher). The most important thing one should take from him is the basic approach, I think. The way he makes things contingent and takes the consequences of a godless world to their last stop, and tries to create a practical philosophy in that position. He refuses throughout his bibliography to say that he is right, that he speaks the truth, and that this does not mean that he cannot make ethical judgements:

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word "true" or "good," supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of "number." They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call "philosophy"-a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that "there is no such thing" as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a "relativistic" or "subjectivist" theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language is too unphilosophical, too "literary," they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach.

And also the following, oft-quoted passage:

Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form "There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you." This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre's remark:

Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.

This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.

If you want to read a book-length work, Contingency Irony and Solidarity is probably the best introduction to his thinking. It's a very easily read, deceptively simple book. The argument of the book is basically an attack on foundationalist conceptions of language, self and community (a negative project); followed by an attempt to construct political and personal possibilities after taking those conceptions apart (a positive project).

First, he attempts to think of the language we use not as a device becoming better and better suited to the world around us, but as a tool for interaction with other human beings. Second, the idea of the self becomes an attempt at redescription of culture in a historical setting. Third, the idea of community becomes a rhetorical element. A set of arguments and descriptions of how certain institutions and ideas of community arose.

In chapter 4, he lays out the political possibilities for the ironist mindset which arises from these contingencies. The ironist is the personality Rorty has the most respect for. A humanist who is never quite able to take himself entirely serious, and is therefore never sure of his own rightness. These people are easily convinced of the right of other people to express their own ways of life, and hard to convince that certain rules should be made to be unbreakable and non-negotiable.

Next follows some readings of cranky old continental philosophers and Derrida, and readings of authors Proust, Nabokov and Orwell of which particularly the Orwell chapter is interesting. There, he basically argues that one of the lessons to take from Orwell is that characters like O'Brien in 1984 are possible. That we might at one point step off the wheel of history at the wrong place, and that one should never give up the diurnal struggle. All it takes is one bad generation before the torturers come knocking. And this is the vision which Rorty attempt to create an apparatus to prevent, O'Brien's vision of history. As an intellectual of the party, he can say the words with a straight face, as something to be desired: "If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever."

And as Winston pleads with him to convince him that such a society is impossible, he appeals to the Spirit of Man, and O'Brien tells him that if Winston is a man, he is the last one. That he is about to become extinct.

Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch

Kurt Vonnegut died last night. So it goes.

Being a humanist means that you try to behave as decently, as honourably, as you can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. When we had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, I spoke at it and said at one point, 'Isaac is up in heaven now'. It was the funniest thing I could think of to say to an audience of humanists. Believe me, it worked - I rolled them in the aisles. If I should ever die, god forbid, I hope people will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now'. That's my favourite joke.
Kurt Vonnegut: Timequake