In Praise of Mud

Given how much Nietzsche, Ivanits, and Thompson I've been reading lately (and that I spend way too much time with these people), it's funny that I should find my philosophical cud for the day in this week's Economist- in a sports article, no less. Behold:

Eero Mantyranta, a Finn, was a double Olympic champion in cross-country skiing. His body has a mutation that causes it to produce far more of a hormone called EPO than a normal person would. This hormone stimulates the production of red blood cells. A synthetic version of it is the (banned) drug of choice for endurance athletes.

Mr Mantyranta was allowed to compete because his advantage was held to be a “natural” gift. Yet the question of what is natural is no less vexed than that of what is fair.

Amen, eh? The article actually comes out on the side of gene doping (a fairly controversial position, I think)- so long as it's "safe" for the athletes, despite acknowledging that athletes are often more than willing to forgo long-term health for short-term glory. I'm unsure as to how they arrived at the conclusion that "safety is easier to measure than fairness" (rationalization: "doctors and scientists adjudicate on such matters all the time"), but it's a ballsy stance and one that I am tempted to applaud.

As a former track athlete and 5'2" 400m hurdler, I understand the sense of unfairness one feels when confronted with a 6' opponent, all legs, next to you in the starting lane. She's a born athlete, you quickly surmise; she doesn't understand the loss of six hours every week to physical therapy, the dependence on pain killers to get through a race, the nightly icing and re-bandaging and hours of stretching obdurate muscles just so you can walk the day after a work-out. She just wakes up every morning, wraps a pink scrunchie around her hair, and she's off- running so gracefully and effortlessly that the hurdles seem to kneel before her approach out of respect.

Yeah, I get it. But I guess my sense of aesthetics is too strong to fall in line with the fairly rational analysis presented by the enlightened staffers of that weekly news-magazine.

The Olympics is best explained as a panoply of savagely dramatic, intensely pagan exhibitions of all that fascinates the reptilian brain within us. A majestic undying fire, a man running so fast that we lose him when we blink, a woman hurling herself sixteen-and-a-half feet into the air with nothing but a pole, millions of exotic peoples huddled together around a circus freak show draped in flags and soaked in sweat. This is not a gathering that exalts how far we've come, this is a collective unwillingness to abandon the mud from which we rose.

There's value in that- value in fanfare, wonder, rage- value in the irrational, and if the Olympics is our last great bastion of primitive humanism then may Nikolai the Wonderworker bless those five rings. But the moment we allow concern for the "unfairness" of natural biology to encroach on this hallowed ground- fairness, that revolting notion born from untrained "rationality"- that very moment, all significance shrivels to ash like a husk set aflame.

McCain courts godless libertarians?

Via TMZ.

J-Mac will be stumping at the Sturgis Rally in South Dakota today. After the Senator pays tribute to Vets at the event, that well-known upholder of moral virtue Kid Rock will rock the main stage. Tans and tatas will be competing in the Hawaiian Tropic contest nearby.

And as the Huffington Post reports, the other entertainment on offer includes "Ringin' Wet & Wild" women's wrestling event and a Fake Orgasm Contest.

Somehow I don't think his press people will sell it that way.

John McCain is aware of the clitoris!

Sounds like a golden opportunity to me. After all, the bastard was a fox when he was younger.

Hail to the Chiefs

David Broockman quotes Matthew Yglesias on some of the dangers of unrestrained localism:

Since urban areas tend to contain both pockets of poor people and pockets of liberals, it's to some extent inevitable that city governments will wind up taking the lead on poverty issues. But for the sake of poor people, we shouldn't be content to leave it that way. On the local level, after all, the easiest and most effective way to eliminate poverty is just to make it too expensive for poor people to live there. [...]

Which isn't to say that state and local government can't do good things. Often they do very good things. But ultimately the incentives facing a lot of local governments are bad, and the resources aren't distributed in the right way. National leadership is vital to making really sustainable progress, especially considering that the number of people in need of help goes up in downturns at just the time when state and local governments usually need to cut spending.

Unfortunately, Yglesias doesn't clarify "bad" or "the right way". To the classical, externality-oriented problem of NIMBYism (nuclear power and what not), my usual answer is to angrily link Coase Theorem five or six times and then play Kikazaru. I assume that's not what Yglesias is getting at.

One example he does give--spending cuts during economic downturns--is a bit strange. Our government's tendency to spend beyond its revenues originates not from any reduced danger compared to the many states but because the Congress enjoys nearly unlimited credit, and the states do not. As we're seeing, that's gotten us into a helluva lot of trouble (though it's made plenty of well-connected people very rich), and I usually count the reduced deficits of smaller governments as an advantage.

By "incorrect" resource distributions, is Yglesias possibly suggesting that poorer cities and states should receive wealth transfers from their richer counterparts? If the welfare state is suspect, state welfare has got to be one of the most disastrous ideas in common currency. Several failed governments on the African continent owe much of their troubles to Western "assistance", and foreign aid to Israel (among many benefits) continues to prop up a fundamentally broken party spoils system.

I think the most important point that Yglesias makes is that local governments tend to be more tightly controlled by an in-crowd who won't sacrifice their own interests. That's true, and in many ways that's the whole point. National governments are impossible to control, and the best we can hope for in any case is majority rule. Not only is popular sovereignty more consistently achieved by smaller governments, it's also worth having, because the population is more homogeneous. As James Polous pointed out earlier, we do have to give up on our dreams of "national unity", but that's also a good thing.

There is a general theme here. The danger with localism is that the strong might ignore the weak. The danger with centralism is a boot stamping on a human face. Forever.

Pick.

DIY

Ars Technica's Timothy Lee reports on an intriguing development in network neutrality:

Customer-owned fiber may offer a way out of this regulatory morass. It's hard to believe today but, as Google's Derek Slater points out, there was a time when the phone company owned the entire telephone network, including the wires inside our homes and the phone on our desks. Shifting the demarcation point to the outside of our homes created a vibrant market for customer premises equipment: not just telephones, but modems, fax machines, answering machines, and other specialized gear. With customer-owned fiber, the demarcation point would be shifted even further from the customer. That would once again mean more responsibility for the customer, but with offsetting benefits that could flow from greater competition.

Lee has written previously on the flaws of Snowe-Dorgan-style regulation, particularly that, once again, we tried that before.