The "Free Rider" Problem is NOT a Problem for Anarchy.

Here is one of what might be a series of articles on the practicality of the abolition of states because I'm tired of getting into the same conversations with statists who think they are original but actually just have identical objections to every other statist.


The "Free Rider" Problem is NOT a Problem for Anarchy.

When you say you disagree with states as a concept people very often say something like "How will you get streetlights?????" Of course, you can substitute for street lights any other thing that the government happens to have a monopoly on doing at the moment, and you really have to wonder, if government provided ball bearings and had a monopoly on that would statitsts be saying, "How would we get steering wheels without government? That's maaaaaadness."

This is called the free-rider problem, and it's one of the most basic problems in economics. If you have a public good that many people benefit from, how do you stop people who don't pay from benefitting?

What I find most frustrating is people raise these objections as though all of the anarchists suddenly have to go have to go "Bah dub a duh duh good point I have never thought of that before, you're right, boo for anarchism, that's insurmountable, I'm now a statist... yup, giving all the guns to a single central authority who are allowed to violently extract income for everyone and distribute it as they might to whoever bribes them, or whomever they want to bribe to vote for them, sounds like a muuuuuch better solution. How very rational."

Such a basic objections, when they are presented with accompanying smugness rather than genuine curiosity, are  kind of insulting to your intellegence, because you'd have to be an idiot not to have thought of these problems. You get to wishing people would just pick up a book and learn a little about a theory before assuming they can knock it down in one blow.

Their argument basically goes ... "I get such-and-such for free and don't have to raise a finger, therefore the system in place is adequate."

But that does not logically follow. Just because there is a system in place does not meant is good, efficient, cheap, practical, suitable long term, preferable to what could be in it's place,  etc.

What is in effect being argued, is that the combined ingenuity of every individual in society who may have a versted interest in solving the free-rider problem when it comes to street lighting say, or quite frankly anything, is going to be inferior to the cenral dictat of a bunch of beaurocrats who are not even spending their own resources, and have less vested interest in solving any given problem than of bribing people to vote for them.

The make a "state of the gaps" argument and will forever point to this hole or that hole which is something which the state has monopolised and therefore cannot be met by another institution, be it a business, charity, consumer or worker cooperative, community project, or any other institution which is voluntary. They want you to say how exactly an endless list of things will be provided without a state, if you can't answer even one of them they go "Ha! See! Anarchism, doomed to fail."

The unreasonably biased nature of this line of questioning, which does not subject an ideology which has been responsible for killing 2-300 million of it's own people in the last hundred years not including the wars,  to the same scrutiny and need for evidence of the ideology they oppose, is only eclipsed by it's irrationality.

Firstly, if the free rider problem is a serious problem, then the government is the worst culprit, because they can grant themselves and their buddies special priveleges with public money which isn't theirs like no other institution in society, and everyone else would have to pay for it. Not only can they, they do.

And more, asking me, or any other anarchist, how exactly this or that would be done in a stateless society is no different from asking an abolitionist how cotton will be picked once slavery is abolished. It would have been literally impossible for anyone to accurately predict that the abolition of slavery would make human labour uneconomic and lead to the invention of great big heaving robots that run on dinosaur juice from thousands of years ago, but that's what happens. When you remove the arbitrary dictats of how things should be done by force, something better rushes in to fill the place, it's compelled to by trial and error. Statism is not trial and error, it's "lets do it this way and ban anyone from doing it any other way." That is why when you look at statist institution they seem frozen in time, but there is a new smartphone with better features every couple of years. How will street lights be provided? In whatever way optimises through trial and error - banning people from trying alternatives by making the government option mandatory certainly can't help in any way. How could it? 

We must note that the free rider problem is only a problem in cases where people consider it to be a problem. For example, if I mow my lawn my neighbour may benefit from his house having a higher value due to the aesthetics of the community, but I am very unlikely to demand remuneration for it. So we can conclue that our discussion of solutions is limited to cases where people receive external benefits from other peoples time or resources in ways which bother payers.

In such cases, maybe people who paid would get stickers on their doors and people who could pay but didn't would get dirty looks and prying questions from their neighbours who wouldn't have any business with them. Or maybe the lighting organisation would offer special priveleges to people who did pay like cheaper electricity for their house. Or maybe people who didn't pay would have to pay more for insurance because they weren't paying in to the safety of their community. Who can tell?

Personally I'd rather not be forced on threat of being put in a cage with murderers and rapists to pay for these things, I'd take my chances with someone being able to see all the solutions offered to me by people who have a real incentive to organise the best system and present the options to the people in my street, or the company that built the roads, or the one who built the houses, or whoever is responsible for making these decisions, so we can choose for ourselves.

How to respond to the "I Was Spanked, And I Turned Out Fine" Argument

1) that's not a vaid argument, only 1/3rd of long term heavy smokers get lung cancer, someone can smoke 60 a day for 40 years and say "I smoked and I was fine" and even though that might be true it wouldn't disprove the evidence that broadly speaking smoking large quantitites over a long period of time is harmful.
Likewise there is a large body of evidence that shows broadly speaking spanking is harmful, and just because you turned out fine doesn't disprove that evidence.

93% of studies on spanking agree It is harmful to children. This has been called "an almost unheard of consensus" in childrearing studies - in other words people who reasearch childrearing find it hard to agree on just about anything, but that spanking is harmful is just about as close to an established fact as you can get.

If you choose to smoke you take the risk with your health but if you spank you take the risk with your child's state of mental health.

Here are the facts on spanking, according to the last 20-30 years of science:
children who are physically punished even mildly:
- Tend to have a lower IQ and are less able to reason effectively.
- Have a poorer relationship with their parents than those who are reared non-aggressively.
- Are more likely to resort to violence as a means of solving problems and even become chronically defiant.
- Are more likely to smoke and twice as likely develop alcohol/drug addictions.
- Are more likely to develop anxiety disorders and depression and show symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
- Are more likely to display anti-social behaviour and abuse their spouse or children later in life.

The use of aggression on the young gains immediate compliance but results in more aggressive children prone to delinquency, anti-social behaviour and crime. The consequences correlate to dose, the more physical punishment, the greater the effects, and effects tend to reduce once physical punishment stops.

While many of parents justify spanking, 85% say they would rather not if there was an alternative.

2) you probably did turn out fine but that doesn't mean you couldn't have turned out even better if your parents knew other ways to influence your behaviour that didn't involve violence.

 
3) you shouldn't need an argument because we don't need an argument to know that a man shouldn't hit his wife, we don't hit our waiters, associates, employees, bosses, friends, spouses and we shouldn't hit children whose personalities and brains are still forming.

There is no gray area when it comes to whether or not hitting your spouse is acceptible, and there is no gray area in hitting your child. There are over 30 countries in which spanking is banned, Children in Switzerland, and Austria are not running wild in the street. Those countries have become less violent as a whole - it's more than likely a direct consequence of people hitting their children less since hitting even a couple of times (if the parent does not apologise and admit they should have used a non-violent approach) teaches that violence can solve problems in some circumstances so that belief comes integrated in the psyche. There is no need for violence and the alternatives which are expounded in books like Parent Effectiveness Training, How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, unconditional parenting, etc. actually use opportunities that most parents would see as a reason to spank as a useful time to teach good values and to bring caregiver and child closer together,





When you spank you're doing two bad things:
1) you're teaching kids to be selfish - ie. don't do this because of the consequences to you (as opposed to the consequences to others)~
2) you're missing the opportunity to use other methods which will teach your children both how to reason and think for themselves, and genuine values that concern caring about the consequences of their actions.

having said all that, rather than make those arguments which are all true, logical, and reasonable, the suggestion is to ask the spanking advocate to give an example of a situation where they think spanking is warranted and demonstrate how the progressive approaches would acheive their aims better within that particular situation.

On The Abolition of Grades, Published in Radiius Magazine

My paper On the Abolition of Grades has been published in Radiius Magazine - woohoo

You can check it out here:

On The Abolition of Grades

the battle to summarise my dissertation continues!

My dissertation will either be entitled “Towards an Objective Aesthetic in music” or “On the cultivation of taste in music,” depending on what conclusions I reach based on my research.

In the piece I want to assess difficult arguments that present themselves when judging the quality of music. If music is a subjective experience how can we argue that some music is better than other music? What is bad music and what makes it bad? What is beautiful in music and what makes it that? Is music meant to be useful or beautiful in itself? 

While some of us may want to argue that Beethoven is a “better” composer than Katy Perry, what do we mean to say by better? Katy Perry is better for dancing and putting on at student parties. So is Stevie Wonder and he is a more sophisticated composer, but the quality of the music doesn’t reflect how useful it is for dancing. And then, no matter how many Adornos there are to demand that people want more out of art than immediacy, most people who listen to a Beethoven symphony will do it to help them relax while taking a bath.

It is hard to argue that there is an objective judgement of quality because all aesthetic experiences are in the subjective experience of the experiencer. On the other hand we know we know there is a distinction in the judgement of saying music is 'bad' as opposed to 'not my kind of thing.' 

  

This is the distinction between preference and taste. One has the right to prefer whatever they wish, but one ought to have a taste for what is fine.  The contention is that a great work does not yield its secrets upon the first listen.

When a qualified critic writes an essay in praise of a poem it is in the hope of showing others the beauty he sees in the art. A beckoning for them to share in a deeper knowledge of the joy that is available to them. Yes we often find “the beauty of simplicity,” but if you can recognise sophistication when you hear it you can be more appreciative of simplicity as well. The critic has to have a more cultivated taste than the public in order to offer genuine insight. If it’s all subjective then cultivating a taste is meaningless.

It could be that beauty is something that goes beyond the faculty of reason alone. We don’t use our eyes to hear, or our ears to see, and perhaps our sense of beauty extends beyond our sense of rationality to explain it. The trained ear experiences the nuances of a virtuoso playing a Bach piece on the experiential level, not by reason alone, while the untrained ear may miss them entirely.

In order to present my case I will be researching the history of the philosophy of art, familiarising myself particularly with arguments from those who focused on music such as Hanslick, Adorno, Dalhaus, Scruton and Kivy, but also acknowledging the views of big philosophers who wrote more generally (Kant, Hume, Mill, Aristotle.) I will present and address arguments to give my work some sense of historical context and to show that I am meaning to advance the dialogue by adding something new to what has already been written. It is important to me that the piece is philosophically rigorous so I will be making an effort to ensure that I address counter arguments that already exist to any points I want to raise so that the dissertation itself presents a dialectic of ideas that familiarises the reader with the history of these debates – they don’t have to have read everything that has already been written to have the foreknowledge required to make a good judgement because the relevant background will be contained and addressed within the text.

It could be that beauty is something that goes beyond reason alone. We don’t use our eyes to hear or our ears to see, and perhaps our sense of beauty extends beyond our sense of rationality to explain it. 

If having a trained ear raises your expectations and makes you less easily satisfied perhaps we best avoid it, there must be some net gain here!

Reverse Temporal Engineering by Antony Sammeroff

A scratch night comedy in one act for two actors.
Acknowledgements to Finn Townsley and Gareth K. Vile.

Cast:
TOM. An obnoxious self-described possibilitarian, probably in his early to mid-twenties.
STU. Another character who is more obnoxious than Tom.

Reverse Temporal Engineering.

Tom enters the stage from one side speaking on his mobile phone.
TOM [speaking into his mobile]. Alright man? ... Yeah I'm at my parent’s house... Where are you?... Alright cool that's near mine. 
Stu enters from the other side of the stage, speaking into his phone, they are in different locations.
STU [speaking into his mobile]. Are you coming out tonight?
TOM. I would but I left my wallet in my flat so I'm waiting on my dad coming home and giving me a lift, but he's on night shift.
STU. Damn that sucks.
TOM. Yeah I know. It’s shit.
STU. It’s shitter than shit. It’s like - a turd sandwich with shit as the bread.
TOM. You’re a classy guy. Can you not just conjure up my wallet since you're near mine and I'll walk into town and meet you there?
STU. Well uhm... Maybe I could do that, if I dunno, I had your freaking keys.
TOM. Teleport?
STU. Not invented yet. Why are you at your parent’s house anyway gaylord?
TOM. Well my new brother in law was visiting.
STU. Haaaaa he's bangin' your sister.
TOM. Ummm… yeah. And?
STU. Well, it’s more than you're getting.
TOM. It is more than I'm getting from my sister... not quite as much as I'm getting from your mum.
STU. Touché good sir, I consider myself bested. I assume by your response you like him then?
TOM. Like him how? I'm afraid anything I say will just be construed as an excuse to make a gay joke.
STU. Probably. Well, just like, since you’re, you know, cool with him… how should I put this sensitively?… Ramming? Hm, no. How about ploughing? No, let’s go with Ramming, I like Ramming - original and best. Since you’re cool with him Ramming your sister every night - takin’ that cute little ass to town - I’m supposing you get on with him.
TOM. Such a way with words! I think you managed to make your point really clear there. What a talent. Yeah I get on with him great! Better than with my sister actually hahaha.
STU. Why’s that?
TOM. Well he smokes for one thing, and she doesn't, so we can go out for a fag.
STU. Ah true, that does make him the better human being.
TOM. Indeed.
STU. So when will I catch you? The weekend?
TOM. Balls to that, I’m coming out.
STU. …Of the closet, you surely mean. By the time you walk to yours and then back into town…
TOM. Teleport?
Stu checks his watch.
STU. Noooope… still not invented yet, try again in another half an hour.
TOM. Do you think teleportation will run on the principle of moving particles through a quantum wormhole to another location and reassembling them? or more like a copy and paste mechanism, where the model is molecularly replicated, but the copy is dispatched during the integral process?
STU. Don’t care. Why?
TOM. Well supposing I’m meant to be in two places at once, I could just teleport myself but conveniently forget to “cut” before I “paste” and then there would be two of me.
STU. Yah, but the real you wouldn’t even essentially be at both meetings, so you’d have no memory whatsoever of one of the events. And then what would you do with the copy afterwards? You can’t just Edit/Undo after you control/c control/v. That would be a bit inconvenient to explain away.
TOM. Hmmm yeah I guess you’re right. Maybe he would become unstable and break down of his own volition after filling me in on the details, or maybe his organs could be harvested for science.
STU. No, no, that’s a sentient life form! You’d have protests from People for the Ethical Treatment of Clones.
TOM. Damn those ultraliberal hippies at PECA.
STU. You only want two of you so you can suck twice as much cock as you normally do anyway. To be honest, you’d be better off Reverse Temporal Engineering it.
TOM. What, you mean sucking off one cock, and then going back in time afterwards to suck off another one so that I didn’t have to miss out on any of the juicy cock-sucking opportunities presented to me?
STU. Sure. I actually just meant Reverse Temporal Engineering it so you could be at both meetings at the same time and remember, but your admission of love for the cock was equally satisfying.
TOM. More satisfying, surely?
STU. Indeed.
TOM. How much more satisfying?
STU. Seven. Seven times more satisfying.
TOM. And yet, still not as satisfying as your mums vagiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.
STU. Damn! Struck by my own sword. You’d also age faster in subjective time while sucking on all those cocks, or being at each of those meetings.
TOM. That’s right actually - but that’s not the only risk. At the second event you could refer to something that happened at the first event which hadn't happened yet subjective to everyone else and confuse people, then – bam! – quantum time paradox, just like that! And the universe collapses in on itself.
STU. That I could deal with, it's all the bullshit you’re talking that troubles me-
TOM. Damn! You really know you lack charisma when a microcosmic temporal contradiction bringing forth the immanent annihilation of the universe along the axes of both time and space is preferable to what is presently occurring in subjective...
STU. Yeah, all that crap would be a relief!
TOM. Ok... I have an idea... Ask behind the bar if your friend left his keys for you.
STU. What are you talking about?
TOM. Look I'm 100% sure this Might work.
STU. Oh you're certain it'll work maybe?'
TOM. Approximately.
STU. On average.
TOM. As a distinct non-zero possibility. In a multiverse all distinct non-zero possibilities become actualities.
STU. In an infinite universe everything that can exist must exist.
TOM. Look, that’s pub talk. Save it for the pub.
STU. But, you're not coming out to the pub because you were at your parents’ house ramming your gay brother-in-law and you left your wallet in your flat.
TOM. Ask behind the bar if my keys are there.
STU. And how exactly do you expect this to work?'
TOM. Well let's see, I saw it in a movie once.
STU. Saw what in a movie?
TOM. This. Teleport isn't invented yet.
STU. Yes, I said that. Twice in fact.
TOM. But, if time travel is invented within my lifetime I can plausibly reverse-temporal engineer things so my keys are left behind the bar for you.
STU. O…kayay... But first - Is the movie you saw this in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure?
TOM. Fuck the shut up!
STU. Don't you mean...
TOM [interrupting]. Whatever!
STU. But was it though?'
TOM. Obviously. But that's besides the point.
STU. I think that is the point exactly. I think the point is you're taking your queues from a sci-fi-teenage-comedy genre-confused mash up.
TOM. Like Biodome.
STU. What the fuck is Biodome?
TOM. Watch it and see.
STU. You're a dick.
TOM. Yeah, but if you never watch it you’ll never know.
STU. If a man is alone at his parents’ house and no one has a clue what the fuck he’s talking about, will he shut the fuck up?
TOM. Get my keys.
Stu moves to the side to address the barman.
STU [to the wings]. Here! Mate!...
Stu produces a set of keys from the wings.
STU. ‘kin ‘ell! He had your keys!
TOM. See, told you.
STU. ‘the fuck dude?
TOM. ‘the fuck indeed. See, I’m a possibilitarian.
STU. You're a retard. Why didn't you just reverse temporal engineer the keys into your parent’s house?
TOM. Never thought of that.
STU. That’s because you're a retard.
TOM. Not too retarded to do this.
The keys disappear from Stu’s hand or person.
STU. 'kin ell where did they go?
TOM [producing the keys from his pocket and jangling them]. Right here.
STU. Jesus Christ that's awesome!
TOM. Ask the barman for the drink I got you.
STU [addressing the barman again]. Here! Mate!...
Stu produces a pint from the side of the stage.
STU. ‘The fuck dude!
TOM. Yeah you're totally getting in the next round.
STU. Except not I'm not because you're wallets still in your flat, and you're at your parent’s house, and I don't have your keys anymore to go and get it for you.
TOM. Dammit! I am a retard.
STU. I said it first.
TOM. Well, [Tom produces the wallet from his pocket] here it is now I suppose.
STU. You know, this is a very convoluted way to meet up under the circumstances.
TOM. Yeah you're right... We should sort that out.
Tom hangs up the phone and walks across to the other side of the stage to join Stu.
TOM. Hey man.
STU. Hey, Pint?
TOM. Fuck yeah.
They walk off towards the bar like best of friends.
END.

Contract law is an abomination. (prototype)

This is a prototype article and I am collecting feedback to improve it and address counter arguments.

Everyone knows that contract laws are litigious and that's why people have to train for so long to be lawyers, but what is the benefit of contract law being handled by the centralised monopoly of the state, when having third parties compete to insure contracts would optimise the process by having lots of great minds working on producing better, simpler and more easier to use models. Likely the best amongst these highly trained lawyers and judges would find fantastic work providing the full service of their skills for those end.

If you and I were wanting to go into business we could seek the arbitration of a third party who could insure our contracts. The more we did business well, the cheaper this would be as we were "trust worthy" and our premiums would go down and down, much like a no-claims bonus for not causing a road accident. If one of us reneged upon our contract, our third party would have to compensate the party that lost out on the deal and would likely never insure the person who broke the deal again until they had compensated them. They could also contact all the other companies that were providing the service and warn of the unworthiness of this client so their premiums for doing business in future would go through the roof.

What though, is someone was willing to renege on a "one time deal" for say $2.5 million and then they could just live happily upon their ill-gotten gains for the rest of their lives? Well, who would insure a contract for $2.5m without the appropriate assurances that their client would pay? Jail time for reneging could easily be written into the contract and voluntarily agreed upon by the parties engaging in the process. But that is just one option. Given the number of people who would be working in the field, surely their combined ingenuity would come up with better solutions than any either of us could come up with as mere individuals playing the game of philosophy.

The idea that the state is required to enforce contracts is not only misgiven, it's a complete waste of tax money for private individuals to subsidise agreements between corporations and other people they have no associations with to pay the inflated salaries of lawyers and judges who could have more important things to do within the criminal justice system such as handle violent criminals. In the meantime lawyers can charge upwards of £100 for writing a letter, or for the privelege of an hour of their time, because the service they provide has become incomprehensibe to the clients they are providing it to and impenetrable to anyone who has not jumped through the government hoops. Surely if alternatives were available society would soon do better.

Do I know you?

-->

by Antony Sammeroff
A scratch night play in one act for one actor and one actress.

Do I know you?

April and Anthony enter from opposite sides of the stage as they draw close they catch eyes and think they know each other immediately, but then a moment of doubt creeps in.
ANTONY [with enthusiasm]. Hey!
APRIL [responding in kind]. Hey!
There is a moment of credulity
ANTONY [communicating with his hands].  I thought we…?
APRIL.  I thought we…
ANTONY.  But we don’t.
APRIL. No, we don’t…
ANTONY.  Well I’m Antony. [He presents his hand]
APRIL. I’m April…
They shake.
ANTONY.  So next time we will.
He smiles.
APRIL.  Next time we will.
They part.

Peaceful Parenting does not produce Naive Children

Psychohistory

I believe childrearing is the birth of society.
 
According to the data, countries who use less phsical punishment have less violent crimes, democracy emerged first in countries where parenting styles moved over to less authoritarian and more democratic, countries with dictatorial parenting styles tend to be dictatorships. The shaping of childrearing is the shaping of the whole society. For more data, The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause, and anything by psychoanalyst Alice Miller are excellent authoritative works in the field.

Preliminary thoughts for my dissertation

On some level we want to say that the great compositions of, say, Beethoven are in some way 'better' than those of say, Katy Perry whom we had a look at in MMA last year with Martin Dixon
(if you happen to think she's a great contemporary composer you may substitute some other name which fits the bill of simply composed/kitsch music.)

On one hand it's hard to say that it's an objective judgement of quality, because all aesthetic experiences fall into the subjective experience of the person receiving them. On the other hand we know we are making a distinction between we say music is 'bad' music versus music which is 'not my kind of thing.'

Personally I hate swing music. Despite liking something in almost every genre of music I've never been able to cultivate a taste for Swing. But I'm not willing to turn around and say that Quincy Jones was a ‘bad’ arranger when working with Frank Sinatra - he's clearly extremely competent. I just personally don’t like it.

On Sunday night I heard two folk singers sing a song together where each of their parts was incredibly sophisticated with little riffs and inventive harmonies – I was impressed by the counterpoint because I thought (“knew”?) it was qualitatively 'better' than if they'd just harmonised in thirds. Not that harmonising in thirds would be “bad” or “unpleasant” – I just felt like what I was hearing was superior.

While the lay patron could also notice a difference in complexity and might likely agree that the more sophisticated, sung by more practiced singers, was the “better”, it seems I've cultivated a taste that allows me to make more complicated value judgements than non-musicians. I can make a distinction here between say, Burt Bacharach, the composer of great pop tunes, and Burt Bacharach the extremely competent and innovative arranger/composer whose use of complex rhythmical phrasing which was rare in pop music, expressive chord changes and ingenious sequences tantalise my ear as a musician.

This impulse may sometimes lead those of us who know a bit about music hear a song and think - "that would be better if only..." [it included such and such an obviously missing vocal harmony, or they chose this note or that chord instead of the one, or they took]  ...

What are we saying? We're not just saying we'd prefer it, we're arguing that we have a qualified opinion on what would improve the piece of music.

But improve the music how? And to what ends? Is it because the pleasure of enjoying more sophisticated music is greater than enjoying pop on the cosmetic level?

As a theatre critic I have to make value judgments and try to offer feedback, which is hopefully useful - either to the company or the patrons. Both if possible. ("I particularly like the ones which, from beneath the veil of the plot, reveal to the experienced eye some subtle truth that will escape the common herd," - Voltaire in The White Bull.)  I have no doubt that the highest achievement the critic can manage is to point out some subtlety of genius that escapes 'the common herd' so that when they read my writing they have an “Ah!” moment – “Oh my god that is so true/observant.” This act of enlightenment forever changes the viewer and opens their eyes to watching out for similar phenomena in future aesthetic experiences. Their taste is more cultivated. Their standards have been permanently raised.

When it comes to giving negative criticism, much of what I write is all but ubiquitously noted by the audience, the lay person may notice and cringe. At other times I notice things most do not, but as far as I’m concerned they are extremely important, perhaps to the fidelity of the writing. A common example is that often the actors have not sufficiently noted what is said about their character by other characters in the script, and disregarded these hint in their portrayal. Such things may often escape the regular theatre goer because an actor’s performance can be internally consistent without while making this error, so in this way having a cultivated taste could be seen as a liability when it comes to gaining pleasure from an aesthetic experience. Then what nonsense does this make of striving to enlighten people just do they can enjoy theatre less? Surely we want them to enjoy poor theatre less so that they can enjoy good theatre more.

The companies may appreciate such feedback because they want to be 'better' - they appreciate there is somewhere to go. If not what would be the point in improving? Why strive to be capable of a Goldberg variation when any pleasant sounding two-part invention will do?

And then, sophistication isn’t synonymous with quality either. We often also appreciate “the beauty of simplicity.”

What is more, if some of the modernists are to be believed, pleasure is not necessarily even the critical point of the aesthetic experience.

I recall Martin Dixon saying, 'Is that all you want from music?' - paraphrasing the essential sentiment of Adorno as he did

My response is to say, as a thinker living in post-modern times, “may many flowers bloom.” Perhaps pleasure is not the critical point of the aesthetic experience in some cases, and in other cases it is.
While I could never “cultivate” a taste for swing, I once had no taste for Opera but developed a love for it. Most peoples experience of Schoenberg or, "worse still", the more impenetrable moderns is that some study plus considerable exposure is required to "get it".

Adorno commented on the relevance of the techniques used to the music at hand (I will cite an example in my essay most likely as I remember reading him comment on such and such a chord in chamber music being appropriate, but not in such and such another genre.) In this observation he is not alone. His remarks are actually very mainstream: in contemporary times the synths so synonymous with 80s pop music sound disastrously “cheesy” except in pastiche. The “choir” or “harpsichord” settings on your keyboard, anathema to a hard rock band, sounds perfectly appropriate and apt in the European “Viking” or “Gothic” metal genres. Simon Frith, in his essay on “bad music” refers to the kind of “genre confusion” involved with “getting this wrong” as ‘ridiculous music… the gap between what performers/producers think they are doing and what they actually achieve.” Certainly this makes a credible argument for calling music bad that does not draw upon the sophistication of the material – music can be both sophisticated technically and “bad” or “cheesy.”

Adorno’s argument that immanence through self-reference makes music better is extremely compelling, and yet it seems to be presented as self-evident and without argument, which makes it difficult to justify in under the Western analytic tradition. That is the problem I will face if I wish to make use of any of Adorno’s arguments for what is good or bad in music.

eBay don't pay all their taxes? Good!

Here's an interesting but controversial thought experiment.

In response to this article in the Guardian claiming that eBay has avoided some £50m in taxes, a friend of mine was asking around to see if there was any alternative she could use because she wanted to boycott them.

I asked her to expand on her reasons why, because I thought that the government would only spend the money on wars, corporate welfare, paying off the bankers and their cronies anyway, so what was the point?... She kindly responded:

"It would mean less of an excuse for austerity measures; if they're seen to be collecting the funds, and still cutting the welfare state. The government is very good at shifting the blame - but if places like Starbucks, IKEA, and eBay actually paid taxes, then the government has nowhere to hide."

My thought was that while those propositions may hold true in a socialist utopia, they are actually based on a basic misapprehension of economics which is quite common, particularly on the left, which is that it is actually possible for corporations to pay taxes. In truth, as the (very liberal) Senator, Mike Gravel, put in his book Citizen Power a Mandate for Change (2008) under the chapter which advocates for tax reform (in line the Fair Tax proposals):

"Liberals bristle at the thought of relieving corporations of income taxes. Unfortunately... fooled into thinking that by taxing corporations they shift the cost of government from the people to corporations. Corporations do not pay taxes; they merely collect taxes from their consumers for the government, In fact, a corporate tax is a disguised retail sales tax....

...they simply take the tax into account as an added cost of production… and adjust their prices accordingly... close examination of the tangled corporate tax structure shows it only serves to inflate the cost of goods and services to consumers... Obviously, if we eliminated all corporate taxes and subsidies, the ordinary tax payer would come out far ahead."

These words are not from a reactionary Republican or Thatcherite, but from one of the most liberal senators in the American political system, who became nationally known for his forceful but unsuccessful attempts to end the draft during the Vietnam War and for putting the Pentagon Papers into the public record in 1971 at risk to himself, and then throughout his career campaigned for direct democracy, an end to war, transparency in government, universal healthcare, social security, and all the other trappings of a left-of-centre Democrat.

That might be pretty hard to apprehend because it arouses our sense of injustice that the big boys can get around paying while small business owners and the rest of us tax cattle have to put in for stuff we don’t agree with (like the wars) but perhaps once we realise that this tax money is not being extracted from the bank accounts of rich CEOs, but us independent eBay users the case may becomes clear. We foot the bill.

Rich people don’t pay income tax the same way we do. They have these handy things called corporations. Private individuals earn, get taxed and live off what is left. Corporations earn, spend, and are taxed on what it’s left, check out this handy diagram from Rich Dad, Poor Dad (2000) Robert T. Kiyosaki:

Remember, the status of “Corporation” is a privilege granted to certain companies by the state rather than the free market. If you wanted to tax the receipts of "greedy capitalists" the option would be to place tax on share dividends, although perhaps even those could craftily be passed on to the consumer.

The truth is, if eBay were forced to pay their taxes, all that would likely happen is that they’d raise the price of listing products. The cost will be passed on to the consumer and be borne by buyers and sellers. It's certainly very unlikely to do any good in the world.

eBay is one of the biggest employers in the world, allowing around 350,000 people to work from home and have more leisure time. It facilitates recycling and ends wastage by putting people who want second hand products in touch with people who have those products and no longer need them. It even has a feedback system which allows people to indicate who is trust worthy to exchange with and who is not. There are punitive consequences for not honouring your word, much unlike in the political realm where those who don't keep campaign promises escape unscathed, and those guilty of far greater crimes and misdemeanours under the guise of foreign policy (or even domestic policy) seem to walk above the law.

eBay enriches the lives of millions of people, allowing them to afford things they couldn't otherwise or make a bit of money on the side instead of chucking things out.

To clarify the point, if we are talking about McDonald's who, we’ve been told, cut down the rainforest, or Coca Cola who are said to monopolise, discriminate and poison, or British Gas who are part of a state-granted cartel of the energy industry which continues to increase prices while enjoying higher profits, to the detriment of elderly customers who may freeze to death this winter... If such a company is dodging taxes, by all means go ahead, boycott them. I'd boycott them anyway on a moral principle, perhaps it will make them less competitive.

But eBay? eBay isn't only harmless, it's is a credit to society.

The state, on the other hand, is a non-voluntary institution which institutes corporate monopolies by regulating into place barriers to entry. It makes war, kills more people than all private individuals and corporations put together, provides corporate welfare to the rich, makes nuclear weapons, sells arms to foreign dictators and subsidises nuclear and unsustainable energy despite the risks. It forces people at gun point to pay for indoctrination camps where their children are forced to do what they are told when they are told, habituating them to living in a hierarchical society before they ever enter the work place, and then after 11-13 years of this state-led ‘education’ most come out with so few skills that are economically valuable that they cannot even find minimum wage job. It puts people in cages with violent criminals and rapists if they happen to have the wrong kind of vegetation in their pocket, and at great expense to the tax payer, despite all the reason and evidence showing that drug prohibition has never worked, does not work, will never work - that addiction should be treated as a public health issue rather than a criminal one - and that those countries who have moved in the direction of legalisation or even decriminalisation have had the most positive outcomes. The state spent the younger generation into 1 trillion pounds of debt before they were even born by the act of buying votes from the older generation by giving them public services that they were not paying for themselves with their own tax money, and by printing money which inflated and devalued the currency to the benefit of the elite and detriment of the poor. And then on top of all that, as though that were not enough, they had the cheek to sell the tax payer further down the river by bailing out the bankers who were largely responsible for the economic crisis to the tune of £500 billion pounds in 2008.

The government has the power to force you to pay for all these immoral things whether you agree with them or not. Whether you like them or not. You are bound to by law.
On the other hand, eBay can't force you to pay for a single thing your conscience disagrees with. Literally nothing. Ever.

And I’m supposed to believe that eBay dodging their taxes is the larger social issue at stake here?

Supposing one of us were put in charge of a real life award of fifty million pounds.

We were told that the other judges had narrowed down the decision to two anonymous candidates, and that they needed us to pick one of the two choices as a tie breaker.

All we were given to base our decision on was a brief summary of what each of these bodies had done, say, since eBay's inception in 1995. Those would include, on one side, the wars and expenses scandals for example, and on the other side a charge of infringing on patents (2000) and accusations of fleecing clients with an increase in charges (2008) to name a couple. Could either of us honestly say, given all the information in an essentially unbiased way - a way uncontaminated by the social-bias which says paying taxes is virtuous by its very nature, while avoiding them is necessarily vicious - that we would give the award to the more violent party?

I'm pretty sure I know who I'd give the money to, if I happened to have the choice, and it wouldn't be the institution that had all the guns.