Out of the dust, a new empire

I recently watched Empire of Dust, the 2011 documentary about Chinese development in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Perhaps you, like me, have trouble keeping straight in your head which is which between Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Congo has Brazzaville, and is merely very bad. The Democratic Republic of Congo has Kinshasa, and stakes a strong claim to being among the worst countries on the planet. An easy mnemonic is that because democracy makes everything in Africa worse, the Democratic Republic of Congo is obviously the bad one. The DRC is a country so screwed up that you can have a war where 5-6 million people die, and you never hear about it because the whole thing is so confusing and depressing that nobody knows what narrative to give, and it's hard to cast as a simple morality play.

I'd seen the trailer linked in a few places, and wanted to watch the whole thing. If you don't have the patience for the remaining 75 minutes, the trailer below is well worth watching for a flavor:


The whole documentary can be found here.

As is appropriate, the trailer contains the most hilarious and quotable lines. No-BS Chinese guy (Lao Yang) delivering some tough realtalk to an African guy (Eddy), saying that the latter's country was left lots of infrastructure and development potential by the colonials when they left, and they (the Congolese) squandered it all through laziness and poor governance. Plus since the Chinese guy is actually working there, he has a lot more scope to claim that he knows whereof he talks. In other words, you can't just accuse him of ignorance - have you been to the DRC? Of course not. So if you don't like his words, you have to find some other angle of attack.

To a western audience, it has the wonderful frission similar to playing cards against humanity - hearing someone utter hilarious taboos, but here with the possibility that they might be true. Eddy gives textbook rationalizations, but with a look as though he doesn't really believe them, and just smiles as he's called on them. Meanwhile, Lao Yang has the easterner's qualified immunity from charges of racism that forces the audience to listen a little longer. Of course, modern progressives would say he is racist (I think - it's hard to keep track of whether minorities can still be racist in The Current Year, or whether the Chinese count as minorities). But in any case, even if one could address him directly, one knows with certainty that if you accused him of racism, neither he, nor his employers, nor his countrymen, would give a flying fig. Take away the power of accusations of witchcraft, and watch how quickly people lose interest in the whole topic of witches.

While the density of both hilarity and insight is lower in the rest of the documentary than in the trailer, it is nonetheless interesting. Because while the trailer mostly gores progressive oxen, the rest of the documentary contains parts that might somewhat surprise a reactionary.

In particular, when the subject of the Chinese in Africa comes up, the standard perspective seems to be that the Chinese are swallowing the choicest parts of the continent in a quest for resource extraction and strategic pieces of infrastructure. They are on track, so the narrative goes, to be the continent's next colonial powers, and probably a lot less charitable than the Europeans they belatedly replace.

If the documentary has one lesson, it is this: rumors of a massive Chinese empire rising rapidly on the African continent are greatly exaggerated. Instead, one gets the impression of Chinese management having to battle with the same problems as everyone else in Africa.

Suppliers are unreliable. Lao Yang drives for a long time to try to find a gravel supplier for his cement project. When he gets there, the workers are standing idle around the machines, because the boss hasn't turned up yet. It's midday. They don't know when he'll be in. They've called him. They can't do anything until he arrives.

Indeed, similar problems arise with the Chinese company's own native workforce. It's a rotating cast who sometimes turn up, and sometimes don't. They need to have basic instructions repeated to them. Don't lose your equipment, or your pay will be docked. Don't slack off, but take your work seriously. Don't steal from the worksite. These are all things that I wouldn't have thought to mention as a manager, since they seem to go without saying. Apparently, not in the DRC. Various Chinese employees recount how they would leave a worksite having given instructions for the Congolese to complete a task, and find out later that the whole Congolese workforce had just wandered off ten minutes later.

The other slightly incongruous aspect that you might be pondering from the trailer - how did they find a well-dressed, eloquent, Chinese-speaking Congolese guy to be the interlocutor to the main Chinese boss, in the middle of nowhere DRC? And why is he so willing to just sit there and take Lao Yang's abuse? You quickly learn that Eddy is the translator, so doesn't really have a choice in the matter. He seems quite competent, and indeed a workforce of Eddies would likely do well. But the rest of the workers seem cut from quite a different cloth. And even with Eddy, one senses flashes of resentment and dual loyalty. When talking with a gravel supplier, Lao Yang is trying to find out where the guy is buying it. Eddy tells the Congelese gravel guy that the Chinese will just try to buy the entire operation - in other words, don't tell him, because it will put you out of business. Eddy of course doesn't translate this part of the discussion back into Chinese, but we as the audience get to hear both parts.

All of which might make you wonder - why do the Chinese put up with all this? Why don't they just bring in their own workforce? Towards the end, one gets the answer. They don't have a choice. Far from being a superpower, in the middle of the DRC, they're a very small minority, and their continued viability is dependent on them being able to give jobs to the Congolese, and presumably grease enough palms in the local government that everyone finds them to be beneficial overall.

Indeed, for all the claims about how the Chinese will make nasty neo-colonial dictators, the overwhelming attitude of the Chinese characters to their Congolese workers and circumstances is weariness and low level frustration. There's little evidence of abuse, or terrible work conditions, or even any threat of force whatsoever. It's quite possible that this exists, and the filmmakers just chose to not depict it in order to get access. Yet the picture presented seems credible, and you can see why. The workers in the Chinese company are basically like a foreign embassy. They're a tiny number of foreigners who are not only far from home, but far from any help that home can offer. If the natives turn hostile, you're done. The ability of the Chinese to project force into the middle of the DRC in a targeted, credible way on short notice is pretty damn close to zero. The same would probably be true for westerners, to be honest. If you all get chopped up, what's the Chinese government going to do? Send its one aircraft carrier to bomb random bits of the DRC in revenge? The country barely even has a functioning government. What would it even achieve?

And so you just have to muddle along as best you can. The narrative of the story is primarily about the attempt to find gravel for a cement factory, and the various travails they encounter along the way. It's portrayed as a microcosm of the struggle of the whole Chinese project. And the general sense one gets is that it's far from obvious that they'll actually succeed. The things that would make it hard for you to get a successful commercial operation going in the DRC are pretty much the same problems that the Chinese face. In the battle between Chinese commercial zeal, and Africa's intractably inhospitable commercial environment, it's not clear who to bet on.

There's a related aspect, which reactionaries will admit about China, but then oddly forget when it comes to the Chinese in the African context. To wit: the Chinese approach to development isn't exactly first rate either. It tends to be a bit slap-dash and poorly planned, with strong central demands to just get things done resulting in buildings that have a habit of falling down, collapsing holes in sidewalks, poisoned baby formula etc. And that's in China. In other words, this ain't a Japanese Just-In-Time inventory management system. When Lao Yang finally finds a potential gravel supplier, he can't tell him exactly how much gravel he's going to need, or when he's going to be paid. Lao tells him, essentially, I'll pay as the money comes in. To which I found myself thinking - they haven't committed the damn money yet? Stop just blaming the Congolese if your own lines of credit aren't set up. How is this guy meant to plan ahead to supply you with gravel if you can't give him a clear timetable of what you need and when?

And if you know anything about operations management, you know that the problem of unreliable suppliers has a well known solution - stockpile inventories in advance to take into account the estimated distribution of delays, so you only have a managably low probability of running out. In other words, it's only the first instance of delay that is a good excuse for running short. If you know you're dealing with jokers, you should be able to at least partially plan around them being jokers. Did the need for gravel just suddenly arise yesterday? Was this an unanticipated event in the development of a cement factory? Don't make me laugh.

Instead, for all the view of China as a monolith engaging in development, the individual Chinese managers seemed pretty much on their own, trying to scrounge around as best they could, and not always succeeding.  In other words, watching the documentary I came away with an unexpected feeling of sympathy for the Chinese in the DRC. Maybe they're going to take over the place, but it's going to be a hell of a slog in the mean time for the people on the ground. It's like with neighbourhood development. Sometimes, the gentrifiers beat out the ghetto. Sometimes the ghetto wins. It's not always easy to say in advance which way it will go.

But I can say the following. The Holmes Investment Trust is sure as hell not going to be setting up any cement factories in the Congo anytime soon.

"Hamilton" as American Propaganda

I recently saw the musical 'Hamilton', which was an enjoyable depiction of American nostalgia for its own myths. That much isn't new. What's new is that this is being successfully marketed to the current generation of narcissistic millennials. Getting them to take any interest in history beyond their own short life span, let alone past the 20th century, is quite a feat, even if what they end up learning ends up having a healthy dose of nonsense.

As both a foreigner and a reactionary, it's interesting to see the American founding myths in all their peculiar detail. Identifying the nonsense stories other people accept uncritically about their own history is much easier than identifying one's own. The US ones are particularly interesting to me - I have a strong fondness for this country, but I still view it as as an outsider, as a) I came across this stuff much later in life, and b) my summary of the American Revolution in one sentence is "the bad guys won". Incidentally, this would make a great tagline for a future reactionary version of the play, 'Hutchinson: The Musical".

Of course, if you want to get the record set straight, Moldbug is of course the best source. And with a little of the alternative perspective on the matter, the most interesting thing about the play is what gets left out.

The second most neglected perspective in the history of American Revolution is the Loyalists. For the most part, they simply don't exist. "America" was fighting King George. The fact that there were substantial numbers of native-born Americans who were philosophically and practically opposed to the War of Independence gets mostly elided. How many, exactly? Hard to say. I've seen numbers floated around as being 20%, but this doesn't mean that 80% were Patriots, as a large number were on the fence. I'd take all these numbers with a grain of salt.

The musical actually does better than I expected - there's one scene where a Loyalist is giving a speech in opposition to the Congress (unpersuasively, of course) , and he then gets mocked by Hamilton. That they don't present a good case for the opposition is not surprising - that they acknowledge the opposition existed, and was American, was frankly a pleasant surprise.

So the Loyalists, uncharacteristically, weren't the Elephant in the Room being ignored here. What was, then? What is the faction you almost never hear about in the re-telling of the American Revolution?

The answer is simple: British Parliament.

Britain in the musical, like in nearly all popular retellings, is represented by King George III. He is depicted as being in charge of the whole affair, pulling all the strings from across the sea. It's like the whole musical, like the country itself, lives in a bizarre alternative universe where the Cavaliers somehow won the English Civil War. In reality, the issue had been decided twice, first with King Charles being separated from his head, and then in case the message hadn't been received, again with the Glorious Revolution chasing King James II out of England, all the way to France in fact. By the time of the American Revolution, the verdict had been in for over a century - when push came to shove, Parliament was in charge.

But you can see clearly why this very quickly becomes awkward for the standard narrative. The American revolution was about establishing democracy (praise be upon it) for the first time ever! Except that the government being overthrown was in fact democratic, in various different forms, from at least 1215 onwards. Quite a pickle, no?

Aha, the apologists respond, but there was no democratic representation among the Americans. No taxation without representation, and all that. What an injustice! I'll let Mr Hutchinson field this one:

The Assembly of Massachusetts Bay, therefore, was the first that took any publick of the Act, and the first which ever took exception to the right of Parliament to impose Duties or Taxes on the Colonies, whilst they had no representatives in the House of Commons. This they did in a letter to their Agent in the summer of 1764, which they took care to print and publish before it was possible for him to receive it. And in this letter they recommend to him a pamphlet, wrote by one of their [6] members, in which there are proposals for admitting representatives from the Colonies to fit in the House of Commons.

I have this special reason, my Lord, for taking notice of this Act of the Massachusetts Assembly; that though an American representation is thrown out as an expedient which might obviate the objections to Taxes upon the Colonies, yet it was only intended to amuse the authority in England; and as soon as it was known to have its advocates here, it was renounced by the colonies, and even by the Assembly of the Colony which first proposed it, as utterly impracticable. 

In other words:

Massachusetts: No Taxation without Representation!

Britain: Hmm. Would you like some representation then?

Massachusetts: No, absolutely not, it would never work!

Comedy gold.

So if the big injustice that Alexander Hamilton was fighting against wasn't really a lack of democratic representation, what exactly was it?

Beats me. Beats Hutchinson too.

And this is the odd sense that comes after all the great songs are over. It's the same feeling I had years ago watching Michael Moore documentaries. In the moment, the strange web of narrative seems oddly compelling, until you leave the theatre and try to distill it into a sentence. And lo and behold, the main thesis is that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up a school because Lockheed Martin had a factory somewhere nearby making parts for satellites. Phrased thus, you realise that this is an insane argument, and you can't believe you fell for it in the first place.

That's where I get to on Hamilton. Once you leave the theatre, odd reactionary thoughts come back in. You mean he was a hardworking immigrant who loved his newfound country so much that he... immediately worked to overthrow its government? Hmm, that doesn't sound so good. Wait, no, he was a poor penniless orphan who wanted to rise up the ranks, and so he realised that helping foment a war and rising up the command would be a great way to do this? Wait, that even worse. Much worse, actually.

The final thought, however, that the honest foreigner must admit to himself, is this: I wonder what equivalent stupidity I've believed about my own history?

Truthfully, I don't quite know. But if I figure it out, I'll let you know.

All the world's a little peer influenced, except for thee and me...

Baaaaa.

Why do you do the things you do?

If you're ever in some trendy cocktail lounge or bar, chances are you'll see somebody drinking an Old-Fashioned. Muddle sugar with bitters (or use simple syrup and bitters), add whisky and a twist of citrus rind (wiped around the edge of the glass, and set on fire with a lighter if the place is fancy), and there you go. I'm not a drinker, but people tell me it's tasty.

Why do they drink it, as opposed to some other cocktail? 

Easy - they like the taste.

Okay, sure, but why did they try it in the first place to find out that they liked it? There's zillions of cocktails, and most people haven't tried most of them.

Probably their friend ordered them one once, or they saw someone drinking one and it looked interesting. 

Okay, so why did that friend order one?

Well now we're into the question of how social trends start. Usually we just have to throw up our hands and say 'peer effects' or 'opinion leaders' or 'fashion' or some equally unsatisfying explanation.

But in this case, we actually have a very definite answer of why you drink Old-Fashioneds.

You drink them because some time in 2006, a writer for the show Mad Men decided that Don Draper, the charismatic man's man main character in the show, would drink them as his drink of choice. The show became a hit, people started asking for them, and a heretofore archaic cocktail was suddenly restored to newfound celebrity.

I would wager that out of the people who drink them, at least 98% of them would swear on a stack of bibles that they drink them only because they like the taste, and not because of a desire to appear trendy.

And yet we reach a very stark conclusion. If that writer had decided that Don Draper would drink Mint Juleps instead, there's probably a high likelihood that you'd be drinking that right now, swearing equally that you just liked them for the taste.

The alternative is that some time around 1960, people's taste buds suddenly changed such that a previously tasty drink became unpleasant, and some time around 2007 they magically reverted back to enjoying them. Want to wager on that one?

Nobody likes to think that their personal tastes are actually fashions dictated by people whom they never met. But, more than we'd like to admit, they are.

Hypothesis Falsified

AL sent me a link to this story about how Jessica Kerr, lately a model for Victoria’s secret, was apparently punted from said job after saying that she didn’t think Taylor Swift had what it took to be an underwear model.

Frankly, this didn’t seem like such a disrespect – the number of women who do have what it takes is surely extraordinarily small. Have you read about what they have to go through before a show? No solid food for 9 days before the show, and no liquid for 12 hours before. Ye gads! Every single excess pound is on display for the whole world, and your career depends on looking absolutely flawless to as many ogling eyes as possible. It’s perhaps not a surprise that this is not dissimilar from playing sport at an elite level, in terms of success requiring both extraordinary commitment and rare natural talent.

So my first hunch was that the Taylor Swift comments were mainly a pretext, and Victoria’s Secret was looking to ditch Kerr anyway. I was guessing it was an age thing – she was just close to the end of what is surely a very limited shelf life for underwear models.

According to the only reference anybody consults anymore, Kerr is 27. Bingo! Surely that’s got to be at the upper end of the range, right?

It turns out, not so much.

A vast and grueling dedication to scientific truth lead me to ascertain that the current list of Victoria’s Secret Models has a much wider age range than I thought. In ascending order:

Karlie Kloss – 21

Erin Heatherton – 24

Behati Prinsloo – 24

Candice Swanpoel – 25

Lily Aldridge – 28

Doutzen Kroes – 28

Lindsay Ellingson – 29

Miranda Kerr - 30

Adriana Lima – 32

Alessandra Ambrosio – 32

32!!! Remarkable, huh? Admit it – when you started reading this article, you would have thought it inconceivable that 30% of the most famous currently employed underwear models on the planet have ages starting with a ‘3’.

Part of the value in economics training is not the logic of economic reasoning itself, but simply the dedication to empiricism. You have a hunch about the world? Great! Find some data that will test said hunch, and see if it’s true or not.

The first thing you will learn is that it is amazing how often your hunches about the world turn out to be wrong.

The second thing you will learn, more by way of conversation, is how tiny the number of people is who actually regularly test their ideas about the world in a systematic way and update accordingly.

More’s the pity.

Much more, actually. 

Disappointment

They made a movie called Don John? At last! Someone else read the Chesterton poem and thought it was as awesome as I did, and wanted to make a movie about the Battle of Lepanto. Gun upon gun, ha! ha! Gun upon gun, hurrah! Don John of Austria, Has loosed the cannonade! This is going to be AMAZING!!!

Wait, what? It's instead a movie where Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a sex addict?

God damn it. Never mind.

The Marketing Genius of Bruno Mars

Like the tobacco industry, you need not want to purchase a product to respect a well-constructed business strategy.

Consider the example of singer Bruno Mars. If you need to understand him in a single picture, try this one:



(via)

He sings cliched romance songs aimed at a young female audience, selling the fantasy of himself as some kind of mix-race romantic icon. Look at him, cheesily holding the hand of some adoring fan and singing directly to her while someone, presumably her friend, takes a photo.

Again, I'm not the target demographic here, but his stuff is well designed.

In particular, here's his famous song 'Just the Way You Are':



First of all, it's marketed broadly at the only demographic still paying for music - impressionable teenage girls.

It begins with pure boilerplate about some hypothetical beautiful girl.

Oh, her eyes, her eyes
Make the stars look like they're not shinin'
Her hair, her hair
Falls perfectly without her trying
She's so beautiful
And I tell her everyday
Yeah

So far, so ordinary. The tune is catchy, the sentiment prosaic.

But then it gets interesting. No, not interesting the way the Iliad is interesting, or the way Yeats is interesting, but the way that a well-constructed ad-campaign is interesting.

I know, I know
When I compliment her she won't believe me
And it's so, it's so
Sad to think that she don't see what I see
But every time she asks me "Do I look okay? "
I say...

These lines flow on effortlessly from the previous ones, constructing a narrative of a pretty but insecure girl. Makes sense.

Then you stop and think, and realise it makes no sense at all. Think back to the really pretty girls you've met. How many of them were in the category of:

a) Being really pretty, but for some reason being really insecure about that fact, and thinking instead they were actually quite ugly

vs.

b) Having known by at least age 10, if not earlier, that they were really hot, as evidenced by being treated nicely by strangers, complimented by adults, having men of various ages stare at them, and all the boys want to kiss them.

Reader, it is a very strong rule that the attractive women of the world generally know that they're attractive. Look at the model in the film clip - do you really think it's credible that 'when he compliments her, she won't believe him'? Don't make me laugh.

So we can be quite sure that song isn't really aimed at girls who are actually pretty but think they aren't. Those girls are unicorns. Rather, it's just aimed at girls who think they aren't pretty. They are a much larger demographic, due to the sad reality of the bell curve - only 2.5% of the population will be two standard deviations above the mean.

Girls who think they're not pretty are, sadly, probably right. But don't worry, Bruno Mars, this hunky romantic guy is here to tell you that you're actually beautiful and just don't know it! Sure, you may not be able to get him directly, but buy his CD anyway! Plus some other Bruno Mars surrogate will surely come along in your life soon.

Then the chorus makes a great segue:

[Chorus:]
When I see your face
There's not a thing that I would change
'Cause you're amazing
Just the way you are
And when you smile
The whole world stops and stares for a while
'Cause girl you're amazing
Just the way you are
Yeah

Notice how effortlessly the song shifts from the third person (she is beautiful) to the second person (you are beautiful). The song is now unashamedly being sung to the audience, just like the first photo. You, listener, are perfect! You shouldn't change anything, just be yourself. 

Talk about mainlining an IV drip of the most saccharine form of feel-good self-esteem culture. There's no problem that can't be fixed by feeling good about yourself.

Admittedly, this sentiment is perhaps less toxic in the area of attractiveness, where a good chunk of the effect really is fixed at birth. (It's more problematic to encourage students to feel good about the fact that they just failed the maths test). Maybe it's just not fun to realise that you're not that attractive, and this is just a palliative.

Perhaps. But the risk is twofold. First, you might just end up with unreasonably high expectations, and end up with nobody, instead of someone who's actually in your league. And secondly, you might think that self-esteem excuses you from self-improvement, especially in the areas where you can make a difference. 

I leave it to the reader to decide the extent to which the phenomenon of excessive self-esteem is a problem among modern American youth of both sexes.

(Also, if you want to hear a really catchy cover of the song that will make you hate yourself as much as I do, check out here.)

Assortative Mating of Celebrities

A fairly robust fact about celebrities is that they tend to date and/or marry other celebrities.

The most obvious explanation for this is that celebrities are the apex of the dating distribution, and hence this is simply a sorting on quality. In other words, everybody wants to marry Scarlett Johansson, but you have to be Ryan Reynolds to get a chance. This is the most depressing (but likely) possibility, and I imagine it explains most of the effect.

The more interesting hypothesis, albeit probably a smaller factor, is that celebrities might prefer to date other celebrities because these are the only people that they can be sure aren't dating them just for the novelty of their celebrity. People who are rich have a similar dilemma - if your husband or wife has much less money than you, can you be really sure that they aren't with you for the money? Sure, they'll hopefully like you as a person too, but you'll never really know the counterfactual. And the not knowing can become a nagging doubt in itself.

The other related factor is that the life of a celebrity almost certainly has its own peculiar problems and miseries, but these are likely difficult to explain to people who aren't themselves famous. Well, you can explain them, but you'll probably just sound like an ingrate - "boo hoo, unlucky me, I'm such a famous movie star that now I can't get a litre of milk without someone wanting a photo, if only I were a no-name janitor instead." Being rich is the same - sure, you have the enormous problem of how you're meant to stop your kids turning into spoiled brats (if you give them money) or resentful and bitter (if you don't give them money). But the average joe will just ask why you don't just give the money away if this is such a problem.

The most cynical answer, I think, is simply a marketing one - most celebrities have a tenuous grip on their status, and will go to huge lengths to stay in the spotlight. Dating or marrying other celebrities is a way to keep the tabloids interested, which is your very oxygen if you're some 'famous for being famous' talentless celebrity.

What these explanations have in common is that they provide very little avenue for you as Joe Public to ever actually date a famous person. So relax! You really aren't good enough for them, so you may as well just enjoy your life.

Stories from an Atlanta Limo Driver

If you're ever with a Limo driver, I recommend asking them to tell you about some of the celebrities they've driven around. I was with one guy, and I just had to suggest the topic and he went on a crazy roll, including the following:

-Expressing skepticism of the claim that Kobe Bryant was a rapist, based on his firsthand experience of the sheer number of groupie women who follow around basketballers, and the gold-digging nature of a lot of them. Apparently it's common practice for these guys to pay off all the groupie women they sleep with - partly to make sure it doesn't get in the papers, partly to make (potentially false) accusations afterwards of rape more difficult ("So why did you take his money afterwards if he raped you? Are you a prostitute?" etc.). I take no stand on any of the above, just reporting what he told me.

-As part of the above, when there were enough groupie women around, some of the guys would say 'okay, one of you go with the driver too', to which he would apparently have to turn them down, noting 'I'm an old man, I've got God in my life. But if you'd caught me 20 years ago...'

-Among rappers, Usher and 50 Cent are apparently d***heads (no, really!), while Lil John and Sean Paul are good guys. P Diddy is okay, but his entourage is full of tools (stop, that surely can't be right!). Apparently it's common for no-name losers in the entourage to act much more entitled than the stars themselves, which I'd totally believe.

-Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley apparently act in real life just like you'd expect from TV - "both really cool guys".

-Apparently, he was in a limo with Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, where Bobby Brown was talking to some business associate and Whitney went crazy and started attacking Brown and screaming - in other words, while the rumors that Bobby beat her up are true, she was also apparently nuts and not an easy woman to be around.

-Chris Brown and Rhianna both apparently seemed quite normal right before he beat the hell out of her. Go figure.

Interesting times - it's like the Taxi-cab confessionals, but with famous people.

Where Were They Then?

Via Jason Kottke, apparently one of Stefani Germanotta's co-workers shot a bunch of photos of her in 2005 in her apartment. Not long afterwards, she went on to become Lady Gaga.

Frankly, I never really rated Lady Gaga. But in these photos, she looks pretty good. I guess when you're wearing a regular cocktail dress with nice hair, instead of a dress made of meat and a ghastly blonde wig, it tends to make you look like less of a weirdo. Who knew?

Drugs Are Perfectly Safe, Unless TMZ Has Ever Written About You

The whole furore (mercifully dying down now) over Whitney Houston’s death gave me cause to reflect on the odd way that the average person of Intelligent Socially Acceptable Opinion tends to hold two fairly contradictory ideas about drugs in their head at the same time.

The first idea is that drugs are basically not harmful on their own – the main ill effects are actually just results of prohibition. Overdoses typically tend to be related to questions of uncertainty about the purity of the drug, which is a natural consequence of the market being unregulated and illegal, since drug dealers will cut the drugs with all sorts of nasty chemicals. If we made drugs legal, people could take them in a controlled environment with known purity, thus eliminating most of the bad side effects.

The second idea is that celebrities tend to die younger than the average person, often because of the effects of extended drug use – Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, etc. etc. Sometimes this was related to illegal drugs (Houston, Winehouse), sometimes prescription (Jackson, Ledger). But the effects of long term drug use made Amy Winehouse (and to a lesser extent, Whitney Houston) look like a walking corpse even before she died, just like Lindsey Lohan has started to age really badly.

It should be obvious to you by my juxtaposing the two that these arguments cannot both be right. Personally I think it is the first one that is faulty. I’m a supporter of quite a lot of drug legalization, and it’s true that there are a bunch of problems that come about mainly through prohibition (crime, wasted police and prison resources, instability in Latin America, erosion of civil liberties) and a bunch more that are exacerbated by prohibition (drug deaths). These provide a totally sufficient reason to legalise drugs.

But that’s a far cry from saying that drugs (with the arguable exception of pot) are free from significant long term health and mortality risks. People kill themselves deliberately and accidently from all sorts of drugs – alcohol, painkillers, diet drugs, heroin, meth, and all the rest. Not to mention combinations of all these, or combinations of these with cars/bathtubs/heavy machinery/the ocean/busy highways. I imagine that the problems of purity are significantly overstated – people know exactly what the purity of a vodka bottle is, but it doesn’t stop people drinking themselves to death one way or another. It’s entirely unclear how legalizing Cocaine would have had the slightest effect on the likelihood of Houston accidentally drowning in a drugged out haze.

Not everything that we make legal is necessarily desirable. The mistake of the liberal consensus opinion is that a lot of liberals have little intrinsic concept of the idea of letting people freely choose things that may be costly mistakes. Libertarians (and some Conservatives ) tend to be open about giving people the freedom to make bad decisions, partly as a matter of liberty, partly as a reflection on the futility of trying to do otherwise. But since the nanny-state types (mostly liberal) tend to be uncomfortable with the idea of letting people make bad choices, they need to convince themselves that the drugs themselves must be good or at least neutral, and all the problems due to government action.

They’re wrong. Unless you’re willing to make the strong form argument that Winehouse wanted to inject herself to death, having more people using meth or heroin is a clear cost to both society and themselves. And a support for legalization does not require a blindness to this fact.

Separated At Birth

Cee-Lo Green from the Superbowl Half Time Show:



'Future Dudes', from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.



The other Cee-Lo description on Reddit was 'a Gay Sith Lord', which I can't find much fault with either.