Another photo from a dinner:
Yeah. I know. Weird photo.
Author: Hafiz Noor Shams
For more about me, please read this.
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[998] Of take heart, libertarians
Several of my friends told me that I could be excessively pessimistic sometimes. I assure them that it’s not my nature to be as such but rather, my environment forces me to be as one. As a green observing the degradation of the environment on daily basis, at the same time, as a libertarian witnessing the trampling of liberty almost everyday in this country, life is hard for me to swallow. It’s doubly hard for me when I see my friends giving up the fight for liberty and migrating away to freer lands abroad, leaving me and the rest behind to fight a war all alone.
Whenever I see friends or even strangers migrating away, saying they have undergone enough injustice, I become bitter. Even envious at times. After all the implicit agreements to come to each other’s aid in the face of gross injustice, appealing to camaraderie based on liberty, quitting the fight by migrating away is a breach of that agreement. Of course, I fully agree that a person’s free to do whatever he so wishes with his person and property as long as he respects others’ liberty to do the same, as any libertarian would say, but trust is something fragile. Once broken, it takes time to rebuild. Disappointment takes toll on trust.
Though you’re leaving this land behind, looking forward for better future abroad, where life is systematically fairer, where liberty is relatively cherished, pursuing happiness that all libertarians dream of, at the very least, don’t forget those of us that choose to guard a bastion of freedom in this liberty-forsaken land. Come to our aid when need be. Stay true to your words, even if you choose to leave, for liberty’s under assault and we need every man available to guard the wall of our fort from tyrannical individuals.
Have you not the heart for sympathy for us? Are you apathetic to the pain your fellow libertarians undergo while defending liberty? Have you seen the oppressed of the past? We, right here, right now, are the oppressed and you and I know that.
The grass is greener on the other side, that much I admit and I do appreciate why you’re leaving. For I myself have experienced liberty in foreign land. It’s a path that I’ve gone through and can never turn back. The aftertaste is too strong to ignore. Once tasted, one forever longs for it the moment one parts from it. I truly understand that feeling. I had the chance to do the same thing, I could have adopted a faraway free land as my first home. I could have but something calls me back and that call places a burden on me to man the fort.
For those that plan to migrate away, please, I beg you, lend me your ears. Do not leave this land behind. However discouraging the situation might be, all isn’t lost yet. Hear me. For every bastion we surrender, is another bastion for tyranny!
Take heart, libertarians, friends. Take heart and stay. For if we make our stand, Fort Liberty shall stand proudly even amidst relentless bombardment. For if we make our stand together, we shall turn the tide that tyranny has forced upon us.
In the last Southeast Asian Games held in the Philippines, a Southeast Asian blogger suggested that there’s a correlation between the number of medals won by a country with the country’s population size and wealth. That sounds reasonable to me. With respect to the ongoing Asian Games at Doha, let’s test it.
Let’s touch on the data first. I use 2005 GDP at PPP (IMF) and population size of Asiad country-participants as listed at Wikipedia. The GDP at PPP is used as a proxy variable to wealth. Data on medals collected by countries as of 0400 Greenwich time is obtained from the official site of the 2006 Asiad. In order to differentiate between gold, silver and bronze, I assign three points to gold, two to silver and one to bronze. I have the all the data in one file and you may have it if you’d like to play around with it.
I got MS Excel to run the necessary regression. I know, it’s a bad choice but I don’t have access to other statistical software. I did download some free, legit softwares off the internet but that was too much hassle.
So, on MS Excel, I regressed medal points — number of medals multiplied by point assigned — on population per thousand and GDP at PPP per million.
Before I reveal the result, let’s talk about my initial hunch. I’d think population size and wealth have positive relationship to medals won by countries. To generalize it further, if we take medals won as a proxy to strength in sports, population size and wealth would contribute positively to countries’ strength in sports. What do you think about that?
Now, the result supports that wealth increases the number of medal won. Specifically, each billion of GDP at PPP leads to a 0.0008 increase in medal point, with all else constant of course.
The surprise comes from the correlation between population size and number of medal won. Each thousand leads to 0.0002 decrease in medal point; an inverse relationship, with the typical caveat, ceteris paribus.
The output:
Honestly, I’m kind of skeptical of my own regression.
Regardless, on a different set of regression – medal points on GDP at PPP per capita – reveals that a dollar increase in GDP (PPP) per capita increases medal point at about 0.0018, ceteris paribus. The regression result if you’re interested in it:
How significant are the figures?
Well…
Akhir-akhir ini, Project Petaling Street penuh dengan tulisan-tulisan tentang Islam and kebebasan. Saya sendiri telah meluahkan rasa hati saya tentang kod pakaian yang diperkenalkan oleh Majlis Perbandaran Kota Bharu baru-baru ini.
Apabila PPS mula dibanjiri dengan rencana-rencana “cut and paste” dan kata-kata kesat oleh seorang Muslim konservatif tempatan, saya terperasan satu perkara yang ditonjolkan oleh laman web terbarunya, Jundullah:
Sekali imbas, rencana itu amat membencikan manusia yang menggunakan akal fikiran. Jika semua masyarakat berfikiran demikian, akan mundur satu dunia. Saya pasti, tiada keraguan di situ. Jika semua masyarakat Islam telah menerima saranan rencana itu, tidak hairanlah mengapa dunia Islam telah lama ditinggalkan kebelakang lagi jauh.
Sebelum saya menamatkan penulisan pendek ini, perlulah dinyatakan bahawa rencana itu sendiri tidak ditulis oleh pemilik laman Jundullah.
As a person hostile to the excessive state power, I’m currently grappling with the idea of submitting to the state whereas membership is forced upon me in the first place. I could accept deterministic reasoning in some sense, that we as human beings can’t choose on certain matters. For instance, we can’t choose our parents, or worse, our siblings, no matter how hard we want it. As a libertarian, most likely as other liberals, the state is established by the people to protect the rights of the people. It is merely an instrument of the people. That idea is alright if a person or a group is establishing a new state. Problem arises when a person is born into the state and citizenship is forced upon him. So, how do I as a liberal solve this problem?
Somebody might have written on this earlier. I know for a fact the individuals like Rousseau have tried to justify the existence of the state. I however would like to make an attempt at rationalism.
At the moment, I see that this problem is caused by mismatch of timelines; the life length of an individual — the citizen — and a state don’t match more often than not. Specifically, as mentioned earlier, the state is established first while a person is born into it. The person will be the citizen of the pre-existing state until his citizenship is taken away from him or a switch in citizenship occurs. If that is the case, if the problem is really caused by timelines mismatched, the most apparent solution to me — and perhaps dangerously naive — would be a revolution each time a person deterministically become a citizen of the state. Such solution is costly and I dare not visit it in the real world. Doing a revolution every second of everyday of the year is beyond rationality and in fact, madness.
A liberal democratic system provides an alternative to constant revolutionary madness. It’s a democracy that keeps tyranny of the majority in check by guaranteeing certain inalienable rights to citizens of the state practicing liberal democracy, enough rights to discourage real revolution as such those that occurred in 18th century France or 20th century China. In a away, a free election is a small peaceful revolution. Through this, free election partially solves the problem of timelines mismatch while reducing the need for violent strength that is ever so necessary in the face of tyranny. It’s only when the democratic system is corrupted, when liberty of the citizens are no longer guaranteed, is a revolution, a forceful change of the state, is inevitable. As Victor Hugo once said, when dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
A simpler solution would be anarchism. An anarchy is a stateless situation of free people. Anarchy is the true condition of being free. Unfortunately, it’s not a stable state as more often than not, a state of anarchy, unlike of a state as an institution, lacks a social contract to govern, at the least, minimally, interactions between individuals. The social contract in a libertarian sense is a rule of law that guarantees negative rights of a person. Without this social contract, a person’s total freedom, limited only by his physique, environment and mind, would be inequitably limited and eroded by stronger others. The social contract — every person is the absolute owner of his own life and should be free to do whatever he wishes with his person or property, as long as he respects the liberty of others — ensures an equitable rights, where such rights won’t be eroded by other individuals, based on implicit agreement. The condition that is stable vis-a-vis anarchy. As so often seen in any libertarian material, that social contract must be at the most minimal level and acts only to prevent the negative rights of a person from being infringed by others.
Though I don’t claim the three solutions as exhaustive, that there could be other options, between the three, I prefer the second option for reasons stated above, I hope, clearly.
With the second option from my point of view however, it becomes a burden for liberals to participate in the political process of the state, either directly or indirectly. Non-participation is not an option for if liberals fail to participate, their rights would be determine by other people that wouldn’t necessarily hold liberty dearly and seek to throw liberty into a dungeon cell far below the earth, beyond the grasp of sunlight.
If the assumption of the cause of state establishment is true, then a person’s participation in a process would be important to partially undo the problem of mismatched timelines. For if every free election is a revolution, active participation in free election is a revolution to rectify the mismatched timelines problem without bloodshed.
This however, of course doesn’t work at all for those with stances very different from the mean. For them, proportional representative democracy such as practiced by the German state currently is crucial to further rectify the problem of citizenship.