There’s a new wave sweeping the blogosphere.

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that sparked the Muhammad Cartoons Controversy, is once again defending freedom against those that hate it. They have published a manifesto signed by a diverse group of high-profile figures. Blogs from all over the world are republishing the document as a show of solidarity.

It’s Islam Awareness Week on the Berkeley campus. Perhaps this is the perfect time to discuss this issue. Let’s prove the Daily Cal wrong: symbolic gestures can play an important part in this great debate.

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According to US intelligence “czar” John Negroponte, China stands poised to become a “superpower” next to the United States. It’s easy to understand why: after all, China’s GDP compares to Canada’s, making China a major global trading partner with the West. (China’s GDP was $1,159 billion in 2001, while Canada’s was $694 billion). China’s economy has been growing at roughly 9-10% every year.

And even on this campus there are those with enough wisdom to recognize this. Dr. Gregor’s course on Communist China (PS 137B) discusses the horrific impact of Mao’s “communism” on China and China’s economic rebirth with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms (slightly dismantling the command economy). It’s quite clear that China today fully intends on becoming a global military and economic power.

But on the flip side, I cannot help but notice that even today, despite China’s roaring economic and military growth, their per capita income is still hovering between $900 and $1,000 dollars per year! Not only that, but the majority of their 1.2 billion people live in the country side. Industrial activity only recently over took agriculture as China’s largest contributor to GDP, 51% as of 2002. China may be growing fast, but frankly, if you have nothing and it grows, you still have nothing. When our economy grows at 3-4%, we are still producing more and adding more to the economy than China does.

I do not mean we should be complacent, on the contrary, we need to be fully prepared economically and militarily to compete against the Chinese in the future. I’m just a little less alarmist about the whole thing. China still has a long way to go, and I do not think that we have to worry too much about them tomorrow, or a year from now, or a decade from now. Maybe I’m wrong and China will surprise me.

To the extent that China becomes a “superpower” it’ll be in the same sense that the Soviet Union was a superpower: through sheer military might. There’s no question that the Soviets, and now the Chinese, cannot compete with us economically (not yet anyway). China can’t continue to pour so much into it’s military without a strong economy behind it and expect to last a long time (again, I use the example of the USSR). And although the Chinese economy has liberalized considerably, their public sector industries are still a major drag on the economy and the state.

Well, those are my thoughts on the matter. Anyone who thinks I’m completely wrong, feel free to tell me so and explain why.

According to a recent Cato paper, every time you buy a stick of butter you pay a 100% tax on the sale. You also pay an 80% tax on the sugar components of all food. Similar taxes, ranging from around 10 - 100 percent are placed on a slew of food products in the United States.

The government makes this tax by paying farmers to grow agricultural products below the rate of demand, and then putting tariffs on competing imports to make the domestic price conform to the reduced supply.

When you go to the store to buy the product, you are forced to pay the difference between the market price and the government price , as well as pay for the original subsidy in your income taxes. The result: money is transferred from you, to a government bureaucracy, and finally to a person with a government guaranteed “private sector” job (there is in fact, one Department of Agriculture bureaucrat for every three farmers in America).

The study states the average American family spends 146 dollars a year for the tax. This may seam as a small sum to a comfortable family, but to people living hand to mouth on the grocery budget, this makes a significant difference.

In addition to the direct cost to consumers, subsidies tie up billions of dollars in capital and millions of workers in sub optimal production. The workers and investment money used to produce goods at a loss could be employed in profitable industries or even in the slew of crops that America exports to the world (only the unmarketable ones are funded).

When Australia and New Zealand abolished their agricultural subsidies and tariffs, they saw a marked reduction in the agricultural sector (with no uptick in unemployment because labor shifts), but that the farms remaining produced goods far more efficiently, and survived on their own selling goods the market would pay for.

The only argument that usually sticks around once it’s clear the subsidies are a giant barrel of pork is a patriotic plea to save that endangered species, the American family farmer.

The only answer to that is that subsidies have been in place for 70 years, putting the farmers in the generational line of farming for a government check. The days of American pioneers building homesteads on the sweat of their backs is mostly a memory; most of the farms being subsidized are corporate farms manned by immigrant seasonal workers. Those that are still family farms have been farming for decades at a loss, maintaining a way of life for the purpose of national quaintness (when they farmed for a profit back in the day, it was actually a way of economic life).
Who is to say that these particular workers, in this particular sector, should be paid to produce at a loss when anyone else would loose their shirt without government pity?

Posted here:

Class Pass Renewal Referendum

Actual Number of Votes (Not including abstentions): 10,950
Voter Turnout Percentage: 33.8%
Yes Votes (and % of Yes/No votes): 8,723 (79.7%)
No Votes (and % of Yes/No votes): 2,227 (20.3%)

Career Center Referendum

Actual Number of Votes (Not including abstentions): 10,549
Voter Turnout Percentage: 32.5%
Yes Votes (and % of Yes/No votes): 2,497 (23.7%)
No Votes (and % of Yes/No votes): 8,052 (76.3%)

“Freedom is the freedom to say two and two make four.”

-George Orwell

“My opinion cannot be changed by your arguments because my circumstances have dictated an ideological platform that is common only to people in my circumstances.”

This, minus all the bloated jargon is the core of Identity Politics, the single most illogical movement to grace modern thought; not surprisingly, it is the new darling child of the academic left.

This philosophy is used to justify radical leftist perspectives, but only if they’re held by women, queers, or people of color; those people are apparently born to be postmodern leftists and cannot possibly understand the analytical language and mathematics of Classical Liberalism that guide us to such silly thoughts as “universalism” and “civil society”.

The problem with arguing with people who have such an obviously absurd position is that its very difficult to come up with a measured response. The tendency, at least for me, is either to be crippled by confusion at the illogic, or to fly into a rage and lose the high ground.

The best response to someone who counters a rational argument with an identity one is to reduce the question to something simple, something relatively uncontroversial but that will prove the point.

For instance, that two and two make four.

Then ask your identity politician if anyone’s identity (gender, race, sexual orientation) can legitimately change this result? If he says no, you can press on the point and show how the entire point of good politics is to use analytical tools such as mathematics to predict results that we can both share, even if our original perspectives are different. This is a place to explain both the strengths and limitations of rational thought, but a clear demonstration that limited commonality exists.

If he says yes, you know what you have on your hands. A nihilist . And make sure to tell him that he is a nihilist, and that identity politics is a poor cover for believing in nothing at all, or simply avoiding the difficulty of actually putting together an analytical argument to forward opinion.

Yesterday, a couple of the BCR/Patriot ladies posed with one of our newest readers. Hi Dan!

Don’t forget to vote on the fee increases sometime before Thursday. I voted no on both.

Just for fun, let’s see who can predict the final results most accurately. Winner gets to be full of his/herself.

I’m going to say 60-40 against the Career Center and 85-15 in favor of the Class Pass. I also thought we were going to win the 2005 Special Election, so I’m probably totally wrong here too.

South Vietnam had elections too. Yes, they too yearned to be free. The Vietcong was indeed a small minority of the country that wanted to subvert the will of the peaceful peasant majority.

But none of that mattered in the end because it was a war, and in a war, it does not matter how right you are; it only matters that your force of arms prevails over your enemy’s.

No matter how noble our mission, we are fighting an unwinnable war and the casualty rates prove it.

The chart shows a consistent cycle of casualties, hovering around two deaths a day, that has continued unabated throughout the war with occasional dips below and surges above. The clinch is that these rates did not change because of any move towards democracy .

The fact is that our army is deployed at enormous expense oversees in Iraq, while the insurgents are fighting in their own territory. What we learned in Vietnam is that insurgents like these can fight on indefinitely and unless our Army can actually defeat them in a measurable course of time, the game is up.

Fellow people of reason: Many of us, including myself, supported the Iraq invasion. The time has come, however, to undergo a sober analysis of the changing situation. It may very well have been the right decision with the information given to us by President Bush, but the time has come to analyse in an empirical fashion whether our continued presence in Iraq will actually do the situation any good.

As our readers continue their witchhunt for Nazi sympathizers on campus, I’d like to bring up a related point for debate.

This post on eLegal Canton (via TechDirt) reminds us of just how exposed we really are on the Internet. We willingly give up some of our privacy to share bits and bytes about ourselves with the rest of the world:

Social networking sites such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com or one’s own blog or comments left on other blogs leave trails of personal information…

We often forget this information is there for anyone to find at any time. That snarky remark or embarrassing photo that seems amusing at the time may become a real problem when future employers check you out.

And for you readers who plan on making politics a career, consider this:

It will become interesting during the next few years when those who routinely use these kinds of sites start running for public office. All kinds of potentially embarrassing information will be readily available to opponents.

While these various ways to interact with others may seem innocuous at the time, they can come back to haunt later. People often treat these kinds of sites like a personal conversation with a few close friends, but the reality is they are having that conversation with the world and it is preserved forever.

I personally think that people should be held responsible for what they write if they decide to use their real identities (as is policy here on this blog). If, 20 years from now, someone googles your name or finds you through the Wayback Machine, then you should be able to explain yourself if anything controversial comes up. On the other hand, people could stand to be a lot less judgemental about what others do in their youth and free time. If Facebook were around when Clinton and Bush were in school, we’d probably know the answers to the basic questions without even having to ask (boxers or briefs? did you inhale?).

But honestly, we just have to live with it. People are always going to use whatever they can to take you down. You can either stand up for yourself or become a victim of the anally retentive. And, hey, if you do lose out, his entire life is only a MySpace search away… What’s this? A tranny fetish?

So while we’ll never get a chance to read Washington’s blog or check out Lincoln’s Facebook profile, the politicians to come from our generation will probably have them. So to 2036 Presidential Candidate X, I say: add me to your buddy list or you’ll regret life (30 years from now)…

I found these poll results from CNN extremely amusing. This is why it is impossible to follow the polls and be a leader at the same time.

Essentially, CNN asked a bunch of questions about what the US response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions should be. And as can be expected, the results were contradictory.

This is my favorite part: “Moreover, 69 percent said they were concerned that the Bush administration would be too quick to use military force, yet 67 percent were also concerned the United States wouldn’t do enough to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.”

To be fair, I think we can take this much out of these poll results: most people are not confident that President Bush or the UN will handle the situation well. Come to whatever conclusions you will.

Madison and Hamilton were right when they wrote that mass politics would be choatic and impossible to control, if not for the republican style of government in our Constitution. I am really glad we are not a direct democracy.

Andrew Quinio applauds the Brits’ latest move in the War on Terror:

This week, the British House of Commons showed great resolve in the War on Terror. It was resolve that we as Americans can learn from. Parliament passed a bill that made it an offense to glorify terrorism. It was a clause defined in their version of the USA Patriot Act, and like the Patriot Act, it has come under considerable fire. The majority, however, was able to put its foot down and definitively declare that you cannot be Osama bin Laden’s cheerleader. Now it’s time for us Yankees to show the same clarity…

Even if we could subject these apologists to the British bill, the ACLU would be present to act as their human shield. The ACLU makes no distinction between responsible criticism and subversive dissent. That is what makes the passage of the anti-glorification bill so admirable. Its existence makes a definitive statement that there is a clear difference between productive debate and harmful opposition.

Among the apologists named are Ward Churchill, Noam Chomsky, Cal’s own Snehal Shingavi, John Kerry and Bill Maher…

My own take: the trouble with restricting speech is who will be doing the restricting. Will those in charge be able to fairly distinguish between glorifying terror and acceptable dissent? Or, as is always the case, will politics get in the way? For example, we could make pretty good cases against the former three on the list, but we’d have to stretch a bit to cast the latter two into the sedition net.

My other fear is that such a vaguely defined law would force our creative types to censor themselves in fear of government backlash. We’re already seeing complex allegories of our current state and our current wars on television, in comic books, and on the big screen (I highly recommend all of these, btw). Like literature, we can read any meaning into the works as we please, even anti-American/pro-terrorist ones. Would such works still be created if there existed even a small chance that their creators could be prosecuted?

The powers that be may only go after the most explicit of terror supporters, but once we move past the clearest cut cases, the potential to unjustly censor becomes very real. Am I the only one who fears the unintended consequences of such a law? And do these laws even help the War on Terror in the first place?

Hi everyone,

My name is Kerry Eskenas. I’ve been asked to contribute to the Patriot blog, but I have to start out by admitting that I have absolutely no blogging experience. So, I’m going to give this a try to see whether or not I have any blogging talent. I’m a third year Political Science major and I’ve worked for the Patriot magazine for more than a year now. I’ve limited myself to news articles in the actual magazine because, like many Republicans at Berkeley, I lean toward the libertarian side of the spectrum. I’d really like the Patriot to serve as an actual ‘conservative’ voice on campus, though, so the opinion articles that I’ve written for the website are not about issues such as abortion. I will also limit myself on this blog to commenting as much as possible from a ‘conservative’ viewpoint.

This is only an introductory post and I think that the issues that I have a lot to say about at the moment have already been discussed this week by the new bloggers (i.e. the Career Center fee (Isn’t the ASUC always complaining about fee hikes from the university? How could they even suggest such a frivolous fee increase without recognizing their hypocrisy?) and the Muhammad cartoons (… Don’t even get me started)).

However, I would like to mention one incident this week that truly annoyed me. This has nothing to do with national politics or even campus politics/events, but I still think it’s relevant. I was in my International Relations class on Monday, and we were discussing an article about women in politics. What shocked me about this discussion was that every girl who spoke up (except for myself) actually supported the idea of having a quota requiring at least a minimum number of female politicians in America. What was even more shocking was that at least one of these girls referred to herself as a ‘feminist.’ Although there are extremists in all philosophies, ‘feminism’ is actually defined as the belief that women ‘deserve equal rights and opportunities.’ The entire movement is undermined when someone claims that women are unable to reach positions of high authority in this country even though they have access to the same educational opportunities. Another comment made during this discussion was that having a woman president would undermine efforts to negotiate with the Middle East because women ‘are not respected or taken seriously’ in most Middle Eastern countries. What always surprises me about this campus is the co-existence of stereotyping and individualism that exists in so many students’ minds. Isn’t it clear that a leader’s individual personality, as well as foreign policy strategies, would determine whether or not that leader is ‘taken seriously’? And really, does any Middle Eastern country ‘respect’ President Bush? I really don’t know many people in the Middle East or elsewhere who ‘respect’ President Bush (although I do), yet I don’t see this as an obstacle to his War on Terror.

Anyway, feel free to respond to me because I enjoy arguing. Have a nice day.

From the Stanford Daily:

Erin Lashnits, a coterminal student in biological sciences, has been suspended for the remainder of her tenure as the Stanford Tree.

Band Manager Mike Priest and Assistant Manager Adam Cohen announced their decision to Lashnits on Thursday night, just hours after UC-Berkeley Athletic Department officials Breathalyzed her at a .157 blood-alcohol content at halftime of the men’s basketball team’s 65-62 loss at Berkeley, according to sources, including several in the band.

But a school mascot never lets things get her down. Lashnits stays positive and demonstrates her school spirit and winning attitude:

“The Tree’s going to be just as awesome as it ever was,” Lashnits said. “Nothing fundamental’s going to change. The Tree will be the Tree forever and ever.”

And though Lashnits said she’ll miss what she called “the closest she’ll ever become to being a rockstar,” she added that her time had come.

“I’m so fucking burnt out,” Lashnits said. “I have shin splints that are killing me and my costume got torn up and destroyed against Washington when Sixth Man stormed the court. The only things I’m missing are two home basketball games which really aren’t that big of a deal to me. I’m not that big of a sports fan.”

Anyway, what I really want to see is an Oski vs. Tree brawl. How awesome would that be?

Update: According to this Playboy interview with the Tree (not necessarily Ms. Lashnits), there was indeed an incident between the rival mascots in the past:

PB: Who’s your biggest rival? You have a bad history with Cal’s mascot, Oski, and in 1998 you got in such a nasty brawl that it was covered on ESPN’s SportsCenter.

ST: Well, he’s a tool, first of all. And just for the record, Oski attacked me. But most of the time I’m not even going to waste my time interacting with another mascot, although I may say a few coarse words here and there.

Coming up there is an online vote regarding student fees for next semester. There is the Class Pass fee and the Career Center fee. Today I want to talk about the Career Center fee. You can check out their website for more information.

The money we would be paying ($12 per semester, going up to as much as $16 over ten years) will exclusively go toward the lease on space at 2440 Bancroft. This will bring the center a few blocks closer to campus; it is currently located further West on Bancroft. It is argued this will make it easier for students to use the resources there.

There is no increase in services offered, only connivance. We are paying for a lease and will have nothing to show for it in ten years time except a center needing a home or a new lease. This does not make good fiscal sense.

There is nothing wrong with the current location, just that it is a little walk or short bus ride away. If a person is too lazy to go the center as it is, why would they make the effort to go to the center even if it is right across from Eshleman? If you don’t care enough to walk or hop on a bus to go a few blocks, would you care about accessing its resources?

There is also the mystical Lower Sproul redevelopment plan. If they are going to rebuild student services it would be a logical choice to move the center there where it will be lease free.

On the online election, I will be voting No on the Career Center Referendum.