The Shipyard shuts down, artists angry, TJIC angry and sad and snarky
http://lee.org/blog/archives/2007/05/11/…
Berkeley Shuts Down Amazing Art Space The Shipyard There was talk, just a little murmur, that the outside should be spray painted, “Berkeley Kills More Art” and that people should weld all the doors shut and sit naked in the center of the space with some heavy weaponry. This is partially in reference to how Berkeley kicked The Crucible out of town. So they moved to neighboring Oakland and have prospered, being the envy of the local industrial art scene. Berkeley wants The Crucible back but they can’t have them. And damit, in 12 months, Berkeley will want The Shipyard back but that won’t happen either. “Man, we just want to work on our shit in piece.”
Lee is a libertarian, so I’m not indicting him in the following comment, just all the countless left-of-center artists who simultaneously (a) say things like “Man, we just want to work on our shit in peace.”; (b) are in generally in favor of government and are overheard to complain that X, or Y, or Z is “under regulated”.
(Example B: leftist doyen TNH, who votes for Democrats and regulation, but gets upset when the FDA tries to yank a medicine that she depends upon off the market).
My comment, in two parts, to these folks:
(a) Nyah-nyah!
(b) You know, you’re not the only one who thinks “Man, we just want to work on our shit in peace”. Maybe you should consider that, for every time you find yourself holding the crappy end of the outhouse-depth-probe, there are 20,000 other times that you’re holding the other end and poking it in the face of someone else.
This is America.
Our unspoken national motto is – or used to be – “Man, we just want to work on our shit in peace”.
Get with the program.
May 15th, 2007 at 4:58 am
Let me get this straight: do you actually think that the only consistent positions are to be for or against regulation per se, without regard to how needful, counterproductive, generally agreed-upon, inappropriate, demonstrably beneficial, unlawful, etc., a given regulation might be?
If that is your position, then please excuse me for saying so, but you’re going a long way out of your way to make your conclusions stupider than is strictly necessary.
May 15th, 2007 at 7:34 am
My position is that anyone who’s paying attention sees that almost every attempt to build a regulatory apparatus so that “the best and brightest” can enact the vision of the annointed is doomed to failure because the incentives inherent in the system do not work to push the regulators to make wise utility-increasing philosopher-king decisions, but instead push them to make politically-popular, and/or ass-covering, and/or bureaucracy-growing, and/or special-interest-decreed decisions. Spend a bit of time reading up on public choice theory and regulatory capture and the Iron Triangle.
So, yes, I think that the only positions that are consistent with the best research that has been done and the only positions that are consistent with the actual effects that we see around us are either to be (a) strongly biased against regulation, or (b) in favor of regulation, but not because it delivers increases in global utility, but because it delivers some particular rent that is of interest – for example, I think that one could be consistently in favor of OSHA regulations if one was an employee of OSHA.
Needfulness of a solution does not make an argument in favor of regulation unless the needfulness of a solution is coupled with a reason to believe that regulation delivers that solution and is deontologically acceptable.
The level of general agreed-upon-ness is also of no concern to me. It has been demonstrated time and time again that people make large systemic (note: systemnic, so the statistics of large numbers do not help us) errors in their understanding of certain things closely regulated to those areas that governments regulate: the non-zero sum nature of profits, etc.
Instead of name-calling, why don’t you provide some evidence for your point of view that amounts to something other than “everyone [ that I know in my demographic ] agrees with me”. Go ahead and refute regulatory capture. Tell me why the FDA banned your particular medicine, thus creating disutiliy for you, but has never done this to anyone else before. Explain why it’s a good idea to build a vast regulatory mechanism even with the assumption that The Other Party will control it for 4 years out of 8.
May 15th, 2007 at 9:36 am
As I thought, then.Re “name-calling”: if you can’t figure out that the one negative adjective in my comment conditionally modifies “conclusions” rather than “you”, I can’t think an extended discussion is likely to be productive, even in areas where we already agree.
[ UPDATED, as per the discussion here ]:
s thght, thn.
R “nm-cllng”: f y cn’t fgr t tht th n ngtv djctv n my cmmnt cndtnlly mdfs “cnclsns” rthr thn “y”, cn’t thnk n xtndd dscssn s lkly t b prdctv, vn n rs whr w lrdy gr.
May 15th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Oh Teresa, admit it — you were sure of what you thought before you ever engaged in this “dialog”.
May 15th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
If only there were a reliable way to tell good from bad regulations…
As far as I can tell, there isn’t. Safety regulations for drugs look like an a obviously angelic regulations … until you actually see them in action. I think we can expect other regulations that look angelic from the outside to hv smlr prblms.
May 15th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I’ve been anticipated!
ObSF: “The Anticipator” by Morley Roberts.