Alex Jacobson 3.0

Morgan asked why I am starting to blog again. I said because I need a place to output thoughts and this is a good one.

Stuff below here is really old.  There are also intervening posts on SpareInk that have yet to be moved.

SpareInk seems to have gone inactive, so I guess I will blog here in the interim. Copying my last post from there.

Zimram Ahmed says:

I agree with Arnold that people are irrational when it comes to thinking about healthcare, and that part of this irrationality expresses itself as a preference for insulation coverage over catastrophic coverage. I’ve certainly felt the urge, to pick the healthcare plan that covers the most stuff when having to make that decision.

I don’t think this is any less rational than preferring all you can eat Internet over paying for bytes transferred. People don’t want decision making transaction costs interfering with import decisions.

From the 11 April Business Week, pp.50-51. (Via Marginal Revolution)

University of Alberta political economist Wenran Jiang calculates China spends three times the world average on energy — and seven times what Japan spends — to produce $1 of gross domestic product. It also is far more inefficient than nations like Brazil and Indonesia…Chinese steelmakers on average use about twice as much energy as Japanese or Korean rivals per ton of output. Only 5% of the country’s office and residential towers meet China’s own minimal energy-conservation standards.

One interpretation here is that China’s inefficient capital markets are burning capital to produce goods. The other is that labor is so cheap that China can afford these sorts of production inefficiencies. The later explanation begs the question of what happens when China’s GDP per capita and laber costs rise. Will it have enough capital to convert to more efficient production approaches or are the fears about an economically powerful china simply overwrought.

In the comments to my post gloating about Iraqi democracy, Josh copies a comment reiterating that we Americans can’t gloat about Iraqi democracy because they did not vote to enable us to gloat. The key line of that comment was “You do not own their courage.”

I would agree that we who favored liberating Iraq and attempting to create democracy there do not own their courage. But, you should also remember that you who opposed this action do not own the terrorism they and we faced. Whenever anti-war folks argue that we are provoking terrorism or whenever people like Michael Moore argue that the terrorists are freedom fighters, they should remember that they don’t own the terrorism and that making such statements only encourages more.

Google’s Big ServerOP in the Sky!
http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html

Update: see also
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2004-04-02

Reader YS worries:

Whether or not Jewish leaders were in some way complicit in Jesus’ crucifixion is not the issue. The fact that Europe used that possible compicity to brutally persecute millions of Jews for 2000 years is the issue.That 2000 history would be unequivocally irredeemable even if Christians could prove the alleged complicity beyond any shadow of a doubt, and I think that is what you should be arguing. Arguing it the other way opens the door for validating the persecution if one can validate the history.

She has a point. However, I think we can argue about actionability seperately. My point was that blaming the Jews has been a tool of oppressive authorities to perserve their power for millenia.

The modern version of “The Jews killed Jesus,” in the Arab world, takes the form of, The Jews Killed the Palestinians with exactly the same graphic depiction of suffering and with the same absence of any political context.

Even if Jews did kill Palestinians, it does not justify the hating and killing of Jewish civilians either in the Middle East or elsewhere. Nonetheless Arab media thrives on Palestinian Passion plays that follows the exact same formula Gibson and the Church have already used for centuries.

Yesterday I got a call from a buddy of mine. A friend of his is a NY Post reporter who was looking for people to see Mel Gibson’s new Passion movie, get photographed, and provide quotes. We met up at the AMC25. They bought us popcorn and soda and we went in.

Mel Gibson presents the Jewish leadership as wanting Jesus dead because they veiwed him as a blasphemer. A subset of them bribe Judas, have Jesus captured, try him in a midnight kangaroo council, beat him up, and hand him over to the Romans. They then proceed to threaten Pontius Pilate with disorder if he does not order Jesus crucified. He eventually does so and the second half of the movie is graphic depiction of the Roman’s torturing and eventually crucifying and killing Jesus.

So objectively, it was ROMAN Pontius Pilate who ordered Jesus crucified and it was ROMAN soliders that then tortured and killed him. Nonetheless Mel Gibson tries to make the Jews take the fall — as if the ONLY reason Pilate had Jesus crucified was because the Jews wanted it and wouldn’t/couldn’t do it themselves.

However Gibson’s presentation of Pilate’s motives are at odds with our historical intuition. The Jews are not known for wanting anyone crucified (it is a Roman invention). The Romans are not known for kowtowing to the sensitivities of their subject populations. An alternative interpetation more consistent with the facts is thiat Pilate was having trouble contending with the power of the Jewish leadership in the region — would the people be loyal to Rome or the Jews? He became aware of an increasingly popular figure in the population names Jesus. He figures he can weaken loyalty to this leadership if it becomes know that they are responsible for the death of Jesus. Since they won’t kill Jesus themselves, the only alternative is for him to order it and claim it was at their behest.

In this context, Mel Gibson’s movie comes accross as a Roman propaganda piece. The Jewish leadership is portrayed as utterly venal. The torture and death portrayed completely graphically generating moral outrage among the audiece to lay at the Jews feet. I don’t know why he is doing it. Perhaps it is doing this to make money, perhaps he is working out his relationship with his father.
Either way, in a world of increasing anti-semitism, it is sad.

What concerns me is that the propoganda is effective. Some of my fellow movie goers cried. In speaking to them afterwards it was clear that many of them believed Mel’s presentation as historical fact. Most of them were probably unware that even though the screneplay was written by Gibson the substitles STILL didn’t match the aramaic. OH well.

Anyway, check out my photo in tomorrow’s NYPOST!
Update: The online version is here.