Sunday, September 14, 2003
Fabulous Pianist Patch!
The Instapundit is in pain! But I can help ...
I suffered hand and wrist pains from computer use some years ago; I'm all better now, but my cure is an unusual one: Hanon.
Hanon is a set of finger exercises excruciatingly well-known among pianists. Since my mother was a piano teacher, I, too, knew of them. Once I had started, I eventually found a teacher -- and the muscular exercise of playing a real keyboard helped me train my hands to type using a computer keyboard in a healthier way (keep the wrist still and flat, let the fingers work, etc.)
As a side effect of this course of therapy, I can now play a few pieces of real music, even though I have no detectable musical talent.
Mouse overuse is still a problem, though, since traditional mice encourage truly lousy wrist positions. But it's rare that I have to use a mouse that much: keyboard shortcuts are so much more efficient.
posted by vepxistqaosani 5:17 PM
Friday, September 12, 2003
No Lind for Peas!
Oh, boy! My first Fisking ...
It is possible, I suppose, to be genuinely concerned about the poor of the third world and to be an American environmentalist -- but Michael Lind doesn't manage it in his New York Times piece, The Canc?n Delusion.
In fact, if a right-winger had come up with a third-world agricultural policy anything like Lind's, the Left would accuse him of racism -- if not fascism and genocide. And, for once, the Left's name-calling would be defensible.
Lind argues that eliminating agricultural subsidies in the first world would do nothing to help the third; that
... while the free traders are getting what they want out of the partnership -- lower taxes and expanded markets -- the populism and environmentalism of the left will be thwarted.
He goes on to say that
Agricultural subsidies in the advanced industrial nations ought to be reduced -- but for reasons that have little to do with their impact on developing countries. Created to promote a rural middle class when much of the population still worked in the farm sector, most subsidies are anachronistic now that agribusiness in the advanced countries employs only a tiny percentage of the population. Farm subsidy programs exploit consumers and taxpayers.
So he's on the Right side of the issue. What's the problem, then?
So yes, the abolition of most farm subsidies by the advanced nations is an overdue reform. But the result is unlikely to be the one hoped for by the left wing of the Canc?n coalition -- the enrichment of peasant farmers.
In fact, ending subsidies, if it leads to the modernization of agriculture in the developing world, is likely to destroy the very sorts of communities the pro-trade left seeks to support.
So the Evil Forces of Globalization are back in the community-destruction business. And how will they manage such destruction? Why, by using machines and chemicals instead of human muscle. Quelle horreur!
The high-tech farming of the global north uses machinery instead of human labor, along with huge quantities of fossil fuels and artificial fertilizers and pesticides. If the third world becomes as attractive to agribusiness as the first, then machines will replace family farmers, who will become as rare in Thailand as they are in the United States.
Technological displacement has the potential to produce social disasters. Many of the inner-city poor of the United States descend from farm laborers and tenant farmers displaced by the mechanization of agriculture in the South a few generations ago. Those who joined the middle class did so because they were able to find work in the expanding industrial and service sectors. But such opportunities are scarce in the developing world. For better or worse, the anti-subsidy movement, if it succeeds, is more likely to eliminate developing world farmers than to enrich them.
Yes, there are problems inherent in the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. But would you rather engage in back-breaking labor 16 hours a day with no guarantee that you'll actually manage to feed your family (much less make any money for the future) or take your chances in the big city? Over the past 250 years, millions of people have been faced with this choice -- and the vast majority choose the city.
Perhaps left-wing environmentalists should be required to work a year on a subsistence farm before they opine. That would save them from embarrassments like this:
The desire of many on the left to preserve traditional small-scale agriculture in the third world ...
Wait a minute! You mean the Left actively wants to keep the poorest people on the planet permanently poor? Well, yes. But there's another problem Lind has discovered (no doubt helped by Jonathan Rauch's article on genetically modified crops in the October Atlantic, not yet on line).
... is also on a collision course with the goal of preserving the last remnants of global wilderness. High-tech agriculture wastes fossil fuels -- but it spares land, by growing more food on less acreage. Genetically modified crops promise to do the same. Premodern third world agriculture doesn't rely on chemicals or genetically modified crops. But it takes far more land to grow the same crop by traditional methods than it does by means of industrial farming. The earth's remaining wilderness would be in even greater danger if the opening of northern markets were to create a financial incentive for developing nations to replace forests, savannas and wetlands with land-wasting peasant farms.
Gosh. Industrialization and technology save the environment. Imagine! Who could possibly have guessed?
These are the alternatives, then. If third world agriculture is industrialized, then much third world wilderness will be saved from the plow. But most farmers will be forced off the farm, and therefore may not profit from the access of southern agricultural exporters to northern markets. If, on the other hand, third world agriculture is not industrialized, then the effort to enrich developing countries by means of exports from labor-intensive farms will inspire a vast expansion of peasant farm acreage -- at the expense of the environment.
Note the hidden assumption: that third-worlders are simply not smart enough to do anything other than farm in the same primitive ways that our ancestors did five millennia ago. Perhaps there's a third way: that the industrialization of third-world agriculture will free up a vast pool of labor for the task of waging the third world's long-delayed industrial revolution.
But that's not what we want ... or not what we should want, anyway:
What looked like a sweet deal that could satisfy everybody except for subsidized special interests, then, seems destined to fall apart on inspection. First world consumers and third world agribusiness (much of it foreign-owned) may profit from the opening of the agricultural markets of the United States and other rich nations. But the activist left is unlikely to get what it wants: an Arcadia of prosperous village farmers living in harmony with the land.
In other words, let's keep 'em down on the farm just because that makes us feel better. And if they want to get off the farm -- well, screw 'em. We know what's best for them.
The fact that we'd never consider such an option for ourselves and our own families is beside the point -- and only right-wing meanies would bring it up.
posted by vepxistqaosani 4:03 PM
