Oh god

Another year.

Bumper sticker

"If animals could talk we'd all be vegetarians."
Other stickers in that series:

• "If I had a billion dollars, I'd be rich."
  
• "If a perpetual motion machine were invented, energy would be free."
• "If the moon were made of cheese, feeding a moon base would be easy."

Besides the highly counterfactual protasis, I think the sentimentality of the apodosis is unusually dippy. If animals could talk, we'd have to consider them a bunch of murderous psychotic perverts. Three minutes' thought about what animals actually do would suffice to find that out, but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

There is also the possibility that animals would beg to be eaten:

A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.

"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?"

"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.

"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."

Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.

"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there." It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.

"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.

"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.

"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."

"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."

"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.

"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's heartless."

"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.

"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."

The Universe raged about him in its death throes.

"I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.

"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."

It managed a very slight bow.

"Glass of water please," said Arthur.

"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.

"A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.

"Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."

It waddled unhurriedly off into the kitchen.

A matter of minutes later the waiter arrived with four huge steaming steaks. Zaphod and Ford wolfed straight into them without a second's hesitation. Trillian paused, then shrugged and started into hers.

The Center for Future Storytelling

MIT has opened a Center for Future Storytelling, a determined effort to destroy the written word in even its debased www form. Sam Leith's (until this week, literary editor of the Telegraph) comments are interesting, although characteristically of a modern Englishman he feels obliged to lout to pop culture (Twitter, GTA4, soap operas) however unconvincingly, and even if, characteristically of an English journalist, he misrepresents the situation. There is no doubt about what the Center intends: it wants to provide the tools for worldwide LARPs.

By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

Vampires ahoy, matey.

Even worse, one of the professors is a Ramesh Raskar, "a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies." In a word: bodcasts.

Leith is only pretending not to understand what MIT is up to and is only playing at pop culture, but he really does know English. He says it perfectly:

The eggheads at MIT have, in this respect, more than just a prose style in common with the governing body at Meadows Community School in Chesterfield.

The closure of the library at this 759-strong comprehensive is being explained as "a move towards the relocation and redistribution of non-fiction and fiction resources in the light of the new developments in a virtual-learning environment and interactive learning".

Every clause is doubled-up into redundancy in the hope of sounding grand. How does "relocation" differ from "redistribution" - and don't they add up to "relocating from the library to the skip"? What are "non-fiction and fiction resources" - other than a fancy way of saying "all the books we have"?

How does "a virtual learning environment" differ from "interactive learning" (what learning isn't "interactive", come to that) - and is it just clever-sounding verbiage for the internet?

The thing is, the internet does some things very well, and the codex book does other things very well. There is an overlap - they are both means of preserving and sharing information - but it's foolish to see the two as interchangeable, or the former as supplanting the latter.

One of the clichés about education is that it should teach you not what to think, but how to think: and a vital part of that is understanding the shape of knowledge - being able to evaluate categories of information and degrees of authority in sources. If the educators themselves can't or won't think about these distinctions, God help their pupils.

Rem tetigisti acu, to address him in his ill-concealed native tongue.

A tip

If you have your hair cut at one of those strip mall franchise places, do not use the word "proportionally" when describing how much you want cut off. She found out how much I wanted off the sides, and when she asked about the top, instead of trying to work out just what length I said something like "shorten it proportionally." She clearly thought I meant "make all the lengths equal." Now my head is a round ball of bristly red.

This is going to be an embarrassing week.

Gervaise on religion

Ricky Gervaise, of The Office, preaches atheism, or at least the falseness of the Old Testament, through stand-up comedy. There are the usual objections: he is beating on an easy, harmless target instead of dangerous ones; he is attacking a minority (Old Testament literalists) among Christians; he does not know what he is talking about (saying he is "fine" with the New Testament when he rejects the Old Testament entirely); he is using his high status to abuse a low-status minority in front of audiences who loathe that minority; worst of all, he is being unfunny and calling it comedy. I wish I knew what hater of comedy first encouraged a stand-up comedian to pretend at thought.

Of course Gervaise is right that the Old Testament is substantially false as a record of fact, and even the historical books are full of errors. That bothered me quite a bit as I found out over the years just how extensively wrong the history is, but the things he makes fun of, like Noah's ark, either convert you to atheism on the spot as a child or in time stop feeling like questions of fact. That effect of a story losing the sense of facticity without undermining the worldview it helped build is a curious thing. Whatever the explanation, it is why tackling an adult Christian over Noah's ark is so futile; he has stopped believing that its truth value and relevance to his faith are connected to its facticity.

Most Christians are comfortable with assessing Biblical stories as myths, though many will refuse to use that word, since it implies affiliation with liberal theology and even outright spiritual disbelief. Instead the emphasis is on its true or inner meaning, that is, its mythical essence. Even the ones who feel obliged to defend its factual truth are, so to speak, fighting outside their borders; they can lose any number of scientific or engineering arguments without losing anything they really care about. A story that once supported a worldview has long since come to take its support from that worldview. Children in non-liberal churches are still taught the stories as written, which is a rather dishonest way of implying their factual truth and one I resent in hindsight, even if it is a little funny to think of a Sunday School teacher trying to present ideas about fact, truth, and myth to six-year-olds. It also cannot be over-emphasized how much contemporary Christians are ignorant, and disregarding, of the Old Testament, other than the chief Sunday School stories.

In none of his errors does Gervaise differ from the rest of the new atheist movement, but I want to point out something extraordinary he says in the Telegraph article:

I don't care if there are 50 per cent atheists or 75 per cent atheists in the world. I've got no problem with God being the most the popular thing in the world, with churches being filled, worship, no problem at all. People who believe in God that don't impinge on me, I don't care about. When it starts infringing on people and taking people's rights away that's a battle that's not going to be won by satirists or comedians. That's going to be won by governments saying: 'Ok you can worship what you like, but you are going to teach that evolution is the truth. You're going to tell them about matter and anti-matter and particle collision. Then you're going to say: Some people believe in the myth of Arthur and Santa Claus.' Religion is going to be lumped in with that. [emphasis added]

He is utterly incoherent in all the things I linked to, so it might be too much to expect him to mean what he seems to say, but then Sam Harris infamously wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation, "The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live." (Harris's defense.) Perhaps then Gervaise does mean it when he says that some other person teaching that evolution is false infringes on his rights. What a radical, what a totalitarian idea! This sick worldview, which is certainly Harris's if not Gervaise's, is why the new atheism must be resisted. As much as I love the discoveries of science, and even though I am not a believer, I would rather live among backwoods Pentacostals than grant the existence of a right over others' thoughts and words. Thank God for the First Amendment.

Hiroshima

The book of WW2 journalism ends with John Hersey's short book, Hiroshima, which was first published as a single issue of The New Yorker. It is odd not to end the book with V-J day, which as it is gets very little mention in the book, unless the editor is making a moral comment on the Good War. Expecting moralizing and not really looking forward to it, I almost did not read it. Instead, it proves to be astounding, powerful and understated, honest and horrifying. Only an ignorant fool would conclude from it that the bombing was manifestly impermissible, yet equally only the most callous could be left with any pride in it. And at the time, there were a great many who were proud of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the one point where it is easiest to hate the U.S. for its decision is when as the wounded are still dying in the fires the U.S. propaganda broadcasts boast on and on about how only the U.S. could have organized so expensive and difficult a scientific and military invention. Hersey's understatement slightly falters there, saying the voices on the radio were "shouting," but you understand why he would lose control there.

It took me two days to read it, though it is hardly 80 pages (in this closely typeset edition), because very suddenly I would find I had taken on as much horror as I could stand; an almost physical sensation somewhat like the visual numbness produced by five or six hours in an art museum. It is beyond belief that people could live on with that in their past, and yet they did. Of the six survivors Hersey follows, none is wholly wrecked in the disaster. One young woman becomes a nun; she was crippled by a collapsing building, her leg badly twisted and shriveled, and abandoned by her fiance, a soldier who survived the war but never returned to her. Japanese Christians have always been rare; her conversion in the hospital and her discovery of a vocation are distressing indications of her desperation. Even so she turned her disaster to something brave and praiseworthy. The other five were less wounded, but the degree to which they lived full lives afterward is hard for me to comprehend.

Hersey does not hesitate to show how ruinous invading Japan was going to be--the hillsides around Hiroshima were being heavily dug in even as the bomb fell--and how to the bombed the atomic bomb did with horrible novelty what had been done to many other Japanese civilians by incendiaries and HE. Because the Japanese did not know how to interpret a daytime flight of just three bombers, and so gave the all-clear before the bomb fell, it is likely that the atomic bomb maimed and killed a great many people, especially children, who would have escaped a conventional bombing. On the other hand, it was widely thought that Hiroshima was coming due for a severe bombing, since it was the mainland military's headquarters and mostly untouched. The Japanese had already evacuated about a third of the city for that reason. The U.S. could have lessened some of the misery by warning more clearly beforehand and by broadcasting whatever was known about the risks of radiation afterward, but the one would risk a shoot-down or even a capture of the bomb and the other supposes more knowledge than the U.S. had.

In the end, the only two moral conclusions to be reached are still either grim relief that the atomic bombings prevented many hundreds of thousands of deaths in a longer war, or Richard Weaver's conclusion that the war should never have been pressed to that point. Perhaps the Japanese military would not have accepted terms that left the island and its closest possessions intact, but the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender made it certain that massive bombings and eventually a mainland invasion would be needed, in the absence of the atomic bomb. Unconditional surrender is a startling demand, and possibly, though I doubt it, one day it will be clear that it is always immoral, as the civilized world has come to accept that rape and pillage, once the natural prizes of victory, are always immoral.

I cannot really believe it made a difference in this case, however; it was not going to be politically, or indeed morally, possible to leave Japan with Manchuria, for instance, and they were at least as attached to it as Germany was to Alsace-Lorraine. Moreover in everyone's mind was Germany's surrender at its borders in 1918, and the disaster that followed. Twenty years after Armistice, Germany was again attacking the world, even more savagely than before; twenty years after Hiroshima, Japan was foremost among the peaceful nations, a bulwark against aggressive neighbors with global ambitions. Perhaps the Japanese military would have accepted defeat gracefully, surrendered Manchuria, and never again tried to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but it beggars belief. Would it really then be the moral choice, to prepare the ground for another terrible war? Even if it were to prove safe, could anyone at the time, as Europe still smoldered, believe that?

The bombings, atomic and conventional, were evil things; if they were not, it is hard to think what is. But so were the horrific landings at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Peleliu; so were the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking; so were the enslavement of Korea and the Philippines; and what good actions were there that would counter those evils and more like them? It is the end of morality, if evil is permitted against evil, but there is often no good, nor is it always possible even to know what is good or evil, and if it should happen to be known, still often the best path was lost long before the crisis, sometimes by men acting for the best. Weaver would unwind three or four generations to find the right path in 1945; but what use is so hypothetical a moral theory?

The perfect gift

Durable illusions. Advertisers offer ephemeral illusions, but lost illusions cause too much upset. Religions (wrong ones only, of course) offer illusions that only death conclusively dispels. Their durability lacks confidence, though; the thought that they might be illusions gives them a hollow feel, no matter how vigorous the inquisition is. The market is wide open for truly durable illusions, as indubitably real as a sports car and as lastingly deceptive as a superstitious habit. Perhaps a large illusion would be destructive, but something too small to cause structural problems would be the perfect gift.

I think these illusions would have to be alterations of memory or sensation. My first catalogue will offer these illusions: in memory, inserting a minor bravery or a brief, requited crush, or shifting an esprit d'escalier to the proper moment, or perfecting a conversation; in perception, coloring a day with significance, or infusing a lover with special glamour, or giving the air some subtle exhilarating scent. Wonderful dreams, remembered clearly, would sell well too. The most prized of all those would surely be the entire day marked by a sense of significance, too unobtrusive to doubt and too enveloping to miss.

It occurs to me that I have memories of all those sorts of things, though not too many; just enough to make it plausible that some other entrepreneur beat me to market. People must have been buying me a durable illusion or two every Christmas. Maybe the past grows sweeter in memory not by nature but because that is where we keep our durable illusions, like toys in a toy box.

Italian bravery

The Italians are very strange. They have not fought a war well or bravely in at least 400 years, but individually they often retain more of the old virtus or pride in manly excellence than any other Europeans. So Quattrocchi told his Islamist tormentors "I'll show you how an Italian dies," ensuring that he would not suffer an ignominious beheading by short blade. And in Germany in World War 2, Janet Flanner describes a similar instance:

Below the Gestapo office was a small sub-basement cell where, the Klingelputz prisoners said, the Gestapo had hung other prisoners six at a time by crowding them a row, standing them on stools, dropping nooses around their necks from an overhead bar, and then kicking the stools out from beneath their feet. One Italian became a legend by kicking his stool loose himself and shouting, as his final strangled words, "Viva l'Italia! Viva la liberta!"

How is Italy often so inspiring at the level of individual men and, once for a century or so, at the level of cities, but so pathetic as a nation? They are getting on to 140 years of governing themselves, more or less, but only recently have had any success, in the implausible form of Berlusconi. It would take most Western nations 140 years to decline to the point where Berlusconi would be welcomed for his good governance.

Not that I am inciting anti-Italian bigotry; I am a quarter Italian, have met my Italian relatives, love Italy, and admire ancient Rome without wanting Italy to be Roman. Even so, it is a remarkably incompetent nation-state.

These Terrible Replays of War

World War 2 video games have always bothered me. Not ludicrous games like Castle Wolfenstein 3D or any of the other Nazis-as-demons fantasies, but highly detailed games like Call of Duty and even Squad Leader felt like an exploitation of appalling pain and horrifying bravery. Then again I thought perhaps I should think of them as celebrations of that bravery, though it still seemed a frivolous way to do it. Reporting World War 2: Part Two American Journalism 1944-1946 has a short article by James Agee of The Nation, titled "These Terrible Records of War," in which he praises two newsreels about Iwo Jima, but goes on to say something that felt just like what I had incoherently tried to work out:

Very uneasily, I am beginning to believe that, for all that may be said in favor of our seeing these terrible records of war, we have no business seeing this sort of experience except through our presence and participation.... Since I am reviewing and in ways recommending that others see one of the best and most terrible of war films [the Paramount Iwo Jima newsreel], I cannot avoid mentioning my perplexity.... If at an incurable distance from participation, hopelessly incapable of reactions adequate to the event, we watch men killing each other, we may be quite as profoundly degrading ourselves and, in the process, betraying and separating ourselves the farther from those we are trying to identify ourselves with; none the less because we tell ourselves sincerely that we sit in comfort and watch carnage in order to nurture our patriotism, our conscience, our understanding, and our sympathies.

The newsreel after all would then be followed by some comedy or melodrama. And if that is a problem, surely playing out the war's worst battles hundreds of times is far more of a problem.

Since he recommended it, I looked it up. The corny newsreel voice and music add a very unfortunate silliness to it, though it is still interesting to see that with its tank-slit view, aerial views, frequent lack of music, and tanker intercom recordings it anticipates the modern style of war reporting. At other times the old-timey style increased the sense of distance so it was hard to remember these men really were killing and dying, but the sight of dead soldiers did prompt the familiar helpless confusion of conscience. I wonder how often civilians' hatred of the enemy is an attempt to feel something, anything simple and complete in such confusion.

Story in the headline

Some headlines give away the entire story just by existing. For instance, Perfectionist Who Felt Ugly Hanged Herself. For a newspaper to put such a headline on a story about a perfectionist who really was ugly would violate one of the laws of news, which is not to offend against sentimentality. Since the suicide was a woman, you also know she will be young and pretty, because it another law of news is that, apart from a rare murderess, only young, pretty women are news; the rest are statistics.

So never mind that by far the more common cases, in order, are a sad, ugly middle-aged man whose perfectionism, depression, and loneliness culminate in suicide, the same in a young man, and a distant third, the same in a young woman. Well, ugly is too much--more accurately average-to-homely, as most of us are, after all. None of those stories is news: no one wants to be reminded of so much bleak sadness or see the pictures. This young woman's story yields the warmly sentimental form of sadness now denominated "tragedy" and vocalized tsk-tsk and "Oh poor girl!" There is also the primal satisfaction of looking at a pretty young woman, enjoyed by both sexes and all ages.

This is also why 99% of nationally reported kidnappings of adults are of good looking young women. I have seen people put it down to racism, since the skew is similarly white, but if it is racism it is a very oblique kind resulting from the ludicrous value present day America puts on blonde hair. (Razib has demonstrated that in the early to mid 20th century, when America was much more racist, brunettes were favored, so blonde favoritism is not simply related to racism.)

Reporters are a pretty disgusting crew. Kind of a pity they are now our moral, political, and cultural arbiters.

Jewish Israeli Neo-Nazis?

What very strange twists human nature takes! It is frustrating that the article does not have more details; something exceptionally odd must have been going on with those stupidly vicious young men.

OMG OED

Nitheful: Envious, malicious, wicked; as a noun, such a person. From nithe, malice, an ancient Germanic word that can also be a verb meaning to hate or be envious of someone. Also nithe-grim: grim, cruel, savage; and nithe-iwork: an evil deed. All of these words are severely obsolete (pre-1400) but it is so sad. Some nitheful person nithing these words their power did this nithe-iwork.

What could be a better comment on the Book of Revelation than this quotation from 1350?

By þe mouþe as a lyoun bitokneþ þe manaces of þe proude Men & of þe niþeful

þ is the thorn (the OED uses a more handsome form that looks like the wynn, but it does not render well in blogspot) and ð is the eth, whose name I always have to look up. Both are "th" so it transliterates, "By the mouth as a lion betokens the menaces of proud and nitheful men." Presumably it is a reference to the description of the beast with seven heads in Rev. 13:2, "And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority."

Another marvelous phrase, though I am not sure how it translates:

þar beð naddren and snaken...þe tereð and freteð þo euele swiken, þe niðfule and þe prude.
There are adders and snakes...he tears and devours when evil men, the nitheful and the proud, deceive.

swike is to deceive, betray, ensnare. The -e ending makes the adjectives plural and the -en ending on swike makes it plural subjunctive. The -eð verb ending is the familiar "-eth" of ye olde English. The translations of þe and þo are probably wrong, because there are several forms that can look like those and some can work together for a different meaning. Maybe some scholar of Old English searching for naddren and snaken will comment someday.

Fun with words: the OED sayeth,

The OE. demonstrative and definite article was thus inflected:

SING.	MASC.	FEM.	NEUT.	PLURAL.
Nom.	se, laterþe	sío, séo, later þío, þíu	þæt	þá
Acc.	þone, þæne	þá	þæt	þá
Dat.	þm,þám	þre	þm,þám	þm,þám
Gen.	þæs	þre	þæs	þára (þra)
Instr.	þý, þon		þý, þon

Imagine, you used to have to buy books to find out this sort of thing. I think I even have a Celtic grammar somewhere for just such a use. How clumsy compared to google.

Best sentence ever

"With parturiencie for greater births, if a malevolent time disobstetricate not their enixibility." From Sir Thomas Urquhart's ; or, the discovery of a most exquisite jewel in 1652. The OED is so much fun. "Disobstetricate" and "enixibility" are nonce-words; enixability is made up from the Latin word for giving birth.

Good health by law

Activists amuck.

600 lb of crazy

Story. Picture.

Politicians

Dalrymple on politicians.

Personality variation

Some evolutionary modeling of the development of personality variation. It is along only one axis, trust, but the researchers mention previous experiments with variance in aggression.

This is your brain on activism

CNN has an excellent example of activism-damaged thinking. The summary is that some labcoated killjoy has "discovered" that higher prices decrease demand. He shows that, unsurprisingly, decreased demand for alcohol means less drinking and less drinking means fewer people drink themselves to death (crashes not included). I suppose it is nice to see basic supply and demand demonstrated, but of course the lablord wants the interpretation to be that taxes should be raised through the roof to decrease drinking deaths. Characteristic errors of someone whose brain is warped by long years of activism:

• Ignoring diminishing returns. The tax increases were quite large: 37% in the first case and 90% in the second, but returns diminish rapidly, from -29% to -11% after the second increase. Since the second tax increase was more than twice the first one, but had less than half the effect, sin taxes look very inefficient for controlling behavior.
• Making a mountain out of a mole hill. The effect was small in absolute terms, -23 deaths/year after the first increase, then -21 after the second. The first change was, at the time, about 0.006% of the population. The second was about 0.003%. These are paltry numbers to generate national news with, let alone set policy.
  
• Treating open systems as closed. Even Alaska is easy enough to leave for another state. Someone who is drinking to the point of cirrhosis has dedicated his life to it. What fraction of that 20-40 / year had simply moved?
• Making broad policy recommendations from a narrow study. What happened to deaths due to other drugs? Alcohol is dangerous compared to pot, but it is baby formula compared to meth. Meth and several other dangerous drugs are very cheap, and if, as is likely, a large proportion of the people who die of drinking are already marginal or actually on the street, the illegality and nastiness of meth would little discourage them from shifting from more-expensive 40s to meth, as a supplement or replacement.
  
• Treating human behavior as static. By dropping car accidents and other violent deaths, the study potentially hides offsetting increases in those. For instance, when activists got Washington to increase the drinking age to 21 but Idaho had not yet changed, there was a long dangerous period when the seven miles of highway between WSU and U Idaho had a horrific rate of accidents. Of course what had happened was that WSU students had acquired the new habit of getting drunk in Idaho, and then driving back to WSU. In this case, if higher taxes shift the proportion of drinking that is done in bars, the accident rate could easily change.
• Not thinking their argument through to its logical conclusion. If preventing 23 deaths / year justifies higher taxes, why not just ration alcohol directly? If you have to present little ration coupons torn from your We-Luv-U HHS ration book whenever you want a drink, you will certainly have a hard time drinking too much. I am giving the doctoroid the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he would agree that disallowing even moderate drinking would be wrong.
• Not applying similar cost-benefit and risk analysis elsewhere. How many people die in skiing accidents in Alaska each year? Snowboarding is even more dangerous; how about taxes to encourage everyone to snowboard hardly ever, ski little, and mostly go sledding on low hills. How many people on Alaskan cruises eat their final lobster tail and expire of some cardiovascular disaster? If we only taxed people in proportion to the extra pounds they carried, we could save so very many lives. Many activisits like this Dr. Little Tin God do think such taxes should be applied, at least to ugly things like fat (I have not seen one attack dangerous sports yet), but if they were to say up front all of the things they wish to tax, ban, ration, and control, they would get no hearing. Parceling out their toxic worldview one narrow study at a time helps them hide their ambition.
• Treating their fellow men as children. Honestly, even if taxing drink by five cents a bottle would save 500 people a year, it would give me no reason to support the tax. All men die in time, but it is the exceptional privilege of Americans and a few other peoples in recent times to live in a complex and civilized society and yet also live as free men. A degree in epidemiology, as this doctor has, grants no authority to act as father to other men.
• Implicitly treating a minor good as the highest good. In this case the minor good is longevity. The activist must treat it implicitly as the highest good because a system of ethics that prizes longevity above all other goods is manifestly disgusting, and contrary to all other forms of morality, whether ancient-heroic, existentialist, Judaeo-Christian, or any other. To live only to keep living at any cost is to be enslaved by the fear of a death that is coming for you no matter how you live.
  

When did the early deaths of those who choose poorly in life become satisfactory justification for binding free men by degrees? You should not have to be a libertarian--I am not one--to be sickened by the abandonment of freedom whenever a clipboard is waved at it.

Descending to personalities

I've never really understood why descending to personalities meant beginning to hurl insults. Personality testing is certainly rich in potential insults; it's hard to make someone who scores very low on agreeableness and conscientiousness sound appealing. I suppose he might make an excellent highwayman.

Here is a little more detail, from a professor of psychology at UO, on the general acceptance of the Big 5 model:

McCrae and Costa’s (1985a,b,c; 1987) findings, like the cross-instrument convergence described above, show that the factor-analytic results from the lexical tradition converge surprisingly well with those from the questionnaire tradition. This convergence has led to a dramatic change in the acceptance of the five factors in the field. With regard to their empirical status, the findings accumulated since the mid-1980s show that the five factors replicate across different types of subjects, raters, and data sources, in both dictionary based and questionnaire-based studies. Indeed, even more skeptical reviewers were led to conclude that “Agreement among these descriptive studies with respect to what are the appropriate dimensions is impressive” (Revelle, 1987, p. 437; see also Briggs, 1989; McAdams, 1992; Pervin, 1994). The finding that it doesn’t matter whether Conscientiousness is measured with trait adjectives, short phrases, or questionnaire items suggests that the Big Five dimensions have the same conceptual status as other personality constructs. For example, Loehlin et al. (1998) found that all five factors show substantial and about equal heritabilities, regardless of whether they are measured with questionnaires or with adjective scales derived from the lexical approach.

Of course, the fact that Freudianism is still mucking up psychology (the quoted author even refers positively to Freud's concept of love) suggests that psychological consensus is not all that one might want.

Hoping, for the moment, that psychology isn't lost in fantasy again, there is that interesting remark about heritability. According to wikipedia, twin studies have shown these per-trait heritabilities:

Openness: 57%
Extraversion: 54%
Conscientiousness: 49%
Neuroticism: 48%
Agreeableness: 42%

Those are about as heritable as IQ. Obviously these all leave a great deal of room for environmental effects. Parents, at least traditional parents who care enough about their children to exercise authority, spend a lot of effort on controlling the environmental factors. I haven't known many people who sent their children to private schools, so this is only anecdotal, but controlling their children's environment had a substantial part in the decision. If, say, 57% of openness is heritable, and the remainder is split among school environment, neighborhood interactions, church, randomly acquired friends, and TV, then little of a child's personality conditioning can even be influenced strongly, let alone controlled, by parenting as such. By comparison, it's easy to see that marrying well vastly outweighs striving for a perfect environment. It also provides a good measure for determining what it means to marry well: good personality traits are irreplaceable and durable assets to give children, while good looks fade and money has a habit of getting lost and found across generations.

It's also interesting to think what might happen if the five factors are really capable of being inherited separately. (With S for stability instead of N:) A woman with a high A, high E, low C, low S, middle O married to a man with a middle A, low E, middle C, high S, and high O could produce, ab ovo, a middle A, low E, low C, low S, high O child who might be impulsively inquisitive and likeable past some reserve, but whose emotional stability was very likely to be disturbed in any social interaction, few of which would be sought out. Such a child might seem like an alien to both parents, with the mother baffled by seeming social retardation and the father astonished that a fellow bookworm could be so explosive and impulsive; the resulting adult might still be something as valuable as a high-energy academic like a field biologist. Coming up all trumps could be just as unsettling, as I think might have happened in my family, if it's the case that a middle A, low E, high C, high S, high O and a high A, middle E, middle C, low S, middle O yielded my youngest brother who is high A, middle-high E, high C, high S, high O, so that he gives the impression of having recently arrived from a more than usually holy and scholastic monastery.

Of course all of that takes a naive view of heritability (in reality these traits, if they have a genetic component, are spread across many genes with varying influence) and for the sake of argument disregards environment. Still it's interesting to think about the broad outlines of a personality being assembled from a mixture of parental elements, the way it's customary to talk about a child having his father's nose and his mother's eyes.

Personality

The idea of a personality test has so many attractions. The results contain the vagueness and flattery of a horoscope without the obvious pseudoscience of astrology. You get to find out that you are a completely excellent kind of person and that other people are freaks. The Myers-Briggs test is a classic of that kind of personality test.

Even so, it would be very interesting if there were statistically significant personality combinations. It certainly conforms to everyday experience that there would be a limited range of broad personality groups. That sort of impression is frequently wrong, so it's important that large-scale personality characteristics, like a tendency to religiosity, are about as heritable as IQ, with r=.5 if I remember correctly. If personality is heritable and, so to speak, a mental phenotype, then it's not a priori ridiculous to look for phenotypic groupings analogous to the phenotypic groupings of outward appearance.

According to John Derbyshire (and wikipedia) psychological consensus is that the Big 5 or some similar model gets close to capturing personality variation and grouping parsimoniously. It makes no assertions in itself about whether the five axes correspond to five, or any other number, of physical brain arrangements, though that would be the most interesting discovery of all. Whether there is a physical correspondence or not, eHarmony tries to cash in on the model by matching personality types. I don't remember whether they mention the basis for their testing at any point, but the model is clearly Big 5.

Anyway, Derbyshire mentioned the Big 5 again today so I took the most official looking version of the test, which has the advantage of being part of a scientific survey. Reading the results gives a somewhat unreal sensation, like hearing myself on the phone. On the other hand, it is a short test, and as a friend who took it found, coming at a small subset of the questions from an unexpected angle can produce surprising results. I would like to see how the reliability of this short version in subsequent re-testing compares to the full version.

Update: so I took it again, just to see. I didn't try to do it at all differently, but got quite a bit of variation. Results: E 7 vs 10; A 90 vs 76; C 93 vs 66 (!); ES 31 vs 38; O 99 vs 99. I think those percentiles change as more people take the test, but that's what they were when I got the results. That change in conscientiousness is startling. When my friend re-took the test, his C score changed even more sharply, from 2 to 83. He made a good point, doubting whether the questions adequately capture the traits described by C, since there are no questions about civic or religious conscientiousness and questions about work predominate. On his second test he admittedly was trying a different way of handling close calls, but the original 2 does not describe him at all. He did find that his E, ES, and O scores were pretty stable, as mine were. Even so, the instability of the results is disappointing. Oh well, back to oneiromancy.

In the presence of saints

Ugh. If this sort of thing were widely known among the general electorate, surely even the supine citizens of modern America would rise as a single body, seize the intolerable gasbags, and hurl them into the sea.

I have to get this out of my system before Obama wins and bad temper becomes illegal.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell proved to be pretty enjoyable. It might not be quite so enjoyable for non-classicists because she wrote it as though it were an academic account of the rediscovery of magic, complete with lengthy footnotes and hundreds of pages without apparent direction, though full of interesting details. It brought back happy memories of grim plods through paceless pages. I wish she had known about the rediscovery of the classics in the late middle ages and early Renaissance, because it would have been the perfect model. As it happens it was quite a time for rediscovering ancient magic as well, though that was somewhat less successful. On the other hand magic might come out ahead, if you judge success by present-day adherents, since there may well be more neo-magick-wiccan-whatevers in the U.S. than people who can read Virgil.

The author, Susanna Clarke, writes quite a bit better than Rowling, and though her 18th/19th century tone occasionally falters, she does a pretty good pastiche. She depicts magic more effectively than Rowling as well, but for the most part prefers to leave it unexplained and often even undepicted. It is effective but after so many pages talking about the scholarship of theoretical magic I became tired of never seeing any. She does offer one explanation for Strange's magic, which amounts to a sort of musical improvisation, but with thoughts and actions instead of notes. However, that technique appears to be peculiar to him. There is a very late suggestion that no one has been doing magic but that all the magic has been done through the magicians by a powerful original magician. I think it was more a colorful statement of that original magician's power than an explanation, but it was not followed up.

I think the ending is kind of a punt, too, or else it is a set-up for a sequel, which would be even more annoying. The book is well worth reading, but I am not so sure I would read a sequel. By far the majority of the interest and all of the charm is in the gradual introduction of magic into a world that is only slightly divergent from the real London of 1800.

A political conversation

Overheard at work:

[A sentence or two I missed, except for the word campaign.]
A: I'm so glad it's almost done and it's going to be ok.
B: Oh I know, it's such a relief.
A: I can't believe how bad McCain has been.
B: Yeah I used to think he had a brain but now...
A: Yeah he just doesn't have a brain.
B: [trying to be fair] Well, he hasn't been using his brain.
I: [turn headphones way up]

A and B are both quite nice. A is a MoveOn/AirAmerica fan but from having been forced to hear her frequently I don't think she actually knows what she's listening to. Very much a politics-as-identity-and-lifestyle sort of person. B is very sweet and it's a credit to her commonsense that she spends, as far as I can tell, no time thinking about politics except when it shows up in funny videos. Or in the case of Saturday Night Live, "funny" videos. It's just barely conceivable that B would have voted for McCain, if the press coverage of him had remained as adulatory as it was in 2000 or 2004.

McCain will almost certainly never be president, but by betraying his party and his own former principles for cheap popularity with journalists, he convinced two people that he had a brain at one point but then later lost it or did not use it. That is radiant political genius even a thistle has to love.

Joie de vive

I had not read Dalrymple's review of La stratégie des antilopes before posting my definition of politics, but it is very much on point and as always with him well worth reading. In talking only of the irritation of community, I failed to include the positive joy that man has in destroying other men. It is hardly news to me but still a natural omission, since I tend much, much more to irritation than joy in destruction. However alien it seems to me, history and the daily newspaper show that some large part of mankind rejoices in violence for its own sake. Politics has to constrain that impulse as well, and while it does not explain the genocide, it is still noteworthy that politics had completely broken down long before the genocide. There is no polity when some men think other men are lower than roaches.

The idea that other men do wrong by existing shows up here:

Rwandan Prime Minister Jean Kambanda revealed, in his testimony before the International Criminal Tribunal, that the genocide was openly discussed in cabinet meetings and that "one cabinet minister said she was personally in favor of getting rid of all Tutsi; without the Tutsi, she told ministers, all of Rwanda's problems would be over."

Had the Hutu succeeded and been left without any foreign interference afterward, that minister would have discovered soon enough, as Stalin and Hitler did, that no matter how many groups you kill there is always another group of people who are the source of all problems.

On the pointlessness of ethics

Damn that worthless idiot Rawls. At least I derive some comfort from the knowledge that when the social democratic consensus of the mid-to-late 20th century no longer seems self-evident, eternal truth to so many academics, he will fall right out of favor. Still, though he is especially bad, the fundamental mistake is attempting a theory of right behavior--ethics.

The only book of ethics that has helped me in practical ways is the Nicomachean Ethics, and even that is chockablock with nonsense, like the pretty but evanescent golden mean. I could pick any other part of ethics to beat on, but the golden mean is common to many ethical theories and particularly annoying. The trick is evident when used in a short form. For instance, a spendthrift is bad, a miser is bad, therefore take a little of both and be willing to spend but willing to save. The badness of the spendthrift and the miser are separate arguments, but one of the things I value in Aristotle is his willingness to work with the moral intuitions that, as Pinker would say, are part of the structure of our minds, and those intuitions are certainly inclined to condemn both kinds of men.

More damning is that there is no reason to suppose those behaviors have a linear, quantifiable, and exclusive relationship. It is perfectly possible to be a miser and a spendthrift; surely that is immediately recognizable in the character of the selfish profligate. Should there be a Cartesian chart of possibilities, in as many dimensions as there are human behaviors that the ethicist feels relevant to the question? I doubt very much anyone is competent to work the vector math of ethics, but if only two points are chosen, the choice will define the answer.

What most shows the golden mean to be brass is that it tells you what to do only when you already know what to do, and nothing at all when you do not. What behavior counts as miserly and what as spendthrift (to return to using only two possibilities) varies a great deal from country to country and also by time and circumstances--compare a man of 40 who gives all his wealth to a charity, though he has a family to provide for, a man of 95 who gives all his wealth to a charity, knowing his family to be well established, and a man of 25 who exhausts all his resources on a party, confident because he has so many years left to work for more. Now imagine them in different countries, even ones as closely related as America, Ireland, and Scotland; the judgments about these men would not coincide. If in your peculiar circumstances you know what would be miserly and what would be spendthrift, then by simple negation you already know near enough how to act, at least if you would prefer not to be seen to be a miser or a spendthrift. There is no need to go pretending that there is some happy place "between" wrong behaviors: just do not do them. If, as is more likely since you are thinking about it at all, you do not know what would be miserly or spendthrift in this case, then you have no points to set, no place to start, and less time to figure things out properly because you have wasted a lot of it trying to make human behavior into geometry.

Do not even get me started about Kant and Plato, those cautionary examples. Their worth, as far as ethics goes, is in pointing out others' errors and, by their own complete failures, in demonstrating the impossibility of a rational system of ethics. Aristotle will tell you a lot about how to become a good man, though he fails to show what a good man is. Only Socrates will teach you what all the virtues are: indescribable.

Politics is not ethics

Adam Kirsch, who is reliably good and interesting, has an article about a Cambridge neo-Leninist's attack on Nozick and that dreary fraud Rawls. Nozick is, and probably always will be, a blank to me, since I decided quite a while ago that ethics is the most worthless subject known to man, but Rawls was inflicted on me before that decision. Rawls is in fact largely responsible for it, because a cruel satirist could not contrive a more self-satisfied, woolly-headed, base-stealing cloudcuckoolander yet ethicists have made him their king. My dislike for ethics is too long for this post, see the next one.

Kirsch's essay needs no comment in itself, but he quotes the neo-Leninist saying something commonplace that struck me for the first time with its utter strangeness: he rejected the idea that "politics is applied ethics." The neo-Leninist wants to say that politics is power inflicting its will, blah blah rampant reification blah, but the really startling thing is the idea that politics should ever have been considered ethics, applied or otherwise. Politics is the art of living in a city, beginning, middle, and end. Polis for city of course, though "in a city" is more simply put "together." Though man's purest misery is isolation, other people are intolerable to him. What each of us really, most sincerely desires is that there be many people about us, but that their wills, tastes, and actions not interfere with ours. That is, each man wants to be with other men but for all that makes them other men to be removed. Since those other men rudely persist in being what they are (this by the way is the genius of A Confederacy of Dunces), we are each of us continually abraded, forestalled, confined, in a word crossed in everything.

The first instinct of man is to fix that by making the most egregious obstacles vanish, and magic being lacking, murder is the preferred solution and politics the faute de mieux. Politics works pretty well for quite a few reasons. For instance, it lets interests combine and separate in ways that are more subtle than warlords changing sides on the battlefield, which permits interests to be more slender and more numerous than they would be if each had to field an army. The more interests there are, each convinced that politics will work best for it, the less likely any one interest, and the men who make it up, will either run away with the whole boodle or give up on the process and start stabbing.

So much, so Federalist Papers. I think the most effective parts of politics are much simpler. Bodies moving through space and words in our ears feel freighted with significance. Politics turns those wellsprings of meaning to the purpose of soothing irritated wills. Parades, elections, the pomp and formality of Congress, every arbitrary and ridiculous rite, all build up a sense of meaningfulness that encourages each to grant to the others some trust and sufferance. All that meaning must derive from some real thing, right? There must really be a State, if it the rites of the state feel so very important and real. For the sake of something so important and real, it is not asking much to listen a little, and so persuasion can begin. Politicians sing their songs, and the singing makes the wills of other men less irksome, by clarifying my will, dissembling your will, tarting up his will. Looking for rational, connected thought in a politician's speech is as silly as looking for sustained rationality in any song. Songs carry their sense in their sound. By singing and dancing together, crossgrained man becomes one of a tribe, a city, a nation, when by his cold and silent will alone he can only endure the role of tyrant. It is merely refinement wrought by time that the songs are long-winded speeches and the dances called parades and parliamentary procedure.

Politics is living together without wholesale murder. Look what happens to countries that try to get beyond politics, Germany Russia China Cambodia Korea.... 1 party, 100% victories in elections, and up to 20% murdered. How I wish St. Barry, St. Joe, and St. John would think, before puffing up with hot air, "They only prefer me to a skull heap."

Windows

I hate it. It's ok as a desktop OS but it is horrible to do systems programming for. Why the !@$!*(&@ doesn't it have select() or even WaitForMultipleObjects() for pipes? No, registering events to trigger on overlapped writes is not sufficient. Do you
realize what a horror of unportable code that is, O pig-headed Microsoft? Not to mention excruciating to implement in perl or python.

Nor is there any excuse whatever for a minimum sleep/select resolution of .002 seconds. What is this, 1985? Do I have a turbo button my computer? This server's CPU (just one of 4) can do 500,000 operations in that time. Waitable timers are once again just not useful. If they were so damned easy, you'd have made sleep() use them internally.

Really, die in a fire already.

[Update] ActiveState python makes time.clock() use QueryPerformanceCounter(), so it provides very fine resolution for wall clock time. This is utterly unlike the meaning of time.clock() on unix-like platforms, so you would never expect it. It is wonderfully useful though. And yes I used thread message queues in the end, though not the Windows API versions, because again complex Windows-only structures are not useful for cross-platform scripting.

Crocker on Zimbabwe

Someone mentioned to me that she liked Ishmael Reed's poetry, so I went to read about him. He turns out to be ghastly beyond measure, though unfortunately not beyond words, which he has a lot of. Like Ron Paul, though this is surely the only point of correspondence, Reed has a newsletter put out under his name. The sample article I read, by "Chinweizu," defends Mugabe against all charges, ranting in full blown paranoia about British war crimes committed against the ZANU-PF, misunderstanding standard international actions, and filling all the remaining gaps with ideology. I would have left it at that, but he named a specific bill, and gave a quotation from Chester Crocker, supposedly in testimony about the bill, that sounded made up: "To separate the Zimbabwean people from ZANU-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you senators have the stomach for what you have to do." That it's from Democracy Now! means it is most likely fantasy, but I decided to take a look; after all the Democracy Now! maniac claims the statement is in the transcript. The Crocker quotation shows up a few places online, all radical sites, but with no better attribution.

The schedule of the bill (S. 494 of the 107th) shows only three opportunities for testimony: the hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the hearing before the House Committee on International Relations, and the short debate in the House on 12/4/2001 (Thomas expires search links, but you can re-search with the day). I checked all the dates in Thomas anyway, but the other dates were merely procedural. (I did get to enjoy the declaration of National Shaken Baby Week on one of the dates.) The committee hearing includes only the formal statements of the participants, but since Crocker is not one of the participants, or even mentioned, that is not a problem. Crocker is also not mentioned in the debate, which of course was not a debate but a series of speeches in favor of a bill that after all passed by 390 or so to 11 in the House and 97 to 0 in the Senate.

I wish I had access to the Lexis-Nexis congressional database, but I am pretty confident this is a sufficient search. The bill is a small one, doing little--it suspends debt service freebies and new loans, allocates money to be given whenever Mugabe stops murdering people, and proposes international travel sanctions against the ZANU-PF leaders--on a subject of peripheral concern to the US, especially just three months after Sept. 11. Zimbabwe, formerly the British colony of Rhodesia, is primarily a British concern in any case. Given the limited American interest, the committee hearings and the short debate are a lot of time.

Added to the complete absence of Crocker from all the proceedings is the implausibility of the phrase. I did find some testimony by Crocker online, and that is not his tone; the quotation sounds like movie dialogue to me. Crocker does have a history of preferring engagement to sanctions, even with South Africa in the 1980s, so it is at least possible that he might agree with the general idea that sanctions would be unproductive. Otherwise, though, I am calling this debunked. This post is to help some other curious person from having to read quite so much congressional blather.

[Update: I was at the university library not long after so I had a chance to use Lexis-Nexis. I have the citations on a card somewhere and if I find it I'll post them, but anyone can duplicate the search. The supposed quotation first appears, quite late, in the Zimbabwean government paper among a lot of other outlandish propaganda. Hilariously, though after its first appearance it appears regularly, the citation for the quote changes every time. It is simply a government fiction, and not a well thought out or cleverly maintained one.]

Speaking of Ron Paul, he shows up in familiar mode in the House hearing:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The gentleman from New York, Mr. Houghton, mentioned that he had some reservations about this bill. And indeed, I think that we all should have some reservations about this bill. The one thing, though, that I would concede to the authors of this bill is the description of the problem that exists in Zimbabwe. There is no doubt about that.
The question I have, though, is whose responsibility is it? Is it the responsibility of us in the U.S. Congress to deal with this? Is it the responsibility of the American taxpayers to deal with it? Quite frankly, I just don't agree, no matter how bad the situation is, that it is our responsibility.

I wholly agree with the sentiment that human misery alone does not grant congress constitutional authority to act, but it comes across very poorly amid the other remarks, which are serious and actually pretty reasonable. Also, surely there are other battles for Paul than a bill that provisionally allocates $26m.

In passing, I noticed that the House Committee on International Relations transcript records a congressman uttering this immortal phrase: "The whole focus of our national posture was always the Middle East and Europe." Focusing posture sounds painful.

The best compliments are unintended

Rolling into work around eleven today--yes, I have slipped back into the 11 AM-1 AM rut, but I have a big project--I was stopped by a slender, dark-haired woman with lively dark eyes who was trying to corral three little children. We have a keycard-protected building and she hoped I could help her get up to her husband's floor to surprise him. I know him, he is a smart and decent guy, but having met his wife and children I cannot honestly say I feel like he deserves them. That is the sound of commandments breaking, all right, but at least I do not care about his ass. Not only is his wife beautiful and charming, but his oldest daughter, a 4 year old, delivered a delightfully serious and very well enunciated speech about how they needed help to surprise him. Even his 2 year old daughter can speak clearly. I have a low covetousness quotient, but a beautiful wife and intelligent, serious children ring the bell and win the kewpie doll or cigar, their choice.

Of course I took them up to see him, and besides waving my keycard at the lock pads, all I did was listen to the oldest girl's speech, and reply as earnestly as I could given how funny she was and make sure the 2 year old got through the revolving door successfully. Even so, in the elevator the mother gave me this sort of piercing or shrewd look and asked if I had children. As so often with me there was that heart-stopping instant when I was not sure whether I would produce an answer that was true but not embarrassing, or simply blurt out the embarrassing truth. I said only "no," which is a success compared to what I just barely kept from adding, "that is the worst thing about my divorce," but still pretty awkward. Then she said, which was so sweet, all the more so for not I think being meant as a compliment, "It's just you're so good with children." I gather childless men are weird around kids. Fortunately my wits had caught up with the situation so I was able to pass it off with the true, relevant, and unembarrassing explanation that I was the oldest of four children, and then the elevator ride was over. What a sweet compliment; if only there were some bank where I could invest it to grow in time into a family.

Parini for the lulz

An absurd article suggesting that playing video games improves the literacy of the player, or perhaps of people near the player (really). Some of the people quoted in the article think playing video games is better than reading books:

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices,” said James Paul Gee, the author of the book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” “You can’t screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game.”

“I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘What exactly is reading?’ ” said Jack Martin, assistant director for young adult programs at the New York Public Library. “Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper.”

Is an assistant director for young adult programs at a library a librarian renamed, or is he in professionalized management with librarians reporting to him? In any case, it is almost admirable how willing he is to be illiterate in support of illiteracy. Usually advocates of bad spelling, grammar, reading, etc use standard English themselves and show some evidence of letters, an ironic fact often thrown back at them by conservatives. Jack is a proper revolutionary, a vanguard illiterate: "Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense" shows how firmly he has rejected English syntax and idiom.

Gee employs some remarkable English with "You can't screw up a Dostoevsky book," but all I have to say to him is that he really should play a video game. He will be astonished to find that games let the player save his place and retry levels, so that choices are almost costless. The 1-Up mushroom will blow his mind like peyote.

The best part of the article, of course, is the appearance of my favorite moronic English prof:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are creating fictional universes which are every bit as complex as the world of fiction of Dickens or Dostoevsky,” said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches English at Middlebury College.

The tendentious might want to ask him what he means by "complex," and whether that word can apply in the same sense to intricate software and well-developed fiction, but look at the implication in his statement: Dickens and Dostoevsky created fictional universes, as though they were mere precursors to Tolkien and his hobby world. I had naively supposed that the "universes," or settings, of their books existed to support each story, which was the intended creation. Maybe Parini is just confused, thinking Dickens and Dostoevsky are the D&D of the Forgotten Realms.

And yes, I have read a shameful number of Forgotten Realms books, and played all the Bioware/Black Isle games. I suppose the one advantage to such a waste of life is that I can say with complete confidence that my literacy suffered for every hour reading the really appalling pulp and playing the entertaining but vacuous games.

Learning's Labor Lost

Dalrymple also thinks the age of highly learned men of science is past:

Will we ever again see the polymathic like of Parkes Weber? How was such a man possible? Apart from a classical education, a congenitally insatiable curiosity, and a long life, what were the conditions that made him possible, though not inevitable?

The collapse of classical education, and education generally, must explain a lot, but he adds something it might take an Englishman to think of:

It occurred to me that he had one great advantage over us moderns: he never in his life had to go to Tesco, find a parking space in the hospital car park, cook a meal, take the children to school, or book tickets online. As one American economist put it, with a certain discomfiting directness, you quickly learn that one servant is worth a household full of appliances. Parkes Weber's career was evidence of this great truth.

Off and on bended knee

There is a fine article in the NY Review of Books about science and religion. The topic is so thoroughly beaten out in so many bad articles and books that I can understand some reluctance to risk another, but this one, by Steven Weinberg, a physicist, is a fair-minded and highly educated account. It includes many references I have not seen before, like Melville's comment, "had [Emerson] lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions," which sticks it right to that pious gasbag.

He also introduced me to Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president and a firm believer in the war of science and religion, and to al-Ghazzali, the Sufi philosopher who introduced into Islam the deranged notion that any natural law would be an abrogation of God's freedom. I once read about this idea, and tried to ask a Sufi guest speaker about it when I was at college, but managed to mangle the question, and since then had often wondered if I had even misunderstood the idea. Apparently not, which is a relief, and I am glad to have a name to go with it.

Looking at his other book reviews, it is clear that Prof. Weinberg is highly educated both in the humanities and in science, and he writes beautifully. It is a real pleasure to see that such a man could live today. He is 75, meaning he was educated in the old world that ended between 1963 and 1968, so his erudition cannot reassure me that much about the days to come. Still it is a fine sight and it is wonderful to be alive now while such things are yet possible.

Of course this is a blog, so even though his essay is as tranquil and clear as Crescent Lake, I am going to stick my oar in, catch crabs, and go about in circles with some criticism. He says,

When I was an undergraduate I knew a rabbi, Will Herberg, who worried about my lack of religious faith. He warned me that we must worship God, because otherwise we would start worshiping each other. He was right about the danger, but I would suggest a different cure: we should get out of the habit of worshiping anything.

Perhaps that would be best; it is hard to imagine a world without serious houses on serious ground, and sad. But set against the beautiful solemnity is a great deal of evil, as anyone can see in others' religions, so that if there could be no worship at all, we might all come out ahead. What I disagree with is the idea that that could happen. Religion is an enormous grab-bag of human passions, interests, and needs, as Steven Pinker, Prof. Weinberg, and Razib have all said, but if any single thing binds it all together, surely that is worship. Worship can be sweet silliness, like Amy Grant's early records, or a mysterious obligation, like the worship owed at every roadside shrine in Shintoism or ancient Greek religion, or pants-filling craziness, like Aztec sacrifices, but it necessarily embodies a recognition that the worshipper is less than he normally feels like, and that something else is more. Some religions, like Christianity, use a kind of jujitsu to flip the worshipper into the greatness he has just exalted, but the abasement of one and the exaltation of the other come first.

Well, then, what would be lost if humanity lost religion, learned not to worship? Of course there would be no foaming imams and Pat Robertson would have to sell cars, and we could all feel a lot safer from new Nazisms and Marxisms, so that would all be good. The rest would not be so great. So strong and universal an impulse as the desire to worship implies that it has a tremendous evolutionary advantage, and possibly other benefits as well that we may enjoy without any real gain in fitness. I think the chief evolutionary advantage is in enabling a non-hive species to achieve astounding works. One of the minor benefits may well be science itself, or at least scientists may benefit by enjoying what they do much more.

If the end of worship came about because men could no longer exalt any other entity, surely great enterprises would become very rare, perhaps impossible. Humans, even disaffected bookworms, do not treat their leaders, whether a small-time CEO or a generalissimo, as though they were only men. If they did so, respecting only the office but having no greater regard for its tenant, every command would grate, every plan would draw cavils, every competing idea would threaten group unity. It might be possible to start out with the conscious submission of will motivated by desire for the communal goal, but fissiparous reason will soon show a few men, then groups of men, then whole sects, that a "communal goal" is something of a fiction, especially when your leader is a blockheaded old goat who won't see reason. He always is, of course, being human.

Dalrymple would say that the end of abasement is more likely, and already in progress. Of course he lives in England, which from every account is suffering just what would be expected in an unworshipping land, as swollen egos collide in every interaction and no one sees a reason to give an inch of ground. Perhaps that is only among the less charming classes, but that means a large part of the country. Some men might be exalted, but not in a way that lets them unite men in a common cause; it is an ersatz worship. Nasty as the city would be, I think the wild would lose something as well. In part, nature's beauty derives its power from letting its intricacy, scale, age, willlessness relieve your heart of the self-regard that so painfully swells it. Would the unworshipping man feel any awe of the natural world? Life would be bleak without that awe, but science would suffer more. Every scientist, writing of his start in science, names some special aspect of nature which in one way or another overawed him and drew him into his life's course. Even if some of them are only fulfilling genre requirements, they seem sincere and many must be; surely few of them would have come to science without that experience, often renewed.

In the end, there will be worship, though we may exclude ourselves. Perhaps mankind should stop worshipping (if "should" really means anything), or least life might be quieter, but if I and you and Prof. Weinberg all stop, we have still changed nothing about the reality that made man a worshipper and that always will re-make him so. Yet if it is foolish and futile to hope for the end of religions and to encourage others to stop worshipping, it leaves a man like Prof. Weinberg stranded. The sensible unbeliever by nature would either accept that he is an aberration with little to say on this subject to normal humanity or else dedicate himself to ensuring that existing religions tame and civilize the religious impulse. The difficulty with the latter is that for any man to choose to worship because mankind must always worship, possibly accords with logic but is humanly irrational, and rather wicked, even if none of us can quite say why.

The disadvantage

The problem with blogging about something with a good reputation, like reading, is that going quiet is an admission of backsliding into vice. I should have chosen to blog about well I was doing at killing endangered animals. Everyone would have liked me more when I blogged less.

Anyway, I have been reading even in this fit of the lazies, but this post is just to call attention to a beautiful column by George Will. Eirenic is just the word for it, I think. My own life is significantly worse than four years ago but significantly better than two years ago, which I think means I need to support Pelosi for president. Or does my life only prosper when there is a Pelosi retrograde in a quarter with a descending Bush? The astrology of personal politics is a tricky thing.

Wallace Falls

This weekend I went on a day-hike in Wallace Falls State Park. It was only three miles to the Upper Falls, and the rise is only about 1,300 feet, but it left me a quivering sloth for the rest of the day. The hike is well worth the pain, since it is beautiful throughout. I recommend going early Sunday morning, getting there as soon as the park opens, at 8. Even that early, on a day that was supposed to storm, I met a few other people on the way up. By the time I got back down to the lower trail, I was meeting people every couple of minutes. It would still be a beautiful hike, but it was far better for being so deserted.

I should finish with mysteries, but those recommendations are turning out so well, I will have to read one or two more. I am just finishing The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey. It is pure pleasure.

Why not to live south of Seattle

South of Seattle (Seatac to Tacoma) is pretty scummy, but even so, a fat bastards' swingers club is remarkable. How excellent that they "hosted a naked rally for presidential candidate Barack Obama" and kept a "mobile sex dungeon" in a truck out front. Politics would be so much more entertaining if it were permitted for candidates to hold all their opponents' supporters against them.

Also, how differently the culture would develop if in popular representation libertinism wore its true, blubbery face. I Hear America Swinging tried, satirizing libertinism with unappealing people in the 70s, but even the crankiest of conservatives could hardly have expected it to be tamer than reality in 2008. This regrettable house of lardly love also reminds me of a distinction between vice and virtue that for a few years I have thought might be universally true, but that I would like to see advanced by a thinker of consequence before I accept it. By coincidence, I first thought it out when I discovered that my entirely disgusting and evil blimp of an uncle and his Cruella of a wife were swingers of long standing, or perhaps long lying.

The idea is that a virtuous behavior has the distinctive characteristic that it remains attractive even when practiced by unappealing people across all classes, while a vicious behavior depends for its attractiveness on the unusual qualities of its practitioners, so that it becomes unappealing when practiced generally. By attractive I mean that seeing others do it is pleasant to strangers; even a vice despised by all draws practitioners by its material advantages and so is attractive in a sense, without being pleasant to see. If this distinction is true, then it helps explain why social conservatism can be beneficial while still being predicated on false ideas about religion and the nature of morality (and every distinct social conservatism thinks all other social conservatisms are falsely predicated). By preventing a vicious social novelty from gaining legal and social standing in its early, meretricious days, conservatism gives it time to show its true appearance, as people of ordinary repulsiveness begin to practice the vice openly.

Since I have not seen any similar idea, it may be a terrible one. Because it breaks virtue and vice loose of any permanency other than human nature and defines them in aesthetic and social terms, it might only be unobserved because it does not fit the intuitive sense that right and wrong are distinct from other judgments. Certainly one failing is that it does not explain why truly attractive behavior should be dignified with the name of virtue, but that is because I think the human mind ineluctably makes that association. Another fault is that large populations, that is societies, might not make common judgments about attractiveness; here, though, I believe what people do and not what they say, and even (or especially) those who claim to have a different moral aesthetic arrange their lives to avoid the unattractiveness of that which they claim not to find unattractive. Just visit Queen Anne in Seattle, or any of the innumerable upper-middleclass left-liberal enclaves scattered through urban areas: you will not find wobbly swingers' clubs.

The most difficult objection, I think, is that most people are repulsive in nearly every way and nearly everyone is repulsive in some ways. We do all right, compared to chimpanzees, who must be the most repulsive animals on the planet, but primarily because we hide our most repulsive behaviors behind walls, words, and willful blindness. In such a morass of ugliness, distinguishing the aesthetic advantage of virtue may be merely chimerical. For me, though, the fact that virtuous actions are so attractive is all the more striking for the fact that people are so very unattractive, and it makes virtue all the more precious that enduring beauty is so rare.

Mysteries

Still stalling on Bacon, I read two mysteries last week. One was another recommendation, this time in the Wall Street Journal, The Lodger by Hillaire Belloc's sister, Marie Belloc Lowndes. It is not a proper mystery, in that the criminal is both deranged and known to the reader from the start, and should probably be called a work of psychological suspense. The twisting of mind and morals suffered by the strict, self-reliant woman of the house as she tends to her mad lodger catches the reader and twines his hopes with hers, so that when she convinces herself for a moment that he is innocent, her relief is the reader's. It is a remarkable performance, and another confirmation that if a good writer recommends a minor novel, you should certainly give it a try.

I also read The Lighthouse, another of the books I picked up at Half Price Books a couple of weeks ago. Dalgiesh is becoming a little too superhuman in his command of himself and everyone he meets. Not only does he always know exactly what to say and, far more important to his very British author, what not to say, in order to achieve the greatest possible effect on everyone else, but he even manages to solve the case from his sickbed as he suffers through SARS. As though to compensate, James has increased the intensity of his self-criticism and the torment of his highly intellectual romance, to such a degree that a man of his intelligence would surely realize he was being ridiculous.

As a mystery, though, The Lighthouse belongs to that pleasant, old-fashioned genre, the locked-room mystery. In this case the locked room is a remote island, a variation that escapes the artificiality of a door locked from the inside. For that matter, it might not even be possible to have a locked room in any meaningful sense now. Bedrooms and studies do not have chimneys, gas fixtures, bell-pulls, keyholes, French doors, or old, thick walls that could hold a secret passage. Forensic science finishes off whatever sneaky alternatives are left, with the possible exception of killing by radio, or of course by time machine. The island is also a secret preserve for the wealthy and powerful, so it takes the place of the now-implausible manor house. The result is a comfortable mystery that, whatever its faults, is no weaker than several of Sayers' mysteries.

Update: I just found that the WSJ had P.D. James give her recommendations, so I have several more books in the queue now. The only one I know is Murder Must Advertise, which James is entirely correct to choose; of Sayers' dozen novels, it is unquestionably the purest entertainment.

Walla Walla

The pictures as promised.

Such a delay

Classic, to blog a bunch then stop cold. But my computer broke so hard that after three days I finally had to re-install Windows. It turns out that vmware can break USB keyboards completely, and I had given away my last PS2 keyboard. Then I went on two vacations of three days each. It is all fixed now and I am home for the week. Tomorrow I will put up pictures from my trip to the family ranch.

While I was filling up the car an hour ago (still averaging more than 30 mpg, so nice) a strangely ratty man, wearing a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves and greasy black hair, gray-streaked and tied in a ponytail and pinned up on one side, asked me if I had watched the evening news. He was crestfallen when I said I had been on the road the whole day. After a short pause, he recovered from his disappointment and let me in on the excitement: he had just been released from the hospital where he had been treated for smoke inhalation, after a fire at a local hotel. Of course he was looking to enjoy his brief fame and especially to enjoy again having been interviewed on TV, by finding someone who had seen him. He added that I looked the sort of person to watch news, which might have been flattering except that he was talking about local news and was also clearly in the mood to think everyone he met might be a news-watcher. I could not bear to disappoint him any more, so I asked about the damage (little) and injuries (none) and congratulated him on his escape, which seemed to satisfy him. He went off into the night with renewed optimism; I hope he found a news-watcher soon enough.

A Certain Justice

I have let myself go completely and have read another mystery. I stopped at the neighborhood Half Price Books on Sunday and of course ended up with several books. I was delighted to find that Patrick McManus, whose North Idahoan outdoorsy humor cheered me up throughout my teens, has started writing mysteries. I got thirty or so pages into Avalanche while waiting for a prescription to be filled tonight; so far it is pleasant but a little uncertain.

I have, I think, all of P.D. James's books now, and have not been disappointed yet. Well, except that A Certain Justice, which I finished earlier tonight, proved to be one I had already read. I did not own it yet and know no one to borrow it from or lend it to, but in the first few chapters I realized I had read it somewhere. Probably it was at someone's house while I was bored. It was good enough to keep going anyway, especially since I had no other book with me yesterday.

It comes close to breaking the one absolute rule separating a proper mystery from a procedural, a thriller, or most ghastly, a true-crime work. The rule is, the suspects (or the murderer, if he is known from the start) must be sane. The murderer will likely prove unbalanced in his emotions--after all, he killed someone--but insanity is a mystery's deus ex machina. Of course a madman is even less free than we are, but the limits of madness in its many forms are so unknown to us that we have only the author's assurance that he is playing fair. Yet the greater unfairness is not, I think, in that it prevents the reader from guessing the murderer; in that sense, Doyle cheats shamelessly, Knox is far too obscure, Christie too obvious, and Sayers is sometimes hardly interested in the criminal. I rarely guess, though I watch for the hints and misdirections so that when the answer is given, I can try to see the path the author intended.

The unfairness of madness goes much deeper, for a mystery is a sort of comedy, like the classical "New Comedy," in which social disruption, mistaken identity, and cross-purposes among more or less ordinary people follow a chain of causation (even if flimsy) from chaos to greater chaos until the plot begins to resolve towards social harmony. It is characteristic of New Comedy to end with multiple weddings and a feast, and in that light it is not all that surprising that Christie, at the more obvious end, also wrote romance novels and that Sayers bent the course of several books towards that one great engagement. Even less romantic mysteries, though, follow that path of initial disruption (the body in the library) through the cross-purposes and misdirections that multiply as more disruptions, often more murders, increase the chaos, until the detective's integrating intelligence pulls society back towards wholeness and comity. Insanity breaks all that. The initial harmony is shown to be a falsehood over the bottomless chaos of madness, the plot cannot progress by a normal sense of causation, and the detective cannot by his powers of explanation formulate events into a meaningful whole. Nor can society be repaired, when the story turns on the excruciating isolation of every mind from every other.