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.