The always brilliant Andrew Sullivan as a pretty nice summation of the reasons I didn't wind up going to see Gibson's Passion and will almost certainly not go to see Moore's Farenheit 9/11: neither of them are aimed at creating dialog. Preaching to the choir may have its place, but I don't seem to find myself on either extreme leftist or rightist camps.
Right now, I'm seriously considering not voting. Not because I don't care, but because I really don't think that either real candidate has a moral advantage. Kerry is a panderer and a waffle. Bush is either a pawn, baffoon, or liar (though I suspect the former far more than the latter). The only difference I can detect between them is their approach to taxes. Bush cut them, Kerry wants to raise them. Immediate points for Kerry, but as neither has evidenced a shred of what might be called an approximation of fiscal responsibility, it's kind of a wash.
In other news, the bootstrapped Knoppix system I started yesterday is still running rock solid. Which is depressing, because it means that a system booted off a CD without any access to fixed storage is more stable than any Windows installation I've ever come across. I get my new MSI board today, so we should be good tomorrow or Thursday.
I'm off to do laundry.
Seeing as we've got a nice little Dune theme going, this link from MetaFilter is quite timely. It is also a complete crock of monkey entrails, and one of the funniest exercises in misplaced allegorical interpretation I've ever come across.
I moved the broken shell of my computer to Coptix on Saturday, hoping there to restore it to full functionality under the more benevolent if esoteric spirits of Gentoo. I learned several important things, some of which are good, some of which are hard, some of which are kind of there, and some of which are as of yet indeterminate. First, I learned that when you use a compressed air can for more than a few seconds it gets really cold due to the expansion. Okay.
I also learned that the problem with my computer may not actually be in the drives after all, It seems that my motherboard, which has served me faithfully for about two years, did not survive the destruction of the power supply last spring as I had hoped. You see, the computer only detects drives when it feels like it. Sometimes they're there. Sometimes they aren't. And there doesn't seem to be any pattern to this. And I know for sure that it isn't the drives because I just put in two brand new ones and they only show up some of the time. o, I'm probably replacing the bad boy today. Great. Just what I needed.
I also learned that booting straight from an SATA drive under Linux isn't all that much easier than it is in Windows, which is to say it's a freaking pain. Regular IDE, sure, we've got that in spades. But the new hotness? Nah, you've got to compile that into the kernel yourself. How exactly you're supposed to do this without access to the Internet or a hard drive because you can't install an OS is kind of beyond me.
That, my friend, is where Knoppix comes in. It's what I'm using right now. Knoppix is a pre-compiled OS-on-a-CD that you can use by simply popping it in your computer and booting up. It's got a nice KDE interface with all the programs you need, and if I'm not mistaken, it also has the necessary drivers so I can export them across the network and have someone else compile and burn them for me later today. Hopefully. If the guys in the office are feeling particularly nice. In any case, I'm online - kind of - again, and I just want to say that the ability to do this without any drive on the computer actually working is pretty damned cool. I still need to get another motherboard, but hey, it's only money, right?
In other news, I'm off this week. I stopped work on Friday so I could spend this week getting my computer back together and getting my life out of 4103 St. Elmo Ave and into my car for a nice, leisurely trek up the Blue Ridge on Saturday. So I've got the time to mess with this, as much of a pain as it is.
Last week I wrote about Frank Herbert’s political ideas as expressed in his magnificent Dune Chronicles. It was suggested to me that these works also contain an insight into economics that is worth investigating. So I investigated. And I came to the conclusion – aided in no small part by finishing God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and most of Chapterhouse: Dune – isn’t interested in economics nearly as much as he is in politics. Herbert is investigating that failing in the human heart that is to society as the law of entropy is to physics, and his particular interest is the shaping of society by superhuman forces, not the everyday pressures of normal existence. The one major economic concern he explores is the bizarre and unhealthy political pressures that a single-commodity economy creates.
“The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.” So said Paul-Muad’dib Atreides of the geriatric spice mélange, for centuries found only as a byproduct of the great sandworms of Arrakis. The spice is, for one reason or another, essential to just about everybody. For most people, it is simply a means of extending life, for a person who partakes of spice on a regular basis will live for centuries. For those with the proper genotype and/or training, it is an awareness-spectrum narcotic that enables one to muck about with higher dimensions. For this latter reason it is also the foundation of interstellar travel, as the Spacing Guild uses it to see dimly into the future in order to guide their Heighliners through foldspace. In any case, once you are addicted to mélange, you must never go without, as the withdrawal symptoms can easily lead to death, especially for one who has extended his life beyond the normal allotment by using mélange.
It can easily be imagined how a commodity with so many applications that is so vital to so many would be immensely valuable, even if it were easy to get. But acquiring mélange is a dangerous process that involves risking some of the most hostile environments known to man. And that’s not even mentioning the worms, who always patrol spice sands and will attack any spice harvester without fail. Harvesting spice is an exercise of getting in and getting out with as much as you can carry before the worm comes.
In Dune, water and mélange are self-conscious metaphors for oil. Herbert makes no bones about this, and says as much in the forward to Heretics of Dune, published 1984. It is not only the utility of mélange, but its location in a desert environment inhabited by a people with strong Islamic roots that solidifies this metaphor. On Arrakis itself, the key commodity is water. Water is so precious that the dead are rendered down for their water. “A man’s body is his own; his water belongs to the tribe.” In the wider universe, it is the spice mélange – and the struggle for control of it – which defines economics.
When a single commodity is so essential to society, weird things start to happen. People will prove willing to do nastier and nastier things for a measure of control over it, and machinations that would be utterly inexcusable under other circumstances become somehow expected when mélange is at issue. In Dune, Houses Harkonnen and Corrino hope to bring about the destruction of House Atreides through deceitful cunning by making them responsible for a drop in spice production. They believe – correctly as it turns out – that no matter how much House Atreides is respected, admired, and looked to for a certain measure of leadership, erstwhile allies will abandon them as fast as possible if the Atreides are found to be responsible for a decrease in spice production. “The spice must flow.”
Applications of this idea to real-world situations are pretty easy to draw. If the largest oil reserve in the world were not located around the Persian Gulf, I’m pretty convinced we wouldn’t be there now. Yes, Saddam was a brutal dictator who wanted to destroy us and we should have taken him out decades ago. Granted. We accomplished a positive moral good by ousting him from power. But he couldn’t have been the threat that he was and we wouldn’t have particularly cared one way or the other if he hadn’t been sitting on a few million barrels of oil per day. North Korea as at least as antagonistic as Iraq ever was, but because the only commodity they seem to have in quantity is famine, we can kind of let them stew. Oil made Saddam rich, and our desire for oil made us interested in the region. Were the Wahabis not backed by petrodollars, I don’t think they’d be able to mount the kind of concerted anti-civilization crusade in which they seem to be engaged.
This is a somewhat interesting exploration of the political ramifications of economic bottlenecks, but it isn’t really a primarily economic concern. In fact, the Dune Chronicles are not a primarily economic story. An exploration into economic pressures would have to deal with everyday people whose main concern is ultimately ensuring a table and putting food on it. The people in Herbert’s stories are anything but everyday people. At the very least, they are nobility, and don’t have to work for a living. But everyone there is either nobly born or the product of training programs that extend back thousands of years, granting near superhuman abilities to their practitioners. Duncan Idaho is a Swordmaster of the Ginaz, and thus one of the most formidable soldiers mankind has ever known. Paul Atreides is the Kwisatz Haderach, a mystical figure capable of powerful prescient visions, and a Duke to boot. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood is the end product of a millennia old training program and breeding scheme. More important, all of these people are either wealthy in their own right or supported by people who are. Herbert provides them with enough income so that he can have them go about the things he wants them to without having to worry about where their next meal is coming from, and basically leaves it at that. The most economically compelling people in the whole Chronicle are the Fremen, and Herbert basically finishes with them in Dune. The rest of the Chronicle has little to do with such economic concerns.
This is, of course, Herbert’s prerogative, and his political ideas are interesting enough that this de-emphasis placed upon economic concerns is not really a liability. But it does separate the characters from the reader. None of us are supermen, but all of us think about money. On the other hand, all of Herbert’s characters are possessed of abilities bordering on the inhuman, only think in the broadest, most macro-level economic terms, and do not seem to be possessed of any kind of economic attitude. And this last, more than anything, is what separates the rich from the poor. The difference is this: the poor and middle-class work for money. They perform a service and are paid a wage or salary. The rich have money work for them. They use money to get more money. Thus, there is a difference between being rich and being wealthy, just as there is a difference between being poor and being broke.
This makes for some interesting facts. For example, physicians, most of whose income is in the top 1-2% in the nation, are very rarely rich. They work for their money. If they want to get paid, they have to go to work. On the other hand, a rich person does not necessarily have to do anything for their income. They own enough things – properties, securities, bonds, you name it – that their wealth generates income without their having to do anything special. The attitudes that go along with this are rather distinct. The poor and middle class view currency as simply money they can use to meet their expenses. The rich view currency as a means for getting more of it. An entrepreneur who has an investment go south may be broke, but he isn’t poor. Give him enough time and he’ll try again. But the redneck who wins the lottery isn’t rich either, because in a few years, after he’s blown his pile, he’ll be back to working for a living. (Most of this paragraph was inspired by Robert T. Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money -- That the Poor and Middle-Class Do Not!, which, despite its title, is really good)
What makes the Dune Chronicles an essentially non-economic work is that none of the characters seem to deal with these tensions at all. They certainly deal with tension – truth existing within tension is one of the key conceits of Herbert’s work – but not these tensions. There is a bit of this in Dune, as the CHOAM company and its far-reaching influence motivates a number of the characters. CHOAM at this point deals with everything from the most mundane to the most exotic and everything inbetween: pundi rice, elacca wood, inkvines, whale fur, soostones, and Ixian machinery. Above all in value and significance is the spice mélange, but though it may be the cornerstone and most important feature in the economy, Herbert manages to hint at a world in which people actually live and have to eat. The spice may drive the galactic economy and the politics behind it, but farmers on Caladan are still harvesting their rice like they always have, spice be damned.
For me, this broader view is part of what makes Dune so fascinating. Unlike other fictional universes, Herbert makes a world in which billions of people can actually exist. Tolkien, even at his best, never manages this. Like the rest of the Dune Chronicles, Tolkien is only interested in heroes and their friends, with ancient mines, guardian cities, and Dark Lords. While this does make for unspeakably cool stories, thinking about the societies which must exist around these heroes can be rather disappointing. Take, for example, the imagery we see in the Lord of the Rings films, especially Rohan. How do these people eat? The Golden Hall is on a hill in the middle of freaking nowhere. There isn’t a farm field for miles. How, exactly, does this city survive? Where is the supporting rural population necessary for an urban population? In our day and age, the ratio of rural to urban can be really small, but there are still people who milk the cows and harvest the wheat. While off to a promising start in Dune, especially with the marvelous Fremen, Herbert basically punts economic pressures in the rest of his books, focusing instead on philosophical issues. Damn cool, but somehow incomplete, and this is especially disappointing given the promise of the first installment.
Keeping economics believable isn’t simply a gripe for realism. I’m more than willing to grant Herbert awareness-spectrum narcotics, Mentats, and prana-bindu training. No problem. But the depth to which you can get lost in a world is directly related to the depth at which that world can function. Dune was pretty deep. He had the Fremen lifestyle worked out really far down: water retention/collection, food production, social hierarchy, heavy industry, and the necessities of an essentially military community. But maintaining this level of detail while wanting to mess around with abstract political ideas is really hard. Most people don’t have the time, energy, or effort to spend on such pursuits because they’re too busy trying to feed their children. Thus, Herbert winds up not writing about most people. Which is okay, but does mean that the Dune Chronicles are not really about economics.
Props to Christopher Hitchens, whose brilliant response to the godawful Farenheit 9/11, about to desecrate decent theaters nationwide, is possibly the best thing on Moore I have yet to read. Mr. Hitchens has Moore pegged exactly: it doesn't matter whether or not Moore has anything at all to say, let alone anything intelligent. Moore's posturing is the intellectual equivalent of standing on your tiptoes and yelling "Bush bad!" while pointing in a fashion that somehow fails to be menacing. Any half-witted third-grader can do that. Does Moore have anything constructive to say? No. Does he have any ideas at all? Not as such. Is he preparing a legal backlash for anyone who "insults him or his pet"? Youbetcha.
Money quote for those who think Moore makes good films, regardless of their content: "If you leave out absolutely everything that might give your 'narrative' a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft." (emphasis in the original)
So my hard drive crapped out last week. Suck. I've been kind of disconnected from all things wired for about that long, and will be for about another week at least. At that time, my new hard drive and DVD burner will make their appearance, and I will mooch space and bandwidth from Coptix where I may exorcise the evil Windows demons therein and replace them with the gentle and esoteric spirits of Gentoo. At that point, two things will obtain: 1) My career as a gamer will be more or less over. This is okay, because they'd just be a distraction at Columbia anyway; 2) Once I get Gentoo working I will probably never have to mess with my computer ever again. I like this thought. I have reached the stage in my life where I want my computer to not only just work, which Windows can fake half the time, but stay working, a state which Windows approximates in the same way that three hundred and twelve slightly greased lemurs approximate a vat of second-hand instant pudding.
Things I need to learn how to do:
1) Install Gentoo on an SATA drive without making use of a floppy
2) Burn data DVDs with Linux
3) Rip audio CDs with Linux
The above don't seem all that daunting, but the next few could be rather interesting:
4) Install Linux on my iPod to configure it for future use
5) Deal with my existing NTFS partitions from a Linux environment and/or back up the disk entirely with DVDs (see step 2)
The goods should arrive by the end of the week, hopefully. We who are about to delve into the innards of electronic devices that should be left well enough alone salute you.
Just about everybody is reporting that Al Qaeda militants in Saudi Arabia have beheaded their hostage Paul Johnson. I'm thinking long, drawn out death is appropriate, perhaps on a spit over a bed of nice, hot coals. I can also think of a few other good uses for said coals. All I really have to say to these animals can be encapsulated in a single word: die.
In similar news, it has hit the presses that media darling/devilspawn Michael Moore admitted that he had footage of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib months ago, but deliberately withheld it because he didn't want to overshadow his current frog-croak, Farenheit 9/11.
A few weeks ago I reread Frank Herbert's brilliant Dune, one of the greatest hard science fiction novels ever, with a world at least as detailed and interesting as anything Tolkien conceived. I had previously started in on Dune: Messiah, but decided it was really dumb and quit about two thirds of the way through.
Well, after reading Dune again, I decided it was time to read the rest of the series. So I muscled my way through Messiah - which I still think is pretty bad - and have now finished God Emperor of Dune. What follows are my thoughts, which use the Dune Chronicles as a launching point into political theory.
Dune is, as I mentioned, one of the greatest works of science fiction ever to be written. Herbert takes notice of culture, religion, politics, geography, ecology, economics, and technology in a manner which has rarely - if ever - been matched in genre fiction. There is a movie associated with the book, directed by David Lynch. The first time I saw it I though that it was a massive betrayal of Herbert's vision. It is really different.
Then I learned that Herbert was integral in the film's creation and personally oversaw most of the changes. So the differences were obviously something he wanted. Now, reading the rest of the books, I have come to believe that this isn't because he simply had a different intent in Dune than I had previously been aware, but that some time after publishing Dune he realized he had a project in mind and simply used the world he had created in Dune to tell it. The crux of this project is present, though latent, in Dune, and can be found in the following aphorism: “A world is supported by four things: the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous, and the valor of the brave. But all these are as nothing without a ruler that knows the art of ruling.” Herbert sets out over the next several thousand pages of the Dune Chronicles to examine and explore the nature of this most essential and chimerical art.
The underlying concern and motivation behind the actions and decisions of the main characters – when they are at their best anyway, for all are subject to passions which can lead to failings of virtue – is a fear that civilization will fly apart into a barbarism from which humanity will never recover. Paul Atreides in Dune sees and fears his own success, knowing that it will produce a bloody jihad, as his legions are released upon an unsuspecting universe. He turns out to be right, and in the next dozen years, billions of people fall before the Fremen. As the series progresses, the Atreides become concerned with the survival of the human race itself, as they fight against forces of humanity which threaten to end every human life. Essentially, Herbert seems to be preoccupied with the question of why humanity does not destroy itself, because it seems to be ready ot do so at the drop of a hat.
I consider Messiah to be a rather unfortunate inclusion in this spectrum, as it is, as far as I can tell, only necessary to set up the following volumes. I'd recommend you skip it except that essential plot points are contained therein. The real action begins with Children of Dune. Herbert begins to play with themes that are timeless in their character, and essential to any long-term political perspective.
Allow me to provide a few key quotes, mostly from God Emperor of Dune, to provide background for this assertion.
"All rebels are closet aristocrats."
"The art of government requires that you never give up the initiative to radical elements... Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they have to offer."
"There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites - conscious hypocrites, unconscious hypocrites, it's all the same."
"Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It's true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of the people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies."
"What you cannot control, you harness."
“The pattern of monarchies and similar systems has a message of value for all political forms… Governments of any kind could profit from this message. Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained. Monarchies have some good features beyond their star qualities. They can reduce the size and parasitic nature of the management bureaucracy. They can make speedy decisions when necessary. They fit an ancient human demand for a parental (tribal/feudal) hierarchy where every person knows his place. It is valuable to know your place, even if that place is temporary. It is galling to be held in place against your will.”
"The difference between a good administrator and a bad administrator is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate decisions [that] can usually be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems... A bad administrator is more concerned with the reports than decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors. [Good administrators] depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they've done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people who act wisely on the basis of verbal orders."
"The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?"
This last, especially, is the crux of Herbert’s political thought. The major conceit of the latter half of the Dune Chronicle is that one man accepts a hideous transformation of his own body – which grants him a lifespan measured in millennia – and combines that with the conscious presence of all of his ancestors in his mind (yes, weird, but you have to read the books for that to make sense) to take the throne of an Empire that will last for generations upon generations. In short, we have an immensely physical powerful being that is immune to poison, disease, and almost impervious to all forms of trauma, that carries with it the wisdom and knowledge of thousands upon thousands of historical figures both great and small. Oh, and he is also prescient, able to look into the future as well as the past. And this person takes power. Hence the title God Emperor of Dune.
This sounds like the platform for utopia to finally be realized. The quotes above expose the essential weaknesses of both authoritarian governments – generally conservative and traditional – and representative governments – generally liberal and progressive. Authoritarian governments are gifted by their ability to make powerful decisions quickly and efficiently. But they are given to stagnation, oppression, and live essentially in the past. Conservative governments are ultimately incapable of adjusting to the progress of history. A good example of this from our history would be the Islamic Caliphate. It just couldn’t adjust rapidly enough to keep pace with Europe. Furthermore, though authoritarian governments may refrain from oppressing their people for a generation or two – at the very longest – the presence of power concentrated in the hands of a few inevitably leads to tyrrany. Representative governments are benefited by their promise of liberty, a keener sense of personal justice and equality, and are, for a time at least, resistant to the oppression of the disadvantaged by the advantaged. But all rebels – and liberals are at their core rebels of some sort – are closet aristocrats and hypocrites. No one’s motives are entirely pure. And when the few people who manage to take on the system succeed in their endeavor, they find that they become the system, and the rest of us find that the old rallying cry that those in power should not have it was really a backhanded way of saying that the agitators are the ones that should have it.
Herbert knows these things. Herbert knows that even the best governments decay, crumble, and are replaced by new, improved versions that aren’t actually any different. What do we need, asks Herbert, for a good society, having tried just about everything times without number? So humanity having failed at everything else, Herbert tries to see what happens when we have a god rule over us, or as close to that as we can get and still look to someone who once was entirely human. Thus we get Leto Atreides II, the God Emperor. He is as close to omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and immortal as one can get without actually being such and remaining mortal. The ultimate benign dictator who can rule for generations.
Herbert makes this being the ruler of an intergalactic civilization for thousands of years. This is the ultimate benign dictatorship, which has been viewed as the supreme governmental model by political scientists and philosophers throughout history. We are given Leto’s Peace, the enforced tranquility that overtakes humanity under his rule. Herbert sees the long, deep desire in the human heart for peace. And Herbert realizes through his fiction that even this, the ultimate political solution, described by Herbert as in spookily eschatological terms as the Golden Path, will not work. The following is a discussion between Leto II and an advisor, emphasis mine:
Leto: “Peace encourages aggression.”
Duncan: “And you say that your Golden Path…”
“Is not precisely peace. It is tranquility, a fertile ground for the growth of rigid classes and many other forms of aggression."
“You talk riddles!”
“I talk accumulated observations which tell me that the peaceful posture is the posture of the defeated. It is the posture of the victim. Victims invite aggression.”
“Your damned enforced tranquility! What good does it do?”
“If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people.”
“What's your game?”
“I modify the human desire for war.”
“People don't want war!”
“They want chaos. War is the most readily available form of chaos.”
“I don't believe any of this! You're playing some dangerous game of your own.”
“Very dangerous. I address ancient wellsprings of human behavior to redirect them. The danger is that I could suppress the forces of human survival. But I assure you that my Golden Path endures.”
“You haven't suppressed antagonism!”
“I dissipate energies in one place and point them toward another place. What you cannot control, you harness.”
Herbert concludes that we need a god to rule over us, for only a god can meddle in the human heart. Yet Herbert concludes, using Leto II as a mouthpiece, that even this is not sufficient. “They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security they squirm in it. How boring they find it. Look at them now. Look at what they do while I record these words. Hah! I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe me, the memory of Leto's Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seek their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.”
It seems to me that Herbert has realized two fundamental truths about human society. First, there is deep within the heart of every man the desire for rest. But secondly, there also resides deep within each heart something which makes that rest impossible, and which causes us to revolt against it in this age. Something is just not right.
For me, reading these books solidifies these things in my mind as well as reminding me of two other things. We wait for a Kingdom that is just beyond sight not built with human hands, and that attempts to create or establish that Kingdom in the realm of sight are destructive to those who remain under the sun. Those who think that if utopia is within our grasp need to be opposed rigorously. These ideas are growing increasingly important to me, as the political process in this country continues to decay, and as the faceless Enemy who seeks only chaos and destruction has assumed a form more dangerous than any we have yet faced.
The knowledge that politics is ultimately not the answer gives me a pretty detached/relaxed perspective on politics. Not only is the question of Red vs. Blue fairly trivial (and to be honest, the difference between the DNC and GOP is minimal at best: do you want the puppet on the left or puppet on the right?), but the question of representative vs. authoritarian governments is also largely moot. Neither is going to completely work. Neither contains the seeds of utopia. Neither is morally superior, and the longer I think about it, both seem equally amoral. Governments are not inherently moral or immoral, but amoral, and their moral status depends entirely on their actions.
This may sound like fatalism and/or defeatism, but it isn’t. The understanding and acceptance that all political systems are eventually doomed is not cause for despair, but grounds for exceptional flexibility. As representation is no more likely than dictatorship to usher in the final rest, neither seems to me to be morally superior, let alone necessary. The question becomes one of expediency and preference for one’s family and descendents. You can’t come up with the government that will save the world. It’s already as saved as political systems are going to make it. The final answer lies in the next age, and will not be present until law is written in flesh instead of stone. You can, however, support a government that can make life better for you and your family. This may sound selfish, but it isn’t any more selfish than any other perspective, it’s just more honest. Herbert was right about that. You are going to be selfish in your politics regardless of your persuasion. The only question is whether or not you are going to be honest and productive in your selfishness. This gives a remarkably free hand in political matters and reduces irresolvable philosophical problems to the level of the empirical, always a good move. Is monarchy morally superior to democracy? The question does not admit an answer. Is dictatorship better for business than monarchy? Ah, but now we have something to talk about.
So don’t worry about how these things go. Iraq isn’t very significant long term, and neither is the result or lack thereof of this year’s election cycle. The beast from the sea and beast on the land are constantly blaspheming and waging war against the saints, but we know their end, and it has nothing to do with politics. Maranatha.
I'm tired. This morning I had to make an emergency trip to Atlanta. I left at about 6:30 AM, got back to town just before noon, and made it to work by 2:00 PM. I'll be here until 8:00 PM. Dang.
In other news, I leave Chattanooga in about three weeks. Still trying to figure out what to do with that...
There's an interesting article on the APA site I got from deep in a Slashdot discussion whose basic thesis is that the less competent you are, the less likely you are to realize that you're incompetent.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Not only do the incompetent lack the skills to tell whether or not they're doing something right, but as they also necessarily lack the skills to recognize competence in others, they are quite likely to grossly overestimate their own competence. Hence the depressingly common "I'm too good for that job" mentality in losers everywhere.
To make a quick reference to a discussion over on Josiah's blog a few days ago, like it or not, there is a mathematically necessary reason that we have people that score in the lowest two quartiles of any given test: it's curved. Corrolate that with things like the 80/20 rule in economics and Clay Shirky's application of power laws to blog traffic, and the temptation of ditching the bell-curve as a useful model for thinking about society grows pretty strong. All this by way of saying that most of the people in this country aren't really capable of holding down a nice, white-collar job with decent benefits, because it would require a level of discipline and competence that most people just don't have. So bring on the Wal-Mart. We need more low-income jobs.
Now there's Allofmp3.com. Holy... You can download just about anything you want for an average of 3-6% of the cost of iTunes. They charge $0.01 or $0.02 per MB. Any format you want. No DRM. They have what looks to be almost the complete Bob Dylan discography. And Led Zeppelin too.
Catches:
1) Classics section is a bit weak.
2) Site is based in Russia. This doesn't delegitimize the site, but one does wonder about privacy/security etc. But they take PayPal, so it can't be too terribly risky.
That being said, this could be the damn coolest thing I've seen all week.
So we just got back from what is without a doubt the best live show I have ever had the privilege to attend. Wilco is arguably the best American band still producing music, and they absolutely rock when seen live. Their new album, "A Ghost is Born," to be released June 22, is going to be amazing, and a lot more up-tempo and high-energy than their last. "Theologians don't know nothing about my soul" is a damn fine line, to say the least.
Tomorrow the six of us - Mesh, Josiah, Todd, Matt, Eb, and myself - pile into two cars and make the drive back to Chattavegas. Hooah.
So I'm in Pittsburgh. A few things to say about that. First of all, West Virginia, a state in which I have not until this point spent much time, is both gorgeous, and a complete hole. I can explain this. The Appalachians are my favorite mountain range, pretty much period. Not really mountains I suppose, but that's what I like about them. I've seen the Rockies. I've seen the Alps. I wouldn't want to live in either of them. I want to live in the Smokies, or near the Blue Ridge. But the drawback to West Virginia as such is that there isn't actually cell service pretty much anywhere. So it's pretty, but you can't talk to anyone. Corrolary to the second point: as I was driving north today I passed a man riding horseback up I-79N. Neither the horse nor the interstate were designed for this.
Second, though I came to Pittsburgh to see Wilco, an event which I still highly anticipate, tonight Mindy Smith played. That was a unexpected and really nice bonus.
Third, we just saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That was a lot of fun. Far and away the most enjoyable of the three movies thus far, and from what I hear, the one that diverges most from the book. The actors are starting to grow up, tension is visible between characters, and damn if Emma Watson isn't going to be stunning once she adds a few more years. There are a few weird things about the ages of the characters, like a boy in the last film who was short and fat is now head and shoulders above everyone else and skinny as a beanpole. And for some reason Malfoy is a lot taller than he used to be, and though the actor could take Harry, Hermione, and Ron himself without breaking a sweat, the character remains a pussy. Go see the movie. It's probably the best thing in theaters until Spiderman 2 comes out next month.
I read this charming little bit this morning. I found it fascinating. It's pretty gruesome though, so you have been warned.
In about half an hour I head up the mountain to pick up Eb, at which point we will make a break for Pittsburgh and the Wilco show there tomorrow night. Matt, Josiah, Aaron, and Todd will be meeting us there at various times and in various ways.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time around me has probably learned that I'm not a big fan of using mood-altering substances as a permenant part of one's psyche. For, example, Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. Here's a Slate article on Paxil that reinforces this. It's a pretty funny read. Some guy decides to go on Paxil as an experiment and reports on his results.
Money quotes:
"Fifteen minutes with a doctor, $15 at the pharmacy, and I've scored a month's supply of a powerful, mood-altering substance."
"Ecstasy tweaks up your serotonin, too. But instead of paying $20 for a night on E, I paid $15 for a month on P."
"The fact that I considered a wholesale career change under the drug's effects, and couldn't complete any work, is alarming. Also, the zaps [a withdrawal side-effect] are for real. Fear them."
USA Today has an article about a growing problem in Japanese society, a problem that seems quite similar to things I complained about last year. In short: the transition of people my age from adolescence to adulthood just doesn't seem to be happening. People are staying single longer, taking their sweet old time starting careers, and having fewer and fewer children. Yes, there is value to be had in slowing down a bit and not thinking that these things are what make life worth living. But they do significantly make life possible. I fear that we are costing ourselves and especially our children any chance at the good life by a endemic unwillingness to do the things require to attain the good life.
I don't know what negative population growth says about a culture, but I can't believe it's healthy. It certainly isn't vital or vibrant.
I, of course, say this without the remote hope of settling down with anyone in the next decade, so it's not like I'm taking my own advice here. Don't think this doesn't bother me, because it does.
Kuro5hin has an essay, a morbidly depressed essay, which bemoans the encroachment of advertising in just about every open space available.
"Remember when there were no ads on top of taxis? On the sides of buses? Remember when there were no coupons on the back of grocery receipts? Remember when there was no ad on the handle of the damn gas pump? Remember when there were no f-----g SUV ads on the big screen before a movie? Now, as I stand at the grocery checkout, I hold up my ATM card to swipe it through the reader, and I see, even there, in the tiny blue letters of the readout, the message: "GOT ICE?"
Yeah, I remember. But you know what? I don't particularly mind all that much. Internet researchers have described what they call "banner blindness", the inability of frequent Internet users to actually see advertising on pages. I myself "suffer" from this, in that I automatically and subconsciously separate between content and advertising, to the point that I actually don't see the ads. using Mozilla to filter them out doesn't hurt either, but even on sites I've never been to before the products advertised never even register with me.
I find that the same is true for me elsewhere too. Stick an ad in the paper and my mind will entirely skip it as I read. I don't see billboards. I have to exert special effort to pay attention if I want to find a gas station on the Interstate because I really won't remember seeing signs for one. And logos? It's like the space they occupy is blanked out.
So as much as cramming ads into every available square inch does strike me as kind of soulless, I'm not all that bothered by it. I won't see them, even if they are there.