Geoff Arnold

Among the sage

Another photo from Monday. Yes, I know that the closest blossoms are out of focus: I turned on macro and thrust the camera deep into the bush....

Searching for the perfect Linux laptop

Quite a few of my friends and colleagues are running Linux on their laptops, but it seems that each of them reports that something doesn't work quite right - WiFi, or sleep mode, or power management. (And the Web seems to be filled with horror stories, hacks, and half-baked solutions.) I'm curious if this is a universal truth, or whether someone has managed to achieve The Perfect Linux Laptop configuration. I'm thinking of things like:

• sleep to RAM works
• everything works correctly after waking from sleep (even if you've unplugged a USB or FireWire device while sleeping)
• WiFi automatically connects to known and public networks, and reconnects after sleep
• power settings (screen brightness, CPU speed) automatically adjust when you unplug from the mains
• able to play, read and write CDs and DVDs
• automatically switch to mirrored or multiple screens if an external monitor or projector is plugged in
• etc.

50 years after Rosa Parks....

The Guardian reports that a ballot initiative in Alabama has failed (despite a recount), which means that the state constitution will still contain language such as: "Separate schools shall be provided for white and coloured children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race." Since this racist claptrap has already been declared unconstitutional, why would Alabamians want to retain it? The mind boggles. But when I saw that former Alabama Chief Justice Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore was involved....

(Via Salon.)

"Play something sad"

The Guardian reports that an incident in which soldiers forced a violinist to play at a roadblock is causing an uproar within Israel. Recent IDF abuses such as the shooting of a young girl and the mutilation of corpses generated less angst than this: "If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

(Via Juan Cole.)

Carmel Valley at dawn

Monday morning, just after dawn, click for 1600x1200 version.

Religious belief in the US

Thanks to Kate and Hannah, here's a link to a detailed (and perhaps more than usually accurate) survey of religious belief in the US. The detailed tables are fascinating. One example: with respect to educational attainment, broad belief in God went from 82% for "High school or less" to 73% for "Post graduate". However absolute certainty about God went from 72% to 53%. (Of course as Flanagan points out, many believers don't actually care very much about whether their belief is well grounded, or strongly held, or even if it's true....)

Heading home

It's just after dawn here in Carmel Valley, CA. A cold night (around 30F), and a beautiful clear morning. Since Merry's parents have sold the house and are moving soon, this will be my final Carmel Valley morning. We're heading up to Santa Cruz (where Chris went to school at UCSC), then over 17 to San Jose to get a flight back to Boston. And (sigh) it looks as if the plane (AA 757) is going to be 100% full....

CD of the week: The Who Live at Leeds: Deluxe Edition

I was hunting through the bazillion tracks on my iPod looking for something, and I stumbled on Magic Bus by The Who. One thing led to another... I found myself with a long drive through holiday traffic, and I had a new iTrip which allowed me to listen to the iPod though the car radio, so I cued up the incomparable deluxe edition of Live at Leeds and let it rip.

I bought the original, single LP version of the album many moons ago when I was still a student. Of course the new version includes a complete live performance of Tommy, as well as several additional classic Who tracks. Definitely one of the great live albums, right up there with Live/Dead, disc 1 of Umma-Gumma, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, and Wheels of Fire.

Doxastic voluntarism

Thought for the day: Do humans have direct voluntary control over their beliefs? Per Michael Sudduth: "This is the so-called doxastic voluntarism thesis. According to this view, a cognitive attitude (belief, disbelief, or withholding of belief) is justified only if the cognitive attitude is within our direct voluntary control. However, there is good reason to suppose that this thesis is false..." This is intriguing: I had always assumed that we do not have voluntary control over our beliefs, and I was surprised to find the idea that we do was sufficiently respectable that it had acquired an impressively polysyllabic name....

I came across the term while reading a review by Jeff Wisdom of Owen Flanagan's The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. I bought the book this morning, anticipating a well-reasoned approach to reconciling humanistic expectations with scientific realities. Like Jeff, I have been disappointed that Flanagan has (so far) failed to address the deeper objections to his, fairly orthodox, views. Now I happen to share most of Flanagan's ideas (though not his Buddhism), but this doesn't mean that there are no arguments to be made. Oh well; even if it isn't a rigorous treatment of the subject, it should be an enjoyable read on my flight back to Boston on Monday.

Tedium is...

Tedium is installing Windows XP SP2 over a dial-up link, on a machine that's not up-to-date with security patches. Updating the Software Update libraries took an hour; downloading SP2 took five hours (overnight). Having 6 Mb/s cable modem service at home has spoiled me....

Musings on standards

I've been involved in standards work since the late 1970s, and I've always viewed the primary objective as interoperability. Interoperability demands unambiguous specifications (as much as humanly possible) and verifiable conformance - preferably machine-verifiable. A standards body creates a spec and defines conformance criteria; people implement that spec and test their implementations for conformance. That's it. (I like to think in OO terms: a standard is an object with one method, conforms(), which takes an implementation and returns or false.) When someone proposes that a standards body address a particular issue, I always ask myself "how does this affect the spec?" and "what are the conformance criteria?"

About a year ago, this came up in a certain web services group: there was a great flurry of activity to try to develop glossary entries for the terms synchronous and asynchronous, even though the terms were not used in the standard. Everybody had their own pet definition, usually in terms of some (irrelevant) implementation behaviour. I tried to apply my usual thinking to the issue, and I got stuck. I generally find that this is a good reason not to act. (Of course such self-restraint is hard for a standards group: like fishes, lack of forward movement usually presages death....)

"Even a three-year old needs to be killed"

The Guardian has a report on an incident in which an Israeli officer emptied his automatic rifle into a wounded thirteen-year-old girl. His explanation (over the radio): "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

Economic `Armageddon' predicted; film at 11

Back on November 5th I blogged about the likely consequences of the "perfect storm" of the trade deficit, budget deficit, and oil prices, particularly the collapse of the dollar. Others have the same idea. In today's Boston Herald, Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, waxed apocalyptic: "To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day. That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings." Roach predicts a major slump, with a massive wave of bankruptcies.

Interestingly, the article concludes: "But [...] there may be an alternative scenario to Roach's. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today's consumer debts in real terms. Inflation of 7 percent a year halves ``real'' values in a decade. It may be the only way out of the trap. Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates.". And this is exactly the "stagflationary" scenario that I predicted.

(Via Boing Boing.)

West coast travel

A synopsis of the last few days.... On Friday we flew from Boston to Seattle for a weekend with Chris and Celeste. On Saturday we drove down to Renton to ride the Spirit of Washington train over to the Columbia Winery for lunch. Then on Sunday we went up to the Joe Bar for coffee, swung by the cathedral to meet folks, and then after lunch went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the stunning exhibition on Spain in the Age of Exploration. We would have gone on to look at the other exhibitions in the museum, but a fire alarm put paid to that. (This is getting to be a habit.)

On Monday morning we flew down from Seattle to San Jose. The plan was that we should get to SJC around 10:30; then Merry would meet up with her parents and drive down to Carmel Valley, while I picked up a rental car and head up to Sun's Menlo Park campus for an important meeting. Initially things went thoroughly pear-shaped. First, we got a phone call from our alarm service saying that the burglar alarm had gone off, and that the police had been dispatched. Then Alaska Air delayed our flight from 8:14 to 9:35. (At least that gave me time to talk to the Brookline police and confirm that everything seemed to be OK at home.) The flight down the coast was OK, although the clouds obscured Mount St. Helens, and it was rather bumpy. And then when we reached San Jose the rendezvous with Merry's parents didn't work as planned. AARGH!! But eventually everything was sorted out, and I was able to phone in to the first 30 minutes of the meeting while driving up 101; the rest of the meeting went just fine.

Americans, evolution, religion, and post-modernism

During the recent US election campaign, the issue of American's attitudes towards evolution popped up again. It's usually presented as "X million Americans don't believe in evolution...", with the corollary at election time "...and they all vote Republican". As I was dozing on the flight from Boston to Seattle on Friday, I found myself musing about this "fact" in various ways.

• Do non-evolutionists get flu shots? After all, they don't believe in the science that underlies the development of flu vaccines, and some of them (in Kansas) clearly don't want their children growing up with the kind of education that would equip them to work on new vaccines.
• How do Biblical inerrantists pick and choose those bits of the Bible they'll use and those bits they'll ignore? There are so many bits of blatantly allegorical and magical thinking, not to mention contradictions galore. Does consistency actually matter? If not, why not? Etcetera.
• Why should I worry about all of this? Things like belief in quaint creation myths, or circumcision, or not eating meat on Fridays, are all just tribal membership memes, ways of identifying that you are a member of a group in a way that is relatively resistant to mixing or diaspora. True... but it becomes important when people seek to impose it on others, whether it be banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas or orthodox Jews stoning tour buses in Jerusalem on Shabbat.

After all this fact-free speculation, it was nice to be proved wrong... or at least to get a chance to appreciate the true complexity of the situation. Over at People for the American Way there's a fascinating report on Evolution and Creationism in Public Education [PDF format]. It's based on a 1999 survey of 1,500 people. Among the more intriguing findings is the fact that for many people the inclusion of creationism in schools is based not on their religious beliefs, but on what the report calls a "Post Modernist" perspective.

A second important contextual point is what we term the “post-modernist” influence. For about a third of Americans, their fundamentalist religious beliefs drive their support for including Creationism in the public school curriculum. However, for most Americans who would like to see some mention of God or a Divine role in the development of humans, along with the teaching of Evolution, it is not primarily religion behind their opinions. It is much more of what can be called a Post Modernist perspective (a “Hey, you never know” mentality). This perspective is characterized by a wide tolerance for many different beliefs, since no single belief is seen as the final and complete answer to any issue. Also, many parents want their children to be exposed to a wide range of views. Their reasoning is, “our kids should be given enough information so, when they grow up, they can make up their own minds.”

Of course this meant that the vast majority of people were opposed to the Kansas evolution decision because it reduced the "wide range of views" that kids would be exposed to. And as one would expect, support for creationism and opposition to evolution were generally linked with poor education and based on ignorance of the ideas involved. Ironically, people were far more confident in the "proven" status of the Theory of Relativity than of Evolution. The basis for such a belief seems hard to understand....

OK, it's a spoof - but a nice one

The Swift Report: Christian Gamers Resurrect Christ--and Profits--in Global Video Game Market : "...with expectations high for Gibson's movie-to-game gamble on The Passion, the question on analysts's minds: What Would Jesus Play?"

(Via Sully, who seems to have been taken in by it.)

Building sci-fi?

When I first started reading science fiction back in the early 1960s, it seemed that all future cities were either shattered dystopias or cool, automated Jetsons-like worlds. This account seems typical: "Just swipe a prepaid card through a stanchion in front of an empty waiting vehicle, punch in the destination number, take a seat in the vehicle and our computer control system will sweep you non-stop to your destination."

(Via Salon.)

A triangular route

We're about to depart on a typically complicated trip. This one involves flying to Seattle for the weekend, then going down to Silicon Valley for a couple of days (work - for me, anyway); then down the coast to Carmel Valley for Thanksgiving, and home via San Jose. And, mirabile dictu, all of the flights are non-stop.

Travel plans (slightly updated)

In a couple of weeks I'll be heading back to my birthplace for a Jini Community meeting. It should be a lot of fun....

Nit-pickers will notice that although the graphic shows West End tube stations, the the earlier, misleading graphic has been updated. The original version is still to be found on Jini.org. Graphics notwithstanding, Jini Community Meeting itself will be at The Brewery in the City of London, near Moorgate and the Barbican.

Humpty-Dumpty on IT

Herewith a collection of the most ill-defined terms in the computer business today. I've chosen them because in the last few months I've encountered at least two WILDLY incompatible uses of each one of them - often many more!

• policy
• virtualization
• agent
• edge
• web service
• solution
• service
• architecture
• SOA

Anyone like to suggest a few more? I'll roll them into the top-level blog item as updates. By the way, I'm not suggesting that we stop using these terms, but I would like to see more judicious qualification and less universalization...

Blogger code

Apparently my blogger code is B5 d+ t+ k+ s u- f+ i+ o x- e l c--. Is this the MBTI of the new millennium?

Philosophical zombies

This page on David Chalmers' web site is way too much fun. Not content with giving us a taxonomy of zombies (including Hollywood zombies and Unix processes), he delves into cocktails, cartoons, and 1960s pop music. Of course the core of the page is the collection of links to papers on philosophical zombies: devices which seem to have become part of the standard toolkit of certain philosophers of mind. Nigel Thomas's elegant Zombie Killer ought to have sent them all packing, but unfortunately these impossible (but arguably conceivable) undead critters just won't stay down....

The Urban Archipelago

Here's a powerful thesis about red America and blue America. It isn't about the north vs. the south. It isn't about slave states vs. free states. It isn't (primarily) about religion, or guns, or gay marriage. It's about cities: an archipelago of blue cities in a sea of red suburbs and rural areas. It's about the Urban Archipelago. Worth reading.

(Via Sully, who also has a link to this really cool graphic.)

It's too early in the season for this kind of thing

We're not yet half way through November, but winter can't wait. The picture is from a traffic webcam about a mile from where I live in Brookline, MA. According to the NWS, Boston got 4 inches and Milton got 6.8 inches; we're half-way between those points, so figure about 5+ inches. That's what it felt like as I lugged the trash to the curbside.

Armistice

Terry wrote: ""On the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the year 1918 all fighting shall cease on the Western Front"

And so came the Armistice. The peace of the world was to follow. It had been a war, to end all wars.

But it wasn't."

(From Better Than Salt Money.)

Good grief

File under "nobody would believe you if you made it up": Oslo Girl: "I saw on TV2 news last night that there was a march in the center of Oslo yesterday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Jews, apparently, were forbidden to participate. Technically, they could join the demonstration as long as they refrained from showing any Jewish symbols, like the Star of David. The rule was enforced in order to "avoid any conflicts.""

(Via Heretic's Almanac. And Sully has also got it now.)

UPDATE/CORRECTION (from Sully's Letters page): "There were Jews present in the demonstration. The arrangers, SOS Rasisme, makes it very clear that not only will they never exclude Jews from their activities, but they have always invited Jewish organisations to participate.

A statement from Norsk Forening Mot Antisemitism (Norwegian Society Against Anti-Semitism, NFMA) also condemned the action as historyless and unworthy."

Book game, again

Terry announced: "Book game (cause it isn't really a meme): Nearest Book, Page 23, Fifth sentence, Posted, with explanation." OK, here goes:

When we talk of a green sensation, this talk is not equivalent simply to talk of “a state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”.

We are talking about the phenomenal quality that generally occurs when a state is caused by grass and trees. If there is a causal analysis in the vicinity, it is something like “the kind of phenomenal state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”. The phenomenal element in the concept prevents an analysis in purely functional terms.

(We played this game before - a few months back, IIRC - but unlike some of these blog games it's pretty much guaranteed to be different each time around.)

'Bye Rob - and thanks

After over 19 years working at Sun, you might think that I've seen it all. But last week I experienced a personal "first": my boss, Rob Gingell, left the company. I was so gobsmacked that I checked back to make sure that this was indeed the first time that this had happened. Of course many of my former bosses have left the company (or, in the case of Phil, been tragically snatched away from us on 9/11), but in every case they'd had the decency to wait until I was no longer working for them.

I've never really understood why we're always so secretive about people leaving companies. (I actually held off writing this piece until Rob had assured me that his mug-shot was on file at his new company.) After all, people come and go for all sorts of reasons, and it shouldn't be a big deal. Rob, like me, had been at Sun since 1985, and after 19 years it's hardly surprising that he was interested in doing something new. But we never announce these things, even internally (unless the person is retiring), and I think this has two unfortunate consequences. First, people tend to interpret secrecy as meaning that you're trying to hide something. ("Oo-er! Rob just quit! I wonder why?! What did he know that I don't know? Should I be worried?!") 99% of the time, the answer is, quite simply, no. (And the other 1% there isn't anything you can do anyway.) Second, by keeping things under wraps we lose the opportunity to celebrate the person's accomplishments and thank them for their contributions to the company. Sure, a few of us may take them out for a drink, but that's inadequate recognition for someone who's touched as many lives as Rob did.

Having violated the taboo, let me say a few words about Rob. I think I first ran into him in 1986 when he was giving a talk on the recent rewrite of the virtual memory system for SunOS (the BSD-based precursor to Solaris). I remember two things from that: his distinctive speaking voice (with the pitch rising steadily through each sentence), and the elegance of the design he was presenting. Over the years we met frequently, particularly after I became a DE in 1991. He was instrumental in the mammoth Sun-AT&T Unix unification effort that became SVR4 and then Solaris; he was a passionate advocate for Java and the community process that underpinned its development; he became the CTO of the software organization; and then in 2002 he was appointed to a newly-created position: Chief Engineer, reporting to the CTO, Greg Papadopoulos.

Rob talked about his new job in an interesting interview with David Berlind of ZDNet, in which he identified his charter as conceptual integrity: "My goal in life is to make sure that all the brains [at the various Sun campuses] are effectively employed and create as much as they can. If only one person creates the ideas, you only get one person's worth of ideas. I'd much rather have 30,000 people's worth of ideas. [...] I actually hope that it's never true that the herding cats phenomenon vanishes from Sun. Some of the chaos you're referring to is what makes us interesting and vital, and keeps us from getting locked into a "we're doing this because we did it last week" mentality. That level of chaos, while it's annoying at times, is also fairly powerful because it's the product of having all those brains usefully applied. Where it's a negative is when you have no way of arbitrating the chaos [...] which I did locally in the software group for many years. It's a new scope expansion to consider doing it for everything all at once."

In the same interview, Rob spoke about his vision of how Sun was evolving. "When I say we're working on our second-generation systems, our first generation was about practicing this [developer feedback] loop with Unix. [...] The Solaris applications catalog is essentially 100 percent of any Unix applications that exist. [...] When we talk about the next generation, we're just talking about another instance of this circle that's based on Java, where the developer number is already at three million. The apps space is only beginning to appear in some areas like your Java phone. [...] All of our initiatives around things labeled SunOne are really about translating that into market share for us so that we can start to see this develop into a self-sustaining ecosystem." It was this vision of Sun's "second-generation" of Java-centric network computing that led me to come to work for Rob a year ago.

I know I speak for many at Sun when I say, "Thanks, Rob, for your engineering leadership, your inspiration, and your friendship. Clear skies and smooth rides..."

Poems: Mary Oliver

Through reading Roger Housden's extraordinary "Ten Poems..." anthologies (starting with Ten Poems to Change Your Life) I have become aware of the poems of Mary Oliver. (OK, I'm slow... Google shows over 52,000 hits for her name. At least I got there eventually.) My first impression was of an impatient Walt Whitman: a combination of transcendent vision with a fierce and uncompromising urgency. These are Emergency Broadcast System messages to one's inner heart: save the only life you can: your own. Consider the opening of The Journey:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.

But the message is not always a call to action: here are the opening lines of her Mockingbirds:

This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.

As I read more of Mary Oliver, I have come to reallize that those first few poems that I encountered in no way define or constrain her. There are many sides to Oliver's work: romantic, visionary, organic, mimetic, mythic; above all grounded in nature. And yet I find myself particularly drawn to these direct, imperative pieces: Journey, the shocking West Wind 2, the absolution of Wild Geese, or the exhortation of Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches?, with its blunt question:

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Well? Are you?

Vulcan at work

Here's a wonderful collection of Mount St. Helens' photographs, infra-red imagery, video clips. And as always you can check out the current status via the webcam.

Google censored?

Search Google images for abu ghraib, and you get 136 hits, with no explicit scenes of torture or humiliation.

Search Yahoo! Images for abu ghraib, and you get 4,035 hits, including the most notorious shots of abuse, torture, and dead prisoners.

What's going on here? Perhaps we should abandon Google if we can't trust it any more....

(Via Slashdot, where it was reported that google.co.uk doesn't have these problems. Well, I just checked, and it does now.)

UPDATE: It now appears that the explanation is quite simple: Google is incompetent at indexing images. Even more reason to dump them.

On reading philosophy and "Three Card Monte"

As I noted earlier, I'm reading David Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind". Early on, Chalmers lays his cards on the table: "In this book I reach conclusions that some people may think of as 'antiscientific': I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible, and I even argue for a form of dualism." He acknowledges that "Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation [...] I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up on this hope, it was quite reluctantly."

Like Chalmers, I too am temperamentally inclined towards a materialist account of consciousness. As I read the book (and I'm still finishing chapter 2 on Supervenience and Explanation), I find myself watching closely to see whether or not he smuggles in some dichotomous assumptions which might affect his eventual conclusions. It feels a bit like watching a game of Three-Card Monte to see if and when a card gets creased or a misdirection occurs. There is plenty of exceptionalism flying around. For instance he concedes that "Almost everything is logically supervenient on the physical.[...] Conscious experience is almost unique in its failure to supervene logically." It'll be interesting to see how he justifies this.

So far, the only troubling section (p.75) has been the way in which he asserts that "...the facts about the external world do not supervene logically on the facts about our experience." One would expect him to treat this as a big deal: after all, as he continues, "Idealists, positivists, and others have argued controversially that they do. Note that if these views are accepted the skeptical problem [due to Hume] falls away." And so, I think, does Chalmers' case that there is a "deep problem" here. But then with one bound our hero is free, Indiana Jones style: "In any case, I am bypassing this sort of skeptical problem by giving myself the physical world for free." Well, maybe - but note that he explicitly means "the external world", and the internal/external dichotomy remains. I have a suspicion that this may be at the root of the eventual dualism, but I'll have to read on and find out.

Carnivals Galore!

Now here's an interesting trend: blog carnivals. Here's the intro from one of them: the Philosophers' Carnival: "This site is the homepage for the Philosophers' Carnival project, which aims to provide a forum to showcase philosophical posts from a wide range of weblogs. We are modelled upon Carnival of the Vanities and Tangled Bank. (See also Carnivalesque, a new carnival about the 'early modern' period in history.) Unlike those other carnivals, however, this one is restricted to philosophy-related blog posts." The rest of the page describes the process of creating a carnival, and provides links to the previous Philosophers' Carnivals, each of which was hosted by a different blog. There have been four so far; the fifth is in preparation. It looks like a promising collaboration model which avoids the usual dependence on one overworked editor.

Sullivan on Chomsky

Apropos of Chomsky, Andrew Sullivan pointed his readers to this piece by Antichomskyite. My response to Sullivan follows.

Thanks for the links. I agree that there are strong arguments against many of Chomsky's theses (though "antichomskyite" makes a hash of many of them - see below), but the problem that you face is that by replying ad hominem you appear to concede (or at least to seek to avoid) the issue on the table. When Chomsky (as many others) refers to Nuremberg, what he is citing is the powerful and unequivocal argument against pre-emptive war made by the American prosecutors. I can't believe that you don't know this. Go ahead, shoot the messenger, rant against Chomsky if you like (though calling his quiet responses to Maher a "diatribe" is a real stretch), but the moral and legal question remains.

Geoff

PS Oh yes, antichomskyite.

How am I to make sense of a strawman like:

Apparently, we are to believe that the Soviet Union was the single most humane empire ever to exist in world history and, as soon as its subjects began to express minor disagreement with their political situation, it happily encouraged their independence and then allowed to go free like children at last taking their first, awkward steps away from their parents.
This has to qualify as one of the most obscenely immoral distortions of history I have ever read.

when only a few paragraphs earlier he quotes Chomsky as saying:

The Cold War provided that too. No matter how outlandish the idea that the Soviet Union and its tentacles were strangling the West, the "Evil Empire" was in fact evil, was an empire and was brutal. Each superpower controlled its primary enemy -- its own population -- by terrifying it with the (quite real) crimes of the other.
In crucial respects, then, the Cold War was a kind of tacit arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States under which the US conducted its wars against the Third World and controlled its allies in Europe, while the Soviet rulers kept an iron grip on their own internal empire and their satellites in Eastern Europe -- each side using the other to justify repression and violence in its own domains.

In fact Chomsky nowhere claims the Soviet Union was "humane".

Later antichomskyite writes:

At least Chomsky does not attempt to parrot the propaganda line that the CIA overthrew Allende

Propaganda line? Well, as the CIA's own documents indicate, the CIA worked assiduously but unsuccessfully to do just that. In fact Chomsky's position on Chile corresponds closely to declassified analyses.

Look: Chomsky is a mecurial character. He has said some outrageous things; he's also supplied some useful contrarian alternatives to self-justifying groupthink. In addition, Maher was right to have him on the show. Hell, he even had Ann Coulter on the other week. Arguing for the silencing of differing points of view is irrational and un-American.

Sullivan on Maher

I just watched the season finale of Bill Maher's Real Time on HBO. Normally I forget to watch it, and have to catch up via video-on-demand, but since Andrew Sullivan had blogged that he was flying out to take part I wanted to see if he'd say the same stuff on TV that he's been blogging.

It was a weird show in some respects - Bill Maher was obviously still pretty angry underneath his bravado - but I was particularly struck by three things that Andrew Sullivan said.

(1) He attacked Bill Maher for losing the election for the Democrats by making jokes about people of religious faith that demeaned them. "If you demean them, how do you expect them to vote for you?" Say what? Look, I'm perfectly willing to concede that there are religious folk in the red states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by what they see as ungodly attitudes and actions from people in the blue states. But it's been that way for years, just as there are secular people in the blue states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by Bible-based thinking and homophobia. For some people on both sides, these attitudes are deeply ingrained, and cleaning up Bill Maher's jokes or Pat Robertson's sermons isn't going to have any effect. Each group offends the other simply by existing, by being themselves, and to argue that they should change seems to contradict Sullivan's pleas for a return to tolerance through federalism.

(2) Why does Sullivan (and many others) froth at the mouth when anyone mentions "America" and "war crimes" in the same sentence? And why do they always argue how much better America's actions are than those of Saddam? Is that the standard by which America should judge itself? From someone like Sullivan who argued so eloquently just a few days ago about the collective amnesia concerning Abu Ghraib, such jingoism seems inapposite.

(3) It is possible that Sullivan's excitability was occasioned by the appearance on the program of Noam Chomsky, whom Sullivan accused of "making millions running around the world denigrating the United States". (I may have got the exact words wrong: he certainly said "millions", which caused a few eyebrows to be raised.) But why the outrage? Numerous legal bodies, including the International Commission of Jurists, have declared that the invasion of Iraq and many of the consequent actions of the USA and its allies violate international law. Logically Sullivan would seem to have only three options: refute the charges, accept them and agree that the USA should take responsibility for its actions, or declare that the USA is somehow above the law. Lashing out at an academic for exercising his freedom of speech, and saying that his views don't deserve to be heard, does Sullivan no credit. (Whatever happened to Evelyn Beatrice Hall's immortal dictum "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?)

Of the other speakers on the show, ex-Senator Alan Simpson seemed determined to take offence, especially at the antics of Maher's unruly audience. (They should fix that - it's actually an embarrassment.) Susan Sarandon was frustrated and exhausted after all her campaigning in Ohio and Pennysylvania, and was a bit too paranoid about voter fraud (though I can sympathize with her). Comedian D. L. Hughley was OK but forgettable, and Pat Schroeder was as forthright as ever.

Despite Sullivan's plaintive "God help me" about tonight's show, he appeared to enjoy himself. His reactions to Bill Maher's New Rules segment seemed to attract the camera like a magnet. I wonder how he'll blog about his perspective?

Follow the bouncing ball

Dollar at record low against euro: "It seems now that the longer-term investors like pension funds and perhaps monetary authorities are either hedging their dollar risk or moving assets out of the United States. It looks like the dollar has further to fall..."

You can check out the historical data using Oanda's FXGraph applet: choose "from USD", "to EUR", "since 6 Nov 1996". Note the trend over the last four years, and extrapolate....

What will this mean for the US economy? Unless the budget and current account deficits are slashed, the probable consequences are rising interest rates, rising inflation, a depressed housing market, and recession. We've seen this before: it's called stagflation. Welcome to the 1970s. Even the oil prices look familiar....

(Via the BBC.)

"Talk more, shoot less"? What a quaint idea....

Iraqis Say U.S. Should Talk More, Shoot Less: Iraq's Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid al-Bayati said the insurgency was partly due to mistakes Bush made earlier. "Using force that kills civilians on a large scale is a mistake. The logic of occupation must end. Bush's main mistake was not to let an Iraqi provisional government take power after Saddam was toppled," he said. "The resistance operations were seen coming as soon as the United States kept acting as an occupier."

(Via Yahoo!.)

Culture war?

From Andrew Sullivan: "A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR: That's Bill Bennett's conclusion. He won't be the only one. What we're seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. [...] But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options."

UPDATE: Amy Sullivan has a different take on this: "the "huge fundamentalist Christian revival" took place about thirty years ago, not last month, and it has always been explictly political". Worth reading, but flawed. Yes, the revival took place years ago, and Reagan and Bush Snr. courted the religious right and then ignored them. Dubya did pretty much the same in 2000. This is the first time that religious wedge issues have been so nakedly and cynically exploited as part of a GOTV effort, and it coincides with (1) the election of a new crop of Republican congressmen who are as rabid as Newt's crowd were but are explicitly religious in their allegiance, and (2) the likely opening of 2-4 Supreme slots. I think that it is going to be different this time.

Creative cartography

One from Not A Dollar Short:

And one from All I Know:

Update: And don't overlook the Purple Haze....

"Education + Militarism = K (constant)"

Terry wrote: "The demagogues will continue... There are not enough Jon Stewarts. The lack of thought will appreciate (Franco had a teaching, "Education/intelligence + Military Fervor/Patriotism = K [a constant]) and the lack of real value to the elections will grow."

Monday morning quarterbacking

Masood has been pointing people at an interesting piece in Counterpunch by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, criticizing Kerry's campaign strategy and tactics for the loss. While the brute facts of the argument are incontrovertible - the role of religion and homosexuality, and Kerry's difficulty in establishing a clear distinction between him and Bush on Iraq, outsourcing, and so forth - I'm not sure that those factors were decisive. Look at it another way: in spite of all of those handicaps, Kerry came extremely close to unseating an incumbent president who should have been a shoo-in. What could he have done differently? (No, he couldn't have tacked left.)

As Cockburn and St.Clair point out, the choice of VP was probably decisive:

Edwards added absolutely nothing to the ticket. At least Dan Quayle held Indiana back in 1988 and 2002. No one state in the south went into Kerry's column. Gore did better in Florida and West Virginia. Dick Gephardt would certainly have brought the Democratic ticket Missouri and probably Iowa and hence the White House.

Gephardt could have worked, but he has a lot of baggage. I actually think that the best choice might have been Wes Clark, in order to hammer Bush on the issue of military incompetence. Unlike Kerry or Edwards, Clark could have invoked Abu Ghraib as a moral catastrophe for which heads ought to roll, and done so without being accused of betraying the troops.

Convenient fictions

Baghdad Burning: "Everyone here knows Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi isn’t in Falloojeh. He isn’t anywhere, as far as anyone can tell. He’s like the WMD: surrender your weapons or else we’ll attack. Now that the damage is done, it is discovered that there were no weapons. It will be the same with Zarqawi. We laugh here when we hear one of our new politicians discuss him. He’s even better than the WMD- he has legs. As soon as the debacle in Falloojeh is over, Zarqawi will just move conveniently to Iran, Syria or even North Korea."

At this point, I don't know if Allawi is using Bush or if Bush is using Allawi. And the truly depressing thing is that I don't think it matters. The dead, the maimed, and the orphans won't discriminate. Meanwhile, please read River's blog and spare a thought for the people of Falloojeh.

Lessons from November 2

Independent of the actual result, one clear message to the rest of the world is that the US is simply incompetent at running elections. After 2000 one might have expected some improvement, but no: if anything it's worse. A crazy patchwork of laws (whatever happened to "Equal protection"?) selectively applied; untested and unreliable machines; incompetent poll workers; running out of ballots; insufficient polling places. See this IHT report on overseas' observers for one example, or the E-Voting Experts blog for more. And don't tell me that it only affects a few voters, or that it's an inevitable side-effect of the size of the country. Japan, UK, Germany, France... all make this stuff work at comparable scale with virtually none of these problems. When a city provides two voting machines for 1100 registered voters (Columbus), or halves the number of polling places in the face of significantly increased registration, that isn't a "scaling problem": it's either incompetence or (worse) a triumph of partisanship over democratic principles. The ends don't justify the means.

Listen guys, it may have been cute to spend a couple of hundred years pretending that you were just a bunch of agrarian sovereign mini-states, like Swiss cantons, but it's time to grow up. Uniform laws. Uniform standards. Voting systems that work. Guaranteed provision of enough ballots, machines, and polling places for ALL, not just the people you expect/want to turn up. Absentee ballots sent out on time, not three days before the election. And voting spread over Saturday and Sunday - what's the rush? (Although mandating an 11 day waiting period for counting provisional ballots is also ridiculous.) Try taking a few lessons from Venezuela, for instance. Or Serbia.

America may be the world's second largest democracy, but don't hold yourselves up as a role model.

Huh?

Israeli Woman Motorists Dance Nude in India?: "India's northwestern state of Rajasthan has punished local officials after residents complained a group of Israeli women motorists had danced in the nude near a town revered by Hindus, a newspaper reported on Wednesday."

Why punish the "local officials", I wonder? /me shakes head

Fulbright got it right

From Tuesday's Guardian: "Stuck in the middle" by David Clark:
Almost four decades ago, during the Vietnam war, the great liberal, Senator J William Fulbright, captured more eloquently than any recent commentary what is at stake in today's US presidential election. There were, he said, two Americas: "One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good humoured, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power."

It's time to choose.

New blog on e-voting

There's an interesting new blog on E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts. Sample issue under discussion: "Suppose, hypothetically, that I knew of a vulnerability that would allow someone to corrupt vote counts or interfere with voting on some e-voting system being used in tomorrow’s election. And suppose further that it was too late to get the vulnerability fixed. What should I do?"

(I'll be watching the RSS feed.)

A statistician's gut feeling

From the Princeton Meta-Analysis of State Polls: " Just for the record, my gut estimate of the likelihood of a Kerry win is about 6-1 in favor."

Update: "Predicted electoral outcome (11/1/2004 noon EST): Kerry 323 EV, Bush 215 EV"

Quote of the day

From Gary Kamiya's article in Salon.com, American nightmare: As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, "The Iraq war ... was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist."

(And the rest of the article is well worth reading too.)

It's a small world: The Votemaster

For some months now one of my "must read" web sites has been Electoral-Vote.COM. (Me and over half a million others every day!) I've watched the maps showing the aggregated results of recent opinion polls, I've read "the Votemaster's" pained accounts of wrestling with different algorithms for aggregating, averaging, aging, and presenting the data. I've even contributed a few bucks to support the effort. Through all this, I had no idea who "the Votemaster" might be, until today. In the Votemaster FAQ , all is revealed: "My name is Andrew Tanenbaum. I am one of the 7 million U.S. citizens living abroad. I am a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [...] I can write fairly complex software. I wrote MINIX, the precursor to Linux, for example."

Ah, that Andy Tanenbaum! "Mister Minix." Now where did I put my battered copy of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation?