Misbelief

I read Ross Douthat's Believe recently. It's not a long book, about 200 pages, generally devoted to the proposition that there is a generalized obligation for people to believe in some sort of higher power, and for those people who are uncertain which one to believe in, one of the four primary contemporary religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) are the best bets.

I was only on page 2 when I realized that I likely wasn't in the target demographic for Mr. Douthat's book. I'm not the sort to regard secularism as "an uncomfortable intellectual default." In other words, I wasn't looking for permission to believe. But I also don't believe that it's "just too difficult to be a thoughtful, serious modern person and embrace religious faith." I don't have faith in higher powers, myself, but that's because I don't perceive any real need for them, not because I find them somehow irrational.

Because Believe is a book for people who already want to believe, it doesn't set out to answer the question of "Is this true?" Rather, it's an answer to the question of "Why is this true?" Accordingly, Mr. Douthat starts from the proposition that God is real, and this lends the book the air of begging the question at times. "Nonbelief requires ignoring what out reason has revealed about the world around us," to quote the dust jacket, because Mr. Douthat's faith admits no ambiguity in reason's revelation. This is a bit at odds with the fact that he admits to assuming certain things to be true: I don't come to different conclusions about the world than Mr. Douthat does because I'm cynically engaged in motivated reasoning... I literally have a different starting point than he does, and that differing vantage point means that my view of the landscape is going to differ from his.

I have a number of notes about the book, but I'm sure that many of them come from my tendency to overanalyze things, so I'll cut to the chase. Mr. Douthat seems to want to avoid falling into Pascal's Wager, but the basic gist of his argument is the same: That what the higher Power wants from people is their belief. There's no indication that belief is a means to an end; that once someone chooses to believe, that then, and only then, can they embark on some project, or come into alignment with the story into which they have been placed. This makes it difficult to square the idea that it's not of primary importance to believe in the correct understanding of that Power.

If, as Mr. Douthat says, "It would be a strange God indeed who cared intensely about how we spend our money or what votes we cast or how we feel about ourselves, but somehow didn't give a damn about behaviors that might forge or shatter a marriage, create a life in good circumstances or terrible ones, form a lifelong bond or addictive habit, bind someone to their own offspring or separate their permanently," isn't is also a strange God who is only moderately interested in which faith, and thus which set of instructions one follows? The idea that the various differences in how different religions dictate that people spend their money, cast their votes and live their sex lives are minor details doesn't seem in keeping with the importance of maintaining a conservative outlook on sexuality.

In the end, it was an interesting read, but the limits of the target audience are worth keeping in mind. Believe isn't for people who are fine where they are; it's for those who find themselves standing outside of a religion, hoping to be invited in. 

Indistinguishable

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

I've been reading William Gibson's Neuromancer again, after some 30 years. I spend a lot of time staring at screens of one sort or another, and have always found paper to be a good way to unwind. The novel is part of the founding canon of the science-fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, and I'd originally read it because I'd become interested in a running a campaign for the Cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game (now in its fourth iteration).

Now that I live in the Dark Future, I find Neuromancer to be interesting in its outlook on technology. The post something-53 ("It's [an AI] got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53.") setting of the novel has a technological base that can only be described as "disjointed." While cellular telephony was present in the early 1980s, it was pretty cutting edge at the time, and so there are no cell phones, as such, in Neuromancer. But at the same time, the mercenary Molly is outfitted with a full broadcast simstim setup that allows protagonist Case to have the sensation of being her, from miles away, and it clearly operates on some sort of radio signal, since the gang fixer Larry can tell not only that it's there, but that it's in use, even though it's strictly a one-way connection. And pay telephones are still a thing. Given where we are in 2025, it seems strangely anachronistic, in the same way that the decidedly analog future of Alien, et al does.

On the other hand, some of the technology seems, quite simply, magical. The character of Peter Riviera can simply project illusions into the visual fields of people around him, out to an undefined distance. "What he imagines, you see," as another character puts it. This due to implanted "silicon," and while it may be rare, it's not unique... the character describing the effect has seen the schematics for the implants. Riviera is basically an expensive entertainer, but the ability to project holograms like this would be a capability with a wide range of applications, licit and otherwise. But strangely, simple communication doesn't appear to be one of them. Likewise, Case is able to surf the net, via a fully virtual reality interface, from a tugboat in space. That's a remarkable amount of bandwidth, and something that seems magical, given the lack of more pedestrian uses for the technology.

All in all, it's shaping up to be an interesting read, as much for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Gibson's portrayal of "the future" as for the actual storyline of the novel. Which, oddly, I'm not very compelled by. (But I am curious as to how a Gibson-esque telling of the main storyline from Cyberpunk 2077 would go.)

But it serves to illustrate that predicting the future is difficult, in the sense that it's often easier to envision new technologies than to spin out where current ones will go.

Booked

Stopped in a Barnes and Noble today, and saw these. I find it interesting that that the byline for Save America is "President Donald J. Trump," considering that Mr. Trump is currently not the President, and, contrary to what I had previously thought, the title is not conferred for life.

While it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, I do find in interesting how the presentations of Mr. Trump and Vice President Harris' books match their broader personalities; Mr. Trump being self-aggrandizing and Vice President Harris being about as low-key as someone running to be President can manage.

It was also notable that there was a children's book for the Vice President. I would have expected there to also be one for Mr. Trump, but perhaps that's not really his thing.

C*rses

One of the things that I don't understand about swearing is why there is such a need to pretend that people aren't. It's common to hear things that would have scandalized people when I was young. Especially given that, when I was young "hell" was still considered to be inappropriate language in some quarters.

And so when people want to put "swear" words on book covers and have them sold in national chains, they simply replace the vowel with an asterisk... like so:

I can't imagine who they think won't know what these titles say.

So... why bother? It's not like people won't immediately recognize the titles as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and Let That Shit Go. If we're not going to be Puritanical as a society, why on Earth would we pretend to be? Sure, there's still something of a taboo about using these terms around preadolescents, but even that is rapidly going the way of the dodo; I've been around children who "swore" like sailors.

References to sex, body parts/bodily functions and waste have pretty much lost all of their shock value, much like "damn" has. So why not just let them go? Language evolves, and sometimes rapidly, there are already new words that are moving onto the list of Think That One Shall Not Say, some of the ones that are currently there, accordingly, can go on to other things.

Covered

This has the whiff a bad idea from the start. Canadian author Sam Forster decided that he'd "go undercover" as it were, and using dark makeup and a wig, traveled some parts of the United States to get a look for himself of the experience of being a Black person. If the online responses to the announcement of his book about the project, Seven Shoulders: Taxonomizing Racism in Modern America, are anything to go by, the Black American community was not amused.

Mainly because they were too busy being offended by a action that, while probably ill-advised, doesn't appear to have been intended to be malicious in any way.

I understand the assertion that if Mr. Forster wanted to write a book about race relation in the United States, he could have spoken to some number of Black people and simply told their stories. But I don't understand that to have been the entire goal. He wanted to understand for himself, first hand, what being Black in America is like. But the problem with that is the unspoken presumption that there's a something that it's like to be Black in America, rather than a few million individual somethings. But that's an error that a lot of people make... after all, it's not like "Whiteness" is understood to be experienced differently by every individual, because it's simply a thing that's out there.

But, and I may alone in this, I applaud him for giving a shot. Whether he went about it in the right way or not, he wanted to understand enough that he took it upon himself to do something that took a great deal of time and effort, and may have even jeopardized his career. That's very much more than can be said for a lot of people. Then again, Mr. Forster is Canadian, so that may have something to do with in. I've long suspected that the way we talk about, and deal with, race in the United States is an active impediment to the progress that people say they want.

Whether his book will do as he hopes, and break through to some people who don't find the writing of Black journalists and academics compelling, I don't know. I doubt that it will. After all, people who actively have something against Black people tend to also dislike White people they perceive as siding with them. But at least he managed to gain some attention for yet another book about race in America.

I'd like to learn more about the book, but the news coverage is more or less exclusively about the negative reaction of "Black Twitter" to the whole project. Outrage for the outrage cycle. I don't know if I'm going to take the time to read it for myself, given that I already understand what it's like to be me in the modern United States. But I suspect it might be a worthwhile takealong the next time I need to travel somewhere; or maybe an audio version would be a good way to spend some time.

In any event, I do think that it would be a good thing for the book to find an audience, if for no other reason than it's going to be a different perspective on something that I think any number of people believe that they already know everything there is to know about.

No Escape

I stopped by the bookstore today, as I've been looking to do some more reading recently. I meandered through the Science-Fiction and Fantasy aisles, checking out things at random. About midway through, I realized that I missed my old habit of picking up books based on how much their cover art appealed to me. I found some real gems back in the day using that "method."

Today I was reading the back cover blurbs, and I found that publishers seemed to have become much more explicit in describing the themes of their books. Sci-Fi and Fantasy have always been ways of exploring various aspects of the times in which they were written, but modern books came across as much more specific in calling out exactly which aspects they were tackling, whether it was sexual consent, prejudice or whatever.

For some reason, I decided that I didn't really want that mixed in the "what if" factor of speculative fiction. So I picked up a copy of Plato's Republic. I didn't claim it was logical.

Out To Sea

So I was in Barnes and Noble recently, and the manager there, who's an old acquaintance of mine, clued me into the fact that they were clearing out a number of books. (I tend not to read the big sale signs when I'm in a store, or I would have figured it out for myself.) One of the books on discount was Send Help!, "A collection of marooned cartoons," as it says on the cover.

As advertised, the book is mainly a series of cartoons about being stranded in the stereotypical "desert island." You likely know the sort, a small, roughly conical bit of land sticking up out of the ocean. It's completely covered in sand, with a single palm or coconut tree at its center.

But the book also touches on the history of the trope, and I was surprised to find that there were "stranded on a desert island" cartoons from the 1930s and 40s that could just as easily been published yesterday. It's one thing to be told that the central themes of island cartoons, like death, relationships or business as usual are timeless. It's quite another to see it for oneself. It's a reminder that some problems, even those that seem quite simple, are often insoluble in practice, and that the way people think of them hasn't really changed in the past nearly 100 years.

I hadn't really paid much attention to humor cartooning, outside of the occasional New Yorker caption contest. I think I should change that, because there's a richer history there than I realized.

Evaluated

I've never read any of Brandon Sanderson's novels. But, from the handful of people I've met who have read his work, they're pretty good. Which may explain why, when the author launched a Kickstarter campaign to release four new books a little over a week ago, it took off. As I write this, the campaign has raised more than $26,000,000. It's goal was to reach just $1,000,000.

As is the case with such things, there is always someone who begrudges another their good fortune. Consider the following passage from a Slate article about the response to the campaign:

Since Sanderson’s Kickstarter made headlines, there’s been, unsurprisingly, some grousing on social media about whether such an already commercially successful author needs that kind of money. “Today is a really good day to support your favorite author who hasn’t made $18M in the last few days,” tweeted the fantasy novelist Natania Barron. Others have been frustrated that it’s a straight white Mormon man benefitting from this largesse: “There is so much excellent diverse SFF out there,” tweeted the critic Alex Brown, “and y’all are intent on giving that man millions of dollars.”

How Angry Should Other Writers Be About Brandon Sanderson’s $22 Million Kickstarter?

(I'll come back to that title later.)

Complaining about other people being successful is never a good look. But complaining about how people choose to spend their own money is a particularly poor look. And it's part of a problem that has dogged the Black community in the United States.

It's not very far off base to say that for a number of Black people in the United States, the valuation given to them by the broader culture is unsatisfactory. And, for the most part, there's nothing wrong with that understanding. But it's a primarily personal judgment, just as value is. That a person feels undervalued can be an absolutely true statement. But that a person is not being given the value that they deserve is a completely different matter, because as with any number of other human ideas, personal value is not objective.

In this sense, complaining about the degree to which people value the work of others is to say that their preferences are incorrect. And that's a really hard sell, especially when dealing with something like Science Fiction and Fantasy, given how personal preference can be. It's one thing to berate a group of people over having pledged millions of dollars for a Kickstarter campaign, but that group of people is made up of individuals who each like Mr. Sanderson's work for their own reasons. Those reasons may not be particularly well thought out, but such is the way of things. "This makes me feel good," is as valid a reason as any other.

Being angry about Mr. Sanderson's success is about as useful as being angry at a storm for the inconsistency of it its effects. Even if it could be definitively shown to be due to the pernicious effects of racism in the United States, that alone won't change the game into one that's less winner (or first mover) takes all. And won't make valuations into an inherently mathematical calculation that only works on the factors that cultural critics think it should.

Unawarding

I suppose that it’s become somewhat clear that I have a fondness for both teapot tempests, and for coming up with other ways of describing same that carry the same connotation of people being worked up over (what I consider to be) trivialities. But part of what makes such coffeecup conflagrations interesting is what they say about the people involved in them, and sometimes by extension, the broader society around me.

Back in August, Nation Public Radio reported the story of a controversy surrounding the Vivian Awards, given out by the Romance Writers of America. To be sure, I have absolutely no interest in romance novels. I’ve understood myself to be Notoriously Unromantic since I was a pre-teen, and find absolutely nothing about the overall genre the least bit interesting. So this caught my attention because it struck me as classic case of people finding a reason to be outraged over something trivial. But, there is something deeper beneath that, and that’s what held my interest (albeit not long enough for me to work out an entire weblog post at the time.

The Vivian Awards are, like a number of such things, broken down into several categories, like “Best First Book” or “Historical Romance.” And what triggered the controversy earlier in the year was the award for “Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements.” The basic plot of Karen Witemeyer’s At Love’s Command is simple. An officer of the 7th Cavalry Regiment (the same 7th Cavalry Regiment once commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer) is involved in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek is what it now the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. After asking for God’s forgiveness and seeking redemption, he gets the girl, as they say, and the two of them have their happily ever after.

Ms. Witemeyer wins a Vivian for her book, cue the outrage.

But outrage, in and of itself, tends to be uninteresting. What stood out for me as NPR relating that author Jenny Hartwell had posted her letter to the Romance Writers of America to Twitter, including the following:

Romances have flawed heroes and heroines who find redemption through the transformative power of love. However, aren’t there some people who shouldn’t be redeemed?

Ms. Hartwell then goes on to list the Usual Suspects for being irredeemable, “Nazis. Slave owners. Soldiers who commit genocide.”

But my answer to her question is an unequivocal “no.” There are, as far as I’m concerned, no people who should not be redeemed. And in this, I’m going to invoke the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Professor Bryan Stevenson: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” And, I would add to that, “no matter how many times we’ve done them.”

I understand the impulse to divide the world into Good and Evil. But, to (screw it) appropriate the language of social justice, calling someone evil is simply a means of “othering” them. And it’s something that people do, in my understanding, as a way of describing themselves. In other words, people call out others as evil, especially irredeemably evil, as a means of marking those people as different from themselves, and not simply as less (or un-) deserving of empathy, understanding or, for that matter, love/being loved. The phenomenon of Whataboutism can be seen as a direct result of this sort of thinking. “If we Soviets are bad actors for the way in which we treat dissidents,” the logic went “are not you in the United States just as evil for the way that Negros are treated?” And to the degree that Cold War criticisms of the Soviets’ human rights record was intended as a means of casting said Soviets as bad people, they had a point. The United States couldn’t claim to be a nation uniquely interested in the rights of all people with Jim Crow being so obviously practiced throughout the South, and all sorts of racially unjust policies (such as redlining) liberally scattered around the rest of the nation. As a defense against the specific charges leveled, Whataboutism is patently pointless. But as a defense against the charge of unique moral deficiency, it’s spot on.

The point behind casting people as irredeemable for the choices of their past is to preclude them from being considered worthy for the choices they may make in their present or their future in a way that most people want for themselves. And that’s different from understanding culpability. While I personally don’t understand the zeal for tracking down and bringing to trial nonagenarians who worked in the prison camps and death houses of Nazi Germany, I understand the idea that as a legal matter, there is no recognized Statute of Limitations on their involvement. But attempting to justify their punishments by claiming them to be perpetually stained by actions that took place so long ago that people have been able to live full lives from end to end in the interim strikes me as attempting to make vengefulness seem like a form of righteousness. (Not that I have a problem with vengefulness, in and of itself. But when people won’t own up to it, then I become dubious.)

But maybe that’s just me. I’m an old man, and maybe I’ve simply aged out of the idea that perpetual grudges are a form of power, rather than simply a millstone around one’s neck.

Current Affairs

Stopped by Barnes and Noble and wandered through the Current Affairs section. The number of books that appear to be geared solely towards reinforcing people's opinions that those they disagree with on matters of politics are corrupt, hateful and unpatriotic surprised me. Which, I suppose is simply proof that I haven't been paying attention.

Old Volumes

Back in the day, Slate Magazine had a feature called "The Book Club." A small group of notable writers would read a book, and then discuss it in a series of letters to the other members of the group. In 2005, Tyler Cowan and Alan Wolfe discussed Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. I was wandering around the Web, and stumbled across their correspondence. I'm pretty sure I'd read it before. Despite the elapsed time, some of it sounded familiar.

The basic premise behind Bait and Switch is the difficulty of finding white-collar work, and to make her point, Barbara Ehrenreich poses as a job-seeker. Mr. Cowan opens with what he sees as the primary problem with Ms. Ehrenreich's experiment; apart from a few people who have agreed to be bogus references for her, she has no network.

She had no church, no family, and no reliance on friends for financial or even moral aid. It is no wonder she found life so tough and capitalism so demoralizing.

Fourteen years on, however, I wonder if more people are in that situation than might have been the case back in the day. But that's somewhat beside the point. In the third installment of the back-and-forth, Mr. Cowan says the following:

It is unfair that a 56-year-old is now expected to compete in a world for which he was never prepared. But we ought to be realistic. These transitional costs are borne by a class that has been about the richest and freest human history has seen.
Tyler Cowen "Why It’s Harder for White-Collar Workers To Find Jobs"

The conflation between an unprepared 56-year-old worker, and the greater class of people to which he belongs has always been baffling to me. Were you to apply the same logic to the Camp Fire in California, like so: "It is unfair that the residents of Butte County had their homes and/or livelihoods wiped out in a wildfire. But we ought to be realistic. This disaster was borne by a state that has been about the richest and freest human history has seen," you'd be tarred and feathered in the streets for being a callous bastard. And as Mr. Wolfe points out: “Calling them members of a class that is 'the richest and freest human history has seen' does not help them deal with their anger, hopelessness, and dismal prospects for the future.”

The fact that many white-collar workers in this country are (arguably) not required to really compete for jobs is not a sufficient reason to treat those who are required to compete, but unable to do so, as unimportant. Being competent at a line of work, while necessary, is no longer sufficient to remain employed, and it's way past time that we stopped thinking that way. We're overdue for teaching a greater competitiveness in the overall job market (not just a single profession).

Obviously, for some people, this new mode of looking at the world will come too late. They're going to wind up largely unemployable, given the market and the other workers who compete with them for the same limited pool of suitable jobs. But I would submit that it's actually less callous to acknowledge that they're screwed, yet we aren't going to aid them, than to pretend that the affluence of their peers renders them above needing aid.

I suppose that one could say that capitalism is best played as a team sport. People's faith (or civic) communities, families and friends should be stepping up to be the backstop that prevents them from losing hope that modern capitalism will work out for them. But I'm not sure that's really an answer, as it simply presumes that the general public should be sharing their limited resources. It's true that much of the pain that the once-affluent (and now-unemployed) are feeling is actually a benefit to people around the world, who are now less poverty-stricken, because they have the opportunity for the work that was taken from their first/second world peers. Mr. Cowan was correct when he noted that "economic justice is being more widely spread, not eroded." But this, I think, is one of the problems that many people have with concepts of economic justice; poverty simply being more widely spread, rather than eroded. Of course, it may be better to be unemployed in the United States than in Niger, but without ready access to the subsistence forms of living that many third-world citizens have grown up with, the end state may be more severe. While it makes sense that it's more just to have an equal percentage of out-of-work people in the United States as it does in Niger, one wonders what Americans would see in this to recommend it, especially given that the difference in salaries between the two nations is likely to simply be taken as increased profit.

As an aside, Mr. Cowan also advocated "lowering the corporate income tax as a means of encouraging white-collar re-employment." It's a standard free-market solution, but he'd already acknowledged that: "[A]lthough the U.S. economic recovery appears robust, labor markets still show signs of slack. Larger-than-expected numbers of workers have stopped looking for work. Wages are flat even though measured unemployment is falling. Anecdotal evidence does not suggest a rush to hire labor. Something is plaguing labor markets, but we do not know what." Why would lower taxes trigger a rush to hire labor? If there isn't enough demand for goods and services that more labor is needed, lower taxes are simply going to go straight into the pockets of investors in one way or another. And why propose a solution of spending via the tax code, when one doesn't know what the problem is?

Aggregate gains are cold comfort to the person whose individual status is eroded or destroyed. But when individuals benefit without a corresponding decrease in someone else's standards of living, the aggregate benefits by definition. This points to a potential change in how to look at things.

P.S.: There are four letters total in the series, if you'd like to read it. One. Two. Three. Four.

Dystopianism

Perhaps you felt, like I did, that something you’d previously felt safe taking for granted—that a man credibly accused of sexual assault might not be elevated to a position of profound power over women—was no longer something to trust.
Sophie Gilbert "The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia"

When I first read this statement, it struck me as remarkably naïve, for lack of a better word. This simply isn't the way that politics works. It's never been the way that politics worked. As I read through Ms. Gilbert's article, the voice that it took on for me reminded me of some of my coworkers, back when I worked with children half a lifetime ago.

There was a fundamental question that all of us had to answer, and I think the easiest way to understand how each of us understood that question was to observe how we set about teaching the children we worked with to avoid using violence. For some of the staff, the reason was one of empathy and building a better world. "You shouldn't hit people," the reasoning went, "because you don't like it when people hit you, and just as you feel bad when someone hit you, other people feel bad when you hit them." For others on staff, it was more a question of the harshness of the world outside of the treatment center. "You shouldn't hit people," the reasoning went, "because it's a bad habit to get into. And once you leave here, if you hit people or frighten them or make them angry, they'll hit you. And they'll want to hit very, very, hard."

That difference, between wanting to teach the children to live in the world we wanted them to live in, versus the world as we understood that it existed, was at the center of a lot of sometimes heated disputes between staff when it came to the philosophy of preparing the children for their inevitable ageing out of care.

And reading Ms. Gilbert's article, I felt that it was the very thing that I had once attempted to prevent. Having a child go out into the world with the idea that it was a better place than it genuinely was. Or could be. And there's a certain degree to which I view dystopian fiction, feminist or otherwise, as a reflection of that encountering the world as it actually is, rather than the rosy place that adult sheltering can make it out to be. But not understanding why it's that way.

Ms. Gilbert describes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as: "a speculative vision of a repressive theocratic state in America enabled by mass infertility and nuclear fallout."

But the thing that would turn the United States into Gilead isn't a drop in childbirths and atomic weaponry. It's the choices that people make. Ms. Gilbert notes, in talking about some of the dark futures (for women, anyway) that writers had called into being in Ms. Atwood's wake, that "The prospective end of humanity is calamitous enough to imagine drastic ends being justified." But what makes the works dystopian isn't the drastic means enacted. It's that they're only drastic for some people. The prospective end of humanity, rather than being a catalyst for shared sacrifice, becomes a rationale for the imposition of costs on one segment of society. But this is the way the world has always been. Because genuine sacrifice, by its very nature, is painful, and when they can, people shift that pain to others.

I understand that the novelists who write dystopian fiction likely have a good deal of genuine insight into the human condition. But the way that the public speaks of the genre often strikes me as driven by a desire for a world that never could have been.

The Lesson

A few years ago, I picked up an Aesop's Fables book from Costco. The book was inexpensive, and I was bored. It turns out that it's a reprint of a version that came out in 1912. I came across it again at the start of the weekend, and read it here and there when I had some time.

One thing that I noticed is that some of the stories had their moral made explicit, and others did not. Those that did had a short aphorism at the end of the tale, such as the classic "SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE." Reading these stories as an adult, I was struck by the degree to which the aphorisms tended to not match the text of the story they were mated to. In some cases. you could see the resemblance. Although if I were going to boil down the story of The Tortoise and the Hare to a single sentence, it wouldn't be "Slow and steady wins the race," I can see how you arrive at it from there.

There was another story, The Farmer and the Stork, in which a farmer, setting traps for the cranes that raided his fields, also catches a stork. The stork pleads for his life, but the farmer says, in effect, that since the stork was in the field with the cranes, it will die like the cranes. "Birds of a feather flock together" seems like an odd choice for the moral to that tale, although I can understand the superficial similarity. The Blacksmith and His Dog, in which a blacksmith pseudo-scolds his dog for sleeping while he works, but always being there for mealtimes is given the moral: "Those who will not work deserve to starve," despite the fact that the story is quite clear that the smith only pretended to be put out by his dog's behavior.

In a way the whole thing comes off as if a person had a small store of random aphorisms in need of homes when someone dropped a load of old fables and folktales into their lap to marry together as best they could. The disconnect between the stories and the aphorisms that serve as the morals to some is interesting, because eventually, one starts to see the hand of class. Things like "There is always someone worse off than yourself," and "There is no eye like the master's" point to this. "It matters little of those who are inferior to us in merit should be like us in outside appearances," and "It is absurd to ape our betters," make the class judgements more explicit; although, perhaps, "It sometimes happens that one man has all the toil, and another all the profit," and "Might makes right," take the award for that.

It comes across as a very Victorian (for lack of a better word) enterprise. I suspect that the attaching of aphorisms to the stories is an artifact of even earlier times, when the fables were turned first into sermons and miniature morality plays. In the end, it seems unnecessary, the stories are simple and straightforward enough that even most children could be expected to understand the lessons each is meant to convey. And so it become a sort of window into the past, courtesy of lapsed copyrights. It's kind of a shame that the morals to fables have apparently become fixed. I wonder which of our own aphorisms we would place on them today, and how they would be received in a century's time.

You Forgot a Bit

I came across a copy of Chris Hayes A Colony In a Nation and read it. It's a quick read, I was able to finish it during the gaps in my workday, and about a half-hour before going to bed. As the title implies, it's a take on the idea of colonialism, with the central premise being that poor Black and Latino (although the book mostly focuses on Black) communities are treated like colonies, and the analogy is made to the original 13 Colonies that made up the early United States. In this, is draws some interesting parallels between the way that modern America jurisdictions of various levels and the administration of King George III treated their colonial subjects.

It is, not surprisingly, a Left-leaning critique of things, although there are some practices that I was surprised that we don't hear more right-leaning commentators talking about. (It kind of reinforces the cynical "freedom for me, and none for thee" charge that is leveled against them.)

The one big miss that popped up for me is the very end of the book. In the conclusion, Mr. Hayes asks the reader to imagine a button that, when pushed, delivers a benefit to the person who pushed it, at the expense of someone else. He goes through a couple of ideas of what that benefit might be, and what it might cost the someone else, but the basic idea is the same. And, on page 216, he says of this:

And if the person sitting by the button is poor and desperate, I doubt we'd judge her if she pushed the button to feed her kids or get money toward much-needed medicine. But overall it's not okay, as a general principle, to impose random harm on someone else so that you can reap a reward. That's our moral commitment.

But as far as I'm concerned, it is okay. That's why people do it so often. Regardless of how unethical or immoral one might claim it to be, the fact remains that reaping rewards by imposing random (or quite specific) harms on someone else is a mainstay of cultures around the world and throughout history (and prehistory, for that matter).

So, is Mr. Hayes wrong about this?

Not entirely. I think, however, that he left out one tiny bit.

But overall it's not okay, as a general principle, to impose random harm on someone undeserving of it so that you can reap a reward.

There, as all the cool kids would say these days, I fixed it for you.

And I think that it's an important distinction; one that explains much of the way in which people actually behave. And the issue becomes that it's never particularly difficult to come up with a reason why someone else is deserving of the harm that is required to reap a reward. They're of the wrong social class, they're from a different place, they've broken this or that rule, they didn't defend us from some harm that someone else did to us, they don't follow the correct faith, their ancestors harmed our ancestors, they're simply inferior. Et cetera. The list is as long as the human imagination. And as varied as human deprivation.

Mr. Hayes notes that we'd refrain from blaming the poor or desperate. (I suspect that judgement would be very quick if the harm befell someone the judge cared about, however.) And that's the other side of the coin. People are quick to see themselves, as poor and desperate. Not as often as they're willing to see the person harmed as deserving of harm, perhaps, but more often than one might think is reasonable.

And this ties in to the overall theme of the book. After all, Mr. Hayes attributes King George's heavy-handed tariff enforcement in colonial America as a way of replenishing the depleted royal treasury after the Seven Year's War, rather than (as it often seems we're taught in grade school) any sort of personal malice. (Although it's likely that he saw the colonies, with their smuggling and other tariff-dodging, as wretched hives of scum and villainy.)

Mr. Hayes idea, that we consider victimizing one another as wrong across the board, is an ideal. And in that, lip service may be paid to it, but it's not often the reality. Understanding the pieces that bring it into line with the world as we experience it, makes it easier to understand how it's actually lived, and perhaps why it's lived that way.

The Arena of Ideas

Milo Yiannopoulos has written a book. That this book exists is pretty much all I know about it. I don't know what the title is, or even what it's about, let alone whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I know that Simon & Schuster said that they would publish it - because that seems to be what's newsworthy about this whole situation. There are calls for boycotts, people lining up their arguments about whether or not this is about the freedom of speech and/or the freedom to publish, if the answer to speech one doesn't like is more speech to counter it, blah, blah blah.

A few years back, I critiqued an essay by Mr. Yiannopoulos, in which he complained about the "sharing economy." I've pretty much entirely forgotten the piece in question, I'm okay with that, given that I didn't really see much to recommend it at the time. One of my comments was this:

Suffice it to say, as also with many things like this, Yiannopoulos takes the world that he wants to live in, and extrapolates that out to a moral imperative that everyone should subscribe to, so much so that rejection, or even questioning, of it becomes a moral crime that must be attacked and stamped out, lest it spread like a cancer.

And that's what I'm going to reexamine here. Because there are "many things like this" in life, and interestingly, I think that we're looking at another one of them. Presuming, since it makes sense to do so, that this isn't all a deep-cover operation designed to make whatever it is that Mr. Yiannopoulos has written into a New York Times Best-Seller, I ask why level any heat against Simon & Schuster? Sure, I can understand the grousing about the publisher being willing to "stoop so low to make a buck as to publish this purveyor of vile hate speech," but the teapot tempest that this flap is stirring up is going to wind up in a lot more bucks being made. Perhaps the complaint is that a well-known publisher, by putting their brand on Mr. Yiannopoulos' book, is helping to "normalize" what he's saying.

And that gets back to the observation I'd made about Mr. Yiannopoulos' article back in 2013. His critics, I think, takes the world that they want to live in, and extrapolate that out to a moral imperative that everyone should subscribe to, so much so that rejection, or even questioning, of it becomes a moral crime that must be attacked and stamped out, lest it spread like a cancer. And a "reputable" publisher like Simon & Schuster aid in that potential spread.

For all that Dennis Johnson, the small publisher that NPR quotes in their article, says, "Nobody in the protest is saying 'you have no right to be published. You have no right, Simon & Schuster, to publish this guy, and this guy, you have no right to be published' — nobody's saying that." I think to a degree, that's exactly what's being said. What I suspect is being sought here is to deny Mr. Yiannopoulos a platform. (I also suspect that it's too late for that.) Because while Mr. Johnson and other people protesting the publication of the book understand Mr. Yiannopoulos to be a "purveyor of vile hate speech," I think that there is a fear that there is a significant audience of people who won't find it so vile, and that among them are people charismatic enough or persuasive enough to convince yet more people that they shouldn't find it vile, either. That it is, in effect, a Lovely Awful Thing; an objectively wrong, but intrinsically appealing, way for other people to behave. And I say "other people" intentionally. I think it's rare for people so say, "Hate speech should be kept out of the mainstream discourse, because I can't be trusted to not internalize the messages."

Sometimes, I think that there a view of social progress that likens it to pushing a boulder up a volcano. Until it's safely nestled into the crater at the top, it's always in danger of rolling back down to the bottom at the slightest provocation. This strikes me as going hand-in-hand with a view of people as being insufficiently invested in the progress that has been made - to the point of always being ready to backslide, with alarming rapidity, to reprehensible, but easier or more profitable, practices of the past. To be sure, I am not of the opinion that the social structures of, say, 1750 could never again rear their ugly heads. I am of the opinion, however, that it will take quite a bit of time for them to claw their way out of their graves. And that we'll be able to see the shift happening, if we're paying attention.

I'm of the opinion that "silencing" and "censorship" are functions of the State, rather than of the populace. Especially today. If Simon & Schuster decide that they won't put out his book after all, Mr. Yiannopoulos could easily self-publish it if he wanted to, and he likely has enough of a following that he could break even on doing so. Whatever ideas he's looking to get out will get out. And I suspect that no-one who genuinely views what he is saying as vile will be swayed by the name of a given publisher. And if there is a large enough population of readers who won't view it as vile that it becomes an issue, that, in and of itself, is the problem that the protestors need to worry about. And virtue signalling won't solve it for them.

Castles and Controversies

For a niche product, Dungeons and Dragons seems to garner much more than it's share of attention. The number of people who take exception to some aspect of the game seems infinite at times. The latest edition is no exception.

The main drivers of the coffeepot conflagration are, interestingly, sexuality. The authors included a short passage in a nod to the overlap between the gaming an LGBTQ communities.

This, I can kind of see starting a controversy. Kind of.

It was mostly well received. Of course, there were people on the far right who immediately took this to be an attempt to recruit children into a leftest agenda of sexual libertinism (because it just wouldn't be the United States without them), but most of the criticism came from LGBTQ gamers, who took exception to the language used.

And it turns out that this wasn't their only gripe with the game. It turns out that two of the people that Wizards of the Coast (the division of Hasbro that produces the game) consulted with were on the bad side of many LGBTQ gamers, enough so that the day after the rules were released, calls for a boycott were already echoing through social media.

This one, I never would have guessed.

Unlike the satanic panic of the 80s, with its focus on Dungeons and Dragons as a cause of suicides and occultism, none of this has risen to the level of being considered at all newsworthy. Mainstream America is likely completely unaware of what's going on with the grandfather of role-playing games. But still, I suspect that there's some poor guy in Wizards of the Coast's marketing department who is even now resolving to become more acquainted with alcohol this weekend.

Expedience

“‘Once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That's not my department,’ said Werner von Braun.”
Tom Lehrer, “Werner von Braun”

After World War II, the United States brought a number of German scientists to the United States to work on weapons and the space program. In return for this, they were effectively forgiven their involvement in Nazi atrocities during the war, and it was hushed up. Recently a new book on the subject was released, and the author was interviewed on NPR. It's made fairly clear that several of them, like the famed Werner von Braun, were both high-ranking members of the Nazi party, and knew of (and were sometimes involved in) the Holocaust. The actions of the United States government to to conceal these histories are portrayed as a “deal with the Devil.” The overall current of moral outrage, or at least criticism, that runs through the interview struck me as somewhere between naïve and willfully ignorant.

When someone is arrested for a crime, it's not uncommon for the prosecutors to offer a plea bargain. At its heart, a plea bargain is a trade - lessened accountability before the law for some consideration, normally saving prosecutors the effort of proving one’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And other trades are made as well, a very common one being a reduction of sentence (or at least the promise of a recommendation of same) or a lessening of charges in return for cooperation with an investigation or naming other people involved in crimes. Unsurprisingly, this has lead to a certain amount of deceit in the process.

Under federal law, the only way someone serving a mandatory minimum prison sentence can get out early is to provide information or testimony that is of “substantial assistance” to prosecutors. What constitutes “substantial assistance” is solely up to the judgment of prosecutors. Make the prosecutor happy, and you go home early. Tell him something that may well be true but doesn’t quite go far enough to win him an indictment or conviction, and you risk giving up a golden opportunity to cut your time. Critics say it’s a system that suborns outright lying.
Radley Balko, “Guilty Before Proven Innocent”

Like Operation Paperclip, the use of jailhouse informants to testify against people is driven by fear. While Operation Paperclip was put in place to help combat the fear of falling behind in the arms race or the quest to reach the Moon, the willingness to give unreliable “witnesses” breaks on jail time (sometimes, quite significant) in return for “substantial assistance” is driven by the public's fear of crime and drugs.

When I was first taking courses in Project Management, one of the classes I had signed up for was one on Ethics. After class one day, I asked the instructor: “Can you ever be considered really ethical if you’re not willing to risk your job, and maybe the rest of your working life?” What followed was an uncomfortable silence and an unspoken agreement. We both knew that the answer was, quite likely: “No.” But we also both knew that it was, quite likely, an untenable trade-off.

One of the lessons that we learn growing up that turns out not to be exactly true is that being held accountable only has costs to the suspected miscreant. When our parents told us that: “This is going to hurt me as much as it’s going to hurt you,” before dishing out a punishment, we rarely, if ever believed them. But the costs of holding someone accountable can, and sometimes do, go beyond the person themselves. And that creates an incentive to buy our way out of the consequences of accountability by releasing others from the same.

A commitment to Justice that begins and ends only with other people “Getting what they deserve” is always going to come up short, because there is no form of Justice that we can create today that lacks costs that the people seeking justice will be called upon to pay. It’s easy to look back on America of the mid-to-late 1940s, and decide that they’d overestimated the risks of sending Mr. von Braun to the gallows at Nuremberg, or to sneer at Louisiana’s law-enforcement community for being willing to send innocent people to prison to demonstrate their commitment to the War on Drugs. But it’s also dangerous. Bad ideas are not universally, or even commonly, the result of people being stupid, credulous or deliberately unethical. Often, they’re the result of being hard-eyed and coldly rational. The willingness to rationalize, like many other “failings,” preys on those who think they are above it.

The End of Stuff?

Supreme Court case will decide whether you own your stuff

Sounds pretty serious, doesn't it? But maybe it's worse than that...

Your right to resell your own stuff is in peril
It could become illegal to resell your iPhone 4, car or family antiques

This is a major legal crisis! How did it go unnoticed? Well, for starters, because, like a lot of headlines, these are a bit... overblown.

To hear Mr. Doctorow and Ms. Waters tell it, the Supreme Court of the United States of America holds in it's hands the ability to decide if you can re-sell anything you own that was made overseas. But... that's not really quite the case.

What's really at stake here is which takes precedence, Section 602(a)(1) of the Copyright Act, which says that you can't import copyrighted items without the consent of the copyright holder, or Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act, which says that once you've purchased something, you may resell it or otherwise dispose of it as you wish.

The language around this case has become fairly dire:

“It means that it’s harder for consumers to buy used products and harder for them to sell them,” said Jonathan Band, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association for Research Libraries. “This has huge consumer impact on all consumer groups.”

Another likely result is that it would hit you financially because the copyright holder would now want a piece of that sale.

And according to Mr. Doctorow:

Following Wiley's theory, you don't really own most of your possessions. You share ownership in your goods with the companies that made the goods you "bought" from them, and they get a veto over your disposal of them, and can also demand a cut of the proceeds.

But perhaps it's worth pointing out what started this all in the first place.

College student Supap Kirtsaeng came to the United States from Thailand to study mathematics at Cornell. When he got here, he realized something - textbooks in Thailand were much cheaper than the same book being sold here in the United States. So, he had his family buy and send him textbooks, which he then sold on eBay at a profit. He repaid his family members for their costs in buying and shipping him the books, and used the reminder to pay for school. There's a simple term for this in finance - arbitrage, and people do it all the time - it's called selling at retail. Here's an example - I go to Costco and buy a box of candy bars. I then take the candy bars to work and sell them to my co-workers for less than they would pay for the same candy bar, were they to buy it from the vending machine in the kitchen.

And this practice is perfectly legal, even for copyrighted materials like books. It's the model that Half-Price books works on when they deal in used books. They buy the books at a discounted price from the owner, and then turn around and sell them at a higher price. Mr. Kirtsaeng, wanting to be on the right side of the law, "sought advice from friends in Thailand and consulted 'Google Answers,' a website which allows web users to seek research help from other web users, to ensure that he could legally resell the foreign editions in the United States." Which he conceivably could - except for that pesky Section 602(a)(1). John Wiley & Sons, Inc., the publishers, sued, claiming that under that section, Kirtsaeng needed their permission to import the books into the United States. Now, they admit to the fact that the Thai versions of the books is less expensive than the domestic version - this is what created the arbitrage opportunity in the first place.

In this light, the question: How do Section 602(a)(1) of the Copyright Act, which prohibits the importation of a work without the authority of the copyright’s owner, and Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act, which allows the owner of a copy “lawfully made under this title” to sell or otherwise dispose of the copy without the copyright owner’s permission, apply to a copy that was made and legally acquired abroad and then imported into the United States? seems a lot less apocalyptic. After all, Mr. Kirtsaeng wasn't just selling his old books when he was done with them, like many college students do. Nor was a selling a family heirloom, brought over from the Old Country. He was racking up some $900,000 (at least) in gross revenues from systematically importing and selling textbooks.

Given all of this, I find it difficult to believe that if I sell the copy of "Gundam Senki" I picked up when I was in Japan a decade ago, that Sunrise, Bandai or T.O.Y International Inc/Aspect are going to come after me for a cut of the sale price. I suppose that they could, and this raises another interesting question - what's the difference between "bringing something back with you" and "importing?"

But honestly, the likely impact of this case (given my limited understanding of the law) is that if John Wiley & Sons, Inc. win, rather than the end of resale at we know it, the status quo will remain in place. To import things for sale, you'll need permission from the copyright holder. As I see things, it becomes interesting if Mr. Kirtsaeng wins in the Supreme Court. Because (again, in my layman's opinion), what I expect will happen is that you'll see an end to differential pricing in different markets for identical items. Whether that means that prices level off between countries (which will likely suck for some poorer nations) or you start seeing differences between items sold in various places, I don't know.

But I suspect that either way, I'll still be able to sell some stuff the next day.

H/T to George Williams.

But It Could Still Bite

"And in general, the world that contraception has made is a world that de-emphasizes the moral weight of the sexual act, while insisting on the centrality of a perpetually-fulfilled libido to human contentment."
Ross Douthat - Slate: The Book Club: Bad Religion: Entry 6: The world that contraception has made.

I was reading Will Saletan and Mr. Douthat write back and forth about Douthat's new book Bad Religion, and this statement, in the most recent entry, struck me as interesting. I, for my own part, am a firm proponent of the idea that most, if not all, virtues are born of necessity. But this, of course, raises the question of what happens to the virtue when the necessity is gone.

Most human beings have a level of libido. And while some are good at ignoring it, others aren't. This is likely a built-in aspect of humanity. After all, humans don't go into heat in the same way that many animals do, and a species of ascetics would be rather short-lived. (In fact, it doesn't take much to see the evolutionary advantage to a strong libido. Those people who greet the thought of sex with an impassioned "meh" aren't known for large families.) But, as with many animals, humans do tend to have a stronger attraction to their own children than they do to the children of others, and many moral prescriptions against sexuality were mainly based around familial relations - in short, no sleeping with people you weren't formally married to. To me, the primary goal behind this was to prevent having a number of children without dedicated caregivers/providers (mostly fathers, since it was generally fairly obvious to anyone around at the birth who the mother of a child was).

But with the advent of reliable contraception, the human libido didn't need to be kept in check so closely to avoid baby booms. So why then should sex remain such a weighty issue? The religious answer to this is that the virtue of chastity wasn't born of necessity, but was handed down, in effect, by the universe itself. So even two people who were incapable of having children, rather than being free to indulge their libidos, had to keep a lid on things or be at odds with the Way Things Should Be. But if you don't believe in a divine lawgiver (especially one whose edicts seem strangely coincident with the needs and wants of certain bronze-age cultures), where does that leave you? Where is the benefit in continuing to be frightened of the bear that you've not only killed, but skinned and made into an attractive throw?

Of course, in a serious of short e-mails back and forth about a book that doesn't have contraception at its core, there really isn't much room to discuss why chastity should be pursued for its own sake when the consequences of being unchaste (the physical ones, anyway) have largely been dealt with. But this is why, for many people, "the Catholic Church’s" (and many others, besides) "teaching on the subject can seem at once obscure, hair-splitting, and willfully unrealistic." It may also explain part of what I suspect Douthat sees a "Bad Religion;" the idea of a wrathful, vengeful deity who seeks to punish anyone who dares to rebel against its cosmic control-freakishness, yet is strangely reluctant to show itself.

Four Color History?

Looking for some short reading material, I picked up The Big Lie, by Veitch and Erskine. The basic premise is a woman uses the Large Hadron Collider to travel back in time to try to stop the World Trade Center attacks on September 11. (Don't ask.) Her efforts are derailed by her husband and his co-workers who are utterly convinced that even if her story of hijacked aircraft was true, the towers couldn't possibly come down due to aircraft strikes.

Patriotic, isn't it?

I'm not going to rate The Big Lie as September 11th fiction, because I don't find the Truther movement to be compelling, and the story is really in service of that. What I find more interesting is the use of the Futile Time Travel trope. I've never cared for this trope, because the time traveler always turns out to be something of a dolt, despite the fact that they've managed to master time travel. And this instance is no exception. Rather than calling in a bomb threat or pulling the fire alarm or even actually starting a fire in the building, our intrepid time traveler from today (2011) decides to show people on her iPad what's going to happen to them if they stay put. And she doesn't go to the NYPD or the FBI - she goes straight to her husband's office, in a risk management firm in the World Trade Center.

To be fair, these sorts of stories are hard to tell. (And this particular story has the added burden of using time travel to lay the groundwork for a conspiracy narrative.) You have to explain how someone who knows exactly what terrible tragedy is about to happen can't manage to stop it. And the easiest way to do that, is, frankly, to rob them of the sense to do the obvious, despite the fact that they have all of the information they need. Now this particular story also throws in the added complication of having the time traveler arrive in the past later than she intended (which is a trope all it's own), so she's rushed and supposedly not thinking straight. But this brings up another issue with time travel. If you can hop back to a point where you are effectively in two places at once, and you realize that you didn't get it right, why not just try again? If you honestly think you can alter history, a la "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," you basically have all the time in the world.

I don't know if the average reader is going to be more concerned with the storytelling style than the content of the story, like I was, but I found the cliches and tropes that they used to be distracting. When you're trying to tell a story that you feel is important, how you tell it matters. Because the tropes they used tended to break suspension of disbelief, the basic preachiness of the story became evident, and that weakened the impact. While I'm not sure how else you'd tell the story they were laying out, I don't know that I'd have used a speculative fiction format. The idea that one could go back and prevent it all from happening is an enticing one, and I almost think the story would have been better if it had been allowed to succeed, although this may have opened a can of worms the writer would have found difficult to contain. In the end you have a typical (if slightly paranoid) comic book story, although the heroine is perhaps a little less competent than we'd come to expect.