perfidy

It's amazing how these women think they can get away with anything.

Hey, wait a minute, maybe I should call the police, too...

Just because I've always loved it, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong advertisement:

It is my pleasure to welcome all quality folks to visiting of Hong Kong. Whether seriously in business or on a fun-loving hijink, make yourself totally homely in this meager environment. If any aspect is not utterly harmonious, gratefully bring it to my notice and I shall strive to earn your satisfaction.

We of Greater Hong Kong take many prides in our extravagant growth. The ones who saw our isle as a morsel of Red China’s pleasure have struck their faces in keen astonishment to see many great so-called powers of the olden guard reel in dismay before our leaping strides and charged-up hustling, freewheeling idiom of high-tech personal accomplishment and betterment of all peoples. The potentials of a all ethnic races and anthropologies to merge under a banner of the Three Principles to follow

• Information, Information, Information !
• Totally fair marketeering !
• Strict ecology !

have been peerless in the history of economic strife.

Who would disdain to subscribe under this flowing banner? If you have not attained your Hong Kong citizenship, apply for a passport now! In this month, the usual fee of HK$100 will be kindly neglected. Fill out a coupon (below) now. If coupons are lacking, dial 1-800-HONG-KONG instantly to apply from the help of our wizened operators.

Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong is a private, wholly extraterritorial, sovereign, quasi-national entity not recognized by any other nationalities and no way affiliated with the former Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which part of the People’s Republic of China. The People’s Republic of China admits or accepts no responsibility for Mr. Lee, the Government of Greater Hong Kong, or any of the citizens thereof, or for any violations of local law, personal injury, or property damage occurring in territories, buildings, municipalities, institutions, or real estate owned, occupied, or claimed by Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.

Join us instantly,
Your enterprising partner,
Mr. Lee

I think in some ways I was primed to accept Moldbug before ever I heard of him.  Not by my growing conviction that Conservatism in philosophy and practice was seriously flawed, not by the obvious dysfunctions of our republic, and of other governments around the world.  But by science fiction.  Frank Herbert, Neal Stephenson, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein - some of my favorite sf authors - all had in their stories things that cracked the door that Moldbug later kicked open.

Stephenson is the obvious one.  In Snow Crash and Diamond Age, he describes a society descended from, but very different from our own.  In Moldbuggian terms, the USG collapses - and the result is not quite a reset.  There is a remnant USG, the Feds, who are still exhibiting all the dysfunction we've come to love, but unable to inflict it on everyone else.  Everywhere else, the quasi-national franchise state has taken over.  These entities are soveriegn nations competing for customers, and have adopted a bewildering variety of governmental structures.  Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong was the best of these, a free-wheeling nation state run by Mr. Lee and whose citizenship was available for a fee.

Moving this world further into the future, the Diamond Age imagined a world where nanotechnology has become a commonplace.  At the pinacle of prosperity and power in this new age are the Neo-Victorians, who live on islands constructed by advanced technology off the coast near large cities.  Like most of the sovereign states in the books, citizenship is voluntary - but there is no indication that the Victorians practice any sort of democracy.  They have a queen, and the aristocracy are referred to as "Equity-Lords," a term that I would later find particularly apt in light of Moldbug's neo-cameralist ideas.

Stephenson, across the decades of future encompassed in these two books (from contextual clues, Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw is probably about my age) portrays a world unfolding more or less as Moldbug might have imagined - the collapse of Democracy, the growth of thousands of micro-states, a return to classical international law.  What struck me particularly about the New Atlantis of the Neo-Victorians was that the basis of their prosperity was described as being cultural - a culture that rejected most of the political theory of the past two or three centuries.  They were reactionaries, they lived in a society of their own creation designed to correct the flaws of the 20th Century West.  They wrapped themselves in manners and propriety, yet they retained the essential liberty of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

When I finally read Moldbug a decade after I first read Diamond Age, this was the image that kept popping up in my mind, and probably contributed greatly to its plausibility for me.

Frank Herbert is best known for the Dune series, and for fathering a son who is actively ruining his father's legacy.  As interesting, fully-realized, well-written and just fabulous as Dune is, there is another book that not many have read.  Herbert's Dosadi Experiment is in many ways more interesting than Dune.  Rather than exploring the border between religion and politics, it explores politics more or less straight on.

Since not many people have read Dosadi, here's a primer. In Dosadi, interstellar travel is possible through the efforts of the Caleban, intelligent stars who can teleport you from planet to planet.  The ConSentiency is the interstellar government of a largely peaceful multi-species society.  One of the key elements of this government is the Bureau of Sabotage:

...sometime in the far future, government becomes terrifyingly efficient. Red tape no longer exists: laws are conceived of, passed, funded, and executed within hours, rather than months. The bureaucratic machinery becomes a juggernaut, rolling over human concerns and welfare with terrible speed, jerking the universe of sentients one way, then another, threatening to destroy everything in a fit of spastic reactions. In short, the speed of government goes beyond sentient control.

...BuSab began as a terrorist organization whose sole purpose was to frustrate the workings of government in order to give sentients a chance to reflect upon changes and deal with them. Having saved sentiency from its government, BuSab was officially recognized as a necessary check on the power of government.  First a corps, then a bureau, BuSab gained legally recognized powers to interfere in the workings of any world, of any species, of any government or corporation, answerable only to themselves.

Crucial to the progress of the story are the Gowachin, a frog-like species with an interesting legal system:

The Gowachin regard their legal practices as the strongest evidence that they are civilized. Gowachin law is based upon the notion of a healthy disrespect for all laws; the purpose of this notion is to avoid the stultifying accretion of a body of laws and precedents that bind Gowachin mechanically. In a Gowachin trial, everything is on trial: every participant, including the judges; every law; even the foundational precept of Gowachin law. Legal ideas from other systems are turned on their head: someone pronounced "innocent" (guilty in other terms) by the court is torn to pieces by angry spectators; judges may have bias ("if I can decide for my side, I will"), though not prejudice ("I will decide for my side, regardless"); defendant and plaintiff are chosen at trial by the side bringing the complaint choosing one role or the other; torture is permitted; and all procedural rules may be violated, but only by finding conflict within procedural rules (an example of Nomic).

Gowachin law is illustrative of a dominant theme in Herbert's books set in this universe: that governments, law, and bureaucracy (collectively, society's tools for regulating itself) are dangerous when allowed to escape human (sapient) control. In both novels, the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) plays a major role. An official bureau, its mandate is to slow the workings of government(s) to ensure that the machinery of governance never overpowers those subject to its power. Historically, BuSab was created when government had become terrifyingly efficient, with laws conceived, mandated, and funded within hours, thus subjecting sapients to an overpowering bureaucratic juggernaut.

Gowachin legal practices are to law and the courts what BuSab is to government bureaucracy: a governor on an engine, preventing a static pronouncement on the state of things (real or intended) from ever over-ruling sentient judgement or discreation at the contingent moment. Inasmuch as only sapience or full consciousness is capable of dealing with a dynamic universe, no procedural set judicial algorithm can ever supersede or effectively protect sapience.

This aspect of the novels is echoed in Dune Messiah, when the Emperor, Paul, rejects a request from a subject world for a constitution. Ostensibly, the purpose is to provide basic guarantees for the people; in reality, it's an attempt to check the Emperor's power with legal limits. Paul justifies his decision by arguing, in his official pronouncement, that constitutions are dead things, limited and limiting to what can be currently conceived as a threat from which the people require protection, ultimately enfeebling them by depriving them of the essential human challenge to deal with an ever-changing universe.

(Both of those quotes are from Wikipedia.)  The main character of the story is Jorj X. McKie, a Sabateur Extraordinaire and the only Human admitted to the Goawachin Bar as a legum.  The center of the story is the planet Dosadi, an experiment conducted with the connivance of one of the Calaban.  Humans and Gowachin are sequestered on the planet Dosadi, a poisonous desert whose only inhabitable area is one river valley.  In this valley is Chu, a city of 89 million humans and Gowachin.  They cannot leave, and every form of poisonous and intoxicating substance known to either species is available.  Many forms of government have been tried on Dosadi - as the story begins, it is a dictatorship.  But one thing that the Dosadi are not allowed to remove is the DemoPol, which is something of a combination of opinion poll, propaganda device, and election tool.  On Dosadi, it is recognized that the DemoPol is one of the chief means of their oppression.

The Dosadi Experiment is monstrously cruel - hundreds of millions of sentient beings forced to lived in horrible conditions over generations, and forbidden any solution that would improve their lot.  It is a cruel society, necessarily; violent and callous.  To maintain a civilization under these conditions is almost impossible, but those most capable of survival under these conditions are very competent indeed.

I imagine that Moldbug would say that Dosadi is an exaggeration of things we see in our society - not so cruel, not on the edge of Malthusian collapse - but similar in its callousness, crime, and most importantly the inability to change what we recognize to be broken.  I remember feeling how odd to entertain the notion that something with "demos" in it could be bad - democracy is the ultimate good, as I had been taught.  If you haven't read the book, do so immediately.

Heinlein has been much more discussed in the context of politics - especially Starship Troopers.  I think that Farnham's Freehold and Moon is a Harsh Mistress are both more accurate representations of Heinlein's actual politics.  Certainly more so than the typical idea that the state in Troopers is fascist, which is obviously false to anyone who has read the book.  Heinlein talked a lot about authority and responsibility, and how they need to be properly aligned for there to be a functional society.  The key bit is that only veterans may participate in the government - people who have demonstrated that they have at least the potential to put society's needs ahead of their own are the only ones allowed near the levers of power.  Others, the taxpayers, are granted all the civil rights we expect save only the franchise.  They are free, but are subjects.

Mistress, on the other hand, introduced me to anarchism and libertarianism in the persons of Prof. de la Paz and Mannie.  But Heinlein did put a royalist in the mix, Stuart Rene "Stu" LaJoie.  I think that reading and enjoying this book was the extent of my serious belief in libertarianism.  Not that I have not (and continue to have) a deep sympathy with many libertarian ideas about many things.  I just don't think it can exist in the pure form.  Heinlein in general was skeptical of democracy, and I think that a lot of that seeped in deep, only to bubble up later.

Finally, John Brunner's Shockwave Rider.  Not a dystopian novel, by any means, but the United States of this world has definitely fallen down in a lot of ways.  A coarsened culture, callousness, violence and crime, corruption in government - what we see now, turned up a few notches.  In many ways, this was a precursor to the cyberpunk genre - computer worms, the hacker hero, bleak environment, corporate and gov't thuggery.  Notably, the book was the first to include the idea of the self-replicating computer virus, and also the Delphi Pool, which bears a passing resemblance to DARPA's Policy Analysis Market.

The politics of Brunner's book verge toward the socialist, but yet with a healthy dose of libertarianism.  While I think his solution is more than a bit utopian; like Snow Crash, his portrayal of a democratic government overwhelmed by organized crime, and the social decay created by too rapidly changing technology is vivid, and powerful.  Shockwave Rider didn't effect me so much with its politics, directly, but by the idea that wisdom is not the same as intelligence.  You hear that a lot of course, but this book showed it.  Rationality and logic and science are only tools, powerful tools to be sure; but if you have a society that is not founded on wisdom you get atomization, grief, violence and cruelty.  Brunner might not agree with this - but I think that the idea that you have to live for something outside yourself is more of an argument for monarchy than a democracy - people link themselves more naturally to people than abstracts.

When I asked for good books to read, Aretae, Foseti and Isegoria all gave me links to “Books that Influenced Me” posts. I guess I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but here’s my list of books that played a part in making me the sicko that I am today.

• Heinlein; The Bible - My earliest reading started with Heinlein. My mom read an article in the local paper about good books for kids. It mentioned Heinlein, and specifically Red Planet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Set the course of my reading for most of the next 35 years. Heinlein’s Juveniles had a profound impact on my thinking - the value and danger of recklessness; the importance of thinking, the martial virtues and competence. It created a huge chunk of my worldview. I later went on to read nearly every thing Heinlein wrote. The other early influence is the Bible, King James Version. I’ve never been particularly religious, but the language of the KJV is second only to Shakespeare. I used to read Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” This prepared me well for High School.
• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus / Schroedinger’s Cat - Shortly after High School, and after leaving college for a major in beer and other intoxicants, I was a bit at sea. Pirsig’s book blew my mind - the idea that some random dude on a motorcycle was challenging the entire edifice of western philosophy was just awesome. Later readings made me appreciate the care with which he drew his analogies. This book was the start of my heretical thinking, as opposed to my earlier reflexive contrarianism. Robert Anton Wilson’s books also blew my mind. Or maybe it was the drugs. Still and all, the big pull from these books was how important perception is to reality - that your worldview can control what you see, and that things that don’t fit really are invisible to most people.
• Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation - Amazing book. Convinced me, before I had heard the word Singularity that it was bound to happen. Also made me realize that most sf writers are frighteningly conservative in their extrapolations.  Nanotechnology, AI and biotech will change the world beyond imagining, and any sf that doesn't wrestle with this is not the true sf.
• Shakespeare - I was trapped in a crappy apartment with no money, not much of a job, and a copy of the complete work I picked up for $13 at an antique store. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I read most of it, and read it slowly. Christ, what a writer. No one compares. No one.
• John Brunner, Shockwave Rider; Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age / Snow Crash - John Brunner and Neal Stephenson are in some ways my favorite sf writers - they not only cram their books with great techojoy, they create vivid societies that result from the technological changes. These books changed the way I looked at technology and its implications.
• Paul Johnson, Birth of the Modern / Intellectuals / Modern Times - Many academic historians give Johnson the cold shoulder. But at least one Academic Historian, my dad, loves him and introduced me. I’d been reading history by the truckload since I left high school, but most of my reading was centered on 1600 and before. Modern Times was the history I should have learned in high school - it is a wonderful tonic for the recieved notions of our recent past. These three books put me on a more conservative path to understanding the world, away from the unfocused quasi-liberalism I had absorbed from my surroundings. Unlike Foseti and Moldbug, I never went through a larval libertarian phase before embracing reaction.  Over time, I developed an appreciation of the flaws of Conservatism, and as soon as I found Moldbug ten years later, went straight to the darkness.
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel - fascinating book. I now think that he went way overboard on the geographical determinism - race and IQ have a huge part to play that Diamond discounts utterly. Still, brilliant work.
• V.D. Hanson, The Soul of Battle - really got me going on classical history for starters, but this book, (and Carnage and Culture, too) is a direct opposite to Diamond. Hanson argues that culture is vastly more important than geography. I noticed also that the “West” while having a constant tradition of freedom and individualism was only occasionally democratic. This was the beginning of my questioning why we associate the former with the latter.
• The Writings of Mencius Moldbug - when I first happened upon Moldbug, it was like coming home. I’d built up, over the previous decade, an understanding of the world that had no explanation. Moldbug gave me a philosophical structure that explained things I had already noticed, and thought about. Still feeling the effects of this one. For one, I still resist giving up the faith of my youth, in the inherent goodness of American republicanism.
• The Catastrophists - I hit this one about the same time that I found Moldbug. I read a book by the sf author James Hogan, Kicking the Sacred Chao which details that author’s scientific heresies. Among them was another look at Velikovsky and Catastrophism. I’d read Velikovsky in high school - my local library had his stuff on the shelves - but I read it like science fiction. Hogan convinced me that at the very least, Velikovsky had been the victim of a colossal hit job by mainstream science and Carl Sagan in particular. Since I already knew Sagan was an asshole, that seemed plausible. I started looking into it more, and have concluded that at least some version of the Catastrophist outline is likely, and that the Plasma Cosmology view of astrophysics is almost certainly true. Complete revolution in my scientific and political worldviews in three years!  Electric Sky by Don Scott and Electric Universe by Talbot and Thornhill are the two most accessible.
• Neal Strauss, The Game - I’d read and enjoyed the evolutionary psychology books for years, but here it was put into practice. Strauss is a wonderful writer, and this is an inherently fascinating topic.

Back in aught four, I attempted to compose a top five list of my favorite science fiction novels. In this, I failed utterly - being unable to get the list down anywhere near the target of five books. As I said then, my list is large, it contains multitudes.

In the intervening six years, I've read a couple more sf novels. One or two. Three at the outside. Some of them deserve a place on the list, and in retrospect, some deserve a kick to the curb.  Hard to imagine, but in 2004, I hadn't discovered Charles Stross, Karl Schroeder, or Peter Watts!  They remain excellent novels, just not on my plus-sized top five list.

You can look at the original list over here.  Of these, I think that Pattern Recognition is out. Likewise Asimov's Pebble in the Sky and Schismatrix. Pastwatch was a late addition, and gets the boot - though it is still one of my favorite alt-history novels, and so does Bring the Jubilee and Lest Darkness Fall. Man in the High Castle will stand in for all alt-history novels because as fun as they are, they are rarely staggering works of genius when it comes to the writing and ideas.

I tried to think about removing some of the books from authors that have more than one title in the list.  I can't.  So that leaves us with:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
Player of Games, by Iain Banks
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Dosadi Experiment, by Frank Herbert
Dune, by Frank Herbert
A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
Cryptonomicon, by Neil Stephenson
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Sundiver, by David Brin
Startide Rising, by David Brin
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Mother of Storms, by John Barnes
Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebroski
Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny
The Greks Bring Gifts, by Murray Leinster
The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clark
Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller
Hyperion Series, by Dan Simmons
The Earth Abides, by George R. Stuart
Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner
Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams
The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith
The Lensman Series, by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Cities in Flight, by James Blish
Tactics of Mistake, by Gordon R. Dickson

And here's my nominations for newly opened spots on the list:

Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross
Ilium/Olympos, by Dan Simmons
Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Permanence, by Karl Schroeder
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

Is on his way to Festung Buckethead and when he gets here, he'll be bringing in his purple velvet bag:

• The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began, by Stuart Clark
• The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, by Edward Luttwak
• Governing for Prosperity, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley
• The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando de Soto
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

And while I was at it, I also pre-ordered:

• A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril An Alternate History, by Peter G. Tsouras
• The Fuller Memorandum (A Laundry Files Novel), by Charles Stross

Rainbow of Blood is a sequel to Britannia's Fist, an alternate history novel where the United States and Britain go to war in the middle of the Civil War - over the British connivance with the Confederates in building armored commerce raiders.  It's somewhat like Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes series, which also had the US and Britain at war, but over the earlier Trent Affair.  Solid historical speculation, and not bad fiction.  Tsouras has edited numerous volumes of alt-history essays, most of which are pretty good.

Charles Stross is one of my favorite sf authors right now.  I just order anything he publishes.  In this case, this is volume three of a really fun series where Cthulhoid monsters meet bureaucracy in the person of a UNIX geek.

Oh, and I got this, in honor of GeekLethal:

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, and thanks Dad for being an enabler for my addiction.

Glommed from GraphJam

Speaking of low-brow humor and memes, this, via an email from my ever-precocious daughter: One definition of "meme", from the always interesting WolframAlpha

The Libertarian / Formalist debate continues over at Aretae and Foseti.  Just start at the top and keep reading.  I've been in meetings all day, and haven't done much more than skim - more updates on this tomorrow.

Kids, I have come into possession of a $75 Amazon gift card.  While I could easily fill this with items from my wishlist, I was wondering if anyone has recommendations.  Read a good book lately?  Let me know.

The deathmarch continues, with new entries from Foseti, Devin and Aretae.   A lot of static seems to be arising out of confusion over terminology.   Good government, strong government, weak government... But what does it all mean? I think we need to back away from the word good. The libertarian (we'll take Aretae as an example) feels that the government that governs least governs best. So, by definition, any government that exists, is bad. Maybe a slight exaggeration. Foseti, Devin, and Formalists feel that weak government is necessarily bad government.   So we mean different things when we say good. Obvious? All of our discussions on this center on three issues - whether a government is competent, whether it is strong, and whether or not it is interventionist. So, a three-axis rating could describe a government in a way we could all agree on; and then we argue over what is most important to the success, failure, or irrelevance of that nation and system.  A competent government makes good choices, does whatever it is charged with doing efficiently and well, and selects good leaders.  A strong government can make choices, enforce order, protect its territory, etc.  An interventionist government is one that sticks its fingers into all the orifices of the public, telling them what and where they can and cannot do things. So, our favorite so far seems to be late 18th Century England. How does it rank? I think we could fairly describe it as on the whole competent, strong and non-interventionist. (Could we replace small/big for interventionist? I don't know if that captures it. But a large government is going to need to do something with its time, and an interventionist-minded gov't is going to get big.) We might describe UK 1760 as a 10,10,0. Its opposite might be USSR 1990 - 0,0,10. Our current USG 2010 is perhaps a 5,5,7 and trending lower on the first two and higher on the last. We can quibble about the rankings if we like, but this would separate the idea of "good" from the other qualities we're discussing. Aretae can admit that a government is strong and competent without admitting immediately that it is good.