June 2010I was going to write about Formalism. I thought that one beer would be relaxing, get me in the mood, as it were. Two beers, it turns out, make me sleepy. I never noticed that before because I usually have one beer, or many, many beers.
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While my wife is away schmoozing with music bidness types for her band, and the boy is in Ohio with Grandma - it's just me and the girls. And since they can be distracted with Dora the Explorer, I actually have a moment to think.
I thought I'd clear out a backlog of interesting stuff I've seen.
Giving women the right to vote really was a bad move:
Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?
Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws. We were also able to deal with questions of causality by taking advantage of the fact that while some states voluntarily adopted suffrage, others where compelled to do so by the Nineteenth Amendment. The conclusion was that suffrage dramatically changed government in both cases. Accordingly, the effects of suffrage we estimate are not reflecting some other factor present in only states that adopted suffrage. [...]
More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes.
Yes, women’s suffrage really did herald the end days of America. The result of giving women the vote has been an ever-increasing nanny state funded on the backs of increasingly sex-dispossessed betas (dispossessed from banging women during their prime years). The elevation of diversity as a moral value and the flooding of the country with incompatible third world immigrants has no doubt been a secondary consequence of suffrage for women, who naturally bring their feminine sensibilities, for better or (more usually) for worse, to the polls. This is why I have argued that the next step in this national devolution toward mindless compassion is the creation of armies of cads. Men want sex, and will do whatever it takes to get it, whether that be good or ill for society.
Hmn.
I'm also thinking about Formalism but more on that later, after I go have a beer.
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My daughter grabbed the basket that the wife was using this morning to pick mountain berries. She put two stuffed animals in it, and told me, "I'm picking cats."
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has a new hobby. And a good one.
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From the Oatmeal, source of all kinds of awesome. Like, Seven Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur off Crack Cocaine. And How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? Or after Kicking a Bear in the Balls? And then there is the mighty, Motherfucking Pterodactyl.
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It's things like this that make me want to agree with Aretae.
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ISS Astronauts, not having any real purpose in furthering our conquest of space, took some time off for photography. Given their privileged vantage point, something like this was bound to come into view eventually.
And that is a pretty amazing something.
Kristian Birkeland, Norwegian physicist and discoverer of the electric currents that bear his name was the first to suggest an electrical explanation for the aurora. He spent months in the far north, in the deep cold observing and measuring the aurora and divining their nature. His theories were for decades ignored in favor of the theories of the English mathematician Sydney Chapman, finally being proven right after the advent of space travel. Birkeland is something of a hero to the plasma cosmology types - he is an archetype for them - brilliant, nominated for the Nobel, dismissed for decades in favor of ideas that were later proved wrong.
The idea that electrical currents connect the various bodies of the Solar System is central to the plasma cosmologist's conception of the universe. Birkeland was the first in the chain. In the write-up for that picture, there's this:
This particular aurora is unique in the sense that it was spotted fairly far away from the South Pole over the southern Indian Ocean, likely as a result of a large ejection of energy that burst from the sun on May 24. The photographer is looking south toward Antarctica, though you can't see the southernmost continent in the photograph.
Interesting, no? We admit that there are electrical phenomena throughout the solar system - Earth and Jupiter's magnetic fields, the braided electrical currents discovered trailing Venus in her orbit, the aurora - seen on many planets, sprites and elves seen above thunderstorms and shooting into space, the coronal mass ejections and numerous other phenomena on and around the sun and their proven effects on Earth - yet there is evidently great resistance to viewing these as a part of a larger, connected whole. Gravity is all.
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Overheard on the Penguins of Madagascar episode my kids were watching a minute ago. Truer words were never spoken.
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Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing has a review of The Upside of Irrationality, The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and At Home. A snip:
...there are sections in which the science of irrationality is readily converted into practical techniques for living better, and these really shine. My favorite is the section on adaptation, that is, the way in which both terrible pain and incredible delights fade down to a kind of baseline normal over time. Ariely points out that adaptation can be slowed or even prevented through intermittent exposure to the underlying stimulus -- that is, if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force.
Here's where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from those things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure -- a great dessert, the delight of furnishing your first real apartment after graduation, a wonderful new relationship -- you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain -- an unpleasant chore, an awful trip -- you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.
This is so true. My mom has successfully managed to do this with books - she is able to read a good book over a period of weeks, parcelling it out into bite sized nibbles. Me, I can't. The better the book, the faster I read it, and - as I've long suspected, I get less enjoyment out of it. I'm better at the miserable experiences, I'll plough right through 'til it's done.
I wonder if the author has any advice for procrastination - once I start a painful job, I'll finish it, but my problem is starting it. The pain of knowing you're avoiding something that needs to be done is real, but it's less in the short term than starting the thing.
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This article in wired describes the efforts of some scientists to grapple with perhaps the biggest problem in modern physics - the total disconnect between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Both are immensely successful theories - tested and confirmed to the limits of accuracy each within their respective domains. Both provide useful theoretical predictions, and in the case of the latter, are the basis for literally the entirety of our modern technology.
Yet, they don't match up. At all. What these intrepid researchers are doing is dropping a Bose-Einstein condensate - a gas so cold that it acts as a single particle, and thus behaves with all the quantum strangeness we've come to know and love. So far, they've just been doing proof-of-concept drops, to reassure themselves that the only thing acting on the condensate in the test capsule is gravity. Soon, though, they hope to start poking at relativity.
What interested me, aside from the general peachy-keenness of the idea, was the implications in terms of the whole plasma cosmology idea. The basic concept that Wal Thornhill, one of the plasma cosmology bigwigs, has outlined is this:
What is Gravity?
Sansbury argues that gravity is due to radially-orientated electrostatic dipoles inside the Earth's atomic nuclei, with the inner pole more positive and the outer pole more negative [36]. The force between any two aligned electrostatic dipoles varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance between them and the combined force of similarly aligned electro-static dipoles over a given surface is squared. The result is that the dipole-dipole force, which varies inversely as the fourth power between colinear dipoles, becomes the familiar inverse square force of gravity for extended bodies. The gravitational and inertial response o f matter can be seen to be due to an identical cause.
Sansbury struggled with a cause for the initial and sustained electrical polarisation within celestial bodies. The initial cause is due to the birth o f stars and planets (see later) in powerful plasma discharge events. Once established, gravity itself provides a weak radial atomic polarisation by drawing the heavy nucleus away from the centre of each atom toward the centre of a planetary body. The resulting radially-orientated dipoles form an electret in the non- conducting minerals of the planet. Surface charge on the planet contributes to the strength of the orientated-dipole electret. This global 'electret' may provide the radial electrostatic field required by Sansbury's model. The electrical model may explain the anomalous gravity readings taken down mineshafts, where Newton's constant, G, was measured to be 1.7 - 3.9% lower than in the laboratory [37]. Rather than invent a 'fifth force' or 'modified Newtonian dynamics' (MOND) [38] to complicate things, it seems we simply need to understand the electrical nature of matter and gravity.
There is another important effect of the orientated-dipole model of the interior of a planet to consider. At some depth where pressure ionisation becomes significant and conductivity increases, charge separation will occur as electrons drift up towards the electret inner boundary. Like charges repel and tend to offset the gravitational compression within celestial bodies. Therefore, changing the surface charge on a celestial body may have a significant orbital effect.
Antigravity?
Conducting metals will shield electric fields. However, the lack of movement of electrons in response to gravity explains why we cannot shield against gravity by simply standing on a metal sheet.
If gravity is an electric dipole force between subatomic particles, it is clear that the force 'daisy chains' its way through matter, regardless of whether it is conducting or non- conducting. Sansbury explains:... electrostatic dipoles within all atomic nuclei are very small but all have a common orientation. Hence their effect on a conductive piece of metal is less to pull the free electrons in the metal to one side toward the center of the earth but to equally attract the similarly oriented electrostatic dipoles inside the nuclei and free electrons of the conductive piece of metal. '[40]
This offers a clue to the reported 'gravity shielding' effects of a spinning, super-conducting disc [41]. Electrons in a superconductor exhibit a 'connectedness', which means that their inertia is increased. Anything that interferes with the ability of the subatomic particles within the spinning disc to align their gravitationally induced dipoles with those of the Earth will exhibit antigravity effects.
Despite a number of experiments demonstrating anti-gravity effects, no-one has been able to convince scientists attached to the theory of general relativity that they have been able to modify gravity. This seems to be a case of turning a blind eye to unwelcome evidence. Support for antigravity implicitly undermines Einstein's theory [42].'Instantaneous' Gravity
A significant fact, usually overlooked, is that Newton's law of gravity does not involve time. This raises problems for any conventional application of electromagnetic theory to the gravitational force between two bodies in space, since electromagnetic signals are restricted to the speed of light. Gravity must act instantly for the planets to orbit the Sun in a stable fashion. If the Earth were attracted to where the Sun appears in the sky, it would be orbiting a large empty space, because the Sun moves on in the 8.3 minutes it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth. If gravity operated at the speed of light, all planets would experience a torque that would sling them out of the solar system in a few thousand years. Clearly, that doesn't happen. This supports the view that the electric force operates at a near infinite speed on our cosmic scale, as it must inside the electron [43]. It is a significant simplification of all of the tortuous theorising that has gone into the nature of gravity and mass and I believe Einstein's postulates to be wrong [44]. Matter has no effect on empty space. Space is 3- dimensional - something our senses tell us. There is a universal clock, so time travel and variable aging is impossible - something that commonsense has always told us - but most important, the universe is connected and coherent.
If all that, or something like it is true, poking at the quantum behavior of elements in free fall could shed some light. I'd be interested to see if differently charged condensates behaved differently - especially considering that since they're acting as a single particle, that dipole effect might not apply, or not in the same way.
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It's amazing how these women think they can get away with anything.
Hey, wait a minute, maybe I should call the police, too...
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Just because I've always loved it, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong advertisement:
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- Information, Information, Information !
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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.
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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.
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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
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Is on his way to Festung Buckethead and when he gets here, he'll be bringing in his purple velvet bag:
And while I was at it, I also pre-ordered:
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Over at Aretae, the debate continues. Finbarr and Foseti are arguing the Formalist/Moldbug case, and Aretae the Libertarian. I have to say, this is some of the best debate I've seen on the web. This is how it should be - people trying to make clear arguments, without making recourse to emotion, or straw men. This, in other words, is fun.
I haven't had a chance to read thoroughly and weigh in on it all, but I will as soon as I have a moment.
In chronological order, here's the stuff:
I enjoin you to read it. And the comments. There'll be a test. And while you're at it, go ahead and read Germania and Finbarr's response, The Tribal Origins of Totalitarianism.
on
| § 0
I've mentioned a couple times that I think modern cosmology is a little addlepated. Here is a classic example of why I think this:
IT'S the ultimate sleeper agent. An energy field lurking inactive since the big bang might now be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein's equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent "dark energy" of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.
To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence. This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein's equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.
120 orders of magnitude is indeed a daunting discrepancy. Like how they almost slipped that by you? Now, if your predicted and observed values are in the ballpark - say, within a standard deviation - you might think you've got it nailed. If your predictions are on the close order of your observed results, well, you might be on to something, but the theory might need some work.
If you're off by a factor of 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. There's another word for the relation between your predictions and the real world. Nonewhatsofuckingever. You're wrong, start over. Don't try and wedgie your theory to overcome that sort of gap. If you were aiming at a man-sized target at a range of fifty yards with that sort of accuracy you'd hit the fucking Andromeda galaxy, and I think I'm underestimating the effect of that many zeroes.
Seriously.
[wik] I hope that the journo who wrote that got the number wrong, or was picking his nose when all this was explained to him. 'Cause 120 orders of magnitude is huge. Huge.
on
| § 2
Found this on Foseti. It's like reading Joyce's Ulysses, but without the comforting assurance of generations of fey English majors that what you are reading is indeed a classic of western literature, no matter how little sense it's making to you as you read.
Start here, if anywhere. And here's a sort of concordance/glossary that may help you understand what you are reading. Or may not. I don't know if I do, but it's fun trying to imagine that I do. There does seem to be something behind the mangled spelling and odd terminology. Whether that something is good, I don't know. I hope he's not typing this in software that has spell-checking, because otherwise the red squigglies would blind him.
From "i luvs you allls o ye of little faith"
to all the spinsters with cats
who teh fed tricked into spinsterhood/serving debt lxolllozlzl
to all the fanboys in ther single mom’s basements
whose dads they never knew because the fed tookawy fatehrhood lzozlzl
to all the broken familes
who were split up by the need to make two salaries to feed the kids
to all aging necon womenz celeberating secretive tapings of butthex without teh girlths conthent lzozllzlzozlzl they tircked you too
to all the spinster chix again i am sorry they sdesouled you
in asscokcing sessins drugged you up on prozac
told you to abort your kids no wonder your’re d[pressed and all fucjked up no lozlzlzlzling here
my heart goes out to you while tucker max & goldman sax laugh zlzolzlzl
too all the aborted fetushes we ask for forgiveness we deserve not and to all those tricked into aborting the gift of life lzozllzllzl we forgive u too and pray for teh fethuses, but not in school as prayer is illegal in school lozlzllzlz
[wik] One of GBFM's favorite word is butthex. But it's not pronounced butt-hex. You are asked to imagine that Barney Frank is saying it - something more like but-thex.
[alsø wik] Not really germane, but considering what I just linked, who the fuck cares? GBFM uses a the pure quill variant of the Hemingway Black WordPress theme that once powered perfidy before we cleaned house and moved to this new, Buckethead-designed theme.
[alsø wik] I don't think we've ever had a more appropriate use of the 'deranged scribblings' category here on perfidy.
[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] I just noticed that there is a post at GBFM entitled, 'how the federal reserve system created the PUA community lzozlzlzloozlzllzll!! they DO NO wan t the men to read mises or hayek or jefferson or the us constitution lzozlzlzlz they want to keep the men in the fiat masters’ cave — the fiat butthex matrix — “gaming” and fighting over the table scraps of all the desoulaed, haggaard, std-ridden, vicious, gold-digging, cold, defeminized, prozac-addled womenz the fiat masters buttthexed and deosuled in college during teh primae nocate ceremeonies, instead of manning up and fighting for their dvine irght to something far greater — an honorable, virtuous wife. lzozllzllzllzozzlz' - I believe I'll save that one for lunch tomorrow.
on
| § 3
A trio of excellent posts have examined the role and status of Dugout Doug, aka General Douglas MacArthur. Foseti starts off with a review of "American Caesar" and then Isegoria and Joseph Fouche chime in. The latter two are a little less convinced of MacArthur's greatness than Foseti.
Over on those three posts, you'll get a deluge of information about MacArthur, all factually accurate and fascinating. While I am dubious of MacArthur's Alexandrine brilliance, I will fully grant Foseti's point that his role as proconsul in Japan was near genius, perfectly executed, and of long-term significance. And he is certainly not the worst American general - Foseti names Mark Clark in WWII, and I could add Bradley and others to the list. But to get to the worst American commander, you'd probably have to look back to the Civil War, where Union generals in the early phases of the war (the first two years, mostly, but some lasted much longer) were frighteningly incompetent, or administrative geniuses totally lacking in a martial spirit. Ambrose Burnside and George McClellan are the two exemplars of each type. Even the better Union commanders were noticeably flawed - Meade, Hooker, and the like lost their nerve at key points.
My view is that the greatest American general of the Second World War was undoubtedly Patton. Three times Patton broke free, and started making huge advances against the Germans - and each time, he was reined in and forced to slow his advance. And each time he did, the Germans were able to dig in and the whole process had to be repeated. The Third Army advanced further, and captured more German soldiers than any other element of the European war. Had Patton been given operational freedom, I believe he would have been across the Rhine in October '44 at the latest. Hell, the rumor of his command of an army of invasion aimed at Calais was one of the factors that kept German forces concentrated out of Normandy.
Bradley defenders will generally argue that the hard facts of logistics are what led to Patton's leash being yanked. That's true to an extent, but resources were diverted from Patton's rapidly advancing formations to units that units that were not achieving similar success, or in fact were stationary. And then you have the whole Market Garden disaster. I think Montgomery and MacArthur have a lot in common, and not the good stuff.
It's inarguable that Patton and MacArthur shared the view, "I am the greatest general now living." MacArthur's lauded island hopping strategy resulted in a slow slog through strategically unimportant territory. At the operational level, his strategy resulted in brutal frontal assaults against prepared positions. Where he was most successful, it was the result of his enemy being isolated or starved into ineffectiveness by the efforts of his real rivals, the US Navy. The signal victories of the Pacific Campaign are mostly owned by the Navy - which is to be expected, they don't call it the Pacific Campaign for nothing. But the significant land victories were most often won by the Marines. (A Marine friend of mine said that MacArthur designed his strategy to kill Marines.)
And on top of that, MacArthur was fighting the Imperial Army. Of the Japanese Army and Navy, it's clear that the Navy got most of the brains in the family. The Japanese never did figure out how to kill an American soldier without losing ten of his own. I don't think anyone would rank the Imperial Army even in the top ten of the 20th Century. Maybe in the top ten of WWII.
Patton, on the other hand was up against what is widely regarded to be one of the best armies of modern times. The Wehrmacht was better trained, better equipped, and better led at the lower levels than the Americans could hope to match. They were often fighting from prepared positions, and had the advantage of interior lines and better logistics. What the Americans had was air support, and Patton.
Yet, over and over, Patton forced them out of their positions and onto the tun. I think that Patton has a much stronger claim to being right.
[wik] I'd say that the three greatest generals in American history are, more or less in order, Sherman, Patton, Stonewall Jackson. They are the best of the best of the best. Other candidates for rounding out a top five would be Winfield Scott, Lee, Grant, and Washington.
on
| § 6
It's been about a year and a half since I last posted anything at all on Perfidy, and even longer since I posted anything of substance.
The fact is, I just haven't been all that evil recently, and certainly not discriminating. What I have been doing is writing up a storm. In the last 18+ months I have, in no particular order, completed three novels, landed an agent, had said agent retire only days before I was going to fire her anyway, and in turn landed a remarkable pair of agents who are doing their damndest to sell my stuff. I've also refurbished my author website - twice - and relocated my webcomic so everything is now in one easy-to-find package on www.ianthealy.com. It's hands-down the best place to keep track of what I'm doing and to watch the cavalcade of guest stars as they parade through every Saturday (you fellow Ministers are encouraged to submit something should you wish to do so).
So with that brief update on my insanity, I shall return to work on my latest project, a slipstream inspired by such oddness as Six String Samurai, Circuitry Man, and The Bible. The title, I hope, says it all: Hope and Undead Elvis at the End of the World.
Yeah, it's like that.
on
| § 0
Sure, men were a good idea. They were a good idea when the world needed immature, aggressive, reckless, “overemotional” brutes who could hunt and plow.
Describing men, in opposition to women, as "overemotional" is new to me. I've been somewhat insulated from the effects described in the post I linked - working in IT. IT remains a predominantly male preserve.
Would it be completely un-PC of me to note that we've seen a drastic decline in innovation in nearly all fields, over the period that women have increased their role in the workplace, save only in the two fields that have not seen a vast influx of women?
Maybe "immature, agressive, reckless, 'overemotional' brutes have some value that isn't currently recognized by the leading lights of our culture. In fact, maybe if we rephrased that description to, "confident, assertive, daring, passionate men" we'd see more of it. One (among many) of the reasons that we've decided to homeschool is the treatment of boys in the public schools - whenever a boy acts like a boy, they generally get prescribed ritalin, and they are indoctrinated into viewing their own nature as "immature, aggressive, reckless, 'overemotional' brutes. I have no brief against women in the workplace, but not at the cost of training boys not to be men.
And while I'm on about it, a little emotional stoicism would likely do us all a lot of good. Except for Jerry Springer and Oprah. A rebirth of emotional stoicism would kill them.
on
| § 0
I thought I'd share that. And this, which I just ordered as my bday present to myself:
A small wallet from Saddleback Leather Co. It's got a 100 year warranty. Their stuff looks pretty awesome, though I don't think I'll be dropping $300 for the satchel - much as I'd like to - anytime soon.
My other birthday present will be this, in about a week and a half. But you probably could have guessed that.
on
| § 5
It figures that I would finally get around to blogging about Anti-Democracy, Reaction, and allied topics, and Moldbug would stop blogging for a month and a half. So it seems that I have no recourse but to point at old Moldbug material.
I've already mentioned a couple - the open letter series, for starters. Another interesting series, equally long, is the Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations (in my head, I can't help but think Unreserved Qualifications. Maybe Moldbug brings out my inner dyslexia.) If you want a convenient gateway into the prolix thought of Moldbug, some dude created a table of contents for UR, with all the posts organized into categories, with handy links to the books that Moldbug references in his posts.
So there's that.
One of the things that really caught my eye, and imagination, was his claim to be a Jacobite. MM seems to have become bored by this idea, he hasn't mentioned it in a while. But a while back, he had this to say:
I suggest a Stuart restoration in an independent England. Through some beautiful twist of fate, the Stuart succession has become entangled with the House of Liechtenstein, who just happen to be the last working royal family in Europe. The father-son team of Hans-Adam II and Hereditary Prince Alois are not decorative abstractions. They are effectively the CEOs of Lichtenstein, which is a small country but a real one nonetheless. As you'll see if you read the links, the last "reform" in Lichtenstein actually increased the royal executive power. Take that, 20th century!
And Prince Alois's son, 13-year-old Prince Joseph Wenzel, just happens to be the legitimate heir to the Stuart throne - illegally overthrown in a coup based on the notorious warming-pan legend. Therefore, the structure of a restoration is obvious. The Hanoverians have failed. They have become decorative pseudo-monarchs. And as for the system of government that has grown up under them, it makes Richard Cromwell look like a smashing success. Restore the Stuarts under King Joseph I, with Prince Alois as regent, and the problem is solved.
Unrealistic? Au contraire, mon frere. What is unrealistic is "a sense of purpose as a nation, a uniting ethos which will restore our sense of pride..." Frankly, England does not deserve pride. It has gone to the dogs, and that may be an insult to dogs. If England is to restore its sense of pride, it needs to start with its sense of shame. And the first thing it should be ashamed of its the pathetic excuse for a government that afflicts it at present, and will afflict it for the indefinite future until something drastic is done.
For example, according to official statistics, between 1900 and 1992 the crime rate in Great Britain, indictable offenses per capita known to the police, increased by a factor of 46. That's not 46%. Oh, no. That's 4600%. Many of the offenders having been imported specially, to make England brighter and more colorful. This isn't a government. It's a crime syndicate.
Ideally a Stuart restoration would happen on much the same conditions as the restoration of Charles II, except perhaps with an extra caveat: a total lustration of the present administration. It has not partly, sort of, kind of, maybe, failed. It has failed utterly, irrevocably, disastrously and terminally.
Therefore, the entire present regime, politicians and civil servants and quangocrats and all, except for essential security and technical personnel, should be retired on full pay and barred from any future official employment. Why pick nits? The private sector is full of competent managers. You can import them from America if you need. Don't make the mistake of trying to sweep out the Augean stables. Just apply the river. (If a concession must be made to modern mores, however, I think this time around there is no need to hang any corpses.)
Now isn't that fun? When Prince Joseph becomes ruler of Liechtenstein, he will be the first heir of the Stuarts to be since James II to be ruler of an actual country. A small country, to be sure, but a real one. Interesting too, is that before the Stuart line stopped claiming the title of King, they always claimed to be Kings of England, Scotland, Ireland and France.
I've read a couple sf novels that involve the Stuarts scheming to regain the throne, maybe we need another one, set in the current day - though it'd be an odd set of circumstances that could possibly lead to young Prince Joseph claiming his rightful throne of England. And I don't think Liechtenstein is about to invade across the channel.
Still - there is something about monarchy that exerts a fascination upon the mind, maybe even especially the American mind. The evolutionary psychologist angle would imply that there is something in us that responds to things like kings. I think it's possible that the key difference between a modern dictatorship and a older style divine right monarchy is not just in the attitude of the autocrat, but in the culture of legitimacy that supports a kingdom in a manner that no dictatorship can ever expect.
on
| § 0
NYTimes' Kristof: A Modest Proposal: A King and Queen for America
Well, hot damn with whip cream! Did I ever jump on the right boat. I admit, somewhat shamfacedly, that I don't dig this whole democracy thing, and just days later the NYTimes is calling for the installation of a monarchy. Do I have timing or what?
Wait, they didn't mean it like I thought they meant it.
It turns out that Mr. Kristof is calling not for a Stuart Restoration as I had hoped, but rather for finding some dope to take Prince Charles' job of walking around cutting ribbon and looking like a doofus. The point of this, apparently, would be to free President Obama from all the tiresome ceremonial duties of his job and focus on gettin' shit done. Like, you know, talking to the CEO of BP about the oil spill and stuff.
A figurehead head of state is a nifty foreign policy tool as well. President Obama has twice had to delay his trip to Indonesia and Australia because of the press of domestic policy, but an American king and queen could spend days greeting crowds and cutting ribbons at new schools. And when they aren’t traveling, our king and queen could be kept busy hosting state dinners five nights a week.
Some folks complain that it’s silly to fret that Mr. Obama doesn’t emote. Of course, it is. It’s farcical that we have bullied our president into trash-talking on television about kicking some you know what.
One of the things I admire about this administration is its cerebral, no-drama emphasis on empirical evidence in addressing issues such as health, education and poverty. This is government by adults, by engineers rather than by dramatists.
But Mr. Obama also knows that drama and emotion are the fuel of American politics, and that’s why he’s struggling to feign fury.
As Stephen Colbert observed about the oil spill: “We know if this was Reagan, he would have stripped to his skivvies, put a knife in his teeth, gone down there and punched that oil well shut!”
That's obviously incorrect. Reagan would have asked Chuck Norris to swim down and punch the oil well shut, and Chuck Norris wouldn't need a knife. Chuck Norris might roundhouse kick the leak, or just glare at it - that's a stylistic issue solely up to Chuck Norris' discretion. But you know that well will stop.
The monarchy in England is expensive. And embarrassing. Why would we want that? Why spend billions of dollars a year for a mook like Charles, his cringe-inducing siblings, and the pleasure of watching a pathetic reality show funded on your dime. Let's let the networks pay the bills, please.
No, if you're going to get a monarch, let's us do it right. A milquetoast, emasculated semi-monarch is not the answer. The answer is a kick ass monarch. Someone who can speak truth to power because he is, uh, power. Someone like this.
And that gets us to this, a thread over at Aretae's where Devin Finbarr was schooling me on being a total wuss about reaction. Here I was, being cautious, and worrying about some possible ill effects - it turns out I was worrying about the wrong effects:
Devin's responding to my earlier comment, here:
[quoting me] My problem with neocameralism as Moldbug goes on with it is that while ideally we'd want Steve Jobs or the like - competent, visionary, minimalist in how he runs Apple - we might get the CEO of Microsoft, or GM. In fact, the latter seems more likely. [end quote]
The management of even GM far exceeds the management of the U.S. government. While many corporations stagnate or fail, they actually have a much harder problem. Microsoft needs to constantly run just to stand still. Maintaining market share/profits requires constant innovation, which is not easy at all.
A government basically needs to keep order, enforce rule of law, maintain a stable currency/business climate, and that's it. A government does not need to innovate (except perhaps in military matters) - it can delegate that to the private sector.
But the U.S. government(s) is increasingly failing to enforce basic rule of law. No corporation has ever destroyed its capital as the American cities did in the 1970's. Almost no corporation manages to turn an operating loss on real estate.
[quoting me] Of course the problem of hereditary monarchy is an issue too - what if the son is an idiot? Elective monarchy might be better, until you get to a point where you have competing claimants to the throne. [end quote]
Elective monarchy is cool, but the trick is to make sure that the elections do not devolve into politics. Once there are parties, competing factions, feedback loops between campaign promises and the results of power, then you're right back where were are now.
As you can see, Devin's thought about this a bit. The next exchange goes a bit further. I commented:
Valid point - the gubmint's job should be easier. You still have the problem of relative bad management - look at North Korea. Almost no corporation - but not to say none. Of course no system will prevent gross stupidity.
The one thing that got me about the Neocameralist proposal was that with the shareholders and choosing a CEO, it seemed as if Moldbug had just created a very odd sort of democracy, not anything really different. Because if the board can remove the ceo for incompetence, you're right back at politics - same as with an elective monarchy, but worse.
And Devin comes back with:
Shareholder voting is majorly different from democracy.
First, the votes are weighted by the number of shares owned. The typical rich, large shareholder is far smarter and competent than the average American. So right off the bat that's an improvement.
But the most important difference is that there is total alignment of goals. The question of how to grow the pie is totally separate from the question of how to divide the pie.
In democratic debates questions of how to grow the pie and divide the pie are mixed. For example the healthcare bill partly dealt with how to make the system better for everyone, and partly with dealing goodies (the mandate as a giveaway to insurance companies, the subsidies as a giveaway to the Democratic base, etc). Political parties constantly support policies that will actually shrink the pie overall, if it increases the portion for their own side (see again, the healthcare bill). Even worse, they will couch their arguments for changing the division of pie in terms of growing the pie. For example, the democrats have argued that subsidies would save money because people would no longer use emergency room. The parties will actually believe their own myths, and both parties will become utterly delusional about how to actually grow the pie.
And worst of all, the fights over dividing the pie generate an enormous amount of antagonism. The parties polarize and begin to hate each other.
Shareholder ownership fixes the "divide the problem problem" by fixing shares outright. And then distribute all benefits of the company in straight up cash. If you distribute benefits as in kind benefits (imagine starbucks issuing shareholders dividends in lattes), then that will not benefit all shareholders equally, and thus will cause conflict.
Once the shares are fixed, everyone in the company has the same goal - increase the share price.
When I joined my current company I had a month of somewhat stressful negotiation over my stock options. But once that was done, and the contract signed, my interests were very well aligned with management. As a result, a company of 150 people all work together as a team with one unified goal.
That said, shareholder management for a sovereign has a number of problems. These problems stem from the fact that there is no external authority to enforce the companies contracts. Potential problems:
a) how do you enforce minority shareholder rights?
b) how do you keep management from stealing the company from the shareholders?
c) how do you prevent the military from stealing the company from the shareholders?
d) how do you prevent the sovereign from engaging in for-profit activities that are morally repugnant? (for example, going on slaving expeditions, breeding slave children in incubators, liquidating residents who were unable to support themselves)
Well those could be issues. At least now I have the right issues. And those issues are real ones, and I think that there is little way that you could formally - by means of institutions or laws - prevent them. The only way to keep these gremlins at bay is culture. There is nothing material preventing the US Marines and their little helpers in the other services from jacking the entire US Government with M1A2 Abrams tanks and sheer ballsiness. Except for the culture that makes something like that unthinkable. I think the reason we have no coups here, or generally in the anglosphere is simply that, along with (nod to Aretae) the economic growth that makes things happy for many people, most of the time. Of course, the two are related.
We have a culture that on the whole prizes order, and peaceful resolution of differences. If we, miraculously, had a Stuart Restoration here in the US tomorrow, that fact more than anything would prevent c) so long as the restoration was legitimate (result of a plebiscite, or the like.) Our culture also holds certain things to be reprehensible. Some of these things actually are reprehensible, others less so - but I think that no king, any more than any president, could maintain the legitimacy that upholds their rule if they violated key precepts of the local give me money culture. This would likely take care of d) and any incubator babies and smoking in bars in the capitol city. It would also militate against a), though to what extent I'm unsure.
The real problem is b) - but since that's the problem we already have, I don't see how you could use that to argue against a reactionary solution.
As Devin pointed out elsewhere, we educate our young to be good democrats. We could equally educate them to be good monarchists. The key in any transition would be to set good precedents, and build the cultural institutions that would support the new order over time - much as Washington did in the early days of the Republic.
Not that that transition is imminent.
Read the whole thread, it's kind of a primer on Formalist/Moldbuggian ideas.
on
| § 2
Some years ago, before I had kids, Mrs. Buckethead and I used to have fun. We'd go out and see bands play. We'd drink and laugh. We saw our friends. Sigh.
Where was I? Back about a decade ago, shortly after we moved to DC, we were taking in a show at the Iota, (probably my favorite venue in the area) and the headlining was Mount Pilot, an alt-country, bluegrass, blues-rock, country gospel band out of Chicago. Their live performance blew me away; fantastic playing and incredible energy.
I was so impressed, I bought the album.
That album - Help Wanted, Love Needed, Caretaker - has been one of my favorites for the last decade. But something like my curse on tv shows I like seemed to be operating that night, and the band split up shortly after. I knew of a second album - their second, self-titled release; but never could I find it, despite having the awesome power of the internet at my command.
Until yesterday, that is. Every year or so, I look to see if the disc is for sale anywhere, typically a futile and frustrating endeavor. But late last night I saw the disc for sale through the good graces of Amazon and the ill-named 2DollarMusic. Add to cart? Yes! The magical disc will arrive sometime between now and July 1st. (I appreciate an online retailer with that level of precision.)
I'm all a-tingle. My ten year quest will soon be over. Now, I'll be free to resume my plans to take over the world.
[wik] I was talking with Patton the other day about The Hickories, another alt-country band whose base player was an ex-blogger and friend of Perfidy Phil Dennison. Their stuff is available on iTunes and CDBaby. Well worth a listen. I wonder what Phil is up to?
on
| § 2
Scalzi's AMC column talks about coolest rides in sf moviedom. He opines that the speeder bike from Return of the Jedi is the sweetest ride evah. I have to agree. When I was eight, the landspeeder was the coolest, but that was only because I hadn't seen the speeder bike.
Despite the many flaws of episodes 1 , 2, 3, and 6, the series as a whole has some of the sickest gear in sf, movies or books. My morning commute into our nation's capitol would be significantly more tolerable if I could motor down the HOV lanes in a speeder bike. So, unlike a lot of sf gear, there's actually a use case for the speeder bike despite it's lack of seat belts.
Any spaceship would of course be cool. Assuming you could keep it away from the government. A blaster would be about as useful as the guns I already have, but probably not a lot more so. An artificial intelligence, secreted away in a small jewel box? That could be handy, provided it was friendly. Make a run at the stock market. Set myself as up as a new delphic oracle or something. R2D2 could mix drinks and vacuum the house. But without the larger world that gives these gadgets context, a lot of them aren't going to be much more than conversation starters.
The single coolest, though - perched in solitary magnificent coolness atop a mountain of cool, looking down at lesser things huddled in the steaming jungles below - is the light saber. Despite its manifest awesomeness, for our world, there's probably no more useless sf gadget. I know, that even if a UFO landed and the little green man handed me one tomorrow, I'd have no earthly use for one. I'm not a Jedi. There aren't any Sith lords locally that I'm aware of. I'd probably slice my own arm off. It might make a decent flashlight.
But damn me if I wouldn't just sit on the couch, and turn it on and off. Wave it around. Listen to the hum.
Maybe I'd cut some firewood with it.
on
| § 4
I subscribe to Slickdeals - it's an rss feed that gives me links to user-located internet shopping deals. Moderately useful. By combining slickdeals and consumer reports, I located a very nice, very large tv for a quite reasonable price. So this morning, I saw this in my feed:
I've not the slightest clue wtf a compound action bypass lopper is, yet I feel compelled to order one. I don't even want to find out what it is. That would just spoil it.
on
| § 0
By way of Boing Boing, we find this absolutely delightful post: Couch Cushion Architecture; A Critical Analysis.
This example, from the middle of the second page, most closely resembles the typical couch cushion fort assembled in Festung Buckethead on a weekly basis:
Drawing from the saw-tooth roof structures of industrial Europe, the orthogonal volume cleverly employs a swing hinge access door, popularized by the mid-century modern masters. Grade: B+
Given the materials at hand, that's usually the best that gets built. Not that the boy (now 7) doesn't occasionally get more ambitious. However, hubris has the same tragic end in our house as it did in ancient Greece - the boy's younger sisters are every ready to follow the the poet:
Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius
By subtly undermining his efforts, first through work slow-downs and general intransigence, later through competing projects requiring the same materials he needs for his fort (and requiring parental adjudication of resource allocation) the boy becomes increasingly frustrated. Still, he perseveres. Over time, and by overcoming great obstacles, the fort is completed. He has attained to a fragile, precarious sort of satisfaction.
And that's when his sisters really go after him hammer and tongs. They demand equal use of the fort. Once in the fort, they refuse him entry. If he makes a secondary entrance, they'll destroy the first. Fixing that, he'll start to notice problems with the roof. Lifting up a roof cushion to readjust its fit and finish, the girls will kick out the support. They'll steal the blanket that acts as a sort of glue to keep the cushions in place. They fill the interior with stuffed animals. And then, they've dashed it all to pieces.
He comes to me, and presents his litany of fully justified complaints.
And then I tell the boy to stop whining. Because whining is for pussies.
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Over at Aretae, another post is getting some good comments - Devin Finbarr seems to have a bit of teh smarts. He mentions that he's working on a draft summary of Formalist/Moldbug ideas, you can see it here, it's worth a look.
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I mention the Bilderbergers in a post, and on the same day, an article about same appears on Drudge. It must be a conspiracy or something. My mustache is all a-twirl.
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Aretae had a post up earlier today, and another yesterday, that hit right at what I've been thinking about. The one thing that holds me back from going full hog Moldbug is just the idea of Freedom. Moldbug would likely say that I'm just confused - that without order, you can't have liberty. And I can see that. Anarchy is not freedom, it's a free-for-all. "What is good?" someone famously asked. Is it better to be able to do whatever you please, or to have a peaceful and ordered society that allows you a maximum, if not theoretically absolute degree of liberty? Does having the vote magically make us free? Clearly not and I think that that points out a key confusion in our modern estimations of freedom, liberty, authority and the like.
Now I know Johno thinks I hate his Freedom, but I think it might be a case of that word not meaning exactly what we think it means. Do we feel more free because we have the right of franchise - does this give us some sort of idea that we are involved somehow in the direction of our ship of state? I think yes to the former, but only to the extent that the latter is operational. We voted, we did our part, and we are satisfied for the next four years no matter what sort of horrific actions are taken in our name - be they the passing of a universal healthcare bill or starting a land war in Asia. That keeps us complacent while dark forces align against us. The permanent civil service bureaucracy, academia, the vast right wing conspiracy, corporate interests, the Bilderbergers.
True liberty is vanishingly absent. I cannot put in a light fixture without paying a $250 fee and filing plans with my county. I can't light up a smoke in a bar after work. I can't have my son sit in the front seat of my car. I can't kill any of the hundreds of deer that wander through my woods. I can't start a business without navigating a frightening wicket of regulations and tax laws. I can't, I can't... Most of these restrictions would be anathema to our founding fathers, who basically started a whole damn war over the equivalent of a postage stamp fee.
So, yeah, I'm on board with the libertarian liberty thingy. Free up everything so we can have that mad economic growth. But how does that society run itself? How does it not encrust itself with all the things we hate, or get invaded by heavily armed agrarian reformers? What if there's a dispute between my private security firm and yours? Do they select champions and let God favor the right?
And really, is liberty everything we need? Equality, I think we have a surfeit of. Fraternity is doing fine, seeing as I'm an only child. What perhaps we are lacking is tradition and order. Look at large parts of our nation's capital and ask yourself if liberty and equality are more important than order. A while back, Aretae had a post about how traditional, conventional wisdom is going to be most right, most of the time, for most people.
In the comments to one of Aretae's posts that I linked up there at the top, I commented:
I'm torn. On the one hand, your defense of libertarianism is righteous and strong. On the other, Moldbug's got history at his back.
Something you said a while back in regard to traditional advice is going to be best for most people, moist of the time has been crouching in the back of my mind, waiting. Could it be, that while the our desired end state is something like what you are advocating - minimal government interference, economic growth, unicorns - requires something more? That the place of a king who is not a dictator is to provide the traditional bulwark for libertarian wackiness?
Back in the late 1700s, as you've argued, we had freedom that was unprecedented, in an intelligent populace largely isolated from danger. This resulted in the growth! growth! growth! that you go on about. It seems that our current system, can't maintain its current vector without running into something ugly sooner or later. We've layered and slathered it with all sorts of things that you, I and Moldbug can all agree are very bad indeed.
The problem with libertarianism for me hasn't been the economics - that, to me, is or should be fairly self evident. But the idea of private security companies does not fill me with joy, exactly. And other like problems. Why not have a king? It would provide something more than an abstraction for the ordinary run of citizen to latch on to, provide a framework of tradition that would provide maximal outcomes for most everyone. We'd have pageantry. Which isn't crucial, but hey, shiny! And still freedom, the "Rights of Englishmen."
To have a monarch that was concerned with foreign relations, maintaining a justice system (with jury nullification, to be sure) and maximizing his profit by creating as close to an ideal business climate, well that would be cool. If someone created a floating Atlantis a la Stephenson's Diamond Age, I'd likely want to move there.
What is lacking, though, is a populace with traditions of living in a society of that sort, the kind that is very aware of their rights as Englishmen even though they do not, and likely never would have the right to vote.
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A couple years ago, I ran across - I can't remember how - a peculiar website. Unqualified Reservations is a reactionary anti-democracy advocacy site. It's pseudonymous (I hope, for it would require some truly cruel parents to be otherwise) author Mencius Moldbug argues at great length that our current system of government is irretrievably broken, and that our only hope is a complete do-over. And that when we start over, we should be leaving all the democracy business behind us.
Well, that sounds weird, doesn't it? One's natural instinct is to judge the author mad, and go about one's affairs. But if you dig in a bit, you see that there are two aspects to his voluminous writings. (Those who remember fondly the USS Clueless will not be staggered by their length. But everyone else will.) The first aspect is an incisive critique of what we have right now. The second is a prescription for what we should replace it with, and how. In the first, I find myself more or less completely convinced. The second - I have issues with.
In the time since I first happened upon UR and Moldbuggianism, I've read his entire archives. Which is a metric buttload of stuff, to be sure. Without a whole lot of exaggeration, I can say that it had a serious impact on how I view the world. This may sound cheap - but one of the reasons I've not posted much over the last couple years is that I can't comment on anything related to current affairs without thinking about Moldbug, and I wasn't quite ready to out myself as an anti-democracy reactionary. But I guess that time has come. And I find myself surprised at how much I've resisted actually admitting that, even on a little-read blog with a single digit audience.
In my discussions with intelligent and well-informed individuals over the last decade or so, I often found myself looking at problems, arguing about solutions with a distinct sense that something was missing. While I am temperamentally conservative, I guess, I as often found myself attacking conservatives as liberals. Some cases could be explained away as those politicians or pundits failing to live up to conservative ideals. Or they were idiots. Or they were just politicians of whom i shouldn't be expecting anything. Or in the case of George Bush, some would say all three. Railing against all sides of the political spectrum makes you either a libertarian, I conspiracy nut, or just bitter and confused. I was trending toward the latter, with dalliances in the other two.
I felt that there should be a unifying explanation for everything I hated. A grand unified theory of hate. The whole process was similar to what I went through with dark matter and cosmology, and like then, I found an answer.
Back a couple months ago, I went looking for people who were commenting on Moldbug in an intelligent way, and I do believe I hit the jackpot in finding Aretae, Isegoria and Foseti. (I've been reading them, and dropping a few comments here and there, for a couple weeks now, and I recommend them highly.)
To them, most of what I'm about to say is old hat. Perhaps they can add some thoughts. This is for my fellow Perfidians, and my reader. (Hi Bram!)
Okay, how to summarize Moldbug? The dude has written probably a million words in the last four years. But, thanks to the magic of the internets, we have this: Condensed Moldbuggery. And you can start where I started with "How I Stopped Believing in Democracy" or dive into the first part (of 12!) of "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" The basic idea though, is that progressivism is a cancer, descended from universalist protestantism and metastasized into a number of horrific tumors including Nazism, Communism and the US Government. Along the way, he demolishes modern conservatism, takes swipes at libertarianism, and sings the praises of people we've largely forgotten, like the nineteenth century historian Thomas Carlyle.
It's hard to digest in one lump. But his critique of what we have before us is, I think, spot on. It gives us reasons for why the left acts like a religion. Because it is. It gives us a hint as to why conservatism fails, utterly, at most things it tries to do. Because, for one, it is merely warmed over thirty year old progressivism fighting against current progressivism. And for another, it fails to understand what it is. It survives because the dominant religion needs heretics, and because it is a home for traditionalists who don't like change. It explains why the State Department behaves so oddly, why the military is not allowed to win, and any number of other things.
The short of it is that a reactionary believes that the real struggle is between order and chaos. Modern progressives are, at heart, anarchists and the enemy of civilization. True liberty can only occur after order has been secured - the emergent order of markets, networks and the like depend on an underlying real order. And the store of civilizational order that we had built up has been pissed away by ten generations of democracy, the result being the crap heap we see before us.
To take one hypothesis and use it to explain a wide array of phenomena is, to me, a good sign of a powerful theory. So I dig it. It resolved issues that I had long had with politics - and gave me a way of looking at things that was entirely outside the bipolar democratic/republican thinking that had long been unsatisfactory. Moldbug's analysis of the modern world now has a comfortable apartment in my brain.
I have more issues with what he proposes as solutions for these problems, but I'll save that for the future. In the meantime, I really suggest - despite its length - reading the open letter series. Even if you remain unconvinced, I think you'll at least be entertained.
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Now go read the post that justifies, in a roundabout way, this picture.
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Over the last decade, our knowledge of comets has greatly increased - several probes sent out to meet these frostily glowing harbingers of doom have returned vast quantities of data. But curiously, our understanding has not similarly increased. Often, we read that scientists are saying that new data will require a back to the drawing board approach. Yet what we get is stale retreads of the same old, same old. When I was a boy, scientists were men, and would tear apart old theories and construct a new paradigm every morning before breakfast. Not so much these days, it seems.
Here with the details is James Hogan, sf author.
I've posted about the Electric Universe ideas previously, here. While I am fully aware of the dangers of heresy - not so much burning at the stake, but the near certainty of being wrong - I become more and more convinced that modern science has gotten a little off track. The way research is funded almost guarantees that much study is devoted to adding ever more intricate filigree to existing theories - because those theories were proposed by the people who are now controlling grants and degrees. A lot of our advances come not from young punks speaking truth to scientific power, but from established scientists with tenure commenting on another field altogether. Alvarez, the physicist, and his dinosaur killer is merely the most famous episode.
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