I can only imagine Neuromancer as an optimistic text by comparison to nuclear war and environmental catastrophy. As dystopian visions go it's not 1984, but cyberpunk was hardly an upbeat literature. As Gibson points out - 1984 was about 1948, and Neuromancer was about 1984.
I'm optimisitic about the potential of information technology to prevent collectives from having any privacy. I'm a good deal less enthused by potential for individuals to not have any. Privacy isn't just a way to keep your dirty secrets secret. Privacy is a significant factor in social equality. Privacy means the people you interact with can't nearly so easily compare their status to yours, and their best chance of acting correctly is to treat everyone equally. That is why it is so vitally important to have the ability to withhold information about yourself and why even asking for you to volunteer information can be so damaging - the ones with something to brag about will volunteer their personal information, and the ones who don't can be assumed to have nothing to brag about. Privacy is the foundation of the presumption of equality, and I'd rather not lose that.
I used to identify myself as marxiste, tendance Groucho as the 68'ers used to put it. (Speaking of political terms in French, there's a verb especially reserved for the act portrayed in the upper right-hand corner of the comments: entarter.) My family was the Canadian equivalent of "Old Labour": leftists by way of the trade unions. But, I think living in the States radicalised me. One thing I certainly got from watching American politics was the sense that - as Jim Hightower puts it - there ain't nothing but squashed armadillos in the middle of the road.
I guess in the end I came to the conclusion that it's both more interesting and more compeling to be radical, as long as you're willing to get a lot less than everything you're asking for. If you have no real access to power anyway, better to run the risk of being wrong in an interesting and productive way than to be timidly, moderately, unconvincingly right.
Nevermind, it works with Blogmatrix. I should have RSS as soon as Blogmatrix' spider gets to me.
From the looks of it, there is a beta RSS publisher for Blogger Pro, but it's not available on the free service yet. I have found a few folks offering hand crafted RSS for Blogger templates, but I'm about six years behind in web acronyms, and so I'm little hesitant to implement it myself.
It will go in the new Pedantry when it's ready though.
Okay, so I'll ask the dumb question: Is there some way for me to coax Blogger into offering such a feed? Or do I have to wait for the wife to do it in the new custom implementation (which will take forever, assuming she ever finishes writing it.)
One of those formative memories of my distant and misspent youth is driving through Chicago for the first time, shortly after sunset on I-90 from Minneapolis. That would have been when I was about 12 and we were moving to New Jersey.
I had never seen a really big city at night - my experience with big cities was limited to a very small number of brief daylight trips to Denver and Minneapolis. Western Canada's metropoles were nowhere near the same order of magnitude. I had no idea what it was like to see the distant lights of the city grow from a dirty orange blob on the horizon into a massive urban agglomeration that made the sky glow in every direction. I remember that it was something over an hour between the time when there was no longer any empty land around us until the lights were all behind us and I-80 was surrounded by farmland.
I had been reading Asimov's Caves of Steel shortly before the trip, but I had not really been able to imagine the kind of place Asimov had in mind, all enclosed with buildings built over each other, all connected and full of people. And here I saw what it was like for small homes to become denser and denser, then grow into multi-storey blocks and finally skyscrapers, interlaced with highways and railways through areas so crowded that the roadside services were actually built on top of the highway itself like some sort of strange overpass.
It was in that light that I saw Chicago. It was scary and wonderful all at the time, and all mixed up with my parents deep distain for big cities and my father's hatred of driving on anything more crowded than a rural interstate. That was the moment when I realised that I wasn't like them. Like a moth, I was attracted to the lights and the noises and the crowds.
Two days later I was in New Jersey, almost within sight of the New York skyline. I didn't like suburban Jersey much, but that trip across Chicago planted in my mind the idea that my disaffection with suburbia might be better resolved by moving further into the city instead of moving out of it, although it would be a number of years before I could test that idea.
Actually, if you want to see a truly different airport, fly into Koh Samui, Thailand. I've put up some photos on my blog at http://pedantry.blogspot.com/2003_04_06_pedantry_archive.html#92084731
Lots of airports use basically the same class of design and then try to add some sort of "local" flavour to it. But there is a reason why airports all look the same: many of the people travelling through them are by definition from far away. They want their airports to be as simple, obvious and clearly laid-out as a McDonald's. No suprises, no confusion.
I'm beginning to understand what European exiles in the 30's must have felt, living somewhere far away and reading the news from their homelands with growing horror.
Karl Marx said that he expected the state to just whither away. Apparently, he was on to something, but I don't think this is what he meant. A state is an institution that exercises and protects its monopoly on violence, at least acccording to Gellner, and Sterling is right to point to the new free market in violence as scary.
The argument that people need to own guns in order to keep control over the government is simply nonsense. There may be other good arguments against gun control, but that one is just plain stupid. It's been a long time - centuries I should think - since an armed mob could actually hold its own against a trained army of comparable size, and if a unit of Marines can't cut through an armed mob like so much butter then they are pretty near worthless. It's even sillier to imagine an armed public holding its own against tanks and aircraft.
What prevents police and military forces from simply establishing a tyrrany is cultural constraint - they have for the most part bought into the idea of elected civilian government and human rights - and limitiations on their own ability to organise independently. That - not guns - protects people.
There is a worse failing in Adam's argument than the misapplication of the law of the excluded middle: misapplying means-ends analysis. The great failing of that sort of utilitarian calculus is to believe first that ends can be determined in advance - like knowing that America will replace Saddam Hussein with something better - and that the means used to obtain those ends are independent of the actual outcome.
The world is full of people who have fought for their independence from foreign rule even when that was plainly against their best interests in every other way. They have fought to defend dictators that they despise rather than see themselves ruled by outsiders. Iraq seems to be the kind of place where that sort of outcome is most likely. It is not clear to me that the people of Iraq would prefer to be ruled even benevolently from Washington rather than have Saddam Hussein, and Washington has a poor record as a source of benevolent overlords. Utilitarian calculus is first misapplied by assuming that, given a choice between George Bush and Saddam Hussein they will pick George Bush. Even utilitarians don't claim that people should generally be ruled by other people's preferences.
Second, ends don't justify means, means create ends. Cruel means lead to cruel outcomes. I don't know how many times I've heard this argument used against left-wing revolutions. The brutality of the Russian revolution made it difficult to rule Russia with anything less than brute force, and the guillotine in the French Revolution led straight to the terrors of Jacobinism, while the relatively mild methods of American revolutionaries made the moderation of the American state possible.
It is only in the aftermath of WWII that a harsh war did not lead directly to an equally harsh occupation, and that was more out of fear of a new enemy than anything else. I'm hard pressed to think of a single other case. Taking control of a country by brute force means ruling that country in the same way. War destroys any alternative way of administering the state. Iraq would not, even if this invasion had been conducted by better people, become one whit less of a dictatorship in the hands of occupiers.
The onus is not on me to provide an alternative to Saddam Hussein. The onus, Adam, is on you to show that the means used in this war will lead to better ends, that their present application represents a desired improvement to those who must suffer through it. So far, I'm told Iraq will be ruled by people appointed by George Bush instead of people appointed by Saddam Hussein. On the balance, this is moderately less democracy, not more. So far, I have seen the United States government justify torture, extrajudicial executions and indefinite detention in the pursuit of its goals. Those means will create horrifying ends, as I strongly doubt that the restoration of human rights will trump the instinct to "protect the troops" by whatever means necessary. Shredding international law and breaking old treaties are means that do not lead to the establishment of the rule of law. So far, this war has not improved the lives of Iraqis one bit, and history offers few examples of occupations that were gentler than the war that precipitated them.
When you start to decide that you can balance someone else's life against your goals, it becomes very hard to stop. Once you start saying that some Iraqis must die in order for the rest to be freed from Saddam, you will find it hard not to justify killing a few more to keep law and order, or to protect the occupying troops, or to establish a new government. At each step, your beliefs about the needs of the many will easily trump the horrors visited on the few, until the ends fade into an ever more distant future and serve no purpose but to justify present cruelty.
The inherent evil in such thinking is exactly why tradition, conventional international law and even the Nurenburg principles forbid wars where the peace has not already been broken. This, and not some anachronistic defence of "national sovereignty", is why so many people are reticent even to allow a humanitarian exception. To allow one power, or in America's case one man, to rule alone on the merits of other people's lives is vastly more horrifying than Saddam Hussein. You need to show that the establishment of _that_ end is better. Weakly claiming that no matter how bad war is, it must be better than Saddam Hussein does not cut it.
I want to forstall the conclusion that this is no one's fault before someone says it. I agree that this is how war is: people get scared, try to comply with difficult and quite possibly contradictory orders, use the best judgement they can under a lot of stress and - unsurprisingly - don't want to die. No, the soldiers who were there are not the ones I want to hang out to dry for this, nor is this a sign that the US military is institutionally evil, or at least not any more evil than plenty of other armies. But there is a bad guy here.
People know - or at least should know - that this is exactly the sort of thing that happens in all but the most restrained conflicts, which this one clearly isn't. The blame belongs to those who consciously sought to bring this conflict about. This - and it is important to remember it - is George W. Bushes fault. It is not his fault alone, but it is his decision and his authority and it is his responsibility to justify it.
But at least with sortition the decisions will represent the irrationality of the public instead of having an elite make the same rationalisations. Furthermore, I think an appeal to the common good is likely to make more sense to someone who has little or no vested interest than someone subject to reelection. The indirect bribery and extortion that passes for lobbying now would be much more difficult to do when the people in power are unlikely to write books, take executive positions in companies, have investments or elections to finance. At least the lobbyists would have an equal opportunity for access, instead of buying it through campaign contributions.
I'm not exactly advocating sortition. The whole problem with advocating a world substantially different than your own is that you don't ever really know how things will turn out. The scheme has its disadvantages. However, it also has its benefits. The problems could be mitigated by a more mixed system, like a three power government with an elected chamber, a chamber selected by sorition and a professional executive.
But, I think on the face of it it's at least as reasonable and democratic as electoral politics.
I think the short story with the single voter was an Asimov piece and maybe 30 or 40 years old, although my memory of it isn't what it used to be.
Actually, sortition is a not dissimilar concept: selecting a statistically representative sample of the population, and then giving them the time and resources to really research every issue and make up their own mind.
It has its advantages. It scales at least as well as representative government and far better than municipal committees, although it makes assumptions about linguistic and cultural uniformity which may not apply on a larger scale than the nation-state. It is less subject to media manipulation, because people with the time, resources and encouragement to listen carefully to several different sides hash out their differences and get into the complexities of an issue are unlikely to be swayed by 15 second sound-bites. It is also automatically fully representative of women and ethnic and racial minorities as well as of any widespread but minority point of view without requiring ethnic voting blocks or quotas.
And, there are no elections. No candidates covering up blowjobs, no parties with skeletons in their closets and no public personas with kingly reputations to uphold. And nobody has to be interested in politics unless they're called up by the sort, and then they're best off just keeping an open mind and using common sense. The rest of the time, they can watch basketball for all the political difference it makes. Unless they want to press for some specific issue or agenda, in which case the only effective strategy is to convince as many individuals as you can and convince them well enough that they won't change their minds, because you never know who will get selected for government.
However, it has the same problems as municipal socialism: how do you deal with the professional wing of the government and how do you guarantee consistent policies over time? The Greeks gave civil service posts out the same way: by drawing lots. However, I don't think that's an effective policy for the industrial age.
Why do you think people are disaffected by the political process? The process doesn't seem to offer them much in return. People do not often see their opinions or political activity reflected in policy. At most, they feel that every few years they have chosen the least bad of usually no more than two condidates for some political post and that that person probably doesn't have the power to put their will into effect, even if they - or the voters - really wanted them to.
That makes it hard to feel very enthusiastic about the process.
There are alternatives to electoral politics. Sortition and variations on the Chinese mandarinate are the ones I've given some thought to, for that ever distant day when I actually write _my_ science fiction novel. Avram's reference to Ken MacLeod is really a reference to various kinds of municipal socialism. The Paris Commune was offering that kind of answer.
Municipal socialism isn't unrealistic. People would probably go to local meetings en masse if it offered them what church offers them: a place to socialise and gossip, a sense of community and a sense of being connected to something larger than themselves. In addition, it can offer something the best churches offer, but many don't: a chance to express yourself and to be heard.
The problem with it is the somewhat laxadasial kinds of policies that come out of it. It might have its points if one otherwise believed in the "nightwatchman state", where government has few active responsibilities. However, as MacLeod points out, there is a need for a civil service, a police and tax collectors. This model does not meaningfully restrict the power of those institutions because there is no elected leadership to counteract them with a different agenda.
I didn't vote in the last election for the same reason as Bryan - I can't. However, before the election I said exactly the same thing as Nader: there is no meaningful difference on any real issue between Bush and Gore. There was little agenda for meaningful reform on either side, nor were the two terribly far apart on any major issue that I thought they could actually control.
I was wrong. I confess that without hesitation. Bush has been orders of magnitude worse than I imagined. My wife - the life long Democrat - voted for Gore and told me this would happen if Bush got in. I didn't believe her.
However, in November 2000 it was hard to take Bushes "faith-based" rhetoric as any different than his father's. Bush was pandering to the right, and considering the first Bush administration it made a lot of sense to think that what he said while campaigning wasn't going to mean much in office. I took Bush to be the not especially talented son of a patrician family who would basically be led around by his father's clique.
Bush Sr. was hardly the greatest president in American history, but he knew what he could and couldn't get away with. Bush Sr. was not a disaster, and there was quite a lot of continuity between Clinton polices and Bush Sr.'s policies. I took it as a given that the new president, whoever he was, wasn't going to risk rocking the boat or making major changes. They might talk big, but I didn't expect to see action.
I was wrong, but I don't think my conclusions in Fall 2000 were unreasonable or politically irresponsible, and I don't think it's right to blame the Nader voters for having come to the same conclusions.
I disagree. As was pointed out, Bin Laden is loaded. I'm not sure why this belief has taken on the patina of a natural law.
Of course it's not natural law. However, people who are not poor and desperate don't generally put up with people who screw up their good thing! The IRA drew members from a broad spectrum of Northern Irish Catholic society. If those folks had been doing well, don't you think the Catholics would have scoured every household in the country looking for the bombers messing up their lives?
Yes, the 9/11 bombers were fom the best educated classes of Arab society, and if the rest of the Arab world had stable, happy lives do you think they would have any basis for support at all? If 9/11 had been committed by Canadians, don't you think Canada wouldn't have scoured the country looking for their supporters? Do you think it would have been out of friendship?
Doesn't it occur to people that the millions of Arabs who will never themselves kill anyone but who will cheer at the sight of American dead are a far bigger problem than the terrorists themselves? Do you think such people will change their minds because you shoot at them? Do you think hunting down individual terrorists or changing particular regimes will keep them from just making more terrorists? It hasn't been working well in Israel.
The British had decades to hunt down the IRA, and the IRA only went away when their public support began to fade, when people began to think of them not as liberators, or even as what the British deserve, but as a group of right bastards who were mucking with people's lives. The same is true of ETA, the Corsican separatists, even the old Red Army Fractions in Germany. They are gone because the people they need to support them - the ones who will turn their backs more than the ones who will actually help - don't like them anymore. Wealth, poverty and people's notions of justice have everything to do with that.
Let me rant for a moment. I would gladly post this on CalPundit, except he doesn't have comments.
The anti-war left doesn't take the risks of terrorism seriously?
My wife spends 8 hours a day, every working day, inside the singularly most lucrative political and military target in Europe and I check the news every couple of hours _praying_ that today is not the day someone decides to take a crack at it. Don't even _think_ of telling me that I don't take the risks of terrorism seriously.
I'm against this war in part _because_ it stands absolutely no chance of reducing the risk of terrorism to someone I love and who is in a very high risk category. I see every chance that this war will raise the risk to her. I find the arguments about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism inane in the extreme and only acceptable to people who have no conception of history and no contact whatsoever with people or politics in the middle east. I see a government of blind, dumb fools using war for political gain and doing so without provocation, breaking one of the few rules of international affairs that has actually served to keep peace. I see a panicked public who don't seem to know better falling for it and worse, I see people who do know better offering support for no apparent reason at all.
Saddam Hussein is a bad man, but tell me, is it better to be a woman in Baghdad or Riyadh? Are Arabs freer in Mosul or in Jenin? Which more likely to use nuclear weapons in support of an ugly cause, Pakistan or Iraq? Whatever ugliness is on Hussein soul - and by all evidence, it's quite a lot - why him, why his country and why now?
People won't take America seriously if it backs down now? That's a justification for war? We should put our lives, not to mention jobs, on the line for America's _ego_?
What should we do to stabilise the unstable states and stop the terrorists? Sign the ICC, cut foreign aid to Israel and raise the non-military foreign aid budget by a factor of ten. Open negociations for a peace treaty with North Korea (even Canada has diplomatic relations with them) and normalise relations with Iran. Subsidise drug research (actually you're already doing that) and tell the drug companies you won't protect them from competition in poor countries. America is the world's largest producer of food, so tell the world no one will ever starve if American food donations can reach them, no matter what kind of government they have. Make it plain that if someone is hungry in the world, it's because their government screwed up, not because America wasn't there for them. Make US aid and trade priviledges conditional on a UN report - not an American report - of their human rights situation and implimentation of multi-party constitutional democracy. Then, apply these same standards to you own government. Make every possible effort to show that America is an honest dealer, that it is fair and principled and doesn't play favourites.
That's just off the top of my head. All these measures, together, still would cost less than war in Iraq and would do far, far, far, FAR more to reduce the risk of terrorism to Americans.
Okay, I'm done ranting.
I'm sorry - I've been away for the weekend so I haven't been able to make a timely response while this was near the top of the blog.
Yes, the world is changing and I don't imagine stability is really an option. I would agree with calling it "grace and balance in response to change." I want to see conservatives saying things like "but maybe we can fix it with only some small changes" when confroted with genuine institutional failure.
I don't want this because I think that every situation should be met with the minimum respose. Deeply entrenched problems may well require radical solutions. But, I want to know that a voice for the smallest change and the greatest constancy is out there and being taken seriously.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 24 |
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