The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Robert West:

I don't think this should be taken too far, but I find it subtly ironic that in another post you are complaining about the "increasingly corroded civic culture" and that, in this post, you say that "a large part of the energy of the left side of blogdrom is tribal and intolerant of heterodoxy, and that's a good thing."

In my experience, it is the tribalism and intolerance of heterodoxy among liberals and conservatives both which is the driving force behind the corrosion of our civic culture. Once we're at the point where dissent is intolerable and discussion with dissenters is considered unreasonable, then it isn't a great leap to dissent being treasonous.

I can certainly understand and even agree (to a certain extent) with the argument which says that, for liberal ideas to prevail, we have to adopt the same unpleasant tactics that the conservatives have used. But I'm struggling with that, because those tactics are what's responsible for the corrosion of our political culture; and i'm very afraid that they represent an arms race whose "innovations" cannot later be disavowed.

Patrick - it's not merely some impressive libertarian thinking; it's utter lunacy.

The particular gentleman who sticks out most in my memory regarding this issue didn't even bend before my attempted reductio ad absurdam: "but if we'd followed that practice, we'd all be paying royalties to the descendants of the man who first invented fire." To which he nodded and agreed and proceeded to explain why that would be a good thing.

I have a cynical suspicion that part of the problem is that the people who advocate things like this, in my experience, can think of no greater ambition than retiring as part of a rentier class - so, of course anything which makes rentier classes more likely is a good thing. But that may just be my lingering socialism speaking.

It cannot be emphasized enough how important it is to spread the word on this. I work in the computer industry, and have many conservative- and libertarian-leaning business associates, and I've had numerous conversations with people who are absolutely convinced that "intellectual property" is property, and that copyrights and patents should never expire, and the fact that they do is immoral theft by the government.

If we don't nip this meme in the bud before it spreads into mainstream thought, the entire traditional understanding of IP is doomed, and it will become a source of perpetual rent for an ownership class.

I'm bouncing back and forth between books, as I often do. Currently on the alternating-list:

Theodore Rex, mentioned above, by Edmund Morris. It's a good presidential biography. My one major ciriticism is that it's a bit thin in the second half.

Britain in Revolution, by Austin Woolrych; a great survey history of the civil war. It has a fair amount of detail about the situation in Ireland and Scotland. The discussion of the protectorate itself seems thin, but the handling of the events preceding the dissolution of the Rump was fantastic.

The Reformation, by Diarmaid McCullough. I've been struggling with this one; it suffers at times from excessive specificity which obscures the general picture, and it seems to assume the presence of a body of knowledge that I don't have.

The Confusion, by Stephenson. I got about halfway through and put it down, and have been unable to muster the concentration to pick it up again.

All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, edited by David Moles and Jay Lake. I was particularly entranced by the story about wild zeppelins in the great plains.

Patrick, David: I was listening to the radio in the car last night and found myself getting angrier and angrier at the DJ who was going on at length about how the election demonstrated just how stupid the American public really is, that the Bush victory demonstrated the ascendance of stupidity over intelligence and irrationality over reason, etc. I share the anger and understand the despair implicit in what the DJ was saying ... but at the same time, we cannot possibly win without convincing the very people he was condemning; and it's extremely difficult to convince someone of anything when you are busy calling them names.

John Scalzi - thank you! That was the most uplifting thing i've read since the election; a great gift of a vision of hope for which I am deeply indebted.

Patrick - i've spent most of the morning despairing in one form or another, in some sense spoiling for a fight just to get the energy out. We lost, and we lost badly, and it's hard for me to summon the courage to believe that we'll ever win again. And yet, at the same time ... if communism could fall, and apartheid, then this too can pass. If we make it happen.

Dave - yeah, i'm still following along. :) I've been 'aphrael' online for twelve years, so I often forget that people don't know me.

Patrick - this is your website, and I am a guest here; is the level of discomfort involved sufficient to constitute a problem? If so, i'll try to remember to use my 'real' name here henceforth. :)

Patrick - Michael Holt (the author of a massive tome on the history of the Whig party) seems to think that the Free Soil party played a critical role in the collapse of the Whigs. His argument is that a small handful of Free Soilers in Congress successfully redefined the Kansas-Nebraska Act as a sectional issue, rather than a partisan one; and that, once the issue was so defined, the northern and southern Whigs split on the issue, and caused northern Whigs to seek other allies in subsequent elections.

If it's true that the Free-Soilers bore a large part of the responsibility for the collapse of the Whig party, then it may follow from that that - institutionally at least - they had more responsibility for the growth of the Republican Party than the Whigs did: in a sense, they were what drove the northern Whigs into the arms of the Republicans.

Rea - and there's a significant debate as to whether or not the American Revolution was, in fact, a revolution. :) There's something somewhat circular about that: "revolutions have quality [x], the American Revolution did not, therefore it wasn't a Revolution" ... but the point remains that the American case is somewhat unique among industrial age revolutions insofar as it did not attempt - as was done in Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and much of Latin America - widespread change in the domestic social order, nor - as was done in France, Latin America, and Russia - did it attempt to overturn the established international order. Indeed, aside from the minor bit about severing ties with Britain, the American revolution was profoundly conservative.

Isn't declaring war on the conservatives of the world one of the first acts of every revolutionary regime?

Insisting that you were correct in retrospect, despite the fact that contemporary evidence undermines everything you said at the time, is far worse than insisting that your position be correct in the abstract today. The latter is letting your idealism get in the way of your goals; the former is arrogantly sticking to correctness in the face of all evidence.

I question whether anyone who is doing that can be trusted to draw accurate conclusions from the facts under any circumstances.

I've long been of the opinion that much of the rhetoric I see online - and hear in person - regarding the evil of the Bush administration is overblown - that Bush is no worse than Reagan was, for example, and that his performance is about what could be expected from any conservative. This website has made me doubt that proposition a bit, mostly through comments made by people who used to work with conservatives, but the core of the view has held. Yet lately i've been increasingly disturbed: disturbed by the fact that nobody of any import in the Bush administration appears capable of admitting that they were wrong, about anything, ever. That's not the behavior of a responsible adult; it's behavior that I would reject in a coworker, that would end a job interview instantly. It's not behavior that we should accept in our leadership.

And here I thought this blog was about well-reasoned left-wing politics. *shrug* I guess i should head off and find a *reason* to want to suck up to editors ...

This isn't quite about the hajj, but about the other major islamic holiday going on right now, the feast of the slaughter: there's something quite surreal about walking down a street in a modern, industrial, european city and encountering, every two dozen street corners or so, flocks of sheep (with shepherds standing watch!) for sale. Or watching tiny european subcompacts go down the road with the entire family crammed in front and a sheep in back. Or (and this was cute as well as odd) teenagers coaxing their ram down the sidewalk along a busy highway by holding food in their hands and slowly walking away, enticing the ram to follow.

Patrick - to a certain extent all digital rights management that i've seen come out of the industry works by making things difficult / confusing enough to deter casual users, not by making it impossible to make copies. In general this a technology limitation; there's no such thing as 'impossible' when it comes to manipulating data with a computer - simply 'expensive' or 'time consuming' or 'undocumented'. The trick is to make it tough enough that Joe Schmoe won't bother, use the lawyers to go after the large-scale duplicators, and hope that techies who can figure it out on their own (for small-scale use) are an insignificant enough fraction of the population to not hurt the company financially.

There are two explanations which immediately come to my mind as to why iTunes wouldn't support windows 98.

• iTunes, by its very nature, has to monitor the firewire device and the cd device, and to talk to the sound device. If the mechanism in Windows through which any of these are done has changed between windows 98 and 2000 (something which is likely), then writing software to support both requires two completely different code paths. This is made more complicated by the fact that the operating system vendor has an annoying habit of making technical documentation regarding 'obsolete' versions of Windows difficult to find.
  
• Also, has anybody tried running iTunes on Windows 98? It's entirely possible that it works, but that Apple didn't want to go through the expense of hiring people to test it under windows 98 (a cost which could easily have been upwards of $500,000). Saying that software requires a certain version of the OS when it could well run on an an earlier version but it wasn't financially worthwhile to test it on that version is a common practice in the software industry.
  

While I wouldn't call it fascinating, it's always interesting to me how people who aren't professional computer people use computer technology. :) It's very easy, living in the insular world of Silicon Valley software development, to completely lose touch with the rest of the world, on this issue at least. :)

When checking out firewire cards, beware one thing: there are two different sizes of firewire port. Any reputable manufacturer will give you a cable that converts between them, but the smaller one - the one that isn't the size the iPod uses - doesn't allow the iPod to draw power from the uplink.

I've had an iPod for about a year and have been anxiously awaiting the release of iTunes. It works beautifully on my laptop. It collaborated with pre-existing hardware conditions to make my home desktop machine unusable, and I ended up having to replace the OS. I'd been blaming it on my machine, but your post makes me have second thoughts.

Tina - i'm terribly sorry, but as a professional developer of windows development tools, if a potential customer complained that my product wouldn't run on windows 98, i'd give them a sugar coated version of the reaction you got from the Apple people.

David - it's a little bit different, but my mother was raised on a series of military bases because her father was an active duty air force chaplain. They moved every year or two, leaving no sense of routine and comforting familiarity; she resented it the entirety of her life.

Josh Marshall's observation is a good one, but the political tactic (of using the failures of a policy to justify intensifying that policy) is nothing new; it's been used by the proponents of the war on drugs for decades, and has appeared in various places throughout history whenever governments have been run by people who know they are right and disbelieve any evidence that shows them to be wrong.

Paul - my brother is in Afghanistan as part of a different brigade within the 82d. Listening to him talk about how that war is basically being ignored makes me angrier than I can express.

Comment statistics for Robert West on the Electrolite blog

Total: 54 comments. View all these comments on a single page.