Wayne Fox in #111 wrote: "I would've liked to have been asked, the answer would've been "Yes!" of course."
Since Wayne sounds like a pretty nice guy, I'll depersonalize this as much as I can. But it's always struck me that any expectation of being asked before people link to one's web resources is a manifestation of a form of mild insanity, or at least severe eccentricity.
Linking to stuff is what the web is for. It's built right into the design. It's what makes one chunk of the internet the World Wide Web, instead of something else.
I'd argue that permission to link -- freely and without prior contact -- is not implicit but rather is explicit in the act of making something available on a server that responds to http requests. In fact, it's not just permission, but solicitation. Putting it on the server is asking "Please link to me." Objecting when somebody does just that? It's like yelling at the people who stop to look at your lawn ornaments. They're lawn ornaments, people looking at them (casually, freely, without prior arrangement or subsequent notification) is why they're in the middle of your lawn instead of, say, your basement.
Sometime yesterday Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond blog at wired.com lost all of its posts back to the middle of March. I'm hoping it was a technical flail somewhere that will be restored soon.
Fragano Ledgister #64: I'm thinking maybe, sometimes a sixteen inch gun is just a sixteen inch gun?
I got one today that offered to supersize my tomatoes.
No, really, the subject line was:
"Supersize your tomatoes with Tomato Giant!"
After wondering for a moment which body parts were supposed to be metaphorical tomatoes, I carefully examined the message content. Oddly enough, this message did appear to be spam aimed at gardeners with Beefsteak envy.
I got one today that said:
"Equip your battleship with main caliber"
I'm one of those people with a family history of bad reactions to Tetanus boosters, but it's old history -- after my grandfather (if I got the family lore straight) lost a finger joint in a lawnmower, the tetanus booster triggered a massive allergic reaction. Attempts (possibly including medical misadventure) to treat the reaction had a bad outcome, with the post hac but perhaps not propter hac result that he suffered a massive stroke with verbal loss and physical paralysis.
By the time I knew him he was a lurching old man who had to fumble for every word, but was nonetheless managing to live an active and happy life. The years of relearning to walk and talk were mostly before my time.
Needless to say, my folks always advised me to refuse tetanus boosters, unless the need was clear. (I dunno why they didn't just advise me to avoid lawnmowers.) Nonetheless, I was immunized and I also remember a considerable parental wrangle before the decision was made to give me a booster around age nine after I stepped on the classic rusty nail.
Since then, I've had no wounds requiring medical attention, nor tetanus boosters either. I'm far from certain in my own mind where the best balance of risks lies.
Fragano #63: "Camomile is taken internally."
Well, not exclusively so.
When I had chicken pox, circa 1977, the scabs and itching caused me considerable discomfort. We were at that time living in a cabin some 160 roadless miles from the nearest road, perhaps 270 miles from the nearest pharmacy.
My mother applied cloth bandages soaked in strong chamomile tea in an effort to help control the itching. Whether it helped; I cannot say; it certainly didn't help much. Why she thought it might help, I also cannot say. But I'm confident she didn't invent the idea; I presume it was recommended in some herbal or other that she had studied. A quick Google turns up numerous indications that chamomile is sometimes recommended for external use against various skin inflammations, although of course this says nothing of its actual effectiveness in that role. (It seems possible to Google up references in support of using just about any herb for just about any ailment.)
My mother eventually moved on to poultices of comfrey, which actually did seem to provide considerable relief, but were messy and smelly.
This seems a fine place to mention my one personal contact with literary history. While writing the portion of Coming Into The Country that discussed the people in and around my home town of Eagle, John McPhee spent several days sitting at our dining table drinking my mother's home brew and interviewing my parents (although it looks more like "shooting the shit with" than "interviewing" when he does it). We all found McPhee to be a fascinating conversationalist, and he taught me (age about eight or nine) a mathematical card trick he claimed was first taught to him by an inmate in a federal prison.
By a strange open thread synergy, one of the seed catalogs mentioned in #19 was also my mom's favorite; namely, Seed Saver's Exchange.
Jaws #50: "there is nothing that opposing counsel likes better than having free reign at your entire unstructured database..."
True words. But there is, buried in there, the implicit assumption that opposing council is any good.
As a young lawyer I learned to take the measure of opposing counsel by their response when you'd point them to a room full of file boxes and say "have fun!" as the rules of discovery often seemed to require.
Bad, or unserious, lawyers would rummage around in the room for hours or days and emerge with a few file folders for copying.
The true professionals would smile an evil grin and make a phone call. An hour later there would be a flying squad of outsourced paralegals in there, with their own photocopiers on wheels, making a copy of every scrap of paper in the room.
Every bit of tech has probably changed since I made this observation, but I'm confident the fundamental distinction still exists.
I have a sister who, in her teen years, refused to wear anything over her blue jeans because she considered them essential to her fashion presentation; it could be sixty below zero and no telling how many pairs of long johns she had on, but it was denim she was going to show the world. And sneakers, when she could; but she'd compromise and put on boots below about twenty below, or when working outside.
Ledasmom #71: "Is someone out there selling leg parkas?"
I grew up on the Arctic circle, and my first response to this was a less charitable version of "Of course they do!"
We just called these "Wool pants" because what we used were olive drab military surplus overpants made of scratchy heavy wool. You just pulled them on (and off) over your blue jeans as you moved in and out of heat.
These days they are all kind of fancy, with polar fleece linings and windproof synthetic outer shells and zippers or velco so you can open them at the sides easily instead of pulling them on and off like pants. (Snowy frozen boots can make the old-fashioned way difficult.) But anyway, some kind of insulated overpants are essential gear for anybody who is trying to be outdoors for sustained periods at temperatures below F -10 to -20. (Twenty below is the absolute limit, IMO, for getting by with blue jeans and cotton waffleweave thermal underwear -- colder than this, you need a third heavy outer layer if you'll be out longer than about twenty minutes.)
If you're actually *working* outside in such temps, of course, you want insulated coveralls, the full body kind that zips to the neck. Carharts makes a very durable set.
Clark E Meyers #255 writes "I suggest '[y]our typical NRA-hat-wearing lower-48ian hunter', of which I am one, has better sense than to skip rifle bullets along the water into the unknown."
To which I'd add the suggestion that your typical lower-48ian hunter does not understand the scale and emptiness of the landscape we are talking about. Obviously if your backdrop is unknown, you don't take the shot, that's a prime rule of shooting safety. But it's not unknown if you can see it, of course; and when it's most of a mile to the far bank of the Yukon, there's a hundred feet of soft sand bluff riverbank for a backdrop over there, there's nothing but empty muskeg swamp for ten miles beyond, and the river is clear of traffic for the three or four miles you can see up and downstream, such a shot is well within normal parameters of shooting safety.
Albatross #231, in Alaska the usual argument about hunting is not whether it's sporting or unsporting; trophy hunts (for head and hide) are widely considered to be in the best tradition of hunting sportsmanship, and they are just as widely despised by "real Alaskans" (a self-defined group in which I include myself, with conscious irony) because of the waste. Those of us who grew up hunting for meat tend to be contemptuous of people who hunt for any reason but to obtain meat (or to get rid of a problem predator in the vicinity of home, children, and chattels, but that's not really hunting per se).
This attitude leads to other strange results. Your typical NRA-hat-wearing lower-48ian hunter will not, for instance, shoot at a duck on the water with a rifle; this is considered "unsporting" and is prohibited by all pertinent hunting laws. A subsistence hunter or anybody who is hungry will do it anyway, because it's cheaper, more efficient at putting meat on the table, and results in many fewer lost and injured birds than sweeping flying flocks with a host of tiny low-velocity pellets.
Meanwhile, Constance at 218 writes "Killing what you can't eat -- and you can't eat polar bear -- it tastes terrible -- is not hunting." Although polar bear is reputed to taste terrible, it is indeed edible and, historically, fairly commonly eaten by those with no better options; the liver is reputed to contain toxic amounts of vitamin A however, so exercise due caution. (If you have successfully hunted a polar bear from the ground, you know already about due caution.)
As my Alaskan mother would admonish, "Don't say you won't eat that; say that you're not that hungry yet." I have hunted both brown and black bear, both of which have people who claim they are inedible; both are nutritious and some black bears are in my opinion actually very tasty. Brown, not so much, although you'd never know it if you make the right kind of onion-heavy savory stew. So I'd join Constance in her condemnation only after modifying it: Killing what you don't intend to eat is not hunting. I must admit, however, that on my part this is a rural prejudice that is not supported by the "sporting" regulations in Alaska or anywhere else I know of.
In re Paul Duncanson, #73, observations on the Something Awful communities:
One of my vices is an internet spaceship game (massively multiplayer) called EVE Online, unique in several ways, one of which has to do with the folks from Something Awful.
EVE features complex in-game economics and politics, plus a "nowhere is completely safe" combat system that still manages to let most people protect themselves from unwanted combat, most of the time. The result is a game environment where you can never quite afford to forget that malevolent human intelligences are out to get you, and will get you if you make a mistake.
The Something Awful connection is that there's a bunch of SA gamers (they call themselves "Goons") who crash into online games in a group and (from some perspectives) act as griefers. In EVE, where there's really no such thing as griefers, this comes across as a huge gang (they have large numbers) of malevolent alien intelligences. They feel "alien" because their motivations are not the usual gamer motivations, which makes them hard to predict, and thus even more dangerous than they would otherwise be.
I realize this is trending off topic, but the science-fictional feel of playing a computer game where there are enemies of human-level intelligence whose motivations are unintelligible (or, at least, very difficult to understand without context that's not readily available in-game) is extremely cool. At least some members of Goonfleet (as the Goons are called in EVE) might claim that they live to ruin the game for everybody else, but in fact, they just make it better.
James D. Macdonald #69: "Anything other than voting for the Democrat rewards Bush and the Republicans. Intelligent people won't do that."
Even I agree with this, and I'm your local anarchist-in-the-woodpile.
Tania #182, my mother used to sneak onto base with her airman boyfriend (in the trunk of his car, what a mensch he was!) when she was attending UAF in the 50s.
As for KJNP, over in Eagle we always felt that when it got to be sunset, they cranked up their towers WAY above their FCC-allowed 50K watts, so that they could beam the Good Word all the way over the pole to the godless commies of the USSR. Certainly they were always a ton louder than every other 50k-watt station in Fairbanks, and at night when the ionosphere hardened up you could pick them up on anything with a speaker, even from hundreds of miles away. It's easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission, and what's an FCC regulation against all the souls of a world superpower?
Lee #180: I agree with your "it's quite possible that a full-scale nuclear war would have exterminated humanity"; it's quite possible, but I never felt it was as certain as the conventional wisdom had it. This is my Heinlein-esque faith in the adaptability and toughness of humans talking; I'm not scoffing at all of the ways the deck would have been stacked against.
Earl Cooley III #65: "Are there any Republican senators who are currently teetering on the brink of scandal to compensate?"
So far as I know, 83-year-old Senator Stevens (R-AK), whose karma can't be in much better shape than Kennedy's, is still waiting for the other shoe to drop since the FBI raided his house last year.
Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I had a different perspective on impending nuclear doom than most people, but that's because I was several hundred miles from the nearest conceivable target. But that one was a doozey -- Eielson Air Force base in Fairbanks, Alaska, widely believed at the time (although the Air Force denies it now) to have been keeping nuclear-armed B52s in the air 24/7. I can't speak to their bomb loads, but they flew over our cabin every few days, you could tell the BUFFs because they had that unique contrail pattern with four pairs of contrails from the eight engines.
Waaay over by the Canadian border, we pretty much knew we'd only learn about "the big one" when the only radio station we could reliably hear, KJNP ("your fifty thousand watt voice of the north, King Jesus North Pole", and I am not making this up) went off the air. But, living right on the ragged edge of "too far north for subsistence agriculture" even before the sky fills with reflective dust for a few years, we all pretty much figured to starve after that, depending on whether or not the caribou could keep breeding once the lichens they eat started accumulating too much strontium-90, which it was already then doing in dangerous amounts just from the years of atmospheric testing.
Most folks, my parents included, made a habit of storing about five year's worth of hard winter wheat in vacuum-sealed cans. My dad still has some of those wheat cans kicking around.
My own view is that extermination of all humanity would not have happened. But I always assumed we would be reduced to tiny populations living in stone age squalor. And Xopher is correct -- the "conventional wisdom" taught at the time was that a broad nuclear exchange would exterminate humanity.
Hey, everybody. My girlfriend has made me an offer too good to refuse with regards to the disposition of my afternoon, so the very real pleasures of this discussion are going to have to wait another day. Thus I'm going to cherrypick from among the many things said, toss off a couple of incomplete responses, and step away from the computer again. I apologize for the shallowness; with luck, I'll be back tomorrow.
Greg London #248, I am genuinely enlightened by your explanation of how Bob's worldview and identification with a community mean that he feels really good about the actions that his community takes (at gunpoint, but really very solicitous of Alice's concerns nonetheless). I've never really understood why authoritarians were so sanguine about their activities, and that really helped. You then said, as if to mock my point of view by the self-evident lunacy of it: "The thing is, you're calling me a gangster, with a posse of gun-totin' dudes, going around and exerting my will on those around me."
Why, yes. Yes, I am, although I'd never have gotten so personal about it. But that is, indeed, the logic of the non-aggression principle when used as a moral lense for viewing the activities of the supporters of a typical modern-day state.
At least now, though, I better understand why your communitarian worldview makes you feel better about that. (Not sarcasm, though it reads like it, even to me. I lack the skill to say the same thing with flat and sincere prose affect, but that's what I'm trying to do here.)
In all seriousness, I think you're right about the different worldviews. I don't think I'm as alienated as you think I am, but I surely was in 1986 or so; and for me the question of how the very real benefits of society and community can be enjoyed without the usual blithe and violent disregard of dissenters is the great and important question in human politics.
I've got to skip over the whole heirarchy-of-power business and how it relates to trolls; it's fascinating, I've followed the Boing Boing saga with interest, and there's much to disagree with, in how you tied it to this discussion. But I simply haven't time. I'm sorry.
Alsafi #257:
"I'm seeing the same split between the idea that taxation=coercion=violence=immoral, and the idea that complete lassez-faire leads to social breakdown with its accompanying violence and harm, which is immoral. In the first view, property is the supreme good, and violating someone's right to it is akin to slavery, and thus a terrible stain on the soul, much greater than the stain caused by allowing someone to come to harm. In the second, people's lives and freedom from harm and (actual, not threat of) violence are the supreme good, and to withhold things at the cost of lives, health, or safety is a moral evil much greater than that of taking some things, even under the threat of coercion."
I agree with this dichotomy in all but the most quibbling details about the assigned moral weights -- it's a good statement of two conflicting worldviews, I think.
"I think, coming to it from the second point of view, that there is reasonable discussion to be had about where the balance should be placed between enforcing the good of all (not always accomplished, but it is the ideal), and allowing people to go their own ways without undue interference, but that these are fundamentally in tension to a certain degree."
Agree. Which is no slam on the second worldview; it's a little messy trying to find the sweet utilitarian maxima, but if that's the enterprise, there's a huge installed base of expertise on how to do it, which can be loosely called "good government" (which may be an oxymoron to me, but it's still distinguishable from, and preferable to, bad government).
"In the first point of view, though--I don't see where any discussion could be had; it seems a very absolutist view to me. Am I wrong in that? Is there wiggle room there? If so, where?"
You're not fundamentally wrong, at the theoretical level. If you'll accept "utilitarian" as a label for the second worldview, I'll say that utilitarianism announces itself as messy right on the label; it seeks to maximize poorly-defined "good", and minimized somewhat better-defined evils, that are tough to measure and impossible to weigh. That leaves plenty of room for wiggle, which is probably a virtue for any system that has to be implemented in the real world.
The first worldview, by contrast, is (at least in my instantiation) horrified by certain acts, acts which strike its adherents as evil and destructive of individual autonomy. There's precious little wiggle room in that horror. What wiggle room exists, exists in the implementation, in the daily compromises, in the weary comprehension that the world is not perfect, nor will it ever be. If I were seeking to change the world, which I am not given the hopeless minority of folks who share the first worldview in any significant degree, I'd argue that we could at least cut back on the morally horrific acts of violent compulsion "for the good of society", and see how things developed. Maybe there is a way monkeys could live together in community without that horror, maybe we just haven't tried hard enough yet.
Basically, holders of the first worldview have to make our own wiggle room in the realm of moral compromise, which (a) we are doing anyway to get through daily life on earth, as the neener neener in Lee's #240 makes so clear, and (b) is not that dissimilar to the moral compromises built into the other worldview we're discussing.
Finally (finally!) I want to say something about positive versus negative morality. Several people here (Mythago #260 very explicitly, but not the first) have suggested that one's obligation to do something about evil is equal to, or even superior to, one's obligation to refrain from doing evil things. I believe this illuminates a very real moral and philosophical dispute between the two worldviews.
There is a strain in libertarian thought that denies positive moral obligation absolutely. "I can gorge myself while watching beggars starve, and it's perfectly moral; if I choose to be charitable, that's my liberty, and if I choose not to be, it's a decision of no moral weight."
That's not me. To me it seems obvious that's a decision of moral weight.
But, I think that I and many other "first worldview" holders do perceive a difference between one's negative moral obligations ("thou shalt not steal") and one's positive obligations ("thou shalt give"). I do perceive the negative ones as more important, and the positive ones as less important. I think the "second worldview" holders are less likely to make that distinction; certainly, Mythago seems not to do so.
I'm too far out on a limb to try and justify my moral intuition here, but I think it's worth acknowledging the difference between the worldviews, or at least stating my opinion that such a difference exists.
As for why I feel the difference, it goes to agency. We are monkeys in a harsh and uncaring universe. The bad things I do to others are within my power; we call them evil because I could refrain from them, but chose not to. The other bad things that happen are not of my agency; if they are evil, they aren't my evil.
The positive moral obligation to prevent or redress evil not of my own making, although I acknowledge one to exist as some do not, seems self-evidently a destructive burden if assumed without limits. Thus, to me as an individualist, it seems proper for each individual to decide for himself how much of that burden to assume. ("None" being a failing answer for most of us, but perhaps not for someone whose personal situation is sufficiently desperate at a survival level.)
Which means that government is bad, if you parse things this way, to the extent that it ignores individual moral judgment on this point, assigns positive moral obligation to individuals, and enforces those assignments at gunpoint.
And wow, that took way longer to type than I planned to spend. Back atcha tomorrow!
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 9 |
| 2008 | 24 |
| 2007 | 26 |
| 2006 | 27 |
| 2005 | 21 |
| 2004 | 9 |
| 2003 | 12 |
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