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Testing
<p>Welcome to Armed And Dangerous, an experiment in weblogging.</p>
<p>This is a test. This is only a test. If this had been an actual<br />
emergency, this post would be immediately followed by a pointer to<br />
some old-media channel that would tell you what to think.</p>

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Acting White
<p><a href="http://volokh.blogspot.com/">Eugene Volokh</a> comments that<br />
many of the leading promoters of racial identity politics in the<br />
U.S. have begun to lump Asians in with white people, but declines to<br />
attempt an interpretation. Actually this development is very easy to<br />
understand. All you need to break the code is to know that &#8220;white&#8221; =<br />
&#8220;assimilated&#8221;.</p>
<p>Asians tend to be perceived as &#8220;white&#8221; not<br />
because they have white skin but because they behave as white people<br />
are expected to behave &mdash; they pursue prosperity and value education,<br />
and seek to blend into the U.S.&#8217;s broad middle class rather than<br />
creating a defiant, adversarial ghetto or barrio culture. Compare the<br />
epithet &#8220;acting white&#8221;, used among urban blacks to sneer at kids with<br />
black skin who work at being good students or holding down regular<br />
jobs.</p>
<p>This is nothing new. Historically, &#8220;whiteness&#8221; has never been a<br />
purely racial category. As late as the turn of the 20th century,<br />
Irish immigrants in the U.S. were sometimes separated from &#8220;whites&#8221; in<br />
speech and writing. Later, Eastern Europeans and Italians had to<br />
assimilate to U.S. cultural norms before being considered as &#8220;white&#8221;<br />
as the English, Germans, and Irish who had preceded them. Today,<br />
prosperous Asians have edged over that border. In our big cities,<br />
Chinese New Year is headed the way of the St. Patrick&#8217;s Day Parade,<br />
becoming as American as apple pie.</p>
<p>So why aren&#8217;t black people white too? The answer, I suggest, has<br />
very little to do with race and a lot to do with class &mdash;<br />
specifically, the persistence of the black urban underclass. Not just<br />
as a population but as a culture that remains mired in high crime,<br />
high rates of single motherhood, high unemployment, and all the other<br />
symptoms of high dependency on government largesse. The &#8220;Great<br />
Society&#8221; programs of the 1960s and the race-hustling identity politics<br />
that followed stalled out the assimilation process that turned Irish,<br />
Italians, and (recently) Asians into whites.</p>
<p>Try to imagine a Korean equivalent of gangsta rap. Or a bunch of<br />
Vietnamese high-school students taunting one of their own for &#8220;acting<br />
white&#8221;. Or Chinese kids fixating exclusively on Chinese adults as<br />
role models. These things don&#8217;t happen. And that&#8217;s why Asians are<br />
white.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Several Asians have written to tell me that I was doing OK<br />
until the last paragraph. There are anti-assimilationists among Asian<br />
immigrants, as it turns out; there is, in fact, even Korean gangsta<br />
music. However, my sources agree that these phenomena don&#8217;t persist<br />
among American-born Asians. I think it&#8217;s also significant that Asian<br />
anti-assimilationism is not a <em>public</em> phenomenon &mdash; it&#8217;s<br />
visible to other Asians but there are no movies glorifying it nor<br />
political organizations trading on it.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=76523509">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Firearms and the dominant media culture
<p>A recent flurry of <a href="http://juangato.blogspot.com/?/2002_05_05_juangato_archive.html#76413238"><br />
nearly identical editorials</a> in American newspapers conveys the<br />
degree of fluttering endemic in dovecotes everywhere in the wake of<br />
the Justice Department&#8217;s new statement of position on the Second<br />
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The <cite>New York Times</cite><br />
and <cite>Washington Post</cite> have viewed with alarm, displaying an<br />
almost pathetic degree of panic at the thought that lawmakers might<br />
once again have to start taking that pesky &#8220;shall not be infringed&#8221;<br />
language seriously.</p>
<p>The dominant culture of the American national media knows what it<br />
believes about guns. Firearms are evil juju that have the power to<br />
induce murderous violence in otherwise normal human beings. Firearms<br />
owners are all either ghetto drug dealers whose idea of the good life<br />
is a drive-by a day, or else tractor-cap-wearing rural sociopaths jes&#8217;<br />
itchin&#8217; to shoot up a schoolyard. Firearms-rights advocates are a<br />
tiny nut-fringe of reactionary wackos barely one step from blowing up<br />
a federal building. Gun-control boosters are virtuous crusaders<br />
animated by selfless love of children and small fuzzy things. There<br />
will come a day when all guns are banned, hallelujah, violent crime<br />
will plummet, and we can stop being embarrassed for being<br />
Americans.</p>
<p>Over the last thirty years this mythology has grown so thick, so<br />
armored with smugness, that the dominant media culture is normally<br />
incapable of noticing mere facts that happen to contradict it. Gary<br />
Kleck&#8217;s <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/point-blank-summary.html"> Point<br />
Blank: Guns and Violence In America</a> should have put paid the<br />
demonization of gun owners back in 1993. John Lott&#8217;s 1998 book<br />
<cite>More Guns, Less Crime</cite> demonstrated that civilian firearms<br />
dramatically reduce crime and violence. And Sanford Levinson&#8217;s 1989<br />
study <a href="http://www.shadeslanding.com/firearms/embar.html">The<br />
Embarrassing Second Amendment</a> began a wave of legal scholarship<br />
that established what is now called the `Standard Model&#8217;, that the<br />
Second Amendment does indeed protect an individual citizen&#8217;s right to<br />
bear arms.</p>
<p>That smugness has been shook, badly, by three different<br />
events of which the Justice Department&#8217;s finding is only the most recent.<br />
The media panic we&#8217;re seeing is a cumulative result of all three.</p>
<p>First there was Michael Bellesiles&#8217;s exposure as a fraud. His book<br />
<cite>Arming America</cite> won the Bancroft prize and gushing encomiums<br />
from the dominant media culture when it purported to show that the<br />
armed and self-reliant American frontiersman was a myth &#8212; that the<br />
gun culture of the U.S. postdates the American Civil War and was alien<br />
to the framers of the Constitution.</p>
<p>Alas for the <em>bien pensants</em> of the world that the book<br />
turned out to be a tissue of lies, invented but nonexistent evidence,<br />
and willful misquotation of existing evidence. A fabrication, in<br />
fact, so egregious that it has induced the National Endowment for the<br />
Humanities to open its first official fraud investigation in thirty-seven<br />
years. Suddenly the fraud claims gun-rights activists had been making<br />
for years about other anti-gun scholarship (such as the infamous<br />
Kellerman <a href="http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/43_to_1_fallacy.htm">&#8220;43:1&#8243;</a>)<br />
study) were no longer so easily dismissible as paranoid ranting.</p>
<p>But worse was to come, on September 9th 2001. Because Al-Qaeda&#8217;s<br />
ability to turns airliners into weapons of mass destruction using<br />
nothing but carpet knives illustrated in the most dramatic possible<br />
way the folly of believing that a disarmed world is a safe one. All<br />
the &#8220;security&#8221; that kept civilian firearms off airplanes did was make<br />
terrorism easier for the determined few who could smuggle weapons on<br />
board.</p>
<p>Many tides turned after 9/11, and not the least result of it was<br />
a huge groundswell in popular support for civilian self-defense and<br />
firearms rights. The <a href="http://www.pinkpistols.org/"><br />
Pink Pistols</a> and chapters of the <a href="http://www.sas-aim.org/"><br />
Second Amendment Sisters</a> on college campuses previously known<br />
as strongholds of anti-firearms politics became impossible to ignore.<br />
The new wave of popular pro-gun agitation could not be forced into the<br />
&#8220;right-wing kooks&#8221; box so beloved of the dominant media culture.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s no wonder the Justice Department&#8217;s endorsement of a<br />
pro-gun-rights brief in &#8220;Emerson vs. U.S.&#8221; has the mavens of the<br />
dominant media culture feeling faint and panicky. One of the pillars<br />
of their world-view (up there with the unquestionable sanctity of<br />
environmentalists, say, or the importance of `diversity&#8217;, or the<br />
superior virtue of the putatively oppressed) is creaking. Those loony<br />
gun nuts night turn out to be (a) right on the facts, (b)<br />
overwhelmingly popular, and (c) backed up by the Bill of Rights, the<br />
Justice Department, and the Supreme Court, after all!</p>
<p>If the Supreme Court grants certiorati on the Emerson case, we can<br />
expect the dominant media culture to get its knickers in a knot so<br />
complicated it would baffle an algebraic topologist. Because given<br />
the composition of the Court and the tenor of the times, the result<br />
might well be a dramatic rollback in the reach of firearms regulation.<br />
Gun-rights advocates can hope that laws touching the Second Amendment<br />
may in the future have to pass the same strictest level of scrutiny<br />
as laws touching the First. A wave of lawsuits successfully striking<br />
down state and local gun laws under the doctrine of incorporation<br />
could well follow.</p>
<p>The closest historical precedent for what may be about to happen is<br />
the rediscovery of the First Amendment in the early 20th century.<br />
Before 1919 speech advocating unpopular ideas could be made a<br />
punishable offense. Oliver Wendell Holmes created the doctrine,<br />
since become sacred to the dominant media culture, that unpopular<br />
ideas demand the <em>most</em> constitutional protection, and that<br />
the press has a broadly privileged role under that shield.</p>
<p>There is irony in the fact that, having benefited from the<br />
reassertion of the first article of the Bill of Rights, the dominant<br />
media culture should so be resisting the second.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=76531063">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Foo on you, Asparagirl!
<p>Asparagirl has committed a <a href="http://www.asparagirl.com/blog/#85088715">base calumny</a><br />
against me. While it&#8217;s true she had something to do with me entering<br />
the blogosphere, this business about threatening her with a Glock is<br />
totally off-base. I would never do anything like that. My carry<br />
weapon is a Colt Officer&#8217;s Model 45 ACP. It&#8217;s my <em>wife</em> who<br />
carries the Glock&#8230;</p>

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Socialists to the Stars
<p>Science fiction, because it deals in extrapolated futures, has a long<br />
tradition of employment as a vehicle for political argument. More than that,<br />
science fiction encourages politically-minded writers to narratize their<br />
beliefs in ways that can sometime reveal more than the writers intended<br />
about the problems and contradictions in their own theories. </p>
<p>I was powerfully reminded of this fact while reading Ken MacLeod&#8217;s<br />
latest <cite>The Sky Road</cite>. A reference in the book led me to<br />
think about Iain Banks, and from there I flashed on some recent<br />
analyses of post-9/11 confusion among the European left. And I<br />
realized that MacLeod and Banks between them inadvertently reveal some<br />
interesting things about socialism in the post-Soviet world.</p>
<p>Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks are two of the most interesting young<br />
writers in science fiction. Both are rooted in Scotland, and both<br />
manage the peculiar and somewhat arresting trick of writing rather<br />
hard SF from a Marxist political stance. For multiple historical and<br />
structural reasons, the dominant strain in the politics of SF has long<br />
been individualist, anti-authoritarian, even libertarian in tone &#8212;<br />
and this has been most true near the hard-SF heart of the field.<br />
MacLeod and Banks, then, are almost unique in proposing SF narratives<br />
in which socialism has a heroic future &#8212; and in doing so giving us an<br />
SFnal window into how socialists in the post-Soviet world think,<br />
and the unrecognized contradictions in their ideas.</p>
<p>Banks is the less explicit of the two. His Culture novels<br />
(including <cite>Excession</cite>, <cite>Use of Weapons</cite>,</p>
<p><cite>The Player Of Games</cite>, and <cite>Look To Windward</cite><br />
are wide-screen space operas in which the good guys are a communist<br />
utopia. In the Culture, there is no money and no want and no markets;<br />
the economy is run by the vast AIs called Culture Minds, who somehow<br />
centrally plan everything so that human beings never have to make<br />
unpleasant scarcity choices. It&#8217;s Marxist eschatology entire,<br />
with the withering-away of the state sustained by deus ex machina.</p>
<p>But Banks never refers to communism or capitalism or any feature of<br />
present-day politics by name. You get his politics by indirection,<br />
mainly by noticing how he thinks economics and history work. In his<br />
universe all the non-communist cultures are barbarians waiting to be<br />
assimilated by Culture contact expeditions. The cat gets let out of<br />
the bag in a historical aside; Banks imagines Earth itself being<br />
subsumed. Marx&#8217;s dialectical imperative having failed us, Banks is<br />
imaginatively counting on invasion by superior aliens to sweep<br />
capitalism and markets into the dustbin of history.</p>
<p>Banks&#8217;s Culture is not quite the dreary exercise in correct-think<br />
the above description might suggest; in fact, the Culture is a lot of<br />
fun to read about. But there is a black hole at the center of Banks&#8217;s<br />
construction. Leaving aside all the tendentious political questions<br />
about who gets to use force in the Culture, and when, and for what<br />
reasons&#8230;the economics can&#8217;t possibly work. The Culture Minds, if<br />
they existed, would run slap-bang into F. A. Hayek&#8217;s `calculation<br />
problem&#8217;. In 1936, Hayek showed that a planned economy, deprived of<br />
the demand signals generated by markets, will inevitably malinvest its<br />
way to collapse. The Soviet Union took less than sixty years to act<br />
out Hayek&#8217;s prediction, and in 2002 there is really no better excuse<br />
for an SF writer not understanding this than there would be for<br />
getting the physics of a story gimmick wrong.</p>
<p>If Banks narratizes the fundamentalist version of socialism<br />
(believe and heaven will take you up), MacLeod gives us something<br />
rather weirder and more complex. Unlike Banks, he is economically<br />
literate. His characters are staunch old socialists who have figured<br />
out that Marxism is a total crock and the Soviet Union was a doomed,<br />
murderous failure. In fact MacLeod is an anarchist at heart, and his<br />
futures succumb to the inevitability of markets in the absence of<br />
state control. And yet, his characters cannot let go of that old-time<br />
religion &#8212; they fetishize posters of Che Guevara and hate<br />
&#8220;imperialism&#8221; and sing the Internationale and get all misty-eyed over<br />
hammer-and-sickle emblems and even obey orders from the shadowy<br />
remnants of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>MacLeod gives us post-Communist Communism, heavy metal irony,<br />
socialist camp &#8212; indeed, one of the two viewpoint characters uses the<br />
latter phrase to describe the &#8220;worker&#8217;s state&#8221; she runs in Central<br />
Asia. The program is gone, all that&#8217;s left is the attitude and the<br />
conspiracy and the dreary verbal cliches and the resentment.<br />
Including the hatred of capitalism. The results in MacLeod&#8217;s weiting<br />
sometimes have an appealing gritty contrarianism, but more often just<br />
the morbid fascination of a bad auto accident. One pities his<br />
characters in the way one might pity any gifted obsessive. In<br />
fact, one pities MacLeod himself.</p>
<p>Banks&#8217;s denial-drenched wish-fantasy. MacLeod&#8217;s<br />
self-loathing-tinged politics of resentment, intermittently<br />
intelligent but unable to escape the sentimental gravitational pull of<br />
the old Soviet evil. Voila! The two poles of the European left after<br />
the fall of the Soviet Union, and especially after 9/11. Neither one<br />
of them which much sustainability or mass appeal.</p>
<p>Leftist theory has been in a state of accelerating disintegration<br />
ever since &#8220;real existing socialism&#8221; fulfilled the fate Marx predicted<br />
for capitalism by collapsing under the weight of its own<br />
contradictions. Once the European left could no longer seriously<br />
propose a Marxist program, it had to settle for a defensive<br />
hunker-down around the socialist-inspired institutions of state &#8212; the<br />
dole, national health services, and so forth. This is why ever since<br />
Margaret Thatcher, most of the dynamism of European political change<br />
within countries has come from the right &#8212; and the European Union,<br />
always an enterprise of the left, may now be in jeopardy under<br />
populist and nationalist pressure.</p>
<p>Pim Fortuyn and Jean-Marie Le Pen (to name the two most ecent<br />
upsetters of the Euroleftist applecart) really had very little in<br />
common except for having been branded &#8220;right-wing&#8221; by left-sympathizing<br />
journalists. In fact, both their platforms are traditionally left<br />
on economic policy. What they did have in common is that they were<br />
both shrewd opportunists who stepped into the vacuum created by<br />
the ideological collapse of the traditional left.</p>
<p>Nowhere in either Banks&#8217;s or MacLeod&#8217;s mythologizations of future<br />
socialism is there any hint of an answer for the rising political<br />
problems of the present. The failure of multiculturalism as a strategy<br />
for preventing inter-ethnic and sectarian strife is the one Fortuyn<br />
and Le Pen exploited. There are others; environmental policy,<br />
information privacy, biotech. The European left, an increasingly<br />
tired anachronism in a capitalist world, no longer has either the<br />
energy or the intellectual heft to tackle any of these. The best its<br />
parties can hope for is to do as the British Labor party did; shift<br />
towards centrist pragmatism while making obeisances to left rhetoric<br />
that everyone involved recognizes as increasingly meaningless.</p>
<p>Perhaps it&#8217;s not surprising that both Banks and MacLeod<br />
are creatures of the post-Soviet world. Their fantasies of<br />
socialism to the stars may be all the Left has left.</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=76683821">Blogspot comment</a></p>

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That&#8217;s Why They Call It &lsquo;Sex Education&rsquo;
<p>I&#8217;m on the road in Thailand, speaking at a U.N. conference on sustainable A<br />
development in the Third World. Earlier today I listened to a presentation<br />
on the effects of sex education for women. The presentation mentioned some<br />
cultural value conflicts about sex education, but it occurred to me that it<br />
didn&#8217;t touch the biggest one. To wit: worldwide, the teachers want the<br />
kids to learn abstinence, but what the <em>kids</em> to learn is technique.</p>

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Closed Source &mdash; Who Dares Call It Treason?
<p>The cat is out of the bag. During <a href="http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s%253D701%2526a%253D26875,00.asp">testimony<br />
before a federal judge</a>, Microsoft executive Jim Allchin has<br />
admitted that some code critical to the security of Microsoft products<br />
is so flawed it could not be safely disclosed to other developers or<br />
the public.</p>
<p>Allchin was arguing against efforts by nine states and the District of<br />
Columbia to impose antitrust remedies that would require Microsoft to<br />
disclose its code. He constructed dire scenarios of U.S. national<br />
security and the war against terrorism being compromised if such<br />
disclosure were required.</p>
<p>Now turn this around. Allchin has testified under oath in a Federal<br />
court that software Microsoft knows to be fatally flawed is deployed<br />
where it may cost American lives. We&#8217;d better hope that Allchin is<br />
lying, invoking a &#8220;national security&#8221; threat he doesn&#8217;t actually<br />
believe in to stave off a disclosure requirement. That would merely<br />
be perjury, a familiar crime for Microsoft.</p>
<p>If Allchin is not committing perjury, matters are far worse &mdash; because<br />
it means Microsoft has knowingly chosen to compromise national<br />
security rather than alert users in the military to the danger its own<br />
incompetence has created. Implied is that Microsoft has chosen not to<br />
deploy a repaired version of the software before the tragedy Allchin<br />
is predicting actually strikes. These acts would be willful<br />
endangerment of our country&#8217;s front-line soldiers in wartime. That<br />
is called treason, and carries the death penalty.</p>
<p>Perjury, or treason? Which is it, Mr. Allchin?</p>
<p>There is another message here: that security bugs, like cockroaches,<br />
flourish in darkness. Experience shows that developers knowing their<br />
code would be open to third-party scrutiny program more carefully,<br />
reducing the odds of security bugs. And had Microsoft&#8217;s source code<br />
been exposed from the beginning, any vulnerabilities could have been<br />
spotted and corrected before the software that they compromised became<br />
so widely deployed that Allchin says they may now actually threaten<br />
American lives.</p>
<p>Thus Mr. Allchin&#8217;s testimony is not merely a self-indictment of<br />
Microsoft but of all non-open-source development for security-critical<br />
software. As with many other issues, the legacy of 9/11 is to raise<br />
the stakes and sharpen the questions. Dare we tolerate less than the<br />
most effective software development practices when thousands more<br />
lives might be at stake?</p>
<p>Closed source. Who dares call it treason?</p>

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Sexual Competence
<p>Most of the participants in the recent blogospheric <a href="http://www.creatical.com/weblog/archives/00000791.shtml#comments"><br />
mini-flap</a> about a Yale Press Daily article on the fine points of<br />
<a href="http://yaledailynews.com/article.asp?aid=17519">fellatio</a><br />
either make crude jokes, dismiss the article as either a sophomoric<br />
exercise in tweak-the-fogies or shocking evidence of the depravity of<br />
today&#8217;s youth.</p>
<p>I think both are missing the real point. Well, OK, the<br />
tweak-the-fogies camp is not completely off base, but there is<br />
something the Natalie Krinsky who wrote this item of tweakery<br />
understands that they don&#8217;t seem to. And that is this: today,<br />
<em>sexual competence is a mainstream virtue</em> &mdash; part of the<br />
normal toolkit of adults, like table manners or choosing appropriate<br />
clothes.</p>
<p>And by &#8220;sexual competence&#8221; I specifically do not mean just the<br />
ability to get laid, but being good in bed once you get there. Sexual<br />
competence includes the ability to give and receive sexual pleasure.<br />
It includes the ability to express one&#8217;s playfulness, affection, lust,<br />
passion, and love towards a sexual partner with physical acts; to give<br />
pleasure with behavior that is considered, purposed, and conscious,<br />
and which expresses pride in and enjoyment of one&#8217;s own sexual<br />
nature.</p>
<p>In the dark and backward abysm of time (that is, before about<br />
1973), nice people weren&#8217;t really supposed to <em>work</em> at being<br />
good in bed. Only prostitutes, gigolos and sex symbols were allowed<br />
the privilege of treating sex as a conscious art of pleasure.<br />
Everybody else was, essentially, only allowed to be good in bed only<br />
by accident of endowment.</p>
<p>There was a limited exception for married couples and other people<br />
passionately in love. They were permitted to improve their sexual<br />
competence as long as the goal was to affirm the relationship. The<br />
idea that competence at giving sexual pleasure could be a good in<br />
itself, even in a one-night stand, was simply not part of our culture.<br />
The outraged critics of Ms. Krinsky&#8217;s article seem still to be living in<br />
that world.</p>
<p>But the reality around them has changed. Alex Comfort&#8217;s <cite>The<br />
Joy of Sex</cite> was probably the breakthrough, nearly thirty years<br />
ago now. Today&#8217;s college kids have grown up in an environment in<br />
which questions of sexual competence (and expectations about it) go<br />
way beyond &#8220;will-she/won&#8217;t-she?&#8221; and &#8220;can he avoid coming too soon if<br />
she does?&#8221;.</p>
<p>Today, even teenage boys and girls expect each other to cultivate<br />
sexual competence; those who don&#8217;t are simply not competitive in the<br />
dating-and-mating game. Ms. Krinsky&#8217;s article may have been intended<br />
to tweak the fogies &mdash; but it also describes learning behavior that is<br />
perfectly adaptive for today&#8217;s environment, because oral sex is a<br />
gateway behavior for the aspiring hedonist.</p>
<p>That is, learning how to give good head is usually the first<br />
pleasure-giving behavior in sex that is not a straight-line<br />
elaboration of instinct. Kissing, caressing, and intercourse are<br />
wired in; one can refine technique, but the behavioral basis is<br />
already present. Oral sex is the usually the first behavior sexual<br />
hedonists acquire that <em>has</em> to be completely learned.</p>
<p>A significant and related fact is that taking <em>pleasure</em><br />
from giving head has to be learned, by a kind of transference from the<br />
pleasure taken by one&#8217;s partner. Experienced fellatrices and<br />
cunnilinguists may learn to take direct sensual pleasure in the act,<br />
but that usually follows from and is conditioned in by the<br />
transference effect rather than leading it. Thus, for beginners,<br />
giving oral sex is a particularly unselfish and adult skill.</p>
<p>Finally, for most pairs of partners oral sex is the most important<br />
method of orgasmic gratification other than vaginal intercourse. So<br />
learning to give good head is not just a gateway behavior, it&#8217;s one<br />
that tends to remain central in the adult repertoire.</p>
<p>Therefore, a teenage girl teaching herself how to give a good<br />
blowjob is not merely learning how to give a blowjob. She is<br />
declaring her intention to acquire the (now mainstream) virtue of<br />
sexual competence. She is matter-of-factly reaching not just for a<br />
particular skill that she knows will be expected of her as an adult,<br />
but to learn the attitude and sensitivity that will take her<br />
further on the path of sexual ability. She is growing herself<br />
up.</p>
<p>Looked at this way, it&#8217;s hard to see why anyone living in 2002<br />
should find Ms. Krinsky&#8217;s report of her self-training exceptionable. One<br />
might just as well object to her teaching herself how to cook, or drive,<br />
or dance.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=76959124">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Women With Guns
<p>James Rummel <a href="http://handbasket.blogspot.com/2002_05_12_handbasket_archive.html#76467847" asks</a> why men keep teaching women to shoot, despite the fact that they tend to outdo us at this manly pursuit.</a></p>
<p>As a man who makes something of a hobby of teaching woman to shoot, I can answer in two ways:</p>
<p>One: Women need to learn to shoot more than men do. Men have a 2:1 advantage in upper-body strength over women. Most criminal assailants are men. While we Y-chromosome types have a fair chance of fighting the average assailant off without technological help, women do not. I teach women to shoot on the principle that the only good rapist is a dead one.</p>
<p>Two: A pretty woman with a gun in her hand is way sexier than one without. Why this is I don&#8217;t know, but I do know that I am far from the only male with this reaction. There was that legendary video of bikini-clad models firing automatic weapons&#8230;</p>
<p>Which reason is more important? Let&#8217;s just observe that all interesting behavior is overdetermined and leave it at that.</p>

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Arm and Assimilate
<p>A current Weekly Standard article, <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/266umtwb.asp"><br />
Crime Without Punishment</a>, observes that European crime rates are<br />
soaring to levels that match or exceed the U.S.&#8217;s even while U.S crime<br />
rates decline for the tenth consecutive year. <em>Schadenfreude</em><br />
is not a pretty emotion, but it&#8217;s hard not to feel a twinge of it<br />
after so many years of listening to snotty Europeans lecture us<br />
Americans on how U.S. crime rates demonstrate that we are a nation of<br />
violent barbarians who can be saved only if we swallow European social<br />
policies entire.</p>
<p>The article proposes as an explanation that local control of<br />
policing is more effective than Europe&#8217;s system of large centralized<br />
police agencies. This may well be true; in fact, it probably is true.<br />
But it fails to explain the time variance &#8212; because that structural<br />
difference is not new, but the flipover in relative crime rates<br />
between the U.S. and Europe is recent.</p>
<p>If that&#8217;s not what is going on, what is? The article passes over<br />
two potential explanations far too quickly. One: differences in<br />
patterns of civilian firearms ownership. Two: the novel presence of<br />
large unassimilated minority groups in European cities.</p>
<p>The article correctly notes that &#8220;John Lott has shown that greater<br />
gun ownership reduces crime&#8221; but then dismisses this with &#8220;gun<br />
ownership levels are about the same as they were when crime hit its<br />
all-time highs in America 30 years ago&#8221;. However, the<br />
<em>distribution</em> of firearms has changed in relevant ways. As<br />
Gary Kleck noted ten years ago, the composition of the U.S. firearms<br />
stock in the early 1970s was dominated by rifles and shotguns.<br />
Nowadays it is dominated by pistols. Americans, aided by a recent<br />
state-level trend towards right-to-carry laws, are packing concealed<br />
weapons on the street in greater numbers than ever before &#8212; and those<br />
are the weapons known to have the most dramatic effect in suppressing<br />
crime. Indeed, one of the principal results of Lott&#8217;s regression<br />
analysis is that encouraging civilians to carry concealed is both a<br />
cheaper and a more effective way to deter crime than increasing police<br />
budgets.</p>
<p>The article dismisses immigration with &#8220;violence and theft have<br />
also spiked in countries that let in few immigrants&#8221;. Again, there is<br />
an issue of distribution here. American experience tells us that it<br />
is not the absolute number of unassimilated poor that matters, but the<br />
extent to which they are concentrated in subsidized ghettos with<br />
little contact with the mainstream and no incentive to assimilate.<br />
After the repeated news stories observing that skyrocketing crime in Paris<br />
is largely a phenomenon of Arab thug-boys from bleak government-run<br />
housing projects, this should not be a difficult concept to grasp.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s new in Europe is not comparatively poor policing, but rather<br />
the combination of two trends: laws disarming civilians and the<br />
formation of persistent, crime-breeding ghetto cultures analogous to<br />
the U.S.&#8217;s urban underclass. Both trends are clearest in Great<br />
Britain, where violent assaults and hot burglaries have shot up 44%<br />
since handguns were banned in 1996, and police now find they have to<br />
go armed to counter gangs of automatic-weapon-wielding thugs in the<br />
slum areas of Manchester and other big cities.</p>
<p>The prescription seems clear: arm and assimilate. Arm the victims<br />
before they become victims and assimilate the criminals before they<br />
become criminals. Raising the frequency of civilian concealed carry<br />
of firearms will deter crime, just as it does in the U.S.<br />
Assimilating the new wave of poor Third-World immigrants and breaking<br />
up the ghettos will drain the stagnant pools in which crime<br />
breeds.</p>
<p>And the next Euro-snob to lecture me on how America&#8217;s &#8220;gun culture&#8221;<br />
causes crime is going to get both barrels of this prescription right<br />
in his face&#8230;</p>
<p>UPDATE: The Boston Globe is running a story on the <a href="http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/146/focus/Targeting_a_myth+.shtml">failure<br />
of gun control in Great Britain</a>.</p>
<p>UPDATE: A reader points out that I was inexplicit about what has<br />
led to the formation of a ghettoized underclass in Europe&#8217;s cities.<br />
It is, of course, the same blunder that started the same process in<br />
American cities forty years ago &#8212; the social-welfare state,<br />
subsidizing poverty.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=76987892">Blogspot Comments</a></p>

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Arm the Passengers
<p>The recent controversy over arming airline pilots against a<br />
possible repetition of the 9/11 atrocity misses a crucial problem that<br />
makes arming pilots relatively ineffective: terrorists would know in<br />
advance where the guns are, and be able to game against that.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s say you are a terrorist executing a hijacking. You know the pilots<br />
are armed. Then here are your tactics &#8212; you send the pilots a message that<br />
you will begin shooting cabin crew and passengers, one every five minutes,<br />
until the pilots throw their guns into the main cabin. Just to make sure,<br />
you split your gang into an A team and a B team. After the pilots have<br />
thrown out some guns, you send the A team into the cockpit. If the pilots<br />
resist, the B team kills more people.</p>
<p>Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed<br />
with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky<br />
marshals (if there are any present; they&#8217;re now flying on less than 1%<br />
of planes, and can&#8217;t be trained fast enough for that figure to go up<br />
significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A<br />
team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals.<br />
Game over.</p>
<p>Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping<br />
firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe <em>now</em>.<br />
Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/03/25/airport.security/?related"><br />
demonstrated</a> that the new, improved airport security has had<br />
effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy&#8217;s ability to sneak<br />
weapons past checkpoints &#8212; it&#8217;s still easy. Despite government spin,<br />
there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just<br />
too hard.</p>
<p>For terrorists to be effectively deterred, they need to face a<br />
conterthreat they cannot scope out in advance. That&#8217;s why the right<br />
solution is to arm the <em>passengers</em>, not just the pilots.</p>
<p>Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns<br />
potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that<br />
flight attendant hostage. You can&#8217;t use her to make people give up<br />
weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume<br />
you&#8217;re outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on<br />
<em>anyone</em>, because you don&#8217;t know who might be packing.</p>
<p>The anti-gun <em>bien pensants</em> of the world wet their pants at<br />
the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed<br />
civilians. They would have you believe that this would be a sure<br />
recipe for carnage on every flight, an epidemic of berserk yahoos<br />
blowing bullet holes through innocent bystanders and the cabin walls.<br />
When you ask why this didn&#8217;t happen before 1971 when there were no<br />
firearms restrictions on airplanes, they evade the question.</p>
<p>The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang<br />
of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent<br />
bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking<br />
out the terrorists. That would be bad &#8212; but, post-9/11, the major<br />
aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives. Instead,<br />
it has to be preventing the use of airplanes as weapons of mass<br />
destruction. Thus: we should arm the passengers to save the lives of<br />
thousands more bystanders on the ground.</p>
<p>And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren&#8217;t balloons.<br />
They don&#8217;t pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful<br />
of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous;<br />
there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere.<br />
To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting<br />
ammunition like Glaser rounds.</p>
<p>Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious<br />
baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security<br />
guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before<br />
boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster<br />
air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists.</p>
<p>Extending this lesson to other circumstances, like when we&#8217;re<br />
<em>not</em> surrounded by a fuselage, is left as an exercise for<br />
the reader&#8230;</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77217747">Blogspot comment</a></p>

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Who&#8217;s a warblogger? Blogotypology considered
<p>My good buddy Doc Searls <a href="http://doc.weblogs.com/2002/06/05#wereAllBlogmongers"> says I&#8217;m<br />
a warblogger, not a techblogger</a>. Truth is I&#8217;ve never thought of<br />
myself either way. I had only the vaguest notion what a `warblogger&#8217;<br />
is until I followed his links to the definitional discussion. I write<br />
stuff related to 9/11 because it&#8217;s one of the definining events of our<br />
day, but I didn&#8217;t start blogging particularly because I wanted to<br />
comment on the war. Y&#8217;all may have noticed that I write about sex and<br />
guns a lot. Nothing about witchcraft yet, but give it time&#8230; :-)
</p>
<p>The blogotypological distinction that makes the most<br />
sense to me is &#8220;thinker&#8221; vs. &#8220;linker&#8221;. I know which of those<br />
camps I&#8217;m in. I&#8217;m a thinker, an essayist. I&#8217;d rather write about<br />
my original thinking than reflect or index other peoples&#8217; words.<br />
VodkaPundit was right on when he compared me to Steve Den Beste over at <a href="http://www.denbeste.nu/">U.S.S. Clueless</a>. <a href="http://instapundit.com/">Glenn Reynolds</a> is, of course, the king of the linkers (though<br />
he goes into thinker mode off-blog).</p>
<p>I&#8217;d actually say there&#8217;s a<br />
third setting on this switch; &#8220;diarist&#8221;, someone who blogs<br />
essentially as a public journal. Like Den Beste, I&#8217;m not a diarist; you wouldn&#8217;t find ramblings about my beagle or my infant daughter here even if I had either.<br />
My personal life appears in this blog only insofar as it&#8217;s the<br />
frame in which my ideas happen. I can imagine writing personal journalism, but it&#8217;s not my default style.<br />
<a href="http://www.asparagirl.com/blog/">Asparagirl</a>, on<br />
the other hand, is a good paradigmatic example of a diarist; her ideas are embedded in a narrative of her life.</p>
<p>Of course, people do mix modes. <a href="http://www.lileks.com/bleats/">James Lileks</a> is<br />
a diarist/thinker, or thinker/diarist, and<br />
<a href="http://andrewsullivan.com/">Andrew Sullivan</a><br />
oscillates among all three modes in a (dare I say it?)<br />
gaily promiscuous fashion. But most bloggers seem to<br />
have a base style that&#8217;s one of these three, from which they<br />
may make occasional excursions but to which they<br />
inevitably return.</p>
<p>As Doc points out, I&#8217;m not a techblogger either. Technology<br />
evangelism is what <em>I</em> do off-blog; <em>Armed and<br />
Dangerous</em> is for the writing that doesn&#8217;t fit that box, just<br />
as a lot of other bloggers treat the medium as an outlet for<br />
whatever is not <em>their</em> day job. Maybe that&#8217;s another<br />
distinction we need; `problogger&#8217; (someone like Jonah Goldberg<br />
whose blogging is a seamless extension of his day job) versus `playblogger&#8217; (someone who blogs to let off steam that their day-job channels don&#8217;t have a good vent for).</p>
<p>While the best I can say about the term `warblogger&#8217; is that<br />
it&#8217;s not completely useless, `techblogger&#8217; seems to me to be a<br />
category that&#8217;s likely to survive as the medium matures. So<br />
does the thinker/linker/diarist distinction, and the playblogger/problogger flag bit.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll end with the obligatory abjurgation not to take any such<br />
terminology too seriously. We&#8217;re all writers, a prickly bunch,<br />
and we&#8217;re all to some degree category-busters by nature or<br />
we wouldn&#8217;t be here in the infancy of a new medium at all. Still&#8230;I suspect that more definite blogotypes will emerge as people explore the space of available styles and discover which ones<br />
are most effective at communication.</p>

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After reading too much political news
<p>Top Ten Reasons I&#8217;m Not A (Left-)Liberal:</p>
<ol>
<li>Gun control. Liberals are completely wrong about this. A fair number<br />
of them know better, too, but they sponsor lies about it as a form of class<br />
warfare against conservative-leaning gun owners.</li>
<li>Nuclear power. They&#8217;re wrong about this, too, and the cost in<br />
both dollars and human deaths by pollution and other fossil-fuel<br />
side-effects has been enormous.</li>
<li>Affirmative action. These programs couldn&#8217;t be a more diabolical or<br />
effective plan for plan for entrenching racial prejudice if the Aryan<br />
Nations had designed them.</li>
<li>Abortion: The liberals&#8217; looney-toon feminist need to believe that<br />
a fetus one second before birth is a parasitic lump of tissue with no<br />
rights, but a fetus one second afterwards is a full human, has done<br />
half the job of making a reasoned debate on abortion<br />
nigh-impossible.</li>
<li>Communism. I haven&#8217;t forgiven the Left for sucking up to the monstrous<br />
evil that was the Soviet Union. And I never will.</li>
<li>Socialism. Liberals have never met a tax, a government<br />
intervention, or a forcible redistribution of wealth they didn&#8217;t like.<br />
Their economic program is Communism without the guts to admit it.</li>
<li>Junk science. No medicical study is too bogus and no environmental<br />
scare too fraudalent for liberals. If it rationalizes bashing<br />
capitalism or slathering on another layer of regulatory bureaucracy,<br />
they&#8217;ll take it.</li>
<li>Defining deviancy down. Liberals are in such a desperate rush to<br />
embrace the `victimized by society&#8217; and speak the language of<br />
compassion that they&#8217;ve forgotten how to condemn harmful,<br />
self-destructive and other-destructive behavior.</li>
<li>William Jefferson Clinton. Sociopathic liar, perjurer, sexual predator.<br />
There was nothing but a sucking narcissistic vacuum where his principles<br />
should have been. Liberals worship him.</li>
<li>Liberals, by and large, are fools.</li>
</ol>
<p>Top Ten Reasons I&#8217;m Not A Conservative:</p>
<ol>
<li>Pornography. The complete absence of evidence that exposure to<br />
sexually-explicit material is harmful to children or anyone else doesn&#8217;t<br />
stop conservatives from advocating massive censorship.</li>
<li>Drugs. We found out that Prohibition was a bad idea back in the<br />
1930s &#8212; all it did was create a huge and virulent criminal class, erode<br />
respect for the law, and corrupt our politics. Some people never learn.</li>
<li>Creationism. I don&#8217;t know who I find more revolting, the drooling<br />
morons who actally believe creationism or the intelligent panderers<br />
who know better but provide them with political cover for their<br />
religious-fundamentalist agenda in return for votes.</li>
<li>Abortion. The conservatives&#8217; looney-toon religious need to<br />
believe that a fertilized gamete is morally equivalent to a human<br />
being has done the other half of making a reasoned debate on abortion<br />
nigh-impossible.</li>
<li>Racism. I haven&#8217;t forgiven the Right for segregation, Jim Crow laws,<br />
and lynching blacks. And I never will.</li>
<li>Sexism. Way too much conservative thought still reads like an<br />
apologia for keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.</li>
<li>Anti-science. Stem cells, therapeutic cloning &#8212; it doesn&#8217;t matter<br />
how many more diabetes, cancer and AIDS patients have to die to<br />
protect the anti-abortion movement&#8217;s ideological flanks. Knowledge &#8212;<br />
who needs it? Conservatives would try suppressing <em>astronomy</em><br />
if the telescope had just been invented.</li>
<li>Family values. Conservatives are so desperate to reassert the<br />
repressive `normalcy&#8217; they think existed in Grand-dad&#8217;s time that they<br />
pretend we can undo the effects of the automobile, television, the<br />
Pill, and the Internet.</li>
<li>Ronald Wilson Reagan. A B-movie actor who thought ketchup was<br />
a vegetable. His grip on reality was so dangerously weak that the<br />
Alzheimer&#8217;s made no perceptible difference. Conservatives worship him.</li>
<li>Conservatives, by and large, are villains.</li>
</ol>
<p>a href=&#8221;http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77590690&#8243;>Blogspot comments</p>

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Bad porn reprise
<p>Many people wrote me with comments on my essay<br />
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#109">Why Does Porn Got To Hurt So Bad?</a>. For all of those who<br />
sent praise, thank you. It&#8217;s actually nice to know there are so many<br />
people who would like to reject the bad-porn aesthetic. For all<br />
of those who refrained from calling down fire and brimstone on me for messing with smut, also thank you. I&#8217;d have ignored you,<br />
but thank you anyway.</p>
<p>I got two responses I thought were particularly interesting.<br />
One was from a gentleman who works as a pornographer. He<br />
opined that I overestimated the porn industry by supposing that<br />
bad porn reflected market demand. The real problem (he claims)<br />
is that it&#8217;s hard to find women who simultaneously don&#8217;t look<br />
hard and jaded yet are willing to bare all for the camera. Most<br />
outfits, he said, don&#8217;t even try. They settle for the fake-pearl-and-synthoboob look out of laziness, knowing it&#8217;s crap<br />
but will sell well enough.</p>
<p>This doesn&#8217;t explain to me why, if Veronika Zemanova can look like a girl one might willingly take to bed in one picture and an unnatural womanoid-thing in another, they don&#8217;t try to photograph<br />
women like her in the more natural mode more often. But perhaps<br />
this one was just a trick of the light.</p>
<p>Another respondent proposes the interesting theory that the<br />
girls are dressed (or rather undressed) to look inaccessible<br />
because if they weren&#8217;t, there might be an epidemic of stalking<br />
as various creeps and wackos tried to get next to them.</p>
<p>It would be touching to believe the porn industry cares that<br />
much about its performers, but I&#8217;m skeptical.</p>
<p>Finally, I got mail from <a href="http://www.germanlucy.com/lucysgirls/images/lucykiesgrube04.jpg"><br />
&#8220;German Lucy&#8221;</a>, who said she was honored to appear in my<br />
essay and quite enjoyed it. Rather to my astonishment, her email style<br />
suggests that she really is &#8220;as sweet-natured and unjaded as she<br />
looks&#8221;. She answered my questions plausibly and thoughtfully and didn&#8217;t even pitch me to sign up for her site.</p>
<p>Holy Diogenes, Batman! I think I might have found the<br />
one honest porn star&#8230;</p>

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The Elephant in the Bath-House
<p>Mary Eberstadt&#8217;s <cite>Weekly Standard</cite> article <a href="http://24.104.35.12/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/344fsdzu.asp"><br />
The Elephant in the Sacristy</a> shines a strong light on facts that<br />
will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don&#8217;t completely<br />
agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn <a href="http://www.amywelborn.blogspot.com/2002_06_01_amywelborn_archive.html#77501086">argues</a>, Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the<br />
doctrine of celibacy in creating an ingrown, perfervid, and corrupt sexual<br />
culture among priests, and too easy on the culture of secrecy and denial<br />
within which priestly abuse flourished.</p>
<p>I would go further than Ms. Eberstadt or Ms. Welborn; I think this<br />
scandal is grounded in the essentials of Catholic doctrines about sex,<br />
sin, guilt, and authority. This is not an accidental corruption of<br />
the church, any more than Stalin was an accidental corruption of<br />
Communism. Bad moral ideas have consequences, and those consequences<br />
can be seen most clearly in the human monsters who are both created by<br />
those ideas and exploiters of them. There is a causal chain that<br />
connects loathsome creatures like the &#8220;Reverend&#8221; Paul Shanley directly<br />
back to the authoritarianism and anti-sexuality of St. Augustine; a<br />
chain well-analyzed by psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and<br />
Wilhelm Reich. I suggest that any religion that makes obedience to<br />
authority a primary virtue and pathologizes sex will produce abuses<br />
like these as surely as rot breeds maggots.</p>
<p>One need not, however, attack the essentials of Catholic doctrine<br />
to agree with Ms. Eberstadt&#8217;s main point: that the dominant media<br />
culture seems bent on obscuring a central fact about the pattern of<br />
crimes &#8212; which is that they are predominently homosexual abuse by<br />
priests with a history of homosexual activity. Cases of priestly abuse<br />
of females of any age are rare (though at least one horrifying tale of<br />
multiple priests cooperating in the abuse of a teenage girl has<br />
surfaced from California). The overwhelming majority of the cases<br />
involve either pederasty (homosexual acts with post-pubescent boys and<br />
young men) or homosexual pedophilia with pre-pubescent boys as young<br />
as six years old. Yet you would be hard-put to deduce this from most<br />
of the vague accounts in the U.S. media, which traffic in terms that<br />
seem designed to obscure the gender and age of the victims and the<br />
homosexual orientation of almost all the abusers. Why is that?</p>
<p>Apparently, because one of the rules of the U.S.&#8217;s dominant media<br />
culture is that Homosexuals Are Not To Be Stigmatized (I think it&#8217;s<br />
carved in stone right next to &#8220;Environmentalists are Saints&#8221; and &#8220;Gun<br />
Owners are Redneck Nut-Jobs&#8221;). Gay conservative Andrew Sullivan<br />
famously noted this rule in connection with the <a href="http://www.tnr.com/040201/trb040201.html">Jesse Dirkhising<br />
murder</a>. We are not supposed to think of either Jesse&#8217;s murderers<br />
or abusive priests as homosexuals; that might reflect badly on a<br />
journalistically-protected class by associating it with criminal<br />
behavior.</p>
<p>But more than that; the truth the dominant media culture really<br />
doesn&#8217;t want to go near is that pederasty has never been a marked or<br />
unusual behavior among homosexuals, and even advocates of outright<br />
pedophilia are not shunned in the homosexual-activist community.</p>
<p>The public spin of gay activist groups like Queer Nation is that<br />
most male homosexual behavior is <em>androphilia</em>, adult-to-adult<br />
sex between people of comparable ages. And indeed, gay historians <a href="http://gayhistory.com/rev2/words/pederasty.htm">agree</a> with<br />
anthropologists that in the modern West, androphilia is more common<br />
relative to pederasty and homosexual pedophilia than has been<br />
historically normal. But another way of putting this is that in most<br />
other cultures and times, pederasty and pedophilia have been more<br />
common forms of homosexuality than androphilia.</p>
<p>Pederasty, at least, remains a common behavior among modern<br />
homosexuals. The `twink&#8217; or compliant teenage boy (usually blond,<br />
usually muscled, depicted in the first dewy flush of postpubescence)<br />
is the standard fantasy object of gay porn. By contrast, I learned<br />
from <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#109">recent<br />
research</a> that the archetypal fantasy object of straight porn is a<br />
fully-developed (indeed, usually over-developed) woman in her early<br />
twenties. And a couple of different lines of evidence (including<br />
surveys conducted within the gay population by gays) lead to the<br />
conclusion that older homosexuals actually pursue boys quite a bit<br />
more frequently than either older lesbians or older heterosexual men<br />
pursue girls.</p>
<p>Homosexual activists, when challenged on this point, like to retort<br />
that older men nailing barely-nubile teenage girls is far more<br />
common. And in absolute terms it is &#8212; but only because there are<br />
twenty-five to a hundred times more straight men than there are gay<br />
men in the world (reliable figures for the incidence of male<br />
homosexuality range between 1% and 4%). Per capita among gays,<br />
pederasty is more frequent than among straights by a factor of<br />
between three and ten, depending on whose statistics you believe &#8212;<br />
and the North American Man-Boy Love Association, actively advocating<br />
pederasty and pedophilia, is welcomed at gay-pride events<br />
everywhere.</p>
<p>If the prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood is<br />
the elephant in the sacristy, the homosexuality/pederasty/pedophilia<br />
connection in gay culture is the elephant in the bath-house. No<br />
amount of denying it&#8217;s there is going to make the beast go away.</p>
<p>But homosexual activists don&#8217;t want straights to see the elephant,<br />
and no wonder. One of the most persistent themes to show up in<br />
hostility towards homosexuals is the fear that they will recruit<br />
impressionable boys who might otherwise have grown up straight. Thus<br />
their insistance for straight consumption that homosexuality is an<br />
inborn orientation, not a choice. Thus also their insistance that the<br />
gay life is all about androphilia, none of that pederasty or<br />
pedophilia stuff going on here. And thus, they&#8217;d rather not have<br />
anyone thinking about the fact that most priestly abuse is in fact<br />
classically pederastic and pedophilic behavior by men who behave as<br />
homosexuals and identify themselves as gay.</p>
<p>That there is a pattern in the national media of political<br />
correctness and spin on behalf of preferred `victim&#8217; groups isn&#8217;t<br />
news, nor is the fact that homosexuals are among those groups. But<br />
get this: Richard Berke, the Washington editor of the <cite>New York<br />
Times</cite> recently said &#8220;literally three-quarters of the people<br />
deciding what&#8217;s on the front page are not-so-closeted homosexuals&#8221;.<br />
There you have it in plain English; gays run the &#8220;newspaper of<br />
record&#8221;. Berke made these comments before a gay advocacy group &#8212; not<br />
merely admitting but outright <em>asserting</em>, as a matter of<br />
pride, that the <cite>Times</cite> engages in gay-friendly spin<br />
control. And it has already been well established by statistical<br />
content studies that the national media tend to follow where they&#8217;re<br />
led by the <cite>Times</cite> and a handful of other prestige<br />
newspapers, all broadly similar in editorial policy.</p>
<p>The expected next step in this sequence would be for me to start<br />
screaming about the evil of it all and demand that Something Be Done.<br />
If I were a conservative, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;d do. But in fact it&#8217;s not<br />
self-evident that this particular disinformation campaign is worth<br />
anybody&#8217;s time to be concerned about, except as yet another example of<br />
wearily predictable bias in the dominant media culture. Whether it is<br />
or not depends upon one&#8217;s value judgment about consensual pederasty<br />
and pedophilia.</p>
<p>NAMBLA and its sympathizers in the rest of the gay community think<br />
they&#8217;re engaged in a worthy campaign for sexual liberation. If they<br />
are right, then the anti-antigay spin on the priestly-abuse scandal is<br />
arguably analogous to what pro-civil-rights sympathizers in the early<br />
1960s might have done if there had been a long string of incidents of<br />
incidents of black men seducing white women, both parties violating<br />
the miscegenation laws still on the books in many states at that<br />
time.</p>
<p>The pro-spin argument would have run like this: interracial sex is<br />
taboo for no good reason, so soft-pedaling the race of the people involved<br />
as much as possible is a justifiable form of <em>suppressio veri</em> &#8212;<br />
not outright lying but being economical with the truth. Our readers will<br />
be able to deduce the whole truth if they put in even a little effort, but<br />
be needn&#8217;t pave the road for them. By doing this, we will avoid inflaming<br />
racial bigotry and advance the worthy cause of civil rights.</p>
<p>For this analogy to hold good, we need two preconditions. First,<br />
we must believe that almost all the pederasty/pedophilia between<br />
priests and boys has been voluntary. Second, we must believe that<br />
consensual pederasty and pedophilia are not, in fact, harmful to the<br />
boys involved. Intellectual honesty (and, I&#8217;ll admit, a low delight<br />
on my part in watching prudes and cultural conservatives turn purple<br />
with indignation) demands that we not dismiss this case without<br />
looking at the evidence.</p>
<p>The modern West condemns pederasty and pedophilia. Our cultural<br />
ancestors did not always do so; among the Athenian Greeks consensual<br />
pederastic relationships were praised and thought to be a good deal<br />
for both parties. Pederasty is socially normal in Afghanistan and<br />
other parts of the Islamic world; pederasty and pedophilia are also<br />
un-tabooed in parts of Southeast Asia and in Japan. Where pederasty<br />
and pedophilia are not taboo, the boys who participate in it<br />
frequently grow up to form normal heterosexual relationships and marry.<br />
In fact, it&#8217;s the modern West&#8217;s hard separation between straights<br />
who <em>never</em> have sex with other males and gays who<br />
<em>never</em> have sex with females that is anthropologically<br />
exceptional.</p>
<p>Of course, the fact that pederasty and pedophilia have been an<br />
approved practice in other cultures does not automatically mean we<br />
should give them a nod. Cannibalism, slavery and infanticide have<br />
been approved practices too. But the anthropological evidence doesn&#8217;t<br />
suggest that boys who have voluntary sex with men automatically turn<br />
into traumatized basket cases; indeed some present-day cultures agree<br />
with the ancient Greeks that such liaisons are good for the maturation<br />
of boys. There are real secondary risks, starting with the fact that<br />
anal sex is a much more effective vector of venereal diseases such as<br />
AIDS than is vaginal sex &#8212; but given a cultural context that doesn&#8217;t<br />
stigmatize the behavior, clear evidence that consensual pederasty and<br />
pedophilia are intrinsically damaging is remarkably hard to find.</p>
<p>Accordingly, NAMBLA may well be right on one level when they argue<br />
that what matters is not so much which tab A gets put into which slot<br />
B, but whether the behavior was coerced or consensual. According to<br />
this argument, the elephant in the bath-house can be lived with &#8212;<br />
might even be a friendly beast &#8212; if it&#8217;s docile-tempered and won&#8217;t<br />
give the tusk to unconsenting parties.</p>
<p>Gay men, or at least the sort of university-educated gay men who<br />
wind up determining what&#8217;s on the front page of the <cite>New York<br />
Times</cite> and spiking stories like the Dirkhising murder, know<br />
these facts. How surprising would it be if they interpreted most<br />
victims&#8217; charges of abuse as a product of retrospective false<br />
consciousness, implanted in them by a homophobic and gay-oppressing<br />
culture? By suppressing the homosexual identification of most of the<br />
accused priests, gays in the media can protect their own sexual and<br />
political interests while believing &#8212; perhaps quite sincerely &#8212; that<br />
they are quietly aiding the cause of freedom.</p>
<p>The trouble with this comforting lullaby is that, even if NAMBLA is<br />
right, coercion matters a <em>lot</em>. As Ms. Eberstadt<br />
reports, the pederastically and pedophilically abused often become<br />
broken, dysfunctional people. They show up in disproportionate numbers<br />
in drug and alcohol rehab. They have a high rate of involvement in<br />
violent crime. Worse, they end to become abusers themselves,<br />
perpetuating the damage across generations.</p>
<p>Voltaire once said &#8220;In nature there are no rewards or punishments,<br />
only consequences&#8221;. Gays experimented with unfettered promiscuity in<br />
the 1970s and got AIDS as a consequence. The mores of gay bath-house<br />
culture turned out to be broken in the way that ultimately matters; a<br />
lot of people died horribly as a result of them.</p>
<p>It may turn out that the consequences of sympathizing with NAMBLA<br />
are almost equally ugly. If a climate of `enlightened&#8217; tolerance for<br />
consensual pederasty and pedophilia tends to increase the rate at<br />
which boys are abused, that is a very serious consequence for which gay<br />
liberationists will not (and <em>should</em> not) soon be forgiven.<br />
The homosexual gatekeepers at the <cite>Times</cite> may be making<br />
themselves accessories before and after the fact to some truly hideous<br />
crimes.</p>
<p>And this is where we come back to the priestly-abuse scandal.<br />
Because a theme that keeps recurring in <a href="http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2002-06-13/feature.html/1/index.html"><br />
histories</a> of the worst abusers is that they were trained in<br />
seminaries that were run by homosexual men and saturated with<br />
gay-liberationist subculture. Reading accounts of students at one<br />
notorious California seminary making a Friday-night ritual of cruising<br />
gay bars, it becomes hard not to wonder if gay culture itself has not<br />
been an important enabler of priestly abuse.</p>
<p>Now it&#8217;s time to abandon the catch-all term abuse and speak plainly<br />
the name of the crime: sexual coercion and rape. It is very clear<br />
that pederasts and pedophiles in the priesthood have routinely used<br />
their authority over Catholic boys not merely to seduce them, but to<br />
coerce and rape them. In a few cases the rape has been overt and<br />
physical, but in most cases it has been a subtler and arguably more<br />
damaging rape of the victim&#8217;s mind and self.</p>
<p>The single most revolting image I have carried away from the<br />
priestly-abuse scandal is victims&#8217; accounts of priests solemnly<br />
blessing them after sex. That is using the child&#8217;s religious feelings<br />
and respect for authority to make him complicit in the abuse. If I<br />
believed in hell, I would wish for the priests who perpetrated this<br />
kind of soul-rape to fry in it for eternity.</p>
<p>And we must <em>call</em> it rape; do otherwise is to suppose that<br />
most of the thousands of known victims wanted to be sodomized. Even<br />
if we discard the victims&#8217; and witnesses&#8217; reports, this is highly<br />
unlikely; there were simply too many victims. Some priests had sex<br />
with <em>hundreds</em> of boys, far too many to fit into the 1-4%<br />
cohort of homosexual orientation in the population they had access to.<br />
And we are not entitled to dismiss the victims&#8217; protests in any case,<br />
not given the corollary evidence that the trauma of abuse reverberated<br />
through the victims&#8217; lives, continuing to damage them years and<br />
decades afterwards. Comforting gay-lib delusions about false<br />
consciousness won&#8217;t wash here.</p>
<p>Continuing our civil-rights analogy, the correct parallel would<br />
have been with an epidemic of interracial rape, rather than<br />
cohabitation. Had there in fact been such an epidemic, civil-rights<br />
proponents would have faced the question of whether black men had a<br />
particular propensity to rape white women. The analogous question,<br />
whether homosexual men have a particular propensity to rape boys, is<br />
precisely the one that homosexuals and their sympathizers in the media<br />
don&#8217;t want anyone to examine &#8212; and precisely the question that the<br />
priestly-abuse scandal demands that we ask.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s easy to sympathize with gay activists&#8217; fears that opening this<br />
question will expose them to a firestorm of prejudice from people<br />
who will prejudge the answer out of anti-gay bigotry. But the<br />
pattern of homosexual abuse by the Catholic priesthood has been so<br />
egregious and so longstanding that we need to understand the relative<br />
weight of <em>all</em> the causes that produced it &#8212; whether those<br />
causes are specific to Catholicism or more general.</p>
<p>Are gay men biologically or psychologically prone to rape boys at a<br />
level that makes a gay man even without a known history of abuse into<br />
a bad risk around boys? Does queer culture encourage a tendency to<br />
rape in gay men who are put in authority over boys?</p>
<p>Here is where the question becomes practical: were the Boy Scouts<br />
of America so wrong to ban homosexual scoutmasters? And here we are<br />
with a crashing thud back in the realm of present politics. After the<br />
numbing, horrifying, seemingly never-ending stream of foul crimes<br />
revealed in the scandal, even staunch sexual libertarians like your<br />
humble author can no longer honestly dismiss this question simply<br />
because it&#8217;s being raised by unpleasant conservatives.</p>
<p>The priestly-abuse scandal forces us to face reality. To the<br />
extent that pederasty, pedophilic impulses, and twink fantasies are<br />
normal among homosexual men, putting one in charge of adolescent boys<br />
may after all be just as bad an idea as waltzing a man with a known<br />
predisposition for alcoholism into a room full of booze. One wouldn&#8217;t<br />
have to think homosexuality is evil or a disease to make institutional<br />
rules against this, merely notice that it creates temptations best<br />
avoided for everyone&#8217;s sake.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77834003">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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The Mirage of Moderate Islam
<p>Diplomatic lies notwithstanding, Islam is anything but a `religion<br />
of peace&#8217;. Any honest scholar will tell you that Islam is a religion<br />
of violence, martyrdom, and conversion by the sword. The duty to wage<br />
war for the propagation of the faith is plainly written in the Koran;<br />
Osama bin Laden&#8217;s suicide bombers are part of a tradition that springs<br />
from Islam&#8217;s warlike origins and has been re-affirmed in every generations<br />
by ghazis, hashishim, and numerous other varieties of holy warrior.</p>
<p>It is the interiorization of `jihad&#8217; as a struggle for self-mastery<br />
that is revisionist and exceptional, one proposed by only a few<br />
Westernized and progressive Muslims and (one senses) not wholeheartedly<br />
believed even by them. A truer window on the nature of Islam is the way<br />
that it divides the Earth into the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam)<br />
and the Dar al-Harb &#8212; the House of War, the theater of battle to<br />
be waged with zeal until the infidel is crushed and submits to the<br />
Will of God. The very word, islam, means `submission&#8217;.</p>
<p>Conspicuous by their absence are any clear denunciations of<br />
bin-Ladenite terror from the members of the ulama, the loose<br />
collective of elders and theologicians that articulates the Islamic<br />
faith. Such internal criticism as we do hear is muted, equivocal,<br />
often excusing the terrorists immediately after half-heartedly<br />
condemning them. Far more common, though seldom reported in Western<br />
media, are pro-jihadi sermons that denounce America as a land of<br />
devils and praise Al-Qaeda&#8217;s mass murderers in one breath with<br />
Palestinian suicide bombers as martyrs assured of a place in<br />
heaven.</p>
<p>There has been some play given in the media lately to the notion<br />
that the ideological force behind Islamic terrorism is not Islam per<br />
se but specifically the puritanical <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/middle_east/newsid_1571000/1571144.stm"><br />
Wahhabi</a> sect associated with the House of Saud. Some accounts<br />
trace the rise in terrorism to Wahhabi prosyletization in Afghanistan,<br />
Pakistan, and elsewhere. Most versions of this theory have it that<br />
Wahhabism is an unattractive doctrine (by contrast with, say, the Sufi<br />
tradition of the Caucasus or the relaxed syncretic Buddhist-influenced<br />
Islam of Indonesia) but that it wins converts because, with billions<br />
in Saudi oil money behind it, the Wahhabites can afford to field<br />
missionaries and build schools that promulgate the puritan party<br />
line.</p>
<p>The trouble with this theory is that it ignores the history of<br />
Islam and the internal logic of Islamic doctrine. The history of<br />
Islam is a collection of cycles of doctrinal decay followed by<br />
fundamentalist renewal. Believers tend to drift away from strict<br />
Islam, but ever century or two some mad-eyed wanderer will come<br />
screaming out of the desert and haul the faithful back on to the<br />
Narrow Way with a blend of personal charisma, argument and force (the<br />
latter generally administered by some allied warlord who sees political<br />
gain in it).</p>
<p>This drama keeps getting re-enacted because, in general, these<br />
charismatic fundamentalist looney-toons are <em>correct</em> in their<br />
criticism of `soft&#8217; Islam. The Koran, the actions and statements of<br />
the prophet Mohammed, and the witness of the lives of his immediate<br />
followers are pretty clear on what the religious duties of a Muslim<br />
are. Long before the 9/11 attacks, I read large portions of the Koran<br />
(in translation) and more than one history of Islam, because I collect<br />
religions. I learned about the Five Pillars and the hadith (the<br />
traditional sayings of Mohammed) and the ulama.</p>
<p>Moderate Muslims trying to argue against the latest version of<br />
Islamic fundamentalism are in a difficult situation. All the<br />
fundamentalists have to do to support their position is to point at<br />
the Koran, which is much more authoritative in an Islamic context than<br />
the Bible is in most Christian ones. Moderates are reduced to arguing<br />
that the Koran doesn&#8217;t really mean what it says, or arguing from<br />
hadith that qualify or contradict the Koranic text. Since the Koran<br />
trumps the hadith, this is generally a losing position.</p>
<p>The grim truth is that Osama bin Laden&#8217;s fanatic interpretation<br />
of Islam is Koranically correct. The God of the Koran and Mohammed<br />
truly does demand that idolatry be purged with fire and sword, and<br />
that infidels must be forced either to convert to Islam or (as a<br />
limited exception for Christians and Jews, the &#8220;Peoples of the Book&#8221;)<br />
live as second-class citizens subject to special taxes and legal<br />
restrictions. The Koran really does endorse suicidal martyrdom and<br />
the indiscriminate killing of infidels for the faith.</p>
<p>(The Koran does not, however, require purdah and the veil; these<br />
are practices the Arab world picked up from Persia after the tenth<br />
century CE. Nor does it require female genital mutilation, which<br />
seems to have been acquired from sub-Saharan Africa.)</p>
<p>For both shallow diplomatic/political reasons and deeper<br />
psychological ones, Westerners have trouble grasping just how<br />
bloody-minded, intolerant, and prone to periodic murderous outbreaks<br />
of fundamentalist zeal Islam actually is. But we <em>must</em> come<br />
to grips with this. If we treat the terror war as a merely<br />
geopolitical conflict, we will be fighting the wrong battle with the<br />
wrong weapons.</p>
<p>It is not merely Al-Qaeda or the Taliban or even Wahhabism we are<br />
fighting, it is a fanatic tendency wired deep into the origins and<br />
doctrine of Islam itself, a tendency of which these movements are<br />
just surface signs. That tendency must be cured or cauterized out.<br />
No lesser victory will do for a world in which means and weapons of mass<br />
destruction grow ever easier for terrorists to acquire.</p>
<p><em>(To be continued&#8230;)</em></p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77964879">Blogspt comments</a></p>

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Beating software version fatigue
<p>In his latest<br />
<a href="http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&#038;CID=1051-061902B">Tech Central Station column</a>, Glenn Reynolds complains<br />
of `version fatigue&#8217;, his accumulating angst over the fact that since the<br />
emid-1980s he&#8217;s had to migrate through three word processors and several<br />
different versions of Windows.</p>
<p>I can&#8217;t fix the sad fact that every new VCR and remote control you get<br />
has a different control layout. But if we&#8217;re talking software, baby, I have<br />
got your solution.</p>
<p>I have been using the same text editor since 1982. I have been using the<br />
same command-line shell since 1985, and the same operating system since 1993.<br />
But that last date is actually misleading, because I still get use out of<br />
programs I wrote for the previous dialect of my OS as far back as 1982,<br />
without ever having had to alter a line.</p>
<p>The last time I had to learn a new feature set for any of the tools<br />
I regularly used was when I decided to change window systems in 1997,<br />
and that was not a vendor-forced upgrade. Yes, that&#8217;s right; it means<br />
I&#8217;ve been getting mileage out of essentially the same user interface<br />
for five straight years. Half a decade.</p>
<p>Does this mean I&#8217;m using software tools that were feature-frozen when<br />
dinosaurs walked the earth? No, actually, it doesn&#8217;t. The text editor,<br />
which is what I spend my screen time interacting with, has grown tremendously<br />
in capability over the twenty years I&#8217;ve been using it. The shell I use<br />
has a lot of convenience features it didn&#8217;t in 1985, but I&#8217;ve only had<br />
to learn them as I chose.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t have a version-fatigue problem, and never have. I get to<br />
use cutting-edge software tools that probably exceed in capability<br />
anything you are directly familiar with. And I have every confidence,<br />
based on my last twenty years of experience, that my software will both<br />
continue to both offer me the innovative leading edge and remain<br />
feature-stable for the next twenty years if I so choose.</p>
<p>How do I achieve this best of both worlds? One word: Unix.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m a Unix guy. You may have heard that I have something to do<br />
with this Linux thing, and Linux is indeed what I use today. But<br />
Linux is only the most recent phase of a continuous engineering<br />
tradition that goes back to 1969. In that world, we don&#8217;t have<br />
the kind of disruptive feature churn that forces people to upgrade<br />
to incompatible operating systems every 2.5 years. Our software<br />
lifetimes are measured in <em>decades</em>. And our applications,<br />
like the Emacs text editor I use, frequently outlast the version<br />
of Unix they were born under.</p>
<p>There are a couple of intertwined reasons for this. One is that<br />
we tend to get the technology decisions right the first time &#8212; Unix<br />
is, as Niklaus Wirth once said of Algol, &#8220;a vast improvement over<br />
most of its successors&#8221;. Unix people confronted with Windows for<br />
the first time tend to react with slack-jawed shock that any product<br />
so successful could be such a complete design disaster.</p>
<p>Perhaps more importantly, Unix/Linux people are not stuck with a<br />
business model that requires planned obsolescence in order to generate<br />
revenue. Also, our engineering tradition puts a high value on open<br />
standards. So our software tends to be forward-compatible.</p>
<p>As an example: about a year ago I changed file-system formats from<br />
ext2 to ext3. In the Windows world, I&#8217;d have had to back up all my<br />
files, reinstall the OS, restore my files, and then spend a week<br />
hand-fixing bits of my system configuration that weren&#8217;t captured in<br />
the backups. Instead, I ran one conversion utility. Once.</p>
<p>Most of the consumer-level problems with computer software &#8212;<br />
crashes, bad design, version fatigue due to the perpetual upgrade<br />
treadmill &#8212; are not inherent in the technology. They are, rather,<br />
consequences of user-hostile business models. Microsoft, and<br />
companies like them, have no incentive to solve the problems<br />
of crashes, poor security, and version fatigue. They <em>like</em><br />
the perpetual upgrade treadmill. It&#8217;s how they make money.</p>
<p>Want to beat software version fatigue? It&#8217;s easy, Glenn. Take<br />
control; dump the closed-source monopolists; get off the treadmill.<br />
OpenOffice will let you keep your MS-Word documents and your Excel<br />
spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Join the Linux revolution,<br />
and never see a Blue Screen of Death again.</p>
<p>UPDATE: A reader complains that Linux is difficult to install.<br />
Answer: Get thee to the Linux user group near you, who will be more<br />
than happy to help you get liberated. Or get thee to Wal-Mart, which<br />
is now selling cheap machines with Lindows, a Linux variant tuned to<br />
look like Windows, for $299.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;commentid=77940749">Blogspot<br />
comments</a></p>

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What Al-Qaeda wants
<p><em>(Second in a series.)</em></p>
<p>In a <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#48">The<br />
Mirage of Moderate Islam</a>, I have described the Koranic roots of<br />
Islamic fanaticism, and observed that Osama bin Laden&#8217;s terror war on<br />
the west is part of a recurring pattern of fundamentalist revival<br />
associated with jihad in Islamic history.</p>
<p>In this essay, I&#8217;ll get more specific about what Osama bin Laden is<br />
really after. In the process, it will become clear why Arab-world<br />
governments are so frightened of him.</p>
<p>The first thing to understand is that Osama bin Laden is neither<br />
crazy nor stupid. He is a very intelligent, educated, visionary man<br />
who is operating from deep within the Islamic worldview. He&#8217;s trying<br />
to do on a global scale what the Ayatollah Khomeini did in Iran in<br />
1979; he&#8217;s bucking for the job of Caliph of Islam (&#8220;Khalifa&#8221; in<br />
Arabic).</p>
<p>The position of <a href="http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/politics/khalifa.html">Khalifa</a><br />
has been vacant since the last Padishah Emperor of the Ottoman Empire<br />
was deposed in 1924, when the British and French broke up the Empire<br />
after it picked the wrong side in World War One. Before that, the<br />
Caliph was in theory both the supreme temporal and spiritual ruler<br />
of the Islamic world.</p>
<p>I say &#8220;in theory&#8221; because the Caliph&#8217;s actual authority varied<br />
considerably. In the early centuries of Islam, during the initial<br />
expansionary phase of the Empire, it was absolute &#8212; in European<br />
terms, as though Charlemagne or Napoleon were also the Pope. It<br />
tended to decrease over time as the increasing size of the Islamic<br />
empire led to political fragmentation. Independent emirs swore<br />
nominal fealty to the Caliph and accepted his symbolic authority<br />
in religious matters, while otherwise behaving as sovereigns. An<br />
able Caliph backed by strong armies could buck this disintegrative<br />
trend and make the allegiance of the emirs more than nominal. Eventually<br />
emperors of the Ottoman Turks collected this title, and gathered most<br />
of the Islamic world under their sway. But the Ottoman Empire had been in<br />
decline for four centuries by 1924, and the title of Caliph had<br />
become almost meaningless.</p>
<p>One of the signature traits of Islamic revivalism is nostalgia for<br />
the halcyon days of Islamic expansion, when the Caliph was the<br />
undisputed Arm of Allah and there was plenty of plunder and rapine<br />
to go around as the armies of God smote the infidel and claimed<br />
new lands for the Dar-al-Islam.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s where we cue the ominous theme music. It is part of Islamic<br />
tradition that the title of Khalifa may be attained by conquest if the<br />
incumbent is not fulfilling his duties &#8212; or if there is no incumbent.<br />
Under shari&#8217;a law and hadith, the umma (the consultative assembly of<br />
the elders of Islam) is <em>required</em> to recognize as Khalifa<br />
anyone who is able to fulfill the duties of the position and<br />
demonstrates the sanction of Allah by mobilizing the Dar-al-Islam in<br />
successful jihad. Jihad, here, is interpreted broadly; a war of<br />
consolidation that united a substantial portion of the Dar-al-Islam<br />
under a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy would do it. </p>
<p>In other words, since 1924 the position of Caliph has been waiting<br />
for a Man on Horseback. Or, for you science-fiction fans out there, a<br />
Muad&#8217;Dib. The Ayatollah Khomeini could never quite make this nut;<br />
first, because he was not a plausible warlord, and second because he&#8217;s<br />
part of the 10% Shi&#8217;a minority branch that disputes the Khalifal<br />
succession. The next Caliph, if there is one, will have to belong to<br />
the 90% Sunni majority.</p>
<p>Osama bin Laden has behaved precisely as though he intends to fill<br />
that role. And in doing so, he has frightened the crap out of the<br />
rulers of the Arab world. Because he&#8217;s played his religious and<br />
propaganda cards very well in Islamic terms, barring the detail that<br />
he may well be dead and buried under rubble in an Afghan cave.</p>
<p>On 9/11, bin Laden took jihad to the symbolic heart of the West<br />
more effectively than any Islamic ruler has managed since the Siege of<br />
Vienna was broken in 1683. By doing so he caught Arab rulers<br />
(especially the Saudis) in a neat theo-political trap. They have been<br />
encouraging hatred of Israel and the West, and hyping the jihadist<br />
mythology of fundamentalist Islam, as a way of diverting popular anger<br />
that might otherwise focus on their own corrupt and repressive<br />
regimes. But Bin Laden has trumped and beaten them at this game. He<br />
has acted out the Koranic duty of jihad in a way they never dared &#8212;<br />
and in doing so, seized the religious high ground.</p>
<p>The sheikhs and ayatollahs now have a dilemma. If they support<br />
jihadism, they must either start a war against the West they know they<br />
cannot win or cede their own legitimacy to the Caliph-claimant who is<br />
leading the jihad. But if they come out against jihad, bin Laden or<br />
his successor can de-legitimitize them simply by pointing to the<br />
Koran. The possibility that the semi-mythical &#8220;Arab street&#8221; would<br />
revolt behind local Khomeini-equivalents hot to join al-Qaeda&#8217;s jihad is<br />
quite real.</p>
<p>Let the last word go to the mentor of Osama bin Laden, Sheik<br />
Abdullah Azzam: &#8220;Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah alone is<br />
worshipped by mankind&#8230;Jihad and the rifle alone&#8230;no negotiations,<br />
no conferences and no dialogue.&#8221; The Palestinians are, as usual,<br />
disposable pawns in a larger game. The objective of al-Qaeda&#8217;s game<br />
is to follow the Koranic blueprint to its logical conclusion; global<br />
jihad, a second age of conversion by the sword, the destruction of the<br />
West, and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy.</p>
<p>Osama bin Laden himself may be dead now. Unfortunately, this<br />
doesn&#8217;t necessarily stop the game, because his body hasn&#8217;t been found.<br />
The Twelfth Imam of Shi&#8217;a disappeared under mysterious circumstances<br />
in 941CE; persons claiming to be him and calling the faithful to jihad<br />
emerged at intervals for a thousand years afterwards, the most recent<br />
one being the Mahdi who led an anti-British revolt in Egypt in 1899.<br />
If the jihadist tendency in Islam is not confronted and destroyed,<br />
Osama bin Laden could haunt the West for a thousand years.</p>
<p><em>(To be continued&#8230;)</em></p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=77964879">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Mirror, Mirror &mdash; why Americans Don&#8217;t Understand the Threat of Jihadism
<p><em>(Third in a series.)</em></p>
<p>In <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#6">What<br />
al-Qaeda Wants</a> and the first essay in this series, <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#48">The<br />
Mirage of Moderate Islam</a>, I have described Islam as a warlike and<br />
bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist<br />
revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic<br />
duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden&#8217;s goal as nothing less<br />
than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global<br />
Islamic theocracy.</p>
<p>I have further explained why it is difficult for anyone living<br />
within the Islamic worldview to reject or argue against these goals.<br />
Jihadism &mdash; the belief that Muslims have not merely the right<br />
but the <em>duty</em> to smite the infidel and propagate the Faith by<br />
force &mdash; proceeds direct from the Koran and is accepted as a core<br />
religious duty by almost all Muslims.</p>
<p>These are simple truths, readily discernable from reading the words<br />
of the Koran, the study of even an outline of Islamic history, and the<br />
propaganda of Osama bin Laden himself. Yet they are truths that<br />
almost no one in the West is speaking in public, in plain language.<br />
In this essay, I will examine the reasons Americans are not yet<br />
ideologically prepared to fight the war against terror as it must be<br />
fought if we are to win.</p>
<p>First, the U.S. government is telling a Big Lie for diplomatic<br />
reasons. It is trying to sell the idea that Islam is a `religion of<br />
peace&#8217;, with al-Qaeda representing only a small fringe of extremists.<br />
Part of this is in order not to be seen attacking the religion of our<br />
Arab allies in the Middle East.</p>
<p>But domestic politics is an even more important motive for this Big<br />
Lie. U.S. policymakers in the know may well fear that if they<br />
described the relationship between terrorism and Islamic doctrine<br />
accurately, the current broad consensus on war policy might collapse<br />
under a hailstorm of accusations of bigotry, prejudice, and<br />
intolerance by the <em>bien pensants</em> who run the national media<br />
and academe. In a political climate where directing extra scrutiny at<br />
young male Middle Eastern air travellers is attacked as unacceptable<br />
`racial profiling&#8217;, this fear would be well-grounded.</p>
<p>Second, the academy has failed us. Americans are almost<br />
universally ignorant of Islamic doctrine and history. Most of the few<br />
who have some knowledge of the area cannot connect that knowledge to<br />
current events. The Islamic-studies and Middle Eastern history<br />
establishment completely, utterly failed to anticipate al-Qaeda&#8217;s<br />
revival of jihadism, ignored or rationalized the decade of<br />
anti-American terrorist acts that led up to 9/11, and is presently<br />
incapable of supplying any significant analytical help to defeating<br />
the terrorists.</p>
<p>The exact anatomy of this failure is well described in Martin<br />
Kramer&#8217;s <a href="http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1101/wrong.asp">Ivory Towers On<br />
Sand</a>. One background problem was a Marxist-influenced tendency to<br />
see political change as all-important and dismiss religious fervor as<br />
a spent force. Another was a reluctance to confront or discuss the<br />
continuing phenomenon of terrorism at all except through the lens of<br />
`post-colonial theory&#8217; that excused it as a legitimate tactic of the<br />
Palestinian or anti-imperialist struggle. Yet a third was the<br />
postmodern belief that objective truth is impossible. In effect, the<br />
Marxist/multiculturalist/postmodernist preoccupations of the<br />
Islamic-studies establishment rendered it incapable of seeing,<br />
thinking, or passing judgment. Confronted by the smoking hole where<br />
the World Trade Center used to be and Osama bin-Laden&#8217;s gloating<br />
videos, the academics had no way of connecting their theoretical<br />
abstractions to the brutal facts and nothing to say. Nine months<br />
later, they still doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Americans outside of universities have few grounds for smugness,<br />
however. While most of the rest of us have not had our critical<br />
faculties rotted out by Marxism, multiculturalism and postmodernism in<br />
their explicit forms, a lower-grade version of the same infections has<br />
done much to damage our capacity to understand the threat of jihadism.</p>
<p>Americans have always had the odd parochial habit of assuming that,<br />
down deep underneath, everyone is basically like us &mdash; sharing<br />
our historically peculiar mix of pragmatism and idealism; valuing<br />
honesty and fair dealing; tolerant, materialistic, freedom-loving,<br />
open-minded, tempting to value comfort and success over ideology. We<br />
reflexively believe that everyone can be reasoned with essentially in<br />
our own terms. Most Americans don&#8217;t understand fanaticism and violent<br />
evil. We have a tendency to be `fair&#8217; by assuming that in any dispute<br />
there must be some right and some wrong on both sides. It&#8217;s telling<br />
that we use `extreme&#8217; as a political pejorative.</p>
<p>Since at least the end of World War II, this parochialism has<br />
become so acute that it has almost blinded us to serious threats.<br />
While more of the left-liberals who shilled for the Soviets and Mao<br />
Zedong and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot during the Cold War were closet<br />
Communists than is yet publicly admitted, a good many were honest<br />
dupes who simply couldn&#8217;t believe that Communists were actually<br />
motivated by the sinister craziness of hard Marxism, and therefore<br />
assumed that America must somehow be at fault. Conservatives<br />
apologizing for unsavory pro-American strongmen mostly weren&#8217;t closet<br />
fascists, either; a good many of them had obvious trouble seeing<br />
caudillos as more than cigar-chomping CEOs running a particularly<br />
tough business, and never mind the gold braid and funny hats.</p>
<p>The see-no-evil tendency in American folk psychology created<br />
fertile ground for the rather less benign dogmas of multiculturalism<br />
(&#8220;all cultures present ways of living that are equally morally valid&#8221;)<br />
and postmodernism (&#8220;there is no objective truth&#8221;). Originally<br />
constructed by Marxists (and one ex-Fascist) as part of a program to<br />
ideologically disarm the West against the radical evil of Communism,<br />
these dogmas have both outlived their original ends and seeped into<br />
American pop culture. Their effect is that many of us can no longer<br />
bring ourselves to think of any political movement, religion, or<br />
culture as radically evil unless it is safely part of history (and,<br />
for political correctness, was run by dead white European males when<br />
it was alive and kicking).</p>
<p>This was a relatively harmless form of self-delusion between 1992<br />
and 2001, the decade of self-indulgence bracketed by the fall of the<br />
Soviet Empire and 9/11. No longer. We are at war. Western<br />
civilization is under attack by a foe that revels in the wholesale<br />
slaughter of civilians, one that proudly announces its intention to<br />
bring a second Holocaust of fire and blood down upon us all.</p>
<p>If our civilization is to survive, we will need to recover the<br />
moral judgment needed to recognize radical evil, the language in which<br />
to condemn it, and the determination to act.</p>
<p>In a perverse way, al-Qaeda has made this easy. They have murdered<br />
thousands in a single attack on one of our heart cities, they have<br />
attempted to unleash biological weapons on us, and have actively<br />
planned to detonate nuclear/radiological weapons in our population<br />
centers. Those who cannot recognize even this as radical evil<br />
&mdash; those who persist in arguing that the 9/11 attack was somehow<br />
justified by something United Fruit did in Guatemala or the Israelis<br />
did in Lebanon &mdash; are rapidly dealing themselves out of the game<br />
of deciding how we shall respond.</p>
<p>Having recognized al-Qaeda&#8217;s behavior as radically evil, we must<br />
next recognize that its motivating ideology is evil, too. And the<br />
first step there is recognizing that Islam&#8217;s apologists are<br />
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=18062002-044316-3353r"><br />
systematically lying to us</a> about what they believe and intend.<br />
Outside of a few fringe groups like the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226056767/qid%3D1024685562/sr%3D1-1/ref%3Dsr%5F1%5F1/002-8067869-9300863">Dauri<br />
Bohras</a> and a tiny minority of intellectual reformers who generally<br />
dare not speak their ideas in their own home countries, there is<br />
simply no constituency in Islam prepared to recognize Western concepts<br />
of peace, tolerance, and pluralism.</p>
<p>We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until<br />
we understand the following things:</p>
<ul>
<li>Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.</li>
<li>The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and<br />
middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon<br />
the will to profile accordingly.</li>
<li>We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances<br />
against America or the West.</li>
<li>Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere<br />
short of surrender and submission to shari&#8217;a law.</li>
<li>Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically<br />
lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who<br />
they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.</li>
</ul>
<p>The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that<br />
the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade<br />
Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off<br />
in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda. It is in fact<br />
the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni<br />
fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic<br />
history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.</p>
<p>We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a<br />
barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To<br />
protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam<br />
(purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic<br />
fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers.</p>
<p>This is a problem for Americans; first, because we have been taught<br />
that we that we must not be intolerant of other peoples&#8217; religions;<br />
and second, because fully grasping the nature of the danger Islamic<br />
poses to Western civilization requires thinking uncomfortable<br />
thoughts about the dominant Christian religion of our own culture.</p>
<p>The reader is at this point invited to learn more about the<br />
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61275-2002Jun16.html"><br />
developing alliance</a> between Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms.<br />
Then, to learn all about <a href="http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.mv">Kissing Hank&#8217;s Ass.</a><br />
Before 9/11, &#8220;Kissing Hank&#8217;s Ass&#8221; was an edgy joke. Today it<br />
demonstrates why ending the threat of religiously-motivated terror will<br />
require us to confront and destroy the fundamentalist/jihadist impulse<br />
not merely in Islam, but also in Christianity and all other<br />
eschatological monotheisms where it finds a natural home.</p>
<p>Christianity, like Islam (and unlike almost all of the other<br />
religions of the world) has violent intolerance of other religions and<br />
the impulse to conversion by the sword wired into its doctrinal DNA.<br />
Most Americans have trouble believing the Koran means what it says<br />
about the duty of jihad because for most Christians, the parallel<br />
Christian duty to smite the infidel is a historical dead letter. But<br />
counterparts of al-Qaeda such as the <a href="http://www.religioustolerance.org/cr_ident.htm">Christian<br />
Identity Movement</a> exist in the West, imbued with all of<br />
al-Qaeda&#8217;s rage. Christian fundamentalists express the same<br />
hatred of modernity and determination to jam the world back into<br />
a medieval mold that motivates Osama bin Laden.</p>
<p>To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly<br />
distinguish it from ethical self-defense. We must be prepared not<br />
merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in<br />
self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of<br />
thought that make fanatics in the first place &mdash; whether they occur in<br />
the other guy&#8217;s religion or our own. Islam has declared itself the<br />
immediate adversary of modernity &mdash; but more than one world religion<br />
will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in<br />
peace.</p>
<p><em>(To be continued&#8230;)</em></p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=78108401">Blogspot comment</a></p>

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Winning the War Against Terror
<p><em>(Final essay of the series.)</em></p>
<p>In previous essays in this series, I have <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#48">described<br />
Islam</a> as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of<br />
violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic<br />
terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden&#8217;s<br />
goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#6">establishment<br />
of a global</a> Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason<br />
Americans have trouble <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#51">comprehending<br />
the scope of the threat</a>, and I have explained why Western-style<br />
diplomacy is <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#22">next<br />
to useless</a> in this situation. In this final essay I&#8217;ll suggest<br />
paths towards a solution.</p>
<p>In order to win, we must begin with realism about the scope of the<br />
war and the objectives of the enemy. We must realize that although in<br />
theory and theology al-Qaeda is making war on the entire infidel West,<br />
in practice they are only interested in attacking the U.S., the<br />
`hyperpower&#8217; that leads it.</p>
<p>There is no possible gain for al-Qaeda in attacking Europe and<br />
risking a change in the pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian tilt of the EU<br />
(which has just resumed support payments to the Palestinian Authority<br />
despite conclusive evidence that the money is diverted to pay for<br />
massacres of Israeli children). Nor can al-Qaeda gain any leverage by<br />
attacks on the remainder of the world. The theaters of the war will<br />
include the U.S. and terrorist base areas in the Islamic arc<br />
stretching from Morocco through the Maghreb through the Middle East to<br />
Pakistan, and perhaps in Indonesia and the Phillipines as well.</p>
<p>To people who view the entire world through the lens of the Western<br />
tradition, the strategy I will outline is doubtless going to sound<br />
bellicose and regressive. It is not; it is founded on a cold-blooded<br />
realization that Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest<br />
of the Islamic world) regard victory in war as a sign of Allah&#8217;s favor<br />
and regard compromise and concession as a sign of weakness.</p>
<p>The war against Islamic terror must be fought on three levels:<br />
homeland defense, military power projection, and cultural subversion.<br />
We must foil terrorist acts; we must imprison or kill the terrorists<br />
who plan and execute them; and we must dry up the pool of potential<br />
recruits before they become terrorists who can only be stopped by<br />
being imprisoned or killed.</p>
<p>Homeland defense includes all those measures designed to make the<br />
attacks on U.S. civilians less likely to succeed. These will include<br />
conventional police and security measures. It must also include a<br />
revival of the role of the unincorporated militia and the armed<br />
citizen. Al-Qaeda has limited resources, but the advantage of<br />
choosing where they will strike; since the police and military cannot<br />
be everywhere, civilians (like the passengers of flight 93) must take<br />
anti-terrorist defense into their own hands.</p>
<p>Military power projection includes direct military action against<br />
terrorist bases and havens. As an anarchist, I would prefer a world<br />
in which private security agencies under contract to insurance<br />
companies pursued al-Qaeda; persons of some other political persuasions<br />
might propose supranational agencies such as the U.N. Unfortunately,<br />
under the current world system there is no alternative to governments<br />
to do this work. The U.S. has begun it in Afghanistan; the war must<br />
continue in Iraq, and it is likely to encompass Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi<br />
Arabia as well.</p>
<p>The goal of military power projection must be twofold: physical and<br />
psychological. The physical goal must be to destroy the physical<br />
infrastructure of terrorism &#8212; the headquarters, bases and training<br />
camps. While this is important, the psychological goal of humiliating<br />
and crushing jihadists is even more important.</p>
<p>Islamic armies and resistance movements are fanatical in attack but<br />
brittle on the defense. When motivated by the conviction that Allah<br />
guides their arm, suicidal bravery is routine.<br />
On the other hand, when the fortunes of a cause decline past a<br />
certain point, Arabs tend to consider the will of Allah to be manifest<br />
and abruptly abandon it. These tendencies form part of the cultural<br />
background that includes even secularized terrorist movements<br />
(such as Yasser Arafat&#8217;s al-Fatah) in the Islamic world.</p>
<p>The U.S. was able to exploit this brittleness effectively in<br />
Afghanistan. By moving in overwhelming force when it moved at all,<br />
the U.S. was able to intimidate many warlords affiliated with the<br />
Taliban into switching sides &#8212; an important reason the campaign<br />
involved so little actual fighting.</p>
<p>We must repeat this maneuver on a larger scale. We must teach the<br />
Dar-al-Islam to respect and <em>fear</em> the power of the West. We<br />
must not negotiate or offer concessions until it is clear from the<br />
behavior of governments, the umma, and the &#8220;Arab street&#8221; that the<br />
public will to support jihad has been broken.</p>
<p>Our most important long-term weapon against Islamic terrorism,<br />
however, will be cultural subversion. That is, to break the hold of<br />
the Islamist/jihadist idea on the minds of Muslims. To do this, it<br />
may be necessary to discredit the entirety of Islam; the question<br />
depends on whether any Islamic figure will be clever enough to<br />
construct an interpretation of Islam purged of jihadist tendencies,<br />
and whether that version can propagate and displace the<br />
Sunni-fundamentalist varieties now dominant in the Islamic world.</p>
<p>I can do no better than to quote Michelle Efird, the woman who<br />
inspired my essay<br />
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#5">We Are All Jews Now</a>. In private mail afterwards<br />
(quoted with permission) she wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>
I don&#8217;t want to appease them, I don&#8217;t want to understand them, I<br />
don&#8217;t want to let them reap the benefits of our liberalism while<br />
plotting our destruction. Like most Americans, I would have been more<br />
than happy to let them pretend the last 400 years of progress never<br />
happened, as long as they didn&#8217;t force their warped-vision goggles on<br />
anyone else. But since they brought the war to us, let&#8217;s pave the<br />
middle east with outlet malls, fast food franchises, and Disney<br />
Mecca. Let&#8217;s infect their entire population with personal liberty and<br />
dissension and critical thinking. And if that doesn&#8217;t work, let&#8217;s<br />
flood them with porn spam.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Osama bin Laden may, in the end, have materialized his own worst<br />
fears. The ideology of jihad has created its mirror and opposite; the<br />
dawning sense that we in the West have the right, the power, and the<br />
<em>duty</em> to wipe bin Laden&#8217;s brand of religion from the face of<br />
the earth before it destroys us all.</p>
<p>UPDATE: N.Z. Bear has written an<br />
<a href="http://www.truthlaidbear.com/001188.html#001188"><br />
excellent essay</a> on memes and cultural subversion.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=78500864">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Run Silent, Go Feep
<p><em>Warning: The following blog entry provides way more than the<br />
recommended daily allowance of geeking. If you don&#8217;t have a serious<br />
propeller-head streak, surf outta here now before it&#8217;s too<br />
late.</em></p>
<p>I&#8217;m mainly a software guy, but occasionally I build PCs for fun.<br />
Design them, rather; the further away I stay from actual hardware the<br />
happier it usually is for everybody. Last year, I designed an <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/ultimate-linux-box">Ultimate<br />
Linux Box</a>; the good folks at <a href="http://www.laclinux.com/">Los Alamos Computers</a> built it and<br />
will cheerfully sell you one. It was a successful design in most<br />
respects, but unpleasantly noisy. This year, as we do the 2002<br />
refresh, I&#8217;m going to be working hard at getting the most noise<br />
reduction I can without sacrificing performance. I&#8217;m experimenting<br />
now with ways and means.</p>
<p>So I spent a couple of hours today disassembling the case of my<br />
wife Cathy&#8217;s machine (minx.thyrsus.com) and lining three sides of it<br />
with <a href="http://www.dynamat.com/">Dynamat</a>, a kind of stick-on<br />
rubber acoustic insulation often used in car-stereo installations.<br />
The malevolent god that normally attends me when I futz with hardware<br />
must have been off tormenting some other hapless ex-mathematician; no<br />
hardware was destroyed, no blood was shed, and I&#8217;m typing this on the<br />
selfsame reassembled machine.</p>
<p>Minx is a pretty generic mid-tower system made with cheap Taiwanese<br />
parts in mid-2002 by my local <a href="http://www.abestpc.com/">hole-in-the-wall computer shop</a>: I<br />
spent only $150 to have it built, recycling a few parts from an only<br />
slightly older machine. It has a 300W power supply, Athlon 950 mobo<br />
with stock CPU cooler fan, one 80mm case fan, 7200RPM ATA drive. I<br />
succeeded in lining both 14&#8243;-square side panels and the case top; this<br />
used up the 4&#8217;sq piece I bought so efficiently that there was only<br />
about 10&#8243;sq in two small piece left over. I used those to cover the<br />
only exposed solid section of the back panel.</p>
<p>If you want try this yourself, the tools I found useful were a<br />
utility knife and a metal footrule, the latter useful both for<br />
measuring to fit and as a cutting guide.</p>
<p>I took before and after measurements with the db meter. dbA scale,<br />
measurements made with the probe one inch above the center-rear edge<br />
of the case.</p>
<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>Machine off:</td>
<td>44dbA</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Machine on, before:</td>
<td>63dbA</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Machine on, after:</td>
<td>61dbA</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>In other words, only a 2dbA drop &#8212; marginal when you consider<br />
that the meter is only rated 1.5dB accurate! but it&#8217;s worth bearing in<br />
mind that the scale is logarithmic; 2dbA is more than it looks like.</p>
<p>I have studio-engineer ears and sensitive musician fingers. I took<br />
before-and-after measurements with those, too, listening to the sound<br />
tambre and feeling for case resonance.</p>
<p>My ears tell me that the box is only slightly quieter, but the noise<br />
spectrum has changed. The proportion of high-frequency noise has<br />
dropped; more of what I&#8217;m hearing is white noise due to turbulant<br />
airflow, less is bearing noise. This is a good change even if total<br />
emission hasn&#8217;t dropped much.</p>
<p>My fingers tell me that the amount of case resonance has dropped quite<br />
dramatically, especially on the side panels.</p>
<p>Was it worth doing? I am not sure. There would probably be more<br />
benefit on a system emitting more bearing noise from 10K or 15Krpm<br />
drives. On this one, I think the power supply is emitting most of<br />
the noise, and acoustic lining can&#8217;t do much against that.</p>
<p>In fact, my clearest take-away from this is that the big gains in<br />
noise reduction on conventional PCs are likely to come from<br />
obsessing about power-supply engineering &#8212; including details like<br />
whether the fan blows through a slotted grille or a cutout with a<br />
wire-basket finger guard (the latter will generate less turbulence<br />
noise).</p>
<p>I&#8217;d like to retrofit minx with a Papst 12dbA muffin fan and see if<br />
that makes a measurable difference. But the best change would<br />
probably be one of the <a href="http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/00005.html?id=LhadbVAh">Enhance</a><br />
300W PSUs that are supposed to only emit 26dbA. I&#8217;ll bet that would<br />
win big.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=79200649">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Right back at ya, Captain
<p>Last Saturday morning in San Diego I had breakfast with Steven den<br />
Beste, the redoubtable captain of <a href="http://www.denbeste.nu/">U.S.S. Clueless</a>. One of the<br />
side-effects of that meeting was a long <a href="http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/07/OpenSourcepart1.shtml"><br />
critique</a> of open-source development. Herewith my response.</p>
<p>Steve and I agree on the scaling problem that has pushed software<br />
development efforts to the ragged edge of what is sustainable even by<br />
corporations with lots of money. Software project sizes are roughly<br />
doubling every eighteen months, and for reasons Steve alluded to the<br />
expected bug count per thousand lines is actually rising.</p>
<p>My assertion is that software development has reached a scale at<br />
which (a) even large corporations can often no longer afford to field<br />
enough developers to be effective at today&#8217;s project scales, and (b)<br />
traditional methods of software quality assurance (ranging from formal<br />
methods to internal walkthroughs) are no longer effective. The only<br />
development organizations that seem to thrive on today&#8217;s complexity<br />
regime are open-source teams.</p>
<p>Note that I am not claiming that open source is a silver bullet for<br />
the software-complexity problem. There are no silver bullets, no<br />
permanent solutions. What I <em>am</em> claiming is that at the<br />
leading edge of large-scale software, closed-source development<br />
doesn&#8217;t work any more. The future belongs to open source plus<br />
whatever other practices and technologies we learn to use with<br />
it to develop at ever-higher scales of complexity.</p>
<p>Steve&#8217;s analysis of the open-source phenomenon is very intelligent,<br />
but doesn&#8217;t quite understand either the mode of organization, the<br />
associated technology, or the factional politics within the movement.<br />
Diagnostic of the slight disconnect is when he writes &#8220;For [the<br />
zealots], the only true &#8220;Open Source&#8221; is governed by the strong form<br />
of the GPL, and all other forms and licenses are harmful dilution of<br />
the concept.&#8221; In fact, the people he&#8217;s talking about reject the term<br />
&#8220;open source&#8221; entirely and insist on the ideologically-loaded term<br />
&#8220;free software&#8221;.</p>
<p>A more serious error is when he writes &#8220;It is plausible that an OSS<br />
project would require each participant to sign an NDA before being<br />
given access to the source.&#8221; It is <em>not</em> plausible. The licenses<br />
and community values of the open-source community would not permit this.<br />
His two bullet points characterizing open source are missing its most<br />
important characteristic: the entire practice is designed to facilitate<br />
scrutiny by people with no institutional or contract relationship to the core<br />
development team. The astringent effect of peer review by people who<br />
have <em>nothing to lose</em> by reporting bugs is precisely the<br />
point of the whole game.</p>
<p>Steve doesn&#8217;t undertand the importance or the power of this effect. This<br />
slightly skews his whole essay; much of it is talking past what open-source<br />
people do, rather than addressing us. He&#8217;s also unaware of a lot of the<br />
real-world evidence for the success of the method. Some of the things he<br />
thinks are technologically or economically impossible are actually being<br />
done, routinely.</p>
<p>He&#8217;s correct when he says that most contributors are self-selected and<br />
self-motivated. He overestimates the cost of training newbies, though. They<br />
self-train; normally, the first time a core developer hears from a newbie<br />
is typically when the newbie sends a patch &#8212; self-evidence that the newbie<br />
has <em>already</em> acquired a critical level of knowledge about the<br />
software. The &#8220;sink or swim&#8221; method turns out to work, and work well.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s incorrect to imply, as he does, that open-source development<br />
is unsustainable because the people doing it are flaky amateurs.<br />
Steve hasn&#8217;t absorbed the implications of the Boston Consulting<br />
Group study that shows that about 40% of contributors to core projects<br />
are professionals getting paid for working on open source by patrons<br />
who need to use the results. In fact, what the open-source community<br />
is evolving into is something very like a huge machine for bringing<br />
newbies into apprenticeship contact with experienced developers and<br />
professionalizing both groups.</p>
<p>He also writes &#8220;OSS by its nature tends to be reactive rather than<br />
predictive. It doesn&#8217;t look into the future, try to predict a problem<br />
which doesn&#8217;t exist now but will exist then, and be ready with a<br />
solution. Rather, it tends to see problems that exist now and work on<br />
solutions for them.&#8221; This is false &#8212; or, at any rate, no more true<br />
than it is for closed-source development.</p>
<p>The open-source community built the Web and the Internet before it<br />
had acquired a name for itself and full consciousness of its own<br />
practices. Today, the cutting-edge work in operating systems<br />
languages, desktop user interfaces, relational databases and many<br />
other areas is being done either within the open-source community or<br />
in cooperation with it by academics. These prodigious efforts of<br />
imagination dwarf any &#8220;prediction&#8221; produced by closed-source software<br />
development in the last two decades.</p>
<p>Steve&#8217;s &#8220;open source is reactive&#8221; claim strikes me as ironically<br />
funny, because I can remember when the standard knock on my crowd was<br />
that we&#8217;re great at innovation but can&#8217;t actually field product. How<br />
quickly they forget&#8230;</p>
<p>He&#8217;s right enough about the difficulty of planning and high cost<br />
of face-to-face meetings, though. These are real problems. It&#8217;s<br />
a testimony to the power of our practices that we manage to ship large<br />
volumes of high-quality software despite these obstacles.</p>
<p>What Steve called &#8220;player-killer&#8221; tactics have been tried &#8212; there<br />
was a famous incident a few years back in which a TCP-wrappers<br />
distribution was Trojaned. The crack was detected and the community<br />
warned within hours. The black hats don&#8217;t seem to bother trying this<br />
any more; our reaction time is too fast for that game to be very<br />
rewarding. The technical design of Linux helps here in ways that<br />
I won&#8217;t go into here &#8212; suffice it to say that it&#8217;s intrinsically<br />
much harder to get a Trojan to do anything interesting than it<br />
is under Windows or other single-user operating systems.</p>
<p>So far, the supply of open-source developers seems to be pretty<br />
elastic &#8212; we&#8217;re not limited much by lacking bodies. Other factors<br />
loom much larger; patents, the DMCA, intrinsically hard technical<br />
problems. I don&#8217;t understand why this is as well as I&#8217;d like to, but<br />
the facts are undeniable; the community is ten times the size my<br />
wildest high-end scenarios predicted a decade ago and seems to be<br />
growing <em>faster</em> as it gets larger.</p>
<p>Steve&#8217;s whole argument that open-source can&#8217;t win in embedded<br />
systems is very curious, since it predicts exactly the opposite of<br />
what is actually happening out there. Linux is taking over in<br />
embedded systems &#8212; in fact, many observers would say it has already<br />
won that space. If Steve had worked in the field within the last<br />
three years he would probably know this.</p>
<p>Here are some data about the demand; the only non-general-purpose<br />
open-source software magazine in existence is the Linux Embedded<br />
Systems Journal. Open-source embedded developers like Monta Vista<br />
Software are bucking the recession by growing like crazy. The first<br />
cell-phone prototype running entirely open-source software just<br />
entered beta testing.</p>
<p>I was in California to meet Steve partly because Real Networks<br />
wanted me to be on stage when they announced the open-sourcing of<br />
their RTSP engine. Their CEO, Rob Glaser, was quite frank about the<br />
immediate business reasons: they needed to get ports to forty<br />
different Nokia cellphones and just couldn&#8217;t figure out how to muster<br />
the resources for that short of inviting every stakeholder on the<br />
planet to hack the problem. Scaling bites. Hard.</p>
<p>In fact, some of the very characteristics that Steve thinks make<br />
embedded systems like cellphones safe for closed development seems to<br />
be the factors that are driving increased open-sourcing. The close<br />
tie to hardware actually <em>decreases</em> the value of secrecy,<br />
because it means the software is typically not easily re-usable by<br />
hardware competitors. Thus open sourcing is often a great way to<br />
recruit help from customer engineers without a real downside risk of<br />
plagiarism.</p>
<p>In fact, it&#8217;s an open secret in the industry that the most<br />
important reason most closed-source embedded and driver software<br />
remains closed is not nerves about plagiarism but fear of patent<br />
audits on the source code. Graphics-card manufacturers, in<br />
particular, routinely swipe patented techniques from their competitors<br />
and bury them in binaries. (This is generally believed to be the<br />
reason nVidia&#8217;s drivers aren&#8217;t open.)</p>
<p>Another trend that&#8217;s driving Linux and open-sourcing in embedded<br />
stuff is the shift from specialty embedded 8-bit processors to 32-bit<br />
chips with general-purpose architectures. Turns out the development<br />
costs for getting stuff to run on the 8-bit chips are sickeningly high<br />
and rising &#8212; partly because the few wizards who can do good work on<br />
that hardware are <em>expensive</em>. The incremental cost for<br />
smarter hardware has dropped a lot; it&#8217;s now cheaper to embed<br />
general-purpose chips running Linux because it means you have a<br />
larger, less expensive talent pool that can program them. Also,<br />
when your developers aren&#8217;t fighting hardware limits as hard,<br />
you get better time to market (which, as Steve observes, is<br />
critical).</p>
<p>Steve is right about the comparative difficulty of applying<br />
open-source methods to vertical applications. But the difficulty is<br />
only comparative; it&#8217;s happening anyway. The metalab archive carries<br />
a point-of-sale system for pizza parlors. I know of another case in<br />
which a Canadian auto dealership built specialized accounting software<br />
for their business and open-sourced it. The reasons? Same as usual;<br />
they wanted to lay off as much as possible of the development and<br />
maintainance cost on their competitors.</p>
<p>This is the same co-opetition logic that makes the Apache Software<br />
Foundation work &#8212; it&#8217;s just as powerful for vertical apps, though<br />
less obviously so. Each sponsoring company sees a higher payoff from<br />
having the software at a small fraction of the manpower cost for a<br />
complete in-house development. The method spreads risk in a way<br />
beneficial to all parties, too, because the ability of separate<br />
companies to sustain development tends to be uncorrelated &#8212; unless<br />
they <em>all</em> sink, the project endures.</p>
<p>The way to solve the problem of not exposing your business logic to<br />
competitors is to separate your app into an open-source engine and a<br />
bunch of declarative business-rule schemas that you keep secret.<br />
Databases work this way, and websites (the web pages and CGIs are the<br />
schema). Many vertical apps can be partitioned this way too &#8212; in<br />
fact, for things like tax-preparation software they almost have to be,<br />
because the complexity overhead of hacking executable code every time<br />
the rules change is too high.</p>
<p>Steve thinks the differences between Apache and Mozilla are bigger<br />
than they are. In fact, the core groups of <em>both</em> projects are<br />
full-time pros being funded by large users of the software.</p>
<p>So, let&#8217;s address Steve&#8217;s objections point by point:</p>
<p><em>For embedded software, OSS has the following problems:</em></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><em>It can&#8217;t be scheduled; timely delivery can&#8217;t be relied<br />
on.</em></p>
<p>Timely delivery can&#8217;t be relied on for <em>any</em> software; see<br />
De Marco and Lister&#8217;s excellent book <cite><a href="http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/pw.html">Peopleware: Productive<br />
Projects and Teams</a></cite> on the delusion of deadlines, especially<br />
the empirical evidence that the &#8220;wake me up when it&#8217;s done&#8221; strategy<br />
of not setting them actually gets your project done faster (also the<br />
implication of a recent Harvard Business School study of software<br />
project outcomes).</p>
<p>Open source is at least not noticeably worse than closed-source on this<br />
axis. Arguably it&#8217;s better, because the rapid release cycles allow users<br />
to pick up on project results as soon as they&#8217;re good enough.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Debugging requires access to custom hardware which usually<br />
can&#8217;t easily be accessed across the net.</em></p>
<p>There aren&#8217;t good solutions to this problem yet, but the increasing<br />
use of &#8220;overpowered&#8221; 32-bit processors using standard busses is<br />
tending to reduce it in scope. The development tools and interface<br />
hardware used in embedded stuff are rapidly getting more generic and closer<br />
to what&#8217;s used in general-purpose computers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Active participation even for junior people requires substantial<br />
amounts of project-specific knowledge which isn&#8217;t easily acquired,<br />
especially remotely.</em></p>
<p>This one puzzles me, because I think Steve ought to be right about<br />
it &#8212; but I&#8217;m not hearing the kinds of noises that I&#8217;d hear if it were<br />
slowing down the move to Linux and open source significantly.</p>
<p>At least part of the answer is that embedded-systems work is<br />
getting de-skilled in a particular sense &#8212; more of it&#8217;s being done by<br />
application specialists who are training up to the required level of<br />
programming, rather than programmers who have acquired expensive<br />
application-specific knowledge.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>A great deal of proprietary information is usually involved in<br />
the process, and if that&#8217;s released the company can be seriously<br />
harmed.</em></p>
<p>It&#8217;s a question of tradeoffs. As RealNetworks found out when<br />
costing its Nokia contract, the choice is increasingly between giving<br />
up control of some of your proprietary IP and being too resource-bound<br />
to ship at all.</p>
<p>There is no market for secrecy. There&#8217;s a market for product. If<br />
you can&#8217;t ship product, or your customers aren&#8217;t confident that you<br />
can maintain it after shipping, all that proprietary IP amounts to is<br />
a millstone around your neck.</p>
<p>There will be more stories like RTSP in the future. Count on it.<br />
In fact, the day will come when most of your contract partners simply<br />
won&#8217;t accept the business risks of having someone else hold<br />
proprietary rights on the embedded software they use.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>It&#8217;s nearly impossible to do embedded software without<br />
common impromptu face-to-face meetings with co-workers, either to ask<br />
questions or to brainstorm. Doing this electronically is sufficiently<br />
different as to not be practical.</em></p>
<p>Yeah. They used to think that about operating systems, too. Obviously<br />
the Linux kernel is impossible, and therefore doesn&#8217;t exist.</p>
<p>(At which point Oolon Colluphid disappeared in a puff of logic.)</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><em>For vertical apps, the objections are:</em></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><em>Security, security, security. You want me to trust my<br />
billing system to code written by anyone who happens to come along and<br />
volunteer to work on it, without any kind of check of credentials or<br />
checks on trustworthiness?</em></p>
<p>One of the lessons the business world has been absorbing is that<br />
open-source projects are dramatically <em>more</em> secure than their<br />
closed-source competition &#8212; anybody who compares the Bugtraq records<br />
on Apache vs. ISS defacements, or Linux vs. Windows remote exploits,<br />
will notice that real fast.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not hard to understand why this is &#8212; I&#8217;ve found that even<br />
corporate executives grok the theory pretty quickly. I won&#8217;t do the whole<br />
argument here, but this article on <a href="http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Kerckhoffs'+law">Kerckhoff&#8217;s<br />
Law</a> holds the crucial clue. When you rely on the obscurity of source<br />
code for security, it means that the bad guys find the bugs faster than<br />
you can plug them &#8212; there are more of them, and they have entropy on<br />
their side. Open source evens the odds for the good guys.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Recruitment: for most of the kind of people involved in<br />
OSS, vertical apps are boring. (Unless they want to figure out how to<br />
steal from it.)</em></p>
<p>This remains a problem. On the other hand, open source makes it<br />
easier to train domain specialists to be good enough programmers to<br />
get the job done. It&#8217;s easier for physicists to learn to hack than<br />
it is for hackers to learn physics.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>It takes a lot of knowledge of the specific aspects of the<br />
problem to make a significant contribution, which means things like<br />
observing the actual process of guests checking in at the front desk<br />
of the hotel.</em></p>
<p>This just reinforces the tendency for vertical-app developers to be<br />
obsessives about something else who learn to program, rather than obsessives<br />
about programming who learn something else.</p>
<p>Professional programmers tend to bridle at this thought. Well, better<br />
learn to live with it. As software becomes more pervasive, the amount<br />
of it done by application-specialist &#8220;amateurs&#8221; is going to increase.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>The industry is full of horror stories of vertical apps<br />
which ran badly over budget and over schedule; the idea scares the<br />
hell out of business people. They&#8217;re unlikely to be very enthused by<br />
the use of a process which by its nature *cannot* be reliably<br />
scheduled. (Remember that Mozilla ran two years long.)</em></p>
<p>Schedules &#8212; and the belief that deadlines make software happen<br />
faster &#8212; are a delusion in the mind of management, one not supported<br />
by the actual evidence about project outcomes. This delusion is<br />
so entrenched that managers fail to interpret the 70% rate of<br />
project failures correctly. It&#8217;s as if people were so determined<br />
to believe the Earth is flat that they ignore what their eyes tell<br />
them when ships sink over the horizon.</p>
<p><em>No</em> software larger than toy programs can be scheduled.<br />
Tactics aimed at doing so normally have the actual effect of<br />
<em>increasing</em> the time to market. `Aggressive&#8217; schedules<br />
effectively guarantee failure. The sooner we learn these objective<br />
truths, and that the illusion of control that schedules give is not<br />
worth the real costs, the sooner rates of outright project failure<br />
will dip below 70%.</p>
<p>Go read <cite>Peopleware</cite>. <em>Now</em>.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><em>For short life apps:</em></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><em>Schedule is everything. If you&#8217;re six months late, you&#8217;re dead.</em></p>
<p>See above. There are reasons open sourcing is less applicable to short-life<br />
applications, but this turns out not to be one of them.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Secrecy is everything else. If you&#8217;re on time but your<br />
competitor knows what you&#8217;re doing a year ahead, he&#8217;ll wipe you<br />
out.</em></p>
<p>This argument has more force for short-life apps than for Steve&#8217;s other<br />
categories, but remember that increasingly the alternative to open source<br />
is not being able to ship at all. Your competitor is in the same boat<br />
you are.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>How do you make money selling what anyone can get for free<br />
from any developer? If your product was developed out in the open, who<br />
exactly buys it afterwards?</em></p>
<p>Steve has a stronger point here. It&#8217;s one that people used to<br />
think applied to almost all software, but which turns out to be mainly<br />
a problem for short-life apps. Actually the distinguishing<br />
characteristic isn&#8217;t expected lifetime per se, but something<br />
correlated with it &#8212; whether the product needs continued downstream<br />
work (maintainance and upgrades) or not.</p>
<p>Long-life, high-maintainance apps create niches for service businesses.<br />
That&#8217;s the main way you make money in an open-source world. It&#8217;s<br />
harder to make that work with a short-life app. Sometimes it&#8217;s<br />
impossible. Life is hard.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><em>For long life apps:</em></p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><em>Will the participants be willing to work on what our<br />
marketing analysis says we need, or will they insist that they know<br />
what is required and try to add that instead? We don&#8217;t need feature<br />
creep, or people trying to change the direction we&#8217;re moving.</em></p>
<p>In open-source projects, the function of &#8220;marketing analysis&#8221; tends to<br />
be taken be direct interaction with the user community. We find we<br />
do better work without a bunch of marketroids getting between us and<br />
our customers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>There is major learning curve involved in making a<br />
reasonable contribution to these kinds of programs; you don&#8217;t learn<br />
how a circuit board router works in a few days of study. In most cases<br />
you have to be conversant with the way that the package&#8217;s customers do<br />
what they do, and most programmers don&#8217;t know these things and can&#8217;t<br />
easily learn them.</em></p>
<p>See my previous remarks about application specialists and the<br />
democratization of programming. And every time you&#8217;re tempted to<br />
say &#8220;But they couldn&#8217;t possibly get away with that in application<br />
area X&#8221; remember that they once said that about all the areas where<br />
open source now dominates.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s just not smart to bet against the hackers. Not smart at all.<br />
We generally end up having the last laugh on the naysayers. As recently<br />
as 1990, &#8220;serious analysts&#8221; laughed at the idea of ubiquitous Internet.<br />
As late as 1996, they said Unix was dead. We showed them &#8212; and there<br />
are more of us now, with better tools, than ever.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Steve is right that one of the most effective ways to head off bugs<br />
is to have a core group of professional engineers do a clean design.<br />
Where he&#8217;s mistaken is in believing this truth has anything to tell<br />
us about open vs. closed development. Us open-source guys, it turns<br />
out, are <em>really good</em> at clean design.</p>
<p>This something to do with the fact that, as individuals, we tend to<br />
be exceptionally capable and self-motivated &#8212; an elite selected by<br />
dedication to the art of programming. It has more to do with not<br />
having managers and marketroids pissing in the soup constantly,<br />
telling us what tools to use, imposing insane deadlines, demanding<br />
endless checklist features that don&#8217;t actually benefit anyone.</p>
<p>But mostly it has to do with the ruthless, invaluable pressure of<br />
peer review &#8212; the knowledge that every design decision we make will<br />
be examined by thousands of people who may well be smarter than we<br />
are, and if we fail the test our effort will be pitilessly<br />
discarded. In that kind of environment, you get good or you get<br />
gone.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=79585067">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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When there&#8217;s nothing left to say, self-parody is the way
<p>I&#8217;m just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of<br />
the 1960s and 1970s. I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and<br />
I disagree with the anti-war Left&#8217;s agitation against a war on Iraq<br />
today. But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert<br />
Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag these days, I wonder if I&#8217;m<br />
getting old and allowing a golden haze to cloud my recollection of<br />
past decades. Because I find myself feeling almost nostalgic for<br />
the anti-Vietnam-war Left.</p>
<p>Yes, yes, I still think &#8220;Hanoi Jane&#8221; and her crowd were basically<br />
wrong. Wrong about the consequences of a North Vietnamese victory<br />
(Communists turn out to be murderously repressive &mdash; what a shock!);<br />
wrong about the motives and interests of the U.S.; wrong about almost<br />
everything except the level of incompetence, buffoonery, and myopia<br />
afflicting the generals and politicians running that war.</p>
<p>But there was one important difference. The anti-Vietnam-war Left<br />
may have been deluded and prone to masturbating in front of Che<br />
Guevara posters&#8230;but if you sifted through enough of their ranting<br />
you could detect the outlines of a principled case, or several<br />
principled cases. There was one argument on which they persuaded me;<br />
though I was not of draftable age, I found I agreed with them that the<br />
military draft was an intolerable form of slavery years before I<br />
encountered Robert Heinlein&#8217;s pithy objurgation that &#8220;A nation that<br />
cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself will not survive<br />
&mdash; and does not deserve to.&#8221;</p>
<p>But try as I might, I can&#8217;t detect a principled case anywhere in today&#8217;s<br />
anti-war Left. Which is all the more curious since I think they<br />
could be making one. Several, in fact: starting with the argument<br />
that we should abandon the path of war not even because of what it does<br />
to our enemies but because of what it does to ourselves. At every<br />
level from the personal to the political, warfare is a brutalizing<br />
experience that erodes our freedoms and empowers the nastiest elements<br />
of human psyches and societies.</p>
<p>There are principled responses to that case, but that particular<br />
argument is not my point. My point is that today&#8217;s anti-war<br />
rhetoric, as exemplified by reports on a planned September 11<br />
&#8220;Teach-In and Panel regarding Oppression&#8221; at UCLA, never seems<br />
to even confront the question of whether war against Afghanistan and Iraq<br />
is justified by the Islamist threat. Instead, the topic is &#8220;U.S. Law<br />
and Policy Against Immigrants of Color&#8221;, as if there is any kind of<br />
equivalence between the U.S.&#8217;s border policies and the catastrophic<br />
mass murder of 2,500 people.</p>
<p>There is a curious kind of evasiveness at work here. We can see it<br />
at work in the arid deconstructionism of Susan Sontag&#8217;s NYT op-ed, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/10/opinion/10SONT.html">Real<br />
Battles and Empty Metaphors</a>. Even the title announces that she&#8217;s<br />
going to lucubrate about the relationship between language and<br />
reality, not confront reality itself. A similar denial is evident<br />
it the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for commentary on the war,<br />
he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if that somehow<br />
banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have nuclear<br />
weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them.</p>
<p>Maybe I&#8217;m getting senile, but it seems to me that the Left of my<br />
teens was in better contact with reality than today&#8217;s crew. There<br />
really was a military-industrial complex and the desire for war<br />
profits probably did drive some of the political support for the<br />
Vietnam war. The military-industrial complex is still with us today,<br />
but the Left seems to have forgotten even the little it once knew<br />
about political economics and isn&#8217;t even bothering to raise that<br />
issue. Perhaps this amnesia is a post-traumatic effect of watching<br />
Marx take a header into the dustbin of history; we&#8217;ve come to strange<br />
days indeed when I have to conclude that my libertarian self could<br />
easily write a better Marxist critique of Dubya&#8217;s war propaganda than<br />
anyone on the Left has yet issued in public.</p>
<p>Instead, what we&#8217;re seeing is a rhetoric that is half a retreat<br />
into language-chopping and half an expression of contempt for the<br />
U.S. &mdash; contempt so out of balance that it&#8217;s doomed to be tuned out by<br />
anyone less far to the left than the unlamented former Congresswoman<br />
<a href="http://www.house.gov/mckinney/">Cynthia McKinney</a>.</p>
<p>When did the Left descend into such empty self-parody? And why?</p>
<p>Watching &#8220;real existing socialism&#8221; self-destruct must have been<br />
part of it. I speculated on the psychological effects of that<br />
political collapse in a previous essay <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200205#75">Socialists<br />
to the Stars</a>, about Scottish SF writers Ken McLeod and Iain Banks.<br />
But something weirder and more diffuse happened to the Left on<br />
<em>this</em> side of the pond, and I&#8217;m not sure what it was.</p>
<p>Some days I wonder if Greg Egan, the reclusive West Australian<br />
author who has produced some of the best hard SF of the last decade,<br />
may not have called it right in the following passage from his novel<br />
&#8220;Teranesia&#8221;:</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and<br />
all the other social justice movements were getting more and more<br />
support. So, in the 1980s, the CIA [...] hired some really clever<br />
linguists to invent a secret weapon; an incredibly complicated way of<br />
talking about politics that didn&#8217;t actually make any sense, but which<br />
spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded<br />
so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just<br />
hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else<br />
let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But<br />
then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;So instead of going to the people in power and saying, `How about<br />
upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?&#8217; the<br />
people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like `My<br />
truth narrative is in conflict with your truth marrative!&#8217;. And the<br />
people in power replied `Woe is me! You&#8217;ve thrown me into the briar<br />
patch!&#8217; And everyone else said `Who are these idiots? Why should we<br />
trust them when they can&#8217;t even speak properly?&#8217; And the CIA was<br />
happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon<br />
lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone<br />
who&#8217;d played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit<br />
what they&#8217;d done,&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>Egan&#8217;s account is implausible only because it seems unlikely that<br />
the CIA is quite that subtle. But he&#8217;s right in pointing out that the<br />
rise of the language of postmodernism &mdash; the sterile, involuted,<br />
pseudo-profundity famously skewered by the <a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/">Sokal Hoax</a><br />
&mdash; seems to be an important correlate of the decline of the<br />
American Left.</p>
<p>Self-parody is where you end up when you have nothing left to say.<br />
And when all you can talk about is `discourse&#8217; that&#8217;s a damn short road,</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=81561881">Bogspot comments</a></p>

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Living With Microsoft
<p>In today&#8217;s episode of the Microsoft follies, we learned that<br />
<a href="http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-957704.html">Media Player 9<br />
is un-uninstallable</a>. Deliberately.</p>
<p>A A Microsoft spokesthing confirmed that Media Player 9 is so deeply<br />
integrated into the operating system that it cannot be removed without<br />
doing a `system restore&#8217;. Which, incidentally, will wipe out your<br />
Office installation.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s at times like this that, contemplating Microsoft users, one<br />
feels as though one is wandering among people lashing themselves with<br />
stinging nettles until blood runs off them in rivulets. One wants to<br />
know why they don&#8217;t just stop. One is told &#8220;But it&#8217;s the<br />
<em>standard</em>!&#8221;</p>
<p>One shakes one&#8217;s head bemusedly.</p>
<p>They pay heavily for the privilege of lashing themselves, too.<br />
Except for those blessed, blissful occasions on which they pay still<br />
more, grease themselves, bend over, and prepare to be buggered by a<br />
chainsaw. That&#8217;s called a &#8220;System Upgrade&#8221;.</p>
<p>One contemplates the uptime figures on one&#8217;s Linux box and<br />
feels &mdash; admit it! &mdash; a bit smug.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=81716506">Comment</a></p>

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So, Howell Raines isn&#8217;t a complete waste of air
<p>The NYT ran a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/18/opinion/18WED2.html"><br />
pro-Linux editorial</a> today.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s good. They had to slip their &#8220;communitarian&#8221; spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping <cite>Mother Jones</cite> readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.</p>
<p>Hah. If they only knew. I&#8217;m not going to say my gun-toting<br />
red-meat libertarianism is typical, because it isn&#8217;t. Actually<br />
the mass centroid of hackers&#8217; politics is a lot like the<br />
blogosphere&#8217;s, a sort of soft-libertarianism-leaning-towards-conservatism or vice-versa<br />
(the centroid used to be further left but a lot has changed in the last decade).<br />
Much less radical than me, but still enough to give the likes<br />
of Raines a bad case of the vapors.</p>
<p>But let&#8217;s keep that our little secret, OK? If Raines wants to believe that open-source people are some kind of cross between Greenpeace and the Ethical Culture Society, that&#8217;s just fine. We&#8217;ll<br />
take the Gray Lady&#8217;s backing. It&#8217;s another small step on the road to world domination.</p>
<p>The day will come when we will be the guys running the<br />
world&#8217;s entire digital infrastructure (not such a stretch; we<br />
already run the Internet). Our example will teach Howell&#8217;s<br />
kids stuff about the power of decentralization and voluntary cooperation, all the things leftists pay lip-service to until the<br />
last second before they&#8217;d have to actually apply them. And<br />
the world will change out from under him. Subtly. Powerfully.<br />
And in ways he can&#8217;t guess at yet.</p>
<p>It should be a fun ride.</p>

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Defeating Hussein Without Government
<p>The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.</p>
<p>For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America<br />
could be better defended by have no government than by the system we<br />
have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without<br />
the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but<br />
with the capability to inflict a world of grief on an invader &#8212; and<br />
with nobody having the authority to tell them to surrender. We<br />
could have a home defense better than Switzerland&#8217;s, our larger<br />
population and longer distances doing for us what mountainous terrain<br />
does for the Swiss.</p>
<p>There would still be a place in an anarchist America for<br />
professional soldiers &#8212; not many, but a few heavy troop formations<br />
would be kept on retainer by consortia of insurance companies. Yes, I<br />
said insurance companies, that&#8217;s because how free markets socialize<br />
shared risks. Normal law enforcement would be funded by pools set up<br />
by vendors of crime insurance looking to reduce their payouts;<br />
national defense and overseas power projection (to the extent the term<br />
still had meaning in a stateless society) would be funded by people<br />
who bought war insurance (say, businesses with overseas assets to<br />
protect).</p>
<p>These measures, I was and am convinced, would stop conventional<br />
wars of conquest dead in their tracks. Invade a nation of 350,000,000<br />
libertarians, most of them routinely armed? Yeah. Right. Any<br />
War-College-trained military officer will tell you that urban warfare<br />
against guerrillas on their home ground chews up armies faster than<br />
anything else. Witness Stalingrad.</p>
<p>Without a government, many of the <em>reasons</em> people might go<br />
to war against America would also vanish. No entangling alliances, no<br />
foreign policy to object to. Conventional terrorism would become a<br />
lot dicier proposition in a libertarian anarchy, too &#8212; as in<br />
Israel, where armed civilians have on numerous occasions thwarted<br />
attempted massacres by shooting back. And, of course, the WTC would<br />
probably still be standing if the <em>passengers</em> had been<br />
armed&#8230;</p>
<p>I grew up in the shadow of the Soviet threat. Theirs was an evil,<br />
evil system, but they were at bottom geopolitically rational. They<br />
calculated their chances very cold-bloodedly, and never pushed the<br />
big red button. An ungoverned America would have stood them off, I<br />
believe, long enough for the inevitable Hayekian collapse to remove<br />
the problem.</p>
<p>But now we face the prospect of weapons of mass destruction dropping<br />
into the hands of people who are behaviorally indistinguishable from<br />
stone psychotics. That prospect poses problems of a different nature<br />
than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did. Because what Al-Qaeda<br />
wants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a<br />
rational estimation of risk and reward. They have no population to<br />
answer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did. They<br />
were madmen, but they were constrained by the necessities of leading<br />
a country.</p>
<p>Under the present system, I see no alternative to state action as a<br />
way to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare<br />
and the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world.<br />
I am not happy with this evaluation; war is the health of the State,<br />
and statism is the most lethal enemy humanity will ever know short of<br />
a giant meteor strike (those who think this statement hyperbolic are<br />
recommended to read Robert Conquest&#8217;s &#8220;The Great Terror&#8221;). The<br />
question that drives <em>this</em> essay is whether, supposing the<br />
U.S. were to become a market anarchy, there would be other means to<br />
the same end.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a tough case. Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not,<br />
at bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth<br />
and freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah. An<br />
ungoverned America, more wealthy and more free by the exact measure<br />
that its productive capacity is spent efficiently on a network of<br />
security agencies and judicial associations rather than being wasted<br />
on the support of parasitic government, would hardly enrage them<br />
less.</p>
<p>Al-Qaeda in itself is not an exceptional threat; in a properly<br />
armed society the 9/11 hijackers would never even have <em>tried</em><br />
their stunt, because they would known that the certain outcome was<br />
death in a hail of civilian bullets. It is the combination of<br />
Al-Qaeda-like suicidal fanaticism with state sponsorship (specifically<br />
the ability to produce chemical/biological/nuclear weapons) that<br />
strains the anarcho-libertarian theory of national self-defense, It<br />
does so by dramatically lowering the cost of aggression for both<br />
sets of bad guys; the fanatics get the capability to strike a<br />
hammer-blow at the Great Satan, and their state sponsors get<br />
deniable cat&#8217;s paws.</p>
<p>It is worth pointing out, however, that it strains the statist<br />
theory of self-defense almost as badly. A governed U.S. has the<br />
neo-imperialist option (conquer Iraq, install Colin Powell as<br />
miltary governor, and try to transform the place as we transformed<br />
Japan), and that may even appear to be the option with the lowest<br />
odds of catastrophic failure, but we don&#8217;t actually have any clue<br />
whether this will actually <em>work</em> &#8212; Al-Qaeda might well<br />
be able to get their bombs from the failing states of former-Soviet<br />
Central Asia, or from North Korea. The historical situation<br />
is truly unprecedented.</p>
<p>Harder than the theoretical problem, perhaps, is the practical one.<br />
How to oppose that expansion of state power without acting as an<br />
unwilling enabler for the terrorists? In some ways that&#8217;s easy;<br />
pushing to abolish all the police-state bullshit at airports is<br />
a no-brainer, since tiger-team tests of the system consistently show<br />
that none of it has made smuggling weapons on board more difficult<br />
(now, as before 9/11, approximately 30% of attempts succeed).</p>
<p>In a wider sense, though, it&#8217;s a very difficult question. One I<br />
will be thinking about &#8212; and possibly writing about &#8212; in the<br />
coming months.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=81941258">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Failsafe
<p>I just sent the following letter to the <cite>Boston Globe</cite><br />
after reading Elaine Scarry&#8217;s excellent piece <a href="http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/265/focus/Failsafe+.shtml">Failsafe!</a>:</p>
<hr />
<p>Congratulations on having the bravery to publish Elaine<br />
Scarry&#8217;s &#8220;Failsafe&#8221;. She is right to point out that distributed<br />
threats require distributed countermeasures. She is right to point out<br />
that centralized defense of the U.S. massively failed us. She is<br />
right to point out that the founders of the U.S. envisioned citizens,<br />
not standing armies, as the backbone of the nation&#8217;s defense.</p>
<p>After all that argument and build-up, it is only unfortunate<br />
that she stopped short of the logical conclusion: that to prevent<br />
future hijackings, the logical course is to arm the passengers. </p>
<p>The extension to other situations involving crime, terrorism, and<br />
politics (insofar as the three are distinguishable at all) is left<br />
as an exercise for the reader.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=82085198">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 1)
<p>WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed<br />
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,<br />
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political<br />
categories;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive<br />
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding<br />
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of<br />
evil for the act of evil;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist&#8217;<br />
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the<br />
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically<br />
descending to almost the same level of religious jihad as our<br />
enemies;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more<br />
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to<br />
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to<br />
the enemy <em>is</em> our only practical instrument of<br />
self-defense;</p>
<p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of<br />
the anti-idiotarian position:</p>
<ol>
<li>THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death<br />
perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the<br />
hands of terrorists by rogue states;</li>
<li>THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser<br />
sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and<br />
a smoldering resentment of the West&#8217;s success and Islam&#8217;s failures;</li>
<li>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or<br />
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against<br />
globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,<br />
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</li>
<li>THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from<br />
their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam<br />
and shari&#8217;a law on the kaffir West;</li>
<li>THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use<br />
civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent<br />
people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we<br />
underestimated their future malice;</li>
<li>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance<br />
with rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea; states that are known<br />
to have active programs working towards the development and delivery<br />
of weapons that would multiply the terrorists&#8217; ability to commit<br />
atrocities by a thousandfold;</li>
<li>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger<br />
through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of<br />
chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated<br />
willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and<br />
his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and<br />
elsewhere.
</li>
</ol>
<p>RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state<br />
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,<br />
to be dealt with as wolves are.</p>
<p>WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause&#8217; of Islamo-fascist terrorism<br />
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam<br />
and not in any significant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of<br />
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy<br />
those animating ideas.</p>
<p>WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy<br />
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can<br />
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free<br />
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear<br />
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures<br />
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level<br />
surveillance of public areas;</p>
<p>WE REJECT the theory that `fairness&#8217; requires us not to notice and<br />
use the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of<br />
our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to<br />
both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the<br />
overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of<br />
the population.</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,<br />
and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members<br />
of the Islamic terror network;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the<br />
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating<br />
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of<br />
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear<br />
blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other<br />
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession<br />
of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of<br />
terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.</p>
<p>WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion<br />
<em>within<em> the moral community of mankind that gives<br />
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.</em></em></p>
<p>ism of the Left &#8212; the moral blindness that<br />
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and<br />
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place<br />
than any culture in which jihad, &#8216;honor killings&#8217;, and female genital<br />
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right &#8212; whether it manifests as<br />
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian religious chauvinism<br />
and bigotry that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our<br />
self-declared enemies.</p>
<p>WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization<br />
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it<br />
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in<br />
our words, and in our deeds.</p>
<p>WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the<br />
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through<br />
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to<br />
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it<br />
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that<br />
evil.</p>
<p>WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the<br />
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we<br />
<em>shall</em> defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing<br />
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our<br />
wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized<br />
ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent culture from<br />
the face of the Earth.</p>
<p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World<br />
Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those<br />
who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the<br />
nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered<br />
by terrorism and rogue states;</p>
<p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
<pre>
Eric S. Raymond
16 October 2002
____________________
(your signature here)
</pre>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83079307">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 2)
<p>Substantive changes from version 1 are <font color="red">marked in<br />
red</font>. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will<br />
say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a<br />
conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal<br />
to a wider audience it <em>is</em> necessary to excoriate the Right a<br />
little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable<br />
with.</p>
<p>Major trivia points to anyone who can identify the source of the<br />
phrase I was quoting in my first draft, the longer form of which reads<br />
&#8220;we declare them the enemies of all men, to be dealt with as wolves<br />
are&#8221;. And no, a Web search won&#8217;t do it.</p>
<hr />
<p>WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed<br />
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,<br />
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political<br />
categories;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive<br />
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding<br />
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of<br />
evil for the act of evil;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist&#8217;<br />
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the<br />
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically<br />
descending to almost the same level of <font color="red">bigotry</font> as our enemies;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more<br />
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to<br />
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to<br />
the enemy <em>is</em> our only practical instrument of<br />
self-defense;</p>
<p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of<br />
the anti-idiotarian position:</p>
<ol>
<li>THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death<br />
perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the<br />
hands of terrorists by rogue states;</li>
<li>THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser<br />
sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and<br />
a smoldering resentment of the West&#8217;s success and Islam&#8217;s failures;</li>
<li>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or<br />
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against<br />
globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty,<br />
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</li>
<li>THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from<br />
their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam<br />
and shari&#8217;a law on the kaffir West;</li>
<li>THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use<br />
civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent<br />
people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we<br />
underestimated their future malice <font color='red'>even<br />
<em>without</em> weapons of mass destruction</font>;</li>
<li>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance<br />
with rogue states such as Iraq, <font color='red'>Iran,</font> and<br />
North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working<br />
towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction<br />
that would multiply the terrorists&#8217; ability to commit atrocities by a<br />
thousandfold;</li>
<li>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger<br />
through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of<br />
chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated<br />
willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and<br />
his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and<br />
elsewhere.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state<br />
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,<br />
to be dealt with as <font color="red">feral beasts</font> are.</p>
<p>WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause&#8217; of Islamo-fascist terrorism<br />
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam<br />
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of<br />
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy<br />
those animating ideas.</p>
<p>WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy<br />
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can<br />
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free<br />
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear<br />
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures<br />
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level<br />
surveillance of public areas;</p>
<p>WE REJECT the theory that `fairness&#8217; requires us not to notice the<br />
dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our<br />
terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to<br />
both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the<br />
overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the<br />
population.</p>
<p><font color="red">IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings<br />
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject<br />
the alternative of ceding to the world&#8217;s barbarians the exclusive<br />
privilege of force.</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,<br />
and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members<br />
of the <font color='red'>Islamo-fascist</font> terror network;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the<br />
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating<br />
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of<br />
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.</p>
<p><font color='red'>WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the<br />
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the<br />
distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm not merely<br />
airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen&#8217;s<br />
right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective<br />
force.</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future<br />
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and<br />
occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of<br />
terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until<br />
such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from<br />
their societies.</p>
<p>WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion<br />
<em>within</em> the moral community of mankind that gives<br />
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left &#8212; the moral blindness that<br />
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and<br />
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place<br />
than any culture in which jihad, &#8216;honor killings&#8217;, and female genital<br />
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right &#8212; whether it manifests as<br />
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a <font color='red'>Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the<br />
Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.</font></p>
<p>WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization<br />
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it<br />
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in<br />
our words, and in our deeds.</p>
<p>WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the<br />
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through<br />
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to<br />
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it<br />
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that<br />
evil.</p>
<p>WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the<br />
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we<br />
<em>shall</em> defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing<br />
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our<br />
wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized<br />
ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent <font color='red'>ideologies</font> from the face of the Earth.</p>
<p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World<br />
Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those<br />
who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the<br />
nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered<br />
by terrorism and rogue states;</p>
<p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
<pre>
Eric S. Raymond
16 October 2002
____________________
(your signature here)
</pre>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83104832">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 3)
<p>Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are <font color="red">marked in red</font>; changes from 2 to 3 are <font color='blue'>marked in blue</font>. I think the changes largely<br />
speak for themselves. I will say that I think some of the criticisms<br />
I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population,<br />
and that for appeal to a wider audience it <em>is</em> necessary to<br />
excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be<br />
completely comfortable with.</p>
<p>I have removed the paragraph about profiling, not out of political<br />
correctness but because I have been presented with good arguments that<br />
profiling is easy for terrorists to game against (and apparently they<br />
have often done so in Israel).</p>
<p>It has been suggested that I should add the heroes of Flight 93 to<br />
the list of those we swear shall not have died in vain. But they<br />
had already achieved that; they saved many lives and provided a<br />
moral example which shall not be forgotten.</p>
<p>Congratulations to the trivia spotters who identified &#8220;to be dealt<br />
with as wolves are&#8221; as a quote from H. Beam Piper&#8217;s <cite>Lord Kalvan<br />
of Otherwhen</cite>. Jerry Pournelle did, I believe, quote it in<br />
<cite>Prince Of Sparta</cite>. I had always assumed Piper<br />
was referring to the Viking sentence of outlawry, in which the outlaw<br />
was declared a &#8220;wolf&#8217;s head&#8221;. Apparently there is a 1703 historical<br />
cite from the US as well.</p>
<hr />
<p>WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed<br />
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,<br />
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political<br />
categories;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive<br />
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding<br />
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of<br />
evil for the act of evil;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist&#8217;<br />
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the<br />
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically<br />
descending to almost the same level of <font color="red">bigotry</font> as our enemies;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more<br />
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to<br />
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to<br />
the enemy <em>is</em> our only practical instrument of<br />
self-defense;</p>
<p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of<br />
the anti-idiotarian position:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death<br />
perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the<br />
hands of terrorists by rogue states;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser<br />
sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and<br />
a smoldering resentment of the West&#8217;s success and Islam&#8217;s failures;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><font color='blue'>THAT the terrorists have declared and are<br />
pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but<br />
against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech<br />
and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of<br />
women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the<br />
qualities which separate civilized human beings from bestiality,<br />
slavery, and fanaticism;</font></p>
<p>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or<br />
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against<br />
globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,<br />
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from<br />
their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam<br />
and shari&#8217;a law on the kaffir West;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use<br />
civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent<br />
people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we<br />
underestimated their future malice <font color='red'>even<br />
<em>without</em> weapons of mass destruction;</font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance<br />
with rogue states such as Iraq, <font color='red'>Iran,</font> and<br />
North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working<br />
towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction<br />
that would multiply the terrorists&#8217; ability to commit atrocities by a<br />
thousandfold;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger<br />
in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts<br />
to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his<br />
own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression<br />
against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror<br />
network in Palestine and elsewhere.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>RE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state<br />
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,<br />
to be dealt with as <font color="red">feral beasts</font> are.</p>
<p>WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause&#8217; of Islamo-fascist terrorism<br />
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam<br />
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of<br />
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy<br />
those animating ideas.</p>
<p>WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy<br />
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can<br />
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free<br />
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear<br />
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures<br />
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level<br />
surveillance of public areas;</p>
<p><font color="red">IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings<br />
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject<br />
the alternative of ceding to the world&#8217;s barbarians the exclusive<br />
privilege of force.</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,<br />
and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members<br />
of the <font color='red'>Islamo-fascist</font> terror network;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the<br />
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating<br />
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of<br />
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.</p>
<p><font color='red'>WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the<br />
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the<br />
distributed threat with a distributed response; </font><font color='blue'>to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the<br />
ordinary citizen&#8217;s right and obligation to respond to terrorist<br />
aggression with effective force.</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future<br />
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible <font color='blue'>overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other<br />
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of<br />
weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those<br />
nations</font> until such time as the root causes of terrorism have<br />
been eradicated from their societies.</p>
<p>WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion<br />
<em>within</em> the moral community of mankind that gives<br />
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left &#8212; the moral blindness that<br />
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and<br />
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place<br />
than any culture in which jihad, &#8216;honor killings&#8217;, and female genital<br />
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right &#8212; whether it manifests as<br />
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a <font color='red'>Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the<br />
Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.</font></p>
<p>WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization<br />
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it<br />
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in<br />
our words, and in our deeds.</p>
<p>WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the<br />
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through<br />
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to<br />
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it<br />
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that<br />
evil.</p>
<p>WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the<br />
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we<br />
<em>shall</em> defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing<br />
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our<br />
wealth and freedoms to <font color='blue'>win</font> their women and<br />
children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and<br />
virulent <font color='red'>ideologies</font> from the face of the<br />
Earth.</p>
<p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade<br />
Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who<br />
died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless<br />
victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by<br />
terrorism and rogue states;</p>
<p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
<pre>
Eric S. Raymond
16 October 2002
____________________
(your signature here)
</pre>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83141982">Blogspot<br />
comments</a></p>

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Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 4)
<p>Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are <font color="red">marked in red</font>; changes from 2 to 3 are <font color='blue'>marked in blue</font>; changes from 3 to 4 are <font color='purple'>marked in purple</font>.</p>
<p>Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from<br />
across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.<br />
Since this process has to close sometime, I&#8217;m declaring that there<br />
will be at most one more pre-publication draft.</p>
<p>I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes,<br />
this work is &copy;2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution<br />
terms &#8212; I&#8217;m not especially interested in making money from it, but I<br />
want some artistic control of how it&#8217;s used.</p>
<hr />
<p>WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed<br />
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,<br />
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political<br />
categories;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive<br />
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding<br />
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of<br />
evil for the act of evil;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist&#8217;<br />
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the<br />
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically<br />
descending to almost the same level of <font color="red">bigotry</font> as our enemies;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more<br />
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to<br />
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war <font color='purple'>back to the aggressors</font> <em>is</em><br />
our only practical instrument of self-defense;</p>
<p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of<br />
the anti-idiotarian position:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death<br />
perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the<br />
hands of terrorists by rogue states;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser<br />
sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and<br />
a smoldering resentment of the West&#8217;s success and <font color='purple'>by their own culture&#8217;s failures;</font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><font color='blue'>THAT the terrorists have declared and are<br />
pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but<br />
against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech<br />
and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of<br />
women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the<br />
qualities which separate civilized human beings from</font> <font color='purple'>savagery,</font> <font color='blue'>slavery, and<br />
fanaticism;</font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or<br />
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against<br />
globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,<br />
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from<br />
their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam<br />
and shari&#8217;a law on the kaffir West;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use<br />
civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent<br />
people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we<br />
underestimated their future malice <font color='red'>even<br />
<em>without</em> weapons of mass destruction;</font></p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance<br />
with rogue states such as Iraq, <font color='red'>Iran,</font> and<br />
North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working<br />
towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction<br />
that would multiply the terrorists&#8217; ability to commit atrocities by a<br />
thousandfold;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present<br />
danger <font color='purple'>in combination with them,</font> a danger<br />
demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use<br />
of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated<br />
willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his<br />
known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and<br />
elsewhere.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state<br />
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man,<br />
to be dealt with as <font color="purple">rabid dogs</font> are.</p>
<p>WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause&#8217; of Islamo-fascist terrorism<br />
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam<br />
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of<br />
the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy<br />
those animating ideas.</p>
<p>WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy<br />
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can<br />
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free<br />
speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear<br />
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures<br />
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level<br />
surveillance of public areas;</p>
<p><font color="red">IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings<br />
out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject<br />
the alternative of ceding to the world&#8217;s barbarians the exclusive<br />
privilege of force;</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,<br />
and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members<br />
of the <font color='red'>Islamo-fascist</font> terror network;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the<br />
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating<br />
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of<br />
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.</p>
<p><font color='red'>WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the<br />
military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the<br />
distributed threat with a distributed response; </font><font color='blue'>to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the<br />
ordinary citizen&#8217;s right and obligation to respond to terrorist<br />
aggression with effective force.</font></p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future<br />
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible <font color='blue'>overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other<br />
nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of<br />
weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those<br />
nations</font> until such time as the root causes of terrorism have<br />
been eradicated from their societies.</p>
<p>WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion<br />
<em>within</em> the moral community of mankind that gives<br />
aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left &#8212; the moral blindness that<br />
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and<br />
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place<br />
than any culture in which jihad, &#8216;honor killings&#8217;, and female genital<br />
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right &#8212; whether it manifests as<br />
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a <font color='purple'>a<br />
Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious<br />
absolutism of our enemies.</font></p>
<p>WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization<br />
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it<br />
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in<br />
our words, and in our deeds.</p>
<p>WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the<br />
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through<br />
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to<br />
make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it<br />
afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that<br />
evil.</p>
<p><font color='purple'>WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that<br />
those we delegate to lead pursue the war against terror with an<br />
unflagging will to victory and all means necessary &mdash; while<br />
remaining always mindful that in the process of fighting the enemy we<br />
must not stoop to the enemy&#8217;s level of contempt for human rights and<br />
dignity, must not become what we fight;</font></p>
<p><font color='purple'>WE SHALL REMEMBER that in this struggle more<br />
than previous conventional wars, the West&#8217;s keenest weapons are reason<br />
and the truth; that it is our obligation as citizens to insist on<br />
reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies<br />
from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be<br />
vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our<br />
victories become tainted and hollow, leaving root causes unaddressed<br />
and sowing trouble for the future.</font></p>
<p><font color='purple'>WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these<br />
challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor<br />
yet by fear of ourselves;</font></p>
<p>WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the<br />
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we<br />
<em>shall</em> defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing<br />
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our<br />
wealth and freedoms to <font color='blue'>win</font> their women and<br />
children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and<br />
virulent <font color='red'>ideologies</font> from the face of the<br />
Earth.</p>
<p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade<br />
Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who<br />
died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless<br />
victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by<br />
terrorism and rogue states:</p>
<p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
<pre>
Eric S. Raymond
17 October 2002
____________________
(your signature here)
</pre>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83175091">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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A request to web artists
<p>I am planning on publishing the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto soon, via<br />
petitiononline.com and possibly other channels. My hope is that<br />
enough bloggers will sign it and talk about it to get the position it<br />
describes some notice in the more blog-friendly of the mainstream<br />
media.</p>
<p>Towards this end, I&#8217;m seeking volunteers to design a web button for<br />
the Manifesto. Use your imagination &#8212; but I&#8217;m thinking a design<br />
using the letters A I M in red, white and blue might be<br />
appropriate.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83175671">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 5)
<p><script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
function swtchon(nav){document[nav].src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-on.png"};
function swtchoff(nav){document[nav].src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-off.png"};
</script></p>
<p>Changes are deliberately not marked. Read the whole thing, this is<br />
a final pre-publication draft. Most of the changes from version 4<br />
are deletions of excess verbiage.</p>
<p>Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from<br />
across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions.<br />
Since this process has to close sometime, I&#8217;m declaring that there<br />
wuill be at most one pre-publication draft.</p>
<p>I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes,<br />
this work is &copy;2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution<br />
terms &#8212; I&#8217;m not especially interested in making money from it, but I<br />
want some artistic control of how it&#8217;s used.</p>
<p>However, this may not happen for a week, as I am about to go on<br />
the Linux Lunacy Caribbean cruise.</p>
<p>Brian O&#8217;Connell has supplied this excellent button for<br />
JavaScript-aware browsers:<br />
<img name="aim" width="100" height="40" border="0"<br />
src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-off.png"<br />
onmouseover="swtchon('aim')" onmouseout="swtchoff('aim')"<br />
alt="Click to Read" title="Click to Read"/></p>
<p>And Erica from Sperari has suppiled a very tasteful static button:<br />
<img name="aim-thumb-button.png" border="0"<br />
src="http://www.catb.org/~esr/graphics/aim-button-thumb.jpg" alt='AIM button' /></p>
<p>These buttons will be included with the final version.</p>
<hr />
<p>WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed<br />
the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers,<br />
politicians, and activists operating within conventional political<br />
categories;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive<br />
anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding<br />
squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of<br />
evil for the act of evil;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist&#8217;<br />
measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the<br />
central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically<br />
descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;</p>
<p>WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more<br />
intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to<br />
recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to<br />
the aggressors is our only practical instrument<br />
of self-defense;</p>
<p>WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of<br />
the anti-idiotarian position:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death<br />
perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the<br />
hands of terrorists by rogue states;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and<br />
are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but<br />
against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech<br />
and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of<br />
women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the<br />
qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery,<br />
slavery, and fanaticism;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or<br />
concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against<br />
globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty,<br />
are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from<br />
their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam<br />
and shari&#8217;a law on the kaffir West;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use<br />
civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent<br />
people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we<br />
underestimated the scope of their future malice even<br />
<em>without</em> weapons of mass destruction;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found,<br />
alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea;<br />
states that are known to have active programs working towards the<br />
development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the<br />
terrorists&#8217; ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present<br />
danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known<br />
efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even<br />
on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit<br />
aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the<br />
Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>RE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state<br />
sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind,<br />
to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.</p>
<p>WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause&#8217; of Islamo-fascist terrorism<br />
lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam<br />
and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of<br />
the war against terror must be to displace and discredit those<br />
animating ideas.</p>
<p>WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy<br />
elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can<br />
be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free<br />
speech, or the right of peacable assembly, or the right to bear<br />
arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures<br />
such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level<br />
surveillance of public areas;</p>
<p>IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in<br />
both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative<br />
of ceding to the world&#8217;s barbarians the exclusive privilege of<br />
force;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies,<br />
and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members<br />
of the Islamo-fascist terror network;</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the<br />
rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating<br />
the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of<br />
terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police<br />
cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a<br />
distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well<br />
the ordinary citizen&#8217;s right and duty to respond to terrorist<br />
aggression with effective force.</p>
<p>WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future<br />
nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible<br />
overthrow of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine<br />
sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass<br />
destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as<br />
the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their<br />
societies.</p>
<p>WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion<br />
<em>within</em> the moral community of mankind that gives<br />
aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left &#8212; the moral blindness that<br />
refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and<br />
experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place<br />
than any culture in which jihad, &#8216;honor killings&#8217;, and female genital<br />
mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.</p>
<p>WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right &#8212; whether it manifests as<br />
head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political<br />
agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.</p>
<p>WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization<br />
to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it<br />
to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in<br />
our words, and in our deeds.</p>
<p>WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the<br />
Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through<br />
the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to<br />
enable and excuse their evil. We shall not flinch from our duty to<br />
confront that evil.</p>
<p>WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to<br />
lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory<br />
and all means necessary &mdash; while remaining always mindful that we<br />
must not become what we fight;</p>
<p>WE SHALL REMEMBER that the West&#8217;s keenest weapons are reason and the<br />
truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which<br />
terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against<br />
the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted<br />
and hollow, sowing trouble for the future.</p>
<p>WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not<br />
be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;</p>
<p>WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the<br />
apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we<br />
<em>shall</em> defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing<br />
their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our<br />
wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways,<br />
and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the<br />
face of the Earth.</p>
<p>THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade<br />
Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who<br />
died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless<br />
victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by<br />
terrorism and rogue states:</p>
<p>YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.</p>
<pre>
Eric S. Raymond
17 October 2002
____________________
(your signature here)
</pre>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83247234">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Armed children
<p>The Bear of Considerable Brain, <a href="http://www.truthlaidbear.com/weblogaction/archives/001455.html">writes</a>:<br />
&#8220;This does not mean every man, woman and child should roam the streets<br />
packing heat, much as some of my more rabid hoplophile colleagues in<br />
the Blogosphere might enjoy the sight.&#8221;</p>
<p>N.Z. was probably thinking of me as one of his &#8220;rabid hoplophile<br />
colleagues.&#8221;; I&#8217;d be rather disappointed if he weren&#8217;t, actually. I<br />
endorse all his good sense about citizen miltias and the necessity of<br />
a decentralized response to decentralized threats; in fact, I wrote an<br />
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200309#63">essay</a><br />
on that topic the day of the WTC attack. Establishing it as normal<br />
custom that adults go armed strikes me as an excellent idea, and<br />
not merely as a tactic against terrorism and crime either. &#8220;The possession<br />
of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.&#8221;</p>
<p>I was originally going to respond to His Ursinity&#8217;s remark by<br />
tossing off some denial that I contemplate universally arming children<br />
as a response to terrorism. But I&#8217;ve decided it would be more<br />
interesting to attack the question from the opposite side: under what<br />
circumstances should children be armed?</p>
<p>If your answer is &#8220;Never!&#8221; than consider that this is actually<br />
quite a radical position. In large parts of the U.S., rather young<br />
children have and use BB rifles. In much of rural America,<br />
including most of my own state of Pennsylvania, boys learn to hunt<br />
early, and to accept both the weapons and responsibilities of men<br />
when barely into their teens.</p>
<p>The bloody slaughters nervous urban liberals would expect from this<br />
policy somehow never materialize. Kliebold and Harris, the Columbine<br />
shooters, were the exception that demonstrates the rule; they were<br />
<em>not</em> taught to use firearms within approved contexts by their<br />
parents and other adults, but instead devedloped a pathological,<br />
isolated relationship to weapons that mirrored their pathological,<br />
isolated lives. Their victims were not killed by the rural gun<br />
culture, but by its absence.</p>
<p>So part of our answer is this: children should be armed, at least<br />
part of the time when in company with responsible adults, in order<br />
to prepare them for the responsibility of arming themselves as adults<br />
and participating in civilian defense against terrorism and crime.</p>
<p>The next logical question is: under what circumstances should<br />
children be trusted to carry weapons for self-defense <em>without</em><br />
direct adult supervision? Again, &#8220;Never!&#8221; would be a radical and<br />
historically exceptional answer. It would also be unfair to the<br />
children, especially poor children who live in areas where the chance<br />
of encountering criminal or terrorist predators is significant.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s worth bearing in mind that most decisions about using a<br />
firearm in self-defense are pretty simple. They don&#8217;t tend to involve<br />
complicated ethical abstractions &mdash; the relevant question is<br />
usually &#8220;Am I or a defenseless person I am responsible for in imminent<br />
danger of being assaulted, abducted or killed?&#8221; If the answer is no,<br />
you don&#8217;t even draw your weapon.</p>
<p>Of course, the capacity to make those judgments varies from child<br />
to child. I have known intelligent, precocious children as young as<br />
eight years old who I would sooner trust with my .45 than, say, an<br />
adult alcoholic with an impulse-control problem. In fact, I wouldn&#8217;t<br />
consider most adult pro-gun-control voters as trustworthy as the<br />
children I have in mind; people who project fear of their own behavior<br />
with weapons onto others make that spot between my shoulderblades<br />
itch.</p>
<p>At the other extreme, it&#8217;s pretty obvious that pre-verbal children<br />
don&#8217;t have the apparatus to make even the simplest ethical decisions<br />
about lethal force. They don&#8217;t know enough about the world yet. The<br />
standard models of childhood development tell me the same thing as my<br />
experience of real kids; the on average, possibility of ethical<br />
competence sufficient for self-defense decisions opens up at around<br />
twelve years old. It is not invariably present at that age, but the<br />
possibility deserves to be taken seriously.</p>
<p>I can say this. If a person who is legally a minor but twelve or<br />
over shows signs of continuing responsibility (including either<br />
holding down a job or applying him/herself to make steady grades in<br />
school), and does not have a history of substance abuse or other<br />
self-destructive or criminal behavior, and <em>wants</em> to accept<br />
the responsibility of going armed &mdash; then I think custom should<br />
support that.</p>
<p>Finally, I want to point out that we may be doing children no favor<br />
by `protecting&#8217; them from the decisions that go with bearing arms.<br />
Thomas Jefferson once wrote to his teenage nephew as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives [only]<br />
moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence<br />
to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too<br />
violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun,<br />
therefore, be the constant companion to your walks.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>This was no aberration. I have developed <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html">elsewhere</a><br />
the theme that the practice of bearing arms was not important to the<br />
Founding Fathers merely as a counter against crime and overweening<br />
government, but as a school of moral character in the individual<br />
citizen.</p>
<p>The retreat of American gun culture from our cities and suburbs has<br />
coincided with the the fetishization of adolescence and<br />
the infantilization of our entire society. To reverse that trend, we<br />
need to remember the ways we used to use to encourage people to<br />
acquire self-discipline, character, and maturity. One of those ways<br />
was &mdash; and in large parts of the U.S., still is &mdash; the<br />
healthy use of lethal weapons.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83850549">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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The capsaicinization of American food
<p>Consider spicy-hot food &mdash; and consider how recent it is as a<br />
mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow<br />
down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal<br />
ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn&#8217;t always that way.</p>
<p>In fact it wasn&#8217;t that way until quite recently, historically<br />
speaking. I&#8217;ve enjoyed capsaicin-loaded food since I was a pre-teen<br />
boy in the late 1960s; I acquired the taste from my father, who picked<br />
it up in South America. In those days our predilection was the<br />
peculiar trait of a minority of travelers and a few immigrant<br />
populations. The progression by which spicy-hot food went from there<br />
to the U.S. mainstream makes a perfect type case of cultural<br />
assimilation, and the role and meaning that the stuff has acquired on<br />
the way is interesting too.</p>
<p>(Oh. And for those of you who don&#8217;t understand the appeal? It&#8217;s<br />
all about endorphin rush, like a runner&#8217;s high. Pepper-heads like me<br />
have developed a conditioned reflex whereby the burning sensation<br />
stimulates the release of opiate-like chemicals from the brainstem,<br />
inducing a euphoria not unlike a heroin buzz. Yes, this theory has<br />
been clinically verified.)</p>
<p>Baseline: Thirty years ago. The early 1970s. I&#8217;m a teenager, just<br />
back in the U.S. from years spent overseas. Spicy-hot food is pretty<br />
rare in American cuisine. Maybe you&#8217;d have heard of five-alarm chili<br />
if you&#8217;d lived in Texas, but chances are you&#8217;d never have actually<br />
eaten the stuff. If you&#8217;re from Louisiana, you might have put Tabasco<br />
sauce on your morning eggs. Aside from that, you wouldn&#8217;t have<br />
tasted hot peppers outside of a big-city Chinatown.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s actually a little difficult to remember how different American<br />
cooking was then. Those were the years when Kool-Whip was cool and<br />
the casserole was king, an era of relentless blandness well-skewered<br />
by James Lileks&#8217;s <a href="http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/"><br />
Gallery of Regrettable Food</a>. Mom didn&#8217;t know any better. Well,<br />
most moms didn&#8217;t, anyway; mine had acquired a few clues overseas.</p>
<p>But most Americans of that day inherited the pale hues of British<br />
and German cooking. What zip there was in our cuisine came from<br />
immigrants, especially (at that time) Italians. Thai, Vietnamese<br />
and Ethiopian had not gained a foothold. Chinese was on educated<br />
peoples&#8217; radar but only eaten in restaurants; nobody owned a wok<br />
yet.</p>
<p>Indeed, Chinese food had already caught on in a few leading-edge<br />
subcultures by the mid-1970s: science-fiction fans, computer hackers,<br />
the people who would start to call themselves `geeks&#8217; fifteen years<br />
later. But most of what was available was Americanized versions of<br />
the blander Shanghainese and Cantonese varieties; restaurants that<br />
made a point of authenticity and advertised Szechuan and Hunan cooking<br />
to round-eyes were not yet common.</p>
<p>This all began to change in the early 1980s. The yuppies did it to<br />
us; experimentation with exotic and ethnic foods became a signature<br />
behavior of the young, upwardly mobile urban elite, and the variety of<br />
restaurants increased tremendously in a way that both met that demand<br />
and stimulated it. More importantly, cooking techniques and<br />
ingredients that hadn&#8217;t been traditional in European cuisine started<br />
to influence home cooking &mdash; white people started buying<br />
woks. And Szechuan fire oil.</p>
<p>The first vogue for Cajun cooking around 1984 was, as I recall,<br />
something of a turning point. Chinese cooking was popular but still<br />
marked as `foreign'; Cajun was not. Spicy-hot gumbo joined five-alarm<br />
chili on the roster of all-American foods that were not only expected<br />
but <em>required</em> to deliver a hefty dose of capsaicin zap. I<br />
remember thinking the world was changing when, in 1987 or &#8217;88, I<br />
first saw spicy Cajun dishes on the menu of a white-bread roadside<br />
diner. In Delaware.</p>
<p>This diner was never going to show up in Michelin&#8217;s or Zagat&#8217;s; in<br />
fact, it was the next thing to a truck stop. Something else was going<br />
on in the 1980s besides yuppies buying woks &mdash; and that was the<br />
embrace of spicy-hot food by the small-town and rural working class,<br />
and its coding as a specifically masculine pleasure.</p>
<p>This probably evolved out of the tradition, going back at least to<br />
the late 1940s, of defining barbecue and chili as what an<br />
anthropologist would call a &#8220;men&#8217;s mystery&#8221;. Despite the existence of<br />
male professional chefs and men who can cook, most kinds of domestic<br />
cooking are indisputably a female thing &mdash; women are expected to<br />
be interested in it and expected to be good at it, and a man who<br />
acquires skill is crossing into women&#8217;s country. But for a handful of<br />
dishes culturally coded as &#8220;men&#8217;s food&#8221;, the reverse is true.<br />
Barbecue and chili top that list, and have since long before spicy-hot<br />
food went mainstream.</p>
<p>For people who drive pickup trucks, spicy-hot food went from being<br />
a marked minority taste to being something like a central men&#8217;s<br />
mystery in the decade after 1985. I first realized this in the early<br />
1990s when I saw a rack of 101 hot-pepper sauces on display at a<br />
gun-and-knife show, in between the premium tobacco and the jerked<br />
meat. There&#8217;s a sight you won&#8217;t see at a flower show, or anywhere else<br />
in women&#8217;s country.</p>
<p>The packaging and marketing of hot sauces tells the same<br />
story. From the top-shelf varieties like Melinda&#8217;s XXX (my favorite!)<br />
to novelty items like &#8220;Scorned Woman&#8221; and &#8220;Hot Buns&#8221;, much of the<br />
imagery is cheeky sexiness clearly designed to appeal to men.</p>
<p>Nor is it hard to understand why the association got made in the<br />
first place. It&#8217;s considered masculine to enjoy physical risk, even<br />
mostly trivial physical risks like burning yourself on a sauce hotter<br />
than you can handle. Men who like hot peppers swap capsaicin-zap<br />
stories; I myself am perhaps unreasonably proud of having outlasted<br />
a tableful of Mexican college students one night in Monterrey,<br />
watching them fall out one by one as a plate of sauteed habaneros<br />
was passed repeatedly around the table.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a sneaky element of female complicity in all this. Women<br />
chuckle at our capsaicin-zap stories the same way they laugh at other<br />
forms of laddish posturing, but then (as my wife eloquently puts it)<br />
&#8220;What good is a man if you rip off his balls?&#8221; They leave us capsaicin<br />
and barbecue and other men&#8217;s mysteries because they instinctively grok<br />
that a certain amount of testosterone-driven male-primate behavior is<br />
essential for the health of Y-chromosome types &mdash; and best it<br />
should be over something harmless.</p>
<p>This gastronomic pincer movement &mdash; Yuppies pushing spicy food<br />
downmarket, truckers and rednecks pushing it upmarket &mdash;<br />
coincided with the rise in cultural influence of Hispanics with a<br />
native tradition of spicy-hot food. In retrospect, it&#8217;s interesting that<br />
what mainstream America naturalized was jalapenos rather than<br />
Chinese-style fire oil. Tex-Mex assimilated more readily than<br />
Szechuan, as it turned out.</p>
<p>We can conveniently date that mainstreaming from the year salsa<br />
first passed ketchup in sales volume, 1996. Perhaps not by<br />
coincidence, that&#8217;s the first year I got gifted with a jar of<br />
homegrown habaneros. They came to me from an Irish ex-biker, a<br />
take-no-shit ZZ-Top lookalike who runs a tire dealership in the next<br />
town over. He&#8217;d be a great guy to have with you in a bar fight, but<br />
nobody who would ever be accused of avant-garde tastes. I guess<br />
that was when I realized spicy-hot food had become as all-American<br />
as apple pie.</p>
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That bad old-time religion
<p>It&#8217;s official. The anti-war movement is a <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/50/news-corn.php">Communist<br />
front.</a></p>
<p>No, I&#8217;m not kidding &mdash; go read the story. Investigative reporter<br />
David Corn digs into last Saturday&#8217;s D.C. antiwar rally and finds it<br />
was covertly masterminded by a Communist Party splinter originally<br />
founded in support of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. For good<br />
later, he further digs up the fact that one if the principal<br />
organizers of the inane &#8220;Mot In Our Name&#8221; petion is a revolutionary<br />
Maoist.</p>
<p>Words almost fail me. There are just too many levels of delicious,<br />
deadly irony here.</p>
<p>For starters, the U.S. revolutionary Communist movement has been<br />
reduced to organizing demonstrations in support of a fascist dictator<br />
with a history of brutally suppressing and murdering Communists in<br />
Iraq. OK, so there&#8217;s precedent for this; the CPUSA organized<br />
anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. during the Nazi-Soviet<br />
nonaggression pact of 1939-41. It&#8217;s still bleakly funny.</p>
<p>More generally the American Left seems bent on fulfilling every<br />
red-meat right-winger&#8217;s most perfervid fantasies about it. All those<br />
earnest anti-war demonstrators were <em>actual communist dupes!</em> Oh,<br />
mama. Somewhere. Tailgunner Joe McCarthy is smiling. Who was it who<br />
said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the<br />
second as farce?</p>
<p>Farce because, of course, Communism as an ideology capable of<br />
motivating mass revolutions is stone-dead. (Well, everywhere outside<br />
of Pyongyang and the humanities departments of U.S. universities,<br />
anyway.) At this point one can contemplate vestigial organs of<br />
Stalinism like the Revolutionary Communist Party with a sort of<br />
revolted pity, like portions of a vampire corpse still twitching<br />
because they haven&#8217;t yet gotten the message about that stake through<br />
the heart.</p>
<p>If I were a conservative, I&#8217;d go into a roaring, vein-popping rant<br />
at this point. And, secretly I&#8217;d be damn glad for them Commies. They<br />
simplify things so much. Because there will be more stories like this<br />
one. All the Communists can accomplish by organizing the anti-war<br />
movement is to thoroughly discredit it &mdash; a fact our reporter<br />
(quite typical of U.S. journalists in that he both leans left and<br />
is too ignorant to notice how much of his world-view is Communism with<br />
the serial numbers filed off) notes with poorly-veiled regret.</p>
<p>So, by supporting a militarist fascist in Iraq, them commies are<br />
very likely to wind up increasing the influence of precisely the<br />
`reactionary&#8217; element in U.S. politics that they most abominate.<br />
Congratulations, comrades! Welcome to the International<br />
Capitalist Conspiracy!</p>
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The Anti-Idiotarian-Manifesto is officially released
<p>It&#8217;s out. The Manifesto site is <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/aim/">here</a>. The Manifesto has been<br />
submitted to <a href="http://www.petitiononline.com">PetitionOnline</a>. To show your<br />
support, please add one of thw web buttons to your splash page.</p>
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Post-postmodern politics
<p>The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night. Never mind their<br />
shiny new governorships &mdash; the `smart&#8217; money pre-election was on<br />
them picking up an absolute majority of governor&#8217;s seats, and at the<br />
Congressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994&#8217;s.<br />
The races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical &mdash; notably<br />
the Florida governorship &mdash; were all lost. And the big Democrat<br />
losses bucked historical trends &mdash; the mid-term election and the<br />
weak economy should have helped them.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re going to hear a lot of gloating from Republicans and<br />
soul-searching from Democrats in the aftermath. The easy explanation<br />
is that 9/11 did the Democrats in; that American elected to get behind<br />
a president who seems to be handling the terror war with decisiveness,<br />
prudence, and strategic acumen.</p>
<p>I think this conventional wisdom is wrong. I think 9/11 merely<br />
exposed a longer-term weakness in the Democratic position, which is<br />
this: the Democrats have forgotten how to do politics that is about<br />
anything but politics itself. They&#8217;re a post-modern political party,<br />
endlessly recycling texts that have little or no referent outside<br />
the discourse of politics itself.</p>
<p>The disgusting spectacle they made of Paul Wellstone&#8217;s funeral<br />
is diagnostic. We were treated to trumpet calls about honoring<br />
Wellstone&#8217;s legacy without any discussion beyond the most superficial<br />
cliches of what that legacy was. All the ritual invocations of<br />
time-honored Democratic shibboleths had a tired, shopworn, unreal<br />
and self-referential feel to them &mdash; politics as the literature<br />
of exhaustion.</p>
<p>The preconditions for paralysis had been building up for a long<br />
time; arguably, ever since the New Left beat out the Dixiecrats for<br />
control of the party apparat in 1968-1972. Caught between the<br />
blame-America-first, hard-left instincts of its most zealous cadres<br />
and the bland dishwater centrism recently exemplified by the DLC, the<br />
Democrats found it more and more difficult to be about anything at<br />
all. The trend was self-reinforcing; as Democratic strategy drifted,<br />
the party became ever more dependent on cooperation between dozens of<br />
fractious pressure groups (feminists, gays, race-baiters, the AARP,<br />
the teachers&#8217; and public-employee unions), which made the long-term<br />
drift worse.</p>
<p>Bill Clinton was the perfect master of political postmodernism and<br />
James Carville his prophet. For eight years they were able to<br />
disguise the paralysis and vacuum at the heart of Democratic thinking,<br />
centering party strategy on a cult of personality and an<br />
anything-but-Republicanism that was cunning but merely reactive. The<br />
Republicans cooperated with this strategy with all the naive eagerness<br />
of Charlie Brown running up to kick Lucy&#8217;s football, perpetually<br />
surprised when it was snatched away at the last second, repeatedly<br />
taking pratfalls eagerly magnified by a Democratic-leaning national<br />
media.</p>
<p>But Bill Clinton was also a borderline sociopath and a liar, a man<br />
whose superficial charm, anything-to-get-elected energy, and utter<br />
lack of principle perfectly mirrored the abyss at the heart of the<br />
Democratic party. The greedy, glittery, soulless Wellstone-funeral<br />
fiasco was the last hurrah of Clintonism, and it cost Walter Mondale<br />
his last election fight.</p>
<p>Reality had to intrude sometime. The destruction of the WTC<br />
reduced all the politics-about-politics rhetoric of the Democrats to<br />
irrelevance. They stood mute in the face of the worst atrocity on<br />
American soil since Pearl Harbor, arguably the worst in U.S. history.<br />
The superficial reason was that their anti-terror policy was hostage<br />
to the party&#8217;s left wing, but the deeper problem was that they long<br />
ago lost the ability to rise above petty interest-group jockying<br />
on any issue of principle at all. The most relevant adjective is not<br />
`wrong&#8217;, or `evil&#8217;, it&#8217;s <em>`feckless&#8217;</em>.</p>
<p>Republicans, by contrast, forged a workable consensus during<br />
the Reagan years and never quite lost it. They&#8217;ve often been wrong,<br />
frequently been obnoxious as hell, and have their own loony fringe<br />
(abortion-clinic bombers, neo-fascists like Pat Buchanan, and<br />
the Christian Coalition) to cope with. But when Osama bin Laden<br />
demonstrated a clear and present danger to the United States of<br />
America <em>they were able to respond</em>.</p>
<p>They were able to respond not merely with reaction, but by taking<br />
a moral position against terrorism that could serve as the basis of<br />
an effective national strategy. Quarrel with &#8220;Homeland Security&#8221; all<br />
you like &mdash; but then imagine Al Gore in charge of defeating<br />
Al-Qaeda and shudder. He would actually have had to take the likes of<br />
Cynthia McKinney and Maxine Waters <em>seriously</em>.</p>
<p>I think these 2002 elections are going to turn out to have been much<br />
more of a turning point than the aborted `Republican Revolution&#8217; of<br />
1994. Unless Bush&#8217;s war strategy completely screws the pooch, he is<br />
going to completely walk over the Democratic candidate in 2004. The<br />
Democrats show no sign of developing a foreign-policy doctrine that can<br />
cope with the post-9/11 world, and their domestic-policy agenda is<br />
tired and retrogressive. Their voter base is aging, and their national<br />
leadership couldn&#8217;t rummage up a better Wellstone replacement than<br />
Walter &#8220;What decade is this, anyway?&#8221; Mondale. The Democratic<br />
party could end up disintegrating within the decade.</p>
<p>This is not a prospect that fills me with uncomplicated glee.<br />
Right-wing statism is not an improvement on left-wing statism; a smug<br />
and dominant GOP could easily become captive to theocrats and<br />
know-nothings, a very bad thing for our nation and the world. And,<br />
unfortunately, the Libertarian Party has courted self-destruction by<br />
choosing to respond to 9/11 with an isolationism every bit as vapid<br />
and mindless as the left&#8217;s &#8220;No War for Oil!&#8221; chanting.</p>
<p>Welcome to post-postmodern politics. Meaning is back, but<br />
the uncertainties are greater than ever.</p>
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Libertarianism and the Hard SF Renaissance
<p>(There is an extended and improved version of this essay, <a href='http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sf-history.html'>A Political<br />
History of SF</a>.)</p>
<p>When I started reading SF in the late Sixties and early Seventies,<br />
the field was in pretty bad shape &mdash; not that I understood this<br />
at the time. The death of the pulp-zines in the 1950s had pretty much<br />
killed off the SF short-fiction market, and the post-Star-Wars boom<br />
that would make SF the second most successful genre after romance<br />
fiction was still years in the future. The core writers of the first<br />
&#8220;Golden Age&#8221;, the people who invented modern science fiction after<br />
John Campbell took the helm at <cite>Astounding</cite> in 1938, were<br />
beginning to get long in the tooth; Robert Heinlein, the greatest of<br />
them all, passed his peak after 1967.</p>
<p>These objective problems combined with, or perhaps led to, an insurgency<br />
within the field. The &#8220;New Wave&#8221;, an attempt to import the techniques and<br />
imagery of literary fiction into SF, upset many of the field&#8217;s certainties.<br />
Before it, everyone took for granted that the center of Campbellian SF was<br />
&#8220;hard SF&#8221; &mdash; stories, frequently written by engineers and scientists,<br />
which trafficked in plausible and relatively rigorous extrapolations of<br />
science.</p>
<p>Hard SF was an art form that made stringent demands on both author<br />
and reader. Stories could be, and were, mercilessly slammed because the<br />
author had calculated an orbit or gotten a detail of physics or biology<br />
wrong. The Campbellian demand was that SF work both as story and<br />
as science, with only a bare minimum of McGuffins like FTL star drives<br />
permitted; hard SF demanded that the science be consistent both<br />
internally and with known science about the real world.</p>
<p>The New Wave rejected all this for reasons that were partly<br />
aesthetic and partly political. For there was a political tradition<br />
that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by its chief<br />
theoretician (Campbell himself) and his right-hand man Robert<br />
Heinlein, the inventor of modern SF&#8217;s characteristic technique of<br />
exposition by indirection. That tradition was of ornery and insistant<br />
individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive<br />
distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism<br />
that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political<br />
ideologizing with suspicion.</p>
<p>At the time, this very American position was generally thought of<br />
by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one. But<br />
the SF community&#8217;s version was never conservative in the strict sense<br />
of venerating past social norms &mdash; how could it be, when SF<br />
literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social<br />
arrangements? SF&#8217;s insistent individualism also led it to reject<br />
racism and feature strong female characters long before the rise of<br />
political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms<br />
of art.</p>
<p>After 1971, the implicit politics of Campbellian hard SF was<br />
reinvented, radicalized and intellectualized as libertarianism.<br />
Libertarians, in fact, would draw inspiration from Golden Age SF;<br />
Heinlein&#8217;s <cite>The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress</cite>, H. Beam Piper&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Lone Star Planet</cite>, and Poul Anderson&#8217;s <cite>No Truce With<br />
Kings</cite> (among many others) would come to be seen retrospectively<br />
as proto-libertarian arguments not just by the readers but by the<br />
authors themselves.</p>
<p>The New Wave was both a stylistic revolt and a political one. Its<br />
inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss)<br />
were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism,<br />
linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.&#8217;s<br />
cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave&#8217;s<br />
later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left<br />
and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public<br />
disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional<br />
questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.</p>
<p>But the New Wave was not, in fact, the first revolt against hard SF.<br />
In the 1950s, a group of young writers centered around Frederik Pohl<br />
and the Futurians fan club in New York had invented sociological S.F.<br />
(exemplified by the Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration <cite>The Space<br />
Merchants</cite>). Not until decades later did the participants admit<br />
that many of the key Futurians were then ideological Communists or<br />
fellow travellers, but their work was half-understood at the time to<br />
be strong criticism of the consumer capitalism and smugness of the<br />
post-World-War-II era.</p>
<p>The Futurian revolt was half-hearted, semi-covert, and easily<br />
absorbed by the Campbellian mainstream of the SF field; by the<br />
mid-1960s, sociological extrapolation had become a standard part of<br />
the toolkit even for the old-school Golden Agers, and it never<br />
challenged the centrality of hard SF. But the New Wave, after 1965,<br />
was not so easily dismissed or assimilated. Amidst a great deal of<br />
self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few<br />
jewels &mdash; Phillp Jos&eacute; Farmer&#8217;s <cite>Riders of the Purple<br />
Wage</cite>, some of Harlan Ellison&#8217;s work, Brian Aldiss&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Hothouse</cite> stories, and Langdon Jones&#8217;s <cite>The Great<br />
Clock</cite> stand out as examples.</p>
<p>As with the Futurians, the larger SF field did absorb some New Wave<br />
techniques and concerns. Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo<br />
on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a<br />
stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the<br />
stature to really break it, in his 1961 <cite>Stranger In A Strange<br />
Land</cite>.</p>
<p>The New Wave also exacerbated long-standing critical arguments<br />
about the definition and scope of of science fiction, and briefly<br />
threatened to displace hard SF from the center of the field. Brian<br />
Aldiss&#8217;s 1969 dismissal of space exploration as &#8220;an old-fashioned<br />
diversion conducted with infertile phallic symbols&#8221; was typical New<br />
Wave rhetoric, and looked like it might have some legs at the<br />
time.</p>
<p>As a politico-cultural revolt against the American vision of SF,<br />
however, the New Wave eventually failed just as completely as the<br />
Futurians had. Its writers were already running out of steam in 1977<br />
when <cite>Star Wars</cite> took the imagery of pre-Campbellian space<br />
opera to the mainstream culture. The half-decade following (my<br />
college years, as it happened) was a period of drift and confusion<br />
only ended by the publication of David Brin&#8217;s <cite>Startide<br />
Rising</cite> in 1982.</p>
<p>Brin, and his collegues in the group that came to be known as the<br />
&#8220;Killer Bs&#8221; (Greg Bear and Gregory Benford), reasserted the primacy of<br />
hard SF done in the grand Campbellian manner. Campbell himself had<br />
died in 1971 right at the high-water mark of the New Wave, but<br />
Heinlein and Anderson and the other surviving luminaries of the<br />
Campbellian era had no trouble recognizing their inheritors. To<br />
everyone&#8217;s surprise, the New Old Wave proved to be not just<br />
artistically successful but commercially popular as as well, with its<br />
writers becoming the first new stars of the post-1980 boom in SF<br />
publishing.</p>
<p>The new hard SF of the 1980s returned to Golden Age themes and images, if<br />
not quite with the linear simplicity of Golden Age technique. It also<br />
reverted to the libertarian/individualist values traditional in the<br />
field. This time around, with libertarian thinking twenty years more<br />
developed, the split between order-worshiping conservatism and the<br />
libertarian impulse was more explicit. At one extreme, some SF (such<br />
as that of L. Neil Smith) assumed the character of radical libertarian<br />
propaganda. At the other extreme, a subgenre of SF that could fairly<br />
be described as conservative/militarist power fantasies emerged,<br />
notably in the writing of Jerry Pournelle and David Drake.</p>
<p>Tension between these groups sometimes flared into public<br />
animosity. Both laid claims to Robert Heinlein&#8217;s legacy. Heinlein<br />
himself maintained friendly relationships with conservatives but<br />
counted himself a libertarian for more than a decade before his death<br />
in 1988.</p>
<p>Heinlein&#8217;s evolution from Goldwater conservative to anti-statist<br />
radical both led and reflected larger trends. By 1989 depictions of<br />
explicitly anarcho-libertarian future societies were beginning to<br />
filter into mainstream SF work like Joe Haldeman&#8217;s <cite>Buying<br />
Time</cite>. Haldeman&#8217;s Conch Republic and Novysibirsk were all<br />
the more convincing for not being subjects of polemic.</p>
<p>Before the 1980s changes in U.S. law that reversed the tax status<br />
of inventories and killed off the SF midlist as a side effect, a lot<br />
of Golden Age and New Wave era SF was pretty continuously in print<br />
(though in sharply limited quntities and hard to find). I still own a<br />
lot of it in my personal collection of around 3,000 SF paperbacks and<br />
magazines, many dating back to the &#8217;50s and &#8217;60s and now long out of<br />
print. I read it all; pre-Campbellian space opera, the Campbellian<br />
classics of the Golden Age, the Futurians, the New Wave ferment, and<br />
the reinvention of hard SF in the 1980s.</p>
<p>In some respects, it took me thirty years to understand what I was<br />
seeing. I&#8217;m one of Heinlein&#8217;s children, one of the libertarians that<br />
science fiction made. Because that&#8217;s so, it was difficult for me to<br />
separate my own world-view from the assumptions of the field. In<br />
grokking the politics of SF, I was in the position of a fish trying to<br />
understand water.</p>
<p>Eventually, however, a sufficiently intelligent fish could start to<br />
get it about hydrodynamics &mdash; especially when the water&#8217;s behavior is<br />
disturbed by storms and becomes visibly turbulent. I got to look back<br />
through the midlist at the Futurian ripples. I lived through the New<br />
Wave storm and the pre-Startide-Rising doldrums. By the time cyberpunk<br />
came around, I was beginning to get some conscious perspective.</p>
<p>Cyberpunk was the third failed revolution against Campbellian SF.<br />
William Gibson, who is generally credited with launching this subgenre<br />
in his 1984 novel <cite>Neuromancer</cite>, was not a political<br />
writer. But Bruce Sterling, who promoted Gibson and became the chief<br />
ideologue of anti-Cambellianism in the late 1980s, called it &#8220;the<br />
Movement&#8221; in a self-conscious reference to the heady era of 1960s<br />
student radicalism. The cyberpunks positioned themselves particularly<br />
against the carnographic conservative military SF of David Drake,<br />
Jerry Pournelle, and lower-rent imitators &mdash; not exactly a hard<br />
target.</p>
<p>Despite such posturing, the cyberpunks were neither as<br />
stylistically innovative nor as politically challenging as the New<br />
Wave had been. Gibson&#8217;s prose has aptly been described as Raymond<br />
Chandler in mirror-shades. Cyberpunk themes (virtual reality,<br />
pervasive computing, cyborging and biosculpture, corporate feudalism)<br />
had been anticipated in earlier works like Vernor Vinge&#8217;s 1978 hard-SF<br />
classic <cite>True Names</cite>, and even further back in <cite>The<br />
Space Merchants</cite>. Cyberpunk imagery (decayed urban landscapes,<br />
buzzcuts, chrome and black leather) quickly became a cliche replicated<br />
in dozens of computer games.</p>
<p>Neal Stephenson wrote a satirical finis to the cyberpunk genre in<br />
1992&#8217;s <cite>Snow Crash</cite>, which (with Bruce Sterling&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Schismatrix</cite> and Walter John Williams&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Hardwired</cite>) was very close to being the only work to meet<br />
the standard set by <cite>Neuromancer</cite>. While most cyberpunk<br />
took for granted a background in which late capitalism had decayed<br />
into an oppressive corporate feudalism under which most individuals<br />
could be nothing but alienated and powerless, the future of <cite>Snow<br />
Crash</cite> was a tellingly libertarian one. The bedrock<br />
individualism of classical SF reasserted itself with a smartass<br />
grin.</p>
<p>By the time cyberpunk fizzled out, most fans had been enjoying the<br />
hard-SF renaissance for a decade; the New Wave was long gone, and<br />
cyberpunk had attracted more notice outside the SF field than within<br />
it. The leaders of SF&#8217;s tiny in-house critical establishment, however<br />
(figures like Samuel Delany and David Hartwell), remained fascinated<br />
on New Wave relics like Thomas Disch and Philip K. Dick, or<br />
anti-Campbellian fringe figures like Suzette Hadin Elgin and Octavia<br />
Butler. While this was going on, the readers voted with their Hugo<br />
ballots largely for writers that were squarely within the Campbellian<br />
tradition &mdash; Golden age survivors, the killer Bs, and newer<br />
writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and Greg Egan (whose 1998 work<br />
<cite>Diaspora</cite> may just be the single most audacious and<br />
brilliant hard-SF novel in the entire history of the field).</p>
<p>In 1994, critical thinking within the SF field belatedly caught up<br />
with reality. Credit for this goes to David Hartwell and Cathryn<br />
Cramer, whose analysis in the anthology <cite>The Ascent of<br />
Wonder</cite> finally acknowledged what should have been obvious all<br />
along. Hard SF is the vital heart of the field, the radiant core from<br />
which ideas and prototype worlds diffuse outwards to be appropriated<br />
by writers of lesser world-building skill but perhaps greater<br />
stylistic and literary sophistication. While there are other modes<br />
of SF that have their place, they remain essentially derivations of or<br />
reactions against hard SF, and cannot even be properly understood<br />
without reference to its tropes, conventions, and imagery.</p>
<p>Furthermore, Gregory Benford&#8217;s essay in <cite>The Ascent of Wonder</cite><br />
on the meaning of SF offered a characterization of the genre which may well<br />
prove final. He located the core of SF in the experience of &#8220;sense of wonder&#8221;,<br />
not merely as a thalamic thrill but as the affirmation that the universe<br />
has a knowable order that is discoverable through reason and science.</p>
<p>I think I can go further than Hartwell or Cramer or Benford in<br />
defining the relationship between hard SF and the rest of the field.<br />
To do this, I need to introduce the concept linguist George Lakoff calls<br />
&#8220;radial category&#8221;, one that is not defined by any one logical<br />
predicate, but by a central prototype and a set of permissible or<br />
customary variations. As a simple example, in English the category<br />
&#8220;fruit&#8221; does not correspond to any uniformity of structure that a<br />
botanist could recognize. Rather, the category has a prototype<br />
&#8220;apple&#8221;, and things are recognized as fruits to the extent that they<br />
are either (a) like an apple, or (b) like something that has already<br />
been sorted into the &#8220;like an apple&#8221; category.</p>
<p>Radial categories have central members (&#8220;apple&#8221;, &#8220;pear&#8221;, &#8220;orange&#8221;)<br />
whose membership is certain, and peripheral members (&#8220;coconut&#8221;,<br />
&#8220;avocado&#8221;) whose membership is tenuous. Membership is graded<br />
by the distance from the central prototype &mdash; roughly, the<br />
number of traits that have to mutate to get one from being like<br />
the prototype to like the instance in question. Some traits<br />
are important and tend to be conserved across the entire<br />
radial category (strong flavor including sweetness) while<br />
some are only weakly bound (color).</p>
<p>In most radial categories, it is possible to point out members that<br />
are counterexamples to any single intensional (&#8220;logical&#8221;) definition,<br />
but traits that are common to the core prototypes nevertheless tend to<br />
be strongly bound. Thus, &#8220;coconut&#8221; is a counterexample to the<br />
strongly-bound trait that fruits have soft skins, but it is sorted as<br />
&#8220;fruit&#8221; because (like the prototype members) it has an easily-chewable<br />
interior with a sweet flavor.</p>
<p>SF is a radial category in which the prototypes are certain<br />
classics of hard SF. This is true whether you are mapping individual<br />
works by affinity or subgenres like space opera, technology-of-magic<br />
story, eutopian/dystopian extrapolation, etc. So in discussing the<br />
traits of SF as a whole, the relevant question is not &#8220;which traits<br />
are universal&#8221; but &#8220;which traits are strongly bound&#8221; &mdash; or,<br />
almost equivalently, &#8220;what are the shared traits of the core (hard-SF)<br />
prototypes&#8221;.</p>
<p>The strong binding between hard SF and libertarian politics<br />
continues to be a fact of life in the field. It it is telling that<br />
the <em>only</em> form of politically-inspired award presented<br />
annually at the World Science Fiction Convention is the Libertarian<br />
Futurist Society&#8217;s &#8220;Prometheus&#8221;. There is no socialist, liberal,<br />
moderate, conservative or fascist equivalent of the class of<br />
libertarian SF writers including L. Neil Smith, F. Paul Wilson, Brad<br />
Linaweaver, or J. Neil Schulman; their books, even when they are<br />
shrill and indifferently-written political tracts, actually<br />
<em>sell</em> &mdash; and sell astonishingly well &mdash; to SF<br />
fans.</p>
<p>Of course, there are people in the SF field who find this deeply<br />
uncomfortable. Since the centrality of hard SF has become inescapable,<br />
resistance now takes the form of attempts to divorce hard SF from<br />
libertarianism &mdash; to preserve the methods and conceptual apparatus<br />
of hard SF while repudiating its political aura. Hartwell<br />
&amp; Cramer&#8217;s 2002 followup to <cite>The Ascent of Wonder</cite>,<br />
<cite>The Hard SF Renaissance</cite>, takes up this argument in its<br />
introduction and explanatory notes.</p>
<p><cite>The Hard SF Renaissance</cite> presents itself as a dialogue<br />
between old-school Campbellian hard SF and an attempt to construct a<br />
&#8220;Radical Hard SF&#8221; that is not in thrall to right-wing tendencies.<br />
It is clear that the editors&#8217; sympathies lie with the &#8220;Radicals&#8221;, not<br />
least from the very fact that they identify libertarianism as a right-wing<br />
phenomenon. This is an error characteristic of left-leaning thinkers,<br />
who tend to assume that anything not &#8220;left&#8221; is &#8220;right&#8221; and that approving<br />
of free markets somehow implies social conservatism.</p>
<p>All the history rehearsed so far has been intended to lead up to<br />
the following question: is the &#8220;Radical Hard SF&#8221; program possible?<br />
More generally, is the symbiotic relationship between libertarian<br />
political thought and SF a mere historical accident, or is there an<br />
intrinsic connection?</p>
<p>I think I know what John Campbell&#8217;s answer would be, if he had not<br />
died the year that the founders of libertarianism broke with<br />
conservatism. I know what Robert Heinlein&#8217;s was. They&#8217;re the same as<br />
mine, a resounding yes &mdash; that there is a connection, and that<br />
the connection is indeed deep and intrinsic. But I am a proud<br />
libertarian partisan, and conviction is not proof. Cultural history<br />
is littered with the corpses of zealots who attempted to yoke art to<br />
ideology with shallow arguments, only to be exposed as fools when the<br />
art became obsolescent before the ideology or (more often)<br />
vice-versa.</p>
<p>In the remainder of this essay I will nevertheless attempt to prove<br />
this point. My argument will center around the implications of a<br />
concept best known from First Amendment law: the &#8220;marketplace of<br />
ideas&#8221;. I am going to argue specifically from the characteristics<br />
of hard SF, the prototypes of the radial category of SF.</p>
<p>Science fiction, as a literature, embraces the possibility of<br />
radical transformations of the human condition brought about through<br />
knowledge. Technological immortality, star drives, cyborging &mdash;<br />
all these SFnal tropes are situated within a knowable universe, one in<br />
which scientific inquiry is both the precondition and the principal<br />
instrument of creating new futures.</p>
<p>SF is, broadly, optimistic about these futures. This is so for the<br />
simple reason that SF is fiction bought with peoples&#8217; entertainment<br />
budgets and people, in general, prefer happy endings to sad ones. But<br />
even when SF is not optimistic, its dystopias and cautionary tales<br />
tend to affirm the power of reasoned choices made in a knowable<br />
universe; they tell us that it is not through chance or the whim of<br />
angry gods that we fail, but through our <em>failure</em> to be<br />
intelligent, our failure to use the power of reason and science<br />
and engineering prudently.</p>
<p>At bottom, the central assumption of SF is that applied science is<br />
our best hope of transcending the major tragedies and minor irritants<br />
to which we are all heir. Even when scientists and engineers are not<br />
the visible heroes of the story, they are the invisible heroes that<br />
make the story notionally possible in the first place, the creators of<br />
possibility, the people who liberate the future to become a different<br />
place than the present.</p>
<p>SF both satisfies and stimulates a sort of lust for possibility<br />
compounded of simple escapism and a complex intellectual delight in<br />
anticipating the future. SF readers and writers want to believe that<br />
the future not only can be different but can be different in many,<br />
many weird and wonderful ways, all of which are worth exploring.</p>
<p>All the traits (embrace of radical transformation, optimism,<br />
applied science as our best hope, the lust for possibilities) are<br />
weakly characteristic of SF in general &mdash; but they are<br />
<em>powerfully</em> characteristic of hard SF. Strongly bound, in the<br />
terminology of radial categories.</p>
<p>Therefore, hard SF has a bias towards valuing the human traits and<br />
social conditions that best support scientific inquiry and permit it<br />
to result in transformative changes to both individuals and societies.<br />
Also, of social equilibria which allow individuals the greatest scope<br />
for choice, for satisfying that lust for possibilities. And it is is<br />
here that we begin to get the first hints that the strongly-bound<br />
traits of SF imply a political stance &mdash; because not all<br />
political conditions are equally favorable to scientific inquiry and<br />
the changes it may bring. Nor to individual choice.</p>
<p>The power to suppress free inquiry, to limit the choices and thwart<br />
the disruptive creativity of individuals, is the power to strangle<br />
the bright transcendant futures of optimistic SF. Tyrants, static<br />
societies, and power elites fear change above all else &mdash; their<br />
natural tendency is to suppress science, or seek to distort it for<br />
ideological ends (as, for example, Stalin did with Lysekoism). In the<br />
narratives at the center of SF, political power is the natural enemy<br />
of the future.</p>
<p>SF fans and writers have always instinctively understood this.<br />
Thus the genre&#8217;s long celebration of individualist anti-politics; thus<br />
its fondness for voluntarism and markets over state action, and for<br />
storylines in which (as in Heinlein&#8217;s archetypal <cite>The Man Who<br />
Sold The Moon</cite>) scientific breakthrough and and free-enterprise<br />
economics blend into a seemless whole. These stances are not<br />
historical accidents, they are structural imperatives that follow from<br />
the lust for possibility. Ideological fashions come and go, and the<br />
field inevitably rediscovers itself afterwards as a literature of<br />
freedom.</p>
<p>This analysis should put permanently to rest the notion that hard SF<br />
is a conservative literature in any sense. It is, in fact, deeply and<br />
fundamentally radical &mdash; the literature that celebrates not merely<br />
science but science as a permanent revolution, as the final and most<br />
inexorable foe of all fixed power relationships everywhere.</p>
<p>Earlier, I cited the following traits of SF&#8217;s libertarian<br />
tradition: ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the<br />
competent man, instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and<br />
a rock-ribbed objectivism that values knowing how things work and<br />
treats all political ideologizing with suspicion. All should now be<br />
readily explicable. These are the traits that mark the enemies of the<br />
enemies of the future.</p>
<p>The partisans of &#8220;Radical Hard SF&#8221; are thus victims of a category<br />
error, an inability to see beyond their own political maps. By<br />
jamming SF&#8217;s native libertarianism into a box labeled &#8220;right wing&#8221; or<br />
&#8220;conservative&#8221; they doom themselves to misunderstanding the deepest<br />
imperatives of the genre.</p>
<p>The SF genre and libertarianism will both survive this mistake<br />
quite handily. They were symbiotic before libertarianism defined<br />
itself as a distinct political stance and they have co-evolved ever<br />
since. If four failed revolutions against Campbellian SF have not<br />
already demonstrated the futility of attempting to divorce them, I&#8217;m<br />
certain the future will.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=83989182">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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My Very First Fisk
<p>Ta-daa! In ritual obeisance to the customs of the blogosphere, I now<br />
perform my very first fisking. Of Der Fisk himself, in his 8 Nov 2002 column<br />
&#8220;Bush fights for another clean shot in his war&#8221;.</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;A clean shot&#8221; was The Washington Post&#8217;s revolting description of the<br />
murder of the al-Qa&#8217;ida leaders in Yemen by a US &#8220;Predator&#8221; unmanned<br />
aircraft. With grovelling approval, the US press used Israel&#8217;s own<br />
mendacious description of such murders as a &#8220;targeted killing&#8221;<br />
&mdash; and shame on the BBC for parroting the same words on Wednesday.
</p></blockquote>
<p>One wonders which word in the phrase &#8220;targeted killing&#8221; Mr. Fisk is<br />
having problems with. Since he avers that the phrase &#8220;targeted killing&#8221;<br />
is &#8220;mendacious&#8221;, we can deduce that he believes either the word &#8220;killing&#8221;<br />
or the word &#8220;targeted&#8221; to be false descriptions.</p>
<p>We must therefore conclude that in Mr. Fisk&#8217;s universe, either (a)<br />
members of al-Qaeda can be reduced to patch of carbonized char without<br />
the event properly qualifying as a &#8220;killing&#8221;, or (b) the drone<br />
operators weren&#8217;t targeting that vehicle at all &mdash; they unleashed<br />
a Hellfire on a random patch of the Hadrahamaut that just <em>happened</em><br />
to have a half-dozen known terrorists moseying through it at at the moment<br />
of impact.</p>
<blockquote><p>
How about a little journalistic freedom here? Like asking why this<br />
important al-Qa&#8217;ida leader could not have been arrested. Or tried<br />
before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for<br />
interrogation.
</p></blockquote>
<p>One imagines Mr. Fisk during World War II, exclaiming in horror<br />
because the Allies neglected to capture entire divisions of the Waffen-SS<br />
intact and subject each Aryan superman to individual criminal trials.</p>
<p>Mr. Fisk&#8217;s difficulty with grasping the concept of &#8220;warfare&#8221; and<br />
&#8220;enemy combatant&#8221; is truly remarkable. Or perhaps not so remarkable,<br />
considering his apparent failure to grasp the terms &#8220;targeted&#8221; and<br />
&#8220;killing&#8221;.</p>
<blockquote><p>
Instead, the Americans release a clutch of Guantanamo &#8220;suspects&#8221;, one<br />
of whom &mdash; having been held for 11 months in solitary confinement &mdash;<br />
turns out to be around 100 years old and so senile that he can&#8217;t<br />
string a sentence together. And this is the &#8220;war on terror&#8221;?
</p></blockquote>
<p>Yes, Mr. Fisk, it is. It&#8217;s a war in which our soldiers gives<br />
individual enemy combatants food, shelter, and medical care for 11<br />
months while their terrorists continue mass-murdering innocent<br />
civilian women and children.</p>
<blockquote><p>
But a &#8220;clean shot&#8221; is what President Bush appears to want to take at<br />
the United Nations. First, he wants to force it to adopt a resolution<br />
about which the Security Council has the gravest reservations. Then he<br />
warns that he might destroy the UN&#8217;s integrity by ignoring it<br />
altogether. In other words, he wants to destroy the UN. Does George<br />
Bush realise that the United States was the prime creator of this<br />
institution, just as it was of the League of Nations under President<br />
Woodrow Wilson?
</p></blockquote>
<p>Interesting that Mr. Fisk should mention the League of Nations. This<br />
would be the same League of Nations that collapsed after 1938 due to its<br />
utter failure to prevent clear-cut aggression by Nazi Germany? One wonders<br />
how Mr. Fisk supposes the U.N. can possibly escape the League&#8217;s fate<br />
if it fails to sponsor effective action against a genocidal, murdering tyrant<br />
who has stated for the record that he models himself on Hitler.</p>
<p>I congratulate Mr. Fisk &mdash; the phrase &#8220;destroy the U.N.&#8217;s<br />
integrity&#8221;; it is very entertaining. In other news, George Bush is<br />
plotting to destroy Messalina&#8217;s chastity, William Jefferson Clinton&#8217;s<br />
truthfulness, and Robert Fisk&#8217;s grasp on reality.</p>
<p>Supposing that the U.S. was the prime creator of the U.N., and<br />
supposing that was a mistake, is Mr. Fisk proposing that we should not<br />
have the integrity to shoot our own dog?</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;Targeted killing&#8221; &mdash; courtesy of the Bush administration &mdash;<br />
is now what the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon can call<br />
&#8220;legitimate warfare&#8221;. And Vladimir Putin, too. Now the Russians<br />
&mdash; I kid thee not, as Captain Queeg said in the Caine Mutiny<br />
&mdash; are talking about &#8220;targeted killing&#8221; in their renewed war on<br />
Chechnya. After the disastrous &#8220;rescue&#8221; of the Moscow theatre hostages<br />
by the so-called &#8220;elite&#8221; Russian Alpha Special forces (beware, oh<br />
reader, any rescue by &#8220;elite&#8221; forces, should you be taken hostage),<br />
Putin is supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught<br />
against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya.
</p></blockquote>
<p>We note for the record that should Mr. Fisk be captured by<br />
terrorists, he would prefer to be rescued by non-elite forces; perhaps<br />
a troop of Girl Scouts waving copies of <cite>The Guardian</cite><br />
would satisfy him. I would defer to Mr. Fisk evident belief that &#8220;non-elite&#8221;<br />
rescuers would increase his chances of surviving the experience, were<br />
it not that I dislike the sight of dying Girl Scouts.</p>
<blockquote><p>
I&#8217;m a cynical critic of the US media, but last month Newsweek ran a<br />
brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a<br />
deeply moving account of Russian cruelty in Chechnya, it recounted a<br />
Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers<br />
broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was<br />
a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier<br />
began to rape her. &#8220;Hurry up Kolya,&#8221; his friend shouted, &#8220;while she&#8217;s<br />
still warm.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, Russian soldiers behaved like al-Qaeda terrorists, and<br />
this is a bad thing. Excellent, Mr. Fisk; you appear to be showing some sign<br />
of an actual moral sense here.</p>
<blockquote><p>
Now, I have a question. If you or I was that girl&#8217;s husband or lover<br />
or brother or father, would we not be prepared to take hostages in a<br />
Moscow theatre &mdash; Even if this meant &mdash; as it did &mdash;<br />
that, asphyxiated by Russian gas, we would be executed with a bullet<br />
in the head, as the Chechen women hostage-takers were &mdash; But no<br />
matter. The &#8220;war on terror&#8221; means that Kolya and the boys will be back<br />
in action soon, courtesy of Messrs Putin, Bush and Blair.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Ahh. So, Mr. Fisk is taking the position that the Russians&#8217; atrocious<br />
behavior in Chechnya justifies hostage-taking and the cold-blooded murder of<br />
hostages in a Moscow theater. Very interesting.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s follow the logic of just retribution here. If the rape of a dying<br />
girl in Chechnya by Russian soldiers justifies terrorizing and murdering<br />
hostages in a Moscow theater, then what sort of behavior might the murder of<br />
3000 innocent civilians in Manhattan justify?</p>
<p>We gather that Mr. Fisk thinks it does not justify whacking half a<br />
dozen known terrorists, including the organizer of the U.S.S. Cole<br />
bombing, in the Yemeni desert. We conclude that Mr. Fisk concedes the<br />
righteousness of retribution, all right, but values the life of each<br />
al-Qaeda terrorist more than those of five hundred unsuspecting<br />
victims of al-Qaeda terrorism.</p>
<blockquote><p>
Let me quote that very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who<br />
tried to warn the West of Israel&#8217;s massive nuclear war technology,<br />
imprisoned for 12 years of solitary confinement &mdash; and betrayed,<br />
so it appears, by one Robert Maxwell. In a poem he wrote in<br />
confinement, Vanunu said: &#8220;I am the clerk, the technician, the<br />
mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don&#8217;t look left or<br />
right, don&#8217;t read the text. Don&#8217;t look at the whole machine. You are<br />
only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>Mr. Fisk apparently believes that Mr. Vanunu had no responsibility<br />
to betray his country&#8217;s defensive capabilities in the presence of<br />
enemies bent on its utter destruction. Or did I somehow miss the<br />
incident in which Israel aggressively atom-bombed a neighbor?</p>
<blockquote><p>
Kolya would have understood that. So would the US Air Force officer<br />
&#8220;flying&#8221; the drone which murdered the al-Qa&#8217;ida men in Yemen. So would<br />
the Israeli pilot who bombed an apartment block in Gaza, killing nine<br />
small children as well as well as his Hamas target, an &#8220;operation&#8221;<br />
&mdash; that was the description, for God&#8217;s sake &mdash; which Ariel<br />
Sharon described as &#8220;a great success&#8221;.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Mr. Fisk, whose love for legalism and international due process<br />
commends giving al-Qaeda terrorists individual criminal trials, seems<br />
curiously unaware of that portion of the Geneva Convention relating to<br />
the use of non-combatants as human shields.</p>
<p>One wonders if he would be persuaded by the Geneva Convention<br />
language assigning responsibility for these deaths not to Israel, but<br />
to Hamas.</p>
<p>One suspects not. In Mr. Fisk&#8217;s universe, it&#8217;s clear that there is<br />
one set of rules for Israelis and another for terrorists. Hamas<br />
terrorists committing atrocities are justified by Israeli actions,<br />
while Israelis committing what Mr. Fisk prefers to consider atrocities<br />
are evil and the behavior of Hamas completely irrelevant.</p>
<p>But we know, from Mr. Fisk&#8217;s famous report of his beating in Afghanistan,<br />
what his actual rule is: hating Americans justifies anything.</p>
<blockquote><p>
These days, we all believe in &#8220;clean shots&#8221;. I wish that George Bush<br />
could read history. Not just Britain&#8217;s colonial history, in which we<br />
contrived to use gas against the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq in the<br />
1930s. Not just his own country&#8217;s support for Saddam Hussein<br />
throughout his war with Iran.
</p></blockquote>
<p>This would be the same Iran that belligerantly and unlawfully seized<br />
the U.S. Embassy in 1979, correct? And held Americans hostage for 120<br />
days, committing an act of war under the international law Mr. Fisk<br />
claims to so scrupulously respect?</p>
<p>It would be entertaining to watch Mr. Fisk argue that Saddam Hussein<br />
was not then fit to be an ally of the U.S. against its enemies, but is now<br />
&mdash; after twenty years of atrocities aggressive warfare &mdash; such<br />
an upstanding citizen of the international community that we should<br />
stand idly by while he arms himself with nuclear weapons.</p>
<blockquote><p>
The Iranians once produced a devastating book of coloured photographs<br />
of the gas blisters sustained by their soldiers in that war. I looked<br />
at them again this week. If you were these men, you would want to<br />
die. They all did. I wish someone could remind George Bush of the<br />
words of Lawrence of Arabia, that &#8220;making war or rebellion is messy,<br />
like eating soup off a knife.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>I wonder if Mr. Fisk can point to any instance in which George Bush ever<br />
stated that he expected the war with al-Qaeda to be &#8220;clean&#8221;? If I recall<br />
correctly. &#8220;clean shot&#8221; was the Washington Post&#8217;s phrase.</p>
<p>Can Mr. Fisk fail to be aware that the Post&#8217;s editorial board is<br />
run by ideological enemies of George Bush, persons who would, outside<br />
of wartime, hew rather closer to Mr. Fisk&#8217;s positions than George<br />
Bush&#8217;s?</p>
<p>Mr. Fisk, I don&#8217;t think any American policymaker doubts that war is hell.<br />
Nor that terrorism is even worse.</p>
<blockquote><p>
And I suppose I would like Americans to remember the arrogance of<br />
colonial power.
</p></blockquote>
<p>We have quite vivid historical memories of the arrogance of Mr. Fisk&#8217;s<br />
particular colonial power, in fact. We recall fighting a revolution to<br />
deal with it.</p>
<p>If Mr. Fisk could point out any American colonies in Iraq, or Iran, or<br />
Palestine, or Chechnya, we would be greatly educated.</p>
<blockquote><p>
Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during<br />
the 1956-62 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting only<br />
last month of his prowess at the guillotine. &#8220;You must never give the<br />
guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head<br />
around and that&#8217;s when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through<br />
his jaw, and you have to use a butcher&#8217;s knife to finish it off. It is<br />
an exorbitant power &mdash; to kill one&#8217;s fellow man.&#8221;<br />
So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Ah. Did I miss the part where American were using guillotines as a method<br />
of execution, then?</p>
<blockquote><p>
No, I hope we will not commit war crimes in Iraq &mdash; there will be<br />
plenty of them for us to watch &mdash; but I would like to think that<br />
the United Nations can restrain George Bush and Vladimir Putin and, I<br />
suppose, Tony Blair. But one thing is sure. Kolya will be with them.
</p></blockquote>
<p>Mr. Fisk&#8217;s surety that American troops will while away their time<br />
in Baghdad raping dying Iraqi girls appears to come from the same<br />
eccentric brain circuitry that supposes U.S. to be a &#8220;colonial&#8221; power and to<br />
be in imminent danger of performing botched executions with guillotines<br />
and butcher knives.</p>
<p>Mr. Fisk neglects an important difference between U.S. soldiers and<br />
al-Qaeda terrorists.</p>
<p>Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, U.S. soldiers found<br />
guilty of such behavior can be &mdash; and, on the rare occasions it<br />
has occurred, frequently have been &mdash; court-martialed and shot.<br />
Not that it seems Mr. Fisk would be likely to acknowledge the<br />
existence of <em>this</em> law, or that it is ever applies.</p>
<p>To Mr. Fisk&#8217;s inability to grasp the terms &#8220;targeted&#8221; and &#8220;killing&#8221;<br />
we may therefore add an inability to grasp the terms &#8220;barbarism&#8221; and<br />
&#8220;civilization&#8221;.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=84287159">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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The Charms and Terrors of Military SF
<p>I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle&#8217;s<br />
SF as &#8220;conservative/militarist power fantasies&#8221;. Pournelle uttered a<br />
rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I<br />
could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend<br />
Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy<br />
and his patriotic instincts. I can hardly argue that point, since I<br />
completely agree with it; that tension is a central issue in almost<br />
eveything Heinlein ever wrote.</p>
<p>The differences between Heinlein&#8217;s and Pournelle&#8217;s military SF are<br />
not trivial &mdash; they are both esthetically and morally important.<br />
More generally, the soldiers in military SF express a wide range<br />
of different theories about the relationship between soldier,<br />
society, and citizen. These theories reward some examination.</p>
<p>First, let&#8217;s consider representative examples: Jerry Pournelle&#8217;s<br />
novels of Falkenberg&#8217;s Legion, on the one hand, and Heinlein&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Starship Troopers</cite> on the other.</p>
<p>The difference between Heinlein and Pournelle starts with the fact<br />
that Pournelle could write about a cold-blooded mass murder of human<br />
beings by human beings, performed in the name of political order,<br />
approvingly &mdash; and did.</p>
<p>But the massacre was only possible because Falkenberg&#8217;s Legion and<br />
Heinlein&#8217;s Mobile Infantry have very different relationships with the<br />
society around them. Heinlein&#8217;s troops are integrated with the society<br />
in which they live. They study history and moral philosophy; they are<br />
citizen-soldiers. Johnnie Rico has doubts, hesitations, humanity.<br />
One can&#8217;t imagine giving him orders to open fire on a stadium-full of<br />
civilians as does Falkenberg.</p>
<p>Pournelle&#8217;s soldiers, on the other hand, have no society but their<br />
unit and no moral direction other than that of the men on horseback<br />
who lead them. Falkenberg is a perfect embodiment of military<br />
<em>Fuhrerprinzip</em>, remote even from his own men, a creepy and<br />
opaque character who is not successfully humanized by an implausible<br />
romance near the end of the sequence. The Falkenberg books end with<br />
his men elevating an emperor, Prince Lysander who we are all supposed<br />
to trust because he is such a beau ideal. Two thousand years of<br />
hard-won lessons about the maintenance of liberty are thrown away<br />
like so much trash.</p>
<p>In fact, the underlying message here is pretty close to that of<br />
classical fascism. It, too, responds to social decay with a cult of<br />
the redeeming absolute leader. To be fair, the Falkenberg novels<br />
probably do not depict Pournelle&#8217;s idea of an ideal society, but they<br />
are hardly less damning if we consider them as a cautionary tale.<br />
&#8220;Straighten up, kids, or the hero-soldiers in Nemourlon are going to<br />
have to get medieval on your buttocks and install a Glorious Leader.&#8221;<br />
Pournelle&#8217;s values are revealed by the way that he repeatedly posits<br />
situations in which the truncheon of authority is the only solution.<br />
All tyrants plead necessity.</p>
<p>Even so, Falkenberg&#8217;s men are paragons compared to the soldiers in<br />
David Drake&#8217;s military fiction. In the <cite>Hammer&#8217;s Slammers</cite><br />
books and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances<br />
attached to it all. &#8220;Carnography&#8221; is the word for this stuff,<br />
pure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There&#8217;s<br />
boatloads of it out there, too; the <em>Starfist</em> sequence by<br />
Sherman and Cragg is a recent example. Jim Baen sells a lot of it<br />
(and, thankfully, uses the profits to subsidize reprinting the Golden<br />
Age midlist).</p>
<p>The best-written military SF, on the other hand, tends to be more<br />
like Heinlein&#8217;s &mdash; the fact that it addresses ethical questions<br />
about organized violence (and tries to come up with answers one might<br />
actually be more willing to live with than Pournelle&#8217;s quasi-fascism<br />
or Drake&#8217;s brutal anomie) is part of its appeal. Often (as in<br />
Heinlein&#8217;s <cite>Space Cadet</cite> or the early volumes in Lois<br />
Bujold&#8217;s superb Miles Vorkosigan novels) such stories include elements<br />
of <em>bildungsroman</em>.</p>
<p>The <cite>Sten</cite> sequence by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch was<br />
both a loving tribute to and (in the end) a brutal deconstruction of<br />
this kind of story. It&#8217;s full of the building-character-at-boot-camp<br />
scenes that are a staple of the subgenre; Sten&#8217;s career is carefully<br />
designed to rationalize as many of these as possible. But the Eternal<br />
Emperor, originally a benevolent if quirky paternal figure who earns<br />
Sten&#8217;s loyalty, goes genocidally mad. In the end, soldier Sten must<br />
rebel against the system that made him what he is.</p>
<p>Cole &amp; Bunch tip their hand in an afterword to the last book,<br />
not that any reader with more perception than a brick could have<br />
missed it. They wrote <cite>Sten</cite> to show where fascism leads<br />
and as a protest against SF&#8217;s fascination with absolute power and the<br />
simplifications of military life. Bujold winds up making the same<br />
point in a subtler way; the temptations of power and arrogance are a<br />
constant, soul-draining strain on Miles&#8217;s father Aral, and Miles<br />
eventually destroys his own career through one of those<br />
temptations</p>
<p>Heinlein, a U.S naval officer who loved the military and seems to<br />
have always remembered his time at Annapolis as the best years of his<br />
life, fully understood that the highest duty of a soldier may be not<br />
merely to give his life but to reject all the claims of military<br />
culture and loyalty. His elegiac <cite>The Long Watch</cite> makes<br />
this point very clear. You&#8217;ll seek an equivalent in vain anywhere in<br />
Pournelle or Drake or their many imitators &mdash; but consider<br />
Bujold&#8217;s <cite>The Vor Game</cite>, in which Miles&#8217;s resistance to<br />
General Metzov&#8217;s orders for a massacre is the pivotal moment at which<br />
he becomes a man.</p>
<p>Bujold&#8217;s point is stronger because, unlike Ezra Dahlquist in<br />
<cite>The Long Watch</cite> or the citizen-soldiers in <cite>Starship<br />
Troopers</cite>, Miles is not a civilian serving a hitch. He is the<br />
Emperor&#8217;s cousin, a member of a military caste; his place in<br />
Barrayaran society is <em>defined</em> by the expectations of military<br />
service. What gives his moment of decision its power is that in refusing<br />
to commit an atrocity, he is not merely risking his life but giving up<br />
his dreams.</p>
<p>Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov have a dream, too. The difference<br />
is that where Ezra Dahlquist and Miles Vorkosigan sacrifice themselves<br />
for what they believe, Pournelle&#8217;s &#8220;heroes&#8221; sacrifice others. Miles&#8217;s<br />
and Dahlquist&#8217;s futures are defined by refusal of an order to do evil,<br />
Falkenberg&#8217;s by the slaughter of <em>untermenschen</em>.</p>
<p>This is a difference that makes a difference.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=84479572">Blogspot omments</a></p>

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What a responsible American Left would look like
<p>The congressional Democrats have made Nancy Pelosi their leader.<br />
Whether or not this is conscious strategy, it means they&#8217;re going to<br />
run to the left. And very likely get slaughtered in 2004.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s truly odd how self-destructive the American Left has become.<br />
They&#8217;re like that famous line about the Palestinians, never missing an<br />
opportunity to miss an opportunity. And there are so many<br />
opportunities! So many good things Republican conservatives can<br />
never do because they&#8217;re captive to their voter base.</p>
<p>Herewith, then, my humble offering of a program for the American<br />
Left. This is not sarcasm and I&#8217;m not trying to score points here,<br />
these are issues where the Left could take a stand and gain back some<br />
of the moral capital it has squandered so recklessly since the<br />
days of the civil rights movement.</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Support war on Iraq, but insist on nation-building<br />
afterwards.</em> Saddam Hussein is a genocidal fascist tyrant, exactly the<br />
sort of monster the Left ought to be against. Support deposing him<br />
&mdash; then be the conscience of the U.S., insisting on our duty to<br />
help rebuild Iraq as a free country afterwards. Push us to win the<br />
peace, not just the war.</li>
<li><em>Derail the Homeland Security Act and other intrusions on<br />
civil liberties.</em> The left hates John Ashcroft. So why don&#8217;t<br />
we see more Left opposition to the law-enforcement power grab that&#8217;s<br />
going on right now, or to the gutting of the Freedom of Information<br />
Act? Many Americans would respond well to this.</li>
<li><em>Stop the War on (Some) Drugs.</em> This is a civil-rights<br />
issue. Blacks and other minorities are disproportionately victims<br />
both of drug prosecution and of the criminal violence created by drug<br />
laws. It&#8217;s a civil-liberties issue for many reasons too obvious to<br />
need listing &mdash; how can any self-respecting liberal countenance<br />
no-knock warrants and asset forfeiture? For too long the Left has<br />
gone along with conservative anti-drug hysteria out of a craven fear<br />
of being dismissed as a bunch of dope-loving ex-hippies. Time to<br />
stand up and be counted.</li>
<li><em>Support school vouchers.</em> Another civil-rights issue<br />
&mdash; it&#8217;s precisely minorities and the poor who most need to escape<br />
the trap that the public-school system has become, and black parents<br />
know this. Yes, it will be hard to take on the teachers&#8217; unions<br />
&mdash; but you&#8217;re in serious danger of losing the black vote over<br />
this issue, so switching would be not just the right thing but a<br />
way to shore up your base as well.</li>
<li><em>Speak up for science.</em> Religious conservatives are up to a<br />
lot of anti-scientific mischief &mdash; banning stem-cell research,<br />
excising evolutionary theory from textbooks. Make a principled stand<br />
for science, secularism, and the anti-Establishment clause. Remind<br />
the world that the U.S. is not a Christian nation, and seek to have<br />
the tax exemption for religious organizations ended because it puts the<br />
U.S. government in the position of deciding what&#8217;s a religion and<br />
what is not.</li>
<li><em>Stop the RIAA/MPAA from trashing consumers&#8217; fair-use rights.</em><br />
The Left claims to be on the side of consumers and against corporate<br />
power elites. So where was the Left when the DMCA passed? If the<br />
RIAA and MPAA have their way, personal computers will be crippled<br />
and consumers will go to jail for the `crime&#8217; of copying DVDs they<br />
have bought for their personal use. Young people, who are trending<br />
conservative these days, care deeply about the RIAA attack on<br />
file sharing. Wouldn&#8217;t you like to have them back?</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=84892010">Blogspot comment</a></p>

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When to shoot a policeman
<p>A policeman was<br />
<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/11/26/state1239EST0059.DTL">premeditatedly shot dead</a> today.</p>
<p>Now, I don&#8217;t regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible<br />
crime &mdash; indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I<br />
would do it myself. If he were committing illegal violence &mdash; or<br />
even officially legal violence during the enforcement of an unjust<br />
law. Supposing a policeman were criminally threatening someone&#8217;s<br />
life, say. Or suppose that he had been ordered under an act of<br />
government to round up all the Jews in the neighborhood, or confiscate<br />
all the pornography or computers or guns. Under those circumstances,<br />
it would be not merely my right but my <em>duty</em> to shoot the<br />
policeman.</p>
<p>But <em>this</em> policeman was harming nobody. He was shot down in<br />
cold blood as he was refueling his cruiser. His murderer subsequently<br />
announced the act on a public website.</p>
<p>The murderer said he was &#8220;protesting police-state tactics&#8221;. If<br />
that were his goal, however, then the correct and appropriate<br />
expression of it would have been to kill a BATF thug in the process of<br />
invading his home, or an airport security screener, or some other<br />
person who was actively and at the time of the protest implementing<br />
police-state tactics.</p>
<p>Killings of policemen in those circumstances are a defensible<br />
social good, <i>pour encourager les autres</i>. It is right and proper<br />
that the police and military should fear for their lives when they<br />
trespass on the liberty of honest citizens; that is part of the<br />
balance of power that maintains a free society, and the very reason<br />
our Constitution has a Second Amendment.</p>
<p>But this policeman was refueling his car. Nothing in the<br />
shooter&#8217;s justification carried any suggestion that the shooter&#8217;s<br />
civil rights had ever been violated by the victim, or that the<br />
murderer had standing to act for any other individual person whose<br />
rights had been violated by the victim. This killing was not<br />
self-defense.</p>
<p>There are circumstances under which general warfare against the<br />
police would be justified. In his indymedia post <a href="http://www.sf.indymedia.org/print.php?id=1545325">The<br />
Declaration of a Renewed American Independence</a> the shooter utters<br />
a scathing, and (it must be said) largely justified indictment of<br />
police abuses. If the political system had broken down sufficiently<br />
that there were no reasonable hope of rectifying those abuses, then I<br />
would be among the first to cry havoc.</p>
<p>Under those circumstances, it would be my duty as a free human<br />
being under the U.S. Constitution not merely to shoot individual<br />
policemen, but to make revolutionary war on the police. As Abraham Lincoln<br />
said, <em>&#8220;This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people<br />
who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing<br />
government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending<br />
it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow<br />
it.&#8221;</em></p>
<p>But the United States of America has not yet reached the point at<br />
which the political mechanisms for the defense of freedom have broken<br />
down. This judgment is not a matter of theory but one of practice.<br />
There are not yet police at our door with legal orders to round up the<br />
Jews, or confiscate pornography or computers or guns.</p>
<p>Civil society has not yet been fatally vitiated by tyranny. Under<br />
these circumstances, the only possible reaction is to condemn. This<br />
was a crime. This was murder. And I would cheerfully shoot not the<br />
policeman but the <em>murderer</em> dead. (There would be no question<br />
of guilt or due process, since the murderer publicly boasted of his<br />
crime.)</p>
<p>But that <em>this</em> shooter was wrong does not mean that<br />
everyone who shoots a policeman in the future will also be wrong. A<br />
single Andrew McCrae, at this time, is a criminal and should be<br />
condemned as a criminal. But his case against the police and the<br />
system behind them is not without merit. Therefore let him be a<br />
warning as well.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=85135479">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Social Security and the Demography Bomb
<p>A friend of mine, Russ Cage aka Engineer-Poet, comments on my essay<br />
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200212#18">Demographics<br />
and the Dustbin of History</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>
People used to have children to take care of them in their old age.<br />
Social Security took care of this by socializing the benefits, but all<br />
of the costs still fell to individuals; worse, taking time out of the<br />
workforce to raise kids reduces your Social Security benefits.<br />
Rational actors will stop having kids to have a good retirement.
</p></blockquote>
<p>He&#8217;s right, and this applies to <em>all</em> public pension schemes.<br />
It&#8217;s a very simple, very powerful mechanism. When you subsidize old<br />
age, you depress birthrates. The more you subsidize old age, the more<br />
you depress birthrates. Eventually&#8230;crash!</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not just Euro-socialism that&#8217;s going to get trashed by<br />
demographics, it&#8217;s the U.S&#8217;s own welfare state. It might take longer<br />
here because our population is still rising, but it will happen.</p>
<p>Now that the effects of income transfer on demography are no longer<br />
masked by the Long Boom, this is going to become one of the principal<br />
constraints on public policy.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=85477017">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Sneering at Courage
<p>One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can&#8217;t afford to sneer<br />
at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen,<br />
Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93<br />
to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots<br />
we&#8217;ve had in the war against terror. We are learning, once again,<br />
that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the<br />
willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful<br />
responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.</p>
<p>(And, usually, it is men who do the risking. I mean no disrespect<br />
to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an<br />
exclusive male monopoly. But it has been predominently the job of<br />
men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today.<br />
I&#8217;ll return to this point later in the essay.)</p>
<p>The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of <em>bien<br />
pensants</em> in our culture. Many of the elite molders of opinion in<br />
the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men. They<br />
have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning<br />
it to fantasy, sneering at it &mdash; trying to persuade us all that<br />
it&#8217;s at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.</p>
<p>If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the<br />
connotations of the phrase &#8220;testosterone poisoning&#8221;. Ask yourself<br />
when you first heard it, and where, and from whom. Then ask yourself<br />
if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man&#8217;s<br />
declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for<br />
what he believes in. When some ordinary man says he is willing to<br />
take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper &mdash; or<br />
even ordinary criminals &mdash; them, do you praise his determination<br />
or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?</p>
<p>Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support. If we mock<br />
our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or<br />
simpletons, we&#8217;ll find courage in short supply when we need it. If we<br />
make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men<br />
&mdash; cops, soldiers, firemen &mdash; we&#8217;ll find that we have<br />
trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse:<br />
our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted<br />
and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and<br />
entitled to take their due when it is not freely given. More than one<br />
culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.</p>
<p>Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage<br />
is a functional virtue in ordinary men. But Todd Beamer reminded us of<br />
that &mdash; and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the<br />
forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage.<br />
Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side<br />
socialites cruising firemen&#8217;s bars? Biology tells; medals and<br />
tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero&#8217;s most<br />
natural and strongest reward is willing women.</p>
<p>Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of<br />
people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a<br />
judgment on American sins; &mdash; the multiculturalists, the<br />
postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the<br />
academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists,<br />
and the plain old-fashioned loony left. By and large these people<br />
never liked or trusted physical courage, and it&#8217;s worth taking a hard<br />
look at why that is.</p>
<p>Feminists distrust physical courage because it&#8217;s a male virtue.<br />
Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just<br />
as surely as nurturance is to femininity. This has always been<br />
understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and<br />
modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors. If<br />
one&#8217;s world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and<br />
maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is<br />
regressive.</p>
<p>For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect<br />
because it&#8217;s psychologically linked to moral certitude &mdash; and<br />
moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from<br />
intolerance and bigotry. Men who believe in anything enough to fight<br />
for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &#038;mdash,<br />
unless, of course, they&#8217;re tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which<br />
fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.</p>
<p>Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more<br />
than a touch of class warfare about them. Every upper crust<br />
that is not directly a military caste &mdash; including our own<br />
&mdash; tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants<br />
and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they<br />
know their place is to be guided by their betters.</p>
<p>For transnational progressives and the left in general, male<br />
physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it&#8217;s an<br />
<em>individualizing</em> virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about<br />
autonomy and the proper limits of social power. A man who develops in<br />
himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less<br />
likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who<br />
have not passed that same test. Brave men who have learned to fight<br />
for their <em>own</em> concept of virtue &mdash; independently of<br />
social approval or the party line &mdash; are especially threatening<br />
to any sort of collectivist.</p>
<p>The multiculturalist&#8217;s and the collectivist&#8217;s suspicions are<br />
backhanded tributes to an important fact. There is a continuity among<br />
self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are<br />
the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in<br />
individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another.<br />
They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward<br />
any of them tend to increase all of them.</p>
<p>After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues. We tried to teach<br />
boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men<br />
are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to<br />
specialists. We preached the virtue of `self-esteem&#8217; to adolescents<br />
while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that<br />
might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect. Meanwhile,<br />
our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated<br />
physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind.<br />
We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant<br />
truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood.<br />
And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.</p>
<p>Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did.<br />
But they were written off as reactionaries &mdash; and many of us were<br />
foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper<br />
crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men<br />
apt to fold under pressure. We became, in Jeffrey Snyder&#8217;s famous<br />
diagnosis, <a href="http://www.rkba.org/comment/cowards.html">a nation<br />
of cowards</a>; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime<br />
rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.</p>
<p>But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War,<br />
we could afford. Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from<br />
the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear<br />
weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant. So it remained<br />
until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.</p>
<p>Now we have need of courage. Al-Qaeda&#8217;s war has come to us. There<br />
is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue<br />
is to smash state sponsors of terrorism. But this war is not<br />
primarily a chess-game between nations &mdash; it&#8217;s a street-level<br />
brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells<br />
often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda<br />
other than by sympathy of ideas.</p>
<p>Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and<br />
citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be<br />
everywhere that terrorists might strike. John F. Kennedy said this during<br />
the Cold War, but it is far truer now:</p>
<blockquote><p>
&#8220;Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to<br />
take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic<br />
purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and<br />
sacrifice for that freedom.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and<br />
self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman&#8217;s readiness than<br />
his weapons. So the next time you see a man claim the role<br />
of defender, don&#8217;t sneer &mdash; cheer. Don&#8217;t write him off with some<br />
pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him. He&#8217;s trying to<br />
tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for,<br />
fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.</p>
<p>Whether he&#8217;s in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby<br />
&mdash; we need that courage now.</p>
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Away from Keyboard
<p>I&#8217;ve on hiatus for a bit while I wrap up my next book, <cite>The Art Of Unix Programming</cite>. </p>
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Some Christmas cheer
<p>Some deeply warped Christmas humor <a href="http://www.asmallvictory.net/hhhs/">here</a> . Now,<br />
<em>this</em> Santa might get me the presents I really want. Like,<br />
say, a custom-tuned Baer .45 semiauto. Or Liv Tyler, fetchingly<br />
attired in nothing but a pair of Arwen ears.</p>
<p>I actually did get a really peculiar Christmas present from a<br />
stranger this morning. It was a gourmet frying pan with a<br />
Tux-the-Linux-Penguin on it. And<br />
an earnest cover letter explaining that it is #8 of a special limited<br />
edition of 1024. Made by a German cookwares company that has<br />
gotten good service out of Linux and decided to commemmorate<br />
the fact.</p>
<p>Odd&#8230;</p>

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A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress
<p>I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my<br />
friend Rob Landley, I&#8217;ve come up with a classification schema for the<br />
levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build<br />
competence.</p>
<p>The base assumption is that for any given user there is a maximum<br />
cognitive load any given user is willing to accept to use an<br />
interface. I think that there are levels, analogous to Piagetian<br />
developmental thresholds and possibly related to them, in the<br />
trajectory of learning to use software interfaces.</p>
<p>Level 0: I&#8217;ll only push one button.</p>
<p>Level 1: I&#8217;ll push a sequence of buttons, as long as they&#8217;re all visible<br />
and I don&#8217;t have to remember anything between presses. These people<br />
can do checklists.</p>
<p>Level 2: I&#8217;m willing to push as sequence of buttons in which later ones may<br />
not be visible until earlier ones have been pressed. These people<br />
will follow pull-down menus; it&#8217;s OK for the display to change as long<br />
as they can memorize the steps.</p>
<p>Level 3: I&#8217;m willing to use folders if they never change while I&#8217;m not looking.<br />
There can be hidden unchanging state, but nothing must ever<br />
happen out of sight. These people can handle an incremental replace<br />
with confirmation. They can use macros, but have no capability to<br />
cope with surprises other than by yelling for help.</p>
<p>Level 4: I&#8217;m willing to use metaphors to describe magic actions. A folder<br />
can be described by &#8220;These are all my local machines&#8221; or &#8220;these<br />
are all my print jobs&#8221; and is allowed to change out of sight in an<br />
unsurprising way. These people can handle global replace, but must<br />
examine the result to maintain confidence. These people will begin<br />
customizing their environment.</p>
<p>Level 5: I&#8217;m willing to use categories (generalize about nouns). I&#8217;m<br />
willing<br />
to recognize that all .doc files are alike, or all .jpg files are<br />
alike, and I have confidence there are sets of actions I can apply<br />
to a file I have never seen that will work because I know its type.<br />
(Late in this level knowledge begins to become articulate; these<br />
people are willing to give simple instructions over the phone or<br />
by email.)</p>
<p>Level 6: I&#8217;m willing to unpack metaphors into procedural steps. People at<br />
this level begin to be able to cope with surprises when the<br />
metaphor breaks, because they have a representation of process.<br />
People at this level are ready to cope with the fact that HTML<br />
documents are made up of tags, and more generally with<br />
simple document markup.</p>
<p>Level 7: I&#8217;m willing to move between different representations of<br />
a document or piece of data. People at this level know that<br />
any one view of the data is not the same as the data, and lossless<br />
transformations no longer scare them. Multiple representations<br />
become more useful than confusing. At this level the idea of<br />
structural rather than presentation markup begins to make sense.</p>
<p>Level 8: I&#8217;m willing to package simple procedures I already understand.<br />
These people are willing to record a sequence of actions which<br />
they understand into a macro, as long as no decisions (conditionals)<br />
are involved. They begin to get comfortable with report generators.<br />
At advanced level 8 they may start to be willing to deal with<br />
simple SQL.</p>
<p>Level 9: I am willing to package procedures that make decisions, as long<br />
as I already understand them. At his level, people begin to cope<br />
with conditionals and loops, and also to deal with the idea of<br />
programming languages.</p>
<p>Level 10: I am willing to problem-solve at the procedural level, writing<br />
programs for tasks I don&#8217;t completely understand before<br />
developing them.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m thinking this scale might be useful in classifying interfaces and<br />
developing guidelines for not exceeding the pain threshold of an<br />
audience if we have some model of what their notion of acceptable<br />
cognitive load is.</p>
<p>(This is a spinoff from my book-in-progress, &#8220;The Art of Unix<br />
Programming&#8221;, but I don&#8217;t plan to put it in the book.)</p>
<p>Comments, reactions, and refinements welcome.</p>
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Hacking and Refactoring
<p>In 2001, there was a history-making conference of software-engineering<br />
thinkers in Snowbird, Colorado. The product of that meeting was a remarkable<br />
document called the <a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/">Agile Manifesto</a>,<br />
a call to overturn many of the assumptions of traditional software development.<br />
I was invited to be at Snowbird, but couldn&#8217;t make it.</p>
<p>Ever since, though, I&#8217;ve been sensing a growing convergence between<br />
agile programming and the open-source movement. I&#8217;ve seen agile<br />
concepts and terminology being adopted rapidly and enthusiastically by<br />
my colleagues in open-source-land&mdash;especially ideas like<br />
refactoring, unit testing, and design from stories and personas. From<br />
the other side, key agile-movement figures like Kent Beck and Martin<br />
Fowler have expressed strong interest in open source both in published<br />
works and to me personally. Fowler has gone so far as to <a href="http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html#N400254">include</a><br />
open source on his list of agile-movement schools.</p>
<p>I agree that we belong on that list. But I also agree with<br />
Fowler&#8217;s description of of open source as a style, rather than a<br />
process. I think his reservations as to whether open source can be<br />
described as just another agile school are well-founded. There is<br />
something more complicated and interesting going on here. and I<br />
realized when I read Fowler&#8217;s description of open source that at some<br />
point I was going to have to do some hard thinking and writing in an<br />
effort to sort it all out.</p>
<p>While doing research for my forthcoming book, <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/">The Art of Unix<br />
Programming</a>, I read one particular passage in Fowler&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Refactoring</cite> that finally brought it all home. He<br />
writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One argument is that refactoring can be an alternative to up-front<br />
design. In this scenario, you don&#8217;t do any design at all. You just<br />
code the first approach that comes into your head, get it working, and<br />
then refactor it into shape. Actually, this approach can work. I&#8217;ve<br />
seen people do this and come out with a very well-defined piece of<br />
software. Those who support Extreme Programming often are portrayed<br />
as advocating this approach.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I read this, and had one of those moments where everything comes<br />
together in your head with a great ringing crash and the world assumes<br />
a new shape&mdash;a moment not unlike the one I had in late 1996<br />
when I got the central insight that turned into <cite>The Cathedral<br />
and the Bazaar</cite>. In the remainder of this essay I&#8217;m going to<br />
try to articulate what I now think I understand about open source,<br />
agile programming, how they are related, and why the connection should<br />
be interesting even to programmers with no stake in either movement.</p>
<p>Now I need to set a little background here, because I&#8217;m going<br />
to need to have to talk about several different categories which are<br />
contingently but not necessarily related.</p>
<p>First, there is <em>Unix programmer</em>. Unix is the operating<br />
system with the longest living tradition of programming and design.<br />
It has an unusually strong and mature technical culture around it, a<br />
culture which originated or popularized many of the core ideas and<br />
tools of modern software design. <cite>The Art of Unix<br />
Programming</cite> is a concerted attempt to capture the craft wisdom<br />
of this culture, one to which I have successfully enlisted quite a few<br />
of its founding elders.</p>
<p>Second, there is <em>hacker</em>. This is a very complex term, but<br />
more than anything else, it describes an attitude&mdash;an<br />
intentional stance that relates hackers to programming and other<br />
disciplines in a particular way. I have described the hacker stance<br />
and its cultural correlates in detail in <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html">How To Become A<br />
Hacker</a>.</p>
<p>Third, there is <em>open-source programmer</em>. Open source is a<br />
programming style with strong roots in the Unix tradition and the<br />
hacker culture. I wrote the modern manifesto for it in 1997, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/">The<br />
Cathedral and the Bazaar</a>, building on earlier thinking by<br />
Richard Stallman and others.</p>
<p>These three categories are historically closely related. It is<br />
significant that a single person (accidentally, me) wrote touchstone<br />
documents for the second and third and is attempting a <em>summum<br />
bonum</em> of the first. That personal coincidence reflects a larger<br />
social reality that in 2003 these categories are becoming increasingly<br />
merged &mdash; essentially, the hacker community has become the core<br />
of the open-source community, which is rapidly re-assimilating the<br />
parts of the Unix culture that got away from the hackers during<br />
the ten bad years after the AT&amp;T divestiture in 1984.</p>
<p>But the relationship is not logically entailed; we can imagine<br />
a hacker culture speaking a common tongue other than Unix and C (in<br />
the far past its common tongue was Lisp), and we can imagine an<br />
explicit ideology of open source developing within a cultural and<br />
technical context other than Unix (as indeed nearly happened several<br />
different times).</p>
<p>With this scene-setting done, I can explain that my first take on<br />
Fowler&#8217;s statement was to think &#8220;Dude, you&#8217;ve just described<br />
<em>hacking</em>!&#8221;</p>
<p>I mean something specific and powerful by this. Throwing together<br />
a prototype and refactoring it into shape is a rather precise<br />
description of the normal working practice of hackers since that<br />
culture began to self-define in the 1960s. Not a complete one, but it<br />
captures the most salient feature of how hackers relate to code. The<br />
open-source community has inherited and elaborated this practice,<br />
building on similar tendencies within the Unix tradition.</p>
<p>The way Fowler writes about design-by-refactoring has two huge<br />
implications for the relationship between open source and agile<br />
programming:</p>
<p>First, Fowler writes as though he <em>didn&#8217;t know he was describing<br />
hacking</em>. In the passage, he appears unaware that design by<br />
repeated refactoring is not just a recent practice semi-accidentally<br />
stumbled on by a handful of agile programmers, but one which hundreds<br />
of thousands of hackers have accumulated experience with for over three<br />
decades and have in their bones. There is a substantial folklore, an<br />
entire craft practice, around this!</p>
<p>Second, in that passage Fowler described the practice of hacking<br />
<em>better than hackers themselves have done</em>. Now, admittedly,<br />
the hacker culture has simply not had that many theoreticians, and if<br />
you list the ones that are strongly focused on development methodology<br />
you lose Richard Stallman and are left with, basically, myself and<br />
maybe Larry Wall (author of Perl and occasional funny and illuminating<br />
ruminations on the art of hacking). But the fact that we don&#8217;t have a<br />
lot of theoreticians is itself an important datum; we have always<br />
tended to develop our most important wisdoms as unconscious and<br />
unarticulated craft practice.</p>
<p>These two observations imply an enormous mutual potential, a gap<br />
across which an arc of enlightenment may be beginning to blaze. It<br />
implies two things:</p>
<p>First, <em>people who are excited by agile-programming ideas can<br />
look to open source and the Unix tradition and the hackers for the<br />
lessons of experience</em>. We&#8217;ve been doing a lot of the stuff the<br />
agile movement is talking about for a <em>long</em> time. Doing it in a<br />
clumsy, unconscious, learned-by-osmosis way, but doing it<br />
nevertheless. I believe that we have learned things that you agile<br />
guys need to know to give your methodologies groundedness. Things<br />
like (as Fowler himself observes) how to manage communication and<br />
hierarchy issues in distributed teams.</p>
<p>Second, <em>open-source hackers can learn from agile programmers<br />
how to wake up</em>. The terminology and conceptual framework of<br />
agile programming sharpens and articulates our instincts. Learning to<br />
speak the language of open source, peer review, many eyeballs, and<br />
rapid iterations gave us a tremendous unifying boost in the late<br />
1990s; I think becoming similarly conscious about agile-movement ideas<br />
like refactoring, unit testing, and story-centered design could be<br />
just as important for us in the new century.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve already given an example of what the agile movement has to<br />
teach the hackers, in pointing out that repeated redesign by<br />
refactoring is a precise description of hacking. Another thing we can<br />
stand to learn from agile-movement folks is how to behave so that we<br />
can actually develop requirements and deliver on them when the<br />
customer isn&#8217;t, ultimately, ourselves.</p>
<p>For the flip side, consider Fowler&#8217;s anecdote on page 68-69, which<br />
ends &#8220;Even if you know exactly what is going on in your system,<br />
measure performance, don&#8217;t speculate. You&#8217;ll learn something, and<br />
nine times out of ten it won&#8217;t be that you were right.&#8221; The Unix guy<br />
in me wants to respond &#8220;Well, <em>duh!</em>&#8220;. In my tribe, profiling<br />
<em>before</em> you speculate is DNA; we have a strong tradition of<br />
this that goes back to the 1970s. From the point of view of any old<br />
Unix hand, the fact that Fowler thought he had to write this down is a<br />
sign of severe naivete in either Fowler or his readership or both.</p>
<p>In reading <cite>Refactoring</cite>, I several times had the<br />
experience of thinking &#8220;What!?! That&#8217;s obvious!&#8221; closely followed<br />
by &#8220;But Fowler explains it better than Unix traditions do&#8230;&#8221; This may<br />
be because he relies less on the very rich shared explanatory context<br />
that Unix provides.</p>
<p>How deep do the similarities run? Let&#8217;s take a look at what the<br />
Agile Manifesto says:</p>
<p><em>Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.</em> Yeah,<br />
that sounds like us, all right. Open-source developers will toss out<br />
a process that isn&#8217;t working in a nanosecond, and frequently do, and take<br />
gleeful delight in doing so. In fact, the reaction against heavyweight<br />
process has a key part of our self-identification as hackers for<br />
at least the last quarter century, if not longer.</p>
<p><em>Working software over comprehensive documentation.</em> That&#8217;s<br />
us, too. In fact, the radical hacker position is that source code of<br />
a working system <em>is</em> its documentation. We, more than any<br />
other culture of software engineering, emphasize program source code as<br />
human-to-human communication that is expected to bind together<br />
communities of cooperation and understanding distributed through time<br />
and space. In this, too, we build on and amplify Unix tradition.</p>
<p><em>Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.</em> In the<br />
open-source world, the line between &#8220;developer&#8221; and &#8220;customer&#8221; blurs<br />
and often disappears. Non-technical end users are represented by<br />
developers who are proxies for their interests&mdash;as when, for<br />
example, companies that run large websites second developers to<br />
work on Apache Software Foundation projects.</p>
<p><em>Responding to change over following a plan.</em> Absolutely.<br />
Our whole development style encourages this. It&#8217;s fairly unusual for<br />
any of our projects to <em>have</em> any plan more elaborate than &#8220;fix<br />
the current bugs and chase the next shiny thing we see&#8221;.</p>
<p>With these as main points, it&#8217;s hardly surprising that so many of<br />
the <a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html">Principles<br />
behind the Agile Manifesto</a> read like Unix-tradition and hacker<br />
gospel. &#8220;Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks<br />
to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.<br />
Well, yeah&mdash;we <em>pioneered</em> this. Or &#8220;Simplicity&mdash;the art of<br />
maximizing the amount of work not done&mdash;is essential.&#8221; That&#8217;s<br />
Unix-tradition holy writ, there. Or &#8220;The best architectures,<br />
requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.&#8221;</p>
<p>This is stone-obvious stuff to any hacker, and exactly the sort of<br />
subversive thinking that most panics managers attached to big plans,<br />
big budgets, big up-front design, and big rigid command-and-control<br />
structures. Which may, in fact, be a key part of its appeal to<br />
hackers and agile developers&mdash;because at least one thing that points<br />
agile-movement and open-source people in the same direction is a drive<br />
to take control of our art back from the suits and get out from under<br />
big dumb management.</p>
<p>The most important difference I see between the hackers and the<br />
agile-movement crowd is this: the hackers are the people who never<br />
surrendered to big dumb management &mdash; they either bailed out of the<br />
system or forted up in academia or industrial R&amp;D labs or<br />
technical-specialty areas where pointy-haired bosses weren&#8217;t permitted<br />
to do as much damage. The agile crowd, on the other hand, seems to be<br />
composed largely of people who were swallowed into the belly of the<br />
beast (waterfall-model projects, Windows, the entire conventional<br />
corporate-development hell so vividly described in Edward Yourdon&#8217;s<br />
books) and have been smart enough not just to claw their way out but<br />
to formulate an ideology to justify not getting sucked back in.</p>
<p>Both groups are in revolt against the same set of organizational<br />
assumptions. And both are winning because those assumptions are<br />
obsolete, yesterday&#8217;s adaptations to a world of expensive machines and<br />
expensive communications. But software development doesn&#8217;t need big<br />
concentrations of capital and resources anymore, and doesn&#8217;t need the<br />
control structures and hierarchies and secrecy and elaborate rituals<br />
that go with managing big capital concentrations either. In fact, in<br />
a world of rapid change, these things are nothing but a drag. Thus<br />
agile techniques. Thus, open source. Converging paths to the same<br />
destination, which is not just software that doesn&#8217;t suck but a<br />
software-development <em>process</em> that doesn&#8217;t suck.</p>
<p>When I think about how the tribal wisdom of the hackers and the<br />
sharp cut-the-bullshit insights of the agile movement seem to be<br />
coming together, my mind keeps circling back to Phil Greenspun&#8217;s brief<br />
but trenchant essay <a href="http://tinyplanet.ca/projects/professionalism.html">Redefining<br />
Professionalism for Software Engineers</a>. Greenspun proposes,<br />
provocatively but I think correctly, that the shift towards<br />
open-source development is a key part of the transformation of<br />
software engineering into a mature profession, with the dedication to<br />
excellence and ethos of service that accompanies professionalism. I<br />
have elsewhere suggested that we are seeing a close historical analog<br />
of the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Secrets leak out, but<br />
skill sustains; the necessity to stop relying on craft secrecy is one<br />
of the crises that occupational groups normally face as they attain<br />
professional standing.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m beginning to think that from the wreckage of the software<br />
industry big dumb management made, I can see the outline of a mature,<br />
<em>humane</em> discipline of software engineering emerging &mdash; and<br />
that it will be in large part a fusion of the responsiveness and<br />
customer focus of the agile movement with the wisdom and groundedness<br />
of the Unix tradition, expressed in open source.</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=105563829929887753">Blogspot<br />
comments</a></p>

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An Open Letter To Darl McBride
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Statism &mdash; Love It Or Leave It
<p>For many years I&#8217;ve been seeing proposals for implementing<br />
libertarian reforms that look superficially appealing and plausible,<br />
but on closer examination run hard aground either on some pesky<br />
reality of politics as it is or the extreme difficulty of waging a<br />
successful revolution. Since I&#8217;m a <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/libertarianism.html">libertarian</a>,<br />
you may well imagine that I find this annoying. How do we get there<br />
from here?</p>
<p>For the first time, I think I&#8217;ve seen a path that is both<br />
principled and practical. Not the whole path, but some firm steps<br />
that both accomplish good in themselves and open up great<br />
possibilities. And the best part is that it&#8217;s a path most statists<br />
can&#8217;t object to, one that uses the premises of the existing federal<br />
system to achieve a fair first test of libertarian ideas within that<br />
system. Even opponents of libertarianism, if they are fair-minded,<br />
should welcome this reality check. Libertarians should cheer it on<br />
and join it.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve had troubles with other libertarians recently. Too many have<br />
retreated into isolationism in the face of a war with terrorism that I<br />
do not believe we can or should evade. The isolationists judge that<br />
empowering the State when we use it as an instrument of self-defense<br />
has consequences for the long term that are more dangerous than<br />
terrorists&#8217; aims are in the short term. I sympathize with this view,<br />
but when all is said and done, Al-Qaeda shahids with backpack nukes<br />
from the &#8216;stans are more of a danger than John Ashcroft has ever been.<br />
I have done my homework and if anything, I believe the U.S. Government<br />
is <em>understating</em> the danger we face.</p>
<p>But the dangers of empowering the State to fight a necessary war<br />
make it more, not less urgent that we pursue all possibilities for<br />
libertarian reform at home. Now, I think I see a workable one. What<br />
if, by perfectly legal and proper means, we could take over a small<br />
American state and actually try out our ideas there?</p>
<p>Yes, I thought it was a crazy idea when I first heard it. An<br />
entire <em>state</em>? How? But the <a href='http://www.freestateproject.org/'>Free State Project</a> has<br />
done the math. I&#8217;ve looked at their arguments and trend curves, and<br />
I&#8217;m pretty much convinced. It can be done. We can do it. The<br />
key is very simple; enough of us just have to <em>move</em><br />
there. Vote with our feet, and then vote in a bloc. And why<br />
a state? Becausr that&#8217;s the only intermediate level of government<br />
with enough autonomy to make a good laboratory.</p>
<p>The Free State Project identified ten small states where 20,000<br />
active libertarians would be a critically large voting bloc. They are<br />
signing up libertarians and like-minded people to vote on the target<br />
state and to move there when the group passes 20,000. The winning<br />
state will be announced on 1st October; they&#8217;ve signed up about 5400<br />
people so far, on a classic exponential growth curve with a six-month<br />
doubling time that should get them there in late 2004.</p>
<p>What could be more American than migrating to a thinly-settled area<br />
to experiment with liberty? And this time we won&#8217;t have to kill off the<br />
natives, because they&#8217;re not going to be organizing any scalping parties.<br />
Most of the states under consideration have a strong local<br />
libertarian tradition, and none of them are going to look askance at<br />
the sort of bright, hardworking, highly-skilled people most likely to<br />
be pro-freedom activists.</p>
<p>Some people won&#8217;t like this idea, though. The national media<br />
establishment, which is statist down to its bones even in the few<br />
crevices where it isn&#8217;t leftist, will inevitably try to portray the<br />
Free State migrants as a bunch of racist conservative redneck gun-nuts<br />
(all these terms being effectively synonymous in the national media)<br />
intent on turning the poor victim state into one gigantic Aryan<br />
Nations compound (especially if it&#8217;s Idaho, as it could be). Expect<br />
network-news interviews with locals teary-eyed with worry that the<br />
incomers will be hosting regular cross-burnings on the courthouse<br />
lawn. Awkward little inconsistencies like the libertarian opposition<br />
to drug laws, censorship, and theocracy will be ignored. This prospect<br />
is especially ironic because, in most of the possible target states,<br />
it is our lifestyle liberalism that is actually most likely to produce<br />
a culture clash with the natives.</p>
<p>The more intelligent members of the political class won&#8217;t like this<br />
either. The brighter and better-able one is to extrapolate<br />
second-and-third-order effects, the more likely the potential success<br />
of libertarianism at a state level is likely to scare them &mdash;<br />
conservatives nearly as much as liberals, and conservatives perhaps<br />
more so when we challenge them to emulate our success with<br />
small-government policies that they speak but don&#8217;t really mean.</p>
<p>But I don&#8217;t think this will be easy to stop. Libertarian<br />
demographics being what they are, 20,000 of us in a small state will<br />
be a <em>huge</em> concentration of technical, creative and<br />
entrepreneurial talent. We&#8217;ll found software businesses, studios,<br />
innovative light-manufacturing shops and engineering companies<br />
by the bucketload. We&#8217;ll create favorable regulatory conditions<br />
for old-line businesses like financial-services houses and for<br />
bleeding-edge ones like the private space-launch industry.<br />
We&#8217;ll attract more people like us. The lucky state, especially<br />
if it&#8217;s depressed and mostly rural like a lot of the candidates, will<br />
experience a renaissance. And we&#8217;ll get to make the difference.</p>
<p>The real fun will start when Americans elsewhere start asking &#8220;Why<br />
can&#8217;t <em>our</em> state be more like this?&#8221;</p>
<p>Liberty in our lifetime? I think this might be how to get there.</p>
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If Guns Are Outlawed, Outlaws Will Use Crossbows
<p><a href='http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/6862693.htm'>This</a><br />
happened about 15 minutes from where I live:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Police in West Chester are looking for an assailant they believe used<br />
a crossbow to shoot a pedestrian from a passing SUV.</p>
<p>The victim, a restaurant worker who was walking home along High<br />
Street early Sunday morning, was shot in the stomach with a 16-inch<br />
hunting arrow. He was released Wednesday from the University of<br />
Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.</p>
<p>Benito Vargas told police he was at the corner of High and Barnard<br />
Streets at about 1 a.m. when he saw the white SUV&#8217;s driver-side window<br />
slide down, revealing the front part a crossbow just inside. Seconds<br />
later, he was lying on the ground.</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>&#8220;This thing would be silent. You wouldn&#8217;t hear any noise,&#8221; West<br />
Chester Detective Thomas Yarnall said. [...] Yarnall said the<br />
shooting appeared random [...]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gives a whole old meaning to the phrase &#8220;looking for a quarrel&#8221;,<br />
which in fact, originally referred to a crossbow bolt.</p>
<p>UPDATE:(Well, maybe. Some etymologists think the noun quarrel and verb quarrel have<br />
separate origins.)</p>
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No Flies On The U.S.
<p>In his recent article <a href='http://andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20030906'>Flypaper:<br />
A Strategy Unfolds</a>, Andrew Sullivan trots out some confirming<br />
evidence for the theory that the U.S. is pursuing a &ldquo;flypaper<br />
strategy&rdquo; in Iraq &mdash; encouraging the Islamist terror<br />
network to fight American soldiers there so they won&#8217;t be attacking<br />
American civilians here.</p>
<p>Mr. Sullivan&#8217;s analysis is plausible. Plausible enough that my reaction<br />
to the article, especially the last paragraph in which he urges Bush to<br />
articulate the strategy as a way of scoring domestic political points. was:<br />
&ldquo;OK, you&#8217;ve demonstrated your cleverness. Now would you kindly<br />
zip your lip before you undermine the strategy?&rdquo;</p>
<p>The leaders of the Islamist terror network are certainly evil and<br />
arguably insane (if only in the general way that all religious<br />
believers are insane) but they&#8217;re not <em>stupid</em>. If the<br />
President of the United States got on network T.V. and yelled<br />
&ldquo;We have a flypaper strategy! We&#8217;re encouraging all the world&#8217;s<br />
nut-jobs to attack us in Iraq so they won&#8217;t attack us in the<br />
U.S.&rdquo;, just what do you suppose would be the result?</p>
<p>Would our favorite murderous ragheads nod agreeably, say<br />
&ldquo;Peachy, we&#8217;ll play your game and keep attacking you where you<br />
think you&#8217;re strongest?&rdquo; Or would they bend all their efforts<br />
to ginning up another mass-murder in the U.S. just to prove they can<br />
do it and the flypaper isn&#8217;t working?</p>
<p>For anyone to talk about a flypaper strategy in public is<br />
irresponsible. For Sullivan to urge that Bush should cop to it in<br />
public in order to one-up his domestic opponents is beyond<br />
irresponsible into idiotic and feckless. The President of the<br />
U.S. would be profoundly derelict in his duty if he courted lethal<br />
danger to American civilians by doing any such thing.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m normally a fan of Andrew Sullivan. His writing is witty if<br />
occasionally a bit febrile, and he is clear-eyed on a handful of<br />
subjects that normally induce rectocranial inversion in conservatives.<br />
But today he should be ashamed of himself. He has engaged in the<br />
exact same error he has excoriated in others, which is treating<br />
the rest of the world as a mere backdrop to domestic American<br />
political feuds.</p>
<p>And I have some advice for him: Mr. Sullivan, next time you feel<br />
the urge to be clever in public, do us all a favor and ask yourself<br />
how many innocent lives you might be endangering by running your<br />
mouth. If the answer is more than zero, <b>shut up!</b></p>
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Nuke &#8216;em for Christ
<p>Pat Robertson, the same paragon of Christian virtue who has opined<br />
in the past that Wiccans like me should be burned alive the way they<br />
used to in the good old days, just created an interesting dilemma for<br />
me by suggesting that the <a href='http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&#038;cid=1521&#038;u=/afp/20031009/pl_afp/us_diplomacy_threat_031009192152&#038;printer=1'>State<br />
Department should be nuked</a>.</p>
<p>As a pagan anarchist, I&#8217;m completely uninterested in being<br />
considered a paragon of Christian virtue. So I can admit to feeling a<br />
sneaking sympathy with Robertson&#8217;s modest proposal. I mean, it<br />
wouldn&#8217;t just be nuking the government, it would be nuking one of the<br />
more repulsive parts of same. The BATF and DEA are certainly a<br />
greater threat to liberty and happiness, but watching the Foggy Bottom<br />
crowd compete to see who can pander most abjectly to &#8220;international<br />
opinion&#8221; and a succession of enemies from the old Soviet Union to the<br />
France of today has been pretty nauseating.</p>
<p>But no. I have my own standards of virtue, and they don&#8217;t quite<br />
stretch to vaporizing Foggy Bottom. Innocents (that is, persons who<br />
are not causally implicated in the government&#8217;s normal practices of<br />
coercion and fraud) could be harmed. Cleaning staff, visiting<br />
children, that sort of thing. Shocking bad form to whack them, don&#8217;t<br />
you know.</p>
<p>Now. Seriously. I&#8217;ve taken some flak in the past for implying that<br />
Christianity is just as vile and violence-prone a religion as Islam.<br />
Pat Robertson has made this point for me before and doubtless will again.<br />
Because, like Osama bin Laden, he <em>really believes</em>. He pays<br />
attention to all the bits of the Bible and doctrine and history that<br />
most so-called &lsquo;Christians&rsquo; edit out &mdash; a maneuver that<br />
makes them better human beings, but worse Christians.</p>
<p>Christianity is sold as a &#8220;religion of love&#8221; but that is just as<br />
bogus as calling Islam a &#8220;religion of peace&#8221;. What is far more<br />
important and fundamental to both is eschatological dualism, which<br />
Islam inherited through Mohammed&#8217;s roots in Monophysite Christianity.<br />
(What? You didn&#8217;t know that Islam started life as a mildly schismatic<br />
Christian sect? Yes, it&#8217;s true.)</p>
<p>&#8220;Eschatological dualism&#8221; is fancy theologist-speak for the belief<br />
that history consists of a titanic struggle between God and the Devil,<br />
which will culminate at the end of time with a great sorting out &mdash; godly<br />
obedient people to Heaven, sinners to Hell. Eschatological dualism<br />
is the root of the &#8220;Kill them all, God will know his own&#8221; attitude that<br />
has always been rather more characteristic of both religions than &#8220;peace&#8221;<br />
or &#8220;love&#8221;. Pat and Osama, brothers under the skin, are squarely in that<br />
grand old tradition.</p>
<p>Christianity, fortunately for all of us, has become quite decadent<br />
and weak these last 400 years or so &mdash; Robertson merely dreams of<br />
smiting the Devil&#8217;s minions with Godly fire, rather than actually<br />
incinerating 3000 people on a fine autumn morning. But it may take<br />
another 400 before Christianity withers away sufficiently that my<br />
descendants need not fear being burned at the stake by a charismatic<br />
looney-tune like Robertson. Islam, 600 years younger, will probably<br />
remain deadly for rather longer.</p>
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Mohammed was a Christian
<p>In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life<br />
as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone<br />
called for sources. Here is what I know about this:</p>
<p>(First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian<br />
nor a Moslem, and in fact consider those two religions #3 and #4 in<br />
the Most Toxic Ideologies Of All Time sweepstakes, after Communism and<br />
Naziism. I have therefore studied the history of Christianity and<br />
Islam fairly closely, basically on the know-your-enemies principle.)</p>
<p>There is a scholar somewhere in Germany using the alias Christoph<br />
Luxenberg. He has published a book called <cite>Die syro-aramaeische<br />
Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschl&uuml;sselung der<br />
Qur&auml;nsprache</cite>. He uses a pseudonym because he thinks many<br />
Moslems will want to kill him when they find out about it. In this<br />
he is undoubtedly correct.</p>
<p>What Luxenberg has done is applied the same methods of philology<br />
and linguistics to the Qur&#8217;an that were applied to the Christian Bible<br />
beginning in the mid-19th century. I have not read the book itself as<br />
I have no German, but when I read several summaries of its conclusions<br />
I was struck by the sense they made of some odd facts I had picked up<br />
over the years. Such as the datum that there is a Christian monastery<br />
in the Sinai which received a special immunity, apparently from<br />
Mohammed himself, under terms its abbots have kept mum about for 1400<br />
years. And the curious resemblance (you have to have read both the<br />
Qur&#8217;an and some odd Christian sources to notice, but I have) between<br />
the rhetoric of the Qur&#8217;an and that of a now-forgotten group of<br />
Christian &#8216;heretics&#8217; called Monophysites who were particularly strong<br />
in the Syria and Arabia of Mohammed&#8217;s time. And the fact that early<br />
Muslims knelt to pray towards Jerusalem, not Mecca.</p>
<p>You can read <a href='http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No1/HV6N1PRPhenixHorn.html'>this<br />
scholarly review</a> for more. Another discussion, which was written<br />
before Luxenberg but is particularly telling on the evidence that Islam<br />
did not emerge as a separate faith until well after Mohammed&#8217;s death,<br />
is <a href='http://www.atheists.org/Islam/mohammedanism.html'>at this<br />
atheist site</a>. I&#8217;ll give you a summary of the high points, some of<br />
which the reviewers (though not the atheists) tiptoe around.</p>
<p>Islam, the Qur&#8217;an, and classical Arabic all formed in a<br />
cosmopolitan culture of Syrio-Aramaic-speaking Arabs. The religious<br />
tradition that went with that language was Christian; in fact, the<br />
very word &#8220;Qur&#8217;an&#8221; probably derived from &#8220;queryana&#8221;, a Syrio-Aramaic<br />
term for a kind of Christian liturgical text. The variant spelling<br />
&#8220;qur&#8217;an&#8221; for that word is attested.</p>
<p>Mohammed was probably a Christian of a Nestorian or Monophysite<br />
stripe, and the Qur&#8217;an originally intended as a commentary or gloss on<br />
the Syriac recension of the Christian Bible. The surah or section of<br />
the Qur&#8217;an that Moslems believe is the oldest contains an exhortation<br />
to take the Christian Eucharist.</p>
<p>In fact, it is almost certain that the concept of an Islamic<br />
identity separate from Syriac Christianity did not develop in<br />
Mohammed&#8217;s lifetime; there are hints that it was a political creation<br />
of the Caliphate, constructed soon after Mohammed&#8217;s death by the<br />
Caliph &#8216;Othman. Notably, he had burned all recensions of the sayings<br />
of Mohammed other than the one prepared under his control.</p>
<p>Many textual difficulties in the Qur&#8217;an vanish once it is realized<br />
that a lot of the words in it are fossilized Aramaic. Luxenberg<br />
wanders deep into technical philology here and you have to know a lot<br />
of details about early Semitic writing systems, including the fact<br />
that they didn&#8217;t record vowels. (I know enough to smell that<br />
Luxenberg has a hell of a strong case.) But the upshot is that you<br />
can go to Syrio-Aramaic vocabularies and extract clear readings from<br />
many passages that are maddeningly obscure if you&#8217;re running under the<br />
assumption that they are written in the vocabulary of later<br />
Arabic.</p>
<p>Remember the brief rash of news stories about &#8220;72 virgins&#8221; actually<br />
meaning &#8220;72 white grapes&#8221;? That was Luxenberg reading the Qur&#8217;an in<br />
its original Syrio-Aramaic-derived vocabulary.</p>
<p>Islamic scholars of the Qur&#8217;an lost the knowledge of the Qur&#8217;an&#8217;s<br />
Aramaic origins shortly after &#8216;Othman&#8217;s book-burning. There are hints<br />
of it in the oldest hadith (traditional saying of Mohammed) but the<br />
hints don&#8217;t make any sense until you do the philology, at which point<br />
they snap into focus and startle the crap out of you. The traditional<br />
Islamic accounts of the Qur&#8217;an&#8217;s origins are are best confused, and at<br />
worst pure inventions of the Umaiyyad propaganda machine that was<br />
busily turning Mohammed&#8217;s reform of Syriac Christianity into a new<br />
religion as the basis for empire</p>
<p>One entertaining detail I didn&#8217;t discover until I did my<br />
fact-checking for this essay is that Catholic theologians have been<br />
claiming Mohammed was a renegade Nestorian, or something like, for<br />
about a thousand years. It also turns out that there are<br />
scholar-priests in odd corners of the Christian world (notably among<br />
Maronites in Lebanon) who had pieces of Luxenberg&#8217;s exegesis all<br />
along, but lacked the philological training to put them together.<br />
Now it turns out they were right. Who knew?</p>
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Toxic Christianity, round two
<p>In the October 15th <a href='http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/'>Best of the Web</a>, James<br />
Taranto asks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So let&#8217;s see if we have this straight: The head of the Anglican<br />
Church is telling us that the wanton murder of thousands of innocent<br />
people [by Palestinian terrorists] is a sign of &#8220;serious moral goals,&#8221;<br />
while the liberation of millions [of Iraqis] from one of the world&#8217;s<br />
most vicious dictatorships is, as he has put it, &#8220;immoral and<br />
illegal.&#8221;</p>
<p>Is this really what Christianity is all about?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, since you asked&#8230;yes, indeed it is.</p>
<p>To understand why, you first have to confront what Dr. Rowan<br />
Williams is actually doing. He is aligning himself with Islamic<br />
terrorists against individual Christians and against the liberation of<br />
Iraq from an Islamizing dictator by a predominantly Christian<br />
nation.</p>
<p>Now, why would the head of the second most prestigious of all<br />
Christian denominations do that? What is it in Christianity that<br />
could make him so confident in the morality of this position? What is<br />
it about the U.S.&#8217;s actions that make it so threatening?</p>
<p>A clue to the problem is that though the U.S. is demographically a<br />
mostly Christian nation, the effect of U.S. cultural hegemony is a<br />
secularizing one. American popular culture severs the bonds of fear<br />
and ignorance that hold people unquestioningly to their ancestral<br />
relgions. The American vision of each individual as an autonomous<br />
being who derives his rights from his humanness, from the simple fact<br />
of his capacity to assert them, is deadly antithetical to any<br />
religious tradition that vests moral authority in a transcendant<br />
God.</p>
<p>The Founding Fathers of the U.S. understood this antipathy full<br />
well. The pro-forma nods towards the distant god of the Deists in the<br />
Declaration of Independence and U.S. Consitution failed to conceal the<br />
fact that the Founding Fathers were freethinkers, agnostics and<br />
atheists almost to a man. As George Washington and John Adams<br />
explained to the Knights of Malta in 1787 &#8220;The United States is in no<br />
way founded upon the Christian religion&#8221;. It could not have been so<br />
founded without a fatal conflict with its aspiration to be a nation of<br />
freedom.</p>
<p>The Archbishop of Canterbury cannot be dismissed as a fringe figure<br />
as some are (incorrectly) wont to do of Pat Robertson. His enmity<br />
towards the U.S.&#8217;s anti-terror strategy, his willingness to line up<br />
with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden after no more than a pro-forma<br />
disclaimer of terrorist means, proceeds directly from this fundamental<br />
conflict. It is diagnostic of a deep sickness, an abiding evil in the<br />
heart of Christianity itself &mdash; the exaltation of obedience, the<br />
denial that humans can have any worth other than through the<br />
condescension of God.</p>
<p>Nietzsche called this one correctly. Christianity, which purports<br />
to be the religion of love, is only sporadically anything of the kind.<br />
It is primarily a religion of slavery and submission. Christian<br />
individualism, when it exists at all, is legitimized only by obedience<br />
to God. In a Christian worldview there is always someone to be<br />
obeyed, whether visible cleric or invisible Nobodaddy. You must<br />
submit; the only argument is about to whom your obedience is owed, and<br />
what humans under what circumstances may transmit the orders of God.<br />
Without that sinew of obedience the entire world-view<br />
disintegrates.</p>
<p>To a Christian cleric, a properly terrified and obedient Muslim is<br />
less of a threat than a person who has rejected the God of the<br />
Abrahamic faiths. The Muslim is still within the system of<br />
submission. Only a handful of symbols separate him from the Christian;<br />
the basic program is the same. Therefore, from the point of view of<br />
the operators of the religious obedience machine that is Anglicanism<br />
(or almost any other Christian denomination) Osama bin Laden is a more<br />
natural ally than any freethinker.</p>
<p>Am I accusing Dr. Rowan Williams of being part of a conscious<br />
totalitarian conspiracy? No; he is something far more dangerous<br />
&mdash; a leading figure in an <em>unconscious</em> totalitarian<br />
conspiracy, one which denies its own nature just effectively enough to<br />
fool others as well. That conspiracy encompasses every tyrant<br />
who has ever told human beings that their path to happiness lay<br />
in the exaltation of some authority, whether God or the State.</p>
<p>It is in this context that Dr. Williams&#8217;s statement makes perfect<br />
and consistent sense. For him, better a thousand terrorist acts than<br />
even one human being waking up to discover that he need not after all<br />
fear the wrath of God.</p>
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Planets of Adventure
<p>Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire<br />
Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of<br />
some of the best stories of Murray Leinster &mdash; a writer once counted<br />
among science-fiction&#8217;s reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten.</p>
<p>I come away from <cite>Planets of Adventure</cite> (pb, Baen 2002,<br />
ISBN 0-7434-7162-8) with a renewed appreciation of something I have<br />
long known. When John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein invented modern<br />
SF after 1938, Campbell perforce had to train a new crop of writers to<br />
produce it. Very few writers with established careers were able to<br />
meet Campbell&#8217;s standards.</p>
<p>Murray Leinster (born Wil F. Jenkins) was one of a very few<br />
exceptions &mdash; and one of only two (with Jack Williamson) who<br />
actually managed to produce better work after Campbell than before<br />
him, rather than merely imitating previous pulp successes on a grander<br />
scale (as did, for example, the now-unreadable Edmond Hamilton and the<br />
still-enjoyable E.E. &#8220;Doc&#8221; Smith).</p>
<p>For this alone Leinster deserves more attention from the historians<br />
and critics of SF than he usually gets. I, personally, was ready to<br />
rediscover him because I had fond childhood memories of reading his work<br />
from the 1950s and early 1960s when it was not too difficult to find<br />
in the used bookstores of ten years later.</p>
<p>One of my sentimental favorites was the <cite>Med Service</cite><br />
series, tales of a doctor making interstellar house calls to solve<br />
ingeniously constructed medical puzzles. I was delighted when Baen<br />
Books printed a Med Service omnibus a few months ago &mdash; but it is<br />
after reading <cite>Planets of Adventure</cite> that I am truly<br />
impressed with Leinster&#8217;s achievement.</p>
<p>The first story, <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite> is a fixup<br />
novel assembled from three novellas, published respectively in 1920,<br />
1921, and 1953. The rest of the stories were published in the decade<br />
after 1947, the last quite coincidentally in the year I was born. In these<br />
stories we get a fine view in miniature both of SF&#8217;s pre-Campbellian past<br />
and the most fertile period of the Campbellian Golden Age.</p>
<p>The first section of <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite>, written<br />
in 1920, is deeply primitive. It&#8217;s a dark thalamic adventure of<br />
regressed humans battling lethal fungi and giant insects in a fetid<br />
alien ecology. The only touches we can recognize as SFnal are a<br />
framing story Leinster added after the fact, in the early 1950s, which<br />
make the humands descendents of a crashed starliner &mdash; in <a href='http://wondersmith.com/scifi/madplan.htm'>origin</a>, the story<br />
had been set on a far-future Earth. One feature of the original<br />
repays notice; Leinster referred to climate change via a<br />
carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. In<br />
1920!</p>
<p>The end of <cite>The Forgotten Planet</cite>, as rewritten at<br />
the beginning of the 1950s, reads very differently. The stranded<br />
primitives, having struggled up on their own to barbarian status, are<br />
accidentally rediscovered by interstellar civilization. This is not<br />
merely a different story than Leinster had begun to write thirty<br />
years earlier, it is written in a profoundly different way, suffused<br />
with plucky optimism and cool efficiency. The protagonist, Burl,<br />
began the action as a a Joseph-Campbellian mythic hero; he ends<br />
it as the archetype of the John-Campbellian competent man, bestriding<br />
both his own world and that of his advanced galactic kindred with an<br />
ease that disconcerts the latter.</p>
<p>In the next section, <cite>The Planet Explorer</cite>, Leinster<br />
demonstrates a flawless command of the Campbellian idiom. These<br />
stories, written in 1955-56, are classic planetary-puzzle pieces of<br />
the sort that filled the pages of <cite>Astounding</cite> magazine.<br />
The protagonist solves life-threatening problems posed by conditions<br />
on alien worlds. These were intelligent stories when they were<br />
written and they&#8217;re still intelligent today. One of them won a Hugo<br />
in 1956. Aside from a slight stiffness in the language, they read<br />
remarkably well.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re in for another surprise. The next story,<br />
<cite>Anthropological Note</cite>, dates from 1957. In it, Leinster<br />
captures perfectly the tone and style of the first post-Campbellian<br />
wave in SF, the social-science SF of the mid-to-late 1950s and<br />
pre-New-Wave 1960s. Truly this story could have been written by Fred<br />
Pohl or C.M. Kornbluth. The wry tone, the anthropologizing, and the<br />
not-so-subtle satirical edge are all there.</p>
<p>The story following that, <cite>Scrimshaw</cite>, is a creepy and<br />
dark little mood piece that manages to anticipate the New Wave of the<br />
mid-1960s by ten years. The rest of the anthology (<cite>Assignment<br />
on Pasik</cite>, <cite>Regulations</cite> and <cite>The Skit-Tree<br />
Planet</cite>) is mostly filler, workmanlike enough stuff from the<br />
late 1940s obviously written to pay bills. These stories are still<br />
readable, but of no special interest other than as a demonstration of<br />
consistent competence.</p>
<p>And there you have it. In these stories Leinster manages, with so<br />
little effort that you won&#8217;t be aware of it unless you&#8217;re looking, to<br />
span four eras of SF and meet all their demands with unobtrusive<br />
efficiency. I am unable to think of anyone else in the history of the<br />
field who can quite match that.</p>
<p> This observation is more interesting because Leinster was<br />
essentially a hack writer. Besides the SF, he churned out reams of<br />
pulp fiction &#8212; formulaic Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories,<br />
jungle adventures &mdash; during a career that begain in 1917 and<br />
ended only with his death in 1975. It appears that the last thing he<br />
wrote was a <cite>Perry Rhodan</cite> novel which I have not read but<br />
which almost certainly stank to high heaven.</p>
<p>His SF, though, was not mere hack-work, or at least not<br />
<em>usually</em> mere hack-work. He was a genuine innovator in the<br />
form who invented the parallel-world story in 1934 and the<br />
first-contact story in 1945. It is impossible to read Leinster<br />
without sensing that to him, constructing Campbellian puzzle stories<br />
was a delight, and probably the closest approach to art for art&#8217;s sake<br />
that he ever allowed himself. Certainly in <cite>Exploration<br />
Team</cite>, the story that won him the 1956 Hugo, one gets the sense<br />
that Leinster is using the story to think through some issues that are<br />
important to him &mdash; and they are not trivial issues, even<br />
today.</p>
<p>But for all that he helped invent some of SF&#8217;s central tropes,<br />
Leinster never quite became an SF writer of the first rank. He was a<br />
solid midlist presence &mdash; the comparisons that leap to mind are<br />
his rough contemporaries James Schmitz and Ross Rocklynne. His novels<br />
tended to be uninspired; his best work (including the genre-defining<br />
<cite>First Contact</cite> and the hilarious and rather prescient<br />
<cite>A Logic Named Joe</cite>) was in short-story form.</p>
<p>What Murray Leinster does show us is that SF was as liberating for him as<br />
for his readers &mdash; that even a hack writer could take from SF the<br />
challenge and the invitation to be intelligent, and give back<br />
something a bit better than he might have written otherwise. I never<br />
got to ask him, but I strongly suspect that Wil F. Jenkins would be<br />
prefer to be remembered for the SF more than for anything else he<br />
wrote.</p>
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Hey, DLC, Rethinking Is Not Enough
<p>The Democratic Party is getting hip to the fact that <a href='http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031016-104703-1418r.htm'>advocating gun bans loses them elections</a>. Way to go, Dems! For a crowd widely touted in the media as the best and brightest, it has taken you far too long to wake up.</p>
<p>But there is still a weird feeling of unreality about the exercise. It seems to be mostly about spin rather than substance, mostly about making people believe that Democrats have reformed on this issue without actual reform.</p>
<p>Various bloggers have waxed acidulous about this, but nobody has stepped up and said, explicitly, what the Democrats&#8217; problem is and how to fix it. So. DLC honchos, you talk about being reality therapy for the rest of the party. Here is reality.</p>
<p>I am one of the independent, swing voters that could have won you the 2000 election. I do not consider myself a conservative, nor do I vote the Republican ticket.</p>
<p>I believe that the Founding Fathers of the United States bequeathed to me as a member of the unincorporated militia (that is, all citizens capable of bearing arms) the responsibility to remain armed and vigilant against both foreign enemies of my nation and domestic tyrants.</p>
<p>I am one of the people who will almost never vote for a Democrat, because I believe the Democratic Party wants to trash the Second Amendment, confiscate my guns, and destroy the balance of power between citizens and government that was intended by the framers of the Constitution.</p>
<p>I do not really trust either major political party on this issue, but whereas Republicans have less than sterling credibility, Democrats have <em>negative</em> credibility. That is, experience strongly suggests that when Democrats are quiet about firearms policy, they are concealing an anti-gun rather than a pro-gun agenda. Their silence is a lie.</p>
<p>Democratic pollster Mark Penn says &#8220;The formula for Democrats is to say that they support the Second Amendment, but that they want tough laws that close loopholes&#8221;. Be aware that I will interpret any Democrat talking about &#8220;tough laws that close loopholes&#8221; as an anti-gun agenda being pursued by stealth and deception.</p>
<p>If the Democrats want my vote, it is not sufficient for the Democratic merely to refrain from pushing more firearms restrictions. The Democratic leadership must explicitly recognize the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual right, explicitly repudiate the gun-grabbers in their ranks, and make the <em>abolition</em> of firearms restrictions part of their formal agenda.</p>
<p>Negative credibility means you have a ways to go before you can even get to zero. Want my vote, and that of millions of independent gun owners like me? Start earning it with pro-gun action, not just talk&#8230;because if you don&#8217;t, those millions of independents will have no realistic option but the Republicans, and the already serious decline of the national Democratic party may well become terminal.</p>
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Why Howard Dean Won&#8217;t Get My Vote
<p>After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to<br />
walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving<br />
independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean<br />
&mdash; who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.</p>
<p>OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun. In this, and in other<br />
ways, he&#8217;s sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But<br />
it is almost certain I will not vote for him. Because the next<br />
President of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the<br />
threat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.</p>
<p>Note that I am not saying the next president must have George<br />
Bush&#8217;s strategic vision &mdash; and don&#8217;t bother with the<br />
Bush-is-an-idiot, it&#8217;s-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely<br />
outsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude<br />
themselves that he&#8217;s a moron, it will be easier for him to continue<br />
doing so. But there must be <em>some</em> strategic vision, some<br />
sense of <em>realpolitik</em>. Dean ain&#8217;t got it.</p>
<p>In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls<br />
appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities,<br />
with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman. And supposing there<br />
were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it<br />
through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.</p>
<p>And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by<br />
interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is<br />
today&#8217;s loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the<br />
anti-globalization crowd &mdash; what conservatives call with some<br />
justification the Blame-America-First brigades. Expecting anything<br />
but toxic babble from these people was always doomed. No, the trouble<br />
is that the Democratic interest groups that <em>aren&#8217;t</em> outright<br />
insane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of<br />
how to do politics.</p>
<p>How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the<br />
racial-problem industry cope? For these groups, politics is all about<br />
identity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the<br />
next round of redistributing the domestic wealth &mdash; they&#8217;ve<br />
actually lost the very *concept* of the &#8216;national interest&#8217;, and are no<br />
more capable of grappling with the implications of 9/11 than they<br />
would be of speaking Sumerian.</p>
<p>Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic<br />
Party &mdash; trial lawyers and the public-employee unions. (Forget<br />
labor in general. The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO<br />
about a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector<br />
unions could no longer keep most of their people from voting<br />
Republican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political<br />
game gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.</p>
<p>The Republicans don&#8217;t have this problem. All of their major<br />
factions have commitments that don&#8217;t stop at the water&#8217;s edge. The<br />
so-called &#8220;national-greatness conservatives&#8221;, the ideological<br />
free-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even<br />
the Buchananite isolationalists &mdash; they may disagree violently on<br />
what the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their<br />
normal discourse about politics where they know that concept<br />
<em>fits</em>.</p>
<p>Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups &mdash; which means<br />
that the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are<br />
being set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger<br />
colleagues call &#8220;barking idiotarian moonbats&#8221; are the only ones in the<br />
Democratic Party who actually <em>care</em>! They&#8217;re the only Democrats<br />
with a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world<br />
as anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.</p>
<p>(I&#8217;m actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians<br />
suck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following<br />
&#8220;international opinion&#8221; relieves them of the intolerable burden of<br />
having to think about foreign policy.)</p>
<p>Thus, Dean. Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to<br />
do is ignore foreign-policy issues &mdash; but the only way he&#8217;s found<br />
to mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries<br />
is to bark like a moonbat.</p>
<p>That won&#8217;t get my vote.</p>
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Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats
<p>Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a<br />
denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of<br />
comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia &mdash; and<br />
<em>I wasn&#8217;t a target</em>.</p>
<p>I&#8217;d ask what I&#8217;ve been doing wrong with my life that I missed out<br />
on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama&#8217;s fuckwit brigade.<br />
But alas, I know full well wherein I failed. This is what I get for<br />
going on hiatus for months to finish my book and put multiple spokes<br />
in the wheels of SCO. I didn&#8217;t maintain the momentum I had in<br />
2002/early-2003, and fell off the moonbats&#8217; radar.</p>
<p>To all of you who were targeted &#8212; Internet Hagannah, InstaPundit,<br />
Steve denBeste, Charles Johnson, and others: you have my respect and<br />
my thanks for what you do every day. The war against terror is a war<br />
of ideas as well as bullets. You do great service by unflinchingly<br />
exposing the lies of the terror network and its apologists in the<br />
West. The Malaysian Moonbats, in recognizing this, have paid you<br />
greater tribute than I can.</p>
<p>Hmmm. Maybe I ought to update the <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/aim/">Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto</a>.<br />
Think that&#8217;d piss &#8216;em off enough that they&#8217;s try to DDOS me?</p>
<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=106678580001235760">Blogspot comments</a></p>

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Stupid Like A Fox
<p>For the kind of articulate extrovert who tends to go into politics or the<br />
media, it can be very difficult to believe that a stumble-tongued,<br />
inarticulate man can be other than an idiot. As an articulate extrovert<br />
myself, I&#8217;ve had to struggle with this. Like most of our media and<br />
chattering classes, my instinct too was to write George W. Bush as an<br />
idiot who had stumbled into the Presidency through no merit of his own.</p>
<p>Events have forced me to nearly the opposite conclusion. George W. Bush<br />
is no idiot. In fact, he now appears to me to be an extremely cunning man<br />
who makes repeated and effective use of his opponents&#8217; inability to take<br />
him seriously.</p>
<p>Over and over again we&#8217;ve seen the pattern. Bush says he&#8217;s gaing<br />
to do something. Opponents rant and rave and scream about what an<br />
idiot he is. Amidst all the name-calling, an effective opposition<br />
fails to materialize. When the smoke clears, events unfold pretty<br />
much according to the Bush script.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s pretty much been that way on every issue bigger than judicial<br />
nominations. Now, mind you, in this essay I&#8217;m not going to express<br />
or even imply a judgment about whether or <em>should</em> be that way.<br />
What I&#8217;m trying to point out is that even the U.N. has pretty much<br />
ended up dancing Bush&#8217;s tune. All of the Franco/German/Russian talk<br />
of thwarting that mad cowboy has come to this in the end: U.S, troops<br />
in control of Iraq, Saddam gone, and the U.N. formally committed by<br />
resolution to support the U.S. reconstruction without either a timeline<br />
or any U.N. authority over Iraq.</p>
<p>Once or twice could be luck. But Bush <em>keeps doing this</em>.<br />
He is such an effective political operator that his opponents find<br />
that their ability to block him has quietly vanished while they<br />
weren&#8217;t looking. The pathological rage now endemic in Democratic<br />
circles is fueled by impotence. They know they were suckered,<br />
swindled, <em>had</em> somehow, but they can&#8217;t pin down why or how the<br />
majority voters stopped listening. Bad enough to have Reagan pound<br />
the crap out of them &mdash; they thought he was an idiot too, but at<br />
least they could console themselves that he was a <em>glib</em> idiot.<br />
Being shellacked by a Republican who sounds like a moron behind a<br />
microphone is more than their blood pressure can take.</p>
<p>Well, Democrats, I&#8217;ve got news for you. Bush is using your rage to<br />
make <em>you</em> into idiots. I think, early in his political<br />
career, he somehow learned how to push this button reliably, and has<br />
been sucker-punching his opponents ever since. Clever of him &mdash;<br />
but then, as I belatedly realized when I was thinking this through. he<br />
<em>has</em> to be brighter than he looks. The dude flew fighter<br />
planes! Simpletons can&#8217;t do that; the Air Force screens pilots for<br />
intelligence because it <em>has</em> to.</p>
<p>Want to stop Bush? Then, Mr. J. Random Democrat, call Dubya evil if<br />
you want &mdash; but accept that, on his record, he is pretty damn<br />
bright. Stop screaming, take his brains seriously, and outsmart him.<br />
That is, if you can.</p>
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Call them Werewolves
<p>The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and<br />
terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It&#8217;s time for a bit<br />
of meme-hacking. Let&#8217;s see if we can displace terms like &#8220;insurgent&#8221;<br />
or &#8220;Saddam loyalist&#8221; with one that conveys the true depth of evil we<br />
are facing. I have a candidate to propose.</p>
<p>A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to<br />
war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator &mdash; Adolf<br />
Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized<br />
a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla<br />
warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and<br />
tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are <a href='http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1373/10_50/66157021/p1/article.jhtml'>very<br />
close</a>.</p>
<p>It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein&#8217;s autobiography that<br />
he admired Hitler&#8217;s ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We<br />
should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of<br />
willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for<br />
themselves.</p>
<p>Call them <b>werewolves</b>. It&#8217;s what they deserve.</p>
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Dehumanization
<p>A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist<br />
holdouts in Iraq <a href='http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200311#85'><br />
werewolves</a>, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize<br />
them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters<br />
like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify<br />
continuing to kill them.</p>
<p>This question displays a kind of self-absorption by a person who<br />
cannot really imagine a moral stance different from his/her own. In<br />
such tender-minded thinking, the world is neatly divided into humans<br />
that one must treat pretty much as though they were one&#8217;s next-door neighbor,<br />
and non-humans who are not part of the moral community. The possibility<br />
that a human being could be outside the moral community is essentially<br />
ignored.</p>
<p>But there are human beings who are outside the moral community by nature.<br />
We call them psychopaths. They lack the wiring for empathy and reciprocity<br />
that makes it possible for most human beings to cooperate; they can (and<br />
often do) commit sickening atrocities for pleasure. Fortunately, most<br />
psychopaths have other kinds of neurological deficits as well and are<br />
therefore not very bright. </p>
<p>Some people who probably were not born with psychopathy make themselves<br />
into psychopaths. Consider, as a relevant example, Saddam Hussein and<br />
his sons. They fed living people into shredders for amusement. No semantic<br />
debate over whether that sort of monster is &#8220;human&#8221; or &#8220;dehumanized&#8221;<br />
is going to change my judgment that that it deserves a violent<br />
death as quickly as that result can be arranged.</p>
<p>The Baathist holdouts in Iraq are the hench-monsters of the<br />
Husseins &mdash; the men who tore infants&#8217; eyes out and strapped women<br />
to tables in rape rooms. Calling them &#8220;werewolves&#8221; or &#8220;orcs&#8221; is not<br />
an attempt to dehumanize them; that would be pointless, since they<br />
have already dehumanized themselves.</p>

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A rant &#8212; Why are CSS designers so utterly freaking clueless?
<p>People who put absolute pixel sizes in CSS layouts should be lashed<br />
with knouts. I&#8217;ve tripped over this problem yet again while moving my<br />
blog; I&#8217;m using <a href='http://cafelog.com/'>b2</a>, and the default<br />
stylesheet shipped with it was obviously produced by some graphics<br />
designer who has failed to grasp the fact that there are lots of<br />
different display sizes and resolutions out there.</p>
<p>OK, for those of you who don&#8217;t see the problem here, it goes like this.<br />
Graphic designer composes his layout on a 1024&#215;768 display. To make the<br />
spacing come out all pretty, he specifies a 10 or 11-pixel font which looks<br />
good on that 72-dot-per-inch display. Now I view it on my 1920&#215;1440 display<br />
at over 120dpi resolution &mdash; and the font is 40% smaller and a hell of<br />
a strain to read. There are many other, related errors as well, like<br />
specifying absolute box or table widths when percentage of screen width<br />
would be more appropriate.</p>
<p>The basic error here is overcontrolling the layout rather than<br />
letting the user&#8217;s browser choose it in execution of the user&#8217;s<br />
preferences. Graphics designers are chronically prone to thinking of<br />
a browser as a device for delivering pixels, rather than information.<br />
But it doesn&#8217;t have to be this way &#8212; and, in fact, HTML isn&#8217;t<br />
supposed to be. You can make your CSS scale to the user&#8217;s chosen font<br />
size by specifying box dimensions in units of em, en and ex (which are<br />
evaluated relative to the parent box&#8217;s current font size) rather than<br />
pixels. But most CSS designers are apparently either too freaking<br />
incompetent to do this or just don&#8217;t give a rat&#8217;s ass about<br />
display-independence or the user&#8217;s preferences to begin with.</p>
<p>This sorry state of affairs is one of the better arguments for the<br />
proposition, widely shared among my peers, that graphics designers<br />
are basically a bunch of dope-smoking <a href='http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/P/ponytail.html'>ponytailed</a><br />
dimwits who need to be smacked upside the head on a regular basis and<br />
not let anywhere near a software or web design without strict adult<br />
supervision by a cluebat-wielding programmer.</p>
<p>Another stupid graphic-designer stunt is changing the colors on<br />
visited and unvisited hotlinks away from the browser defaults (it&#8217;s especially bad when they&#8217;re mapped to the same color). What make this annoying is that it<br />
discards an important visual cue for web page users by making it less<br />
obvious where the hotlinks are. People who do this should be clubbed<br />
with a chair leg until they stop.</p>
<p>Sigh. Here&#8217;s the <a href='layout2b.css-orig'>default b2<br />
stylesheet</a> and here is the <a href='layout2b.css'>stylesheet I<br />
use</a>. Notice how much simpler mine is? The more you default<br />
rendering decisions to the browser like Ghod and Tim Berners-Lee<br />
intended, the more error-prone crap your stylesheets can omit, the<br />
faster your pages will render, and the better the user experience<br />
will be.</p>
<p>UPDATE: A reader tells me that part of this is the browser vendors&#8217;<br />
fault. It seems that on older browsers, only pixel sizes worked<br />
reliably. He says this has long since been fixed but the damage to<br />
CSS designers&#8217; minds was already done. Another reader pointed me to a<br />
good rant on this topic by <a href='http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/design.html'>Jamie Zawinski</a>.</p>

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CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell
<p>The CSS designer for <a href='http://www.wordpress.org/'>WordPress</a>, the successor to the<br />
b2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous<br />
rant. In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said &#8220;But<br />
even if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let<br />
you easily resize this?&#8221;.</p>
<p>This, I&#8217;m afraid, is CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell.</p>
<p>In particular, I should not have to do an explicit operation every<br />
time to get the font sizes I want. In general, answers of the form<br />
&#8220;you can override the designer&#8217;s preferences by jumping through hoops&#8221;<br />
show the wrong attitude. This attitude clashes with the objective<br />
reality of lots of different display devices out there.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s also bad human-factors engineering. As the user, <em>my preferences<br />
should be primary</em> &mdash; in font sizes as in all other things. That&#8217;s<br />
how the Web is supposed to work, and CSS and web designers who don&#8217;t<br />
get this are doing users a major disservice in order to gratify their<br />
own egos.</p>
<p>Ultimately they&#8217;re shooting themselves in the foot, too &mdash; think about<br />
what will happen over time as display sizes both average larger and<br />
the size dispersion increases (e.g. cell phones and PDAs get WiFi at<br />
the same time desktop displays go to 1600&#215;1200 and higher).<br />
Fixed-size fonts, in farticular, are going to be a bigger and bigger<br />
lose as time goes on.</p>
<p>To the extent you think of yourself as a servant of the user, rather<br />
than an artist whose job it is to make things pretty, that&#8217;s when your<br />
designs will have real and lasting value. This is a hard lesson for<br />
artists to learn, but it&#8217;s the only way to avoid filling the web with<br />
designs that are gaudy, wearisome, and lose their utility as display<br />
technology improves and becomes more various.</p>

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Possible outage today
<p>The good folks at ibiblio.org are about to upgrade me from b2 to WordPress. There might be a short outage involved, and it&#8217;s possible the </p>
<p>new CSS will garble my pages. Any problems should be transient and fixed<br />
within a few hours.</p>

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Yee-ha! W00t! Excelsior!
<p>I got email from Dr. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of <cite>Analog</cite>,<br />
about an hour ago. The bad news was, he turned down the short story. The<br />
good news was he accepted the fact article.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m going to be published in <cite>Analog</cite>!</p>
<p><em><em>/me does geeky victory dance</em></em></p>
<p>OK, so this is one of those things where if you don&#8217;t immediately<br />
get why it&#8217;s wicked cool, no amount of explanation is likely to<br />
enlighten you. I&#8217;ll just say I&#8217;ve been a science-fiction fan<br />
for 35 years and <cite>Analog</cite> has always been the banner-bearer<br />
for my kind of SF, the stuff with the rivets in it. I&#8217;ve wanted to<br />
get published there when I grew up ever since I was 11 years old;<br />
this is literally a childhood dream come true.</p>
<p>Oh. And Dr. Schmidt asked me to send him more fiction&#8230;</p>

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The desexualization of the American (fe)male
<p>There&#8217;s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit&#8217;s<br />
essay <a href='http://www.kimdutoit.com/dr/essays/essays.php?id=P2327'> The<br />
Pussification Of The Western Male</a>. The single feature of the<br />
conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to<br />
Steven den Beste&#8217;s equally searing essay <a href='http://denbeste.nu/essays/femaleperson.shtml'>Anglo Women are an<br />
endangered species</a>.</p>
<p>Steve&#8217;s point complements Kim&#8217;s and amplifies it in some useful<br />
ways. Nobody wants to go back to the days when women were treated as<br />
chattels or second-class citizens. Anyway, attempts to do so would be<br />
doomed for reasons not so much moral as economic; societies that<br />
suppress the productivity and intelligence of 50% of their members are<br />
inevitably going to lose out to societies that don&#8217;t. But what Steve and<br />
Kim have pointed out is that Western society often has pursued the<br />
worthy goal of equality in a way that is hamfisted and destructive,<br />
because it tries to remake human nature rather than acknowledging and<br />
working with it.</p>
<p>These essays address two specific problems we&#8217;ve been saddled with;<br />
Kim&#8217;s with the attack on masculinity, and Steve&#8217;s with the attack on<br />
femininity. Among white anglos (especially bicoastal<br />
&ldquo;progressive&rdquo; white anglos), it is no longer respectable<br />
for a male person to behave like a man and a female person to behave<br />
like a woman.</p>
<p>In fact, in today&#8217;s bien-pensant circles, one can be attacked as a<br />
sexist for suggesting that the phrase &ldquo;like a man&rdquo; or<br />
&ldquo;like a woman&rdquo; has any meaning at all. Many of us have<br />
become obscurely terrified of sexual dimorphism, apparently out of<br />
fear that acknowledging it will bring back the bad old days.</p>
<p>This kind of attitude has done more damage than most people<br />
realize. Read those essays. There&#8217;s something gone badly wrong when<br />
normal boys are dosed with Ritalin for being normally loud and<br />
aggressive, and only strippers have the privilege of hugging a man<br />
they like while at work.</p>
<p>I think our culture will recover from this. Beginning in the<br />
1950s, portions of the kibbutz movement in Israel made the most<br />
fervent try yet at erasing sex differences &mdash; they raised kids<br />
in creches and tried to systematically stamp out sex-differentiated<br />
behaviors. They failed; the children of the first generation, despite<br />
intense socialization, gravitated back to traditional sex roles.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ll all be happier when we relax enough to acknowledge that<br />
although equality before the law is something every human deserves,<br />
some things naturally fall in men&#8217;s country and some in women&#8217;s<br />
country &mdash; and the fact that minorities of men and women behave<br />
in gender-atypical ways doesn&#8217;t change that reality. There will never<br />
be more female soldiers or policemen than male ones, and never more<br />
male nurses and child-rearers than female ones. Men are going to<br />
groove on power tools and women are going to coo at babies; that&#8217;s<br />
just the way it is. down to our DNA. Behavioral dimorphism is wired<br />
into us for good reasons that have everything to do with Darwin and<br />
nothing to do with political correctness.</p>
<p>The first stage of recovery is recognizing that there&#8217;s a problem<br />
&mdash; that men and women find each others&#8217; behavioral as well as<br />
physical sex differences attractive, and that neither men nor women<br />
are well served by efforts to cram us all into a unisex box. My wife<br />
once observed, on behalf of a billion sisters, &#8220;What good is a man if<br />
you cut off his balls?&#8221; &mdash; and she was talking everyday behavior,<br />
not just anatomy or sexual function. There aren&#8217;t a lot of men who<br />
will seek out the company of defeminized women if they have a choice<br />
in the matter, either.</p>
<p>That is where essays like Kim&#8217;s and Steve&#8217;s can help. By waking us up<br />
and pissing us off, they remind us that our sex-linked behaviors and<br />
our preferences for sex-linked behaviors in others actually<br />
<em>matter</em>, that they&#8217;re every bit as much a part of our normal<br />
human makeup as having penises or vaginas. People who want us to<br />
forget this for ideological reasons are objectively inhumane.</p>

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Whose character are you?
<p>I always wanted to be a Heinlein character when I grew up. Somebody thinks I succeeded&#8230;</p>
<p><img src="http://images.quizilla.com/B/blightgrrl/1068268073_laheinlein.jpg" border="0" alt="Robert Heinlein"><br />Robert Heinlein wrote you &#8211; your stranger in a<br />strange land, you.</p>
<p><a href="http://quizilla.com/users/blightgrrl/quizzes/Which%20Author's%20Fiction%20are%20You%3F/"> <font size="-1">Which Author&#8217;s Fiction are You?</font></a><br /> <font size="-3">brought to you by <a href="http://quizilla.com">Quizilla</a></font></p>

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Here&#8217;s what kept me from blogging
<p>This is what kept me too busy to blog for months:</p>
<p><img src='http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/cover-small.png' border='1' alt='Book cover image'/><br />
<br clear='left' /></p>
<p>To find out more about it, go <a href='http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/'>here</a>.</p>

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Selecting for intelligence
<p>Mike Smith relays an interesting possible explanation for the observed<br />
statistical fact that American and European Jews have a mean IQ a<br />
standard deviation higher than Caucasian gentiles:</p>
<blockquote><p>
During the period from ancient times to modern times, there was a<br />
constant phenomenon of Jews converting to Christianity (there were<br />
many social pressures to do so). In a nutshell, the idea is that the<br />
lower-IQ Jews were statistically more likely to convert, as it freed<br />
them from having to learn to read Torah. During the Middle Ages, it<br />
was not worth the effort for most people to become literate; the<br />
payback was not worth it. Books were rare and expensive, and learning<br />
to read was no guarantee of getting ahead in life. Of course, people<br />
like to do what they&#8217;re especially good at, and the higher-IQ&#8217;s among<br />
the Jews did not find learning to read to be such a burden. As such,<br />
they were statistically less likely to convert (and statistically more<br />
likely to become fathers of many children in a culture that valued<br />
intelligence.) It is worth noting that in ancient times, Jews were not<br />
stereotyped as especially intelligent; that stereotype arose in the<br />
Middle Ages.
</p></blockquote>
<p>This is a special case of one of my favorite Damned Ideas, originally<br />
developed by John W. Campbell in the 1960s from some speculations<br />
by a forgotten French anthropologist. Campbell proposed that the<br />
manhood initiation rituals found in many primitive tribes are a<br />
selective machine designed to permit adulthood and reproduction only<br />
to those who can demonstrate verbal fluency and the ability to override<br />
instinctive fears on verbal command.</p>
<p>Campbell suggests that all living humans are descended from groups<br />
of hominids that, having evolved full-human mental capability in some<br />
of their members, found the overhead of supporting the dullards too<br />
high. So they began selecting for traits correlated with intelligence<br />
through initiation rituals timed for just as their offspring were<br />
achieving reproductive capacity; losers got driven out, or possibly<br />
killed and eaten.</p>
<p>Campbell pointed out that the common elements of tribal initiations<br />
are (a) scarring or cicatricing of the skin, opening the way for<br />
lethal infections, (b) alteration or mutilation of the genitals,<br />
threatening the ability to reproduce, and (b) alteration of the mouth<br />
and teeth, threatening the ability to eat. These seem particularly<br />
well optimized for inducing maximum instinctive fear in the subject<br />
while actually being relatively safe under controlled and relatively<br />
hygenic conditions. The core test of initiation is this: can the<br />
subject conquer fear and submit to the initiation on the basis<br />
of learned (verbal, in preliterate societies) command?</p>
<p>Campbell noticed the first order effect was to shift the mean of<br />
the IQ bell curve upwards over generations. The second-order effect,<br />
which if he noticed he didn&#8217;t talk about, was to start an arms race in<br />
initiation rituals; competing bands experimented with different<br />
selective filters (not consciously but through random variation).<br />
Setting the bar too low or too high would create a bad tradeoff<br />
between IQ selectivity and maintaining raw reproductive capacity. So<br />
we&#8217;re descended from the hominids who found the right tradeoff to push<br />
their mean IQ up as rapidly as possible and outcompeted the groups<br />
that chose less well.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t seem to have occurred to Campbell or his sources, but<br />
this theory explains why initiation rituals for girls are a rare and<br />
usually post-literate phenomenon. Male reproductive capacity is<br />
cheap; a healthy young man can impregnate several young women a day,<br />
and healthy young men are instinct-wired to do exactly that whenever<br />
they can get away with it. <em>Female</em> reproductive capacity, on<br />
the other hand, is scarce and precious. So it makes sense to select<br />
the boys ruthlessly and give the girls a pass. Of course if you push<br />
this too far you don&#8217;t get enough hunters and fighters, but the right<br />
tradeoff pretty clearly is not 1-to-1.</p>
<p>(This would also explain why humans are designed for mild polygyny,<br />
1 to 3 sexual partners per male. You can spot this by looking at<br />
where human beings are on various physical characteristics that<br />
correlate with degree of polygyny in other primates &#8212; disparity in<br />
average size between males and females, for example, is strongly<br />
correlated with it.)</p>
<p>What Campbell <em>did</em> notice is that this theory of selection<br />
by initiation would neatly explain one of the mysteries of human<br />
paleoanthropology &mdash; how human beings got so smart so fast. The<br />
differences between H. Erectus and H. Sapiens are not large in<br />
absolute genetic terms (they can&#8217;t be, we share over 94% of our genome<br />
with chimps) but they&#8217;re hard to credit given normal rates of<br />
morphological change in mammals and only two million years to work<br />
in. <em>Something</em> must have been putting hominids under<br />
abnormally strong selective pressure &mdash; and Campbell&#8217;s idea<br />
is that we did it to ourselves!</p>
<p>Now, I&#8217;m not sure I believe Jews bootstrapping themselves up a<br />
whole standard deviation in less than 2000 years, but if you apply<br />
a similar idea to a longer timeframe it begins to look pretty<br />
reasonable. (And Campbell did suggest that the Jewish practice of<br />
infant circumcision had originally been a manhood rite.)</p>
<p>Within my lifetime, I expect we&#8217;re going to have the ability to do<br />
germ-line enhancement of human intelligence. I strongly suspect that that<br />
will set off another arms race &mdash; because cultures that suppress<br />
that technology will be once again doomed against cultures that do. And<br />
this time, we&#8217;re smart enough to know that in advance&#8230;</p>

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Funny, but incorrect
<p>From the November 12 &#8220;Kernel Panic&#8221;:</p>
<p><img src='http://ubersoft.net/kpanic/comics/kp20031112.png' alt="Nov 12 2003 strip"/><br />
<br clear='left'/></p>
<p>In fact, this strip is incorrect. I did not coin the term &#8220;open source&#8221;;<br />
I only popularized it. It was coined by<br />
my friend <a href='http://www.foresight.org/FI/Peterson.html'>Christine Peterson</a> of the Foresight Institute. While it&#8217;s true that I more or less ran the brainstorming session and fortunately had enough of a clue to recognize a winner when it popped up, the creative leap was all hers.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Yes, it now reads &#8220;popularized&#8221;. Chris Wright changed it.</p>

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What good is IQ?
<p>A reader asks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To clarify, while I believe natural selection explains a lot I have<br />
caveats about IQ as a tool for testing intelligence. If you can&#8217;t<br />
measure the coast of France with a single number how can you do it<br />
with human intelligence?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Easily. Human intelligence is a great deal less complex than the<br />
coast of France. :-)</p>
<p>It&#8217;s fashionable nowadays to believe that intelligence is some<br />
complicated multifactor thing that can&#8217;t be captured in one number.<br />
However, one of the best-established facts in psychometry (the science<br />
of measuring mind) is that it is quite difficult to write a test of<br />
mental ability that is not at least 50% correlated with all other such<br />
tests. Or, to put it another way, no matter how you design ten tests for<br />
mental ability, at least about half the variance in the scores for any one<br />
of them statistically appears to be due to a &#8220;general intelligence&#8221;<br />
that shows up on the other nine tests as well.</p>
<p>Psychometricians call this general intelligence measure &#8220;g&#8221;. It<br />
turns out to predict important real-world success measures quite well<br />
&mdash; not just performance in school but income and job success as<br />
well. The fundamental weakness in multiple-factor theories of intelligence<br />
is that measures of intelligence <em>other</em> than g appear to predict<br />
very little about real-world outcomes. So you can call a lot of other<br />
things &#8220;intelligence&#8221; if you want to make people feel warm and fuzzy,<br />
but doing so simply isn&#8217;t very useful in the real world.</p>
<p>Some multifactor theorists, for example, like to describe accurate<br />
proprioception (an acute sense of body position and balance) as a kind<br />
of intelligence. Let&#8217;s say we call this &#8220;p&#8221;. The trouble with this<br />
is that there are very few situations in which a combination of high p<br />
and low g is actually useful &mdash; people need to be able to balance<br />
checkbooks more often than they need to walk high wires. Furthermore,<br />
g is easier to substitute for p than the other way around; a person<br />
with high g but low p can think up a way to not have to walk a high<br />
wire far better than a person with low g but high p can think up a way<br />
not to have to balance a checkbook. So g is in a strict functional<br />
sense more powerful than p. Similar arguments apply to most of the<br />
other kinds of specialized non-g &#8216;intelligence&#8217; that have been<br />
proposed.</p>
<p>Once you know about g, you can rank mental-capability tests by<br />
how well their score correlates with g. IQ is valuable because a<br />
well-composed IQ test measures g quite effectively. For purposes<br />
of non-technical discussion, g and IQ can be considered the same, and<br />
pychometricians now accept that an IQ test which does not closely track<br />
g is defective.</p>
<p>A lot of ink has been spent by people who aren&#8217;t psychometricians<br />
on insisting that g is a meaningless statistical artifact. The most<br />
famous polemic on this topic was Stephen Jay Gould&#8217;s 1981 book<br />
<cite>The Mismeasure of Man</cite>, a book which was <a href='http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/psychology/IQ/carroll-gould.html'>muddled,<br />
wrong</a>, and in some respects rather dishonest. Gould was a<br />
believing Marxist; his detestation of g was part of what he perceived<br />
as a vitally important left-versus right <em>kulturkampf</em>. It is<br />
very unfortunate that he was such a persuasive writer.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Gould, g is no statistical phantom. Recently g<br />
and IQ have been shown to correlate with measurable physiological<br />
variables such as the level of trace zinc in your hair and performance<br />
on various sorts of reaction-time tests. There are hints in the<br />
recent literature that g may be largely a measure of the default level<br />
of a particular neurotransmitter associated with states of mental<br />
alertness and speed of thought; it appears that calling people of<br />
subnormal intelligence &#8220;slow&#8221; may not be just a metaphor!</p>
<p>IQ is one of several large science-related issues on which<br />
political bias in the dominant media culture has lead it to present as<br />
fact a distorted or even reversed version of the actual science. In<br />
1994, after Murray and Herrnstein&#8217;s <cite>The Bell Curve</cite> got a<br />
thoroughly undeserved trashing, fifty leading psychometricians and<br />
psychologists co-signed a summary of <a href='http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-curve/support-bell-curve.html'>mainstream<br />
science on intelligence</a>. It makes eye-opening reading.</p>
<p>The reasons many popular and journalistic accounts continue to<br />
insist that IQ testing is at best meaningless and at worst a sinister<br />
plot are twofold. First, this belief flatters half of the population.<br />
&#8220;My IQ may be below average, but that doesn&#8217;t matter because IQ is<br />
meaningless and I have high emotional intelligence!&#8221; is,<br />
understandably, a favorite evasion maneuver among dimwits. But that<br />
isn&#8217;t the worst of it. The <em>real</em> dynamite is not in<br />
individual differences but rather that the distribution of IQ (and<br />
hence of g) varies considerably across groups in ways that are<br />
politically explosive.</p>
<p>Men vs. women is the least of it. With other variables controlled,<br />
men and women in a population have the same mean IQ, but the<br />
dispersion differs. The female bell curve is slightly narrower, so<br />
women have fewer idiots and fewer geniuses among them. Where this<br />
gets touchy is that it may do a better job than cultural sexism of<br />
explaining why most of the highest achievers in most fields are male<br />
rather than female. Equal opportunity does not guarantee equal<br />
results, and lot of feminist theory goes out the window.</p>
<p>But male/female differences are insignificant compared to the real<br />
hot potato: differences in the mean IQ of racial and ethnic groups.<br />
These differences are real and they are large enough to have severe<br />
impact in the real world. In previous blog entries I&#8217;ve mentioned the<br />
one-standard-deviation advantage of Ashkenazic Jews over gentile<br />
whites; that&#8217;s roughly fifteen points of IQ. Pacific-rim Asians<br />
(Chinese, Japanese, Koreans etc.) are also brighter on average by a<br />
comparable margin. So, oddly enough, are ethnic Scots &mdash; though<br />
not their close kin the Irish. Go figure&#8230;</p>
<p>And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist<br />
bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard<br />
deviation <em>lower</em> in IQ than American whites at about 85. And<br />
it gets worse: the average IQ of <em>African</em> blacks is lower<br />
still, not far above what is considered the threshold of mental<br />
retardation in the U.S. And yes, it&#8217;s genetic; g seems to be about<br />
85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards<br />
the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather<br />
than nurturance effects.</p>
<p>For anyone who believe that racial equality is an important goal,<br />
this is absolutely horrible news. Which is why a lot of<br />
well-intentioned people refuse to look at these facts, and will<br />
attempt to shout down anyone who speaks them in public. There have<br />
been several occasions on which leading psychometricians have had<br />
their books canceled or withdrawn by publishers who found the actual<br />
scientific evidence about IQ so appalling that they refused to print<br />
it.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, denial of the facts doesn&#8217;t make them go away. Far from<br />
being meaningless, IQ may be the single most important statistic about<br />
human beings, in the precise sense that differences in g probably drive<br />
individual and social outcomes more than any other single measurable<br />
attribute of human beings.</p>
<p>Mean IQ differences do not justify making assumptions about any individual.<br />
There are African black geniuses and Ashkenazic Jewish morons; humanity and<br />
ethics demand that we meet each individual human being as an individual,<br />
without prejudice. At the same time, group differences have a significance<br />
too great to ignore. In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but<br />
commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is<br />
unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the<br />
general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact<br />
independent of skin color.</p>
<p>And that is actually a valuable hint about how to get beyond<br />
racism. A black man with an IQ of 85 and a white man with an IQ of 85<br />
are about equally likely to have the character traits of poor impulse<br />
control and violent behavior associated with criminality &mdash; and<br />
both are far more likely to have them than a white or black man with<br />
an IQ of 110. If we could stop being afraid of IQ and face up to it,<br />
that would give us an objective standard that would banish racism per<br />
se. IQ matters so much more than skin color that if we started paying<br />
serious attention to the former, we might be able to stop paying<br />
attention to the latter.</p>
<p>UPDATE: An excellent summary of science relating to g<br />
is <a href='http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000658/'>here</a></p>

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Jack needs a girlfriend
<p><img src='http://ubersoft.net/kpanic/comics/kp20031120.png'/><br />
<br clear='left'/></p>
<p>&#8220;Free Love&#8221;, eh? Well, that would explain a lot. Jack must have been the dude I saw<br />
damn near run into a doorframe yesterday because he was checking out <a href='graphics/cathy-red.jpg'>my wife Cathy</a> so intently he forgot to watch where he<br />
was going. Not that there&#8217;s anything wrong with that.</p>

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Re: My Photo

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The Prudential interview
<p>I&#8217;ve spent a lot of time and effort since 1997 developing effective propaganda tactics for<br />
reaching the business world on behalf of the hacker community &mdash; among other things, by<br />
popularizing the term &lsquo;open source&rsquo;. If you want to grok how this is done, read<br />
my October 15 <a href='http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/prudential.html'>interview</a> with a bunch of Prudential Securities investors.</p>
<p>Pay attention to style as well as content. This is the language you have to learn to speak<br />
to reach the people who write big checks. It&#8217;s not very complicated, if you just bear in mind<br />
that these people are obsessed with two things: <b>risk management</b> and <b>return on investment</b>. As they should be &mdash; it&#8217;s their job.</p>

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Da Big Snow
<p>Yup, the blizzard is big. Here in eastern Pennsylvania we&#8217;ve had over a foot of snow and<br />
a lot of drifting today. I shoveled my driveway. I&#8217;m going to be stiff tomorrow.</p>

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Ejected in Geneva
<p>The organizers of the Internet Summit in Geneva have had Dr. Paul<br />
Twomey, the president of ICANN (the organization that&#8217;s chartered to<br />
administer the international domain-name system), ejected by security<br />
guards after he&#8217;d flown twenty hours to participate in the<br />
meeting.</p>
<p>I was not especially surprised. The organizers of the Geneva<br />
summit seem to be very much the same scum of the planet that one<br />
normally finds running these U.N. events &mdash; third-string<br />
diplomatic timeservers, addle-brained NGO moonbats, a scattering of<br />
celebrity Eurotrash, and a legion of gray apparatchiks from<br />
authoritarian Third World pestholes. It didn&#8217;t astonish me that<br />
they&#8217;d use force to keep out anyone who might interfere with their<br />
plans for a government-friendly, politically-correct, censored, and<br />
very thoroughly <em>controlled</em> Internet.</p>
<p>No, the really surprising part is that I found myself sympathizing<br />
with Dr. Twomey. ICANN&#8217;s performance, while not the unmitigated<br />
disaster many of its critics like to portray, has not been glorious.<br />
Way too many deals have been done in back rooms and the organization has<br />
been far too kind to expansive trademark claims and other sorts of<br />
corporate land-grab.</p>
<p>Perhaps the one salutary effect of the Geneva summit is to remind us<br />
that things could easily be worse &mdash; and almost certainly will be, if<br />
the U.N. gets control.</p>

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