Grumpy old liberal

Posted on January 27, 2005 by acb

It’s disillusionment about human nature that makes me progressive. HEB, the original grumpy old liberal, puts this very well.

Currently the received wisdom seems to be that Liberals believe that people are inherently good so that Trust is warranted while Conservatives believe that people are fundamentally bad so that it takes soldiers, cops and coercion to keep a lid on things. I’d with the Conservatives when it comes to their pessimistic view of human nature and views about the importance of coercion. What I don’t understand is how this supports their views on domestic policy. If people are fundamentally bad, as I believe, employers will certainly exploit their employees because they can, men will beat their wives because they’re bigger and stronger and none of us will contribute substantially to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves. We’re bigots and selfish jerks because our nature is fallen but our rational nature, imago dei, isn’t wholly corrupted, so we can see what we are and establish schemes to circumvent our sinfulness–coercive taxation and the welfare state.

(Actually she wrote “soldiers, copes and coercion”, but only Opus Dei operates like that. Reform doesn’t believe in vestments.)

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Notes from the war with Eastasia

Posted on January 26, 2005 by acb

I try not to do agitprop too much. It almost all comes back to “I told you so” and the only people who listen are those who were also telling them so. But this is Rafe Coburn, whom I have known online for about ten years now, and who strikes me as a perfect example of the decent, not unnaturally political American:

I remember when Iraq was a gathering threat. I remember when Saddam harbored the kinds of terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. I remember when the next smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud. I remember when Iraq’s oil revenue would pay for reconstruction. I remember when the idea that stabilizing Iraq would take hundreds of thousands of troops was ludicrous. I remember when Iraq could develop nuclear capabilities within a year. I remember when the mission was accomplished. I remember when killing Uday and Qusay Hussein would end the insurgency. I remember when capturing Saddam Hussein would end the insurgency. I remember when putting the interim government in power would end the insurgency. I remember every time attacking Fallujah would break the back of the insurgency.

And this is of course gratifying. Then he goes on to say the bit — just as true for us — that make it better than “you told us what was not so, and we told you so”:

“I think that for most people who have opposed President Bush and his agenda from the beginning, there’s at least a side of them that wants to see him fail. To leave office in humiliation. Only there’s a huge problem with that, because he’s gambling with our future, and he’s gambling with the future of those people in Iraq who never asked for what they’re dealing with today. So much as I detest what he’s done and how he’s gone about it, I have to hope every day for President Bush to succeed, for our sake and for the sake of the everyday Iraqi. It’s not a very fun place to be.”

Posted in War | 3 Comments

A vignette from the Palace

Posted on January 26, 2005 by acb

So my friend <mmmmph> rings up and says how nice it was to see me in London the other night, and how we must meet again at some party without the Archbishop of Canterbury hosting it. The conversations circles for a little while.

Then he says, “Do you remember when we were talking to Rowan?”
“Yes …”
“Did I tell him to cheer up, we journalists weren’t his enemies.”
“No.”
“Do you remember what we were talking about?”
“Yes. Child soldiers, mostly.”
“Oh. I can’t remember that. In fact I can’t remember anything about how I got back to my hotel. I must have taken a taxi, but I was completely pissed. Are you sure we only talked about child soldiers? What did we say?”
“Well. Rowan wanted to know how they could be rehabilitated, and you wanted to talk about how arms companies profited from them, and I wanted to talk about the technology that makes it all possible. He said you should read his speech at Great Ormonde Street Hospital.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“It’s on his web site.”
[abstracted clicking noises]
“Oh. I’ve found it. I can write to him now and say how much I admired it. … You’re sure I didn’t say that thing about journalists?”
“Sure”
“Because I rang my wife as I was leaving Lambeth Palace and said that I had done.”
“Ah. Well, I was perfectly sober at the beginning of the evening, and I told Jane then that if their son had come down to see all the journalists he should have bought a killing bottle and a collecting pin.”

No wonder that every Archbishop gives one drinks party, and one drinks party only, where he is expected to mingle with the press.

Posted in Journalism | 4 Comments

A neat gimmick

Posted on January 23, 2005 by acb

Yahoo Desktop search is elegant. It’s not perfect, but it’s very quick, and has important advantages over Google’s. It doesn’t rely on IE; it can be tweaked to search openoffice files and display their context in plain text — actually more useful than the formatted display of word files; I cna have it search my browser cache if I want. It might search Opera email, but there’s no need, since the whole point of Opera as an email client is its searching and indexing. YDS has, however, indexed all my old mail archives from the Bat, which is something I have wanted for ages.

Against this, the actual search interface is ugly and unintuitive. The indexing is intrusive and chews up CPU time. The indexes are gigantic. But none of these things matter very much beside its virtues. I can learn the interface, and like anyone else who had bought a PC in the last three years, I have more disk space and CPU cycles than I can exhaust.

Posted in Software | 3 Comments

shame and guilt

Posted on January 22, 2005 by acb

I was thinking yesterday about the difference between shame and guilt: guilt, it seems, is where you have wronged someone. They feel you have behaved badly towards them and you agree. Restitution is possible, at least in theory. It can be discussed. You can do things to diminish it, or you can come to an agreement that nothing more can be done.

Shame is a different thing, because it can’t be expiated. It is a failure to live up to your own idea of yourself; and if you canot modify the habits that fill you with shame, the only cure is self-knowledge. No wonder it’s such a powerful spur to self-improvement.

Of course,this definition cuts across normal usage. It entails, for example, that what we call “survivor guilt” is actually survivor shame. It’s pretty atheistic. After all, God might be harmed (were he not perfect) by behaviour that damages no one else. Perl makes the baby Jesus cry and all that. But it marks a distinction that’s important and sometimes useful.

Anyway, I posted some days ago a rather tasteless link, for which I feel slightly guilty to the Internet at large. Here is a sort of expiation — duelling harpsichords from a California winery, distributed freely. Something to make you feel proud of civilisation. Any moment now I’ll be so happy I’ll have to pay for it.

Posted in Blather | 1 Comment

A brilliant propagandist

Posted on January 20, 2005 by acb

Of all the people I have discovered from blog reading, the most journalistically talented is Billmon, whoever the hell he is. It’s not so much that he is a good writer: there are lots of people out there who can write with angry terse eloquence, even if not enough do. But he is a great editor. He understands the art of arranging fragments into a bigger story. The Independent ought to hire him to edit their fancy pages.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on A brilliant propagandist

tsting 3.14

Posted on January 19, 2005 by acb

OK. A long day mostly wasted, but I should now have finally upgraded to MT 3.14. When Six Apart launched MT 3.0 there was a huge flurry of complaint that they had sold out, gone all corporate, etc. But my experience today has been that they have kept many of the good values of their old amateur setup, along with a truly terrible support documentation that even a sourceforge project should be ashamed of.

The good includes the fact that the donations I made in 2002, when I first dicovered how wonderful it was, were remembered and knocked off the price of the upgrade to 3.1. But that turns out to have a bug of the most frustrating sort imaginable. It has, as a major selling point, the ability to serve some pages dynamically, using PHP. This matters when you must otherwise rebuild more than a thousand static pages after a big comment spam attack, or even when yuou change the template. But it turns out that the PHP bits of MT don’t actually read from templates that have been updated. So if there is something they don’t like — and all sorts of plugins don’t work after the upgrade, so that references to them have to be removed — they don’t notice the edit.

there is something about this in the support forums, thogh not in the FAQ. But to log in to the support forums you have to enter an entirely new name ansd password, different from the one that you need to invent to download the software. Of course, it doesn’t say that. Waste ten minutes trying different ombinaitons of somethign you know should work. Then the fourth search claims that all you need do is disable one of the most attractive features of the MT templating setup — the ability to edit your templates in an external file on site. to make PHP work. Except that it doesn’t.

This is the kind of error — where the computer simply ignores your input silently — that I find more frustrating than any other. It is supposed to have been fixed in a release of November last year. It is not fixed. The only remedy is to rebuild all pages statically one more time, and then hope that the dynamic rebuiild will catch up, which it seems to have done.

I hope the site is quicker and more responsive as a result, as well as being easier for me to improve and keep free of spam.

Posted in Housekeeping | 3 Comments

semantic styles

Posted on January 17, 2005 by acb

As usual when work presses, I bubble over with brilliant procrastination. Here’s a bit. Now that OOo has an invisible attribute for text, an MS Word style outliner is just a bunch of macros away. The only hard bit would be making the toolbar to list the levels you want shown or hidden.

But in the mean time there is already the opportunity to do semantic highlighting. There is an icon on the main toolbar which paints selected text with a highlight colour by changing the background colour. Instead of that, just make a set of character styles which have these colours, but informative names: the example that occurs to me is when you have a bunch of quotes on different subjects that you want to pull out of an interview transcript. They could be colour-coded by subject (or, from a different sort of transcript, by speaker). So the coloured styles are named for the meaning they convey. Then a macro goes through and extracts all the quotes of a particular colour into another file, or, if you’re me, ecco.

I already have, and use for
analysis, a system where bookmarked sections are highlighted and pulled out like this. But at the moment they are organised by bookmark names. Colours and style names are quicker and clearer.

Posted in OOo | Comments Off on semantic styles

A choice of lectures

Posted on January 15, 2005 by acb

On Wedensday 22 February, the Darwin Centre at LSE finally restarts, with a lecture by Richard Dawkins. On the same night. Simon Conway Morris is lecturing at St Mary le Bow on his version of Darwinism. Which to attend? Actually, this requires very little thought. Dawkins’ lecture will be reprinted all over the place and I have never met SCM. But I wonder if there is anything special about the date which makes it irresistable to lecturers on evolution.

Posted in God, Science without worms | 2 Comments

No more research needed

Posted on January 13, 2005 by acb

The Times was delighted with this story. “Believers go on rack to prove God relieves pain” said its headline. “People are to be tortured in laboratories at Oxford University in a United States-funded experiment to determine whether belief in God is effective in relieving pain.”

I don’t know where to begin. You’d have thought they needed only to look out of the window at the Martyrs’ Memorial to be reminded of an earlier experiment on these lines, conducted on the 16th October 1555 with two Protestant bishops, Nicholas Ridley and High Latimer. They didn’t need ethics committees in those days, but both men had bags of gunpowder tied round their necks after they had been chained to the stake so they could hope to die quickly. The experiment, recorded in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was inconclusive.

Continue reading →

Posted in Science without worms | 1 Comment