the second time as tragedy …

Posted on June 20, 2004 by acb

Marx had the order wrong. The first time round it’s funny. Here is Bill O’Reilly, one of the most popular talk show hosts in the Murdoch empire, on the radio on Thursday this week.

Because look … when 2 percent of the population feels that you’re doing the m a favour, just forget it, you’re not going to win. You’re not going to win. And I don’t have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they’re a prehistoric group that is — yeah, there’s excuses.

Sure, they’re terrorized, they’ve never known freedom, all of that. There’s excuses. I understand. But I don’t have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it’s time to — time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain’t going to work.

[…]

They’re just people who are primitive.

And here is e.e. cummings, in 1944

ygUDuh

ydoan
yunnuhstan

ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
yguduh ged

yunnuhstan dem doidee
yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn

LISN bud LISN

dem
gud
am

lidl yelluh bas
tuds weer goin

duhSIVILEYEzum

Posted in War | 2 Comments

The OED rewritten in limericks

Posted on June 18, 2004 by acb

I stole this from languagehat. It is the most awe-inspiring project I have ever seen on the web.

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theory of religion

Posted on June 18, 2004 by acb

There are two main theories of religion deriving from modern, computerised science — ie the sort that can only be done with computers in the background, either to model, or to run the equipment. [the influence of programming as an activity on the way we think about complex systems is a different, rather wider way of thinking about “computerised science”]

The Boyer sort looks at the cognitive mechanisms which promote supernatural belief. The D.S. Wilson / Herbert Gintis “functionalist” expressions look at the effects of religious practice and argue that these must be beneficial.

There is one important point on which they both agree. Morality does not proceed from religion. Our moral intuitions and imperatives, or something like them, predate language and provide the script for our supernatural beongs to act within. Ths is an argument against individualism, in a way. I think that instead of Gods appearing in individual minds, and shaping our social experience; for most people social experience is primary, and shapes what we think God says. The exception would be the so-called “religious virtuosos”, who talk directly to God, but even the, perhaps especially they, depend for their status on social experience. Without it, they are not religious virtuosos, but lunatics, at best possessed by evil spirits.

One more random thought: the connection of deserts and other lifeless places with the appearance of the divine makes a lot of sense if Boyer is right, and the root of our sense of the supernatural is the overdetection of agency. A place without life bigger than lizards, where even they are furtive, is going provide more opportunities for overdetection, to the extent that it does not provide opportunities for real detection. It is a very specialised form of sensory deprivation. One knows about St Anthony being tempted with luscious women, in visions which appeared precisely because there were no women for fifty miles. Might he not also have been tempted with visions of agency in the world?

Who is that third who walks always beside you?

Posted in God | 5 Comments

succulent stuff

Posted on June 16, 2004 by acb

I have just been sent the catalogue from Imprint Academic, the tiny company that publishes the Journal of Consciousness Studies and it’s full of good things. Specifically, I want this and this and this. They will do to be going on with, anyway.

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email experiment overload

Posted on June 13, 2004 by acb

Earlier this week I decided to give Opera’s mail client a proper go because I was sick of the horrible editor in the Bat, and sick, too, of maintaining a list of about 90 filters for different correspondents which all got reset to filter things back into the inbox in a crash soe months ago.

Opera’s mail client works like nothing else. It’s rather good, but you waste the first week trying to set up filters to make it work like a normal mail program. Essentially the “received” view, or inbasket is completely useless unless it is switched to show only unread, non-spam mail. Everything else is accessed through ad-hoc views. To find mail from anyone you have ever contacted is a matter of typing their name into the incremental search box: a filter appears with all that correspondence in it. This looks like a very promising way to work.

There are snags. The three biggest that I have found:

  • It won’t work as a MAPI client. If you want to mail stuff direct from the word processor, you need something else as well.
  • the editor is horrible
  • you can’t drag stuff to the “sent mail” folder. When importing from an old client, you have to download a copy of eudora, import into that, mark all the messages sent that need to be, and then import fro eudora into Opera. This is irritating, and will lose time
  • it’s new, and still, to judge by the newsgroups, buggy.
    But, on balance, it is the best way I have found to store and manipulate large quanities of email. It is just about google on the hard disk, which is what we all need.

So this afternoon someone emailed me a gmail invitation … I’ll have to try that out, but with another account; perhaps the one I use for mailing lists. Certainly, running two mail systems seems to me very silly. Opera is already nervous about this. It has a very nice built-in spam filter, which you can train; and it was while poking through the day’s spam that I found the invitation to gmail.

Posted in Software | 4 Comments

I just want to see

Posted on June 10, 2004 by acb

Tony Blair watch these pictures, with Cherie beside him: from a report of Seymour Hersh speaking at the University of Chicago:

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, “You haven’t begun to see evil…” then trailed off. He said, “horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”

via Brad de Long

Posted in War | 1 Comment

Angry readers write

Posted on June 8, 2004 by acb

As I promised …

Continue reading →

Posted in War | 4 Comments

They laughed

Posted on June 7, 2004 by acb

When I posted a photograph of trout fishing on the Cam here. So I would just like to say that I took a fourteen-year-old cousin there last night, a child on whom my chest waders came up to the armpits: in an hour’s dry fly fishing, he caught two really nice trout and I caught two more. He even found a pool deeper than the waders. You wouldn’t find anything loike that in Texas, arr, no how. Because you wouldn’t find no bugger in Texas walking around in they neooprene waders. Arr. No.

Posted in Trouty things | 1 Comment

Apologies

Posted on June 7, 2004 by acb

Some weeks ago I wrote a wormseye, simultaneously flip and depressed, urging that GW Bush be re-elected this autumn since most Americans still can’t see what was wrong with electing him the first time. They need to learn, and nothing will teach them more surely than another four years with him in charge.

This morning I had a bunch of letters through from readers in the USA complaining in anguish, and they have a point. Reading reports abstracted from the WSJ about the 100 page memorandum commissioned by Rumsfeld from his lawyers when he needed to encourage institutionalised torture, I realised that I was utterly wrong. Apologies. The original piece, and the letters, are below the fold.

Continue reading →

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rubber-legged in anticipation

Posted on June 7, 2004 by acb

I’ve just been sent the programme for the Aventis bash next week. There is a photocall for the authors at five, and then a steady programme of refreshments until eight, when the prizes are announced. After that, they feed us. Is this entirely wise? A dozen authors, locked up for three hours with friends, rivals and unlimited booze, waiting to see who among them will win small fame and a large cheque: this sounds like the plot of a Frayn novel. Those convinced that they will never win might drink to provoke their own bonhomie; those who think they might win will drink to calm their nerves — and one way or another there is, it seems to me, a fair chance that whoever gets shovelled up on stage to make a speech of less than one minute as the programme says in bold, will be scarcely able to find the mike stand.

Posted in Worms | 3 Comments