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Source: http://blog.peterdonis.com/index.rss

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<channel>
<title>It's Not Magic</title>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com</link>
<description>Writings of a techie wizard</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2011-2015 by Peter A. Donis</copyright>
<pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2015 04:07 GMT</pubDate>
<managingEditor>wizard@peterdonis.com (Peter A. Donis)</managingEditor>
<generator>simpleblog3 0.9.8 http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simpleblog3</generator>
<item>
<title>Offline</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/offline</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/offline.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
As you might have noticed, I haven't posted here in a while, and what with
various things going on, I don't expect to be posting again for a while.
Everything that's here now will stay, but I won't be adding any new posts
for an indefinite period. I hope you've enjoyed what I've posted here, and
thanks for reading!
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2015 04:07 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Science, Heal Thyself (Again)</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/science-heal-thyself-again</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/science-heal-thyself-again.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Courtesy of
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/19/the-federalist-neil-degrasse-tyson-and-the-science-of-smug-condescension/">Watts Up With That</a>,
I came across a
<a href="http://marvelclimate.blogspot.com/2014/09/i-am-so-bored-with-hiatus.html">blog post</a>
by Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who says she is "so bored with the
hiatus". The WUWT article makes some good criticisms, though in fairness
to Marvel, it appears to take her post's title a bit too literally--she
isn't bored with the fact of the hiatus, but with all the media attention
it gets, which is not quite the same thing. But here I want to focus on
another aspect of Marvel's post: it's another good illustration of something
I've
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/science-heal-thyself.html">blogged about before</a>,
namely, why the public finds it hard to trust what scientists say.
First, I want to quote a particular paragraph from Marvel's post in full,
so that when I start to parody its style, as I am about to do, it will be
clear that I am not exaggerating:
<blockquote>
Look, sometimes the ocean takes up more heat, and sometimes the atmosphere
does. This is because the climate system is complex--so complex that people
literally do nothing all day but study how the air and water on Earth slosh
around and interact with each other. These pitiable people are called
scientists, and despite their questionable life choices they are really
pretty sharp. While they no doubt appreciate being reminded of the hiatus
by you, WSJ writer/internet commenter/angry uncle, you may rest assured that
they are aware of it, perhaps even more so than you! The question they are
interested in is not, "how come surface temperatures are rising so slowly?"
but rather, "why is the ocean doing so much of the work right now, and how
long will this last"?
</blockquote>
Wow, that sounds really cool! So what you're saying is, there are these
really awesome people who are studying the climate, and they came up with
this graph that shows how the ocean is absorbing a whole lot of heat. And,
from what I can tell, the question they are asking is why the ocean is
absorbing more heat now that it used to, right? That's what "doing so
much of the work right now" means, yes?
The problem is, you see, that if I look at this graph you gave, that's not
what I get from it. First of all, it's hard to tell what it's saying, because
you didn't actually give any data to back it up. So I can't check any real
numbers; all I can do is eyeball this graph to try and pick out trends. For
example, I can try to figure out how much heat the ocean absorbed from, say,
2000 to 2008 (which appears to be the end of the graph), and compare that
with how much it absorbed in previous time periods of the same length.
And when I do that, I come up with something like this: about 70 units of
heat absorbed from 2000-2008 (the units are 1021 J, according to
the graph); about 20 units absorbed from 1992-2000; about 60 units from
1984-1992; about 50 units from 1976-1984; and about 30 units from 1968-1976.
Now, if I were asking questions about this, the question I would be
interested in is not "why is the ocean doing so much of the work right now?",
because it doesn't look like it's doing significantly more work now than it
did in the 1970s or 1980s. The question I would be interested in is "why did
the ocean do so little work in the 1990s?", because that is the time period
that seems to be so different from the ones before and after it. But from
what you say, these "sharp" climate scientists, of which you yourself are
one, are not even asking that question at all.
(If I were really sharp, I might ask about the 1960s and early 1970s too,
and I might even hypothesize that there was some sort of natural cycle in
the way the oceans absorb heat, and that this might affect the climate. I
might also ask, though, how reliable this ocean heat data is back that far
in the first place, since we didn't even start trying to cover the ocean
systematically with temperature measurements until the ARGO buoy project
started in 2003, and that didn't give us reasonably complete coverage until
about 2010. But maybe that's too much for a single post.)
In other words, your graph does not tell me that the ocean is masking warming
now by absorbing more heat than usual. It tells me that, during the 1990s,
the ocean caused warming by absorbing less heat than usual. So the story
you are trying to tell me with this graph is not the story that the graph
itself tells me. That does not inspire my confidence, and it probably does
not inspire the confidence of other members of the public either (to say
nothing of media outlets like the Wall Street Journal).
We do appear to agree on one thing, though:
<blockquote>
my biggest problem with the hiatus is that it's really so tedious.
</blockquote>
The only difference is that what I find tedious is not the "hiatus" or the
general reporting about it, but the fact that scientists like you trot out
data and graphs and so forth and claim they say one thing, when they really
say something else.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 27 Sep 2014 01:57 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Don't Worry, It's Only Monopoly Money</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/monopoly-money</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/monopoly-money.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Peter Thiel, in a recent
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536">article</a>,
says that (as the article's subhead puts it)
<blockquote>
If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly
</blockquote>
Of course this works out well for the monopolist; but how about the rest
of us?
I'll go ahead and get the obvious criticism out of the way first: Thiel's
actual examples don't justify the "create" part, only the "capture" part.
Actually, "examples" is an overstatement, because he only gives one (at
least, only one that directly addresses the point made in the subhead): he
compares U.S. airline companies to Google. His numbers do show that Google,
the monopoly, captures much more value than the highly competitive airlines
do. But they also show that the airlines create much more value than
Google does.
I'll also go ahead and clear up the obvious objection that the word
"monopoly" raises: Thiel does make it clear that he isn't talking about
monopolies that only got that way because of special favors from the
government or a willingness to bend the rules in a way that other
companies are not. He is talking about
<blockquote>
the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm
can offer a close substitute.
</blockquote>
Of course, that definition makes a monopoly sound like a good thing, even
though, as we saw above, they don't actually create more value. But that
isn't really why Thiel thinks monopolies, in his sense, are good (which is
why I got that criticism out of the way quickly, so we could focus on his
real points--never mind that they aren't the same as the point the subhead
makes). His real argument is twofold. First, he says, monopolies are
better for workers:
<blockquote>
Imagine you're running one of those restaurants in Mountain View. You're
not that different from dozens of your competitors, so you've got to fight
hard to survive. If you offer affordable food with low margins, you can
probably pay employees only minimum wage. And you'll need to squeeze out
every efficiency: That is why small restaurants put Grandma to work at the
register and make the kids wash dishes in the back.
A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about
competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its
products and its impact on the wider world.
</blockquote>
This is wrong in at least two ways. First, the problems Thiel attributes
to the restaurants in Mountain View are really problems of small businesses,
not low-margin businesses. They can only afford to pay minimum wage
(assuming they actually do; Thiel only says they "probably" do) because
they have a small customer base, so wages, like everything else, have to
come out of a small pool of resources. There are plenty of competitive
businesses that can afford to pay high wages for people with the skills
to justify them. Intel, for example, is certainly facing stiff competition,
but they don't skimp when it comes to paying chip designers; they can
afford to pay them well, because they have a much larger customer base
and therefore a much larger pool of resources to draw on.
Second, even if it's true in theory that Google, as a monopoly, has more
leeway to care about things, it's not at all obvious that this actually
translates to better outcomes in practice. Plenty of ex-Googlers have
described various downsides of working there. And the "impact on the
wider world" that Google is having is by no means an unmixed blessing.
Along with the undeniable value of the search engine and of some apps
like Google Maps, there is the ad-supported business model, the
increasing amount of personal data on Google's servers, the repeated
pattern of apps being launched, getting wide usage, and then being shut
down because they aren't gaining Google enough revenue, and so on.
Looking at the actual impact of Google, instead of the theoretical
impact, based on the "don't be evil" motto, that appears to be all
Thiel has bothered to consider, also brings up another problem with
his analysis. Monopolies are supposed to be better because they capture
more of the value they create: but Google actually captures no value
directly from any of its applications. Anyone can use any Google app
for free. All of the value Google captures is indirect, from measuring
how many eyeballs land in the various places that it tracks. The major
direct effect of this is on Google's users, not on its workers (and
we'll talk about that further below); but the fact that users have no
way of directly communicating to Google how much value they are getting
from its services is a huge elephant in the room that Thiel never even
mentions, even though capturing value is central to his analysis.
So it's by no means clear that monopolies are better, either for workers
or for users, if we go by the example of Google. But Thiel gives another
argument for why monopolies are better for customers, despite the claims
of economists to the contrary:
<blockquote>
Profits come out of customers' wallets, and monopolies deserve their bad
reputation—but only in a world where nothing changes.
In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner
the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no
choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: Deeds are
shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There
is no way to win by inventing a better kind of real-estate development.
The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you
can do is try to buy them up.
But the world we live in is dynamic: We can invent new and better things.
Creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new
categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren't just good
for the rest of society; they're powerful engines for making it better.
</blockquote>
On the face of it, this seems backwards. The usual view in economics is
that competition is what forces companies to innovate. But Thiel claims
that competition actually prevents companies from innovating; in fact,
it prevents companies from doing anything beyond day-to-day operations:
<blockquote>
Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money;
non-monopolists can't. In perfect competition, a business is so focused on
today's margins that it can't possibly plan for a long-term future. Only
one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for
survival: monopoly profits.
</blockquote>
In part, the error here is the same as the one we saw above with the
restaurants in Mountain View: having no resources to spare for anything
beyond day-to-day operations is a problem of small businesses, not low
margin businesses. It also doesn't help that Thiel fails to take into
account that the profit margins companies report in their financials
are what's left after all expenses are subtracted, and those expenses
include things like spending to plan for a long-term future. (They also
include employee wages and salaries, which is why a low-margin business
is not forced to pay low wages, as we saw above, provided it has enough
of a customer base to justify hiring highly skilled people.) Airlines,
for example, spend plenty on things like new aircraft, and that spending
is subtracted before they quote their profits.
But the real problem here is that, while monopoly profits do provide an
extra pool of resources for the company to spend as it wishes, they do
not guarantee that this extra spending will actually translate into extra
value. We saw an aspect of that above, when we looked at the effect of
Google's business model on its users: the fact that Google captures no
value directly from its users means that Google has no way of knowing the
value of its various services to users. Of course, figuring out a way
for users to be able to, for example, directly pay for Google search
is a very hard problem. But solving it certainly seems like it would be
of great value, and surely, if any company in the world is in a position
to solve that kind of a problem, it's Google. So why, if monopolies
really work the way Thiel claims they do, hasn't Google solved it?
The standard economist's answer to this question is that Google has
no incentive to solve the problem. The only way to create such an
incentive would be for some competitor to put Google in a situation
where the problem had to be solved in order to keep its user base.
In the absence of such competition, Google is free to do, not what
its users actually want (since it has no way of knowing that), but
what it thinks its users might want, at least enough to increase its
ad revenues. In other words, Google is using its monopoly profits,
not to create wonderful new benefits for users, but to run expensive
experiments on what users will click on; any new benefit for users is
a lucky side effect (and is likely to go away once Google realizes
that it isn't going to increase their revenues). Google is doing this
simply because it can--because nothing is forcing it to do what seems
obvious from the user's viewpoint and simply let users tell it
directly how valuable its services are, by paying for them.
Of course there's an obvious objection to this: if Google started
charging for search, say, people would simply stop using it. But if
that is really true, then that just sharpens the argument I made
earlier: monopolies like Google may capture more value, but they
create less. If Google search isn't worth paying for, let alone its
other services, then Google is creating even less value than we thought.
And that just makes Thiel's claims even harder to swallow.
The other examples Thiel gives don't make his case any better. For
example, the change from AT&T's monopoly of phone service to the
current state was a classic example of increasing competition benefiting
users by reducing prices and increasing the availability of services; it
was certainly not a case of a new and improved monopoly displacing the
old one, which is Thiel's stated reason for mentioning it. One can
perhaps justify viewing Microsoft and Apple as monopolies in Thiel's
sense, depending on how narrowly you want to draw the line around what
would count as a "close substitute". But, as with the case of Google,
the benefits of Windows and iPhones have brought with them significant
downsides for users: for example, the litany of security flaws in Windows,
and a greatly increased cost of switching systems and applications. What
has kept these problems from being worse than they are is competition:
from Macs and Linux for Windows, and from Android for iOS.
Thiel may be confused about competition because he is confused about
how economists model it. He says:
<blockquote>
Economists copied their mathematics from the work of 19th-century
physicists: They see individuals and businesses as interchangeable atoms,
not as unique creators. Their theories describe an equilibrium state of
perfect competition because that is what's easy to model, not because it
represents the best of business... But every new creation takes place far
from equilibrium.
</blockquote>
It's true that, in order for new creation to take place, the economy has
to be out of equilibrium. But new creation is not what disturbs the
equilibrium; the equilibrium is always being disturbed anyway, simply
because people's needs and wants are always changing. Economists know
perfectly well that the "equilibrium state of perfect competition" exists
only in theory, not in reality, just as physicists know that no real
system is ever in perfect thermodynamic equilibrium, because the system
is always interacting with its environment, and the environment is always
changing. But a physical system's drive towards equilibrium is what
enables useful work to be done; and similarly, an economy's drive towards
equilibrium--competition--is what enables useful creation to be done.
Without that driving incentive, monopoly profits will simply get frittered
away on things that may look good to the company, but don't actually
benefit the rest of us.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 15 Sep 2014 03:38 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>How Not To Support Your Customers</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/how-not-to-support-your-customers</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/how-not-to-support-your-customers.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
The latest round of the Netflix-Verizon tiff that I
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/netflix-neutrality.html">recently blogged about</a>
has now appeared in a
<a href="http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/why-is-netflix-buffering-dispelling-the-congestion-myth">post by Verizon</a>
and a
<a href="http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/">response from Level 3</a>.
First, Verizon purports to describe the problem and its solution:
<blockquote>
Even though there is no congestion on our network, we're not satisfied
if our customers are not. We fully understand that many of our customers
want a great streaming experience with Netflix, and we want that too.
Therefore, we are working aggressively with Netflix to establish new,
direct connections from Netflix to Verizon's network.
</blockquote>
Which sounds good, but now look at Level 3's response explaining what
would actually be needed to fix the problem:
<blockquote>
[W]e could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by
connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something
we've been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something
other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon
has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion.
Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they've
run out - even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand
dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more.
If that's the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can't afford the
small piece of cable between our two ports. If that's the case, we'll
provide it. Heck, we'll even install it.
</blockquote>
In other words, Verizon wants Netflix to make a huge investment in a
"direct connection" between the two networks, when all that's really
needed is a few port cards and cables, the cost of which wouldn't even
amount to rounding error in Verizon's accounting (and as you can see,
they wouldn't even have to spend that since Level 3 has offered to cover
all the costs).
But that seems daft: Verizon customers are having a serious problem
that has a simple fix, yet Verizon refuses to allow that fix. What
could Verizon possibly be thinking? Here's Level 3's answer to that:
<blockquote>
This congestion only takes place between Verizon and network providers
chosen by Netflix. The providers that Netflix does not use do not
experience the same problem. Why is that? Could it be that Verizon
does not want its customers to actually use the higher-speed services
it sells to them? Could it be that Verizon wants to extract a pound of
flesh from its competitors, using the monopoly it has over the only
connection to its end-users to raise its competitors' costs?
</blockquote>
If you're wondering how Netflix and Verizon are competitors, see
<a href="http://www.redboxinstant.com/">here</a>.
It's worth noting that Verizon's talk about "direct connection" leaves
me wondering exactly what the Netflix-Verizon deal I referred to in my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/netflix-neutrality.html">previous post</a>
was supposed to accomplish, since the whole point of that deal was
supposed to be giving Netflix a direct connection to Verizon's network,
similar to the deal it made with Comcast. But if that were really the
case, Level 3, which is a transit provider, would not even come into the
picture. It's possible that, as
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/why-verizon-wont-solve-its-netflix-problem-as-soon-as-comcast/">Ars Technica notes</a>,
Verizon is simply taking time to implement the direct connections that
their deal with Netflix makes possible, and until that implementation
is complete, at least a part of Netflix traffic to Verizon customers
goes via Level 3. But Verizon's post, quoted above, certainly seems to
imply that "direct connection" is an alternative to what Netflix is
doing now, not something Netflix has already paid Verizon for but Verizon
has not finished implementing yet. Either way, this confusion certainly
doesn't help Verizon's credibility.
I'll leave you with this statement in Verizon's post, which is
particularly ironic in view of all the above:
<blockquote>
Verizon is focused on providing its customers with the best Internet
experience possible.
</blockquote>
As long as you don't try to experience Verizon's competitors, apparently.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 03:12 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Netflix Neutrality (Again)</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/netflix-neutrality</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/netflix-neutrality.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
In an entirely predictable development, at least if you've been keeping up
with my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/why-we-need-net-neutrality.html">previous</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/net-neutrality-redux.html">posts</a>
on net neutrality, Netflix is now
<a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101728447">having a tiff</a>
with Verizon over slow delivery of Netflix content to customers.
It seems that Netflix has been displaying messages to customers when videos
take a long time to buffer, telling them that the reason is congestion on
their ISP's network. Verizon, of course, didn't like that very much, so
they sent Netflix a cease-and-desist letter telling them to stop blaming
Verizon for slow video delivery.
What's interesting about this is that Netflix has a similar deal with
Verizon to the one it made with Comcast, which I referred to briefly in
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/why-we-need-net-neutrality.html">my first net neutrality post</a>.
The deal means that Netflix traffic does not have to go through a third
party to get to Verizon's customers; Netflix has direct connections to
Verizon's network (and to Comcast's), so the problem has to be either on
Netflix's end or Verizon's end (update: further developments have shown
that it's more complicated than that--see below). And in all the heavy
weather Verizon is making about this, the one thing they are conspicuously
not saying is that the problem is on Netflix's end.
In other words, Verizon's customers are asking for Netflix data; the data
is slow getting to the customer because Verizon's network is indeed slow
(since if Netflix's end were slow, you can be sure Verizon would be saying
so, loudly--update: it looks like they are saying loudly that the problem
is not their network being slow, but that doesn't mean it's not their fault;
see below); but Verizon does not want its customers to know that. As
Netflix's spokesman says, quoted in the CNBC article,
<blockquote>
This is about consumers not getting what they paid for from their
broadband provider. We are trying to provide more transparency, just like
we do with the ISP Speed Index, and Verizon is trying to shut down that
discussion.
</blockquote>
Of course, trying to shut down the discussion now is closing the door after
the horse has left the barn. The only thing the cease and desist letter did
was ensure that even people who are not Verizon customers, like me, now
know that Verizon's network is slow (update: or at least that there is a
significant problem that Verizon is not fixing as they should). The only way
Verizon can really fix this problem is to, well, fix it, by upgrading its
network (update: or fixing its connections with transit providers). But I'm
not holding my breath.
<h1>Update (17 July 2014)</h1>
As I note in a
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/how-not-to-support-your-customers.html">follow-up post</a>
to this one, the fact that Verizon and Netflix have made the deal referred
to above does not immediately take Internet transit providers (like Level 3,
who handles Netflix traffic) out of the game. In fact, it's still not
entirely clear, at least not from Verizon's public statements, exactly
what the technical implications of the Netflix-Verizon deal are. See the
follow-up post for more on that. However that may be, though, the bottom
line is still the same: Verizon doesn't want its customers to know the
real reason why their Netflix streaming is having problems, or what
options for fixing it (some of which are quite simple, as I discuss in
the follow-up post) have been refused by Verizon, for reasons which have
nothing to do with serving the needs of their customers.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2014 03:26 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Net Neutrality Redux: Peer Pressure?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/net-neutrality-redux</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/net-neutrality-redux.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
If you've read my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/why-we-need-net-neutrality.html">previous post</a>
and are still wondering, even after the Postscript, whether I was really
being fair, you may be interested in
<a href="http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/observations-internet-middleman/">this</a>
from Level 3, another major Internet transit provider like Cogent, which
I mentioned in my last post. It should come as no surprise that they are
also having problems with major broadband providers.
As the article notes, Level 3 has a total of 51 peers, i.e., other major
Internet providers with whom they connect so that they can route traffic
from their own customers to the portions of the Internet that they don't
serve directly. Level 3 has no issues with most of those peers; there are
only 12 with whom they observe significant congestion issues:
<blockquote>
A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated,
dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated
to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single
congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of
making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as
traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers.
That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the
interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in
place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity.
They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying
customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers
make for content.
Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in
Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large
Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in
their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple
Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers.
</blockquote>
Emphasis mine.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2014 01:43 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Why We Need Net Neutrality</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/why-we-need-net-neutrality</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/why-we-need-net-neutrality.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
In the wake of the
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/welcome-to-the-net-neutrality-nightmare-scenario">Federal Court ruling</a>
in January that struck down key portions of the FCC's
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality">Net Neutrality</a>
regulations, it looks like the agency is now considering allowing ISPs
to have a
<a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101607254">"fast lane"</a>
for preferred traffic, which means traffic that content providers are
willing to pay the ISP extra for carrying. Needless to say, the content
providers, such as Netflix, are
<a href="http://blog.netflix.com/2014/04/the-case-against-isp-tolls.html">not in favor of this</a>.
And also needless to say, ISPs like Comcast are hastening to assure us that
<a href="http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/comcast-response-to-netflix">these aren't the droids we're looking for</a>.
(Notice that the Netflix article is full of technical details, while the
Comcast post is just corporate doublespeak--not to mention that the
boilerplate disclaimers are more than twice the length of the actual post.)
I'm not going to rehash all the arguments and counter-arguments here.
Instead, I want to tell a little fable to illustrate why we, the ordinary
users of the Internet, should be very concerned about any such "fast
lane" regulation being put in place.
<hr>
You are at the intersection where you normally turn left to get to your
favorite store. However, something seems to have happened to the road there.
Instead of the usual smooth paved surface, it's all pockmarked with potholes
and the surface in between the potholes is rough and gravelly. You're not
even sure your car will tolerate being driven over that surface; certainly
you'll have to take it a lot slower than you normally do. The store itself
looks no different, nor does its parking lot (which is the private property
of the store owners), and there's no obvious reason for the change in the
road leading there.
The road to the right, which leads to the SuperMegaStore that you never shop
at, looks even nicer than it normally does. New lines have been painted, new
street lights have been installed, and there's even a big sign at the turn
now telling you about all the great bargains available at the SuperMegaStore
if you just Turn Right Now. The SuperMegaStore itself, along with its huge
parking lot, is the same as it's always been; once again, there's no obvious
reason for the change in the road. But it seems like a lot more traffic is
turning right now rather than left, which isn't surprising considering the
conditions of the respective roads.
A man happens to be standing to one side of the intersection, observing the
traffic and making notes on a clipboard. You pull over to the shoulder of
the road and walk up to him.
"Hi," you say. "I don't want to interrupt, but I'm a bit curious about what's
going on."
The man makes a last note, then looks up.
"You mean what's going on with the roads, no doubt?"
"Yes," you say.
"Well, it's not really that surprising. The Fast Lane Regulation went into
effect at midnight last night."
"The Fast Lane Regulation?" you ask. "I remember hearing about it on the news,
but I never really understood what it was all about."
"Well, it's really very simple," the man says. "As of midnight last night,
the owners of roads can charge extra fees to the businesses the roads lead to,
in order to maintain the roads' throughput. Otherwise, the owners wouldn't be
able to recover the costs of building enough road capacity to serve the needs
of the businesses. SuperMegaStore paid its fee, plus the extra surcharge for a
road upgrade, and an advertising fee to have a larger sign put in, so that's
what it got."
"And the other store?" you ask, though you can already see what the answer is
going to be.
"They couldn't afford the fee," the man says, "so their road got downgraded."
"But it was a perfectly good road before," you say. "I suppose I can see it
not getting new lines painted or fancy street lights, but why make it worse
than it was before?"
"Well, obviously, if a store, or any other business, can get the same road
quality without paying the fee, businesses won't want to pay the fee," the man
says.
"But I'm not sure I understand," you say. "The owners of these roads already
get paid for building them, by the taxpayers, and even by tolls. I had to
pay a toll on the main highway coming in here. And now they're charging the
businesses the roads lead to as well? Isn't that getting paid twice for the
same thing?"
"I can't comment on that," the man says. "I'm sure the Road Commission took
such things into consideration before it made the regulation."
"But now I can't get to my store," you say. "Even if my car made it over that
road this one time, it certainly won't be able to do it regularly. How am I
going to get my shopping done?"
"I can't comment on that either," the man says.
As you drive around, you see the effects of the Fast Lane Regulation
everywhere. Your favorite restaurant is now reachable only by a gravel track,
while the chain restaurants whose food you can't stand have wide access roads
and large billboards pointing them out. The MegaTheater has what almost seems
to be a superhighway leading to it, while the smaller art theater that shows
the old movies you like is now on the other side of a dilapidated one-lane
bridge. It seems like you can't get anywhere you would like to go.
Then you begin to wonder: what about new businesses? It seems like they
would have to be able to pay the fees just to come into existence; otherwise
starting them would be pointless, since it would be so difficult to reach
them. It used to be fairly common in your town to see a new business starting
up; but that was when everyone could count on customers having access to any
place they chose to go on equal terms. What will it be like now?
You keep thinking that this just doesn't make sense. Roads are supposed to
be common infrastructure for everybody; they're not supposed to privilege
some businesses over others. How could something like this Fast Lane
Regulation even happen? Businesses already compete based on the quality
and price of what they provide; competing on the basis of extra fees to
allow customers to reach them doesn't seem fair. There must be some way to
fix it.
<hr>
So what is the moral of this little tale? Well, each Federal Court that has
ruled on this subject has given the FCC a very broad hint: if it wants to
regulate ISPs as
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier">common carriers</a>,
it can regulate them however it wants. This is exactly what was done with
the telephone companies in the 1930's, and it is why the sort of scenario
described in the above fable never materialized for telephones. I've been
racking my brain trying to come up with a reason, other than the obvious
one--corporate influence--why the FCC would not be taking this obvious
course, but I've been unable to do it. But regardless of the reason, the
course the FCC is considering now would be very, very bad for the Internet
and for us, its users.
<h1>Postscript</h1>
By the way, if you're wondering whether the above fable was really being
fair by downgrading the roads that didn't pay the fee, consider
<a href="http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious-graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/">this graph</a>
showing the performance of Netflix by ISP.
Also, just to add some more fuel to the fire, consider
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/02/23/comcasts-deal-with-netflix-makes-network-neutrality-obsolete/">this article</a>
talking about the wider implications of the Comcast-Netflix deal. Basically,
Comcast, Verizon, and the other major internet providers are no longer just
ISPs; they also now own a considerable portion of the Internet's backbone,
which is where competition between providers used to do the most good. In
other words, the major ISPs are working hard to create a situation where
they control every pathway from the rest of the Internet to you. As the
article notes, this will make it harder for any regulation by the FCC to
be implemented fairly, though I don't agree with the article's title that
it makes such regulation obsolete. We still need common carrier regulation
in this environment; we just need to also push back against the way the
Internet's structure is evolving away from a decentralized peer-to-peer
network and towards a system of monolithic walled gardens. But one battle
at a time.
<h1>Post-Postscript</h1>
This just in, a
<a href="http://gigaom.com/2014/04/28/verizon-inks-paid-peering-deal-with-netflix/">Netflix-Verizon deal</a>
similar to the Netflix-Comcast deal has been made. If you're wondering why
Comcast and Verizon just happened to be the first two major ISPs to strike
this deal with Netflix, it may help to know that, prior to these deals, the
same transit provider,
<a href="http://www.cogentco.com/">Cogent</a>,
was serving Netflix content to both of them, and that, prior to these deals,
the ISPs were making
<a href="http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/unbalanced-peering-and-the-real-story-behind-the-verizon-cogent-dispute">quite a bit of noise</a>
about the fact that, because of the volume of Netflix traffic, Cogent was
sending them a lot more data than they were sending Cogent, which apparently
was not kosher (at least not to the ISPs) under the existing peering
agreements between the ISPs and the transit providers, which assumed that
the traffic between them would be roughly balanced, and allowed the peering
to be free (i.e., no money changing hands either way) on that basis.
Of course, an obvious course for Verizon or Comcast to take if peering was
becoming unbalanced with Cogent would be to stop giving Cogent peering for
free, and start charging them for the excess traffic generated by Netflix.
So one way of looking at the situation is that, as
<a href="http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/heres-comcast-netflix-deal-structured-numbers.html">this article</a>
suggests, it may actually be cheaper for Netflix to pay Comcast and Verizon
directly and cut out the middleman, if the alternative is for the middleman
to no longer get peering with the ISPs for free. As the article notes, even
if the issues with Cogent were resolved now, Netflix might want to change the
transit provider it uses at some point, which it apparently has done fairly
often in the past, and the new provider would then have the same issues.
What's missing from all of this, though, is any acknowledgment of the people
who are actually the ultimate source of all this traffic: the customers of
Comcast and Verizon (and other ISPs) who want to watch streaming movies over
broadband. The ISPs are talking as though it's all Netflix' fault for
generating so much traffic, without even mentioning that it's their own
customers who are actually creating the traffic. Sure, they happen to be
doing so by watching Netflix right now, but it could just as well be Hulu
next week, or some new service next year that doesn't even exist now. If
all of these services just happen to have problems connecting with a few
particular ISPs, is that the service's fault, or the ISP's fault? Isn't there
a saying that "the one common factor in all of your failed relationships is
you"?
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2014 03:14 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Does Bernie Sanders Read This Blog?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/does-bernie-sanders-read-this-blog</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/does-bernie-sanders-read-this-blog.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Some time back I made a
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/proposal-for-campaign-finance-reform.html">proposal for campaign finance reform</a>.
Now I find that Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a
<a href="http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/031213-CUAmendment.pdf">constitutional amendment</a>
that is identical to my proposal. I don't know if Sanders reads this blog,
but however he got the idea, I'm for it.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2014 21:18 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>News Flash: IPCC Says Burning Food Is A Bad Idea</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/ipcc-says-burning-food-bad-idea</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/ipcc-says-burning-food-bad-idea.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
The Daily Telegraph
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/10716756/Biofuels-do-more-harm-than-good-UN-warns.html">reports</a>
that, based on the latest draft of the IPCC AR5,
<blockquote>
The United Nations will officially warn that growing crops to make "green" biofuel harms the environment and drives up food prices
</blockquote>
(hat tip:
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/24/ipcc-admits-the-scientific-consensus-was-wrong-in-reversal-on-biofuels/">Watts Up With That</a>
). At first glance, this looks promising, an actual outbreak of sanity for
the IPCC, something like
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/what-if-they-gave-a-crisis-and-nobody-came.html">admitting that climate model forecasts are inaccurate</a>.
But just as with that previous item, you shouldn't get your hopes up too
much; as you can see even from the brief quote above, the obvious reason
for not using food crops to make biofuels (the one that's in the title of
this post) is not the primary reason the IPCC gives for their about-face
on this issue.
The primary reason the IPCC gives is that
<blockquote>
growing biofuel crops on a large scale requires either the conversion of
agricultural land used for food crops or the destruction of forests to free
up land, possibly offsetting any reduction in carbon emissions from the use
of biofuels.
</blockquote>
In other words, the IPCC isn't really concerned about rising food prices;
after all, if they had been, the AR4, back in 2007, would not have made such
an aggressive recommendation to increase the use of biofuels. It's not as
though burning food only just started to drive up food prices. No, it's all
about CO2 alarmism.
Of course, even if we restrict the discussion to the climate aspect, the
IPCC is admitting that they screwed up. Did they just now discover that
growing biofuel crops requires the use of land? Couldn't exactly the same
analysis have been done back in 2007? Why wasn't it? Of course, nobody is
asking those questions. And if the IPCC can screw up something this basic,
what does that say about their ability to get it right on more complex
issues, like, oh, say, predicting what Earth's climate will be like in
fifty or a hundred years? Of course, nobody is asking those questions
either.
But to me, all that is secondary to the real issue, which is that the IPCC,
and all the governments that make policy based on what the IPCC says, were
willing to make it more difficult for a significant fraction of the world's
population to get enough to eat, right now, based on the belief that it would
lead to some vague benefit to the climate fifty or a hundred years hence.
Which they're now saying isn't going to be a benefit anyway (not that I
believed them whey they said it would, but the point is that now even they
admit it's not). And the people who wouldn't get enough to eat had no say
in the matter. These are the people whom we are supposed to trust with the
future of our planet. Personally, I don't trust them to add two and two
correctly. But maybe that's just me.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2014 02:32 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Constitution Worship?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/constitution-worship</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/constitution-worship.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Some time back I
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/watch-out-first-step.html">noted</a>
that what was then a common sentiment (I found it in an op-ed in the New
York Times, which is proof of it being a common sentiment if anything is)
about the Constitution seemed backwards to me. The claim was that we were
getting into trouble about the "fiscal cliff" because we were too obsessed
with following the Constitution; but as I showed in that post, the real
problem was that we weren't following it enough.
Now I've come across a
<a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/09/skeptical-view-of-constitution-
worship.html">lecture</a>
given by Michael Karman at Johns Hopkins University on Constitution Day,
2010, entitled "A Skeptical View of Constitution Worship", which goes even
further than the NYT op-ed did. My basic response is the same: the problem
is not that we "worship" the Constitution, it's that we ignore it.
But the lecture presents such a tempting target that I can't help going
beyond that; so here goes.
I'll start with a key point that the lecturer doesn't appear to be aware of
(or if he is, he's done a swell job of concealing it): we can amend the
Constitution. For example, the lecturer bemoans the fact that the original
Constitution allowed slavery, and even gave it legal protections:
<blockquote>
[I]t's hard to celebrate a Constitution that explicitly guaranteed the
return of fugitive slaves to their masters, protected the international
slave trade for 20 years, and enhanced the South’s national political
representation to reflect its slaveholding.
</blockquote>
Well, we fixed that problem with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Amendments. The lecturer also complains about the original Constitution
being anti-democracy:
<blockquote>
The Framers were trying to create a powerful national government that
was as distant from popular control as possible: very long terms in office,
large constituencies, indirect elections. They thought of democracy as rule
by the mob. They didn't think poor people could be trusted with the suffrage.
They didn't think women should vote.
</blockquote>
We amended the Constitution to fix those things too: popular election of
Senators, giving women the right to vote, prohibiting poll tax to remove a
major roadblock to voting. The lecturer might feel, of course, that these
reforms didn't go far enough: perhaps we need even more protection for
voting rights; perhaps we should pass the Equal Rights Amendment to ensure
that women's rights are respected. But why aren't the reforms we have made,
by amending the Constitution, mentioned at all? Do they somehow not count?
Similarly, the lecturer complains about features of the Constitution that
"still bind us", without appearing to be aware that we can amend those things
too. (It's true that one thing he complains about, having two Senators for
every State regardless of population, would be much harder to change, since
there is an explicit provision about that.) But more than that, the lecturer
appears to assume without question that whatever he thinks is a good idea,
must in fact be a good idea, so if the Constitution makes it harder for us
to do it, the Constitution must be bad.
For example, he complains that no foreign-born person can be President,
and that the Electoral College is a bad idea. Well, guess what? If you think
those things should be changed, propose an Amendment to change them. And
then we can actually have a substantive debate about whether these changes
would, in fact, be good for the country. Don't blame the Constitution for
the fact that it makes you go through that laborious process instead of just
dictating to everybody that whatever you think is a good idea is what we're
going to do. There's a reason the Constitution is set up to make these kinds
of changes hard: to protect us from ourselves. And judging by our performance
when we disregard these protections, the Framers were quite right to try to
put roadblocks in our way to prevent us from charging ahead to make changes
whenever we feel like it.
In other words, the lecturer doesn't understand what the Constitution is
really about. It's not about finding the "right" set of provisions and
enforcing them on everyone. It's about finding a structure that lets people
with very different ideas about what is "right" coexist peacefully in the
same country, going about their business and not interfering with each other,
by agreeing on a common set of basic guidelines that everyone can live with,
and stopping there.
Which brings us to the lecturer's third point: we ignore the Constitution
anyway. This is often true, as I argued myself in my previous post on this
topic. However, unlike the lecturer, I view that as a bug, not a feature.
And it doesn't make much sense to argue that following various Constitutional
provisions is bad for the country, as the lecturer has just done in points 1
and 2, when you're also arguing that we don't follow the Constitution.
Which also brings us to the fourth point: the Supreme Court ignores the
Constitution. I certainly agree with that; I've
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">said</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look.html">the</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html">same</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/strict-constructionist.html">thing</a>
myself. But once again, is this supposed to be a feature, or a bug? Is the
right response to just admit that we ignore the Constitution, and discard it?
Or is the right response to start actually taking it seriously? Which means
that if we really have a problem with a Constitutional provision, because
our values have changed from those of the Framers, we amend it, like the
Framers explicitly told us to do?
Would it be worth it to do all that work? Well, that brings us back to point 0:
how many of our freedoms, which the writer justifiably admires (I do too), do we
owe to the Constitution? Let's see:
<blockquote>
It's a wonderful thing that one can criticize the president--even call him a
socialist or a coddler of terrorists, if you like--and not worry about being
arrested for it.
</blockquote>
In other words, freedom of speech. First Amendment: check.
<blockquote>
It's a great thing that one can pursue one's own religious beliefs with a
great deal of tolerance...
</blockquote>
First Amendment again: check.
<blockquote>
...and that a black man can be president of a country that held blacks in
slavery just 150 years ago and that still had an entrenched system of white
supremacy until roughly 50 years ago.
</blockquote>
We already covered that one above: check. (And a case can be made that the
reason it took so long to overcome Jim Crow after the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments were passed was that we ignore the Constitution when
we feel like it. If we had really taken those Amendments seriously, we might
have had a black President sooner.)
<blockquote>
It's a great thing that in America a woman came very close to being elected
president of the United States two years ago and that one probably will win
such an election sometime fairly soon.
</blockquote>
We covered giving women the right to vote above too: check. (And I'm all in
favor of a woman President as long as it's not Hillary Clinton.)
<blockquote>
I personally think it's a wonderful thing that in many states gay and
lesbian couples can get married just like straight couples, and that, I would
predict, they will be able to do so in most of the country within another
decade or so.
</blockquote>
Ok, you've got me on this one: as Justice Scalia is fond of pointing out, the
Constitution says nothing about marriage.
Oh, wait: what's that in the Fourteenth Amendment? "Equal protection of the
laws"? I take it back: the Constitution has this one covered too. As I've
blogged
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/in-defense-of-marriage.html">before</a>.
The funny part is that the lecturer gets things almost right at the end:
<blockquote>
In the end, we, the American people, determine what sort of country we live
in--
</blockquote>
Right on! But then he muffs it:
<blockquote>
--the Constitution and the courts play a relatively marginal role in that
process.
</blockquote>
And as we've seen, when that does happen, the process does not work. But then
it gets even better: we have a statement that is a truth and a deeply flawed
misunderstanding at the same time:
<blockquote>
To paraphrase the great jurist with the greatest of names--the Honorable
Learned Hand--no constitution and no court are going to rescue us from white
supremacy or sexism or homophobia or Japanese American internment or FBI
profiling of Arabs and Muslims.
</blockquote>
This is true as a matter of history: as we've seen, the Constitution and the
Supreme Court did not rescue us from many bad things. But that's our
fault. We chose to ignore the Constitution, and chose not to hold our elected
representatives and the Supreme Court accountable when they ignored the
Constitution, and indeed, we got all these bad things. What would have
happened if we had upheld the Constitution, and voted people out of office
when they ignored it, and protested when the Court failed to uphold it?
Unfortunately we can't go back and find out what would have happened in the
past; but we could at least give it a try for the future.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 21 Mar 2014 03:58 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>What If They Gave A Crisis And Nobody Came?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/what-if-they-gave-a-crisis-and-nobody-came</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/what-if-they-gave-a-crisis-and-nobody-came.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
It's been obvious for quite some time, at least to anyone not marinated
in the ideology of climate change alarmism, that the models being used to
produce the IPCC's forecasts of doom
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/20/cowtan-way-off-course/">do not match reality</a>.
But now it's become so glaring that even the IPCC itself has admitted it
in the
<a href="http://www.climate2013.org/spm">Summary for Policymakers</a>
(SPM) from Working Group I for its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)
(hat tip:
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/09/the-ipcc-discards-its-models/">Watts Up With That</a>
).
Actually, of course, "admitted it" is optimistic phrasing: a more apt
description would be "attempted to pretend nothing is actually wrong".
You have to look carefully to see the admissions; for example, as noted
in the Watts Up With That post, one is in a footnote on p. 14 of the SPM
(and in a font small enough that I had to zoom in to read it on my
computer). Also, there is no discussion that I can find of a key point that
is often overlooked when comparing the climate models to reality: the
different model projections are based on different assumptions about how
much CO2 will be emitted in the future, and actual CO2 emissions thus far
have been similar to the most pessimistic set of models (i.e., the ones
that assumed the most CO2 emissions), which have overpredicted actual
temperatures significantly more than the average of all the models, which
is what is usually quoted when comparing the models to actual observations.
So the IPCC's admissions still don't fess up to the full extent of the
problem: the model predictions are even worse than they admit.
(It's also worth noting that, despite admitting, however obliquely, that
its models cannot predict future climate, the IPCC continues to fill its
report with predictions of future climate. Perhaps it's force of habit.)
The IPCC report is not the only venue in which climate change alarmism is on
the defensive. The
<a href="http://unfccc.int/meetings/warsaw_nov_2013/meeting/7649.php">Warsaw Climate Change Conference</a>
ended in November, and despite the positive spin on the conference website,
the general sense was that it
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/warsaw-climate-conference-produces-little-agreement/2013/11/22/705a06d0-538f-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html">fell short</a>
even of somewhat limited expectations. Part of the reason for that may have
been that alarmists' efforts to link any sort of adverse event to climate
change have been facing increasing skepticism. The fact that the conference's
educational materials
<a href="http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/11/un-climate-conference-cop19-tells.html">lied about sea level rise</a>,
claiming that the sea level began rising in the late 1800's "for the first
time since the last ice age", didn't help either. (The materials also claimed
that Northern Hemisphere snow cover is decreasing, which it isn't.) And back
in October, the U.S. Supreme Court
<a href="http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/15/climate-change-goes-back-court/">agreed to hear a case</a>
challenging the EPA's regulation of CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act.
You'd think that a bunch of people who claim to be honest scientists would
feel some contrition over all this. Instead, they continue to dial up the spin.
One meme which has become popular is the "Hiroshima bomb" comparison, which
I referred to in
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/science-heal-thyself.html">a recent post</a>.
The meme has now even appeared as an
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/25/the-4hiroshimas-app-propaganda-of-the-worst-kind/">app</a>
that counts the "Hiroshima bombs" of heat being added to the climate. Of
course, as I showed in that recent post, these numbers don't actually amount
to much at all when put in perspective (and the link above gives more numbers
showing the same thing). Another common meme is "denialists are harassing
us"; a good recent example is
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/09/denialist-harassment-of-climate-scientists-needs-to-stop">this piece in The Guardian</a>
about the case currently before the Virginia Supreme Court regarding a
Freedom of Information Act request for emails from Michael Mann and other
climate scientists. The Guardian's position on this is interesting:
<blockquote>
Freedom of Information (Foia) laws...were enacted at the federal level
and also in many states to help insure transparency and accountability in
government. They have proved invaluable tools for journalists and public
interest organizations seeking to uncover information that some in government
would prefer to hide. But applying these so called "sunshine laws" to
academics at state-run academic institutions is something new.
</blockquote>
In other words, governments shouldn't be allowed to hide information, but
academics doing science under government grants (which are Federal grants,
by the way, despite that bit about "state-run" institutions), science which
is claimed to justify public policies with huge costs? Sure, hide all the
information you want, no sweat. The author does helpfully explain why:
forcing academics to openly share information would
<blockquote>
have a chilling effect on the free and open sharing amongst colleagues
which is essential in the scientific process.
</blockquote>
So "free and open sharing" apparently means "not giving information to people
who disagree with you". Well, it's nice to have that clarified.
But then the piece goes on to make a point that does make some sense. It
quotes Michael Halpern of the Union of Concerned Scientists:
<blockquote>
"Freedom of information laws rightly exempt internal communications and
deliberations in order to facilitate the free exchange of ideas," Halpern says.
</blockquote>
Now as a pure matter of principle, I actually agree with this--if it is
limited to "internal communications and deliberations" (a distinction that
is, of course, notably lacking in the article up to this point--not to
mention the fact that it's notably lacking when the media is pestering the
government for information, but that's another post). I'm really not
interested in reading Michael Mann's private emails. I don't care what
discussions he has behind closed doors or what sort of groupthink goes on
in his research group--as long as it stays there.
But what I do care about, as I've
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/climate-change-alarmists-relax.html">said before</a>,
is scientists like Michael Mann doing bad science, then declaring a planetary
emergency based on it, and then obstructing at every turn any attempt to get
the details on which the science is based, to demonstrate that it's bad
science. Mann hasn't just withheld private emails; he's done his best to
withhold raw data, statistical methods, and anything else that could be
used to check his work. And when that information finally came out, in
spite of his best efforts to the contrary, it showed that his science was,
in fact, bad science. Yet instead of owning up, or at least shutting up,
he continues to peddle climate change alarmism.
As the recent efforts at spinning the IPCC AR5 show, this behavior is
typical of climate change alarmists: the more their conclusions are
discredited, the louder they shout that hey, there really is a planetary
emergency--really! Cross my heart and hope to die! Why is this? Of course
I telegraphed my answer in the title of this post. These are people of
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote.html">Heinlein's class one</a>,
who are afraid of losing their cushy position as the ones who get to tell
others what to do and pronounce moral judgment on everyday activities like
driving your car. If they give a crisis and nobody comes, they might have
to find honest work.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2014 04:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Non-Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/non-beatings-will-continue</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/non-beatings-will-continue.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
A few weeks ago the Federal Reserve announced that it would
<a href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/monetary/20131030a.htm">continue "quantitative easing"</a>
at its current level. The reason, as explained in the press release just
linked to (though in rather oblique language, as is the usual practice with
such things), was basically that, while the economy appears to be recovering,
the Fed isn't sure that it's recovering strongly enough. Which leads to the
obvious next question: how much longer will this have to go on?
To see just how acute this question really is, you have to bear in mind that
the reason the Fed is doing "quantitative easing" (QE) in the first place is
that it has already maxed out its other tools. The Fed's target interest rate
is already as low as it can go, i.e., zero, and the press release makes it
clear that there are no plans to change that any time soon (in fact, the
release notes that the rate will probably remain at effectively zero for some
time after "quantitative easing" ends, whenever that is). Bank
<a href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm#table1">reserve requirements</a>
are about as low as they can possibly go without admitting openly that they
are basically zero (and note that the upper limit of the "low-reserve tranche"
in which only 3 percent of liabilities must be held in reserve, has been rising
steadily, as shown on the table further down the page, and is scheduled to rise
again in January 2014). Yet the economy continues to be sluggish.
Of course, there is no shortage of theories as to why the economy has not
responded more emphatically to all this nice treatment. The standard Keynesian
answer, which you can find even at
<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/11/unconventional-monetary-policy-1">The Economist</a>
these days, is that without QE the recession would have been much worse. On
this theory, the Fed should certainly not be even thinking about scaling
back QE (as they almost did in September); if anything, they should be
thinking about expanding it. The main problem with this theory is that, if
the Keynesians actually believed it, they would be advocating expanding QE,
yet none of them are. True, they aren't advocating reducing the pace either;
<a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/tobin-and-the-taper-wonkish/?_r=0">this column</a>
by Paul Krugman is a good example of the current Keynesian wisdom:
<blockquote>
On the whole, I'm sympathetic to skepticism about the effectiveness of QE,
predictably. After all, I’ve been arguing for forward guidance instead for
15 years. On the other hand, right now investors are not making a clear
distinction between QE and forward guidance; taper talk has been accompanied
by a clear shift in expectations toward the notion that the Fed will raise
short-term rates sooner rather than later. So I wouldn’t be tapering now--it
sends a bad signal at a time when recovery remains very weak and fragile.
</blockquote>
That bit about "forward guidance" just means that, instead of QE, Krugman
would prefer that the Fed just cross-its-heart-and-hope-to-die-double-promise
that it really, really, really won't raise interest rates, and hope that by
itself is enough to get the economy to recover. You will note, of course, as
I did above, that the Fed basically did exactly that in the press release; in
fact they have been doing it pretty consistently for the past few years. So
if it were going to work, you would expect that it already would have worked,
with or without the added push of QE. Another beautiful theory spoiled by an
ugly fact.
Let's try a different theory. Consider: what is the Fed actually doing when
it does QE? According to the press release, it is buying "additional agency
mortgage-backed securities...and longer-term Treasury securities". In plain
English, the Fed is buying various securities from banks in order to drive
up their price and thereby drive down the interest rates on them. The hope
is that the lower interest rates will encourage people and businesses to
take out more loans and thereby start spending again.
But for that to happen, the banks, who are the direct recipients of the $2.8
trillion and counting from the Fed, have to make the loans. What if they
just choose to hold on to the cash instead? According to the Fed's
<a href="http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/20131114/">accounting of bank reserves</a>,
that's exactly what they have been doing. As you can see from the link, at
the end of October, 2013, total bank reserve balances were about $2.4
trillion. Does that number sound familiar? And what's more, only $73 billion
of that is required to meet the banks' reserve requirements. According to the
Fed, they can lend out all the rest, i.e., about $2.3 trillion. But they
haven't. Why not?
Before answering this question, we should pause to observe how outlandish this
situation is, at least on the surface. As
<a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/101186133">CNBC</a>
points out, banks can earn anywhere from 4 percent to 10 percent or more on
various types of loans; yet instead, they are leaving their money deposited at
the Fed earning 0.25 percent. What's going on here?
CNBC's answer is simple:
<blockquote>
[B]anks now apparently consider that their risk-adjusted return on consumer
loans are lower than the 0.25 percent deposit rate at the Fed...
</blockquote>
In other words, on this theory, banks are actually acting rationally: they
would make less than 0.25 percent, on net, if they actually loaned out that
$2.3 trillion. So the situation is actually even more outlandish than it
first appears; what kind of messed up economy do you have to have for banks
to think that their best available rate of return is 0.25 percent?
I've never seen a Keynesian economist even ask this kind of question, but
there are other kinds of economists, though you rarely see them as talking
heads on the news or blogging in venues like the New York Times. For example,
you could try
<a href="http://mises.org/daily/6534/">this article</a>
from the Ludwig von Mises Institute:
<blockquote>
[V]arious studies that supposedly show that the Fed's quantitative easing
can grow the US economy are fallacious. To suggest that monetary pumping can
grow an economy implies that increases in the money supply will result in
increases in the pool of real wealth.
This is however a fallacy since all that money does is serve as the medium
of exchange. It enables the exchange of the produce of one specialist for
the produce of another specialist and nothing more. If printing money could
somehow generate wealth then world wide poverty would have been eliminated by
now.
On the contrary, monetary pumping sets in motion a process of economic
impoverishment by activating an exchange of something for nothing. It diverts
real wealth from wealth generating activities towards non-productive
activities.
</blockquote>
First, a side note: many non-Austrian economists would object to the term
"monetary pumping" being used to describe QE. For example,
<a href="http://pragcap.com/understanding-quantitative-easing">this article</a>
on the "Pragmatic Capitalism" site claims that QE does not actually create
any new money. All it does is transfer money from one asset to another: the
Fed gains an asset such as a mortgage-backed security and the seller gains
a reserve balance at the Fed.
However, this analysis ignores the fact that a bank can make loans based on
its reserve balance at the Fed (as long as the balance doesn't go below the
"reserve limit", which as we saw above, is basically negligible right now),
whereas it cannot make loans based on its holdings in mortgage-backed
securities. And everyone agrees that banks making loans based on fractional
reserves does create new money; so the fact that QE itself is just an
"asset transfer" is a red herring: banks' ability to make loans is being
boosted, and that's what counts.
Having got that out of the way, let's look at the real point: what if banks
aren't making loans because, quite simply, there really is so little actual
productive activity going on that there are no useful loans they can make?
Of course it isn't quite right to say that there is no productive activity
going on. Obviously there are a lot of people still doing productive work,
because life is still going on: people still need food, clothing, and shelter,
they still need cars to go places, they still want new smartphones and wide
screen TVs and other gadgetry. But there is more than enough of all that stuff
already being produced; nobody needs a bank loan to make more of it.
What is not happening is the creation of new forms of wealth. Bright,
ambitious young people no longer want to be scientists or engineers or
explorers; they want to be investment bankers and hedge fund managers. But
these activities don't generate any wealth; all they do is transfer wealth
from one pocket to another. Of course investment bankers and hedge fund
managers will vehemently object to this, but there's an easy way to test
it. Just ask the question: when you trade a stock or a bond or some other
security, do you expect to make money? Of course the answer is yes, otherwise
you wouldn't be making the trade. But if that's the case, you must also
expect the other party to the trade to lose money.
It's worth taking a bit to unpack this. Normal transactions, involving money
on one side and something tangible on the other--a good or a service--are
positive sum: both parties are better off after the trade. When you buy
a DVD player, the player is worth more to you than the money you pay for it,
because you can't use money to play DVDs. But to the store, the money is
worth more than the player, because they don't need it to play DVDs; they
only have it in the first place in order to sell it. In other words, the
good or service that is traded has a different value to you than it does
to the store.
But when you trade stocks or bonds, that isn't the case, because the stock
or bond is no use for anything by itself; its only use is as a financial
instrument, entitling you to some series of cash flows in the future. Those
future cash flows will be the same regardless of who owns the stock or bond,
so it must be the case that, whenever the stock or bond is traded, one
party to the trade is worse off. If the stock or bond is going to do well,
the seller is worse off: the cash they receive is worth less than the net
present value of the future cash flows. If the stock or bond is going to do
poorly, the buyer is worse off: the net present value of the future cash
flows is worth less than the cash they paid. One or the other must be
true, as a matter of simple math, which means that, as above, one party to
the trade must lose money.
Now consider what must happen for bank loans to be profitable. The bank
gives the borrower present money in exchange for future money: a series of
future cash flows. The bank will not make the loan unless the net present
value of that series of future cash flows is greater than the amount of
present money they lend. But that means the borrower, in order to be able
to pay back the loan at all, must do something productive with it, i.e.,
something that is positive sum, something that creates enough new wealth
to be able to pay back the loan from the proceeds and still come out ahead.
Of course, it's quite possible for some people to take loaned money and
start investment banks or hedge funds (of course, they call the lenders
"clients" instead), and transfer enough wealth to themselves to pay back
the money. But it's impossible for everybody to do that; and if enough
people start trying to do it instead of productive activity, loans will
shut down, no matter how much QE you pump into the banks.
On this Austrian view, the solution is simple: stop QE, and in fact stop
all of the Fed's interventions into the economy. All they are doing is
masking the true state of the economy, and therefore preventing people
from adjusting to reality. True, the adjustment will be painful, but it
would have been less painful if we'd done it sooner.
So whose view is right? The Austrian view has at least this much going
for it: it offers an explanation for what is, on the mainstream Keynesian
view, the great mystery of why the economy continues to stagnate despite
all of the TLC lavished on it by the Fed. However, it looks like the TLC
is going to continue, though it seems to me to be a rather bitter twist
on the standard line about beatings and morale.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 28 Nov 2013 04:31 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Science, Heal Thyself</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/science-heal-thyself</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/science-heal-thyself.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
A while back, I advised climate change alarmists to
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/climate-change-alarmists-relax.html">get off the soapbox</a>.
Now it appears that I have to extend that advice to scientists more
generally.
In the course of wandering around the Intertubes, I came across
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/opinion/welcome-to-the-age-of-denial.html">this op-ed</a>
by Adam Frank, which appeared in the New York Times a couple of months ago.
(Hat tip:
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/24/quote-of-the-week-the-death-of-popular-science/">this post</a>
by Anthony Watts, which linked to Popular Science magazine's post explaining
why they were
<a href="http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments">shutting down comments</a>,
which linked to the NYT op-ed.)
Frank laments the fact that the public doesn't have the confidence it
used to have in science:
<blockquote>
The triumph of Western science led most of my professors to believe that
progress was inevitable. While the bargain between science and political
culture was at times challenged -- the nuclear power debate of the 1970s, for
example -- the battles were fought using scientific evidence. Manufacturing
doubt remained firmly off-limits.
Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to
deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, "creationism" was a minor current in
American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was
a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as
"creation science" and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though
transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for
some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.
</blockquote>
So far, so good; I've
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/two-articles-two-cultures.html">blogged before</a>
about the same problem. But then comes this:
<blockquote>
Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists' PR
playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate
science that were decided scientifically decades ago.
</blockquote>
Sorry, Professor Frank, but you just illustrated why the tactic of denying
"scientific fact" has become politically effective and socially acceptable:
scientists themselves have misrepresented what is "scientific fact", using
that term not just in reference to fields like evolution that have massive
supporting data and a comprehensive theory to back them up, but to fields
like climate science that simply are not in the same category, but which
happen to fit the scientist's personal ideology.
For example: what, exactly, are these "fundamental issues in climate science
that were decided scientifically decades ago"? The fact that CO2 absorbs
infrared radiation? No reputable scientist denies this, and even climate
scientists who do not support the so-called "consensus" around climate change
alarmism, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT, will tell you that media hacks who
claim that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas are just that, media hacks.
But by juxtaposing climate science with evolution, Professor Frank is inviting us
to believe that climate change alarmism itself is based on "fundamental issues
in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago": that the
climate science in, say, the IPCC's
<a href="http://www.climatechange2013.org/report/review-drafts/">WG 1 Report in the AR5 draft</a>
has the same level of confidence and support behind it as the theory
of evolution. And that is, how can I put this delicately, wrong. I don't
want to make this a book-length post (though I will probably have more to
come on this subject in the near future), and the work of showing how the
so-called "consensus" trumpeted by the IPCC is, to put it bluntly, bogus,
has already been done, most recently by the
<a href="http://nipccreport.com/reports/ccr2a/ccr2physicalscience.html">NIPCC</a>,
a group of scientists who want to make clear that they are not part of
the "consensus" and are willing to do the grunt work of refuting it point
by point. But I'll take a brief detour to give just one illustration of what
I'm talking about.
A recent post on
<a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/">RealClimate</a>
about ocean heating contained this little gem:
<blockquote>
The increase in the amount of heat in the oceans amounts to 17 x 1022
Joules over the last 30 years. That is so much energy it is equivalent to
exploding a Hiroshima bomb every second in the ocean for thirty years.
</blockquote>
The hysteria factor alone should raise red flags with scientists in other
fields like Professor Frank; but let's put that aside and do some simple math to
see what these numbers really mean. (We're also putting aside, by the way,
any questions about whether the numbers quoted are accurate, which, since
we have only had reasonably comprehensive ocean coverage since 2003, is not
a trivial point; but that's another post.) This amount of heat is for the
upper 2000 meters of the world's oceans. How much water is that? The surface
area of Earth's oceans is 360 million square kilometers according to
<a href="http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1997/EricCheng.shtml">The Physics Factbook</a>.
That makes a total volume of water of 720 million cubic kilometers, if we
assume the entire ocean is at least 2000 meters deep. But of course it
isn't that deep everywhere, so we have to cut that number down some. Let's
say, just for a quick calculation, that the actual amount of water is 3/4
that, or 480 million cubic kilometers. (This is probably a substantial
underestimate, since the average depth of the oceans is more than 2000
meters; but we want to be conservative since we're just doing a rough
calculation to put the numbers in perspective.)
But that's cubic kilometers; each cubic kilometer is a billion cubic
meters, so we're talking about 480 million billion (4.8 x 1017)
cubic meters. Water weighs about 1000 kilograms per cubic meter (seawater is
actually somewhat heavier, but we're being conservative in our numbers),
so that's 4.8 x 1020 kilograms of water.
How much will 17 x 1022 Joules raise the temperature of
4.8 x 1020 kilograms of water? Water has a specific heat of 4180
Joules per kilogram per degree Celsius, so it takes 4.8 x 1020
x 4180 = 2.0 x 1024 Joules to heat up the top 2000 meters of the
ocean by 1 degree C. That means the temperature rise over the last 30 years
is 17 x 1022 divided by 2.0 x 1024, which comes out
to: 0.085 degrees Celsius.
You may be fidgeting in your seat about now, thinking that I have pulled
a fast one. Surely the important quantity is heat, not temperature,
right? And that same 17 x 1022 Joules can raise the temperature
of the atmosphere a lot more than the temperature of the oceans, right?
These statements are not false, but they are also not telling the whole
story. The first, obvious point left out is that direct heat transfer
only occurs if there is a temperature difference. So the heat will
stay in the ocean unless the ocean is warmer than the air above it;
and if the ocean's temperature has only changed by 0.085 degrees C,
it can't raise the temperature of the atmosphere by direct heat transfer
more than that.
The second point arises from a question you might have after reading the
last paragraph: what about evaporation? Even a small difference in ocean
temperature will increase the evaporation rate; and evaporation transfers
heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, right? Yes, that's right: but what
that statement leaves out is how the heat gets transferred. Evaporation
is part of the hydrologic cycle: heat gets carried by water vapor from the
surface to high altitudes, where the water vapor condenses to form clouds
or precipitation. When it condenses, the latent heat it was carrying gets
deposited in the atmosphere; but because that is happening at altitude,
it's easier for that heat to escape to space.
In other words, of the two possible ways that 17 x 1022 Joules
of heat could get transferred from the oceans to the atmosphere, one will
not make much difference (because the ocean temperature has only risen by
0.085 C), and the other makes it easier for that heat to escape back to
space, which provides a negative feedback. Either way, to just state the
amount of heat in the oceans, without talking about how it could possibly
get transferred to the atmosphere and what those mechanisms entail, is not
a fair presentation of this issue. (And the Hiroshima bomb thing only makes
it worse.)
If you read through the NIPCC's report that I linked to above and compare
it with the IPCC WG1 report (or if you have been following this issue for
any significant amount of time), you will see that every specific issue
you dig into suffers from the same disease: the actual science doesn't say
what the IPCC "summary" says it says, and it certainly doesn't say what the
hysterical rhetoric in the popular media says it says. Scientific theories
that deserve the confidence Mr. Frank wants us all to give to science are
not like that. There may be polemics on both sides; indeed, there are
scientists, for example Richard Dawkins, who are just as vituperative,
if you just look at the surface rhetoric, when defending the theory of
evolution as climate change alarmists are at defending their so-called
"consensus". But when you look at the actual substance behind the rhetoric,
with theories like evolution, you find that the main claims that the
rhetoric makes are justified. All living organisms on Earth are
descended from a common ancestor. Natural selection does cause changes
in the gene pools of populations of organisms.
Also, scientists in the field of evolution are quite willing to say just
where the limits of knowledge are; evolutionary biologists will readily
admit that many of our current beliefs about how specific species or
specific structures or traits evolved are tentative, and may well turn out
to be wrong when we learn more. And when biologists recommend policies to
the public that have huge consequences, they can back those recommendations
up, and they can demonstrate specific consequences that will happen if the
recommendations are not followed. For example, biologists predicted that
overuse of antibiotics would lead to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria, and sure enough, it did.
In short, a well-supported scientific theory like evolution looks very
different, when you take the time to check into it, than climate science
does. Yet Professor Frank likens climate science to the theory of evolution; so
either he hasn't bothered to check into it, or he has decided that the
difference doesn't matter. Either way, he has demonstrated why ordinary
people don't trust science the way they used to: how can they, when
scientists themselves are either sloppy or disingenuous when talking to
the public?
Please note, by the way, that I said "scientists" just now, not "climate
scientists". Adam Frank is a physicist and astronomer; his scientific
work is far removed from climate science. I'm not saying that every
scientist in every field has to take the time to check up on every other
field; we all have plenty of demands on our time, I understand that. But
a scientist does have the responsibility, when talking to the public,
to not misrepresent science, in any field, not just his own. If he hasn't
checked up, he should say so, and should not present what he says about
the other field as fact. Being a scientist doesn't relieve you of the need
to have an informed opinion if you're going to have an opinion at all;
indeed, scientists are supposed to be better than the average person at
recognizing that need and taking action appropriately.
It's disappointing to see Frank, and many scientists like him, not doing
that. It's even more disappointing when you see that, when it suits him,
Frank is perfectly willing to draw the distinction he does not draw in
his op-ed. For example,
<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/05/17/136406757/the-final-word-on-life-after-death">here he is on life after death</a>:
<blockquote>
For myself I remain fully and firmly agnostic on the question. If ever
there was a place where firm convictions seem misplaced this is it.
There simply is no controlled, experimental verifiable information to
support either the "you rot" vs. "you go on" positions.
In the absence of said information we are all free to believe as we
like but, I would argue, it behooves us to remember that truly "public"
knowledge on the subject - the kind science exemplifies - remains in
short supply.
</blockquote>
Just to be clear: I am not saying that science can never give us
reliable knowledge, the kind of knowledge that does justify branding
those who refuse to accept it as "deniers". We have scientific theories,
such as relativity and quantum mechanics, that have been experimentally
verified to extremely high accuracy. We have others, such as the theory
of evolution, that, while their subject matter prevents them from being
verified experimentally to the same degree, still have a mountain of
evidence in their favor, with more coming in every day, and a
comprehensive theoretical structure that explains the evidence and
makes correct predictions. But we also have plenty of areas of science
where we do not have that same level of understanding: and the real
disservice to science is to fail to be honest with the public about
which is which. That is what needs to be fixed if scientists like
Frank want "science denial" to stop.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 26 Oct 2013 01:38 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Some Things Never Change</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/some-things-never-change</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/some-things-never-change.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This
<a href="http://www.openculture.com/2009/07/bill_gates_puts_richard_feynman_lectures_online_.html">news</a>
is several years old now, but I just came across the article today and
I can't resist a brief comment.
The good news: videos of Richard Feynman giving his famous lectures on
physics at Caltech in 1964 are available online, thanks to Bill Gates.
The bad news: if you think this means that a wonderful resource for
learning about science is now open and accessible to everyone, think again.
From the article:
<blockquote>
Note you will need to download Microsoft's Silverlight to get around
the site.
</blockquote>
You can take the boy out of Microsoft, but you can't take Microsoft out of
the boy.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:47 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>There Oughta Be A Law</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/there-oughta-be-law</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/there-oughta-be-law.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
A recent
<a href="http://www.policymic.com/articles/38177/want-a-job-with-239-vacation-days-become-a-member-of-congress">article</a>
(via
<a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/">Reuters</a>,
via
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6310788">Hacker News</a>)
says that the US Congress should spend more time working and less time
vacationing. I could go on and on about what Congress actually does when
it is working, but that would go in the rants section of this blog. Here
I just want to comment on one particular thing that struck me about the
article.
Here's the article's main point:
<blockquote>
We have to let our representatives know that business as usual isn't
acceptable and we expect them, above all else, to get stuff done. The
number of laws passed by Congress last year was fewer than at any point
since 1947.
</blockquote>
An accompanying graph shows laws passed by year from 1947 to 2012. (I
could digress by asking why they picked 1947, but that would be another
article.)
When I read this, I at once thought of a remark made by
<a href="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html">Edsger Dijkstra</a>
about measuring the effectiveness of programmers:
<blockquote>
[I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines
produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish
as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
</blockquote>
It seems to me that much the same thing applies to Congress and laws; we
should not count laws as "laws produced" but as "laws spent". If it takes
more and more laws to give us good government (leave aside, once again,
the question of how good it actually is), that means Congress is doing a
worse job, not a better job. A really competent Congress would figure out
how to accomplish the same goals for government with fewer laws, not more.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 01 Sep 2013 23:04 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>"Your" Cloud Data Is Not Yours, Take 2</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/your-cloud-data-not-yours-2</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/your-cloud-data-not-yours-2.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
(Note: there is a discussion of this post on
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6210496">Hacker News</a>.)
I
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/your-cloud-data-not-yours.html">posted</a>
some time back that one drawback of the "cloud" is that you can't
control how data you post to a "cloud" service is used. Facebook has
now provided us with an even better example than the case (Instagram)
I talked about in that post.
According to
<a href="http://www.groovypost.com/news/facebook-shadow-accounts-non-users/">groovyPost</a>
(via
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6200538">Hacker News</a>),
Facebook uses data in your contact list to create "shadow" accounts for
people who aren't even on Facebook. It isn't clear exactly how Facebook
uses the data in these "shadow" accounts, but their previous behavior
does not inspire confidence. There is no way for the user to turn off or
control this behavior; it's not even visible to you as a Facebook user.
In fact, based on a quote from a Facebook representative given in the
article, Facebook apparently believes that allowing users to control
this behavior would violate Facebook's freedom of speech!
(I should make clear that if you only sign in to Facebook through the
Facebook website, as far as I can tell, it doesn't access any of your
contacts. But if you sign in to any other site and connect that
account with your Facebook account--for example, if you use the Gmail
feature that lets you automatically log in to Facebook using your
Gmail account--then any contacts you have on the other site will get
harvested by Facebook. Or, if you use Facebook's smartphone app, all
of your contacts stored on the phone will get harvested.)
I don't want to draw out this post with a discussion of whether
corporations even have freedom of speech the way individuals do
(that's a whole other can of worms). My point here is simply that it's
one thing to decide that you don't mind your own personal information
being spread all over the Internet. I've said
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/not-crazy-about-cloud.html">before</a>
that I personally don't choose to do that, but as long as it's just
your own information, it's your choice. But Facebook has decided to
put you, if you're a Facebook user, in a position where you might
be compromising other people's personal information, even if they
would much rather you didn't, and without giving you any choice in
the matter. If that isn't something you want to do, you should think
carefully about how you use Facebook.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 23:56 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Linux Virus (Not) Causing Problems</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/linux-virus-not-causing-problems</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/linux-virus-not-causing-problems.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
A while back I
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/kernel-org-not-cracked.html">blogged</a>
about the Linux kernel site (not) being cracked. That is, someone had
indeed cracked the server, but had not been able to do any damage because
all of the files stored there were cryptographically signed in a way that
could not be forged. Strictly speaking, that was not a story about how
Linux itself is more secure than other operating systems; but the fact
that the Linux kernel developers took such precautions certainly indicates
a mindset towards security that is different from that of certain other
operating systems.
Yesterday ZDNet
<a href="http://www.zdnet.com/linux-desktop-trojan-hand-of-thief-steals-in-7000019175/">reported</a>
on some more direct evidence of Linux's security as an operating system,
not just the security of its kernel repository.
There is a Linux virus out there called "Hand of Thief" which apparently
can do quite a bit of damage, if it gets installed on your Linux system.
(By the way, contrary to what the opening sentence of this article might
lead you to believe, this is not the first time such a thing has happened;
Linux viruses have been in the wild for years, doing negligible damage,
for precisely the same reasons as this one is doing negligible damage,
as we'll see in a moment.)
The problem (at least, it's a problem from the standpoint of whoever wrote
the virus) is that qualifier I put in: if it gets installed on your Linux
system. The article notes:
<blockquote>
Fortunately, as Limor Kessem, one of RSA's top cyber Intelligence
experts, wrote after a conversation with the Trojan's "sales agent,"
Hand of Thief has no good ways of infecting Linux users. Instead, the
cracker "suggested using email and social engineering as the infection
vector."
</blockquote>
That probably doesn't sound as dramatic as it actually is. When a virus
author admits that he has "no good ways" of infecting a Linux computer,
that's like a bank robber admitting he has "no good ways" of getting into
Fort Knox. He's admitting defeat, pure and simple.
Evidence like this is nice because it cuts through all the opinions and
arguments among experts on a question like this. As you can see on
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware">Wikipedia</a>,
there are indeed experts on both sides of this question. But experts can
have plenty of reasons for promoting a particular opinion, particularly
if the experts happen to also sell anti-virus software. So it's refreshing
to see evidence that doesn't depend on anything like that.
You may be wondering about the last part of the above quote, that talks
about "email and social engineering". Does that mean Linux won't protect
you if you accidentally click on the wrong link or open the wrong email
attachment? And don't all those anti-virus programs for Windows advertise
email scanning, link scanning, etc.?
It's certainly true that no operating system can protect you from yourself;
if you try hard enough to run malicious code, your computer will run
malicious code. And that's true even if you're running all those anti-virus
programs with email scanning, link scanning, etc. At best, such programs
can remind users who need reminding that they shouldn't indiscriminately
click on links or open attachments; but these days, there aren't many users
left who even need such reminding. And no such scanning program can ever
spot all possible malware; at best such programs are an arms race, with
malware writers constantly finding new tricks and anti-virus writers trying
to update their programs to spot them. No program can replace human judgment
about whether something looks fishy.
But with Windows, even if you do practice good Internet hygiene, you can
still get infected, because there are just too many holes in the system.
Windows was not designed from the ground up to be secure; security has been
bolted on to it as an afterthought. The very existence of the anti-virus
industry is due to this fact. (And by the way, that's also true of the Linux
wing of the anti-virus industry; if you look at the Wikipedia article I
linked to above, you'll see that even the experts who advise running
anti-virus software on Linux do so only because it allows you to scrub
files that come from Windows systems.)
Some Windows users may be thinking, what about the popup that appears
whenever you try to install a new program, asking if it's OK to change
system files? Won't that protect you? Yes, if Windows spots the attempt
to modify system files. But on Windows, there are plenty of ways for malware
to get in without triggering the parts of Windows that monitor for such
attempts. On Linux systems, many of which now implement a similar prompt
since it's easier than having a completely separate administrator account,
there is no way to modify any system files without triggering it, since
unless you've responded "yes" to the prompt your user account has no
permissions to change anything except your user files.
And let's suppose you do slip up and malicious code manages to run on your
machine. There's still a big difference between a Linux system and a
Windows system. On a Linux system, malicious code can certainly mess up
your user files. But it can't corrupt the system unless you really slip
up; just clicking on the wrong link or opening the wrong email attachment
won't do it. So cleaning things up is easy, because you can still depend
on the system files to be clean. If you get malware on a Windows system,
you can't really trust anything, and most often the only remedy is to wipe
the hard drive and reinstall.
Of course now all the Mac users are thinking, doesn't OS X have the same
security features as Linux? After all, they're both variants of Unix,
which is the original source of the security model. That's quite true.
But then why is there anti-virus software for OS X?
There are experts on both sides of this question too; some say
<a href="http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/features/security/3418367/do-apple-macs-need-antivirus-os-x-security-explained/">OS X doesn't need anti-virus software</a>,
for basically the same reasons that Linux doesn't. I'm inclined to
agree with this, and to interpret the fact that companies sell OS X
anti-virus software as saying more about those companies' ethics than
about OS X's security or lack thereof. But maybe that's just me.
However that may be, the article also contains an interesting tidbit:
<blockquote>
The most recent version of OS X...includes the GateKeeper function
that by default prevents Mac users from installing anything other than
Apple-approved software. And the lack of Java and Flash plugins removes
the temptation to install fake versions of both--previously the principal
vectors of infection for Macs.
</blockquote>
In other words, Apple's approach to keeping OS X secure is to make it
less functional. I'm no fan of Java or Flash, but the fact remains that
a lot of Internet content is packaged that way, so just punting and
saying you can't install it isn't very helpful. It's not as though it
can't be done: Linux systems manage to run Java and Flash without
compromising security, by making sure that secure versions of them are
available in cryptographically signed repositories, so you can check
that they're the right versions when you install them. And although
third parties can write "Apple-approved software"--if they're willing
to pay Apple for the privilege--the quantity of such software available
is nothing like the quantity that's available for Windows or Linux.
All of which is just another reason for this:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>peter@localhost:~$ uname
Linux
</pre></div>
(Update: there is a discussion of this post on
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6210499">Hacker News</a>.)
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 10 Aug 2013 02:01 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Lawyer Humor</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/lawyer-humor</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/lawyer-humor.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This is just a quick link to a
<a href="http://abovethelaw.com/2013/06/how-to-write-a-great-response-to-a-cease-and-desist-letter/">hilarious response to a cease and desist letter</a>
(hat tip:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907732">Hacker News</a>).
If you ever need a lawyer, hopefully you will find one with a sense
of humor like the one that wrote this response.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 20 Jun 2013 03:25 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Be Careful What You Wish For</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/be-careful-what-you-wish-for</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
<a href="http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2013/04/24/gun-control-group-should-target-dems-that-voted-for-reform-not-against-it/">Fire Dog Lake</a>
is angry about the recent Senate vote that
<a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/us/murkowskis-expected-no-a-blow-to-toomey-manchin-on-guns-683813/">killed the Toomey-Manchin background check amendment</a>
to the latest gun control bill. However, the anger is not directed at
the Democrats that voted against the amendment, but at those who voted
for it.
What gives?
<blockquote>
If the 51 Democrats who voted for the amendment really wanted to see
it passed in the Senate, they could have passed it. They could have
voted to eliminate the filibuster and than pass the bill with a simple
majority vote like the Constitution specifies.
</blockquote>
Wait, what? Where, exactly, does the Constitution say that bills must
pass by simple majority vote? There is nothing in the Constitution about
what percentage of either house's vote is required to pass a bill.
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html">Article I</a>
says that a majority of each house constitutes a quorum to do business,
but that just means being able to debate bills or hold votes; it's not
the same as the standard for passing a bill. It also says each house can
determine its own rules of procedure, of which the filibuster rule is an
example; so, far from being against the Constitution, the filibuster looks
like an example of the Constitution being used as it was written.
Of course, nothing in constitutional law is ever that simple; if it were,
I would never have been able to get
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">so</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look.html">many</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html">posts</a>
out of the subject. Nearly a year ago,
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/is-the-filibuster-unconstitutional/2012/05/15/gIQAYLp7QU_blog.html">Ezra Klein blogged</a>
about a suit that was submitted to the Supreme Court arguing that the
filibuster rule should be reviewed for possible unconstitutionality.
The argument was based on three main points. One is simply that, although
the Constitution says that each house of Congress determines its own rules
of procedure, those rules cannot violate other Constitutional provisions,
and the Supreme Court has in the past reviewed procedural rules for
constitutionality. The second, more interesting point is that there is
apparently an "established rule of construction" called "expressio unius
est exclusio alterius", which I won't bother translating literally from
the Latin, but which basically means that, since the Constitution does
explicitly state particular exceptions to majority rule (there are six
in total--for example, the two-thirds majority in each house that is
required to override a presendential veto), there is an implication that
there are no other exceptions, since if there were, it would have stated
them. (A contrast is drawn here with the Bill of Rights, which does
explicitly say that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are not
a complete list.) The third point is that the filibuster rule isn't what
the Founders intended; for example, by decreasing the number of Senators
required to vote down a bill, it upsets the "carefully crafted balance"
that the Founders set up between the large states and the small states.
The only thing these arguments prove to me is that constitutional lawyers
can do sophistry about as well as Supreme Court justices can. This will
come as no surprise if you have read the previous posts I linked to
above, since one of the main points I argued in those posts is that if
the standard were what the Founders intended, most of what passes for
constitutional law would be out the window. But even if we just consider
the merits of this particular case, the arguments don't hold up. For
example, the idea that if the Bill of Rights didn't include the Ninth
Amendment, there wouldn't be any other rights than those explicitly given,
doesn't hold water even with most constitutional lawyers; many of them
have argued that the Ninth Amendment is not really necessary, since
what it says is already implied by the rest of the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights.
As for the "carefully crafted balance" between large and small states, if
that's the objective, why should a 51 percent majority be the default?
There's no reason why that particular number must always magically be the
"right" balance. The brief for the lawsuit notes that at the time of the
founding, the smallest seven of the 13 states, representing 27 percent of
the population, could command a majority in the Senate; but now, with the
filibuster rule, the smallest 21 of the 50 states, representing only 11
percent of the population, can kill a bill. Clearly this is a major
change in the balance of power, but what makes the original balance any
more "right" than the current one--or than some point in between? The
brief makes no argument for what the right balance should be; it just
assumes that a simple majority must be right, because, well, that's what
"democracy" means, right? (We'll come back to this last point.)
Of course we know what the debate about filibuster reform is really about.
As I said in my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/watch-out-first-step.html">post on the fiscal cliff</a>, we have
long since stopped thinking of the Constitution as a set of underlying
rules for a stable society, the preservation of which is more important
than the action we take on any particular issue. We no longer see our
government as a tool for arriving at consensus solutions to difficult
political problems; we now think of it as a vehicle for imposing our
particular beliefs on everybody else. And of course we get frustrated
when the rules seem to obstruct our efforts to do that, and we blame it
on the rules, instead of on ourselves. As the National Review recently
<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/340610/filibuster-reform-avik-roy">noted</a>,
not so very long ago it was the Republicans who were complaining about the
filibuster rule, and the Democrats who were saying how important it was to
keep it as an aid to wise and mature government. But that same article
argues that the Republicans should agree to end the filibuster rule,
because, even though that will make it easier in the short run for the
Democrats to impose their policies, it will also make it easier in the
longer run for the Republicans to impose theirs.
To me this is a classic case of "be careful what you wish for". The
problem is not that it's too hard to pass laws; it's that it's too easy.
It's too easy for Congress to change the rules by which our society
operates, and as a result the rules are changed so often that nobody
can keep up. Or, rather, no ordinary citizen can keep up, which means
that laws are written by lobbyists and special interests, and are voted
on by legislators that for the most part have not even read them. Is
that what the Founders intended?
I said we would come back to that word, "democracy". That's another word
that does not appear in the Constitution. There is, indeed, only one
reference to any form of government in the entire document; Article IV,
Section 4, says: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in
this Union a Republican Form of Government". The original Constitution
had Senators elected by State legislatures; not until the 17th Amendment,
in 1913, were Senators elected by popular vote in their States. Even
the House of Representatives, which has always been elected by the people
directly, has never had each representative representing exactly the same
number of people. Indeed, the latest
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congressional_districts">redistricting</a>
has the largest district containing almost twice the number of people as
the smallest. So even if we do have a democracy in the United States, it
is an imperfect one.
The Founders, if they knew anything, knew that any government must be
imperfect. Their goal was not to find the perfect set of rules, or even to
find the perfect framework for coming up with a set of rules. Their goal
was simply to come up with something that worked better than the Articles
of Confederation, and to include ways of amending it as time went on. If
simple majority rule was that important to them, they could have said it
explicitly; and for that matter, if it's really that important to us, we
could amend the Constitution now to say that all votes in Congress are
simple majority votes unless specified otherwise.
But the Founders could not protect us from ourselves. No system of
government, no set of rules, can protect us if our response when the rules
get in our way is to blame the rules. Abolishing the filibuster rule won't
fix our government; if anything, it will make it easier to mess things up
by making changes without a clear understanding of the consequences.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:12 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>In Defense Of Marriage?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/in-defense-of-marriage</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/in-defense-of-marriage.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Some interesting items have come out of yesterday's
<a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/03/27/175456870/transcript-supreme-court-arguments-on-defense-of-marriage-act">oral arguments</a>
before the Supreme Court on the Defense of Marriage Act case. Since
I've blogged about this case
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/strict-constructionist.html">before</a>,
I wanted to take a look at the Court's handling of it.
The first thing I noted is that the Court appointed an amicus curiae to
present arguments for the position that the Court did not have jurisdiction
to hear the case. This is unusual since neither party to the case had taken
this position. However, the case is also unusual in that both parties
agree with the lower court decision; neither one is asking the Supreme
Court to reverse it. This is what raises the jurisdictional issue: since
there is no actual controversy between the parties, why should the Court
rule on the case at all?
The reason the case is before the Court is that the Obama administration
wants the Court to uphold the lower court decision, which would have
the effect of striking down DOMA, which the administration believes is
unconstitutional. Of course this raises the question: why is the
administration enforcing a law it thinks is unconstitutional? The
administration's position is that it is obligated to enforce laws even
if it disagrees with them, because Article II of the Constitution says
that the President shall "take care that the laws are faithfully
executed". But Chief Justice Roberts responded to that:
<blockquote>
[T]he Executive's obligation to execute the law includes the obligation
to execute the law consistent with the Constitution. And if he has made
a determination that executing the law by enforcing the terms is
unconstitutional, I don't see why he doesn't have the courage of his
convictions and execute not only the statute, but do it consistent with
his view of the Constitution, rather than saying, oh, we'll wait till the
Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.
</blockquote>
This reminds me of Roberts' opinion on the
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html">individual mandate</a>
portion of Obamacare, where he basically said that the Court can only rule
on whether a law is constitutional, and a law that is constitutional may
still be a bad law; it's the job of elected representatives, not the Court,
to determine whether a law is good or bad. It will be interesting to see
if any of this comes through in the final opinion.
Later on, the point was raised that President Obama, who made a
determination that he believed the Act was unconstitutional, is not
the President who signed it into law--that was President Clinton, in
1996--which could affect the decision on whether or not to enforce it.
If a President determines that a bill is unconstitutional when it reaches
his desk for signature, he can simply veto it. But if a President believes
that a law signed by a previous President is unconstitutional, he may
still choose to enforce it out of deference to the previous President who
signed the bill and the previous Congress that passed it. A ruling from
the Supreme Court would break this kind of deadlock. (Later on it was
pointed out that when DOMA was being considered by Congress, it asked
the Clinton Justice Department three times if the proposed Act was
constitutional, and all three times the response was that it was.)
Another interesting point arose during the next argument: since the
Executive Branch is basically asking the Court to declare a law passed by
Congress unconstitutional, shouldn't Congress be a party to the case as
well? One key aspect of this is that the Executive Branch is the one
litigating the case, making decisions as to how it's argued, whether or
not to appeal to the next level of courts, etc., even though the Executive
Branch doesn't believe the law is constitutional. As the lawyer making the
argument puts it:
<blockquote>
It's a conflict of interest. They're the ones that are making litigation
decisions to promote the defense of a statute they want to see invalidated.
And if you want to see the problems with their position, look at Joint
Appendix page 437. You will see the most anomalous motion to dismiss in
the history of litigation: A motion to dismiss, filed by the United States,
asking the district court not to dismiss the case.
</blockquote>
Justice Kennedy remarked in response that this "would give you intellectual
whiplash. I'm going to have to think about that."
But in the rebuttal argument of the amicus, a good response to this was
given:
<blockquote>
[O]nce the litigation is enacted, Congress's authority to supervise it is
at an end. It goes over to the Executive Branch. And whether the Executive
Branch does it well or badly in the view of Congress, it's in its domain.
And separation of powers will not be meaningful if all it means is the
Congress has to stay out unless it thinks that the President is doing it
badly.
</blockquote>
In other words, for better or worse, the Constitution says that the
President, not Congress, executes the laws, and that includes litigating
them when they are challenged in court.
I was pleased to see that the arguments addressed the issue of government
benefits given to married people, since I said
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/strict-constructionist.html">previously</a>
that this was the key issue, because of the Constitution's guarantee of
equal protection of the laws to all citizens. But I was disappointed to
see that not much attention was paid to the fact that the 14th Amendment
applies the equal protection provision to the States, not just the Federal
government, so if it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to
restrict the definition of marriage on equal protection grounds, it must
be equally unconstitutional for a State to do so. In fact, the first
argument on the merits explicitly assumes the contrary:
<blockquote>
[T]he legal question on the merits before this Court is actually quite
narrow. On the assumption that States have the constitutional option either
to define marriage in traditional terms or to recognize same-sex marriages
or to adopt a compromise like civil unions, does the Federal Government
have the same flexibility or must the Federal Government simply borrow the
terms in State law?
</blockquote>
Justice Ginsburg did raise a question about what happens if Federal law
doesn't recognize a marriage that a State has recognized:
<blockquote>
[I]f we are totally for the States' decision that there is a marriage
between two people, for the Federal Government then to come in to say no
joint return, no marital deduction, no Social Security benefits; your
spouse is very sick but you can't get leave; people--if that set of
attributes, one might well ask, what kind of marriage is this?
</blockquote>
This question eventually led to a good summation of the 1996 Congress's
motivation for passing DOMA in the first place:
<blockquote>
Congress is worried that people are going to go there [to Hawaii, which
was close to adopting same-sex marriage at the time through a state court
ruling], go back to their home jurisdictions, insist on the recognition
in their home jurisdictions of their same-sex marriage in Hawaii, and then
the Federal Government will borrow that definition, and therefore, by the
operation of one State's State judiciary, same-sex marriage is basically
going to be recognized throughout the country. And what Congress says is,
wait a minute. Let's take a timeout here. This is a redefinition of an
age-old institution. Let's take a more cautious approach where every
sovereign gets to do this for themselves.
</blockquote>
But, as the ensuing discussion made clear, DOMA doesn't actually do this.
It privileges the traditional definition of marriage, so States that uphold
that definition get to "decide for themselves", but States that adopt
same-sex marriage do not; their decision is constrained by the fact that
they know the Federal government under DOMA does not recognize same-sex
marriage. The lawyer tried to argue that DOMA simply codifies a uniform
definition of marriage for the purposes of Federal law, on the theory that
when previous Congresses passed laws that used the term "marriage", they
meant that term under its traditional definition. But Justice Kagan pointed
out:
<blockquote>
[F]or the most part and historically, the only uniformity that the
Federal Government has pursued is that it's uniformly recognized the
marriages that are recognized by the State. So, this was a real difference
in the uniformity that the Federal Government was pursuing. And it suggests
that maybe something--maybe Congress had something different in mind than
uniformity.
</blockquote>
Which of course it did; Congress explicitly said that the law was for the
purpose of protecting the traditional definition of marriage, and did not
recognize same-sex marriage because homosexuality was morally wrong. This
fact was referred to several times during the arguments.
The Solicitor General did make an equal protection argument when it was
his turn to speak:
<blockquote>
The equal protection analysis in this case should focus on two fundamental
points: First, what does Section 3 do; and second, to whom does Section 3 do
it? What Section 3 does is exclude from an array of Federal benefits
lawfully married couples.
</blockquote>
But this still applies the equal protection analysis only to the Federal
law. Later on, the question of State laws outlawing same-sex marriage was
brought up, and the Solicitor General did say that those would have to be
looked at on equal protection grounds as well. But then he basically said
that's not relevant to this case, which is only about what a Federal law
can properly exclude:
<blockquote>
They [State laws] have to be analyzed under equal protections principles,
but whatever is true about the other situations, in the situation in which
the couple is lawfully married for purposes of State law and the exclusion
is a result of DOMA itself, the exclusion has to be justified under this
Court's equal protection analysis, and DOMA won't do it.
</blockquote>
In fact, towards the end of the Solicitor General's brief, Justice Sotomayor
asked him point blank:
<blockquote>
[Y]our bottom line is, it's an equal protection violation for the Federal
Government, and all States as well?
</blockquote>
And the Solicitor General responded yes; but then Justice Sotomayor asked:
<blockquote>
Is there any argument you can make to limit this to this case, vis-a-vis
the Federal Government and not the States?
</blockquote>
In other words, we don't want to hear about whether States outlawing
same-sex marriage is unconstitutional; that's not part of this case. In
fact, the ensuing discussion suggests that, not only is it not part of this
case, but that fact in itself gives the equal protection argument less
weight in this case, in the Justices' minds. It seems like the Court might
shy away from ruling DOMA unconstitutional on equal protection grounds,
precisely because that would imply that State laws outlawing same-sex
marriage are also unconstitutional on equal protection grounds.
During the next brief on the merits, Chief Justice Roberts posed an
interesting question to the lawyer for the woman who originally brought
the case in lower courts (she was married in Ontario to a same-sex partner,
but was forced to pay estate tax in the US when her spouse died because
her marriage was not recognized under DOMA): would there be an issue if
Congress passed a law recognizing same-sex couples as being married for
purposes of Federal law even if the State they lived in did not permit
same-sex marriage? The concern here is not equal protection but federalism:
can Congress ever adopt a different definition of marriage than the
States?
The Chief Justice commented that everyone kept "returning to the Equal
Protection Clause every time I ask a federalism question". But given the
discussion that followed, I can see why. The lawyer kept trying to say that
there isn't a single blanket answer to the federalism question because it
would depend on the circumstances, but the Justices kept pressing her to
give a blanket answer anyway. This makes one wonder whether the Court is
looking for a way to rule on DOMA's constitutionality without having to
do so on equal protection grounds, because of the broad implications that
the latter type of ruling would have.
Towards the end, the issue of benefits was brought up once more:
<blockquote>
[W]hen somebody moves from New York to North Carolina, they can lose
their benefits. The Federal Government uniquely, unlike the 50 States,
can say, well, that doesn't make any sense, we are going to have the same
rule. We don't want somebody, if they are going to be transferred in the
military from West Point to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, to resist the transfer
because they are going to lose some benefits.
</blockquote>
But nobody made the obvious rebuttal that, if DOMA is upheld, a same-sex
couple that moves from West Point to Fort Sill in Oklahoma won't get the
benefits in the first place; to say that well, then they won't have to
worry about losing them, is not much comfort.
But just after this, the most interesting argument is given, right at the
end of the transcript. I'll quote it at some length because I suspect it
is going to be referred to a lot:
<blockquote>
Now the Solicitor General wants to say: Well, it [the passage of DOMA]
was want of careful reflection? Well, where do we get careful reflection
in our system? Generally, careful reflection comes in the democratic
process. The democratic process requires people to persuade people.
The reason there has been a sea change [in public opinion about same-sex
marriage] is a combination of political power, as defined by this Court's
cases as getting the attention of lawmakers; certainly they have that. But
it's also persuasion. That's what the democratic process requires. You have
to persuade somebody you're right. You don't label them a bigot. You don't
label them as motivated by animus. You persuade them you are right.
That's going on across the country. Colorado, the State that brought you
Amendment 2, has just recognized civil unions. Maine, that was pointed to
in the record in this case as being evidence of the persistence of
discrimination because they voted down a statewide referendum, the next
election cycle it came out the other way. And the Federal Congress is not
immune. They repealed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Allow the democratic process
to continue.
</blockquote>
What is interesting about this is that the lawyer invokes "the democratic
process", which is a pet phrase of Justice Scalia, and he invokes it to
make precisely the kind of argument that Scalia likes: the Federal
government shouldn't interfere in issues like this. But this lawyer is
arguing for upholding DOMA. In other words, he is arguing that the
Federal government should not interfere in the democratic process, and
his definition of "not interfering" is to uphold a Federal law that imposes
a definition of marriage which the "democratic process" in a number of
States has rejected.
Of course this kind of sophistry fits right in with the view I have taken in
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">my</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look.html">previous</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html">posts</a>
on the Supreme Court. Compare, for example, the position I expect Justice
Scalia to take in this case, in line with the above argument, with the
position he has taken on abortion in a number of cases (most notably in
his dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey):
<ul>
<li>
Abortion: the Constitution says nothing about it, and long-standing
tradition of our society opposes it, so we should let the States decide;
the Supreme Court should get out of this area.
</li>
<li>
Same-sex marriage: the Constitution says nothing about it, and
long-standing tradition of our society opposes it, so we should not
let the States decide; the Supreme Court should uphold a Federal law
that imposes a uniform definition of marriage, for purposes of all
Federal laws and regulations, with which not all States agree.
</li>
</ul>
As far as the actual question at issue is concerned, I've made my position
clear before and I see no reason to change it: to me, the equal protection
argument is sufficient to strike down DOMA. It is true, as I noted above,
that this argument would also imply that State laws forbidding same-sex
marriage are unconstitutional. But note carefully why this would be. It
isn't because States can't define what "marriage" is; it's because States,
like the Federal government, attach lots of benefits to being "married".
If States are going to do that, then defining "marriage" in any way that
excludes a class of people violates equal protection. It's that simple.
The right solution to this problem would be for the Federal and State
benefits to attach, not to "marriage", but to some legal status that has
no social connotations. For example, people could make a legal commitment
to form a "household", or designate each other as "significant others",
in order to get the benefits. Of course such a legal commitment would
have to be something more than just saying so: it would have to involve
the same sort of signing of contracts and filing of paperwork and agreeing
to legal conditions that marriages and civil unions do now. But it would
be a separate thing from the social designation of a given couple as
"married", which could then be left up to whatever social circles the
couple belonged to.
Unfortunately, such a solution is almost certainly not politically viable
in the US today. We just can't help passing laws that help to increase
friction between different parts of our society instead of helping to
reduce it. We just can't help using political power, when we have it, to
try to entrench our particular view of how things should be, instead of
making it easier for people with different views to coexist. That's a
shame, since allowing people with different views to coexist is what the
United States of America is supposed to be about.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 29 Mar 2013 02:04 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Tolkien Redux</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/tolkien-redux</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkien-redux.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I hadn't intended to say any more about the Peter Jackson films after my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html">last post</a>,
but then I came across a series of
<a href="http://www.rilstone.talktalk.net/lotr-movie-review.htm">three</a>
<a href="http://www.rilstone.talktalk.net/ttt.htm">reviews</a>
<a href="http://www.rilstone.talktalk.net/jackson.html">of the movies</a>
by Andrew Rilstone, and found that I have more to say after all. (This
will come as no surprise to those who know me, of course.)
The first review, of Fellowship of the Ring, makes a good general
observation:
<blockquote>
This is not Lord of the Rings: it is only the story of Lord of the
Rings. In movies, 'story' is all. The canons of script writing tell
us that if a scene does not directly advance the plot, you must cut
it out, and throw it away. But story is very rarely the most important
thing in a novel. Name of the Rose is a rambling book about medieval
church politics and semiology. The movie cut out nearly all the
theology and all the philosophy, arguably missing the entire point
of the book: but it turned out that the bit that was left over was
still a rather engaging little whodunit. (Umberto Eco called it a
palimpsest, but then he would, wouldn’t he.) If you cut all the
elegant writing and ironic observations out of Pride and Prejudice,
it turns out that you are still left with quite jolly little Barbara
Cartland country house romances than that you can show in movie-houses
and before the watershed on BBC 2. What you do not have is anything
very much to do with Jane Austen. The point of Lord of the Rings is
the Middle-earth setting: the history, the back-story, the languages,
the little poetic asides. In filleting the book for the screen, and
extracting the story, all this has be thrown out--but what is left,
ring-fillet, is still plenty for a decent, entertaining fantasy film.
</blockquote>
As a lead-in to Rilstone's reviews of all three films, taken together,
this brings up an important point. I noted in my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkien.html">previous</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html">posts</a>
that the films are all right if taken just as fantasy films, not as
adaptations of Tolkien's books for the screen. But Rilstone gives
plenty of ways in which the subsequent films, even taken just as
fantasy films, are not as good as the first one; in his view, the
films taken as a whole do not live up even to the standard set in
the quote above. I'll comment further on that after we've seen some
of the specific comments he makes.
There is at least one place where I think Rilstone gives the movies
more credit than they deserve:
<blockquote>
Tolkien never makes it particularly clear why Aragorn has been
wandering in wastelands when he could go home at any time and become
king. Jackson’s elegant solution--that he is at some level afraid that
he will become corrupt in the way that Isildur did--is true to the
spirit of the book, if not to its letter.
</blockquote>
I have two problems with this. One is that it's quite clear in the
books why Aragorn doesn't just walk into Gondor and claim the Kingship.
First, Aragorn's ancestor, Arvedui, had already tried and failed;
Gondor rejected his claim. So it's clearly not as simple as Aragorn
simply showing up in Minas Tirith and saying, hey, I'm King now. Second,
if he did try to claim the Kingship, Sauron would destroy Gondor; whereas
by working in secret as he does, he can improve the odds without
provoking Sauron, as when he leads an attack against Umbar in disguise
(as told in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen) to remove, or at least
postpone, the threat posed to Gondor by the Corsairs. Finally, it is
perfectly clear from Denethor's words to Gandalf and Pippin that Aragorn
would have caused a severe political upheaval in Gondor if he had tried
to claim the Kingship (and Aragorn knows this because he served Denethor's
father in disguise and so was familiar with Denethor's character and
views), and as he tells the other Captains after the Battle of the
Pelennor Fields, he has "no mind for strife except with the Enemy and
his counsellors". In short, Tolkien does give more than enough back
story to show that the course Aragorn actually takes is the best choice
for Gondor, all things considered.
The second, more important issue is that Jackson's "solution" is anything
but elegant. I've already
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html">gone into this in detail</a>,
so I won't belabor it here, but briefly, Aragorn in the books does
not show that kind of internal conflict because he, like all of Tolkien's
central characters, sees himself as a moral agent, able to make his own
choices, not controlled by external forces. What's more, Tolkien makes
clear why Aragorn has that sense of moral agency. When he finds out his
lineage from Elrond, he has just "returned to Rivendell after great deeds
in the company of the sons of Elrond". In other words, he has been given
the chance to prove himself, and to develop the self-knowledge and
self-confidence that enables him to know that he can make the right
choices. He has no reason to fear that he might fail at the test just
because his ancestor Isildur did, because he knows himself well enough
to know that he is his own person, regardless of what his ancestors did
or failed to do.
Jackson's "solution" takes away that crucial feature of Aragorn's
character, and it's not a positive change. We don't need another
angst-ridden post-modern antihero, and Tolkien certainly did not intend
Aragorn to be one. So Aragorn in the movies is not by any means "true
to the spirit of the book".
I also have a minor quibble with a comment Rilstone makes when he talks
about how the "battle between the wizards" was portrayed in the first
film:
<blockquote>
But was it essential for the duel of the wizards (left off stage in
the book) to resort quite so obviously to Star Wars Jedi trickery, with
Gandalf and Saruman levitating each other all round the joint. One just
hopes that McKellen will get through part 2 without having to say 'These
aren't the hobbits you're looking for.'
</blockquote>
So far, so good (although, as we'll see in a moment, the criticism here
could have been even more pointed). But then Rilstone goes on:
<blockquote>
(It is interesting, by the way, to speculate about how Tolkien would
have visualized the battle, had be been required to do so. I think
perhaps that Saruman and Gandalf would have stared at each other until
Gandalf's 'Will' was overcome. Which would not, I grant you, have been
a very visual moment.)
</blockquote>
We don't have to speculate; Tolkien did visualize the "battle", through
Gandalf, when he describes it to the Council of Elrond. And Gandalf's
account makes clear that there wasn't any "battle", and Gandalf's will
was not overcome. Saruman tried to convince Gandalf to help him find
and wield the Ring, and Gandalf made his rejection as plain as day:
<blockquote>
'"Saruman," I said, standing away from him, "only one hand at a time
can wield the One, and you know that well, so do not trouble to say we!
But I would not give it, nay, I would not give even news of it to you,
now that I learn your mind. You were head of the Council, but you have
unmasked yourself at last. Well, the choices are, it seems, to submit to
Sauron, or to yourself. I will take neither. Have you others to offer?"'
</blockquote>
A fair rendering of this into "movie-speak" might have shown Saruman
putting Gandalf in some kind of magical confinement, yes, but it would
certainly not show Gandalf's will being overcome. What overcomes him in
the book is main force: Saruman's servants take him and confine him at
the pinnacle of Orthanc. Saruman does not win any struggle of will with
Gandalf: quite the reverse, he loses that struggle, and that is why
he is forced to confine Gandalf by force. Saruman is trying to corrupt
Gandalf morally, and he fails. The "Jedi" portrayal in the movie makes
it seem as though the struggle isn't a moral struggle at all; it's just
a question of which one has stronger telekinetic powers. Rilstone's
suggested visualization has the same problem: it makes it seem like it's
just a question of who can stare harder.
But these are relatively minor objections to Rilstone's review of
Fellowship of the Ring. Let's get on to Rilstone's second review, of
The Two Towers, which says this early on:
<blockquote>
I had a long list of quibbles with Fellowship of the Ring, but I was
never in any doubt that it was a pretty successful attempt to translate
books 1 and 2 of Lord of the Rings into a movie idiom. 'As good as could
be expected under the circumstances' was about the rudest thing anyone
sensible could say about it. My feelings towards the Two Towers, on the
other hand, can best be summed up as 'Hey, what?'
</blockquote>
A key reason for this reaction is that this film is inconsistent in the
way the characters are portrayed; for example:
<blockquote>
After the death of his son, Theodred, Theoden says: 'Alas that these
evil days shall be mine. The young perish and the old linger. That I
should live to see the last days of my house.' This isn't from the book,
but it's the kind of thing that a chap like Theoden might be expected to
say. But then he starts to blub and announces to the world that: 'No
parent should have to bury their child.' (Note 'parent' and 'child'
rather than 'father' and 'son'.) It is hard to imagine any sentiment
less likely to come from the lips of a king in an honour-based warrior
culture. The bathos comes, not just from the fact that we've shifted from
'high' language to a vernacular, but because we've shifted from heroic
sentiments to soap-operatic ones. You can't be expressing Tolkienesque
ideas in Tolkienesque language in one sentence and Hollywood banalities
the next and expect it to make sense.
</blockquote>
This is something that wasn't really present in the first film, and I
have to agree it is jarring. Rilstone also comments on how the morality
Tolkien tried to portray in the books is completely mangled in this film;
for example:
<blockquote>
Jackson's simplifications are not limited to recasting complex speeches
as Hollywood banalities. He simplifies the whole moral structure of the
book, continuously re-casting it in terms of a two sided battle between
'good' and 'evil'. Characters who Tolkien paints in darker or lighter
shades of grey become, for Jackson, pure black or pure white. (Remind me
to write an article one of these days on the Significance of the Colour
Grey in Middle-earth: Grey Elves, Grey Havens, Grey Pilgrim, etc.)
</blockquote>
Another example is something I hadn't spotted in the interaction between
Frodo, Sam, and Gollum in the film:
<blockquote>
Even the Frodo-Gollum-Sam triad is simplified, although it must be said
with more reason and more dramatic success. In the book, Gollum talks with
two voices. Sam imagines that there are two sides to him, 'Slinker' and
'Stinker.' Smeagal-Gollum talks to himself in extended soliloquies, the
dominance of the 'good' side often represented by a light in his eyes.
Jackson extends this dual personality to the point where Smeagal (the
good side) can consciously think of Gollum (the bad side) as 'he', and
tell it to 'leave us and never come back'. In the book, Sam's cruelty to
Gollum is treated consistently as a blemish on his character to be
contrasted un-favourably with Frodo's kindness to him. Here, Smeagal
is explicitly aware that Sam hates him because he sees--and Frodo does
not--that Gollum intends to betray them. Sam, in fact, is in the right;
Frodo's kindness really is a weakness. Frodo sees that Sam is cruel to
Gollum and upbraids him for it; and in a magnificent example of
Hollywoodisation, says that he pities Gollum 'because I have to believe
that there is a way back.'
This, I am afraid, will annihilate a psychological crux of the text.
In Tolkien's story, Frodo's mercy to Gollum brings the good, Smeagal
side to the fore. At one moment, Smeagal is on the point of repenting and
becoming a wholly regenerate character, but Sam accuses him of 'sneaking'
and destroys the moment. According to Tolkien this is the most poignant
moment in the whole epic. But it is only because Gollum remains evil and
seizes the Ring that the world is saved; the evil Gollum does what the
good Frodo cannot do. In the long run Sam's cruelty rules the fate of
many just as surely as Bilbo's mercy. (This is, presumably, the kind of
thing which Phillip Pullman has in mind when he calls the book morally
simplistic.) It will be interesting to see if any of this survives
Jackson's Manichean reworking of the text.
</blockquote>
As we'll see when we get to Rilstone's review of the third film, below,
it doesn't.
Rilstone also notes some of the same things that griped me the most,
such as Aragorn's "death" (but, as Rilstone notes, "he's only mostly
dead", thus scoring serious points as a Princess Bride fan as well
as a good judge of movies), and the complete change in the way the
subplot between Arwen and Aragorn is handled.
The only point that I can see where Rilstone goes wrong in this review
is that he is confused about how Jackson, who knows Middle-earth lore so
well, can make so many bad decisions in making the film. My answer, of
course, is that while he may know the lore, he doesn't understand
Middle-earth.
Rilstone's review of Return of the King is even more negative than his
review of the Two Towers:
<blockquote>
The end result is a movie which is uneven in tone, at crossed purposes
with itself. Neither a successful adaptation of Lord of the Rings, nor a
stand-alone fantasy movie.
</blockquote>
As I noted above, I was willing to give Jackson credit for making a
reasonable stand-alone fantasy movie, even if it wasn't a good adaptation
of Tolkien's Middle-earth. But I have to admit that Rilstone has found
flaws that I didn't spot. Some of them are the same ones he spotted in the
second movie:
<blockquote>
It is pretty clear that Jackson the cinematographer wanted to make a
movie where people spoke in modern English. But Jackson the Tolkien fan
snuck into his office at night, scribbled lines from the book into the
script, and hoped no-one spotted it.
I think that the cinematographer resents the Tolkien geek's
interventions, and starts retaliating. Often, when Tolkien-Fan-Jackson
puts one of his "favourite" scenes into the scripts, Movie-Maker-Jackson
deliberately spoils them, by adding a weak joke or making the characters
appear more cynical and less noble than they do in the book.
</blockquote>
Also, Rilstone spots something I hadn't about the climactic scene at
Mount Doom:
<blockquote>
I think that Cinematic Peter intended that Frodo really would fall
over with Gollum: that Frodo would die in the closing minutes of the
film. The only way for Frodo to destroy his shadow-self and evil
reflection is to drag him down into the abyss with him.
This ending was set up in Two Towers. Galadriel has told Elrond that
"The Quest will claim Frodo. I have foreseen it. I know it to be true.
It is your destiny". (Sorry, wrong movie again.) The scenes outside the
Black Gate with everyone shouting "Frodo" and looking sad seem to have
been filmed with this ending in mind. It would have been different in
content from the book, but rather faithful thematically: Frodo sacrifices
himself to save the Shire; one person gives something up so someone else
can enjoy it. I think cinematic Jackson would have liked to end the movie
with Frodo disappearing into the lava and the Dark Tower collapsing.
(He could have thrust out his arms as he fell, thus conforming to another
important cinematic rule: at least one character has to be Jesus.)
But of course, Tolkien geek Jackson was aghast at the suggestion that
someone might want to Change The Plot so radically, so Jackson has to
splice in a terribly corny Flash Gordon get out clause in which Frodo
grabs the edge of the cliff and is left hanging on by his fingers, and
then does another love scene with Sam.
Having had his ending messed up, Jackson now can't work out how to get
out of the film.
</blockquote>
This may or may not be valid speculation about Jackson's actual mental
process here, but it certainly explains why Jackson said that everything
after the Mount Doom scene was "epilogue" to him, and why he does such a
bad job at the denouement of the story, in contrast to Tolkien, who was
careful to tell the whole story, not end it at the climactic moment.
(For example, the Scouring of the Shire, which Tolkien said several times
was an integral part of the story, is completely absent from the film;
but a detailed discussion of that will take yet another post, which I may
end up writing at some point. You have been warned.) Rilstone says that
the film has six endings, none of which are good ones, instead of the one
good ending it should have had, and it's hard to argue with him when he
presents the details.
On consideration, I have to agree with Rilstone's overall conclusion:
the first film was reasonably good as a fantasy film, but the second and
third don't even measure up to that standard. In the first film, Jackson
was able to keep a balance between making the movie recognizably about
Middle-Earth and making it a good fantasy movie in its own right. In the
second and third films, that balance is no longer there. Fortunately,
there are always the books.
<h1>Postscript</h1>
Rilstone also has a good
<a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2007/08/tolkien-blues.html">post</a>
reviewing The Children of Hurin and discussing The Hobbit (the book, not
the movie). It's worth a read.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 11 Feb 2013 01:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Tolkien's Ring</title>
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<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkiens-ring.html</link>
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<div>
I have a confession to make: I have not yet seen The Hobbit. This
may seem strange to you if you've read my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkien.html">previous post about Tolkien</a>,
since I made it plain that I have been a Tolkien fan for a long time;
but since I also said in the Postscript that I wasn't too happy with
the Peter Jackson films of Lord of the Rings, it may not seem so
strange after all that I haven't rushed out to see The Hobbit. But
I do have a report from a friend who has seen it, and who has been a
Tolkien fan as long as I have, and based on that report, I'm not in
any hurry to see it. This post explains why.
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/dislike-peter-jacksons-em_b_2342591.html">An article at the Huffington Post</a>
says that many of the negative reviews of the film are based on a
lack of understanding of Tolkien's world:
<blockquote>
What these critics don't know, and what Jackson most certainly does,
is the history of The Hobbit as a text, and of Middle Earth as a
holistic construction.
</blockquote>
I don't dispute the fact that many reviewers clearly don't have such
an understanding, but I do dispute the claim that Jackson does. Or
at least, if he does have such an understanding, he hasn't put it to
very good use in the movies.
It's worth noting that Christopher Tolkien doesn't think so either. As
all Tolkien fans know, he has put in decades of hard work on Middle-earth,
first by reading his father's writings in draft and giving feedback, and
then by continuing to publish his father's writing posthumously, along
with voluminous editorial commentary on the history, development, and
meaning of the work. I think it's safe to say that no living person
understands Middle-earth better than Christopher Tolkien does, and he
was not very complimentary about the films in
<a href="http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-society/my-father-039-s-quot-eviscerated-quot-work-son-of-hobbit-scribe-j.r.r.-tolkien-finally-speaks-out/hobbit-silmarillion-lord-of-rings/c3s10299/">this interview in Le Monde</a>,
which is currently the subject of
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5014392">a long discussion on Hacker News</a>:
<blockquote>
Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to.
Why? "They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young
people aged 15 to 25," Christopher says regretfully. "And it seems that
The Hobbit will be the same kind of film."
This divorce has been systematically driven by the logic of Hollywood.
"Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed
into the absurdity of our time," Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. "The
chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has
become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic
and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one
solution for me: to turn my head away."
</blockquote>
The standard Hollywood rebuttal to this is that the films have generated
a lot of interest in the books. The Le Monde article notes that sales of
the trilogy went up by a factor of 10 after the release of the first
movie. On the Hollywood view, this can't be anything but good; the
measure of success is the number of viewers, after all. Whether those
viewers actually get a proper sense of what Tolkien was trying to convey
is beside the point. It's entertainment.
But, as I noted in my previous post, Tolkien's story of Middle-earth is
not just a fantasy story. Tolkien explicitly said in his foreword that
his story wasn't an allegory, but he didn't mean to imply that it had
nothing to say about the real world:
<blockquote>
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have
done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much
prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the
thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability'
with 'allegory', but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the
other in the purposed domination of the author.
</blockquote>
This passage, of course, has received much commentary. But I realized
recently that there is a clue in it, not just to the general way in which
Tolkien wanted readers to take his work, but specifically about its central
plot element and metaphor: the Ring. And the treatment of the Ring also
illustrates a key failing of the films: they give no sense of what the Ring
really stands for, and what lessons it has for the real world, not just
Middle-earth. I touched on this briefly in my previous post about Tolkien,
but it deserves a longer exposition.
In the films, the Ring is a magical object that's evil and needs to be
destroyed; that's pretty much all there is to it. It is portrayed as having
an attraction about it, and as changing the mental processes of those that
possess it; but the portrayal is standard Hollywood fare, with no hint of
any deeper meaning than "it's evil". In particular, no hint is given of
why any of the characters would want to wield the Ring, other than
"yes, it's evil, but it's powerful, too".
This is a great pity, because Tolkien gives us a lot more. He does not just
tell us that the Ring is evil; he also tells us why. What's more, he
doesn't tell us himself; he lets the characters themselves, the ones who are
tempted by the Ring, tell us. The first such temptation we see is that of
Gandalf:
<blockquote>
'You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?'
'No!' cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. 'With that power I should have
power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still
greater and more deadly.' His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire
within. 'Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord
himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness
and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it,
not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great
for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.'
</blockquote>
Note that Gandalf would desire the ring for strength to do good. If the
Ring is evil, how can this be? Clearly there is more going on here than
just "it's evil".
Another temptation that is drawn in greater detail than Gandalf's is that
of Galadriel. Her description of what would happen if Frodo gave her the
Ring, as he has offered to do, is one of the best passages in the whole
epic:
<blockquote>
'In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be
dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the
Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and
the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love
me and despair!'
</blockquote>
To be fair, the key lines here are included in the movie as well; but the
scene is portrayed very differently. The movie's imagery is again standard
Hollywood fare for "being tempted by something evil", with the usual dark
clouds, lightning and thunder, and ominous background music. The scene in
the book is nothing of the sort; the description is almost austere in its
simplicity:
<blockquote>
She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a
great light that illumined her alone and left all else dark. She stood
before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond
enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the
light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken:
a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft
and sad.
'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and
remain Galadriel.'
</blockquote>
Note that Galadriel is sad that she cannot take the Ring. Once again, if
the Ring is evil, why should she be sad? You would expect her to be relieved
that she was able to pass the test, to resist the temptation and remain good
(and in the movie, that is how she reacts). What's going on here?
We get a further clue from Sam, just before the scene ends:
<blockquote>
'But if you'll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish
you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up
the gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folk pay for their dirty
work.'
'I would,' she said. 'That is how it would begin. But it would not stop
with that, alas!'
</blockquote>
In other words, a person who uses the Ring can start out by doing good. So
whatever power the Ring gives, it can't just be a stereotypical "evil"
power.
The obvious next step is to view the Ring as a metaphor for the old saying,
"power corrupts". People start out using power to do good things, but
gradually they become used to it, and start using it for questionable things,
and finally end up using it for outright evil things. A number of commentators
have taken this view. In fact, Peter Jackson himself appears to hold it,
according to
<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/lotr.html?pg=3&topic=&topic_set=">an article in Wired</a>:
<blockquote>
"One of Tolkien's great themes is that power itself always corrupts,"
explains Peter Jackson. "Ultimately there can never really be any good
power."
</blockquote>
But if we take Tolkien's portrayal of Middle-earth seriously, this view
cannot be right, because Tolkien shows us plenty of uses of power that do
not lead to corruption. Gandalf has power, and uses it: he fights off
Wargs, and later the Balrog, and when he returns as Gandalf the White he
is invulnerable to weapons and able to fight off Ringwraiths. None of
this corrupts him; he ends up returning over the Sea to the Undying Lands
from which he came. Galadriel also has power: she has her own ring of
power, Nenya, and uses it to defend Lorien against Sauron and his minions.
And Aragorn gains power throughout the epic; he takes over the
leadership of the company after Gandalf's fall, he is recognized by the
Riders of Rohan as a leader in battle, and he ends up becoming King. None
of this corrupts him; as the Appendices tell us, he lives on for 120
years as a wise and just King, and ends up dying in peace.
What is the difference between all of these exercises of power, and the
power given by the Ring? As I noted in my previous post, the difference is
between power wielded justly, rightly, and power wielded unjustly, wrongly.
But how do we tell which uses of power are just and right? This is where
critics of Middle-earth often go astray. They claim that Tolkien cheated,
as it were; he declared by fiat, as the author, that certain people in
Middle-earth had a "right" to wield power, just because. Aragorn is the
rightful King because he is descended from Elendil; Gandalf has the right
to use power because he was given it by the Valar; Galadriel has the right
to wield Nenya because she is the last survivor in Middle-earth of one of
the noble houses of the elves. In the real world, we have nothing like
this; there is no magical method of knowing who has the right to wield
power, and so the only conclusion we can draw is that no one in the real
world can "rightfully" wield power.
It is true that there is nothing in the real world corresponding to the
notion of Aragorn as the "rightful King", for example, as it is portrayed
in Middle-earth. But Tolkien makes it clear that there is more to it than
just having the right descent, or the right blessing from the Valar. You
have to use the power you have in the right way. For every person who
wields power rightly, Tolkien shows us another person, with a similar grant
of power, who wields it wrongly, and goes astray as a result. Aragorn is
the rightful King, and lives up to that; Denethor is the rightful Steward,
but does not live up to it. Saruman starts out with the same blessing
from the Valar as Gandalf; indeed, he starts out with more, as Gandalf
himself recognizes when he says that as Gandalf the White he is "Saruman
as he should have been". But Saruman, unlike Gandalf, does not use what he
is given rightly. Even Galadriel and Elrond, who wield the elven rings as
best they can, are contrasted with the elven smiths who made the rings
because they were deceived by Sauron, and so tied their fates, and the
fate of the elves themselves, to the fate of the One.
But what, exactly, is it about the One that makes the difference? This
is where the clue I referred to earlier, in Tolkien's statement in the
foreword, comes in. He contrasts the "freedom of the reader" with the
"purposed domination of the author". And "purposed domination" is exactly
what the Ring is about. But in accordance with his own professed preference,
Tolkien does not shove this in our faces; he gives us hints and leaves us
to figure it out for ourselves.
It is notable that we are never shown explicitly exactly what the Ring
does. We are never shown anyone actually using the Ring for anything
except to become invisible. We are told that it would be very bad if
Sauron regained the Ring, but we are not given any details about what he
would do with it, except that the people of Middle-earth would become
"slaves", as the orcs already are. But we are given hints; for example,
when Frodo asks Galadriel:
<blockquote>
'I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others
and know the thoughts of those that wear them?'
'You have not tried,' she said. 'Only thrice have you set the Ring upon
your finger since you knew what you possessed. Do not try! It would
destroy you. Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according
to the measure of each possessor? Before you could use that power you
would need to become far stronger, and to train your will to the domination
of others.'
</blockquote>
Of course we have already had a hint of the Ring's power in the verse
which Gandalf recites to Frodo, which includes the phrase "One Ring to
rule them all". As the verse is explained, by Gandalf and later by Elrond
at the Council, Sauron made the One Ring to rule over all the other Rings
of Power, so that their wearers would be controlled by him. But again,
we must not make the mistake of thinking of this as a stereotypical "evil"
power. As Elrond says, "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was
not so." Tolkien amplified this in a
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauron#cite_note-letters190-26">letter</a>:
<blockquote>
[Sauron] was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all 'reformers' who
want to hurry up with 'reconstruction' and 'reorganization' are wholly
evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up.
</blockquote>
In other words, even Sauron originally intended to use the Ring to do
"good", as he saw it. True, he saw "good" as a Middle-earth with himself
at the top, ruling over all as his master, Morgoth, had wanted to do. But
his purpose was not, originally, to rule over all just to "do evil". His
purpose was, essentially, the purpose that Saruman tried to persuade
Gandalf to follow: "to order all things as we will, for that good which
only the Wise can see." And the Ring was a tool to make it easier for
Sauron to achieve that purpose.
Let's try to put these clues together. Ordinarily, when you want someone
else to do something, you have to convince them; you have to give them a
reason to want to do it. But every person who has ever had an idea for
making the world better has felt a desire to skip that step. Convincing
people of things, particularly if they are things that require drastic
change, is hard work, and takes a long time, and often you fail anyway.
You have to spend all this time explaining to people why your idea is such
a good idea, over and over and over again, and many of them don't even
appreciate all the thought you've put into it and all the effort you've
made to consider everyone's needs and everyone's point of view. And all
the time, whatever problem you are trying to solve isn't getting solved.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could cut out all that fuss, and just make
people do what you want?
That is what the Ring does. It lets you just make others do what you
want them to do. Of course you have to be strong enough to wield it, and
you have to "train your will to the domination of others". But given that,
you can use the Ring to cut out all the bother of convincing people, and
just command them instead. And at the start, the things you command them
to do might well be good things. Certainly if you are coming into a place
like the Shire under Saruman, which has been systematically plundered,
there are a lot of easy improvements to be made, and they may well get
made faster if the chain of command is very short, as it will be with the
Ring. (In the real world, of course, there are plenty of examples of
countries which improved for a while after a dictator was put in charge.)
But the improvements come at a terrible price.
In Middle-earth, we are shown the price in several ways, in addition to
the indirect hints we get from Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and others in
passages like those quoted above. First, of course, we see the effect
that long possession of the Ring has had on Gollum. He never used it for
anything except becoming invisible to avoid relatives or catch fish; but
still it has made him into something quite unlike the hobbit-like
creature he originally was. Second, we see the Ringwraiths, who have
been commented on enough that I don't think I need to elaborate on them
here. And of course there is the price paid by Sauron himself when the
Ring is finally destroyed. But perhaps the most poignant price is paid
by the elves, who lose the power and benefits of the Three Rings when
the One is destroyed, and must then leave Middle-earth or "dwindle to
a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten".
This last price is also the most relevant if we are trying to find a
parallel in the real world, because it shows that the making of the
Rings of Power in the first place was, in the long run, a mistake. It
gave the elves power, but it also made them vulnerable in a way they
would never have been had the Three never existed. This point is made
during the Council of Elrond:
<blockquote>
'Those who made them [the Three Rings] did not desire strength or
domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing,
to preserve all things unstained. These things the Elves of Middle-earth
have in some measure gained, though with sorrow. But all that has been
wrought by those who wield the Three will turn to their undoing, and
their minds and hearts will become revealed to Sauron, if he regains the
One. It would be better if the Three had never been. That is his
purpose.'
'But what then would happen, if the Ruling Ring were destroyed, as
you counsel?' asked Gloin.
'We know not for certain,' answered Elrond sadly. 'Some hope that the
Three Rings, which Sauron has never touched, would then become free,
and their rulers might heal the hurts of the world that he has wrought.
But maybe when the One has gone, the Three will fail, and many fair
things will fade and be forgotten. That is my belief.'
</blockquote>
And Elrond turns out to be right. The specific way this plays out in
the story is tailored to Middle-earth, but the general point is
basically the one I made when I posted about
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote.html">my favorite Heinlein quote</a>:
any "shortcut" in the use of power turns out to be a net loss, not a
net gain. That is why the Ring is evil: there is no way to use it
that is not a shortcut. You can't use it to convince, only to command.
In the real world, of course, there is no One Ring; but there are lots
of ways to shortcut the use of power, and Tolkien was not a fan of any
of them. Certainly his attitude towards using power to command was
clear. In a
<a href="http://rodbenson.com/2011/08/20/tolkien-on-anarchism/">letter to his son</a>,
he wrote:
<blockquote>
The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were
at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a
million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the
opportunity...
</blockquote>
But Tolkien does not just show us how not to use power. He also, as I
have already noted, shows us what the just use of power looks like.
Critics often miss this point because they get hung up on the fact,
which I mentioned earlier, that in the real world there is no such
thing as "rightful" rule. But that does not mean that nobody in the
real world has power. And as I noted, the real test is how those with
power use it. In Tolkien's story, the common factor among all of those
who wield power rightly is that they don't use it to command. The
elves are the purest example of this; they are not only unwilling to
give orders, they are even reluctant to give advice, as Gildor tells
Frodo:
<blockquote>
'Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous thing,
even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.'
</blockquote>
Gandalf and Aragorn are quite willing to answer questions and give
advice, but they always make it clear that the choice lies with the one
asking for answers or advice. And even though they are obviously wise
and powerful, and recognized to be so by everyone, they almost never
give orders, and the ones they do give are obviously necessary to deal
with an immediate problem, such as Gandalf directing the company when the
Wargs attack, or Aragorn leading them out of Moria after Gandalf's fall.
At every critical point where there is a weighty decision to be made
that involves others, Gandalf and Aragorn never direct anyone; they
always leave the choice to them. Gandalf does not force anyone to go
to Moria; he only asks who will follow him if he leads them there.
Aragorn makes a suggestion about who should accompany Frodo to Mordor
if Frodo insists on going, but it is only a suggestion, and it gets an
immediate protest from the hobbits and Legolas (and of course it is
soon overtaken by events anyway). He insists that anyone who accompanies
him on the Paths of the Dead must do so willingly. And he does not force
anyone to go all the way to the Gates of Mordor for the final battle;
he gives those who are wavering an alternate task to choose if they
wish.
What Aragorn and Gandalf, and the others who wield power rightly, do
use their power for is to make it possible for others to make
important choices, and to give them the information they need to make
them. Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, and all the other enemies of Sauron
use whatever power they have to resist him, but nobody is ever forced
to resist; it is always their free choice. (I'll have quite a bit more
to say about why free choice is so important in Tolkien's conception
of Middle-earth below.) The hobbits are not commanded to take the Ring
to Rivendell; they freely choose to. But they are only able to make that
choice because of the efforts of Gandalf and Aragorn. So it is with the
other key choice points in the story: the choice is only made possible
because those who wield power in resisting Sauron, do so to enable the
free choices of others, not to command them. This happens throughout
the story, but the two pivotal points where it happens are the Council
of Elrond and the Last Debate.
At the Council of Elrond, almost all of the time is spent in sharing
information. The debate about what to do with the Ring, after all the
information is on the table, is brief. What's more, it is a real debate;
Elrond and Gandalf make clear that they believe the Ring must be
destroyed, but their position is not accepted blindly, without argument.
In fact, as the scene is presented, it seems quite possible that no
decision at all would have been made if Bilbo had not butted in:
<blockquote>
'But tell me: what do you mean by they?'
'The messengers who are sent with the Ring.'
'Exactly. And who are they to be? That seems to me what this Council
has to decide, and all that it has to decide. Elves may thrive on speech
alone, and Dwarves endure great weariness; but I am only an old hobbit,
and I miss my meal at noon. Can't you think of some names now?'
</blockquote>
At the Last Debate, Gandalf once again makes clear what he believes
must be done; but he does not order anyone to follow the strategy he
gives. Nor does Aragorn; he too makes clear that he will follow Gandalf's
strategy, but in the next breath he says:
<blockquote>
'Nonetheless I do not yet claim to command any man. Let others choose
as they will.'
</blockquote>
The other Captains choose to follow him, but even Imrahil, who takes
Aragorn's wish as a command, follows that up immediately with his own
concern, which none of the other Captains have thought of, and which is
immediately recognized as important by the others:
<blockquote>
'Now, it may be that we shall triumph, and while there is any hope of
this, Gondor must be protected. I would not have us return with victory
to a City in ruins and a land ravaged behind us. And yet we learn from
the Rohirrim that there is an army still unfought upon our Northern
flank.'
'That is true,' said Gandalf.
</blockquote>
And Imrahil's suggestion is forthwith incorporated into the strategy.
I have gone into quite a bit of detail about this in order to make my
two central points perfectly clear. First, the simplistic views of the
Ring and power, that the Ring is a simple "evil" item and that power
always corrupts, cannot be right; Tolkien's actual portrayal of these
central issues is much more complex than that. And second, none of
that complexity is there in the movies. And since these central themes,
and the complexity surrounding them, are a crucial part of "Middle-earth
as a holistic construction", the fact that they are not even so much as
hinted at in the movies tells me that, as I said at the start of this
post, Peter Jackson either doesn't understand Middle-earth, or at any
rate has failed to put such an understanding into his movies.
<h1>Tolkien's Characters</h1>
It is important to emphasize, once again, that Tolkien did not
put these ideas into his writings overtly. No one in Middle-earth
articulates just what I have articulated above about the Ring and the
use of power, and it is at least arguable that no one in Middle-earth
even conceptualizes things that way, at least not fully. Tolkien's
beliefs and convictions about how power should and should not be used
were "built in" to Middle-earth, as part of its "internal logic", as
Tolkien called it in his essay "On Fairy-Stories". As such, these ideas
would appear to those within Middle-earth, not as philosophical ideas,
but as something like "laws of nature".
And indeed, in the books, when we see the characters most likely to
understand the internal logic of their world, such as Gandalf, Elrond,
and Galadriel, explain it, they do so the way we would explain simple
facts about the world, like gravity. To people like us, who live in a
world whose laws are different, it may seem as though they are uttering
moral platitudes; but remember that, in the books, the understanding
these characters have comes from direct experience, not from reading
philosophical tomes. As Elrond tells Frodo:
<blockquote>
'[M]y memory reaches back even to the Elder Days. Earendil was my
sire, who was born in Gondolin before its fall; and my mother was
Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Luthien of Doriath. I have seen three
ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless
victories.'
</blockquote>
And Elrond's experience, great as it is, is still much less than that
of Galadriel. (Gandalf is something of a special case; he has been in
Middle-earth for a much shorter time, but he also is of the same order
as the Valar, so he can, at least in principle, draw on experiences
that not even Galadriel can. But a detailed comparison of these cases
would take us much too far afield.) Even Aragorn, who is only a mere
(by comparison) 88 years old when The Lord of the Rings begins, has
had the benefit of being raised by Elrond in Rivendell, and traveling
for many, many years all over Middle-earth learning about its lands
and peoples. He has also been friends with Gandalf during most of that
time, and has learned much from the wizard.
This brings up another key failing of the movies: none of these
characters display any of the maturity and understanding that they
have in the books. I mentioned this in my previous post, but again,
it deserves more discussion, because the understanding that the key
"wise" characters have is another crucial element in "Middle-earth as
a holistic construction", and its complete absence from the movies is
another illustration of Jackson's failure to display a real understanding
of Middle-earth.
The way in which these characters react to the temptation of the Ring,
already discussed, is only one aspect of the understanding that the
movies completely fail to convey. Another aspect is the way in which
the characters approach the struggle against Sauron, and how it interacts
with their personal lives. Let's start with the example I gave in my last
post, the desire of Aragorn and Arwen to wed and Elrond's reaction to it.
Just to be clear about what we're dealing with, keep in mind two key
things about the movies: Aragorn starts out not wanting to become King,
and Elrond lies to Arwen to try to get her to depart with the Elves
instead of waiting to marry Aragorn.
In the books, as many critics have commented, Tolkien gives us very
little to go on concerning the complex relationship between Elrond,
Arwen, and Aragorn. We get a hint at the merrymaking the night before
the Council of Elrond, when Frodo sees Arwen and Aragorn together; and
we get another hint when the Fellowship leaves Rivendell:
<blockquote>
Aragorn sat with his head bowed to his knees; only Elrond knew fully
what this hour meant to him.
</blockquote>
In Lorien we get another hint, when Frodo sees Aragorn at the foot of
Cerin Amroth recalling being there with Arwen; but there is nothing to
indicate what is in fact the truth, that the occasion he is recalling
is the plighting of their troth. Aragorn's words to Galadriel at the
Company's farewell to Lorien also mention Arwen, but this hint is likely
to be lost on the reader without the back story that is only given in the
Appendices. Another hint comes when the Rangers catch up with Aragorn
and the Riders of Rohan, and Halbarad tells Aragorn what he is carrying:
<blockquote>
'It is a gift that I bring you from the Lady of Rivendell,' answered
Halbarad. 'She wrought it in secret, and long was the making. But she
also sends word to you: The days now are short. Either our hope cometh,
or all hopes end. Therefore I send thee what I have made for thee. Fare
well, Elfstone!'
And Aragorn said: 'Now I know what you bear. Bear it still for me for
a while!' And he turned and looked away to the North under the great
stars, and then he fell silent and spoke no more while the night's
journey lasted.
</blockquote>
And, of course, we get one more hint when Aragorn tells Eowyn:
<blockquote>
'Were I to go where my heart dwells, far in the North I would now be
wandering in the fair valley of Rivendell.'
</blockquote>
But these hints (and as far as I can tell the ones I have mentioned are
the only ones) are so thin that it is perfectly possible for the reader
to be as surprised as Frodo when he sees Arwen approaching Minas Tirith
and realizes that she is there to marry Aragorn. Only when we read The
Tale of Aragorn and Arwen in the Appendices do we finally see everything
that lies behind these hints; and it is nothing like what is portrayed
in the movies.
First of all, there is no hint in the movies of the gravity of the choice
Arwen has to make, which Aragorn makes clear to her in the book when they
plight their troth:
<blockquote>
'Arwen said: "Dark is the Shadow, and yet my heart rejoices; for you,
Estel, shall be among the great whose valour will destroy it."
'But Aragorn answered: "Alas! I cannot foresee it, and how it may come
to pass is hidden from me. Yet with your hope I will hope. And the Shadow
I utterly reject. But neither, lady, is the Twilight for me; for I am
mortal, and if you will cleave to me, Evenstar, then the Twilight you
must also renounce."
'And she stood then as still as a white tree, looking into the West,
and at last she said: "I will cleave to you, Dunadan, and turn from the
Twilight. Yet there lies the land of my people and the long home of all
my kin." She loved her father dearly.'
</blockquote>
The Aragorn that is portrayed in the movies certainly does not start out
as the kind of man who could put everything on the line like that with
the woman he loves. By the end of the movies, true, Aragorn has grown;
and one might try to justify Jackson's treatment by observing that the
requirements of moviemaking force him to telescope a lot of character
development into a short time that, in the books, can take place over a
period of years. But that won't work, because in the books, even the
young Aragorn is not the kind of man that Aragorn in the movies is at
the start.
In the movie, Aragorn is unwilling to pursue the throne of Gondor
because he is afraid he will fail, because he is descended from Isildur
and Isildur failed by not destroying the Ring when he had the chance
(more on this below). In the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, as soon as
Elrond tells the young Aragorn his lineage, Aragorn is committed to the
struggle against Sauron; and he also foresees that the climax of that
struggle might well come in his own lifetime. He tells Elrond, when the
latter has told him of the choice before his children:
<blockquote>
'"But lo! Master Elrond, the years of your abiding run short at last,
and the choice must soon be laid on your children, to part either with
you or with Middle-earth."
</blockquote>
And Elrond confirms his foresight:
<blockquote>
'"Truly," said Elrond. "Soon, as we account it, though many years of
Men must still pass."'
</blockquote>
So Aragorn in the books simply does not undergo the kind of crisis of
faith that Aragorn in the movies does. But one might reasonably ask, why
not? He has chosen goals in life that would make any sane man stop and
think; and though he never loses hope, it is difficult to see anything
tangible for his hope to be based on. Indeed, Aragorn himself does not
see how his hope is to be fulfilled, as he admits to Arwen. Why, then,
does he keep it?
A hint at the answer is in Elrond's speech to Aragorn after he learns of
his betrothal to Arwen:
<blockquote>
'"My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little
is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been
appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored."'
</blockquote>
At many critical junctures in the story, characters like Elrond, Gandalf,
and Galadriel use language like this. Gandalf tells Frodo:
<blockquote>
'I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find
the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to
have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.'
</blockquote>
When Frodo tells the Council of Elrond that he will take the Ring to
the Fire, this is Elrond's response:
<blockquote>
Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him, and Frodo felt his heart
pierced by the sudden keenness of the glance. 'If I understand aright
all that I have heard,' he said, 'I think that this task is appointed
for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will.'
</blockquote>
And before the Company's last night in Lorien, Galadriel tells them:
<blockquote>
'Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with thought of the road tonight.
Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your
feet, though you do not see them.'
</blockquote>
Many critics have commented on the fact that there is some sort of
"guiding power" at work behind the scenes in Middle-earth, and of course
this is not surprising given Tolkien's Catholic faith. But whatever we
might think about Tolkien's reasons, it is obvious that the "wise"
characters in the books believe that there is something at work that
"appoints" tasks to certain people, and to them, this something is like
a law of nature, part of the internal logic of Middle-earth, just like
the consequences of unjust use of power. The movies do not convey this
at all; and this failure means that one more key element of the
internal logic of Middle-earth is simply not there.
One might argue that, to modern sensibilities, the metaphysics of
Middle-earth as portrayed by Tolkien would simply be too alien to come
across in a movie. In the books, once again, the "wise" characters have
direct experience of a huge swath of history, so they have seen tasks
be "appointed" to people in the past, and seen how the response of the
people appointed makes a difference in how things come out. We don't
have anything like that kind of moral clarity in the real world. But it
would be one thing to try to tone down the metaphysics to make it more
believable to a modern audience; it is quite another to get rid of it
altogether and substitute a completely different set of "rules", which
is what the movies do.
I have already noted that Aragorn in the movies goes through a crisis
of faith, which is not there in the books. But more than that, in the
movies, he does not change his mind because of anything internal to
himself, any kind of personal growth; he changes it because Elrond
brings him the reforged sword Anduril, and he realizes that, oh, maybe
he ought to try and defeat Sauron and become King after all. In other
words, it is an external event that prompts him to change. Similarly,
Elrond's change of heart in the movies is brought about by an external
event, not by his own growth; Arwen finds out that he was lying to her
and confronts him with it. (Of course the lying itself is utterly unlike
the Elrond in the books; he is heavy of heart about the prospect of
losing his daughter, but even to think of lying to manipulate her would
be abhorrent to him. More on that below.) In general, what personal
growth the characters in the movies experience follows this pattern;
they react to external events instead of really trying to see their
choices and their lives as part of a larger whole, and choosing their
paths accordingly.
But the whole point of the faith that Tolkien's characters have in
the books is that it motivates them to make their own choices, and to
see those choices as fitting into something greater than themselves.
Aragorn's hope in the books is not just a Pollyanna belief that things
will work out in the end; it is what gives him the will and the
strength to make them work out, by doing his part. What's more,
this kind of hope is what makes it possible for the Council of Elrond
to even consider trying to send the Ring to Mordor to be destroyed,
which is the only way to really achieve victory:
<blockquote>
'Thus we return once more to the destroying of the Ring,' said Erestor,
'and yet we come no nearer. What strength have we for the finding of the
Fire in which it was made? That is the path of despair. Of folly I would
say, if the long wisdom of Elrond did not forbid me.'
'Despair, or folly?' said Gandalf. 'It is not despair, for despair is
only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom
to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though
as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly
be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise,
and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the
only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges
all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will
refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek
this, we shall put him out of reckoning.'
</blockquote>
It is notable, once again, that this justification for the Ring-Bearer's
quest, which is a pivotal point in the story in the books, is not given
in the movies at all. In the movies the reasoning is basically, "the
Ring is evil and we can't use it, so let's destroy it". But there is no
real discussion of alternatives; the Council spends most of its time
bickering instead of debating. And we are given no reason why such a
mission would have any chance of succeeding. The key distinction Gandalf
makes in the book, between "false hope" and recognizing necessity, is
completely absent; for all we know, in the movie, Gandalf and Elrond might
just be rolling the dice, hoping that the Ring can get to Mordor somehow.
This illustrates that Jackson's portrayal of Middle-earth does not just
lack certain elements that are in the books: it changes critical
elements, and does so in a way that destroys the real meaning of
Tolkien's work. Jackson's characters are not just immature compared to
Tolkien's; they lack the moral agency that Tolkien took such pains to
give them. Tolkien's characters in the books do their best to make hard
choices in difficult situations; Jackson's characters in the movies just
react. For example, in the Council of Elrond scene in the movie, the
Ring itself controls the flow of events, by whispering to the various
Council members. There is no sense at all that the Council is trying to
decide what to do; they are just reacting to the Ring and each other.
In fact, the treatment of the Ring in general in the movies shows the
same failure to give the characters moral agency. In the books, the Ring
forces characters to make a choice: do I try to gain the Ring and use
it, or not? But in the movies, the Ring is just one more external thing
that the characters react to. Those who give in to it, such as Boromir,
are just doing what comes naturally; there is no sense that they are
faced with a difficult moral choice and choose wrong. Even those who
resist the Ring, like Gandalf and Galadriel, are not portrayed as
freely choosing to do so; they are portrayed simply as being lucky
enough not to give in.
Moreover, in the books, those who are tempted by the Ring and resist it
do so by thinking through what the consequences would be. Some, like
Gandalf and Galadriel, have evidently thought it through beforehand; in
Galadriel's case, she tells us so herself:
<blockquote>
'For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great
Ring come into my hands...'
</blockquote>
Faramir, too, has evidently considered the issues involved; perhaps not
specifically with regard to the Ring, but considered them nonetheless:
<blockquote>
'I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas
Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon
of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. I do not wish for such
triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.'
</blockquote>
It is notable, by the way, that Faramir says this before he knows
what Frodo's burden actually is, and before he knows what it did to his
brother Boromir. In the movies, Faramir diverts Frodo, Sam, and Gollum
towards Minas Tirith, and only after the Nazgul attack Osgiliath (the
timing of these events is significantly changed from the books) does
he change his mind and let them go on with the quest.
But even Sam, who has not thought it through beforehand, is able to
resist the temptation of the Ring in the book by thinking it through:
<blockquote>
In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most
to hold him firm; but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his
plain hobbit-sense: he knew in the core of his heart that he was not
large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere
cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his
need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not
the hands of others to command.
</blockquote>
The movie changes the whole sequence of events at Cirith Ungol, and
again, the characters, instead of doing their best to make hard choices,
react to external forces; in this case, Frodo and Sam react to Gollum's
manipulations, Sam by offering to take the Ring, Frodo by telling Sam
to go home and leaving him (!!). Sam comes back in time to drive off
Shelob, but he thinks Frodo is dead (as in the book); but before he has
any chance to consider what to do next, the orcs come along and Sam,
overhearing them, realizes that Frodo is not dead after all, and follows
them. So once again, Sam does not really make any choice, he simply
reacts to events.
But the most significant change in this scene occurs after Sam has found
Frodo, and gives him back the Ring. In the movie, Sam feels the Ring's
temptation here, and it seems like Frodo only gets the Ring back because
Sam is too slow to react and Frodo, who is also drawn by the Ring, is
able to snatch it from him. Both characters are being controlled by the
Ring. And after Frodo has it, the only thing he says is, "It will destroy
you, Sam."
The scene in the book is nothing like that, and it's worth quoting it at
length to see why:
<blockquote>
'I took it, Mr. Frodo, begging your pardon. And I've kept it safe. It's
round my neck now, and a terrible burden it is, too.' Sam fumbled for the
Ring and its chain. 'But I suppose you must take it back.' Now it had
come to it, Sam felt reluctant to give up the Ring and burden his master
with it again.
'You've got it?' gasped Frodo. 'You've got it here? Sam, you're a
marvel!' Then quickly and strangely his tone changed. 'Give it to me!'
he cried, standing up, holding out a trembling hand. 'Give it me at once!
You can't have it!'
'All right, Mr. Frodo,' said Sam, rather startled. 'Here it is!' Slowly
he drew the Ring out and passed the chain over his head. 'But you're in
the land of Mordor now, sir; and when you get out, you'll see the Fiery
Mountain and all. You'll find the Ring very dangerous now, and very hard
to bear. If it's too hard a job, I could share it with you, maybe?'
'No, no!' cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam's hands.
'No you won't, you thief!' He panted, staring at Sam with eyes wide with
fear and enmity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist,
he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes, and he passed a
hand over his aching brow. The hideous vision had seemed so real to him,
half bemused as he was still with wound and fear. Sam had changed before
his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a
foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth. But now the
vision had passed. There was Sam kneeling before him, his face wrung
with pain, as if he had been stabbed in the heart; tears welled from his
eyes.
'O Sam!' cried Frodo. 'What have I said? What have I done? Forgive me!
After all you have done. It is the horrible power of the Ring. I wish it
had never, never been found. But don't mind me, Sam. I must carry the
burden to the end. It can't be altered. You can't come between me and
this doom.'
</blockquote>
It is worth noting, not only that the effect of the Ring is treated
very differently, but that Frodo and Sam are both aware of that effect
in a way that they are not in the movie. They both realize that the
power of the Ring can alter their perceptions, so that they need to
take extra precautions before believing them; and they both realize that
they can take such precautions, that they do not have to let the Ring
control them. There is nothing like this in the movies.
Other pivotal situations in the movies show similar differences from
their treatment in the books. We have already seen two others: Elrond's
lying to Arwen, and Aragorn's fear that he will fail as Isildur did. I
have already observed that to lie about anything so important, most
of all to his beloved daughter, would be abhorrent to the Elrond of the
books. But why? Here is how Elrond deals with the situation in the
book; I quoted the first part of this above, but now let's take a look
at all of it:
<blockquote>
'"Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men
may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen
Undomiel shall not diminish her life's grace for less cause. She shall
not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor.
To me then even our victory can bring only sorrow and parting -- but to
you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom
of Men may seem hard at the ending."
'So it stood afterwards between Elrond and Aragorn, and they spoke no
more of this matter; but Aragorn went forth again to danger and toil.'
</blockquote>
Elrond in the books does not even think of lying, to either Arwen or
Aragorn, because he understands that it isn't about him; all three of
them are part of something much larger, the possible restoration of the
kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. But note well that he does not simply let
Aragorn off the hook because there's something greater involved. He
makes it clear that Aragorn will have to live up to his heritage if he
wants to win Arwen.
Elrond in the movies is too caught up in his own feelings to realize
that, by lying to Arwen, he is jeopardizing something much bigger than
any of them. Only when it starts affecting Arwen herself does he wise
up and start thinking of the consequences of what he is doing. Reviewers
have commented that Elrond in the movies is a much darker character
than he is in the books; but as the above shows, he is not just dark,
but small, mean, and petty, quite unlike anything that Tolkien conceived
for the Master of Rivendell.
Aragorn in the movies is at least not mean or petty, but he is, as
already noted, conflicted in a way that Aragorn in the books is not, and
afraid to fulfill his birthright because his ancestor, Isildur, failed
at a critical moment, and he fears that he might fail too. This is quite
in keeping with Jackson's failure to give his characters moral agency as
Tolkien does; the idea that Isildur might just have made a wrong choice,
and that Aragorn could choose differently, is not even contemplated. In
the books, the possibility that Aragorn might have inherited whatever
quality in Isildur caused him to refuse to destroy the Ring is never
mentioned; but it is clear, nonetheless, that Aragorn is aware that
Isildur made a mistake, for he tells the Council of Elrond that he helped
Gandalf to search for Gollum because "it seemed fit that Isildur's heir
should labour to repair Isildur's fault". In other words, he sees his
inheritance simply as imposing a duty on him, not as anything to fear.
And why should he fear it? By that time he has already had his chance to
give in to the temptation of the Ring (it is notable that this scene is
completely absent in the movie) and has chosen not to.
So just as with Jackson's treatment of the Ring, his treatment of the
characters completely fails to show any understanding of Middle-earth.
Tolkien made his characters moral agents, doing their best to make hard
choices in difficult situations. Sometimes they fail, but they never
simply react to events, as Jackson's characters do. The movies convey
no sense of the importance of free choice in Tolkien's world.
<h1>Tolkien's World</h1>
The above should make it abundantly clear why I am in no hurry to see
The Hobbit. But it is worth making an already long post a little longer
in order to comment on one more feature of Tolkien's world that is
absent in the movies.
A fairly common reaction to the basic plot of The Lord of the Rings is
that the plan which is adopted, and which ultimately leads to victory,
to send the Ring to Mordor to be destroyed, is not a plan that anyone
would expect to work in the real world. In fact, Tolkien has Denethor
voice a similar opinion to Gandalf and Faramir and Pippin:
<blockquote>
'What then is your wisdom?' said Gandalf.
'Enough to perceive that there are two follies to avoid. To use this
thing is perilous. At this hour, to send it in the hands of a witless
halfling into the land of the Enemy himself, as you have done, and this
son of mine, that is madness.'
</blockquote>
(Denethor, by the way, is another character who is much diminished in
the movies compared to the books, for no real purpose that I can see.
In the books, even though he ends badly, Denethor does his best to make
hard choices, as the other characters do. In the movies he is the next
thing to a barbarian. But I've said enough on that theme here.)
The plan only works, according to this line of criticism, because of
the "guiding power" behind the scenes, which I referred to above, and
which Tolkien obviously meant to play a similar role to what is called
Divine Providence in Christian literature. In other words, the main
plot line is basically a deus ex machina. I have to admit that when
I first read The Lord of the Rings, I had a similar reaction. Tolkien
sets up his world so that, ultimately, right choices will be rewarded
and wrong choices will be punished. Yes, "ultimately" may be a long
while: it takes more than 4700 years for Sauron's wrong choice in
making the One Ring to be punished. But sooner or later the appropriate
consequences will occur.
Tolkien, as a Catholic, may have believed that the real world is like
that; but I, as an agnostic, do not. Yet I can read about Middle-earth
again and again without ever getting tired of it. Why is that? Because
the question of whether our real world has a "guiding power" behind the
scenes or not is beside the point. Tolkien's wanted to create an
imaginary world, with rules that he believed ought to be true of our
world, whether or not they actually are. And many, like me, who read
and re-read his stories of Middle-earth do so, at least in large part,
because we enjoy being in that world, even if it is only imaginary. We
enjoy reading about and imagining a world where people, not just wise
and powerful ones like Gandalf and Aragorn, but ordinary ones like
Frodo and Sam, can make free choices, and make the right choices,
and have those choices rewarded.
Not only that, but imagining such a world helps to motivate us to do
what we can to make our own real world more just, more fair than we
found it. And there is no need to disregard Tolkien and treat his work
as an allegory to do that. "Applicability" is more than enough, and
Tolkien's books are a rich source of material to apply; I have discussed
some of it here, but of course there is a lot more. Jackson's movies
give none of that, and that is why I seeing The Hobbit is not going
to be high on my list of things to do any time soon.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jan 2013 04:06 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Media Industry Is Officially Lame</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/media-industry-officially-lame</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/media-industry-officially-lame.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This is just a quick note to confirm that it's official: the media
industry is lame. YouTube recently deleted more that 2 billion
<a href="http://www.tomsguide.com/us/youtube-sony-bmg-universal,news-16514.html#xtor=RSS-980">fake video views</a>
that were created by Sony, Universal, RCA, and other media companies.
This violates YouTube's terms of service, of course, which is why the
fake views were deleted. But that's a minor point compared to the big
question: how lame do you have to be to generate fake views to make
your videos appear to be more popular than they actually are? Remember
we're not talking about a few teenagers shooting home videos; we're
talking about the biggest media companies in the world.
But even that isn't the full extent of the lameness. Remember that these
are the same companies that complain loudly about "pirated" videos being
posted on sites like...YouTube. As I have blogged
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html">a number</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/internet-blackout-day.html">of times</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/one-rant-deserves-another.html">before</a>,
the reason these companies are having these problems is that they are
either unwilling or unable to change their business models to give their
customers what they actually want. If this is their attempt to try and
fix that, they need to think again.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2013 05:52 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Watch Out For That First Step, It's A Lulu</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/watch-out-first-step</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/watch-out-first-step.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This is my obligatory blog post about the "fiscal cliff". One can't
expect to maintain one's blogging credentials without making some
comment on an issue like this, but I have been hesitant even so
because there didn't seem to be anything worth saying that hadn't
already been said many, many times. Then I came across
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/lets-give-up-on-the-constitution.html?pagewanted=2&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all">this op-ed</a>
from yesterday's New York Times:
<blockquote>
As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are
reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken.
But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the
Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil
provisions.
</blockquote>
My take is exactly the opposite: our government is broken because we
don't obey the Constitution, or indeed any coherent system of rules,
if we think we can get our way by breaking them. And the fiscal cliff
gives a perfect illustration of how this works and why it's a problem.
Of course the op-ed's lead, quoted above, did its job by impelling me to
read further, hoping to see examples of these "evil provisions" in the
Constitution. Well, it does give one:
<blockquote>
Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader
last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats
to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the
Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower
chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27
members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold
on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to
decide the nation’s fate?
</blockquote>
Apparently this writer can't recognize political posturing when he sees
it. Congress has been more than happy to work around that Constitutional
provision in the past; in at least one
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/an-interesting-twist.html">fairly recent case</a>,
the Senate replaced the entire text of a bill that had originated in the
House so that they could address a revenue issue without violating the
Constitutional provision. Much of the rest of the op-ed is devoted
to listing similar instances of adhering to the letter of the
Constitution while violating its spirit, so the writer is clearly
aware that it can be done. Why should the problem suddenly be, in
this case, that the Constitution is getting in the way, instead of
simply that it's not being used as intended?
It may seem hard to believe, but this is the only specific example
in the entire op-ed of an "evil provision" of the Constitution that
makes our government dysfunctional. We do get another example, but it's
a hypothetical one:
<blockquote>
Imagine that after careful study a government official -- say, the
president or one of the party leaders in Congress -- reaches a considered
judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country.
Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of
white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing
of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought
it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action.
Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her
mind because of this divination?
</blockquote>
A more pertinent question might be, has this ever actually happened?
Once again, the rest of the op-ed is a survey of the many different ways
in which our government has ignored the Constitution, or adhered to its
letter while violating its spirit. A reasonable conclusion from all this
would be that we are not paying enough attention to the Constitution;
yet the writer offers it as support for the claim that we are paying
too much attention to it?
It's worth taking a brief detour here to note this comment in the op-ed
on Supreme Court jurisprudence:
<blockquote>
The fact that dissenting justices regularly, publicly and vociferously
assert that their colleagues have ignored the Constitution -- in landmark
cases from Miranda v. Arizona to Roe v. Wade to Romer v. Evans to Bush v.
Gore -- should give us pause. The two main rival interpretive methods,
"originalism" (divining the framers' intent) and "living constitutionalism"
(reinterpreting the text in light of modern demands), cannot be reconciled.
Some decisions have been grounded in one school of thought, and some in the
other. Whichever your philosophy, many of the results -- by definition --
must be wrong.
</blockquote>
I have
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">covered</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look.html">this territory</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html">before</a>,
and I certainly agree that there has been a lot of creative interpretation
of the Constitution in Supreme Court decisions, much of it inconsistent
when taken as a whole. But again, while this may give some support to the
claim (which I'll get to in a moment) that ignoring the Constitution is
not going to cause our society to collapse, it does not at all support the
claim that we have been paying too much attention to it up to now.
But we are getting further away from the fiscal cliff, which is what I
said this post was going to be about. Let's start heading back by looking
at the central claim of the op-ed:
<blockquote>
Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced
chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and
prosper.
</blockquote>
Set aside (for the moment) the question of whether we have grown and
prospered because of ignoring the Constitution, or in spite of that.
The claim appears to be that basically, ignoring it has worked all right
up to now, so why not make it official? But once again, that's not at all
the same as claiming that we have paid too much attention to it, and
we'd be better off not doing that. Later on, the writer gives more
details about how our key institutions -- Congress, the Presidency,
the Supreme Court -- might work if we did this:
<blockquote>
What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the
basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify
military action against Iran solely on the merits, without shutting down
the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as
commander in chief. Congress might well retain the power of the purse,
but this power would have to be defended on contemporary policy grounds,
not abstruse constitutional doctrine. The Supreme Court could stop
pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting
affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.
</blockquote>
Going back to the example at the beginning of the op-ed, the Senate
minority leader would no longer be able to hide behind a Constitutional
provision to justify inaction. He might still try other ways of political
posturing, but that particular way would be closed to him.
There is a point that could be taken away from this, but unfortunately
it's not the one the writer intended. Giving up the Constitution would
not stop political posturing; it would only change its form. Giving up
the Constitution would amount to admitting that no written document,
no set of rules, can work if people refuse to follow them when it
serves their interests to break them instead.
This throws rather a different light on the conclusion of the op-ed:
<blockquote>
If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at
least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a
good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a
tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.
[P]erhaps the dream of a country ruled by "We the people" is impossibly
utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing
people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate.
But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try
extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real
freedom a chance.
</blockquote>
But if we can't even make a good faith effort to understand others'
views when we have a written document setting out the rules for how to
do so, how will it work any better when we don't? The Constitution, and
written law in general, is by no means the only tool people have to force
others to do things they don't want to do. But written laws, like written
contracts, have at least the advantage of being written: there is a text,
however imperfect, whose words are a matter of objective fact, rather than
just vague ideas in people's heads. (Of course, the whole issue of strict
vs. loose construction of the Constitution, or "originalism" vs. "living
constitutionalism" as the op-ed has it, shows that even written words
don't always establish an objective meaning. But having no written
words would be worse still.)
You may think I'm still on a detour here; the fiscal cliff is not a matter
of Constitutional law. Indeed it isn't, and that's the point. Consider what
got us here: back in the summer of 2011, to deal with the debt ceiling
crisis, a law was passed that imposed a deadline on Congress and the
President to deal with budget deficits, or else spending cuts would be
imposed willy-nilly. But what caused the debt ceiling crisis? Well, another
law was passed, quite some time ago, that imposed a ceiling on the debt and
required Congress and the President to periodically revisit it. Why was
that law passed? Well, because it had become evident that the national
debt was continuing to grow despite all efforts to control it. And why was
that? Well, because the government couldn't stop spending more money
than it was taking in in revenues.
Where, in any of this, was the Constitution a factor? The Constitution
doesn't say anything about a debt ceiling, or how the national debt is to
be controlled. It doesn't say anything about how the government is supposed
to control its spending. (It does put limits on the kinds of things
Congress can spend money on, which, as I've argued before, have been
interpreted out of all recognition by the Supreme Court. But that's just
another example of us not paying attention to the Constitution.) Blaming
any of this on the Constitution, or on our supposed adherence to the
Constitution instead of to practical solutions to problems, is simply a
misdiagnosis. The problem is that our government refuses to be restrained
by any set of rules if politicians think that breaking them will help
them reach their goals.
It's important to note that this applies to both sides of the aisle.
The Republicans are the ones currently backed into a corner, but the tactic
of bending or breaking the rules to one's advantage is used all the time by
both parties. As an example on the other side, consider all the maneuvering
done by the Democratic leadership of both houses of Congress to get
Obamacare passed before the 2010 midterm elections gave control of the
House to the Republicans.
But, I hear the op-ed writer protesting, Obamacare was a good thing! Of
course it's all right to bend (or even break) the rules if you're doing a
good thing, right? If you have reached "a considered judgment that a
particular course of action is best for the country", why should you let
yourself be stopped by a few pesky rules? Of course this is exactly what
one expects to hear from people of
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote.html">Heinlein's class one</a>
when they want to tell other people what to do. But my point here is even
more drastic than the one I made in that earlier post about my favorite
Heinlein quote. Here I'm saying that even if a particular course of action
is best for the country, considered by itself, getting it done by bending
or breaking the rules is still a net loss, because it destroys people's
faith in the stability of our society, and that faith is more important
than the particular course of action we take on any single issue.
It's worth taking another brief detour here to note that even the premise
of the argument I just sketched is usually not valid. It is actually
extremely rare for anyone, in government or out, to have a "considered
judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country" which
ends up being correct. The track record of such "considered judgments" is
extremely poor. Very often doing nothing would be better than whatever the
government does. When the government passed huge bailouts and a stimulus
package in 2008 and 2009, the "considered judgment" was that it would fix
things without too much delay; nobody then was contemplating an economic
situation in 2012 like the one we actually have.
In the case of the fiscal cliff (that last detour was actually a shortcut),
both sides are basing their positions on predictions of the future that
are no more reliable than the ones that were used four years ago. The
Democratic position is basically the one described by Paul Krugman in
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/krugman-brewing-up-confusion.html?src=me&ref=general">another op-ed</a>
from yesterday's New York Times: if we let the "sequestration" spending
cuts happen, and we let the tax rates go up for everyone, we will reduce
the deficit too fast, leading to another recession. But if we really had
that much of a handle on how government spending and tax rates impact the
economy as a whole, we would be in better shape now than we are. It's not
as though trying to regulate the economy through government spending and
tax rates is a new idea. The argument seems plausible, but "plausible"
isn't a very high bar, particularly when Nobel-Prize-winning economists
like Krugman are spending a lot of time and (electronic) ink on this.
The Republican position is hard to discern (they have, perhaps wisely,
refrained from being too explicit about exactly what their goals are),
but based on comments made over the past couple of days by several
Republican Senators about "sequestration", they may well think, behind
closed doors, that going over the cliff might cause short-term pain, but
could ultimately prove to be a good thing. It would force the
government to cut spending whether it wants to or not, and the tax hikes
would make a start at addressing the deficit. But such a strategy, while
it would be refreshing coming from a party that claims to support
conservative values but hasn't done much to actually support them, would
only work if they stuck to it, not just for the next couple of days, but
for the next couple of years -- the ultimate object in view being, of
course, to shift the balance in Congress again in the 2014 election by
pointing to the benefits gained by standing firm on this issue.
I seriously doubt that the Republican party is capable of holding to any
strategy for that long. Even if we go over the "cliff" tomorrow, there is
still plenty of time for a deal to happen before the effects actually
build up, and such a deal would mean that any supposed benefits of the
spending cuts and the tax hikes would not actually happen. Even assuming
that going over the cliff would, in the long run, be a net positive, to
achieve that, we would have to go over it, and then start climbing back
up from the bottom of the canyon; stopping the fall part way down won't
do it. I don't think the Republican party has the stomach for that.
In the end, I suspect we will, as usual, end up somewhere in the middle.
And that is what really makes the willingness of both sides to break the
rules when it suits them so maddening: it doesn't even accomplish
anything. After all of the grandstanding, we will probably end up with
much the same deal that would have happened if it had been done a while
ago, when it should have been. After all of the bending of the rules, we
will be no better off than if everything had been done the way it should
have been, within the rules. In fact, we'll be worse off, because we will
have yet another proof that the rules have no force, and that is the
real problem.
The same goes for all of the ignoring of the Constitution that the op-ed
talks about. What has it really gained us? Consider some of the examples
the op-ed gives. The Alien and Sedition Acts were indeed contrary to the
First Amendment; perhaps that's why the main practical impact they had
was to remove the Federalists, who passed them, from power in the next
election. The New Deal legislation, which led FDR to pack the Supreme
Court with Justices favorable to his views, started the very trend of
increasing spending that has led to our current situation. And nearly
60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which Justice
Jackson said had no basis in the Constitution (that's debatable, but
let's concede it to the op-ed writer for the sake of argument), our
schools, while they may no longer be segregated, are
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/us-students-still-lag-beh_n_1695516.html">not exactly paragons</a>
<a href="http://www.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,2043378,00.html">of educational achievement</a>.
Given all this, it seems to me that the problem with the Constitution is
not that we pay too much attention to it; it's that we never gave it a
chance at all. The op-ed admits that "No sooner was the Constitution in
place than our leaders began ignoring it." This is a bug, not a feature.
Perhaps it's impossible for us to actually abide by a set of rules;
perhaps the temptation to gain a temporary advantage by bending or
breaking them is always going to be too strong. But if so, then that
is what will end up destroying "our heritage of self-government".
If we really want to preserve that heritage, we ought to try placing a
higher value on the fundamental stability of our society, and the trust
and integrity that it requires, even if that means giving up some
temporary political advantage, or even giving up a quicker solution to
a specific problem. And if there's one thing the history surveyed by
the op-ed writer teaches, it's that we need explicit rules to do that.
It's all very well to talk about "aspirations that, at the broadest
level, everyone can embrace"; but the same people who talk about sharing
such broad aspirations will, in the next breath, proceed to disagree on
every specific point of any substance. The fiscal cliff has shown us
this in spades: one minute everybody is talking about how no one wants
to go over the cliff, but the next minute everybody is talking about how
they can't come to agreement on any specifics for avoiding that.
The Framers of the Constitution believed that people could not be trusted
to work things out based on nothing more than shared aspirations. They
knew that solutions that are worked out under pressure, solutions that are
pushed by one faction over the objections of another based on the political
climate of the moment, are likely to be bad in the long run for the country
as a whole. So they gave us a specific structure that was designed to force
us to take a step back instead of charging ahead whenever we saw something
that needed fixing. Our government is broken today because we have lost
sight of the basic truths that the Constitution was built on. Maybe we
ought to give the Constitution a chance.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 31 Dec 2012 23:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>"Your" Cloud Data Is Not Yours</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/your-cloud-data-not-yours</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/your-cloud-data-not-yours.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
A while ago I explained
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/not-crazy-about-cloud.html">why I'm not crazy about the cloud</a>.
In that post I stressed that, since you're not a paying customer to "cloud"
services like Facebook and Google, you don't get to decide how they're run.
Now I want to talk about another aspect of the cloud that seems risky to
me: you don't get to decide how the data you post to a "cloud" service is
used.
Yesterday,
<a href="http://instagram.com/">Instagram</a>,
which was recently
<a href="http://blog.instagram.com/post/20785013897/instagram-facebook">acquired by Facebook</a>,
released updated Terms of Service which were widely interpreted as
<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57559710-38/instagram-says-it-now-has-the-right-to-sell-your-photos/">claiming the right to sell your photos</a>
without giving you a penny of compensation. Of course this caused much outrage
all over the Internet, and Instagram
<a href="http://blog.instagram.com/post/38252135408/thank-you-and-were-listening">responded</a>
by clarifying why they changed their Terms of Service:
<blockquote>
Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we'd like to
experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram.
Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to
others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that
this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your
photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is
clear.
</blockquote>
This seems clear enough, and further on there is more clarification:
<blockquote>
The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can
be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and
because of that we're going to remove the language that raised the question.
</blockquote>
So this looks, on its face, like a good story about a cloud service. The
service proposed new terms (it's important to note that the new Terms of
Service will not take effect until January 16, 2013, so Instagram was not
trying to slip anything by), people raised concerns, and the service responded
to those concerns. There is even an explicit recognition that Instagram users
own their photos, not Instagram itself:
<blockquote>
Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership
rights over your photos. Nothing about this has changed. We respect that there
are creative artists and hobbyists alike that pour their heart into creating
beautiful photos, and we respect that your photos are your photos. Period.
I always want you to feel comfortable sharing your photos on Instagram and we
will always work hard to foster and respect our community and go out of our way
to support its rights.
</blockquote>
All of this sounds good. But it begs the question: if Instagram is so
concerned about its users, and if it's so valuable to them, why doesn't it
let them pay for the service?
The more you look at what Instagram says, the more this question comes to the
fore. For example:
<blockquote>
From the start, Instagram was created to become a business. Advertising is
one of many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business, but not
the only one.
</blockquote>
Yes, indeed. So why is it the only one that Instagram appears to be pursuing?
And why is it continuing to pursue it when it has already led to one near miss?
Instagram responded well this time, but if they weren't depending on ads for
their business model, they wouldn't have had to respond at all.
What's more, the "context" they provide about their business plans makes you
wonder where "innovative advertising" fits in:
<blockquote>
To provide context, we envision a future where both users and brands alike
may promote their photos & accounts to increase engagement and to build a
more meaningful following. Let’s say a business wanted to promote their account
to gain more followers and Instagram was able to feature them in some way. In
order to help make a more relevant and useful promotion, it would be helpful
to see which of the people you follow also follow this business. In this way,
some of the data you produce — like the actions you take (eg, following the
account) and your profile photo — might show up if you are following this
business.
</blockquote>
What does any of this have to do with ads? It's just straightforward social
networking.
I should make clear that I am not accusing Instagram of being engaged in a
deep conspiracy to hoodwink users, as some comments on the
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939849">Hacker News thread</a>
have implied. I am quite ready to believe that they are perfectly sincere.
That's the problem: they sincerely believe that pursuing "innovative
advertising" is a good business model, but just charging users for a service
that is obviously valuable is not.
This blind spot is not limited to Instagram, of course. Facebook itself has
the same problem, although to be fair, Facebook's users fit a very different
profile from Instagram's users. Google has the problem too; in fact, the
problem is worse with Google, because their core search service is at a more
fundamental level than social networking. And yet those core search results
are now less useful because they can be
<a href="http://www.thenichethinktank.com/google-search-results-are-skewed-by-personalization-how-to-get-real-search-results/">skewed by personalization</a>,
and can
<a href="http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-drive-facebook-twitter-crazy-107554">preferentially show results from Google services over competitors</a>.
In fact, the case of Google is probably worth its own post all by itself.
Of course, the direct impact of this blind spot will be felt by the cloud
services themselves, not users; but how will the services respond? It would
be nice if they would respond in the obvious way, by finding ways for users
to pay them directly for the value they receive. But I don't see any big push
in that direction. Instead, I see cloud services looking for more and more
creative ways to monetize their users' data while keeping the service free.
Unless the service gets driven out of business by some competitor that does
let users pay directly, there is only one way this trend can end, as far as
you the user are concerned: "your" data will ultimately not be yours. It's
great that Instagram wants to protect its users' rights, but it's not up
against a hard choice (yet) between cashing in on its users' data and going
out of business. What will happen when (not if) it is?
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:48 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Strict Constructionist?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/strict-constructionist</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/strict-constructionist.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I've posted a
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">few</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look.html">times</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html">now</a>
about the Supreme Court, and at one point I noted that I had labeled
myself a "strict constructionist". Now that the Defense of Marriage
Act (DOMA) and California's Proposition 8 are
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-07/gay-marriage-gets-supreme-court-review-for-the-first-time.html">going to the Supreme Court for review</a>,
having been found unconstitutional in a number of lower court cases,
I have a chance to swing the pendulum back the other way somewhat.
The terms "strict constructionist" and "loose constructionist", as they
are usually used, are actually rather ironic since each really means
its opposite when you look closely. A strict constructionist like
Justice Scalia says that "the words of the Constitution say what they
say and there is no fiddling with them", but he also believes that the
"traditions" of our society are what we should turn to when the
Constitution doesn't address something, rather than looking at the
words in more general terms. But those traditions change over time, as
he acknowledges; he just thinks that's okay because the changes happen
by democratic processes.
Furthermore, the traditions are not always consistent. For example, in
1996, the Supreme Court struck down VMI's males-only admissions policy in
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Virginia">United States v. Virginia</a>.
Justice Scalia dissented, arguing that the standard applied by the
Court was stricter than it had been in similar cases in the past.
However, the service academies had been
<a href="http://www.womensmemorial.org/H&C/History/milacad.html">admitting women since 1976</a>,
so Scalia was essentially arguing that it was Constitutional for VMI to
exclude women, but equally Constitutional for the service academies to
include them.
A loose constructionist, on the other hand, believes that what changes
over time is only our understanding of the Constitution and the
principles it is based on, not the principles themselves. To a loose
constructionist, it was always against the principles of the Constitution
for the federal service academies to exclude women; we just didn't
understand that until the 1976 laws were passed. Similarly, the Virginia
law allowing VMI to exclude women was always, strictly speaking,
unconstitutional; we just didn't acknowledge it until the Supreme Court
said so in 1996. And if the 1976 federal laws were repealed, a woman
could bring suit against the service academies for excluding her and the
Supreme Court ought to support her and declare the new law
unconstitutional. So we have the ironic situation of a "strict"
constructionist having to take a position that implies that what is
just changes over time, while the "loose" constructionist is the one
arguing that justice itself does not change, although our understanding
of it does.
The question the strict constructionist always asks, of course, is what
justification the loose constructionist can give for finding all these
"new rights" in the Constitution that aren't mentioned explicitly there.
I think there is a good argument for this, which I wish would be made
more explicit in court opinions on these issues. The Constitution was
not meant to enumerate all rights, powers, or duties explicitly; it
clearly envisions that people will use common sense in interpreting
what it says. This is shown in the original document itself by such
clauses as the "necessary and proper" clause, and in the Bill of Rights
by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which clearly show an expectation
that the document is not expected to explicitly cover all cases. This
much is admitted by everyone, but strict constructionists appear to
believe that there is no middle ground: either the Constitution says
it explicitly, or it doesn't cover it at all.
The problem with that strict viewpoint is that it views the Constitution
as stating laws. Laws either apply or don't apply; a law concerning
theft doesn't apply to a case of assault. But the Constitution is not
supposed to be law in this sense; it is concerned with setting up the
governmental structure that will make, execute, and interpret laws. As
such, it obviously will have to be applied to cases that were not
envisioned by the framers, and the only way to do that is to read it,
where possible, as giving general principles, not specific rules for
specific cases. That is what the loose constructionist does. For
example, the Constitution says nothing specifically about marriage,
but the Fourteenth Amendment does give general guarantees of due
process and "equal protection of the laws". That means that, if the
law provides benefits attached to a certain status, such as marriage,
all citizens must have equal access to that status; the law cannot
arbitrarily exclude a class of persons (such as gays) from access.
(This does not mean that the law cannot impose any limitations on
access; for example, it can specify a minimum age requirement for
marriage, or require some other legal condition, as long as everyone
can potentially meet it. Everyone eventually arrives at adult age,
barring tragedy.) So laws banning gay marriage are unconstitutional,
and the courts should overturn them.
As you can see, this issue is actually pretty simple from the loose
constructionist's point of view. The Constitution doesn't specifically
say that "equal protection" applies to gay marriage, but it doesn't
specifically say it applies to anything. In fact, the Constitution
says nothing whatever about marriage specifically. But "equal protection
of the laws" is a general principle, not a specific rule for specific
cases. It is true that long-standing tradition in our society says that
marriage is between one man and one woman, but there are plenty of ways
of acknowledging that without violating the equal protection guarantee.
One obvious way would be to separate the legal aspects of marriage from
the social ones: find some neutral legal term (like, oh, say, "civil
union", or "household") and use that to define the legal benefits
available, and let various social groups decide for themselves what
they will count as a "marriage". You are perfectly within your rights
not to invite the gay couple down the street to dinner because you
don't acknowledge their union, but you are not within your rights to
say they can't file a joint income tax return, make medical decisions
for each other if one is incapacitated, buy a house together, or
inherit from each other without being taxed.
This brings up the key point that opponents of gay marriage seem
unable to talk about: married couples get lots of legal benefits.
As
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States">the Wikipedia page on same-sex marriage</a>
notes, the GAO has identified well over a thousand benefits conferred
on married couples, so the ones I listed above, as important as they
are, barely scratch the surface. To pretend that gay marriage is only
about whose unions deserve to be recognized socially is to ignore the
huge network of advantages that "traditional" married couples take for
granted. Once those advantages are recognized, of course the equal
protection implications are obvious.
In the previous post where I said I had labeled myself as a strict
constructionist, I was making the point that the courts should only
"say what the law is" in the sense of determining which law should
govern when different laws conflict, not in the sense of making new
laws. But the loose constructionist also has a valid point: it is
perfectly possible for courts to uphold the principles embodied in the
Constitution without making up new laws and legal frameworks out of
whole cloth. In the case of gay marriage, as I said above, and also
back when New York State
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/whats-up-1.html">passed its law permitting same-sex marriage</a>,
the issue is pretty simple: does "equal protection" mean what it says,
or not? In the Supreme Court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education,
<a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Earl_Warren">Chief Justice Warren wrote</a>
that "Such an opportunity, where the State has undertaken to provide
it, is a right that must be made available to all on equal terms". He
was talking about education, but I see no reason why the same logic
should not apply to the legal benefits that the State attaches to
marriage. If that means I have to turn in my strict constructionist
membership card, well, so be it.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 09 Dec 2012 02:34 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Vote Early, Not Often</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/vote-early-not-often</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/vote-early-not-often.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
The New York Times' "Bits" blog has a
<a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/disruptions-casting-a-ballot-by-smartphone/">post</a>
today arguing in favor of digital voting.
The main argument is that allowing people to vote via the Internet would
increase turnout:
<blockquote>
According to a report released by the Census Bureau this year, nearly
50 million Americans didn’t vote in the 2008 election. Millions of people
said this was because they were out of town, had transportation problems
or were too busy to get to the polls. Internet voting could let millions
more people take part.
</blockquote>
The Times also quotes President Obama, who said regarding the long lines
at the polls in the 2012 election, "We have to fix that."
However, the post fails to mention that the President, most likely, was
referring to early voting, not Internet voting, as the fix. Perhaps
the "Bits" blogger doesn't read other Times blogs and missed
<a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/the-caucus-click-obama-votes/">this post</a>
about President Obama voting early (the first time a President has done
so), and encouraging others to do so as well. (My wife and I have early
voted in the past three elections; each time there have been more people
doing so.)
Furthermore, the Times says that the inherent security issues with online
voting are "not impossible" to fix; but it also quotes Ronald Rivest, one
of the three inventors of RSA, the most widely used strong encryption
scheme today, as saying the opposite:
<blockquote>
“One of the main goals of the election is to produce credible evidence
to the loser that he’s really lost,” he said. "When you have complicated
technology, you really do have to worry about election fraud."
</blockquote>
No further details are given, but it's pretty easy to fill them in. The
RSA algorithm works like this: say you want to send me a message in such
a way that I can prove that it came from you. You generate two encryption
keys, a public one, that you give to me (and anyone else who wants to get
digitally signed messages from me), and a private one that you keep secret.
The two keys are the inverses of each other: each one decrypts what the
other one encrypts. So if you want to send me a digitally signed message,
you encrypt it with your private key and send me the encrypted version. I
decrypt it with your public key. The fact that I get readable text instead
of gibberish proves that it must have been encrypted with your private key.
This system works fine as long as your private key stays private. But
it has to be stored somewhere; the most likely place is on your computer
(or smartphone, or tablet, or whatever device you want to use to vote).
What if that device gets infected with a virus that is specifically
designed to change your vote, and do nothing else? You would have no way
of knowing it was there; you would use your voting app, cast your vote for
Candidate A (you think), and the virus encrypts a vote for Candidate B and
sends it to the voting server. To the server, it looks like a valid vote;
it's encrypted with your private key. Only you know that you intended to
vote for Candidate A, not Candidate B; but you don't see the vote that the
server actually counted.
Of course, in principle, a recount could be done by looking at every single
vote counted by the server and asking the corresponding voter if it matched
his intent, which would show that something fishy was going on. But recounts
are not currently done that way; they only look at the ballot itself. And
changing voting law to permit recounts to ask voters about their intent
would destroy the secrecy of your ballot, not to mention that it would be
a huge increase in the time required for a recount. (It would also be
tantamount to admitting that online voting was not secure.) The
whole point of paper ballots is that you can leave a record of your vote
that can be verified without raising all those issues.
By the way, the same issues apply to electronic voting machines at the
polling place. I've had the option of choosing electronic or paper ballots
in a number of elections now, and I've always chosen paper. The Times
mentions that Estonia has more than a million voters who are registered to
cast their ballots online, apparently to make the point that the United
States should be a technological leader. But leadership means making the
right choices, not following every new trend. The United States would do
better, in my opinion, to set an example of restraint and proper setting
of priorities for voting, not technological faddishness.
As a commenter on the Times blog post said, the voting process is not
supposed to be fast; it's supposed to be accurate, to properly capture the
vote that you want to cast. We already have a solution for the genuine
issue of making it easier for more people to cast their votes: early voting.
But it still has to be secure early voting, and that, I submit, means paper
ballots, now and for the foreseeable future. If that means we have to wait
longer for the results, so be it. For one thing, a lot of pundits would be
able to go to bed at a normal hour on election night.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 11 Nov 2012 19:17 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>A Proposal for Campaign Finance Reform</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/proposal-for-campaign-finance-reform</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/proposal-for-campaign-finance-reform.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Now that the 2016 campaign has officially started, I thought it would
be a good time to take another look at campaign finance reform. This
is a very frustrating subject for me, as I'm sure it is for many; every
scheme I've seen so far, from what I can tell, is just an attempt by
some special interest groups to give an advantage to their method of
buying politicians over other methods of buying politicians. But I have
a proposal to cut through all the posturing and get to the root of the
problem:
<blockquote>
The only entities who can make political contributions are those who
can vote. In other words, only individual voters.
</blockquote>
We have a fundamental imbalance in the United States between political
power and political rights. Special interest groups don't vote.
Corporations don't vote. Religious organizations don't vote. Think tanks
don't vote. Lobbying organizations don't vote. Individual people are the
only ones who vote, and yet their political voices are the easiest ones
to lose amidst all the noise from everywhere else. There's no single
change that will fix that overnight, but limiting political contributions
to individual voters seems like a good start.
I realize that this scheme is not perfect; the most obvious problem is
that it gives an advantage to the rich, who have more money to contribute.
Perhaps limits on individual contributions could be retained, similar to
or maybe somewhat larger than the
<a href="http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/contriblimits.shtml">current ones</a>.
This would mean, for example, that no individual could contribute more
than a few thousand dollars to any single candidate for a given election.
What?! I hear the politicians crying. A few thousand dollars per
person? How are we going to amass our huge war chests at that rate?
Well, maybe those huge war chests are part of the problem. Maybe
politicians who don't have those huge pots of money coming from
non-voting special interests will have to get creative in getting their
message across. Like maybe actually talking about issues, or maybe even
writing actual essays about their views and posting them on the web
where everybody can read them, and having open discussions online about
them so people can actually weigh the pros and cons. Putting up a web
site costs next to nothing; even the Green party can afford one.
But if that doesn't satisfy the politicians, they would have another
option: actually convince enough individual voters to contribute enough
money to allow them to buy television airtime, ads in newspapers and
magazines, and trips around the country to glad-hand the voters. I know
that sounds like hard work compared to attending gala fund-raisers at
hundreds or thousands of bucks a plate and getting free food and
entertainment. But nobody said political life had to be easy.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 08 Nov 2012 16:27 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Economics Is Not Optional</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/economics-is-not-optional</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/economics-is-not-optional.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I recently came across
<a href="http://dashes.com/anil/2012/10/the-blue-collar-coder.html">a blog post</a>
proposing a rather novel solution to what it calls "the shortage of
technology talent in the United States".
(I got there by following a link trail from
<a href="http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/OperatorsAndSystemProgrammers">this post</a>
at
<a href="http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/">CSpace</a>,
a sysadmin's blog which I recommend for general reading if you're at
all interested in tech issues; I read it regularly and I'm not even a
sysadmin.)
The blog in question only allows comments if you have a Facebook,
Twitter, Yahoo, or AOL account, and for reasons which I have blogged
about
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/not-crazy-about-cloud.html">before</a>,
I have none of the above and don't intend to any time soon, so this
post will have to do. I have no comment on most of the post, which
seems to be fairly standard fare in this genre; what got my attention
was this towards the end:
<blockquote>
I am proud of, and impressed by, Craigslist's ability to serve hundreds
of millions of users with a few dozen employees. But I want the next
Craigslist to optimize for providing dozens of jobs in each of the towns
it serves, and I want educators in those cities to prepare young people
to step into those jobs.
</blockquote>
In other words, the author wants tech companies like Craigslist to be
economically inefficient on purpose, in order to provide more tech jobs.
As
<a href="http://www.literaturecollection.com/a/doyle/sherlock-holmes2/6/">Sherlock Holmes</a>
would say, this plan seems to have only one drawback, and that is that it is
intrinsically impossible. Economic inefficiency is economic inefficiency; it
means you are expending excess resources that could be put to better use
elsewhere. And that means that, sooner or later, those resources will be
put to better use elsewhere. How long that process takes, and how painful
it is, depends on how soon you recognize that it's inevitable and let it
happen. (As an example of what happens when you don't recognize this early,
I give you the U.S. economy, and indeed the world economy, over the last few
years. But that's another post.) Propping up economically inefficient jobs
just isn't a viable long-term strategy; that's what "economically inefficient"
means, and it doesn't magically stop being true just because you're doing
it in what you consider to be a noble cause.
But what about all those venture capitalists and startup founders that are
raking in tons of wealth and not sharing it, leading to what the blog post
author calls "continued income inequality"? Isn't that unfair? Paul Graham
wrote an essay years ago entitled
<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html">Mind the Gap</a>
that gave a good rebuttal to that argument: the prospect of all that
wealth is what drives wealth creation. If startup founders didn't have the
prospect of a huge payoff if they succeed, they wouldn't even try; and if
the venture capitalists didn't have the prospect of a huge payoff if the
startup they fund succeeds, they wouldn't fund it. The wealth those startups
create is not taken from anyone else; it's created, out of nothing, and
the people who create it get the first dibs on it. That's how it works.
Furthermore, even if it were somehow true that startup founders, once they
have gotten the big payoff, have some sort of "duty" to share it by creating
lots of jobs that their companies don't need, that wouldn't fix what the
author says is the underlying problem. In
<a href="http://dashes.com/anil/2012/09/to-less-efficient-startups.html">an earlier post</a>
entitled "To Less Efficient Startups", the author expands on what he thinks is
wrong with the "standard" startup wealth creation model:
<blockquote>
Instead of generating tens of thousands of middle-class jobs as industrial-age
titans did, these companies make a few dozen people truly extraordinarily
wealthy, and then give generous payouts to a few hundred people who were already
on a path to success by having been privileged enough to go to top universities
and by having the identities that tech and engineering cultures are biased toward
today.
</blockquote>
There are certainly well-known startups and founders that fit this profile
(Mark Zuckerberg, for example, or even Bill Gates). But the one the author chose
as his primary example doesn't.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark">Craig Newmark</a>,
the founder of Craigslist, came from a normal middle-class background,
and he founded Craigslist 18 years after he graduated from college. If anything,
Craigslist illustrates the sort of behavior the author wants
from startups; the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist">Wikipedia page</a>
quotes its CEO as saying that
<blockquote>
Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit, instead it prefers to help
users find cars, apartments, jobs, and dates.
</blockquote>
So if Craigslist is operating with a small number of employees, that's because
it can; it can meet the needs of its owners and its customers with what it has,
so why should it try to grab more resources and wealth? Instead, it leaves those
resources and wealth for others to use. If only Wall Street investment banks
showed that kind of restraint. The author should be applauding Craigslist, not
telling them to create unnecessary jobs. And in any case, creating unnecessary
jobs wouldn't do a thing to fix what the author is really complaining about:
<blockquote>
There is effectively no blue collar path to success, notwithstanding the
much-vaunted stories of tech company chefs entering these companies in the
kitchen and exiting as millionaires.
</blockquote>
The way to fix this would be to try to create more blue-collar startup
founders, not to create more blue-collar employees. But they will still be
startup founders, facing the same set of potential outcomes and economic
constraints.
In fact, the author completely misses a real issue that does contribute to
excess income inequality ("excess" meaning over and above the amount that's
needed to drive innovation, per Graham's essay). He says:
<blockquote>
It is a triumph...for Facebook to serve a billion users with just a few thousand
employees.
</blockquote>
Which is true, but misses a key point: Facebook doesn't get paid by users. It
gets paid by advertisers, and many if not most of those few thousand employees
spend their time, not on meeting the needs of users, but on figuring out ever
more creative and complex ways to get those users to click on buttons that track
their web usage for advertisers and marketers. If Facebook were paid by its users,
it might well be able to operate with fewer employees; certainly its employees
would be spending time doing far more interesting things, not to mention avoiding
the constant stream of privacy issues and other debacles for users, like
<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57465433-93/facebooks-e-mail-debacle-one-bug-fix-but-rollback-impossible/">losing "unknown amounts of email"</a>
with no way to recover them even after the bug that caused it was fixed.
So the huge concentration of wealth in the hands of Facebook's early investors
(from the looks of things after the IPO, "early" means "before it went
public", but that's another post) is more a sign of an economic bubble in
the ad-driven model of web applications, than a sign of lasting value. Many
of the Internet startups the author talks about (even Google, at least to an
extent) are the same way. But that's not something that programmers and
startup founders can easily fix, because it requires changing user behavior,
not just programmer and founder behavior. Facebook has a billion users because
it's easy, centralized, and free. Sooner or later that model may well backfire
on enough users to make a difference (for the reasons why, see the earlier post
of mine about the cloud that I linked to above), but even that won't matter
unless enough people take enough time and expend enough effort to build an
alternative.
And there's the real rub: any handicap in building the alternative may well
kill it. At least one company the author mentions, Kickstarter, is trying to
do something along these lines, building a distributed way for people with
ideas and people with spare cash to hook up. Does the author really think that
such companies will be able to compete with the likes of Facebook by being
economically inefficient? Because ultimately, that's what it's going to come
down to.
I'm all for a more distributed economy, where creation of wealth is open to
everybody, not just those who can get the attention of venture capitalists.
But we won't get there by being less efficient on purpose.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Oct 2012 02:16 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Python v. Go Redux: Error Handling</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/python-v-go-error-handling</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/python-v-go-error-handling.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Some time ago I posted about Go vs. Python with regard to
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/delimiters-suck.html">delimiters</a>.
I now have another reason to prefer Python to Go:
<a href="http://blog.golang.org/2011/07/error-handling-and-go.html">Go's error handling</a>
(hat tip:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562211">Hacker News</a>).
To briefly see the issue, consider the following snippet of idiomatic
Python:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>with open(filename, 'r') as f:
# do something with f
</pre></div>
What happens if the <code>open</code> call fails? An exception is thrown. If we
want to deal with it, we wrap the call in a <code>try/except</code> block:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>try:
with open(filename, 'r') as f:
# do something with f
except IOError:
# handle failure to open the file
</pre></div>
Now consider the corresponding snippet of Go, taken from the blog post
linked to above:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>f, err := os.Open(filename)
if err != nil {
// handle failure to open the file
}
// do something with f
</pre></div>
Two things jump out at me by comparing the above snippets (leaving aside
all the stuff about delimiters, etc. that I ranted about last time).
First, if the file open fails, Python guarantees that the "do something
with f" code will not execute; Go depends on the programmer putting
something in the "handle failure to open file" code that does that. Of
course, fixing that particular wart is easy:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>f, err := os.Open(filename)
if err != nil {
// handle failure to open the file
} else {
// do something with f
}
</pre></div>
Which of course begs the question, why didn't the blog post write it
that way? Perhaps because the poster expected the "do something with f"
code to test for a valid file object? In other words, they really
intended to write this:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>f, err := os.Open(filename)
if err != nil {
// handle failure to open the file
}
if f != nil {
// do something with f
}
</pre></div>
(I'm assuming that testing for a non-nil <code>f</code> is sufficient; if it isn't,
changing the if statement appropriately is straightforward.) In Python,
no such testing of <code>f</code> is required:; Python guarantees that inside
the <code>with</code> statement block (the "do something with f" code), <code>f</code> is
a valid open file object. It can make that guarantee, of course, because
it can guarantee that the block will not execute if the file open fails.
In other words, Go forces the programmer to do things by hand that Python
takes care of automatically, and since those things are, at least IMHO,
"boilerplate" things that programmers shouldn't have to worry about,
Python's method is preferable.
This by itself may not be a huge issue; but now consider the second thing
that jumped out at me. In Python, I only need to wrap the <code>with</code> block
in a <code>try/except block</code> if I want to handle the failure condition in that
particular section of code. Otherwise, I just let the exception propagate
until something catches it. This is, of course, the whole point of having
exceptions as your error handling mechanism: it uncouples handling of
errors from handling of normal conditions. Some people, apparently including
the Go designers, consider this to be Very Bad Juju, and as you can see,
in Go you have no choice about where you handle errors; you have to test
for them and handle them locally, whether you want to or not.
Why might you not want to? Suppose I'm writing a library to open and parse
a particular type of file. This library might be used by a variety of
applications; some might be end-user apps for editing the file, while others
might be server-side apps that just want a parsed object they can use to
read attributes from. The way that a failure to open the file should be
handled is very different for these two types of apps: the end-user app
needs to display a message to the user (at least if it wants to be usable),
while the server-side app probably should just log the error and go on,
or perhaps send an urgent page to a sysadmin.
If I'm writing this library in Python, handling all this is simple, because
error handling is uncoupled from normal functionality. Each app's code simply
catches the <code>IOError</code> exception in the appropriate place and deals with it.
In Go, what do I do? Either my library gets overgrown with error-handling
code for all manner of possible use cases, even though I know far less about
those use cases than the app writers do, or else I have to put together an
elaborate system of callbacks, plugins, or what-have-you to deal with what
is fundamentally a simple problem.
So once again, while it's great that people are trying new things with
programming languages, I'm still sticking with Python.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 26 Sep 2012 01:01 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>An Interesting Twist in the Obamacare Debate</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/an-interesting-twist</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/an-interesting-twist.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
As reported by
<a href="http://www.volokh.com/2012/09/13/new-obamacare-challenge-the-origination-clause/">the Volokh conspiracy</a>,
the Pacific Legal Foundation is now asking a Federal court to rule
that Obamacare violates the
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html">Origination Clause of the Constitution</a>.
Article I, Section 7 says:
<blockquote>
All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of
Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments
as on other Bills.
</blockquote>
Since the Supreme Court has ruled that
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html">the Individual Mandate is a tax</a>,
Obamacare qualifies as a bill for raising revenue; and the text of
the bill originated in the Senate, not the House, so the challenge
appears to be straightforward.
There's a twist, though: the text of the bill did originate in the
Senate, but the actual bill, on paper, originated in the House. The
Senate took a bill that had been passed by the House, struck out all
of its language, and replaced it in its entirety with the language
that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama.
So technically, the bill did "originate" in the House; it's just
that none of the language that originated in the House actually
became part of the final law that was passed.
Does that make the law unconstitutional? At this point, nobody knows.
The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that revenue bills which
originated in the House but were amended by the Senate were
constitutional, but that is explicitly allowed for by the Constitution,
as the above quote from Article I, Section 7 makes clear. There has
never been a ruling before on a bill in which the entire text was
replaced by the Senate. To me, that seems like an obvious attempt
to circumvent the constitutional provision, and therefore should not
be upheld; but of course I'm not a judge.
It seems inevitable that this issue will reach the Supreme Court
one way or the other, since whichever side loses at each lower level
of the Federal courts will certainly appeal. It will be interesting
to see what the final outcome is, particularly because it looks to
me like Chief Justice Roberts is likely to be the swing vote again,
just as he was for the Individual Mandate ruling. It will be still
more interesting to see how quickly the case is handled, given the
upcoming election; it would be extremely quick work to even get it
onto the Supreme Court's dockets by November, but the people bringing
the challenge are, of course, not unaware of the political implications
(to put it mildly). We'll see.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 14 Sep 2012 18:06 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Announcing Simpleblog</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/announcing-simpleblog</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/announcing-simpleblog.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Well, it's happened: I have yielded to the temptation to write my
own blogging system, and I am now using it to write and publish
this blog. It's called simpleblog, and you can find the release
version on the Python Package Index
<a href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simpleblog">here</a>,
or look at the bleeding-edge development git repository
<a href="https://github.com/pdonis/simpleblog">here</a>.
I should probably explain that when I say "blogging system" I
don't mean a complete package that I'm planning on offering as
a web service for blog publishing any time soon. It's just a
Python package that lets me write entries for this blog and
publish them here with an absolute minimum of effort. I wrote
it because it was getting to be too much effort to get things
exactly the way I wanted them with any existing blogging system.
If you've visited here before, you will have seen the "powered
by Pyblosxom" image on the right, but Pyblosxom was not the only
package I experimented with while I was trying to make an existing
system fit my needs. (And I should also emphasize that I'm talking
about my needs; plenty of other people use existing blogging
systems and it doesn't seem to get in their way.)
Just in case you're curious, the two things which pushed me over
the edge were the two main things that have changed here as of
this post. First, entries on index pages now only show the
portion "above the fold", with a link to the full entry. This
makes index pages a lot shorter and more manageable. Second,
the individual entry pages now have links at the bottom to the
next and previous entries in the blog as a whole, within the
entry's category, and within each of the entry's tags. This makes
it easier to browse the blog post by post without having to flip
back and forth between an index page and entry pages. There are
plenty of other features I've added, of course, but most of them
are behind the scenes; they make it easier for me, but they aren't
visible to you, reading this.
Of course I could have tried to write plugins for Pyblosxom to
do the above (I couldn't find any existing ones or I would have
used them). In fact, I had already written several home-brewed
plugins to add other small features to Pyblosxom. But that was
part of the problem: writing those plugins had shown me that it,
for whatever reason, Pyblosxom's architecture was not making it
easy for me to do what I wanted to do. Designing simpleblog, and
architecting it so that modifying it would be easy for me, has
gone very smoothly. (Some of the issues I was having were probably
because this blog is statically generated, whereas Pyblosxom is
mainly intended for dynamically serving blogs; it has static
rendering, but that's not its primary purpose. Simpleblog, right
now, only does static rendering, so that's what it's optimized
for.)
If you want to try simpleblog yourself, please do; the release
source on PyPI is stable (though of course I've only tested it
with this blog and the "example" blog that comes with the source).
I make no guarantees about the development source on github, but
I will try not to push to it unless this blog and the example
blog render properly (for some value of "properly"). If you do
try it, please let me know what you think, either by email or
through github's issues and pull request system.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2012 22:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>I Miss Konqueror</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/i-miss-konqueror</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/i-miss-konqueror.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I recently came across
<a href="http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/">this</a>
from Jamie Zawinski, and one of his gripes with Firefox struck a huge
chord with me:
<blockquote>
The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant "improvement",
which means "change" which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade
it and shit has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task
that I was happily doing before.
</blockquote>
Not only that, but each "upgrade" seems to give the Linux version of
Firefox, at least, a new crop of bugs. The latest Firefox "upgrade" from
Ubuntu was so crappy that I was forced to build my own copy of an
earlier version from source, so I could delete the standard package.
(Yes, I know that means I won't get "security fixes" and so forth any
more. I'll deal with it. See below for some further comments.) To pick
just one example: when Firefox re-drew its window, menu headings and menu
item titles would often disappear, so that I would see blank spaces where
words like "File", "Edit", "Copy", "Options", etc. were supposed to be.
What the f---?
And the thing is, it isn't just Firefox. It's practically everything on
the desktop. It may be more noticeable on Firefox these days, but it's
everywhere. For example, a while back I ranted about how
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/kde4-sucks.html">KDE 4 sucks</a>.
Most of my complaints can be filed under this heading: they changed stuff
that worked just fine as it was. And the other Linux desktop environments
are no better; here's a good quick example of
<a href="http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/10/has-gnome-3-decided-that-people-shouldnt-want-screen-savers/">jwz on gnome</a>.
And don't even get me started on Ubuntu's latest eye candy (over and above
the KDE 4 suckage that I've already mentioned).
To be fair, some of the changes on the desktop are responses to changes
elsewhere. For example, as the title of this post tells you, I miss the
old days when I could use
<a href="http://www.konqueror.org/">Konqueror</a>
(the
<a href="http://www.trinitydesktop.org/">KDE 3 Trinity</a>
version, thank you very much) to surf the web with no issues. The Konq was
not a very popular browser, even among people who were otherwise solidly
hooked on KDE; but it just worked, at least for me, and more importantly,
it worked the same through a lot of KDE 3 releases. I never had to re-learn
the browser interface just because my Linux distro had decided to do an
update. Not only that, but its rendering was more consistent than other
browsers. (This was because Konqueror, unlike other browsers, actually
paid attention to actual standards.)
But over the years, the web changed, and more and more sites would cause
Konqueror to hiccup or even crash, simply because it was not being kept
up to date with the latest Web 2.0 fads like other browsers. This
eventually pushed me to the point of having to switch to Firefox for most
of my surfing, because back then, Firefox was still reasonably clean and
fast instead of the bloatware it is now. Which meant that I now had to,
as jwz says, re-learn how the browser works every time a version upgrade
came out. Which eventually meant (combined with the bloatware issue) that
I had to switch to Chrome for most of my surfing, because Chrome, at least
for the time being (but I'm not expecting it to last), is reasonably clean
and fast.
(Of course, now I get to wonder how much additional data Google is
collecting on me since I'm using their browser. I do not use it to surf
to sensitive sites, like my bank, btw; I use my built-from-source copy of
Firefox, the earlier version, for that, with all privacy settings cranked
up to maximum. But that's a different issue, which I've blogged about
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/not-crazy-about-cloud.html">before</a>;
I would do it even if none of the stuff I'm complaining about in this post
were a problem.)
Linux distributions do the same thing, and with the same annoying
results. Ubuntu, thank goodness, still believes in long-term support
releases, which means I can continue to run 10.04 while I wait for all
the bugs to be sorted out of 12.04, without worrying that my current
version will drop out from under me and force me into an unwanted
upgrade (which happened a number of times with other distros). But one
of the things I am waiting for with 12.04 is for the KDE 3 Trinity
project to do a build based on it, which hasn't happened yet, and
doesn't look like happening any time soon. Which is now making me look
around to see what else is out there in case I have to switch desktops
(again) so that at least I can do it on my own initiative instead of
being forced into it.
Zawinski is right that the Mac interface has been a lot more stable over
the years than Linux desktops have. Unfortunately, I can't stand the Mac
interface, which in addition to all the other reasons
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/why-run-linux.html">why I run Linux</a>,
keeps me from considering switching to a Mac for ordinary use. If there
were a version of Safari for Linux, I might consider using it (for one
thing, they still, last I checked, use the KHTML rendering engine that
Konqueror used), but of course I don't expect that to happen any time
soon. :-)
But even Apple is not immune to the "force users to upgrade whether they
need to or not" problem. (I take it the fact that Microsoft was not, is not,
and never shall be so immune is too obvious to need mentioning.) We have a
MacBook that is six years old or so, and still runs OS X 10.4. It works
fine, if a little slow for some things (but that's a much a matter of
Internet bandwidth as anything); but there are a number of apps out there
now that require 10.5 or later (or in some cases even 10.6 or later).
Upgrade? Oh, sure--if we pay Apple for the privilege. Or, of course, we
could pay them even more for the privilege of buying a new MacBook to
replace a perfectly good older one. Sigh.
As I said in my earlier post about KDE 4, in the grand scheme of things,
this isn't all that big a deal. But it makes you wonder what all these
people are thinking. At the end of the day, we're talking about drawing
text, rectangles, and little images on the screen. This is not rocket
science, and it shouldn't require the level of incessant design effort that
goes into, say, nuclear reactors. This should be a solved problem by now.
Of course, that's not to say that if it were, all the people currently
working feverishly on it would switch to something useful as opposed to,
say, figuring out ways to get users to click on ads. But one could hope.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Aug 2012 01:17 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Still Another Nerd Interlude</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/still-another-nerd-interlude</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/still-another-nerd-interlude.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
(Note: there is a good discussion of this post and the Knuth-McIlroy
exchange on
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4304696">Hacker News</a>.)
The other day I came across
<a href="http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/">a blog post</a>
about an interesting exchange between two world-class programmers,
<a href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/">Donald Knuth</a>
and
<a href="http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/">Doug McIlroy</a>.
I talked about McIlroy in
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/another-nerd-interlude.html">my last nerd interlude</a>. To
briefly summarize what happened (the article goes into more detail and
is worth reading, at least if you're into this sort of thing), Knuth
was asked by a computer magazine to write a program that illustrated
"literate programming", a technique that Knuth had spent much time
developing, and McIlroy was asked to critique what Knuth did.
The program was supposed to solve the following problem, as described
in the blog post:
<blockquote>
Read a file of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and
print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.
</blockquote>
As it turned out, the heart of McIlroy's critique was simple but
devastating: a six-line Unix shell script that accomplished exactly
the same task as Knuth's 10-page Pascal program. McIlroy then went on
to explain why this was a better method of solving the problem than
Knuth's, his main argument being that his method re-used general purpose
utilities instead of writing custom code. Just to lay my cards on the
table at once, I'm with McIlroy on this one, as the author of the blog
post appears to be, and I'll spend most of the rest of this post giving
some reasons why. Unfortunately it's too late to comment on the blog post
itself, or I'd be doing it there, since I'll be responding to comments
that were made there.
A number of commenters on the post said that McIlroy's critique was
unfair, because Knuth's program was intended to illustrate his
literate programming techniques, not to serve as an actual real-world
solution of the problem he was given. This misses the point. McIlroy
specifically points out, not just that reusable code is a good thing in
general, but that Knuth's program, specifically, does not use or produce
any. It is a one-off program to solve a one-off problem, and it doesn't
break the problem down into generic sub-problems, as the shell pipeline
does. It implements everything specifically for this particular problem.
As McIlroy notes:
<blockquote>
Everything there--even input conversion and sorting--is programmed
monolithically and from scratch. In particular the isolation of words,
the handling of punctuation, and the treatment of case distinctions are
built in. Even if data-filtering programs for these exact purposes were
not at hand, these operations would well be implemented separately: for
separation of concerns, for easier development, for piecewise debugging,
and for potential reuse.
</blockquote>
It's quite true that this criticism is orthogonal to the question
of whether literate programming, in general, is a good thing. But it is
certainly not orthogonal to the question of how to use any
programming methodology, literate or otherwise. McIlroy is not saying
that Knuth's program is bad; he's saying it could have been a lot better,
and served as a much better showpiece for literate programming, if it
had taken a different approach to solving the actual problem.
Other commenters noted that you can have reusable code with libraries just
as easily as with separate Unix utilities called by shell scripts. That
is quite true. (For example, see my Python solution to the problem, linked
to below, which is entirely built out of built-in Python commands and
routines from the Python standard library.) But either way, you have to
have the reusable code available. What if you don't? That was McIlroy's
point: if you don't have any reusable code yet (which Knuth didn't in
the Pascal he was working with), why not build some as part of building
your program? Instead of writing a one-off program to solve a one-off
problem, why not write a library, or set of libraries, that provides a
set of generic tools that you can then use to compose the solution to
your specific problem?
Of course McIlroy already had the generic tools, the Unix utilities. But
that's because he helped build them. He invented Unix pipes,
remember? Knuth had an opportunity to do for Pascal what McIlroy and
those he worked with did for Unix: Knuth could have emerged from his
effort with a bunch of Pascal libraries that did a lot of the same general
tasks as the Unix utilities. But he didn't.
This is also why the commenters who talked about "portability" are
missing the point. Yes, McIlroy's specific solution would only work on a
Unix system where those utilities are available. But again, they're there
because he helped build them. Knuth's solution is "portable" to any OS
that has a Pascal compiler, but so what? Once you've compiled it,
you still have a one-off program to solve a one-off problem. Why not
build the generic utilities in Pascal instead, and have them be
portable? (And in any case the Unix utilities are written in C and so are
portable to any OS that has a C compiler, i.e, to a superset of those
that have Pascal compilers. Yes, some of the system calls would have to
be changed, but that would be true of the Pascal version as well.)
Finally, another commenter noted that Knuth's program is easily extensible
and claimed that McIlroy's shell script is not. He gave as an example
handling contractions. Now, I am certainly no McIlroy at shell script (or
programming in general, for that matter--I noted in my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/another-nerd-interlude.html">previous nerd interlude</a>
that McIlroy had written a set of Haskell one-liners that do the same job
as the multiple files of Python code I wrote to implement power series
as generators), but even I can see how to handle contractions in shell
script: just add four lines to the beginning of McIlroy's pipeline, and
modify one of his lines:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>sed s/[^A-Za-z]\'/\ / |
sed s/^\'/\ / |
sed s/\'[^A-Za-z]/\ / |
sed s/\'$/\ / |
tr -cs \'A-Za-z '\n' |
tr A-Z a-z |
sort |
uniq -c |
sort -rn |
sed ${1}q
</pre></div>
The first four lines just change quotes that don't lie between two
letters--i.e., that aren't part of contractions--to spaces. (There's
probably a slicker way to do this with <code>sed</code>, but what's there works,
and as I said, I'm not McIlroy.) Then we just modify the <code>tr</code> line to
include the remaining quotes in the set of characters we don't change to
newlines. Boom. Done.
The commenter gives further challenges: count multiple spellings (for
example, "color" vs. "colour") as single words, and hyphenated words.
He seems to think those would be difficult in shell script. But having
seen how contractions were handled just now, it should be obvious that
those other cases could be handled as well. Hyphenated words can be
treated the same way contractions were--in fact just adding the hyphen
character to the regular expressions in the first and third <code>sed</code> lines
above, as an alternate to the quote, should do it. Multiple spellings
require a little more, since the script would have to take as input a
table of what different spellings count as the same word. But given such
a table, using it to canonicalize the spellings of words prior to sorting
them is straightforward. True, it might actually require writing a small
separate filter script to do the canonicalization--but such a script
would just be another generic, reusable tool in the same spirit as the
Unix utilities. (The actual programming is left as an exercise for the
reader--though at some point I may post my own solutions.)
Of course all these cases could be handled in Pascal (or Python--my
Python solution includes an extended version that handles contractions)
as well. But once again, debating whether they would be harder to handle
in shell is missing the point. Knuth's program could no doubt have been
modified to handle contractions, multiple spellings, hyphenation, etc.,
etc. But how would he have modified it? Would he just have written
more custom code? In shell, you just keep composing the same simple
utilities in new ways. That's what makes them so powerful. (And as I
noted above, I have tried to take the same approach in my Python
solutions.)
So with all due respect to Donald Knuth (which is a lot, make no
mistake), I have to agree with McIlroy's final assessment:
<blockquote>
Knuth has shown us here how to program intelligibly, but not wisely.
I buy the discipline. I do not buy the result.
</blockquote>
<h1>Postscript</h1>
As I mentioned above, I couldn't resist the temptation to program a
solution to this problem in Python. It's quite a bit more than six
lines. :-) You can see it on github
<a href="https://github.com/pdonis/wordcount">here</a>,
along with an enhanced version that handles contractions, and McIlroy's
shell pipeline along with my enhanced version above, for comparison.
There's also a test text file on which you can run the different versions
to see the output, along with the expected output for each version.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 28 Jul 2012 03:59 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Supreme Court Does It Again</title>
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<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/supreme-court-again.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Today's great news story is that the US Supreme Court has upheld the
"individual mandate" portion of the Affordable Care Act. I won't bother
linking to any particular stories since it's everywhere by now. I also won't
comment here on whether or not the individual mandate (or indeed the act
itself) is a good idea; that would be a much longer post than I want to
write right now. Instead, I want to look at the Court's opinion from the
viewpoint I have posted about
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look.html">before</a>,
that the Court has turned what Chief Justice Marshall called the power "to
say what the law is" into something very different from what Marshall's
opinion in Marbury v. Madison was arguing for.
The Court's opinion is
<a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf">here</a>, and
is worth reading in full, if for no other reason than to see a good up
to date example of the kind of legal reasoning that the Court likes to
engage in. But the gist of it can be summarized briefly thus: the
individual mandate is not constitutional under the Commerce Clause or
the Necessary and Proper Clause (the primary argument made by the
Government in the case), but it is constitutional under the Taxing
Clause. In other words, the Federal government can't say that you are
required to buy health insurance, but it can force you to pay extra
taxes if you don't.
Of course the proponents of the individual mandate are calling this a
victory, but they should stop and think for a bit before getting too
overjoyed. The Supreme Court has just declared that the individual
mandate is a tax. That means the Affordable Care Act can now be termed
a tax increase, and you can bet that opponents are going to be doing
exactly that from now until election day. Moreover, by closing off the
Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause justifications, the Court
has basically said that any regulation of health care, if it is going
to be economically feasible (and the chief justification for the individual
mandate has always been that without it the act as a whole is not
economically feasible), is going to involve a tax increase. Not that I
disagree with this proposition; in fact I would be more than happy to
find people applying this kind of reasoning to all efforts by the
government to fix problems. But it's not the kind of reasoning that the
proponents of the act want people to engage in.
Even so, this ruling is undoubtedly bad news for those who had hoped
that the individual mandate would be ruled unconstitutional. In my
original post on the
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">Marbury v. Madison</a>
decision, I argued that the Court has been allowing Federal power to
expand far beyond what the Framers intended for a long time, arguably
since the time of that very decision. So this ruling is no surprise on
that score. What is interesting, though, is the comparison between the
ruling on the individual mandate and the accompanying ruling on the
Medicaid portion of the act. In the latter ruling, the Court agreed
with the States that it is unconstitutional for Congress to withhold
funds for existing Medicaid benefits from States that decline to
support the expanded benefits authorized under the act. What's more,
the Court agreed with the States (and the opinion of the Court
disagreed sharply with the Court's own dissenters) that the expansion
of Medicaid was not "part of the existing program" (a claim based
largely on language in the original Medicaid act that allowed Congress
to "modify" the program), but was properly seen as a new Federal
program even though Congress had not labeled it as such.
So there is an interesting parallel between the two sections of the
Court's opinion: it ruled that the individual mandate is a tax, even
though it was not labeled as such, and it ruled that the expansion of
Medicaid is a new program, even though it was not labeled as such. True,
the two parallel rulings have opposite effects: the States won't be
forced to adopt expanded Medicaid, but we'll all have to either buy
health insurance or pay extra taxes. But in both cases, the end result
is that most of the act is upheld; expanded Medicaid and the individual
mandate are both still there, even if slightly muted in effect. And
the Court most certainly did not agree with the States that finding
two particular provisions of the act unconstitutional required nullifying
the entire act; it explicitly ruled that the two provisions are severable
from the rest of the act, which therefore remains in effect. (Since the
act contained explicit language about severability, this portion of the
Court's opinion is hardly surprising.)
The really interesting part is that Chief Justice Roberts wrote and
delivered the opinion of the Court. While there is a lot of
"strict constructionist" language in the opinion (and there are also
several comments to the effect that the Court is not expressing any
opinion on the wisdom of the act--as the concluding remarks of the
opinion put it, "that judgment is reserved to the people"), there is
nothing to hinder future expansion of Federal power in a practical
sense. Indeed, the Court's opinion practically gives a roadmap of how
to do so: just make it a tax. (True, there are plenty of comments on
the limits of such tactics, but they are not very restrictive limits,
practically speaking.) And Justice Ginsburg's opinion, which argues
that the individual mandate should have been upheld under the Commerce
Clause, gives plenty of scope for future Courts to find ways to ignore
the parts of today's opinion that are inconvenient for those who want
to keep expanding the government's power. (In fact, Ginsburg practically
admits this: "if history is any guide, today's constriction of the
Commerce Clause will not endure.")
Of course, the dissenting opinion by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas,
and Alito goes in the other direction, arguing that the entire act
should be struck down because the clauses that are unconstitutional
are central to its operation, and doing so with far stronger "strict
constructionist" language than the Court's opinion. In fact, this
opinion probably has the soundest arguments of any of those issued
today, considered logically. For example, a key argument for the
individual mandate being a necessary aspect of the act is the adverse
selection problem: without it, healthy people will simply not buy
health insurance, and rates will skyrocket. However, as the dissenting
opinion points out, that problem is not unique to health care (as
Justice Ginsburg's opinion claims); any industry that is regulated
by the government finds its market skewed by such regulation. The
dissent points out many other instances in which the majority opinion,
Justice Ginsburg's opinion, and the Government's arguments in the case
are, to say the least, questionable. But dissenting opinions,
particularly by the more conservative justices, have been like this
before (for example, consider Scalia's dissent in Planned Parenthood
v. Casey in 1992), and it hasn't had any effect yet.
(By the way, there appears to be considerable speculation that Roberts
switched his vote at the last minute, and that what now appears as the
dissenting opinion by the four Justices referred to above was originally
supposed to be part of the majority opinion. See, for example,
<a href="http://www.volokh.com/2012/06/28/was-scalias-dissent-originally-a-majority-opinion/">this post at the Volokh Conspiracy</a>
and the links there. If that is true it makes the above observations
even more interesting.)
So nothing in today's events changes the general conclusions I reached
in my previous posts about the Supreme Court. I was actually somewhat
surprised by the ruling; I had expected (though not very strongly, as
it's always difficult to predict which way the Court will jump on an
issue this close) the individual mandate to be ruled unconstitutional.
That would have been a change from the pattern I noted in my previous
posts, but not much of one, I admit. And if Justice Ginsburg is right,
even the small change in pattern on the Commerce Clause (how many times
has the Court ruled that anything doesn't come under the scope of the
Commerce Clause?) will not last. (Before today I would have said it
would last at least as long as Roberts' Chief Justiceship, but now I'm
not so sure.) I wonder what James Madison would think.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 29 Jun 2012 03:02 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Climate Change Alarmists: Get Off The Soapbox</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/climate-change-alarmists-relax</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/climate-change-alarmists-relax.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
In my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/discovery-retires.html">last post</a>
I mentioned that global warming would get its own post
sometime soon; it appears that now is the time.
I ran across a
<a href="http://climateaudit.org/2012/04/23/checking-in/">quick update</a>
from Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit (linked to from
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/23/mcintyres-rebutall-of-manns-pants-on-fire-book/">Watts Up With That</a>)
that mentions Michael Mann's new book:
<blockquote>
I had also spent some time considering a response to Mann's book. It
amazes me that a reputable scientific community would take this sort of
diatribe seriously. Mann's world is populated by demons and bogey-men.
People like Anthony Watts, Jeff Id, Lucia, Andrew Montford and myself
are believed to be instruments of a massive fossil fuel disinformation
campaign and our readers are said to be "ground troops" of
disinformation. The book is an extended ad hominem attack, culminating
in salivation in the trumped up plagiarism campaign against Wegman,
arising out of copying of trivial "boilerplate" by students (not Wegman
himself). Wegman's name appears nearly 200 times in the book (more, I
think, than anyone else's).
Virtually nothing in its discussion of our criticism can be taken at
face value. Mann begins his account by re-cycling his original outright
lie that we had asked him for an "excel spreadsheet". Mann's lies on
this point had been a controversy back in November 2003. The incident
was revived by the Penn State Investigation Committee, which had
(anomalously on this point) asked Mann about an actual incident. Instead
of "forgetting", as any prudent person would have done, Mann brazenly
repeated his earlier lie to the Penn State Investigation Committee.
Needless to say, the "Investigation" Committee didn't actually
investigate the lie by crosschecking evidence, but accepted Mann's
testimony as ending the matter. In the book, instead of leaving well
enough alone, Mann once again re-iterated the lie.
Or to pick another example, Mann noted the controversy about the
contaminated Korttajarvi sediments (Tiljander), but conceded nothing.
Mann said that there was no "upside down" in their "objective" methods
and asserted that his results were "insensitive to whether or not these
records were used", a statement contradicted in the SI to
Mann et al 2009. In any sane world, Mann would have issued a retraction
of the many claims of Mann et al 2008 that depended on the contaminated
Korttajarvi sediments. But instead, more attacks on critics.
</blockquote>
Pretty strong language, which should not be a surprise to anyone who
has been following the ongoing contretemps between McIntyre and Mann.
But McIntyre is not the only one commenting on Mann's book; Harold
Ambler
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/21/amblers-rebuttal-to-mann-in-the-wall-street-journal/">wonders</a>
how he can actually get his hands on all that funding that Mann claims
is being doled out by Big Oil to climate skeptics:
<blockquote>
This is all a bit hard to take. I myself am a skeptical blogger and
author, yet I am in no way funded by Big Oil. In fact, my
three-and-a-half years of toiling on the subject of climate change has
yielded approximately $4,000 worth of income. I'm not proud of this fact
as a father, husband or man, but it does undercut the constant
conspiracy theories about funding behind global-warming skepticism.
Meanwhile, as I've noted elsewhere, mainstream climate scientists
themselves have received grants totalling more than $1 billion from
Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and other large energy companies.
</blockquote>
And, of course, there's the continual stonewalling that's been going on
for years now at the RealClimate site, as noted by
<a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/19/mann-of-the-people/">Anthony Watts</a>:
<blockquote>
Email 2743, Sept 2009, Michael "Robust Debate" Mann: "So far, we've
simply deleted all of the attempts by McIntyre and his minions to draw
attention to this at RealClimate."
</blockquote>
And Mann himself, apart from his book, has
<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/23/469307/michael-mann-the-danger-of-climate-change-denial/">blogged</a>
defending his position, with plenty of strong language on his own account:
<blockquote>
As a climate scientist, I have seen my integrity perniciously attacked,
politicians have demanded I be fired from my job, and I've been subject
to congressional and criminal investigations. I've even had death
threats made against me. And why? Because I study climate science and
some people don't like what my colleagues and I have discovered. Their
attacks on scientists are part of a destructive public-relations
campaign being waged in a cynical effort to discredit climate science.
</blockquote>
My first inclination after collecting the above quotes was to put this
post in the "rants" section. After all, the battle lines are pretty well
drawn by this time, aren't they? But no. This wouldn't really be worth a
post just to rant, and anyway I'd be rather late to the party. And there
is, actually, an issue worth teasing out from the diatribes and discussing
on its own merits.
First, take a look at what seems to me to be the core of Mann's blog post:
<blockquote>
By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing much of
the carbon that had been buried in the earth over the eons into the
atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and other gases. Those gases
are acting like a heat-trapping blanket around the planet.
If we continue down this path, we will be leaving our children and
grandchildren a different planet - one with more widespread drought and
flooding, greater competition for diminishing water and food resources,
and national-security challenges arising from that competition.
As a father of a six-year-old daughter, I believe we have an ethical
responsibility to make sure that she doesn't look back and ask why we
left her generation a fundamentally degraded planet relative to the one
we started with.
There's a tendency for people to be so overwhelmed by the challenge and
the threat of climate change that they go from concern to despair. They
shouldn't. While some warming is already locked in, there's still time
to turn the ship around. We can still limit our emissions in the decades
to come in a way that prevents some of the most serious impacts of
climate change from occurring.
</blockquote>
Forget all the criticisms and diatribes for a moment. Forget the fact
that the things Mann states as simple facts in the above are nothing of
the sort; they are beliefs that he holds, which may or may not be
justified. The question I want to start with is: does he really hold
these beliefs? Is he sincere? I think he is, and so are the other
climate scientists and politicians who preach alarmism about global
warming; and that is what we should really be worried about.
Without getting into the whole history of the "hockey stick" and other
debates that Mann has been involved in, let's just look at Mann's simple
statements above and apply some basic critical thinking. First: it is
true that the carbon in fossil fuels was stored there over a very long
period of time (millions of years during the Carboniferous period, some
300 to 360 million years ago, if our current understanding is correct),
and we are now releasing it over a much shorter period of time. However:
there have been plenty of periods in between the Carboniferous period
and now when humans were not burning fossil fuels--so all that carbon
that's supposedly warming the planet now was not released, but stayed
buried--and yet the climate was warmer than it is now, sometimes
quite a bit warmer. What made it warm then, since it obviously wasn't
all that carbon that was buried?
Of course, I'm quite sure Mann would have an answer to this if we asked
him--though he might need some help from the other folks at RealClimate
to work it into a really good blog post. But the point remains: the
basic assumption underlying all of this hysteria about global warming is
that CO2 released by human burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver
of the climate. But it clearly wasn't in the past, so what's changed now?
Do the laws of atmospheric physics somehow adjust themselves because they
know that humans are now burning fossil fuels? Or could it be that there
are other things that drive the climate? After all, if Mann is correct,
we are releasing millions of years' worth of carbon over a few hundred
years, so if all that carbon really made so much of a difference, Earth's
climate should already be somewhere around where it was at the start of
the Carboniferous period, right? But it isn't.
But let's put that aside and go on to the next point. Suppose the Earth
does warm by another degree Celsius or so by 2100--so what? Mann
asserts that this will degrade the planet--but hold on a second. The
planet warmed by 0.6 degrees Celsius from 1900 to 2000, according to the
IPCC. Do you feel any impulse to look back and ask why those profligates
in the early 1900's left us such a degraded planet? True, things have
changed since then: but we have adapted to the changes. Not only that:
we have innovated. We have found new ways of doing things, and new
things to do, that the people in 1900 could not have imagined. And as a
result, the planet is much, much richer today. Yet somehow, all that is
supposed to stop, and we are just stuck? People won't find any more new
ways of adapting? That is just silly. I expect that Earth in 2100 will
be a lot richer than Earth today, and to the people of the future,
climate change will be a non-problem, not because it won't be happening,
but because adapting to it will be cheap, the same way that adapting to
changes in the weather is cheap in developed countries today.
(An aside: it could well turn out that not just adapting to climate
change, but controlling it, will be cheap by 2100. That would be even
nicer, just as being able to control the weather would be nicer than
having to adapt to it. I can wear a raincoat and carry an umbrella, but
if things could be arranged so the rain fell while I was sleeping and it
was always sunny out when I had to go somewhere, I certainly wouldn't
complain. But the main obstacle in the way of controlling the climate
is--climate science. As long as Mann and his ilk are running this field,
we will never really understand how the climate works, because they
are not trying to understand it; they are trying to force it to conform
to their predetermined conclusions. But that's another post.)
Mann talks about people being overwhelmed by the challenge; but it seems
to me that he and his crew of alarmists are the ones who are
overwhelmed, and are simply projecting their own feelings onto the rest
of us. They have a sense of planetary emergency because they can't
think of any ways to adapt--the only response they can come up with is
alarm: stop emitting CO2 RIGHT NOW! Well, let me reassure you, Mr. Mann:
the rest of us have plenty of ways to adapt. It may well turn out that
we burn a lot less fossil fuel in the future than we do today--but for
reasons that have little or nothing to do with climate change. Gasoline
is well over $4 a gallon in the US as I write, and hybrid vehicles are
selling like hotcakes. Some of those people are probably buying hybrids
because they're concerned about the climate, but I expect a lot more are
buying them simply because they want to save money. Or because they're
concerned about their dollars going to oil-rich countries in the Middle
East. But regardless of the reason, people do respond to reasonable
incentives to change their behavior. What they don't respond well to is
being told that their only choices are to emasculate the economy or
destroy the planet.
So I'm not responding to Mann's book by writing the long, long post I
could write about all the details of what is wrong with Mann's so-called
research, why the hockey stick is bunk, why the climate models are
worthless, and so on. (I may write that post anyway sometime, just for
fun--or perhaps to go more deeply into the underlying issue of how we
should be doing science--but this isn't it.) None of that really
matters to the bottom line, which actually ties in nicely with my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/discovery-retires.html">last post</a>:
<blockquote>
Humanity has always faced problems, and we always will. The only choice
we have is whether we face them with hope or with fear. But there is not
only an individual choice, for each of us to make for ourselves; there is
also a social choice, whether or not to let the fears of the fearful
constrain the hopes of the hopeful.
</blockquote>
When it comes right down to it, Michael Mann isn't being investigated
because he did bad science. Scientists are human, and can make mistakes;
we all realize that. He's being investigated because he did bad science
and then used it to justify declaring a planetary emergency. When you do
that, people take notice, and if it later turns out--after you have
<a href="http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html">tried your best to obstruct the investigation</a>--that
you didn't do the science right, people get annoyed. Particularly if,
even supposing the problem you are worried about is real, there are
other ways of dealing with it besides pushing the emergency button.
The real problem with climate change alarmism is that the alarmists
just can't get this; they just can't get that the whole alarmism thing
is their personal thing, and most other people just don't share it.
It's not that we don't want to "save the planet"; of course, everybody
wants to save the planet. It's just that we don't agree that your
declaration of a planetary emergency is the way to save the planet.
It may even be counterproductive, since it involves committing a lot
of resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.
So here's my advice to climate change alarmists: get off the soapbox.
Yes, we know you're concerned, and we appreciate your concern. By all
means, buy a hybrid car, support alternative energy research (and by
the way, it would be nice if you would include nuclear power under
"alternative energy", but that's another post), look for other ways to
help reduce our use of fossil fuels. There are other good reasons to
do that anyway. But we are not going to stop everything else and cripple
the world's economy. You've had your say, and there are plenty of other
pressing issues to attend to. Deal with it.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Apr 2012 03:19 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Discovery Retires</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/discovery-retires</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/discovery-retires.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Along with a lot of other people, I watched Discovery fly over Washington,
DC on its way to Dulles Airport. A good sequence of pictures is
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2012/apr/17/space-shuttle-discovery-flight-pictures">here</a>.
I lamented
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/whats-up-1.html">a while back</a>
that today's NASA seems to have fallen far from the NASA of the Apollo
missions, but obviously there's not much to be done about that except to
move on (see below for more on that), and anyway, that's not Discovery's
fault. The Shuttle deserves a good retirement, and will get one; I plan
to go see it in its new home.
Then I saw news of a new venture called
<a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57416120-76/is-asteroid-mining-in-our-near-future/">Planetary Resources</a>,
backed by James Cameron and the founders of Google, which, if speculations
are correct, plans to
<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/18/2957585/planetary-resources-space-exploration-company-james-cameron-google">mine asteroids</a>.
So as I said in that post a while back, we don't need NASA to go into
space now; private ventures, at least in the US, will do it on their
own dime. It will be interesting to see if NASA's
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/index.html">current plans</a>
get there before a private venture does.
Many people are probably wondering why a private venture would even get
into this business. I am sad to note that the magazine closely associated
with my alma mater, Technology Review, appears to be in this category;
their
<a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27776/">response</a>
to the press release announcing the venture can only be described as
snarky:
<blockquote>
According to the company's press release (below):
"[...] the company will overlay two critical sectors - space exploration
and natural resources - to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP.
This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition
of 'natural resources'."
That sounds like asteroid mining. Because what else is there in space
that we need here on earth? Certainly not a livable climate or a replacement
for our dwindling supplies of oil.
</blockquote>
Regular readers of TR (which I still am, but may not be for much longer if
they keep going the way they're going) will recognize the "livable climate"
bit as a reference to global warming; I won't comment on that here since it
deserves a whole separate post (and will probably get one sometime soon).
The "dwindling supplies of oil" bit is just as bad; we don't need to go
into space to find
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel">substitutes</a>
for oil. (And that's not even considering other alternatives like nuclear
power--TR does know that MIT has a whole Nuclear Engineering department
working on that, right?) And even if the venture is intended to be nothing
more than asteroid mining, at least to start with, there are a lot of
resources to be mined from asteroids; that "trillions of dollars" part is
not hyperbole (in fact it is probably an underestimate of the total value
that will eventually be realized). Does that not count enough in TR's
calculus of value to merit more than a passing comment before the snark
begins?
But the real problem with this attitude is the narrowness of vision, the
underlying belief that the best way to face our problems is to withdraw
inside our shell, to scramble as best we can for our share of a limited
pie, rather than looking for new ways to make more pie. Isaac Asimov wrote
a story called
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Way">The Martian Way</a>
which showed this kind of contrast. Human settlers on Mars have a problem:
Earth is reducing shipments of water to Mars, which are crucial for the
settlement because it needs much more water than it can tap from Mars'
polar cap. The temptation is there to withdraw, to accept the limitation
and reduce the settlers' quality of life by restricting their water usage;
ultimately, it is quite possible that this would mean the settlement would
have to be abandoned altogether, and its people would have to return to
Earth to an impoverished existence. But the Martian people choose another
option: go and get water from the rings of Saturn, which turn out to be
composed of huge mile-wide chunks of mostly pure water ice (this was the
actual scientific belief then and still is today). They bring back enough
to be able to not only meet their own needs but to sell water back to
Earth in order to help with the water shortage there that forced the
shipments to be reduced.
Humanity has always faced problems, and we always will. The only choice
we have is whether we face them with hope or with fear. But there is not
only an individual choice, for each of us to make for ourselves; there is
also a social choice, whether or not to let the fears of the fearful
constrain the hopes of the hopeful. When we sent astronauts to the Moon,
we chose not to let that happen; there were plenty of naysayers who said
it could not be done, and plenty more who said that maybe it could be
done, but that it was too risky to try. We made the same choice, to a
lesser extent, when Discovery and the other Shuttles flew. But neither
of those ventures was supposed to be the end; both were just first steps
and were meant to be followed by others. And it looks like they will be.
I'm glad to see that happen. It appears that TR is not, which is fine;
but at least they should have the decency to keep it to themselves.
So happy retirement, Discovery, and I hope you'll have some company in
time, when the museum exhibit opens showing the first retired spacecraft
that made the run to the asteroids and back.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 20 Apr 2012 03:07 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Delimiters Suck</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/delimiters-suck</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/delimiters-suck.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
A while back I explained
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/why-python-not-lisp.html">why I use Python, not Lisp</a>.
However, after reading
<a href="http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/go-review">this review of Go</a>,
I realized that I left out something important, something
that sets Python apart from pretty much every other language
out there, and certainly from every "C-oid" language, which is
all that the author of the review seems able to find himself
wishing for.
Here it is, in a nutshell: delimiters suck.
Back in the old days, when CPU cycles were scarce and parsers had
to be streamlined, it made a kind of sense to make the programmer
do the lion's share of the work of defining the structure of the
source code. Curly braces, parentheses, semicolons, and so forth
helped simplify the process of parsing and compiling code, and if
that made the difference between a short wait for your code to
compile and run so you could test it, and having to go out and grab
coffee (or even lunch) while your code compiled, that was a tradeoff
worth making.
But this is 2012, for goodness' sake. Compilation is cheap. Code
gets compiled on the fly all the time now; after all, web pages are
code that needs to be compiled every time the page loads. And that
means that any programming language that makes more work for the
programmer in the name of making less work for the compiler is simply
braindead in today's world. And yet that's exactly what programming
languages with delimiters do. Why should I have to tell the parser
that, oh, here's a new block; oh, here's the condition for an if
statement; oh, here's the end of a statement? Why can't it figure
all that out for itself?
The answer, of course, is that it can; but our lazy programming
languages don't require it to. Except one. And that's why Python is
my favorite language: no delimiters. No curly braces, no parentheses,
no semicolons. None. (Yes, strictly speaking, there is one delimiter:
the colon that opens a new indent block. But typing that feels natural,
since the whole point is that I'm starting a new block, and typing the
colon feels like I'm just starting the new block, especially since
I don't need to type any corresponding closing delimiter at the end
of the block. Still, if Python were to upgrade its parser to eliminate
the need for the colon, I wouldn't complain.) Python indicates code
structure the sane way, with indentation. In other words, it uses
something that every coder does anyway, simply because it's necessary
to make the code readable. Indentation requires no extra typing; I do
what I'm best at, writing actual code instead of delimiters, and the
computer does what it's best at, applying complex but precisely
specified formal rules much faster and more accurately than a human can.
And truth be told, even those who claim to prefer other languages know
in their hearts that I'm right. For example, the reviewer applauds the
fact that Go doesn't require semicolons--but then says:
<blockquote>
Well, actually there are semicolons, but they are discouraged. It
works like JavaScript, there is a simple rule that makes the parser
insert a semicolon at certain line ends.
</blockquote>
In other words, the Go designers know that the parser is perfectly
capable of spotting the end of a logical statement without requiring
a delimiter. Then why isn't the delimiter eliminated, instead of
just being "discouraged"?
But wait; it gets better. The next comment we get is this:
<blockquote>
Next in category "pure heresy": Go defines a canonical indentation
and the One True Bracing Style.
</blockquote>
In other words, the Go designers also know that indentation is
important; yet they still cling to the delusion that somehow the
indentation needs help from curly braces. But if you're going to
define a One True Bracing Style, why can't the parser simply deduce
where the braces would go, the same way it can deduce where semicolons
would go? Well, the reviewer says this about the canonical indentation
style:
<blockquote>
Like Python, only I think python has a tad too little visual cues.
Indentation alone isn't always sufficiently clear, so we get to keep
our beloved braces.
</blockquote>
Oh, so the braces are to help the programmer know where the ends
of blocks are? Strange how so many people are able to program in
Python perfectly well without this crutch. Of course, if you don't
have a canonical indentation style, you can't depend on it as a
cue, so you may have problems with indentation being "sufficiently
clear". But the reviewer just told us that Go does have a canonical
indentation style! I think he hasn't fully grasped the implications.
(An aside here: the Go designers are making a huge mistake with the
canonical indentation, by using tabs instead of spaces. Of course,
all Pythonistas know that indenting with tabs is just a straight road
to perdition. See
<a href="http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces">here</a>
and
<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/d77d5cbb5888bb68">here</a>
for the details.)
There's another funny bit in the next item in the review. We read
this...
<blockquote>
Speaking of braces, there are no brace-free forms of if and loops.
</blockquote>
...followed almost immediately by this:
<blockquote>
One important technical reason for the previous point is the fact
that those control statements no longer have parens.
</blockquote>
In other words, take away parentheses around conditionals (good),
but then use that as an excuse to keep curly braces (braindead).
Give with one hand and take away with the other. But wait; there's
a reason:
<blockquote>
Only Perl6 tries to parse paren-less if without curlies, and we all
know how complicated Perl parsers used to be (and obviously, still are).
</blockquote>
I guess the reviewer forgot that Python has no trouble parsing
paren-less if without curlies. And without forcing you to use Perl and
its parser, either.
<h1>Static Typing Sucks Too</h1>
Since we're on the subject of Python vs. "C-oid" languages, I'll go
ahead and rant about variable typing as well. The reviewer notes that
Go is smart enough to use duck typing, as Python does, instead of
requiring explicit interface declarations:
<blockquote>
Go uses interfaces exclusively. Unlike Java, however, you don't
declare that a given type conforms to some interface. If it does, it
automatically is usable as that interface.
</blockquote>
Great! Go objects are duck-typable. But that raises the obvious next
question: what about references to objects, i.e., variables? Well,
that's better than C, in that variable declarations don't require
explicit type specifiers:
<blockquote>
If you leave out the type, the type is instead taken from the assignment.
You may even leave out the declaration altogether by using the new
declare-and-initialize operator.
</blockquote>
Okay, good. But once you've done that once, you're stuck; the new
variable declaration syntax
<blockquote>
does not introduce dynamic typing, it does not allow changing a
declared variable's type, it does not remove the need to declare variables,
it does not allow you to declare variables twice. It's really the same as
before, semantically, but much lighter on syntax. Feels like an ad-hoc
scripting language but still gives you the benefits of static typing.
</blockquote>
Um, what benefits of static typing? Objects are already typed; once
you create an object, its type is fixed forever. That's true in every
language, including Python; I'm not sure I can see how you could implement
an object system at all without it. That, plus duck typing, ensures that
if you try to do anything with an object that it doesn't support, the
language will tell you. If you want anything more draconian than that,
you don't want a language like Go, or Python, or C for that matter. You
want something like Visual Basic, because you're going to let people use
it who can't be trusted with fully capable tools.
But given that you're cool with duck typing, whyinhell would you want to
restrict variable bindings? When you reassign a variable, you aren't
changing the type of its object; you are binding it to a new object,
which has been freshly created, and of course when you write the code
that creates it, you have already decided what type you want it to be,
just like when you bound the variable to its original value. Sure, the
vast majority of the time, the new object will have the same type as the
old; but what about those cases where you don't want it to? What if,
for example, you want to assign a new object that is duck-type compatible
with the old one, but has no common base type with the old one, so the
type system can't tell they're compatible? Again, if you want your type
system to prevent you from doing this, you don't want a fully capable
language in the first place.
I could go on about other stuff, but I think I've said enough to make it
clear, once again, why Python is my favorite language. Frankly, the only
advantage I can see with Go over Python (and not just based on this
review; I've been following Go's progress for several years now) is speed;
but Moore's Law and projects like
<a href="http://pypy.org/">PyPy</a>
are making that less and less of an issue every day. It's great that
people keep on trying new things with programming languages, but at least
this time, I'm sticking with Python.
(Update: there is a discussion of this post on
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322227">Hacker News</a>.)
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:28 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>One Rant Deserves Another</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/one-rant-deserves-another</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/one-rant-deserves-another.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Cary Sherman, the CEO of the RIAA, is upset. He says those mean and nasty
Internet companies shut down SOPA and PIPA by spreading misinformation
and claiming it was fact. Well, after reading his recent
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-tell-you.html?pagewanted=print">op-ed in the New York Times</a>,
I will certainly concede that Mr. Sherman ought to know about that sort
of thing, since he is evidently an expert at it. Just for fun, I
thought I would post some examples.
<blockquote>
Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American
court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal?
</blockquote>
Oh, is that all Mr. Sherman wants to do? He can do that now, under existing
law, and his organization certainly hasn't been shy about it. In fact, he
hasn't even been shy about shutting down operations without going through
all the hassle of taking them to court or getting a review of the evidence,
but simply on his say-so. One wonders why he needs SOPA and PIPA in the
first place. Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty"?
<blockquote>
As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and
PIPA didn't take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their
case. That's partly because "old media" draws a line between "news" and
"editorial." Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don't recognize the
ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the
presentation of editorial opinion as fact.
</blockquote>
What? Google has editorials plastered all over its search page? I must
have missed it. Wikipedia has "SOPA is bad" banners at the top of every
article? I guess I need to get my eyes checked because I didn't see them.
Or maybe Google and Wikipedia said negative things about SOPA/PIPA on
their blogs or their editorial pages--you know, the places which are
clearly marked as expressing their opinions, not facts.
Of course, Mr. Sherman would certainly like to have his opinion
accepted as fact. In fact, it's hard to tell whether or not he even
knows the difference. He writes an "opinion" piece and gets it published
on the op-ed page, where you are supposed to give your opinions, and then
states his opinions as facts and hopes nobody notices. Hmm.
Perhaps the problem is that Mr. Sherman has some vocabulary issues. For
example:
<blockquote>
Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative
to protect American property from theft, to shield consumers from
counterfeit products and fraud, and to combat foreign criminals who
exploit technology to steal American ingenuity and jobs.
</blockquote>
By "American property" he means "the money RIAA companies make by
exploiting the work of artists", not "the actual work done by the
artists, which is what people actually want to listen to".
<blockquote>
They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of
what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged,
</blockquote>
By "music sales" he means "sales of CDs", not "sales of music". In other
words, he means "sales of stuff I want to sell because I'm too lazy to
actually give customers what they want".
<blockquote>
and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half
since then, to less than 10,000.
</blockquote>
By "the industry" he means "companies which are members of the RIAA". He
does not mean "anybody who actually makes music".
<blockquote>
They studied the problem in all its dimensions, through multiple
hearings.
</blockquote>
None of which included the people who actually make the Internet work.
In fact, as I noted
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/latest-from-sopa-front.html">in a previous post</a>,
several technical experts were supposed to testify before Congress, the
first opportunity any such experts had had to do so, on January 18th;
but there's no indication that the hearing ever actually happened.
But perhaps the real problem is something else. Mr. Sherman lets slip
an interesting comment towards the end of his article:
<blockquote>
The conventional wisdom is that the defeat of these bills shows the
power of the digital commons. Sure, anybody could click on a link or
tweet in outrage - but how many knew what they were supporting or
opposing?
</blockquote>
Good question. How many legislators who initially said they supported
SOPA/PIPA knew what they were supporting? How many who switched to
opposing it did so because they actually read the bills, so they did
know what they were opposing?
The root of the problem is that Mr. Sherman and the rest of the "old
media" simply don't understand what's happened. They don't understand
that the reason they're having all these problems is that the Internet
has killed their business model. They think it must be some evil plot
by "hackers" and "pirates", because surely people wouldn't just stop
buying CDs because, say, they wanted more convenience and knew there
were ways to get it? Naw, that couldn't be it.
<blockquote>
No doubt, some genuinely wanted to protect Americans against theft but
were sincerely concerned about how the language in the bill might be
interpreted. But others may simply believe that online music, books and
movies should be free.
</blockquote>
Or we may believe that if we are going to pay money for music, books,
and movies, we should get something worth paying that money for, not
something that's been emasculated and micromanaged to the point where
it's more trouble than it's worth. And that our money should go to the
people that actually create, not the people that exploit them. And that
we should not be treated like potential thieves when all we want to do
is listen to music, read books, or watch movies.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 04 Mar 2012 01:50 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>More From The Internet Front</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/more-from-internet-front</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/more-from-internet-front.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Eric Raymond has published an
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155">Open Letter to Chris Dodd</a>
in response to Dodd's
<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/23/idUS13183087620120223">recent speech</a>.
Any comments from me would be superfluous (and if you've read my previous
posts on this subject you'll know where I'm coming from anyway); just read
Eric's post. It's worth it.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 25 Feb 2012 05:56 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Internet Blackout Day</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/internet-blackout-day</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/internet-blackout-day.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Many sites on the Internet (including this blog) were "blacked out"
yesterday as part of a protest against SOPA/PIPA. Opposition to these
bills has been mounting for some time, and a few days ago it appeared
that SOPA, at least, had been
<a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/putting_sopa_on_a_shelf034765.php">shelved by the House</a>,
but it turned out that it had only been
<a href="http://judiciary.house.gov/news/01172012.html">delayed until February</a>.
(Even if does eventually get "shelved", the cynical read on that, which
would be mine, will be that Congress is simply taking it off the radar,
knowing how short the public's attention span is, and will try to slip
it in later as an amendment to some other bill that is expected to
pass without much scrutiny. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.)
CNN ran
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/18/tech/sopa-blackouts/index.html?hpt=hp_c1">an article</a>
about the blackout which summarized the position of
SOPA's supporters:
<blockquote>
SOPA's supporters -- including CNN parent company Time Warner and groups
such as the MPAA -- say that online piracy leads to U.S. job losses
because it deprives content creators of income.
The bill's supporters dismiss accusations of censorship, saying the
legislation is meant to revamp a broken system that doesn't adequately
prevent criminal behavior.
</blockquote>
The MPAA, as quoted in
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/sopa-livesand-mpaa-calls-protests-an-abuse-of-power.ars">Ars Technica</a>,
was a bit more vituperative about the blackout:
<blockquote>
Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation
responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called
for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business
interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them
into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find
solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and
damaging.
It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on
them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of
power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.
It's a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve
as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their
users in order to further their corporate interests.
</blockquote>
After reading this, I was tempted to add another post to the "rants"
section of this blog. But I'll resist the temptation, because there
actually is a serious issue here that deserves some non-ranting
discussion. (It's worth noting, though, that Google's service was not
unavailable during the blackout, nor were most others--though Wikipedia
was. So there actually wasn't any "disservice to people who rely on
them." But I'll pass over that.)
The MPAA speaks of "the freedoms that these companies enjoy in the
marketplace today." What freedoms, exactly, are they referring to? Google
gets the lion's share of search traffic because it's the best search
engine on the web. So they certainly enjoy the freedom to provide an
excellent service and have users choose to use it. But they don't have
the freedom to force people to use their service, much less to make
people believe their version of the facts. People are protesting because
they rightly feel outrage at attempts to emasculate the Internet, not
because Google or anyone else is "inciting" them. I would protest just
as loudly, as I'm sure would many others who protested yesterday, if
Google went to the government to try to get laws passed to favor their
business model over others.
The simple fact is that the business model on which the corporations that
make up the MPAA and RIAA were built is dead. The Internet killed it.
It's not a question of "piracy"; it's a simple question of efficiency.
Why should customers pay some company to make millions of copies of a
plastic disk when the same information can be transmitted essentially
for free over the Internet? It's not as though there are no new business
models to replace the old ones; Netflix and iTunes are proof of that.
In fact, the MPAA and the RIAA are up against that very freedom of the
marketplace that they talk about so blithely: the freedom of we, the
customers, to choose what we will and will not pay for.
But what about all those jobs that are being threatened, and all those
content creators who are being deprived of income? This was the part
that really tempted me to write a rant, because in fact the MPAA and
the RIAA do not create content. Artists, and writers, and musicians,
and actors, and directors, and so forth, create content. The
corporations that make up the MPAA and the RIAA distribute content.
That's all they do. The Internet has not stopped content creators; on
the contrary, content creators are empowered by the Internet. I would
not be publishing this blog if I had to make photocopies of every post
and send them out by mail.
Of course, I don't expect to make money from this blog. What about people
whose livelihood is creating content? The MPAA and RIAA want you to
believe that these people are worse off because of "piracy". But what
do the content creators themselves say? You'll note that the MPAA and
RIAA most carefully don't quote them. That's because they would have to
quote things like
<a href="http://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy.html">this</a>,
which would start people thinking about the way these corporations
actually treat artists, as shown for example
<a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110707/03264014993/riaa-accounting-how-to-sell-1-million-albums-still-owe-500000.shtml">here</a>.
The truth is that the MPAA and RIAA do far more to deprive content
creators of income than any amount of "piracy" could ever do.
(It's worth noting in this connection that the Hollywood "guilds",
including the Screen Actors Guild,
<a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sopa-blackout-protests-dga-sag-statement-support-283028">sent a letter supporting SOPA</a>
to several members of Congress yesterday, to coincide with the
Internet blackout. More on that below.)
The opposition to these bills does appear to have had some effect
beyond provoking the predictable responses discussed above. For
example, the MPAA appears to have
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/reeling-mpaa-declares-dns-filtering-off-the-table.ars">backed off on DNS filtering</a>
(this may have been the "major concern" referred to in the MPAA quote
from the Ars Technica article early in this post), although the
article notes that this may not last. However, they also make this
interesting statement:
<blockquote>
"The future of our industry relies on the Internet," [the MPAA's
tech chief] said, noting that movie studios were increasingly selling
their products to consumers via the Internet.
</blockquote>
I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean. If it just means
that I can buy DVDs from Amazon instead of at the store, well, yes, I
suppose it's true. But if there's a movie studio out there that is
running a site like Netflix that streams video direct to people without
making them jump through hoops, it's a very well-kept secret. Or
perhaps the quote is referring to Netflix itself; but even here the
studios appear to want to restrict the channel, as
<a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/08/technology/netflix_starz_contract/index.htm">CNN Money</a>
noted in an article some time ago:
<blockquote>
Netflix subscribers got a taste of the studios' new hardball approach
last month, when hundreds of Sony (SNE) movies -- including high-profile
titles like "The Social Network" and "Salt" -- abruptly vanished from
Netflix's "watch now" catalog.
In a
<a href="http://blog.netflix.com/2011/06/temporary-removal-of-sony-movies.html">blog post</a>,
Netflix pinned the blame on a "temporary contract issue" between Sony and
Starz, a pay cable network that licenses Sony's movie catalog. Back in
2008, Netflix struck a four-year deal with Starz that gave it streaming
access to Starz' offerings.
But Starz' deal with Sony included a cap on the number of subscribers
who can watch Sony movies online, a source told the LA Times. Once
Netflix' audience exceeded the cap, the contract was null. Starz'
catalog of Disney movies available for online streaming is on the verge
of triggering a similar contractual cap, the newspaper reported. 
</blockquote>
So it really looks like the MPAA and RIAA simply don't understand what
"selling via the Internet" actually means. More evidence of this is
found in the MPAA's own
<a href="http://blog.mpaa.org/BlogOS/post/2012/01/14/MPAA-Response-to-White-House-Position-on-Anti-Piracy-Legislation-.aspx">blog post</a>
in response to a statement by the Obama Administration on anti-piracy
legislation:
<blockquote>
We also share the Administration's desire to encourage innovation.
The American businesses that are victimized on a daily basis by global
Internet thieves are among the most innovative industries in this nation
and we welcome the Administration's support of these American businesses.
</blockquote>
So the "most innovative industries in this nation", according to the
MPAA, are industries that want to ship movies on plastic disks instead
of as bits over the Internet, and want to restrict the ways that
legitimate buyers of their products can use them (by, for example,
region-encoding DVDs and restricting viewing of movies online), while
companies like Google that have changed the way the entire world
searches for information are just trying to take away American jobs
by enabling "piracy":
<blockquote>
Every day, American jobs are threatened by thieves from foreign-based
rogue websites.
</blockquote>
Which jobs? Later on, the post says "the 2.2 million Americans whose jobs
depend on the film and television industries". But how many of those
people are actually involved in creating content, as opposed to
distributing it? And how many of them actually have a decent share in
the profits? Of course the MPAA isn't sharing that information. Not only
that, but how many of those jobs are actually threatened by "piracy", as
opposed to being threatened by the inability of the very corporations
who make up the MPAA to join the rest of us in the 21st century? Netflix
and iTunes aren't stopping movies and music from being made.
This is why I think that organizations like the Screen Actors Guild are
mistaken in supporting legislation like SOPA. They do so because they
see their jobs being threatened if the system put in place by the MPAA
and RIAA for making and distributing films and music is threatened. I
understand their concern, but I think they're making a huge mistake by
hitching their fates to the fates of organizations as hidebound as the
MPAA and RIAA. I would be more likely to pay to see movies if I knew
that my money was going to the people who actually make them instead of
Sony and the other media corporations (and the few high-profile actors
who can command huge fees--not that I mind the fees, but they are
<a href="http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_money_do_actors_earn">not representative</a>
of what most of the people who make movies or TV shows earn). As I
said above, the actual content creators are not being well served by
the existing system, and they ought to seriously consider ditching it,
regardless of what the MPAA and RIAA think.
And for all of us as Internet users, I don't expect these bills to go
away. The corporations whose business models are dead still have a lot
of money, and they will continue to spend it to try to put the Internet
genie back in the bottle. We should not let them.
<h1>Postscript</h1>
I said I wouldn't make this post into a rant, but
<a href="http://www.deadline.com/2012/01/exclusive-hollywood-moguls-stopping-obama-donations-because-of-administrations-piracy-stand/">the latest from Hollywood</a>
is just too good to pass up. Apparently the "medial moguls" are not
pleased that (in what they see as a drastic turnaround from the
previous Administration statement that I referred to above) President
Obama has taken a stand against SOPA:
<blockquote>
The moguls are reminding Obama et al that, in the words of one studio
chief, "God knows how much money we've given to Obama and the Democrats
and yet they're not supporting our interests. There's been no greater
supporters of him than we've been from the first day and the first
fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And,
at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we
need the administration to support us."
</blockquote>
In other words, as a number of commenters have noted, Hollywood is
accusing President Obama of failing the classic test of an honest
politician: he's been bought, but he won't stay bought.
But there actually is a more serious nugget here:
<blockquote>
"The issue at hand -- piracy -- is a legitimate concern. But Google
and those Internet guys have been swiftboating the entertainment
industry by saying we're trying to shut down the Internet just because
we don't want them to advertise pirated movies."
</blockquote>
I'll be charitable and grant that the "studio chief" quoted here sincerely
believes that he is not trying to shut down the Internet by trying to get
SOPA and similar legislation passed. He's not a technical expert. But his
sincere beliefs don't count; what counts is the actual effect that such
legislation would have if passed. He appears to think that "Google and
those Internet guys" could quite easily stop advertising pirated movies
if they wanted to. Perhaps he thinks that Larry Page and Sergey Brin sit
in a big room and supervise a bunch of people who assiduously review every
ad by hand. Chris Dodd displays similar ignorance
<a href="http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118047080">here</a>:
<blockquote>
"When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they
couldn't do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out
how to block sites."
</blockquote>
No, they agreed to shut down the pathway that had allowed people in
China to access Google without going through the Chinese government's
firewall, since they knew the Chinese government was going to shut it
down anyway. They most certainly did not put in place any kind of
system that could block individual sites.
Actually, of course, it would be impossible for Google, or any other
Internet site of any size that allows users to post content, to police
everything that they are hosting and still provide the immensely
valuable services they provide. There is simply too much content and not
enough time for humans to review even a tiny fraction of it; the
processes have to be automated if they are going to work at all. And how
can we expect computers to reliably tell "pirated" content from the rest,
when humans often have to go through many levels of the judicial system to
get a decision on the question?
Not to mention that, once you give people a way to shut down websites by
claiming they are "rogue" sites, this ability will be abused, and the
collateral damage from such abuse will be far worse than any possible
damage from "piracy". I've mentioned this
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/dont-tread-on-internet-sequel.html">once before</a>,
but there are plenty of other examples, such as
<a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110620/01370314750/universal-music-goes-to-war-against-popular-hip-hop-sites-blogs.shtml">this</a>
and
<a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111005/10082416208/monster-cable-claims-ebay-craigslist-costco-sears-are-rogue-sites.shtml">this</a>.
The first article talks about Universal Music's claims that popular "hip
hop" sites and online magazines covering that music genre are "rogue"
sites; so much for the "media moguls" being concerned about the actual
"content creators", who, of course, want their music to be heard and
talked about on these sites. The second talks about Monster Cable's
claims that Costco and Sears, among others, are "rogue" sites.
So this really is a binary choice. Either we have valuable Internet
services like the ones we have, or we have a locked-down system where
everything else is sacrificed to the goal of stopping "piracy". And
even then the goal won't be achieved. Mr. Dodd and the MPAA would like
the US to be more like China in the way it controls the internet. But
the
<a href="http://www.iipa.com/">International Intellectual Property Alliance</a>,
which counts among its members--wait for it--the MPAA and RIAA,
is continually
<a href="http://www.iipa.com/pdf/IIPAPressReleaseonUSITCChinaReport121410.pdf">agitating</a>
about how much piracy there is in China. Of course, this may be as
much a matter of the Chinese government not caring all that much
about piracy as anything else. But that only underscores the point:
Americans do care. As I noted in
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/latest-from-sopa-front.html">my last post</a>,
we don't want to steal. But we also don't want to pay for outmoded
products, and we don't want to put up with inconvenience and being
treated like potential pirates when we just want to watch a movie or
listen to a song. Does that justify stealing? No. But the alternative
is not for us to start buying what the MPAA and RIAA would like to
sell us; the alternative is for us to spend our money somewhere else
entirely. Trying to buy legislation is going to make that more likely,
if anything, not less. Maybe the "media moguls" should stop trying to
emasculate the Internet, and start working on giving their customers
what they actually want.
<h1>Post-Postscript</h1>
The phenomenon of corporations seeking to buy legislation to prop up
dead business models is not limited to the arts. A number of companies,
notably Elsevier, have for years had a sweetheart deal with the US
government allowing them strict publishing rights for scientific journals.
Now the Internet has killed that business model too, but the companies
don't want it to die, as
<a href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/elsevier_evil.php">PZ Myers reports</a>:
<blockquote>
Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another
acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of
information: RWA, the
<a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3699:">Research Works Act</a>.
This is a bill to, it says, "ensure the continued publication and
integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector", where
the important phrase is "private sector" -- its purpose is to guarantee
that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of
scientific information...
This is a blatant attempt to invalidate the NIH's requirement that
taxpayer-funded research be made publicly available. The internet was
initially developed to allow researchers to easily share information...and
that's precisely the function this bill is intended to cripple.
</blockquote>
PZ is a biologist, which is why he refers specifically to the NIH, but
the same problem exists in other scientific fields. However, the physics
and math communities got tired of this years ago and started
<a href="http://arxiv.org/">arXiv</a>,
a site where preprints of scientific papers are made freely available.
As you can see from the site's home page, other scientific fields have
joined this effort as well. Papers on the arXiv can still be (and often
are) published in journals, but until they are actually submitted, the
scientists who write them have the publication rights, and they routinely
publish preprints; in fact, they have to in order to enable the very
"peer review" process that the journals claim to be facilitating. In
the days before the Internet, preprints were circulated by mail, but
of course the Internet makes it all much, much easier, just as it was
intended to do (as PZ notes).
In other words, the very justification for the US government giving the
sweetheart deals to journals in the first place, to "ensure the continued
publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works", is no longer
valid. Scientists no longer need these companies to help them share
information, because of the Internet. The companies' response: try to
buy legislation. Of course the journals' business model is in even worse
shape than those of the film and record companies, because the latter
can at least offer some additional value to customers in the form of
particular actors or brands. The journals are pure middlemen; the only
value they added to the process was distribution. (They claim that they
also added value to the peer review process, by organizing and vetting
editors and reviewers, but even before the arXiv site was stood up, the
process had long been shifting in the direction of more and more review
of preprints and less and less review of actual journal submissions. Now
of course, the first question anyone, even a journal reviewer, asks
about a paper is "is a copy on arxiv?" There is even a
<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.6590">proposal</a>
to formalize this process by allowing signed reviews of papers to be
linked to the papers themselves.)
All of this just reinforces the fact that any attempt on the part of
government to interfere with things is fraught with risk. The
interventions are usually reasonable at the time: in their day, the
journals really did facilitate a lot of sharing of scientific
information. But the interventions always end up long outliving their
usefulness, and in the process they may do harm that more than outweighs
the good they did originally. It's up to us, the people, to try to keep
that from happening.
<a href="http://freedomkeys.com/vigil.htm">Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty</a>.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:56 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Latest From The SOPA Front</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/latest-from-sopa-front</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/latest-from-sopa-front.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This is just a quick update to
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html">my</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet-redux.html">previous</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/no-really-dont-tread-on-internet.html">posts</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/yet-another-reason-not-to-tread-on-internet.html">on</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/dont-tread-on-internet-sequel.html">SOPA</a>
to collect a few more links of interest.
First, a "mainstream" media channel (CNN) is now at least
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/06/tech/web/sopa-web-piracy-act/index.html?hpt=hp_c1">covering the issue</a>.
No surprises in the article, but at least it means the issue is getting
some attention.
Next, The Register has posted about a
<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/04/study_piracy_legal_alternative/">study</a>
that finds that, first, the vast majority of people prefer to obtain
content legally (no surprise for anyone who has heard of Netflix or
iTunes, but it seems like media companies still haven't gotten the
memo), and second:
<blockquote>
When it comes to the penalties for piracy the American public is a
lot more forgiving than the courts. Three quarters of those surveyed
felt that fines of less than $100 per song were acceptable and only 16
per cent felt that cutting off internet access was justified to stop
piracy. Only a quarter who approved of disconnection felt that more
than a one month ban was warranted.
</blockquote>
Just in case anyone was still wondering whether SOPA and similar
legislation actually represents what the people want, here's your
sign: it doesn't.
Finally, it appears that one of the founders of
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/">Reddit</a>,
the CEO of
<a href="http://www.rackspace.com/">Rackspace</a>,
and
<a href="http://dankaminsky.com/">Dan Kaminsky</a>,
a world-class expert on Internet security and DNS, will
<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/01/09/reddit-founder-dns-hacker-and-other-sopa-critics-to-address-congress/">testify before Congress</a>
on January 18th. One of the main thrusts of their testimony will be that
SOPA and the Protect IP Act will in fact be harmful to US national
security. (The fact that SOPA will
<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/20/sopa_breaks_dnssec/">break DNSSEC</a>
is one aspect of this, but not the only one.) Hopefully that will help
to keep these bills from passing.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:58 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Another Brief Nerd Interlude</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/another-nerd-interlude</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/another-nerd-interlude.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Years ago,
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy">Doug McIlroy</a>, the inventor
of the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline_%28Unix%29">Unix pipe</a>,
published a
<a href="http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/squinting_at_power_series/squint.pdf">paper</a>
on techniques for computing the terms of power series. The paper talks
about a number of key concepts in programming, such as "lazy" evaluation,
that were not well supported by most programming languages at the time,
which is why McIlroy spent a good portion of the paper describing an
implementation of his techniques in a new language designed by
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike">Rob Pike</a>.
I came across this paper recently and realized that Python's
<a href="http://docs.python.org/tutorial/classes.html#generators">generators</a>
would be a perfect fit for representing power series. They support all
the key techniques McIlroy described, particularly "lazy" evaluation (a
generator doesn't compute any specific term of its series until it is
asked for it in sequence). You can see the Python implementation I came
up with on github
<a href="https://github.com/pdonis/powerseries">here</a>.
A particularly neat feature is that you can recursively include a Python
generator in itself; this allows the recursive nature of many power series
to be directly represented in the code. For example, here's the exponential
series:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>def _exp():
for term in integral(EXP, Fraction(1, 1)):
yield term
EXP = PowerSeries(_exp)
</pre></div>
No monkey business with factorials; just a generator that recursively
integrates itself. This same trick also works for implementing operations
on power series; for example, any series can be exponentiated by a method
similar to the above. The reciprocal and inverse operations on series use
similar tricks, which basically make the code look just like the
mathematical descriptions of those operations in McIlroy's paper.
Once I got the Python implementation working smoothly, I began checking
online to see what other recent implementations of these techniques
existed, and found that McIlroy posted an
<a href="http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/powser.html">implementation in Haskell</a>
on the web in 2007. All of the key operations are one-liners. This is
possible because Haskell has built-in support for expressing these
operations declaratively, instead of having to define functions and use
for loops and so on. So in a sense, my Python implementation is a case of
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule">Greenspun's Tenth Rule</a>.
But it's still fun.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Don't Tread On Our Internet: The Sequel</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/dont-tread-on-internet-sequel</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/dont-tread-on-internet-sequel.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html">thought</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet-redux.html">I</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/no-really-dont-tread-on-internet.html">was</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/yet-another-reason-not-to-tread-on-internet.html">done</a>
with this topic for now, but I can't help adding one more quick post,
because it now appears that it isn't just media companies who want to put
a stranglehold on the Internet.
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/us-judge-orders-hundreds-of-sites-de-indexed-from-google-twitter-bing-facebook.ars">Chanel</a>
is getting in on the act.
Yes, the perfume maker. Based on what appears
to be extremely meager evidence, a Nevada federal judge has ordered that
"hundreds" of domain names can be seized by Chanel and transferred to
a US registrar (GoDaddy). The judge also ordered that "all Internet
search engines" and "all social media websites" must "de-index" the
seized domains.
In case you're wondering what "meager" evidence means, it appears that,
of the most recent batch of 228 domains that were seized, three were
actually verified to be shipping counterfeit merchandise, by placing an
order and seeing what was delivered. (Even this "verification" is
somewhat dubious, since it was done by Chanel itself and not by a neutral
third party. Also, if you're wondering about that "batch", Chanel has
been bringing these claims to court in groups, and there does not seem
to be any endpoint to this process; they'll just keep on doing it as
long as they feel like it.) The rest were seized based on "a Chanel
anti-counterfeiting specialist browsing the Web", according to the
article linked to above.
For extra fun, the
<a href="http://servingnotice.com/sdv/038%20-%20Order%20Granting%20Second%20TRO.PDF">court order</a>
that authorizes seizure of the latest 228 domains calls itself a
"Temporary Restraining Order". Anyone who has ever tried to switch
even an ordinary, non-seized domain from one registrar to another knows
how Byzantine the process is. I can only imagine what the companies
whose sites were seized, should they be found to not actually be selling
counterfeit merchandise, will have to go through to get control of their
domains back. So the order might as well say "Permanent" since that's
what it will effectively end up being. Eventually, Chanel might even
sell the domains it has seized; who says the domain seizure business
isn't lucrative?
One should also note that the court order, and the complaint that gave
rise to it, are ex parte, which is legalese for "the defendants didn't
get a chance to rebut anything". Also, the order is dated November 14,
2011, and it sets a hearing date of November 29, 2011, with any responses
to the complaint required to be filed with the court by November 23, 2011.
Is it just me, or is that a really short response time? (Particularly
as many of the seized domains probably were not even based in the US,
which makes a Federal court's jurisdiction rather problematic. Indeed,
some non-US registrars apparently have not complied with the court's
order to transfer domain registrations to GoDaddy.)
I should make one thing clear: if Chanel wants to defend its trademarks
(that's what "counterfeit" amounts to in this case, infringement of
trademarks), it is entitled to use legal means to do so. I personally
think that anyone who is buying the counterfeit stuff is not going to be
a potential customer for the real stuff anyway (for one thing, the real
stuff's price is not for the squeamish, and people who are willing to
spend that much on perfume don't want the counterfeit stuff), so I
strongly doubt any of these "counterfeit" websites are losing Chanel any
sales. But that's their call; if they want to spend time and money on
what to me is a fruitless pursuit, they're welcome to.
But the appropriate legal means for that fruitless pursuit are not
seeking a "temporary" restraining order with an extremely short fuse as
a first action. Even the US Congress' previous attempt to emasculate
the Internet (and other things), the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act">DMCA</a>,
doesn't allow that. (Yes, I know the DMCA refers to copyright, not
trademark; but the principle is the same.) In fact, one wonders why the
judge's first question to Chanel was not "Have you contacted any of these
websites and demanded that they cease and desist?" As the article I
linked to above notes, if the US government and US courts are going to
behave like this, the Protect IP Act/SOPA battle may end up being rather
superfluous. I understand that companies try these shortcuts all the
time, but that doesn't mean the government and courts have to cooperate.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Nov 2011 03:14 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Yet Another Reason NOT To Tread On Our Internet</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/yet-another-reason-not-to-tread-on-internet</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/yet-another-reason-not-to-tread-on-internet.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This is just a quick update to
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/no-really-dont-tread-on-internet.html">yesterday's post</a>.
According to
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/why-sopa-endangers-americas-internet-leadership.ars">Ars Technica</a>,
<blockquote>
Last Thursday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution ahead of a
forthcoming summit between Europe and the United States. It included a
section on "the need to protect the integrity of the global Internet and
freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke
IP addresses or domain names."
That provision was added at the urging of the civil liberties organization
European Digital Rights (EDRi). In a presentation to the Parliament's Civil
Liberties Committee, EDRi's Joe McNamee noted that "the United States has, up
until recently, never sought to exploit its theoretical jurisdiction over the
companies and infrastructure that are at the core of the Internet."
</blockquote>
The Internet was created in the US, and as the article goes on to note, key
pieces of the Internet's infrastructure are based in the US, such as
<a href="http://www.icann.org/en/about/">ICANN</a>,
the company that coordinates domain name assignments, many key DNS root
servers, and the registries for .com, .org, and other popular TLDs. Up to
now, nobody has really had a problem with this, because the US has been
careful not to abuse its privileged position. If our lawmakers want to
change that, and squander our position by abusing it, they're going the
right way about it. It's ironic that we now have the European Union, whose
<a href="http://www.proyectos.cchs.csic.es/euroconstitution/Treaties/Treaty_Const.htm">Constitution</a>
weighs in at more than 350 pages (more than double that if the "Protocols
and Annexes" and "Declarations" are included) and has to be delivered as
PDFs, trying to tell the United States, whose
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html">Constitution</a>
can fit in a single reasonably sized HTML page (or two such if the
Amendments are included--what extravagance!), how something as simple as
protecting freedom of communication and civil liberties is supposed to
work. But so it is.
I suppose one could argue that, in the long run, it would be better for
the Internet's infrastructure to come under the control of an international
body that was not controlled by any single country's government. In theory
that would be a good argument. The problem with it is that all our evidence
about such bodies shows that they do not work. The United Nations was
supposed to end war and ensure human rights for everyone. As Dr. Phil would
say, how's that workin' out for ya? As much as I complain about the US
government, I still think that, up to now, its stewardship of the Internet
has served the Internet better than any possible alternative, and that
ending that stewardship would be a turn for the worse. I really hope it
doesn't come to that.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 24 Nov 2011 01:56 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>No, Really, DON'T Tread On Our Internet</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/no-really-dont-tread-on-internet</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/no-really-dont-tread-on-internet.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I've
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html">posted</a>
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet-redux.html">twice</a>
now about the
<a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/protect-ip-act-coica-redux">Protect IP Act</a>,
or
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act">SOPA</a>
(the former is the Senate version, the latter is the House version),
which is the latest attempt on the part of big media companies to put a
stranglehold on the Internet.
As you can see, since this is the third time
around on this topic, I'm not going to mince words. I've mentioned some of
the damage this bill will cause in previous posts, but it's worth taking
a look at the Wikipedia article on SOPA linked to above and seeing all the
different issues raised under "Ramifications". (The Wiki article also has
lots of good reference links.) If you haven't already done so, and you are
a US citizen, I strongly urge you to contact your elected representatives
and demand that they make sure this bill doesn't pass. Two good sites to
help you do that are the
<a href="https://www.eff.org/action">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a>
and
<a href="http://demandprogress.org/">Demand Progress</a>.
You can also go to the
<a href="http://stopcensorship.org/">Stop Censorship</a>
site to register your opposition to the bill and to put your name on a list
of citizens that Senator Ron Wyden intends to read from the Senate floor if
he is forced to filibuster the Senate bill.
Having got that out of the way, I can now vent in a more leisurely fashion.
(This post is filed under "rants", but the previous paragraph is not just
venting, as my rants usually are. The issue is a serious one, so I wanted
to get the serious part out of the way first; but that's only a paragraph
and the rest of this post is, well, longer, so into the "rants" category
it goes.) Today I came across a
<a href="http://theagilepanda.com/2011/11/21/the-true-intent-of-sopa/">blog post</a>
comparing SOPA to China's "Great Firewall", which is the Chinese government's
massive infrastructure dedicated to controlling what the Chinese people can
and can't see on the Internet. The post is worth a read, if for no other
reason than that it uses the same word I did above, "stranglehold", to
describe the aim of this bill. :-) (It also has a number of good reference
links.)
What gets me, though, is that as you'll see if you read the post, some US
lawmakers actually think that the fact that legislation like this would make
the US more like China in its control of the Internet is a feature, not a
bug. If you're a person of
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote.html">Heinlein's class two</a>,
like me, this sort of thinking just seems so far out in left field that it's
hard to understand how it can survive and even thrive. Don't these people
understand that the Internet is not something you can control? Don't they
realize that the Internet is individual empowerment, individual freedom,
individual choice, in just about the purest form that those things have
ever existed? The United Nations realizes it; as the blog post I linked to
above notes, the UN has declared free and uncensored Internet access to be a
<a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/internet-a-human-right/">basic human right</a>.
Shouldn't that be enough to stop this kind of legislation from even being
considered? Hey, folks, um, trying to put into law something that the UN
considers a violation of human rights is probably a bad idea, okay? It's
not as though there aren't plenty of other pressing matters to attend to,
like, say, trying not to let the country's credit rating slip again.
But of course the proponents of this legislation do realize all the above.
That's why they're trying to get it passed. The analogy with the Chinese
government is far closer than it might seem. China is the classic example
of a country run by people of
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote.html">Heinlein's class one</a>;
the government wants to control everything. The United States of America
was supposed to be the exact opposite: the government was supposed to
control as little as possible. But it's really, really tough to sustain
that vision in the face of harsh reality. The US government in 1790 didn't
have much of a choice, because the country was so large and the technology
of the time so limited. The pattern ever since has been for the amount of
control the Federal government exerts to increase, to the point where today
we have laws and regulations covering all manner of things that would have
been unimaginable as subjects of Federal interest to an American of 1790
(or even one of 1890, for that matter). But at least, for most of that time,
each individual law or regulation appeared to be a good idea in itself;
what caused trouble was the cumulative effect of all of them, combined, of
course, with the law of unintended consequences.
Now, though, we have something different: we have a law that, I would venture
to say, looks like a bad idea to most Americans, and yet it won't go away.
It's not the first such law; take a look at many of the laws and regulations
that cover the financial industry, and you will see the same pattern (and,
not coincidentally, a lot of reasons for the economic meltdown we have been
experiencing). It's certainly not a new thing to have a bunch of large
corporations with outdated business models trying to buy legislation that
will prop up those business models, regardless of the damage it might cause
elsewhere, using the cover story that it will "protect society" from something
or other. We heard the same story from the financial industry all the way up
to the big crash, and now we're hearing from them that we need more regulations
to "protect" us from another one. (Remember the classic definition of insanity?
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?) And
we're hearing the same story in the fight over the US budget and whether or not
the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire; we're told that keeping the tax
cuts will "protect" small businesses and help innovation, when in fact a number
of commentaries, for example these articles in
<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/columnist/abrams/2010-12-03-bush-tax-cuts-small-business_N.htm">USA Today</a>
and
<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_40/b4197030541676.htm">Business Week</a>,
have argued that letting the tax cuts expire would not hurt small businesses
at all, and might even help them, since the current rules actually define
"small business" in a way that excludes a lot of the businesses that are
actually (a) small, and (b) innovating, while including a lot of entities
that are really more tax shelters for the wealthy than anything else.
So why am I picking this particular issue, a free and uncensored Internet, as
the one we really, really need to take a stand on? Because with a free and
uncensored Internet, it's a lot easier to fight all those other battles.
Information is power, and the big media companies who are trying to put a
stranglehold on the Internet know it. So do lawmakers who would love to give
the US government the power to shut down sites like Wikileaks. But we in the
USA are supposed to understand that we, the people, have the power. We get
to decide how information flows. The Internet is our medium for making those
decisions. If we want to say something, we post it. If we like something
someone else says, we link to it. If we don't like what someone else says,
we refute it. We don't censor it. We fight bad information with better
information, not with a Great Firewall. Ultimately, if we don't like what's
on a given website, we exercise our own freedom of choice by surfing somewhere
else. But we need a free and uncensored Internet to do all this. Don't let it
be taken away.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 Nov 2011 04:59 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Dennis Ritchie, RIP</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/dennis-ritchie</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dennis-ritchie.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Amidst all the news about Steve Jobs' passing, you may not have heard that
Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and one of the
original designers of Unix, also passed away this past weekend.
The news first broke on the Internet through
<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP?hl=en#101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP">this post from Rob Pike on Google Plus</a>.
Pike later followed up with
<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZDtY#101960720994009339267/posts/33mmANQZDtY">another Google Plus post</a>
giving a longer tribute to Ritchie and his work. Tributes to Ritchie have
also appeared in the
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html">New York Times</a>,
on
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/14/tech/innovation/dennis-ritchie-obit-bell-labs/">Wired, by way of CNN Tech</a>
(including the classic photo of Ritchie and Ken Thompson, the founders of Unix,
working on a PDP-11), on
<a href="http://boingboing.net/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie-1941-2011-computer-scientist-unix-co-creator-c-co-inventor.html">BoingBoing</a>,
in
<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/13/dennis_ritchie_obituary/">The Register</a>,
on
<a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/10/12/DMR">Tim Bray's blog</a>,
and on
<a href="http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie/">Herb Sutter's blog</a>.
Finally, this
<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/jKyyV1tXD6c#101960720994009339267/posts/jKyyV1tXD6c">follow-up Google Plus post by Rob Pike</a>
is worth a quick read, since it quotes from an email Pike received from
Ritchie encouraging him to pursue a programming project that turned out
to be important in the history of Unix.
I don't have much to add to what you'll read at the above links, but I
do want to comment on the headline of the Wired/CNN story: "Dennis
Ritchie: The shoulders Steve Jobs stood on." Jobs, and pretty much
everybody else who uses a computer. Ritchie created the C language, as
the story notes, "because he and Ken Thompson needed a better way to
build UNIX." But it turned out that the feature of C that enabled that,
the fact that it was "portable" between different types of computer
hardware, turned out to be a better way to write almost all programs,
not just Unix. C is now the foundation of pretty much every piece of
software in existence; if the software is not written in C directly,
it's built on top of something that is. (My personal favorite language,
<a href="http://www.python.org/">Python</a>,
for example, is implemented in C.) The story quotes Brian Kernighan,
another key figure in the development of C, as saying, "There's that
line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants...We're all
standing on Dennis' shoulders." I'm glad Wired and CNN recognized this
and gave Ritchie his due.
<h1>Postscript</h1>
I shouldn't end without mentioning
<a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/">Ritchie's page at Bell Labs</a>,
which has links to many of his writings. If you're a programmer, or even
if you're not, they're worth reading.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:50 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Some Items About Steve Jobs</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/steve-jobs</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/steve-jobs.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Unusually for me, this post will be almost entirely links to and quotes
from articles by others. But I should explain briefly why I'm linking to
them and quoting them. It's not to set the stage for my own comments about
Mac OS X, or about iPods and iPads and so forth. I made comments about
OS X in an
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/why-run-linux.html">earlier post</a>,
and there's no need to rehash them here. Nor do I have any personal
anecdotes to share. My reason for linking to these articles, and quoting
briefly from them, is, quite simply, to draw attention to what they say.
First, Eric Raymond's post
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3790">On Steve Jobs's Passing</a>,
in which, towards the end, he says:
<blockquote>
Commerce is powerful, but culture is even more persistent. The lure of
high profits from secrecy rent can slow down the long-term trend towards
open source and user-controlled computing, but not really stop it.
Jobs's success at hypnotizing millions of people into a perverse love
for the walled garden is more dangerous to freedom in the long term than
Bill Gates's efficient but brutal and unattractive corporatism. People
feared and respected Microsoft, but they love and worship Apple - and
that is precisely the problem, precisely the reason Jobs may in the end
have done more harm than good.
</blockquote>
Next, quotes from two articles that Raymond links to. One is an op-ed in
the New York Times entitled
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the-future.html?_r=4">Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia</a>,
by Mike Daisey:
<blockquote>
I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in
the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was
permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at
Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed
him my iPad, and he gasped because he'd never seen one turned on. He
stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth,
the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator,
"It's a kind of magic."
Mr. Jobs's magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and
business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple's immense
resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to
make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view
him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius
in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen
again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to
"think different," in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his
users and his workers. 
</blockquote>
The other quote is from
<a href="http://www.skepticblog.org/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-succumbs-to-alternative-medicine/">SkepticBlog</a>:
<blockquote>
Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve
was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet
cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with
excellent survival rates - if caught soon enough. The median survival
is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it's removed surgically.
Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much
longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a diet instead of
early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet
cell carcinoma. As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and
took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.
</blockquote>
Finally, to put that last quote in perspective, here's one from another
article, on Science Blogs, about
<a href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/10/steve_jobs_neuroendocrine_tumors_and_alt.php">Steve Jobs, neuroendocrine tumors, and alternative medicine</a>:
<blockquote>
Did Jobs significantly decrease his chance of surviving his cancer by
waiting nine months to undergo surgery? It seems like a no-brainer,
but it turns out that that's actually a very tough question to answer.
Certainly, it's nowhere near as certain as Dunning [the author of the
SkepticBlog article] tries to make it seem when he writes things like:
"Eventually it became clear to all involved that his alternative therapy
wasn't working, and from then on, by all accounts, Steve aggressively
threw money at the best that medical science could offer. But it was too
late. He had a Whipple procedure. He had a liver transplant. And then he
died, all too young."
After over seven years of science-based treatments that prolonged his life.
One has to be very, very careful about making this sort of argument. For one
thing, it could not have been apparent that it was "too late" back in 2004,
when it became clear that Jobs' dietary manipulations weren't working. For
another thing, we don't know how large the tumor was, whether it progressed
or simply failed to shrink over those nine months, and by how much it
increased in size, if increase in size it did...
In retrospect, we can now tell that Jobs clearly had a tumor that was
unusually aggressive for an insulinoma. Such tumors are usually pretty
indolent and progress only slowly. Indeed, I've seen patients and known a
friend of a friend who survived many years with metastatic neuroendocrine
tumors with reasonable quality of life. Jobs was unfortunate in that he
appears to have had an unusually aggressive form of the disease that probably
would have killed him no matter what. That's not to say that we shouldn't
take into account his delay in treatment and wonder if it contributed to his
ultimate demise. It very well might have, the key word being "might." We
don't know that it did, which is one reason why we have to be very, very
careful not to overstate the case and attribute his death as being definitely
due to the delay in therapy due to his wanting to "go alternative." It's
also important to remember that, as much of a brilliant visionary Jobs was,
even brilliant visionaries can make bad decisions when it comes to health.
</blockquote>
All of the articles are worth reading in full; none of them are very long.
All of them recognize what everyone knows, that Steve Jobs was indeed a
brilliant visionary; as President Obama said in his
<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/10/05/president-obama-passing-steve-jobs-he-changed-way-each-us-sees-world">statement eulogizing Jobs</a>,
<blockquote>
there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much
of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.
</blockquote>
The quotes I've given above focus on other aspects of Jobs's life and work,
not because they're more important, necessarily, but because it's always
worth trying to put things in perspective. And that's all for now.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 09 Oct 2011 02:39 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Why I'm Not Crazy About The Cloud</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/not-crazy-about-cloud</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/not-crazy-about-cloud.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I've seen a number of online articles and blog posts recently with the
common theme of being uncomfortable with Facebook. For instance,
<a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2304425/">this</a>
at Slate, or
<a href="http://public.numair.com/2011_fbfool.html">this</a>
from a programmer, or
<a href="http://benwerd.com/2011/09/facebook-timeline-nearest-digital-identity-creepy-hell/">this</a>
from a Facebook developer.
Of course the privacy implications of putting your data in the cloud,
with Facebook or anywhere else, are (or should be) obvious; as
<a href="http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html">this article by Rick Moen</a>
says,
<blockquote>
Experience suggests that "Possession is nine points of the law", and the
best way to prevent
<a href="http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/200104/200104.htm">abuse of your personal data by strangers</a>
is not to give it to them.
</blockquote>
I personally do not do Facebook, and keep only minimal data in the online
accounts I do have, for exactly this reason. But apparently most people
are not like me, and are quite willing to post lots of personal information
where it is visible, if not to the entire Internet, at least to anyone who
uses the same social media services they do (which is a lot of the entire
Internet). That's a decision everyone is entitled to make.
However, the common theme of the above articles goes beyond that, and it
was brought into focus for me by
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-clouds-my-mom-cleaned-my-room-problem/245648/">this article on The Atlantic's website</a>
(which I got to via <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3040047">Hacker News</a>
).
The key observation is this:
<blockquote>
We've always been dependent on software providers to create the digital
spaces we inhabit, but when your email and documents and music are in
the cloud, you're giving up the lock on the door and allowing changes to
be made on the schedule of the parent. He or she may clean up or buy you
a new desk. He or she may take away the car or decide you can't do
something you think you should be able to.
</blockquote>
This is not a new problem. The question of whether to own or rent (or
more precisely to live rent-free on someone's property, which is what the
"cloud" amounts to, as the Atlantic article notes later on) is a very old
one, and the tradeoff has always been the same: ownership can be a burden,
yes, but without it you lose control. Facebook and Google and all these
other wonderful "digital spaces" do not belong to you. And complaining
that the changes are affecting your "user experience" is kind of missing
the point; your user experience makes a difference to them only to the
extent that it affects their ability to collect data that they can sell.
It's not as though you are a paying customer.
But I seem to be an outlier; most people don't seem to see things in the
stark way I just put them. Perhaps what makes me (and Rick Moen, and other
programmers who have posted about this kind of thing) different is that I
don't need or want "software providers" to create any "digital spaces" for
me. Sure, there are some services (like Google) that I can't reasonably
create for myself, so I use them (but I try to give Google
<a href="http://www.optimizegoogle.com/">as little information as I can</a>
when doing so). And I do participate in online
<a href="http://physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3524335&postcount=631">forums</a>
in areas I'm interested in, and where I think I have something to
contribute. But those are limited uses for limited purposes. As far as
my email and documents and music go, I can see paying a hosting provider
to maintain one's own personal "cloud" online, both as a backup and for
convenience. (I don't even do this for a lot of my data, but as I said,
I'm an outlier; not everybody has a RAID array on a file server, not to
mention multiple other machines to store copies of data, in their house.
Although these days, external USB hard drives are cheap enough that anyone
can have their own personal backup storage.) But the idea of putting all
my data on the servers of someone, even Google, to whom I am not a paying
customer--that is where I draw the line. No amount of convenience is
worth that.
And it is basically about convenience, as the Atlantic article makes
clear:
<blockquote>
This isn't a bug in the way that cloud services work. It is a feature.
What we lose in freedom we gain in convenience. Maybe the tradeoff is
worth it. Or maybe it's something that just happened to us, which we'll
regret when we realize the privacy, security, and autonomy we've given
up to sync our documents and correspondence across computers.
</blockquote>
In case the reader is still in any doubt, I'm betting on the second
option. I could be wrong; it could be that "cloud" services will evolve
in the direction of less centralization and more privacy. But I think
that will only happen if their business model is changed. And that
will only happen if we, as users, start to be willing to pay for some
things that we are used to getting for free, in order to ensure that
they are set up in our interests. We'll see.
Update: Not long after posting the above I came across
<a href="http://adrianshort.co.uk/2011/09/25/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it/">this post</a>
taking an even bleaker position than mine:
<blockquote>
The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The
technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you'll
be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the
foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled
and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies.
</blockquote>
However, it's clear from the rest of the post that this kind of thing is
much more of an issue for businesses and organizations than for individual
people. I am certainly not opposed to as many people as possible reading
this blog, but I don't need people to read it the way a lot of
businesses need people to visit their sites. And for a business, the
tradeoff between keeping control of data and making information visible
is very different. I don't use Facebook in my personal life, but as a
business owner (see the
<a href="http://pdappsinc.com/">PDApps</a>
link under Wizard Projects on this page), we certainly have a social
media presence; we want people to see what we're up to as a business.
No small business has ever been able to control the rules by which that
game is played; companies that a decade or two ago were trying to get
press "hits" (see
<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html">Paul Graham's essay on PR firms</a>
for a good account of how this worked in the mid-1990's for a web startup)
are now doing search engine optimization and trying to build Facebook and
Twitter followings. I simply don't see this sort of thing as a harbinger of
doom for the web, or anything else; it's just business as usual.
But the post I quoted from just now also has links to projects that are
aimed at making it easier to have the convenience of data in the "cloud",
without having to sacrifice privacy and control. For example,
<a href="http://unhosted.org/">Unhosted</a>
is building software to allow you to have your own "cloud", which you can
host anywhere but which only you (or those you give user accounts to) can
access, because everything stored in the "cloud" is encrypted.
<a href="https://joindiaspora.com/">Diaspora</a>
is taking a somewhat different approach, building tools to let people set
up their own social media networks where they control their own data and
how it is shared.
<a href="http://www.thimbl.net/">Thimbl</a>
is making a micro-blogging platform that is free and open source. And
even the W3C, the web standards body, is working on specs for a
<a href="http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/">Federated Social Web</a>.
So even on the personal side, the picture is not all bleak. There will
always be ways to opt out of the Big Web companies' offerings if you
want to. Maybe most people won't want to; that's their choice. But it's
important that there is a choice.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:02 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>George Smiley is Back</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/tinker-tailor</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/tinker-tailor.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This is a culture interlude, not a nerd interlude, although of
course the kind of culture I'm about to focus on might well be
called nerdish. A new production of Le Carre's classic spy novel,
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is out. A short video of the cast
at the premiere in Britain is
<a href="http://www.anglotopia.net/british-entertainment/british-movies/colin-firth-and-gary-oldman-at-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-premiere/">here</a>.
Very interesting casting: Gary Oldman as George Smiley; it will
be interesting to see how his take on the role differs from the
book and Alec Guiness' classic portrayal, since this role is
kind of against type for him. Not that I'm against that; good
actors deserve chances to do different roles. John Hurt is
"Control", Smiley's former boss who died too soon to finish the
hunt for the Russian mole in The Circus (Le Carre's name for
British Intelligence), leaving Smiley to complete the job. That
should be interesting; the role has possibilities that weren't
really explored in the 1970's BBC adaptation.
I won't say any more since I want to avoid the temptation to
speculate without having seen the film, or to include spoilers
based on my knowledge of the story from the books. (Yes, I've
read every one that I mention below, and have re-read most of
them a number of times. I warned you about what kind of interlude
this was.) I have just one final comment. At the end of the video
clip, Le Carre was asked about possible sequels, and he took what
I thought was just the right line: yes, it would be great, but it
has to be done with "fear, not confidence." I would love to see
this crew do Smiley's People, assuming this film does well
(which I think and hope it will). Having them do every Le Carre
novel in which Smiley appears (there are five in which he plays
the leading role, one, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, in
which he is a major character but not the lead, and at least
two others I can think of in which he appears) is probably too
much to ask, but one can hope. :-)
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 15 Sep 2011 01:29 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Why I Run Linux</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/why-run-linux</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/why-run-linux.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Having spent enough time using all three of the major OS's to have a
decent understanding of their flaws, it's easy to explain why I use
Linux whenever I have a choice: its flaws are much easier to manage.
Part of that is the Unix tradition: everything is visible, and you can
always take full manual control of something if you really need to. On
Windows, there's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes that you
can't really see, and can't really control. On my Linux box, I know
exactly what every single running process is there for, what data it
is able to clobber, and what functionality will go away if I kill it.
On Windows there are all these "system services" lying around that I
can't make go away and can't know what they could potentially mess up.
And then there's the Windows Registry...
But Mac OS X also has Unix under the hood, so the Unix tradition isn't
all there is to it. The problem I have with Mac OS X is that there are
too many layers of spackle over the Unix core, and those layers are not
transparent the way Unix is supposed to be. And although OS X lets you
do things in the traditional Unix way, without going through all the
layers of spackle, it strongly discourages you from doing it very much.
And yet, some basic GUI tools simply aren't there, such as a task
scheduler (even Windows has a GUI task scheduler) to automate things
like backups. Yes, I know OS X has Time Machine, but that's another
example of the same problem. If I want to use some other mechanism for
backups, such as rsync, or pushing to a version control repository, I
can't use Time Machine and the other GUI tools; I have to drop back to
the Unix command line, and OS X doesn't even like you to use crontab
the way it was designed. Basically, OS X wants you to do everything in
the One True Apple Way, which is fine if that works for you, but when
it doesn't, things get very difficult.
Linux has flaws too, of course, but as I said above, they are much
easier to manage. For example,
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/kde4-sucks.html">KDE 4 sucks</a>,
but I don't have to use KDE 4; I can use KDE 3, or any of a number of
other desktops. Or I can be more minimalist and just pick a good
window manager, of which there are quite a few, and build my own GUI
desktop tailored to my needs. Or I could be even more hard-core
minimalist and run bare-bones X Windows. (I'm pretty sure that there
are very few, if any, nerds left who are so hard-core that they refuse
to run a GUI at all; even if you're just running emacs, a terminal,
and a text-only browser, it's still nice to have multiple windows on
screen at the same time.) As another example, Ubuntu's standard GUI
for network configuration is braindead enough not to have a way to
specify DNS servers when you're using DHCP, even though the DHCP
config files have an option designed precisely for this purpose. I
need this option because, for reasons explained by Rick Moen in
<a href="http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lan.html">this article</a>,
I run my own recursive DNS server on my home network instead of just
defaulting to the ones run by my ISP (who shall remain nameless here
because, at least in this particular case, they're no worse than any
of the others). If Windows lacked this option in its GUI, I'd be
helpless (ok, maybe not totally helpless, since I suppose there's
some registry key somewhere that might help with this, but it might
take a lot of pointless work to find it). If OS X did, I'd be, if not
exactly helpless, certainly wearied after what I would have to do to
make sure the config change persisted across reboots. On Linux, I
make a quick change to /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf and I'm done.
Another thing the various Linux distributions have done very well
is providing a cryptographically verified distribution chain for
software, both binary and source. On Windows, yes, you can get
software updates from the Windows Update site, but that only
covers software that Microsoft distributes, and many of the
so-called "updates" aren't really for your benefit anyway; they
are to enable Microsoft to control more of what you do with your
computer. On OS X, again, you can get updates for Apple's software
from Apple, but not for third party software. For third party
software on both Windows and Mac, you are pretty much stuck with
surfing to some website, downloading an .msi or .dmg file that
may or may not have any means of verifying that it's actually what
you think it is, and installing the thing by hand in the hope that
it isn't a virus or spyware. And, of course, in neither case is the
source code open to you. With Linux, you use the package management
tool that comes with your distribution, which can verify that every
piece of software it downloads and installs for you is digitally
signed and comes from a trustworthy source.
I realize that this doesn't sound much like making flaws easier
to manage, but bear with me for a moment. When people find out I
run Linux, they often ask how I keep my system free from viruses.
The definitive answer to this question is by Rick Moen,
<a href="http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=virus">here</a>,
and basically boils down to this: viruses and malware are not
problems in themselves; they are symptoms of deeper problems with
either the OS or the user or both. No OS is perfect; there are
always flaws in any software system that can in principle be
exploited. But one can still design an OS to not only make it as
free of flaws as possible, but also to minimize the impact of
flaws when they are found. And included in "flaws" from this point
of view are ways that a user can make mistakes and do damage to
the system. Linux, and Unix variants generally, are designed
explicitly to contain such damage, and so the kinds of anti-virus,
anti-spyware, anti-whatever tools that are ubiquitious on Windows
are simply not necessary. Mac OS X, being built on Unix, gains
this advantage to an extent, but the key thing it lacks, compared
to Linux, is precisely the cryptographically secure distribution
chain, which removes an obvious way for users to make mistakes
and do damage. (Windows, by contrast, has had what security
features it has bolted on as afterthoughts, and it shows.)
Of course, as computer users go, I am a statistical outlier. I am
a programmer, which means that I have to have a degree of control
over my computer that most users do not, because I have to be
able to configure it to build and test software, not just use it.
It also means that I actually like doing things like editing
/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf by hand to make sure DNS is set up just
the way I want it. Users with different requirements for their
computers will make different tradeoffs between control and
convenience, and that's fine. This post is about why I run Linux,
not why everyone should.
But to close, I do want to say one thing about Linux that should
be important to everyone. Control over your own computer is not just
for programmers. I'm not saying that every user should have to edit
/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf; but every user should own their computer,
and the software that runs on it. If you run Windows, you may not
realize it, but you don't own your software; you are "licensed" to
use it by Microsoft, and if you read the fine print in all those
license agreements that you probably clicked through without thinking,
you will find that you have signed up to allow Microsoft some pretty
draconian control over not just the specific software they gave you,
but your whole computer. And if the RIAA and MPAA get their way, it
could be law in the US that you have to allow such external control
over your computer, in the name of preventing "piracy". Apple is
somewhat better, since you can run the core of Mac OS X without
signing up for their DRM, but as soon as you use iTunes, you're in
about the same position as a Windows user. Only Linux has remained a
fully open OS where you own your computer, and you don't have to
"license" anything from anyone, or cede any of your rights to anyone,
to use it.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 11 Sep 2011 03:59 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Linux Kernel Site (Not) Cracked</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/kernel-org-not-cracked</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/kernel-org-not-cracked.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Unless you're a Linux nerd like me, you probably didn't hear that the
<a href="https://www.kernel.org/">kernel.org</a>
site, the "home" of the Linux kernel and the "official" place to get a
copy of its source code, was recently cracked. As far as I can tell
from the
<a href="http://www.google.com/#q=kernel.org+cracked">Internet oracle</a>, this
hasn't made the news outside of the Linux developer and distribution
community. If you're a conspiracy theorist, you might be thinking that
this not making the news is some kind of nefarious scheme to hide
flaws in the security of Linux. When a bank's server gets cracked,
everybody finds out in a New York minute. Why should Linux's kernel
source be any different?
The answer is in
<a href="https://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/171-jonathan-corbet/491001-the-cracking-of-kernelorg">this article</a>
on linux.com. Basically, the cracking of the kernel.org server was a
non-event, in security terms, because even though the cracker gained
root access to the server, he couldn't change any of the kernel source
code stored there without immediately raising alarms, because that code
is cryptographically signed in a way that cannot be forged. So the damage
was limited to having to take the servers offline once the cracking was
detected, to reinstall their operating systems and restore the stored
code repositories from backups (which were themselves checked against
the cryptographic signatures to make sure they were correct).
As a matter of fact, I wish this event would get wide news coverage,
but not because it shows any problem with Linux. Quite the opposite:
it is a perfect example of how professional software development and
distribution, particularly of something as critical as an operating
system, is supposed to be done. First, extremely strong security
precautions were taken against the possibility of a server being
cracked, even though such events are very rare on well-managed servers.
Nobody sat back and said, well, we do such a good job of securing our
servers against intrusion, we don't have to worry about what would be
compromised if somebody did get in. Second, when the compromise did
happen, the kernel development community was completely open about it.
Even though their server was cracked, they quite literally had nothing
to hide; everything was out in plain sight anyway, and the security
features that protected the source code have been public knowledge for
years. All the site maintainers had to do was point to them.
Oh, by the way: the Linux kernel, and the version control system
that protects its source code,
<a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a>,
are both free. And yet their developers set a standard of
professionalism that I strongly suspect is unmatched by
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows">proprietary</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X">systems</a>
that users pay good money for. Of course, we don't know if the source
code for those has ever been compromised, because it isn't out in the
open where anyone can check it. Perhaps that secrecy makes it safe.
We don't know. With Linux, we know. Which is one reason for what I
showed in my brief nerd interlude on
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/linux-is-20.html">Linux's 20th birthday</a>.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 02 Sep 2011 03:03 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Another Look At Marbury v. Madison</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison-another-look.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I just came across an
<a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1301448/posts">article</a>
that shows I'm not the only one who thinks that US Constitutional law
has gone a little overboard in its interpretation of the
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">Marbury v. Madison</a>
Supreme Court decision.
The article's position is summarized in this
paragraph, towards the end of the introduction:
<blockquote>
It is the fundamental betrayal of Marbury's premises and Marbury's logic
that accounts for nearly all of what is wrong with "constitutional law"
today. The twin peaks of constitutional law today are judicial supremacy
and interpretive license. Marbury refutes both propositions. Correctly
read, Marbury stands for constitutional supremacy rather than judicial
supremacy. And constitutional supremacy implies strict textualism as a
controlling method of constitutional interpretation, not free-wheeling
judicial discretion.
</blockquote>
The bit about "strict textualism" is explained further later on in the
article:
<blockquote>
Marbury's conception of written constitutionalism implies a particular
methodology of constitutional interpretation: originalist textualism -
that is, the binding authority of the written constitutional text,
considered as a whole and taken in context, as its words and phrases
would have been understood by reasonably well-informed speakers or
readers of the English language at the time. 
</blockquote>
As I noted in my previous post, this does raise questions when
considering issues that weren't even contemplated by the Framers, such
as whether wiretapping constitutes a "search and seizure" under the
Fourth Amendment, as in
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmstead_v._United_States">Olmstead v. United States</a>.
But such questions always end up being questions of classification,
not principle: whether wiretapping counts as a search and seizure,
rather than whether evidence obtained by a search and seizure without
a warrant is admissible (no one disputed that it was not). As I noted
in my previous post, many of the Court's classifications (such as what
they think counts as interstate commerce) are highly questionable, and
the logic suggested by the above quote can be used to see why. Would
an average American in 1790 have agreed that
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn">growing food on one's own property for one's own use counts as "interstate commerce"</a>?
I'm guessing not. So on the whole I think the methodology advocated
in the article is sound.
The full article is worth a read, and I won't belabor the details of its
arguments here (though I will note that the article focuses, as I did,
on Chief Justice's Marshall's statement that the Supreme Court's job is
to "say what the law is", and how that statement has been taken way out
of context). However, I can't resist one more quote:
<blockquote>
Marbury truly fits Mark Twain's definition of a "classic": a work that
everybody praises but nobody actually reads. Marbury is invoked today
for the myth it has become, not for its actual reasoning and logic.
</blockquote>
Which is a good brief summation of what I was getting at in my previous
post. (Please note that this is not a blanket endorsement of everything
on the Free Republic website, which is where the article is posted. The
article itself is from the Northwestern University School of Law.)
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:59 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Don't Tread On Our Internet, Part II</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/dont-tread-on-internet-redux</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet-redux.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
In a
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html">previous post</a>
I mentioned the
<a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/protect-ip-act-coica-redux">Protect IP Act</a>
as an example of government making things worse instead of better when it
tries to censor the Internet. Today I came across an article talking about
another very bad effect that the Protect IP Act would have if it were
passed: it would
<a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110825/23232315691/paul-vixie-explains-how-protect-ip-will-break-internet.shtml">break DNSSEC</a>,
which is a key security mechanism that lets your computer validate DNS
records, so that, for example, when you type your bank's URL into your
browser, you know that you're talking to your bank's server, instead of
some rogue site that has been set up to impersonate it.
Of course, as
the article also notes, this will not actually reduce online copyright
infringement, since people who really want to infringe can simply
bypass any blocking technology that is put in place (for example, if the
US were to mandate DNS filtering, people could just use DNS servers that
are outside the US). So once again, the law would impose substantial
burdens on legitimate uses of the Internet, without making a dent in
illegitimate ones. As I noted when I posted about
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote.html">my favorite Heinlein quote</a>
(I warned you I'd be referring to it again),
whenever you try to fix things by fiat, by controlling people, it
always ends up being a net loss.
(By the way, I haven't even gone into the fact that two key organizations
that are trying to get the government to pass the Protect IP Act, the
RIAA and MPAA, are doing it to prop up their outdated business models,
not out of any genuine concern for the people that actually create
"intellectual property". If they were really concerned about the actual
artists that create the IP they are selling, they wouldn't go to such great
lengths to
<a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2000/06/14/love">rip them off</a>.
But that's a whole other post.)
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 28 Aug 2011 16:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Happy Birthday, Linux!</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/linux-is-20</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/linux-is-20.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Twenty years ago (yesterday, to be exact, but cut me some slack here),
Linus Torvalds posted a message to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix,
announcing that he was working on a free operating system and wanted
to know what features people were interested in. The original message
is on Google Groups
<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/b813d52cbc5a044b?pli=1">here</a>.
So it's time for another
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/nerd-interlude.html">brief nerd interlude</a>:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>peter@localhost:~$ uname
Linux
</pre></div>
At some point I'll do a longer post on why the above is true, but for
now I think I'll just let it stand by itself. Thanks, Linus, for starting
it all 20 years ago, and thanks to all the developers and distributions
who have kept it going.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:37 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>My Favorite Heinlein Quote</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/favorite-heinlein-quote.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I've already referred to my favorite Heinlein quote
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html">once</a>,
and I'm sure I'll be doing it again, so I figured I might as well lay
it out in full and unpack in detail why it's my favorite quote. Here
it is, from Time Enough For Love, as noted on
<a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein">wikiquote</a>:
<blockquote>
The human race divides politically into those who want people to be
controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists
acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest
number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in
altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
</blockquote>
I'll start the unpacking with the following hypothesis: human progress,
which I will define in a moment, only comes from people of the second
class.
Heinlein himself, of course, was of the second class. All that business
about the people of the first class being "idealists" and those of the
second being surly curmudgeons was irony, particularly sharp irony
since it describes well how people of both classes see themselves, but
while people of the first class do tend to see those of the second as
surly curmudgeons, people of the second, like Heinlein and like me, do
not see those of the first as actually doing good. We see them (or
more precisely those of them who want to actually do the controlling
of others, as opposed to just wanting others to be controlled; I'll
expand on that later in this post) as infernal busybodies, whose general
effect on human history is best summed up by
<a href="http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/index.php?page=crybaby">this quote</a>
from Rick Moen:
<blockquote>
Experience suggests that, if we were able to kill off the
well-intentioned at birth, as a preventative measure, the leftover
evil-doers would be small potatoes, in comparison.
</blockquote>
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
How do I define "human progress"? Simple: it is anything that expands
the choices people have for how to live their lives, without infringing
on other people's choices. The reason I like this definition is that
if you propose it to people of the first class, you will have them
nodding their heads in agreement; yes, indeed, that's what progress
means. And yet, when we take this definition of progress to its logical
conclusion, we'll find that it confirms my hypothesis above: actual
human progress always comes from people of the second class. And so,
if you are of the first class, and you are in favor of human progress,
the best thing you can do to help is to switch to the second class.
Consider this simple question: do you, yourself, want to be
controlled? No, of course not. Nobody does. Everyone wants complete
freedom for himself. Most of us (grudgingly) accept that we can't have
complete freedom, because we have to share the planet with others. But
we want as much as we can get. We want it because we want, as the
definition of true human progress above says, to have as many choices
as possible for how to live our lives. We don't want to be restricted
by someone else's idea of what is "good" for us, or what is "proper",
or what is "right". We want, as responsible adults, the freedom to
decide those things for ourselves.
If you are of Heinlein's second class of people, this is no problem. You
don't want to be controlled, and you don't want to control others. The
situation is symmetric. You also, as Heinlein noted, will be a more
comfortable neighbor, because you aren't always sticking your nose into
other people's business.
But if you are of the first class, you have a cognitive dissonance
problem. You don't want to be controlled, but you do want others to
be controlled, even though the others themselves don't want to be
controlled. This situation is not symmetric, but our evolved ape
brains are very adept at inventing rationalizations for the asymmetry.
We say that people need to be controlled in the name of "security",
for example. Or we say that they need to be controlled because
otherwise they will corrupt our children. And so on.
But, you might think, wouldn't people's natural desire not to be
controlled stop these rationalizations from working? Well, that's where
somebody of class one, somewhere way back in human history, invented a
neat trick. A person of class one wants other people to be controlled,
but this does not mean every person of class one wants to do the
controlling. Like everything else, it's easier to get someone or
something else to do the hard work if at all possible. So when a person
of class one comes along who does want to do the controlling, they
can simply attach a little rider to all those rationalizations I
mentioned above: yes, people need to be controlled to protect our
security, or to protect the children, or whatever, and I will take
care of all that if you just give me the power to do the controlling.
And it works! People of class one, it turns out, will happily submit
to being controlled if they think that they are thereby obtaining
security from the crazy antics of all those other loons who don't
want to be controlled.
And note that if you are the lucky person of class one who gets to do
the controlling, you get the best of both worlds: you get to claim to
be a person of class one, so you don't set off the alarms that people
of class two set off in the minds of all the other people of class one,
but you also get all the freedom that people of class two want, plus
power. Nice work if you can get it. We'll come back to this in a
little bit.
I have stated the above in roundabout terms, but of course what we
have here, in plain English, is a dominance-submission hierarchy.
It is far older than the human species. It has been one of
evolution's handy solutions to organizing social animals since its
invention. Cognitive scientists are finding that we have "modules" for
this behavior pattern pretty much hard-wired into our brains. From
that standpoint, it is not a mystery why the trick works. What is a
mystery, at least from this viewpoint, is why it doesn't work on
everyone: why there are any people at all of the second class.
Of course old-fashioned liberal philosophy has the answer to this one:
human beings are not just animals. Somehow, we managed to cross a line
and become persons. And once you're a full-fledged person, the whole
system of dominance and submission looks the way socialism looked to
E. O. Wilson:
<a href="http://www.froes.dds.nl/WILSON.htm">great idea, wrong species</a>.
Human beings are not insects. You don't have to believe that humans were
made in the image of God to believe this; indeed, you don't even have to
believe that there is a God. But you do have to believe that human
beings are persons, and that persons, while they are evolved animals,
are not just animals. We have some extra quality that makes us unique,
different from other animals. This extra quality doesn't have to be
anything mystical or mysterious; the simple fact that we are capable of
even thinking about and discussing the question of "human progress" at
all will do. Insects don't have elaborate debates on how best to run
the hive.
In other words, as soon as you have the ability to even think about
a concept like the "good" life, as soon as you can even consider one
potential future vs. another in the abstract and label one as "better",
over a whole lived life instead of just limited to the next meal, you
have crossed a line, and you have only two choices. One is to exit the
whole scheme that evolution evolved for organizing social animals; it
quite simply no longer applies to you, because it evolved in animals
that didn't have the conceptual ability that you have. This makes you
a person of the second class: you don't want to be controlled, and you
don't want to control anyone else either. As I noted above, this
situation is symmetric, and it makes for a minimum of hassle.
The other choice is to yield to the temptation of the Ring, as
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkien.html">Tolkien</a>
would have put it. You find yourself in possession of a great secret:
you now know that it is possible to not be controlled, that you can
have a "good" life completely free of the dominance-submission hierarchy
that evolution saddles social animals with. But why should you share
this secret with anyone else? Why not use it instead, to put yourself
at the top of the hierarchy?
Of course, to do that consciously, with full malice aforethought, as it
were, you would have to be evil, wouldn't you? But there's a handy
dodge for this too. Taking power, putting yourself at the top of the
hierarchy, just for yourself would be evil, but if you do it for a
good cause, that is quite another matter. After all, there is so much
that is wrong with the world, and yet nobody seems to be fixing all
these wrong things; they just seem to go on and on. But you, of
course, have a great idea for really fixing something, really making
a difference. All you need is the power to do so. And we've already
seen how you can get that: just work the trick we saw above on all the
other people of class one, and get them to help you impose your system
of control on the people of class two.
But doesn't this count as human progress? Okay, so it was done using
the Ring; but even so, didn't something get fixed that needed fixing?
Maybe, for a time anyway. But the fixes, even if they are fixes at
first, don't last. What does last is the system of power that the
well-intentioned people of class one construct to implement their
fixes. And the first thing such a system does is to make sure that
nobody else has a chance at the top. And so, as Richard Feynman said
in his eloquent essay,
<a href="http://alexpetrov.com/memes/sci/value.html">The Value Of Science</a>,
<blockquote>
we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, "This is it, boys,
man is saved!" and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of
authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination.
</blockquote>
In other words, as soon as you use power to "fix" something by fiat,
by controlling people, you always end up taking away more choices
than you open up. It always turns out to be a net loss, not a net gain.
And so no real human progress ever comes from people of class one.
It's often difficult to see this because the perceived gains from
controlling people are visible and immediate, while the losses from
restricting other choices are often invisible and take time to be
felt. For example, in the
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html">previous post</a>
where I referred to my favorite Heinlein quote, I talked about efforts
to censor the Internet in the name of some "good cause", such as
preventing computer viruses or child porn. Advocates of such schemes
always talk about the obvious, visible benefits, but they never talk
about the hidden costs: all the good things that could be done on the
Internet that haven't been thought of yet, but which would be harder,
or even impossible, on a censored Internet. We can't know today how
valuable those things might be, any more than someone in, say, 1995
could know how valuable Google would be today. But that's exactly why
we can't afford to, as Feynman said, confine future innovators to the
limits of our present imagination.
The conflict I am describing is an age-old one in philosophy:
which is more important, virtue or liberty? W. H. Auden described it
as the difference between the European and the American viewpoints;
an article in Life magazine in November 1947, which is
<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=p1EEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38#v=onepage&q&f=false">readable online</a>
via the wonder of Google Books, quotes him thus:
<blockquote>
Europe's faith, as a recent essay by W. H. Auden puts it, involves
the proposition that virtue is prior to liberty: you must do and think
right, by free choice if possible, but in any case you must do and
think right. The American proposition is that liberty is prior to
virtue: it is better to choose wrong than to have right chosen for you,
since freedom of choice "is the human prerequisite without which virtue
and vice have no meaning."
</blockquote>
(I believe the Auden essay in question is in The Dyer's Hand, but I
have not found it online.)
It should be obvious that Heinlein and I and everybody of class two
are on the American side in this. "Freedom of choice" is simply
another unique quality of humans that makes us persons, unlike other
animals. (I could argue that it's actually the same quality that I
was talking about above, but that will have to wait for another post.)
The only thing I would add is that the European proposition assumes,
without proof, that it is even possible to ensure virtue by making
it prior to liberty; and if history teaches anything, it teaches that
that is a pipe dream. Even the most draconian systems of control in
history, such as the medieval Christian Church, came nowhere near
ensuring that people would "do and think right". If anything, people
have probably been more virtuous, on average, in societies that
have given them the liberty to decide for themselves what "virtue" is.
Which is, of course, precisely the American point.
Does any of this guarantee that real progress will come from people
of class two? Of course not; there are no guarantees. But at least
we of class two recognize the plain fact that human beings cannot be
controlled. We are simply too complex. Still less can reality itself
be controlled. That may seem strange to say in this scientific age,
but any real scientist will be the first to tell you how vast is our
ignorance. The supposed "security" that the people of class one at the
top of the hierarchy are promising to the other people of class one
underneath them is an illusion; it can't actually be had at any
price. The best we can do is to let everyone use their own judgment
about how to make the choices they have. This certainly isn't perfect,
but at least it makes progress possible, which is more than can be
said of the alternative.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:17 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Two Cultures Redux: But Wait, There's More</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/but-wait-theres-more</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/but-wait-theres-more.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
The New York Times, which is certainly a bastion of the liberal arts
types if anywhere is, has been running a debate about law school that
is similar to the one about college in general that I discussed in
my post a couple of weeks ago on the
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/two-articles-two-cultures.html">two cultures</a>.
The question under debate is: "Should the standard three years of law
school, followed by the bar exam, be the only path to a legal career?"
I won't bother canvassing most of the responses, which are predictable.
What got my attention were a couple of responses that got into that same
"two cultures" territory that prompted my last rant.
First up is a law professor who wants us to know that law school is
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/21/the-case-against-law-school/the-right-preparation-for-lawyer-citizens">not a trade school</a>:
<blockquote>
At the risk of sounding "liberal artsy," law school should emphasize
educated citizenship. It prepares people to become leaders in our
society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as
thinkers. They will become stewards of policies that affect our everyday
lives: in our schools, our jobs and our families. All of this
responsibility, in diverse fields, comes from legal education.
</blockquote>
I hardly know where to start, but perhaps that phrase "liberal artsy"
will do. So a degree in, say, physics, or chemistry, or engineering
doesn't qualify one to be a "steward" of important policies? Not even
a degree in one of those other liberal arts, like literature? "All
of this responsibility" can only be had if you first get a law degree?
Wow.
The standard liberal artsy argument, of course, is that one doesn't
have to actually understand the details of a technical field, like
physics or chemistry, in order to be a "steward of policies" that are
dependent on such a field. One can always learn enough to know which
experts in the field to trust. I would hope that my last rant, and the
observations of C. P. Snow that I quoted there, would be sufficient
refutation of that, but in case you don't think it is, consider this
from
<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html">Paul Graham</a>:
<blockquote>
Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends
all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they
have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature,
and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how
to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which
group is more worried?
We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal
got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art
of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A
couple weeks?
What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a
parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?
</blockquote>
My experience leads me to a similar conclusion. I would much rather have
a scientifically educated person making policy and having to learn the
political stuff as they go, then have a liberal arts educated person
making policy and having to learn the science as they go.
But even that conclusion assumes that those are the only choices. Why
do they have to be? And no, I'm not talking about those
"interdisciplinary" degrees. I'm talking about the misconception that
there should be any rule for choosing "leaders in our society", other
than doing stuff that works. No one group, no one academic discipline,
has a lock on "educated citizenship". This is America; we are all
supposed to be educated citizens. And there are no degrees in that
discipline; we all learn it on the job.
Even focusing on "degrees" in the first place ignores all the other
areas of experience that are highly relevant to citizenship, such as
serving in the military, or even something simple like being a good
neighbor. If we look at the track records of "stewards of policies",
it certainly doesn't look to me like law degrees, or indeed any degrees,
stack up very well against those other types of experiences. (The hard
sciences know this; people outside the standard "academic" circles can
get work published if it's good. Einstein, of course, was a Patent
Office clerk when he published his five classic scientific papers, in
1905, in the most prestigious physics journal in the world at that
time, Annalen der Physik.) Have our Presidents, or Senators, or
Representatives, with law degrees been better, on balance, than
those with other backgrounds? Congress is certainly chock full of
lawyers now, and look at it.
But wait, there's more. Another law professor says that a law degree
is
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/21/the-case-against-law-school/a-law-degree-is-priceless">priceless</a>
because of the experience it gives you:
<blockquote>
My own decision to attend law school was based in part upon my
perception, still shared by those who rush our doors, that a legal
education provides an unparalleled opportunity to understand the
intersection of private and public power, to explore the rationale for
the organization of human society and to participate more knowledgeably
and effectively in every aspect of human endeavor.
</blockquote>
I guess I can't quarrel with the "intersection of private and public
power" part; lawyers certainly get to see that first-hand. But unlike
the law professor, I regard that as a bug, not a feature. As Chesterton
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/316508">said</a>:
<blockquote>
[T]he horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about
all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policeman, is not
that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid
(several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have
got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all
they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful
court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.
</blockquote>
It seems to me that the best way to "participate more knowledgeably
and effectively" in society is to actually participate in it, not to
sit above it and tinker with the rules. And I'm all for exploring the
"rationale for the organization of human society", but again, that's
part of educated citizenship, and no one group or discipline has a
special private line to the right answers. We can only judge by the
actual track record.
In fact, the law professor says so himself:
<blockquote>
When the history of legal education is written, the important
question...will be, "Did our legal education system deliver equal
justice under law?"
</blockquote>
The answer in our society today, I submit, is quite often "no". Too
bad the professor thought the question was just rhetorical.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Aug 2011 02:40 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>A Brief Nerd Interlude</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/nerd-interlude</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/nerd-interlude.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
For non-nerd readers, I promise I won't do this very often, but once in
a while I just have to get these sorts of things out of my system. Does
anyone else find the following (from a transcript of a short Unix shell
session) a little weird?
<div class="codehilite"><pre>peter@localhost:~$ true
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
0
peter@localhost:~$ false
peter@localhost:~$ echo $?
1
</pre></div>
The test of whether you're a nerd reader or not, of course, is first,
whether the above makes sense to you, and second, if it does, do you
immediately see why I find it weird?
(And for the really nerdy nerds who are brimming full of explanations
of why it's not really weird at all, it makes perfect sense for things
to be that way, yes, I know why it's that way. I write Unix shell programs
too. I just said it was a little weird, not that it was bad engineering.
It isn't, all things considered.)
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Aug 2011 02:19 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Wow, Sometimes Things Actually Work</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/sometimes-things-actually-work</guid>
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<description><![CDATA[
<div>
In the interest of keeping the record honest following my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/no-intelligent-life.html">last post</a>,
it's only fair to report that I have now been pleasantly surprised.
Not relishing the prospect of a phone call (including most probably a
lengthy time spent on hold), I decided to try email first. Believe it
or not, my email was actually acted on within a day, and I have now
received confirmation that the claim is being handled properly. Whoever
read my email and did the right thing, I doubt you're reading this, but
thanks. You've saved my wife and me (and your company as well) a
significant amount of hassle. It's nice to be reminded that things can
actually work.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 29 Jul 2011 21:44 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Beam Me Up Scotty, There's No Intelligent Life Here</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/no-intelligent-life</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/no-intelligent-life.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Today I had one of those experiences that make you wonder how anything
ever gets accomplished in our society.
A couple of days ago I faxed in a
claim form to our health care spending account for some prescription
copays. After I faxed the form, I realized that I hadn't signed it, so
I signed it and faxed it again.
Today I got an email from the agency that processes the forms. It
referenced two claim forms received. The first claim form was marked as
"pending" with the following note:
<blockquote>
PLEASE SIGN THE CLAIM FORM AND RESUBMIT FOR CONSIDERATION.
</blockquote>
The second claim form was marked as "denied", with the following note:
<blockquote>
THIS CLAIM IS A DUPLICATE OF A PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED CLAIM.
</blockquote>
The real fun will be when I call the 800 number and speak to a human
and see if they can actually fix this without my having to fax the form
a third time. Bets, anyone?
Update (29 July 2011): The issue has been
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/sometimes-things-actually-work.html">fixed</a>.
It still makes a good story, though. ;)
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 28 Jul 2011 03:10 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Two Articles and Two Cultures</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/two-articles-two-cultures</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/two-articles-two-cultures.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I recently came across two articles talking about whether a traditional
college education is really worth it any more, and they awakened a pet
peeve of mine.
The first article, which is titled
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/03/stephens.college/">College is a waste of time</a>,
is by a 19-year-old recipient of a Thiel Fellowship, which he is using
to organize "UnCollege" as an alternative to the traditional college
education, which he says
<blockquote>
...rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than
collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than
application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out
of us.
</blockquote>
All of these are commonplace (and often valid) criticisms, and the writer
goes on to talk about a different way, in what by now are familiar (and
again often valid) terms:
<blockquote>
The success of people who never completed or attended college makes us
question whether what we need to learn is taught in school. Learning by
doing -- in life, not classrooms -- is the best way to turn constant
iteration into true innovation. We can be productive members of society
without submitting to academic or corporate institutions. We are the
disruptive generation creating the "free agent economy" built by
entrepreneurs, creatives, consultants and small businesses...
</blockquote>
But then, right after the end of the paragraph from which I just quoted,
I found a link to an article by the president of Wesleyan University on
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/21/roth.liberal.education/index.html?iref=allsearch">Why liberal arts matter</a>,
in which I read:
<blockquote>
A well-rounded education gave graduates more tools with which to solve
problems, broader perspectives through which to see opportunities and a
deeper capacity to build a more humane society.
</blockquote>
This sounded all right (if a bit vague), but already I was wondering about
the contrast with the article I just clicked from. So college is supposed
to be part of a well-rounded education after all? I read on:
<blockquote>
Already at liberal arts schools across the country there is increasing
interest in the sciences from students who are also studying history,
political science, literature and the arts. At Wesleyan, neuroscience
and behavior is one of our fastest growing majors, and programs linking
the sciences, arts and humanities have been areas of intense creative
work.
</blockquote>
This is still vague and general (and the only specific major given,
neuroscience and behavior, looks like straightforward science to me). How
about some specific examples? Well, the article does give a few; these two
in particular struck me:
<blockquote>
...a philosophy and chemistry major at Wesleyan...founded [a]
biotech chemistry company...to "transform the way serious diseases
are treated."
...an interdisciplinary social science major at Wesleyan...helped
restructure the U.S. auto industry as a deputy director of the
National Economic Council.
</blockquote>
You will note that neither of these examples illustrates any kind of
synergy between the liberal arts and the sciences. The first person's
hard science major (chemistry) has an obvious relationship to his
achievement, but did his philosophy major really play any role? (Later
on, the article says that "cultural understanding, economic planning
and ethical reasoning" are needed to effectively deliver vaccines, but
it would be nice to see some evidence that a philosophy major, for
example, actually has any special expertise in any of these areas,
beyond what any well-informed citizen, or chemistry major for that
matter, would have.) Reading the second example, one wonders whether
economics is included in "interdisciplinary social science", as
otherwise there seems to be no connection at all between the education
and the achievement, not to mention that the achievement itself is
hardly "interdisciplinary"; were any technical people, such as
engineers, at the big three automakers consulted about what they
thought might help? Based on what I've read about the "restructuring",
I'm guessing not.
I can only surmise that the CNN site put the link to the second article
in the middle of the first one to provide some kind of "balance" in
viewpoints. If so, the second article seems to me to come up short in
the comparison. The message I get from the two articles combined is
not that college is, after all, worthwhile for some people, if not for
all; instead, what emerges from the comparison is that, while a degree
in science (preferably hard science) might be useful, one in liberal
arts might well be, as the first article suggests, a waste of time.
You are probably wondering, having read the title of this post, how
I've managed to come this far without mentioning C. P. Snow. Fear
not; I was simply saving him for the coda. Of course the comparison
between the two articles above brings to mind his
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures">famous speech</a>
about the "two cultures"; but I wonder how many liberal arts majors
realize that he was not talking about scientists being ignorant of
the humanities, but the opposite:
<blockquote>
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by
the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated
and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity
at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked
and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second
Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative.
Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of:
Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question - such as,
What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific
equivalent of saying, Can you read? - not more than one in ten of the
highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.
So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of
the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight
into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
</blockquote>
And this type of ignorance is worse than ignorance about the arts and
literature, because it's about things that can be objectively tested.
We can argue forever about whether a given novel is "good" or not, or
whether "absolute truth" is possible, or whether we can truly "know"
anything, and liberal arts types often do. But we know to a moral
certainty that the Earth is round, not flat; that it goes around the
Sun; that energy is conserved and "perpetual motion" is impossible;
that human beings evolved from apes, and in fact all living things
on Earth evolved from a single common ancestor; and a host of other
scientific facts. And yet non-scientists can still get away with being
ignorant of, or even denying, these facts, or saying things like "the
jury is still out" on evolution, without being hooted down in derision.
(As the comedian Lewis Black said about George W. Bush when he made
that remark about evolution, "What jury, where? The Scopes trial is
over.")
But at least everyone agrees on the ultimate goal, don't they? Both
articles appear to:
<blockquote>
It's not a question of authorities; it's a question of priorities.
We who take our education outside and beyond the classroom
understand how actions build a better world. We will change the
world regardless of the letters after our names.
We should have confidence, as my parents did, that a broadly based,
liberal education will help our young people lead lives of creative
productivity, lives in which they can make meaning from and
contribute to the world around them.
</blockquote>
So we all agree that we want to make the world a better place. But
in that case, it seems to me that we don't need Shakespeare or a
philosophy major or an interdisciplinary degree to tell us the right
thing to do. We already know that. What we need is practical knowledge
of how to solve the practical problems that stand in the way of a
better world for all. In other words, science and technology.
Of course the liberal arts types have an obvious retort: if science and
technology are so great, how come we still have all these problems?
And how come we now have new problems, like environmental pollution,
that we didn't have (or at least it's claimed we didn't have them)
before science and technology entered the picture? Doesn't that show
that we need input from the humanities in order to use science and
technology for good ends?
The problem is that, if we look at the barriers that are keeping
people from taking advantage of known solutions to their problems, we
find that they are mostly economic and political, not technological.
(The same goes for the reasons why cultures of the past, for example,
often weren't such good stewards of the environment as they are
portrayed in the liberal arts version of history.) And those economic
and political barriers have not changed much through all of human
history. Science and technology, on the other hand, keep discovering
ways to not so much remove the barriers as make them irrelevant. (The
medium by which you are reading this is one outstanding example.)
Daniel Dennett (a philosopher, no less!) gave a similar answer to
a similar point, in the essay "When Philosophers Encounter Artificial
Intelligence", which appears in his book Brainchildren. He was
talking about other philosophers' responses to AI in particular (Hilary
Putnam's in this case, but he makes similar comments about other
philosophers elsewhere), but what he says applies just as well to the
general case we've been discussing:
<blockquote>
But still one may well inquire, echoing Putnam's challenge, whether
AI has taught philosophers anything of importance about the mind yet.
Putnam thinks it has not, and supports his view with a rhetorically
curious indictment: AI has utterly failed, over a quarter century,
to solve problems that philosophy has utterly failed to solve over
two millennia. He is right, I guess, but I am not impressed. It is
as if a philosopher were to conclude a dismissal of contemporary
biology by saying that the biologists have not so much as asked the
question: What is Life? Indeed they have not; they have asked better
questions that ought to dissolve or redirect the philosopher's
curiosity.
</blockquote>
Yes, science has utterly failed, in a few hundred years, to solve
problems that the "liberal arts" have utterly failed to solve over
the entire length of human history. Science recognizes when something
isn't working, and tries something different. Liberal arts types keep
on saying that if we just try one more time (using their pet solution,
of course), maybe it will work. Isn't the classic definition of insanity
repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different
results?
All of which further underscores the comparison between the two
articles I started with. The first article recognizes that a standard
college education isn't working for many people, and proposes trying
something different. The second, purporting to address the same issues
as the first, proposes...more standard college education. You do the
math.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:34 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Greatest Tragedy of American History</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/greatest-tragedy-of-american-history</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/greatest-tragedy-of-american-history.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
After posting last week about
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html">how the Supreme Court's role has evolved</a>
since the US Constitution was adopted, I did some more poking around
on the
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/">Charters of Freedom</a>
site.
I found a
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_of_freedom_10.html">page on the US Civil War</a>
that includes the following interesting paragraph:
<blockquote>
At stake in the Civil War was the survival of the United States of
America as a single nation. Eleven Southern states, invoking the spirit
of 1776, seceded from the Union in 1861 to form a nation they named the
Confederate States of America. The Federal Government refused to allow
it. Massive armies representing the Union and the Confederacy squared
off in a conflict that tested the experiment in self-government as never
before. At the end of the Civil War's carnage, the primacy of the
Federal Government over the states was indisputably upheld.
</blockquote>
Those who attended similar history classes to the ones I had may well
wonder: what about slavery? It isn't mentioned at all in the (admittedly
short) Charters of Freedom page. But Lincoln himself would not have been
surprised, since he said often that his primary concern was the Union,
not slavery. In a
<a href="http://www.classicallibrary.org/lincoln/greeley.htm">letter to Horace Greeley in 1862</a>,
he wrote:
<blockquote>
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is
not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by
freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by
freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.
</blockquote>
What's more, the leaders of the Confederacy would also not have been
surprised to read that the Union went to war to assert Federal supremacy
over the states.
<a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/08/rabble-of-imperial-rome.html">This post</a>
by Mencius Moldbug includes an interesting quote from R. L. Dabney, who
was a chaplain in the Confederate Army and chief of staff to Stonewall
Jackson:
<blockquote>
History will some day place the position of these Confederate States,
in this high argument, in the clearest light of her glory. The cause
they undertook to defend was that of regulated constitutional liberty,
and of fidelity to law and covenants, against the licentious violence
of physical power. The assumptions they resisted were precisely those
of that radical democracy, which deluged Europe with blood at the close
of the eighteenth century, and which shook its thrones again in the
convulsions of 1848; the agrarianism which, under the name of equality,
would subject all the rights of individuals to the will of the many,
and acknowledge no law nor ethics, save the lust of that mob which
happens to be the larger.
</blockquote>
Perhaps the greatest tragedy in American history, in my opinion, is
that the South was able to base its economy on slavery. The Framers of
the US Constitution basically punted on the slavery issue, and I suppose
we can't really blame them, since they were having a tough enough time
getting a Constitution in place at all. They did at least manage to
put in the
<a href="http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#A1Sec9">clause</a>
that ended the slave trade after 1808. After that, according to what
students in US schools are taught in history class, the South kept its
slavery-based economy while the North realized that slavery was wrong
and worked to abolish it, eventually leading to the US Civil War, when
the issue was decided once and for all.
But what isn't often talked about is that the South had a valid point
too. The Union was supposed to be a balance between Federal power and
States' rights, and yet Federal power kept expanding. Had the South
taken a stand in defense of what the Constitution was supposed to stand
for, on any issue other than slavery, they would at least have had a
chance of being heard. All during the antebellum period, the South kept
trying to keep the Federal government from getting too large and taking
on too much power. The South tried to
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_and_Virginia_Resolutions">make sure the Federal government respected the Constitution</a>,
and tried to
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_Crisis">keep Federal power from being used to favor some parts of the country over others</a>.
But the South was mostly disregarded, because
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Calhoun">they</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise">were</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmot_Proviso">defending</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850">slavery</a>.
That one fact was enough to outweigh everything else. (To be fair,
while the South defended states' rights when a state was supporting
slavery, they were quite ready to insist on using Federal power over
states' rights when a state was against slavery, as in the case of
Wisconsin's attempted nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850.)
The North's hands were not exactly clean, either. Northern merchants,
particularly those of New England,
<a href="http://www.slavenorth.com/profits.htm">profited from the slave trade</a>
until it ended. And as noted above, the North did not hesitate to use
its growing industrial superiority to its advantage in national politics
(though to be fair, President Andrew Jackson, who was in office during
the Nullification Crisis, was a southerner from Tennessee). Meanwhile,
the cotton gin gave the South a staple crop that sustained its economy
just long enough for the slavery issue to boil over, and for the South's
leaders to have solidified their position on states' rights and the
necessity of secession if they could not get what they considered to be
fair treatment at the North's hands.
So from the South's point of view, they were, as Dabney says, simply
asserting their right to opt out of a country and a Constitution that
had morphed into something they could no longer sign up to. But the
slavery issue was enough to close off even that option. Lincoln could
say that the war was about the Union, not slavery; but the very fact
that he felt he had to say this, and say it often, shows that in the
minds of most people in the North, the primary issue was slavery, not
the Union. They were fighting to free the slaves, and it was only to
achieve that objective that they were willing to change the Union from
a completely voluntary agreement between "Free and Independent States",
as the Declaration of Independence has it, to something that, in this
respect, was more like the Mafia or the IRA: once you're in, you're
never out. As Confederate general John B. Gordon
<a href="http://www.civilwarhome.com/gordoncauses.htm">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>
The South maintained with the depth of religious conviction that the
Union formed under the Constitution was a Union of consent and not
of force; that the original States were not the creatures but the
creators of the Union; that these States had gained their independence,
their freedom, and their sovereignty from the mother country, and had
not surrendered these on entering the Union; that by the express terms
of the Constitution all rights and powers not delegated were reserved
to the States; and the South challenged the North to find one trace of
authority in that Constitution for invading and coercing a sovereign
State.
The North, on the other hand, maintained with the utmost confidence
in the correctness of her position that the Union formed under the
Constitution was intended to be perpetual; that sovereignty was a unit
and could not be divided; that whether or not there was any express
power granted in the Constitution for invading a State, the right of
self-preservation was inherent in all governments; that the life of
the Union was essential to the life of liberty; or, in the words of
Webster, "liberty and union are one and inseparable."
</blockquote>
When I called this a tragedy, I was not just talking about the South,
as if I were rehashing Gone With The Wind. I was talking about all
of the United States of America. Our entire nation changed as a result
of these events, and it wasn't entirely for the better. But given the
strongly held convictions on both sides, with some genuine merit on both
sides, how could it have been avoided? Both sides were trapped, not just
by their flaws, but by their principles, into a situation where there
was no longer any compromise possible, and so
<a href="http://www.civilwarhome.com/casualties.htm">more than half a million Americans had to die</a>.
That is a tragedy.
<h1>Postscript: Not Entirely A Tragedy?</h1>
Another thing that isn't often talked about is that
<a href="http://www.civilwarhome.com/europeandcivilwar.htm">Europe really, really wanted the South to win the US Civil War</a>.
As the article just linked to notes, this was one reason why Lincoln
changed his tune and issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862,
explicitly making it a goal of the war to free the slaves. Europe, up
until then, had played dumb and said that, well, since the US Government
had said that it was not fighting to free the slaves, but only to
preserve the Union, there was no moral issue involved, and so it was
quite okay for them to help the South. Lincoln realized that he had to
take away that smokescreen.
But why did Europe want the South to win? The article linked to above
says it was because they wanted the American experiment with "democracy"
to fail, but I think it's more than that. I think they knew, even then,
that the United States, if left to itself, was going to become a
superpower, and they wanted to nip that in the bud. Many people these
days might well say a non-superpower USA would have been a better
outcome. But consider some alternative paths that history could have
taken.
First, suppose the South had won the Civil War, and ever since, there
had been two countries between Canada and Mexico, instead of one. In that
case, I strongly suspect that Germany and France, for example, would
still be fighting each other, just as they did for centuries before the
US came along. Western Europe (and Japan) would not have had more than
half a century of peace following World War II, courtesy of the United
States of America. A divided USA and CSA, I believe, would simply not
have had either the strength or the will to get involved in Europe's
affairs to such an extent.
In the light of this alternative, the Union was more important than
slavery, just as Lincoln believed. But now consider a second
alternative: suppose slavery had not been an issue. Suppose that the
South had had to transform its economy as the North did, so that the
question of slavery was simply taken off the table. Would the South
still have stood up for those ideals that Dabney enumerated, while the
North pushed for more Federal power? Would the Union still have been
fractured, but without the issue of slavery to make it worthwhile, in
the eyes of the people of the North, to fight to preserve it? We might
have ended up in much the same situation as the first alternative, with
two countries instead of one, but split not just over slavery, but over
an entire spectrum of political ideas.
And there's even a third alternative: suppose the Union had not been
fractured. Suppose that, not just slavery, but all of the Constitutional
questions that are raised in the quotes above, had been peacefully
solved by the middle of the nineteenth century, by finding a reasonable
equilibrium between Federal power and States' rights. Would even a
unified United States of America, having gone through that process, have
been willing to get involved in European wars? Would we have remained
isolated on our side of the oceans, wanting to avoid what George
Washington in his farewell address called "entangling alliances"? Could
we, even, have been forced to get involved by an attack on American soil
worse than 9/11, worse than Pearl Harbor?
Of course playing the what-if game is entertaining, but you can't let it
get out of hand. We have the history we have, and we can't go back and
change it; we can only try to learn from it. I am not really trying to
argue that the way things turned out was, all things considered, the
best of all possible worlds. It might have been, but if so, that just
shows that even the best of all possible worlds can suck pretty bad. And
not just because six hundred thousand Americans died in the US Civil War.
If we are going to be fair about the record since, we have to consider,
not just the fact that the US kept Western Europe at peace after World
War II, but the fact that it arguably
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations">contributed</a>
to making the situation so dire that World War II happened in the
first place. Not to mention that the Union has
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal">continued</a>
on the path of more and more centralized power, a trend which not
everyone agrees is a good thing.
Perhaps the deepest lesson we can learn from the US Civil War is that
people can honestly disagree even about fundamental principles. On the
last day of deliberation of the Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia in 1787, Ben Franklin was asked, "What have we got, a
Republic or a Monarchy?" Franklin
<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/73/1593.html">replied</a>,
"A Republic, if you can keep it." Both sides in the US Civil War
sincerely believed they were fighting to keep it. And both sides were
right, and wrong. But once the fight was over, those who had fought
showed each other respect. Confederate general
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_E._Johnston">Joseph E. Johnston</a>
died of pneumonia contracted when he took off his hat as a sign of
respect at the funeral of his old adversary, Union general Sherman.
Today the USA gets scant thanks from Europe for keeping that continent
at peace since 1945, and Republicans and Democrats in the US seem
unable to credit each other with any good intentions at all. I doubt
if any leaders of the various political factions, in the US or in the
world as a whole, could write the kind of fair summary of their
opponent's views that General Gordon wrote of his. That's something
we need to fix if their sacrifice is to be, if not less tragic, at
least not futile.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 21 Jul 2011 02:11 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>A Bit Of Shameless Vanity</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/vanity</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/vanity.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
My alma mater, MIT, has always been in the forefront of Internet presence
(since the Internet was, after all, largely developed there). Quite a few
years ago now, the
<a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm">Open Courseware</a>
site was launched, which contains free online lecture notes, readings,
past problem sets, and past exams for just about all of MIT's courses. To
anyone who believes in the free sharing of knowledge, this is a great
thing. But I found out today that MIT has gone one better; it also has
<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/">DSpace</a>,
a site that makes MIT research materials freely available online.
When I got to the site and read the description, I immediately wondered:
do they have theses posted? And of course the answer is yes; so here,
for your reading pleasure, are my MIT theses, now available to the world
courtesy of DSpace!
<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/44668">Bachelor's</a>
<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/44669">Master's</a>
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:10 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>A Living Constitution?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/marbury-v-madison</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/marbury-v-madison.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
After I posted my
<a href="http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/independence-day.html">independence day post</a>,
I spent some time browsing around the
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/">Charters of Freedom</a>
site at the US national archives, which is where the transcript of
the original Declaration of Independence is hosted. I noticed that,
along with the pages on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the
Bill of Rights, they have a page there on the
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_of_freedom_8.html">Marbury v Madison</a>
Supreme Court case.
That reminded me of an article on
<a href="http://www.jonathantweet.com/jotptxcourts.html">courts and majorities</a>
that I read years ago on Jonathan Tweet's website, and a discussion I
had online with Tweet as a result, where we reached a conclusion that
is probably not quite what the writers of the Charters of Freedom page
were thinking when they wrote that "the U.S. Supreme Court has...resolved
some of the most dramatic confrontations in U.S. history."
Jonathan Tweet was one of the designers of D&D 3rd Edition, which is
how I first found his website, but he likes to range all over the map
in his web posts, and since I do too, I've had several interesting
exchanges online with him. His main thesis in the article I have just
mentioned was that the US courts provide a much-needed counterweight
to the tyranny of the majority in a democratic system:
<blockquote>
Elected officials violate our ideals because the people who vote for
them want them to, and because they want to themselves. What the
courts do, on the other hand, is hold us accountable for our own
ideals. That's why so many people hate the courts. Courts favor the
high-minded principles that people can put down on paper when they
think in terms of liberty, equality, and personal sovereignty. They
don't favor the hatreds and prejudices that people express when they
try to put their neighbors in their places.
</blockquote>
This sounded good to me when I first read it, but as it happened, soon
after that I read a book, The Living U. S. Constitution, by Saul K.
Padover, which talked about major Supreme Court decisions and showed how
the viewpoint of the Court has evolved over time. And, as I pointed out
in a discussion thread on Tweet's message forums (unfortunately the
exchange appears to have vanished from the web, which is one reason why
I'm writing this post now), what I saw in the book was quite different
from what Tweet's article portrayed. There are certainly cases in which
the Supreme Court has upheld our ideals against popular prejudice (Brown
v. Board of Education is probably the canonical example). The problem is
that the Court does a lot more than that, and not all of it is in
harmony with those same ideals.
In the aforementioned discussion thread, I gave a number of examples
culled from the book (and I'll discuss some of them below), but at the
time it never occurred to me to wonder just how far back I could go and
still see signs of the pattern I was describing. Later on, thinking over
the question again, I realized that I could make a case that the pattern
goes all the way back to the very
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison">Marbury v. Madison</a>
decision that the Charters of Freedom page talks about.
You're probably familiar with the facts of the case, but let me recap
them briefly. John Adams lost the presidential election of 1800 to
Thomas Jefferson. In what remains a firm tradition of the American
presidency, Adams spent his last days in office getting a bunch of
people from his party appointed to Federal positions and confirmed by
the Senate, hoping to hamstring his successor. (It always amazes me how
people complain, as if it were some huge new issue that needs to be
fixed right now, when current Presidents do things that just about
every President has done since the country was established.) Once
confirmed, each appointee was supposed to receive a commission, which
had to be delivered in person. However, some were not delivered prior
to the expiration of Adams' term at noon on March 4, 1801, and they
ended up in the hands of the new Secretary of State, James Madison.
One of the appointees who didn't get his commission, William Marbury,
sued Madison. However, he did so in a rather unusual way; at least, it
seems unusual to me, particularly in the light of the outcome. He filed
a petition directly with the Supreme Court for a writ of mandamus,
which is legalese for asking the Court to order Madison to deliver his
commission. What seems unusual to me about this is that: (a) he did not
petition for the United States, itself, to deliver his commission, but
for Madison, as an individual, to do so; and (b) he nevertheless brought
the petition directly to the Supreme Court, instead of to a lower
Federal court. And, of course, the whole case turned on whether the
Supreme Court actually had original jurisdiction (an issue which would
not have arisen had the petition been brought in a lower court, and then
possibly come to the Supreme Court on appeal). I wonder if Marbury's
lawyer was either not very competent, or perhaps had some ulterior
motive for adopting a strategy that was open to such a simple objection.
(As we'll see below, there was legal support for this strategy in the
Judiciary Act of 1789, but that support proved to be illusory.)
Of course we all know what happened. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote
and delivered the opinion of the Court, which said three things. First,
Marbury did have a legal right to his commission; Madison was in the
wrong by not delivering it to him. Second, Marbury did have the right
to seek a legal remedy against Madison (and a petition for a writ of
mandamus was a perfectly acceptable remedy to seek). But third,
filing the petition directly in the Supreme Court was not the correct
legal remedy, because the Supreme Court did not have original
jurisdiction in the case. (I'm hard pressed to think of a better example
of giving with one hand, then taking away with the other. I would love
to have seen Marbury's face, and that of his lawyer, while the opinion
was being read.) Marbury never did get his commission.
This case is so important in the history of Constitutional law
because of the argument Marshall made in support of the third item
above. Marbury had used the Judiciary Act of 1789 as justification
for submitting his petition directly to the Supreme Court, since that
Act stated that the Supreme Court had original jurisdiction over
writs of mandamus. However, the Court found that that provision of
the Judiciary Act was unconstitutional. The Constitution simply does
not give Congress the authority to add to the Supreme Court's original
jurisdiction; it only gives Congress the authority to make "exceptions"
and "regulations" to the Court's appellate jurisdiction. (Technically,
there is a small matter of interpretation involved, since the section
in question in Article III could, by a very tortured interpretation, be
construed such that the "exceptions and regulations" clause applies to
the whole section, rather than just to the part concerning appellate
jurisdiction, as a normal reading of the language would indicate. As
far as I know, nobody since Marbury's lawyer has seriously tried to
defend such a tortured interpretation.) And, Marshall argued, since the
Constitution is the supreme law of the land, if there is any conflict
between the Constitution and a law passed by Congress, the higher law,
the Constitution, must govern. Otherwise there would be no point to
having a Constitution at all.
(Another legal point about the case is also worth noting. Some critics
argued that the Court had original jurisdiction over the case even without
the Judiciary Act of 1789, since Article III grants original jurisdiction
over "all cases affecting...public ministers and consuls", and Madison,
as Secretary of State, was such a public minister or consul. However,
that raises the question of why Marbury's suit named Madison
individually, not in his capacity as a public minister or consul.
Again, I wonder what Marbury and his lawyer could have been thinking,
not to avail themselves of these obvious strategic moves.)
When I first learned about this decision (in government class in high
school, if you must know), a particular quotation was given as a sort of
"tag line" to Marshall's opinion:
<blockquote>
It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to
say what the law is.
</blockquote>
Taken in context, it is clear what Marshall means by "say what the law
is". Indeed, he goes on to amplify that very point:
<blockquote>
So, if a law be in opposition to the Constitution, if both the law and
the Constitution apply to a particular case, so that the Court must
either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the
Constitution, or conformably to the Constitution, disregarding the law,
the Court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the
case. This is of the very essence of judicial duty.
</blockquote>
And, of course, the latter option is the only acceptable one, since the
Constitution is supposed to be the supreme law of the land, superior to
laws passed by Congress.
But there is another, quite different meaning that could be placed on
the phrase "say what the law is." Consider another case that is often
cited as an example of the Court upholding our ideals against popular
prejudice: Roe v. Wade. The Court ruled that a woman's right to choose
was included in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. (There is an
interesting point about this, though: the lower court decision had been
based on the Ninth Amendment, but the Supreme Court preferred to base
its decision on the Fourteenth Amendment.) There were strong dissenting
opinions by Justices White and Rehnquist (though the latter was later
the Chief Justice when the Court upheld Roe v. Wade in several decisions
in the 1980's and 1990's), arguing that, as White's dissent put it,
there was "nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to
support the Court's judgment." But the majority ruled in favor of
Roe, and that ruling still stands today (though the interpretation of
it has evolved, as we'll see below).
So far, what the Court did was well in line with what Marshall's opinion
in Marbury v. Madison described. But the Court did not stop there. Rather
than just say that the law under review (a Texas state law) was
unconstitutional, the Court erected a whole framework of what was, in
effect, new law, setting down rules for how states could regulate
abortion. This is not just "saying what the law is" in the form of
determining what law shall govern when existing laws conflict. This is
"saying what the law is" in the form of making new laws. Yes, they're
written as "opinions", and states can try to write laws that differ from
what the "opinions" say is allowable. And when they do, and it comes to
court, those laws get struck down, just as though the words in the Court's
"opinion" were part of the Constitution. (To be fair, as I noted above,
the Court's interpretation of its own words has evolved over time, so
that, for example, the trimester framework laid out in the Roe opinion is
no longer really applicable. But the primary criterion, viability, is
still in force, and even Justice Blackmun, who wrote the Court's opinion,
admitted that that criterion was "arbitrary".)
Of course I know that, in terms of the long-running debate over how to
interpret the Constitution, I have just labeled myself as a "strict
constructionist". But I'm not saying, as the dissenters in Roe v. Wade
did, that if the Constitution doesn't explicitly say that it covers,
for example, abortion, then it simply doesn't cover it at all. I know
the Court has to interpret; no body of written law can possibly cover
all cases, or even anticipate all possible types of cases that might
have to be covered. There is nothing explicitly about abortion, or
even about marriage or parenting, in the Constitution, but that doesn't
mean those things somehow aren't covered by the Constitution, as Justice
Scalia, for example, likes to claim. My objection is simpler:
interpretation of existing laws is not the same thing as writing new
ones. The latter is supposed to be the job of the legislative branch,
not the judicial. And yet we allow the Supreme Court to "say what the
law is" in both senses, not just the first. (One could argue, in
connection with my mention of Justice Scalia just now, that his dissent
in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is worth reading if for no other
reason than as an example of judicial humor, was making the same point
I just made. But even there, where I think he was justified in saying
that the Court is not supposed to just make up rules like the trimester
system or viability out of whole cloth, he tried to make his argument
prove too much: he tried to show that the Court simply can't regulate
abortion at all.)
This sort of thing casts a very different light on this statement
from the Charters of Freedom page:
<blockquote>
The word of the Supreme Court is final. Overturning its decisions
often requires an amendment to the Constitution or a revision of
Federal law.
</blockquote>
This seems all right if the Court is only going to "say what the law
is" in the narrow sense that Marshall described. But that's not what
the Court has evolved into. For example, take the long history of the
Court's rulings on the Commerce Clause, the clause in Article I,
Section 8 that gives Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with
foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian
Tribes." An early case that turned on this clause was Gibbons v. Ogden
in 1824. The Court ruled that the State of New York could not prevent
Gibbons from operating a steamboat service on the Hudson River, even
though the State had, by act of the legislature, granted exclusive
rights to navigation on all waters within the State to Livingston and
Fulton (who licensed that right to Ogden), because the Constitution
gave Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, and Gibbons'
service ran between New Jersey and New York. In itself, this seems
reasonable enough, but it opened the door to an evolution of
jurisprudence that had the Court ruling, in Wickard v. Filburn in 1942,
that the growing of food on one's own property for one's own personal
consumption came under the heading of "interstate commerce" in terms
of Congress' power to regulate it. In fact, it seems at this point that
practically anything comes under the heading of "interstate commerce",
apparently on the theory that just about anything might somehow, by some
process, possibly, by some amount even if it's small, in at least one
case even if it's rare, affect interstate commerce. Perhaps this isn't
"saying what the law is" by writing completely new law, but it certainly
goes beyond what I, at least, would call a reasonable interpretation of
the law that was actually written.
As another example with a different twist, consider Missouri v. Jenkins
in 1995. The question at issue was a desegregation program that a
district court ordered the school district in Kansas City to undertake.
The Supreme Court in this case actually overturned the district court's
ruling ordering various measures, such as salary increases and remedial
education programs. This in itself seems reasonable enough; the district
court had for almost two decades been micromanaging the school district's
desegregation program, and the Supreme Court simply said that the
district court had been exceeding its authority, as indeed it was.
So it looks here like a lower court was trying to "say what the law
is" in too broad a sense, and the Supreme Court called them on it.
But two things complicate the picture. First, in striking down a
desegregation program, the Court was not, apparently, upholding
our ideals against popular prejudice. Why wasn't the Court as willing
to "say what the law is" in the broad sense here, when it obviously
has been in so many other cases? Second, when you dig into some of
the nuances of the Court's opinion, you find that the rationale for
striking down the district court's ruling may not be quite what you
expect. With reference to the district court's imposition of a tax,
for example, the Court ruled that, as the Wikipedia page on the
decision puts it, "while direct imposition of taxes is indeed beyond
judicial authority, it would be permissible for the district court to
order the school district to levy the same tax". The Court went on to
say (and I have to quote this directly from the opinion because it's
so revealing) that:
<blockquote>
Authorizing and directing local government institutions to devise
and implement remedies not only protects the function of these
institutions but, to the extent possible, also places the
responsibility for solutions to the problems of segregation upon
those themselves who have created the problem.
</blockquote>
In other words, the problem wasn't that the district court was
micromanaging the school district, but that it wasn't doing so
properly.
So the Court can't even be depended on "say what the law is" in the
broad sense when it would uphold our ideals. Not only that, but they
can't even be depended on not to go against our ideals. (One
could say that regulating everything in sight under the Commerce
Clause isn't really upholding our ideals, but that's not nearly as
clearcut as the example I'm about to give.) Take the Kelo v. New
London decision in 2005. Here the Court ruled that taking private
property from individuals and handing it over to a private corporation
as part of a "redevelopment" project qualified as "public use", so it
was a constitutional use of the eminent domain power. It's worth noting
that the expected "community benefits" the Court relied on in its
argument never materialized: the land that was taken is an empty lot
today. But the Court should not have had to prophesize that outcome
(although it wouldn't have been hard to prophesize; the track record
of such "redevelopment" projects is spotty at best) in order to see
the problem with the City of New London's argument. Would any
reasonable citizen really think that this was a justified
interpretation of the phrase "public use"?
As I confessed at the end of the discussion thread I referred to at
the start of this post, I'm actually hard pressed to find any kind of
a reliable pattern to the Court's rulings. They look to me like a
hodgepodge of ideologies, personal preferences, and yes, sometimes
upholding our ideals. The only common thread I can find is that, once
Marshall said that the Court could "say what the law is," sure enough,
it's done so. The fact that the Court has evolved into doing so in a
way that Marshall and the Framers never envisioned is apparently not
a significant issue; after all, if something needs fixing, someone has
to fix it, and if legislators aren't doing it, doesn't the Court have
to step in?
But this viewpoint ignores the fact that the Constitution has
separation of powers, and checks and balances, for a reason. They
are not just inconveniences to be worked around; they are there so
that when we are ready to charge ahead and fix something, but we find
that to do so we would have to compromise a founding principle, we
don't just ride roughshod over the principle; instead, we're supposed
to stop and think. If "fixing" the issue requires bending (or breaking)
the Constitution, maybe we ought to step back and examine whether our
fix, at this time and place, is really a good idea. Maybe it would be
better in the long run to play by the rules, even though it means that
particular issue takes longer to resolve. The rules are bigger than
any individual issue, and they're not supposed to be ignored. If they
really need to be changed, well, the Constitution has been amended
twenty-seven times. It can be done, if you do the work of convincing
enough people that it's worth doing.
<h1>Postscript: It's Not Just the Court</h1>
It's worth noting that the pattern I describe here is not limited to
the Supreme Court, or even to the US courts in general. (Did anyone
really think it was? I hope not.) To take just one relatively minor
example, consider the kerfluffle a few years back over getting official
voting representation in Congress for the District of Columbia. I should
make clear that I am in complete sympathy with that objective; the
original theory that justified not giving representation to D.C.
is clearly no longer operative. (The idea was that the people living in
D.C. would all be involved with government in some way, either as
elected representatives or civil servants, and so their lack of direct
voting representation would be compensated by having other avenues for
getting their views heard. Clearly this does not apply to almost all
of D.C.'s current inhabitants.) So given that we have a desirable
objective in view, there are, broadly speaking, two ways to get there:
(1) A Constitutional Amendment: the obvious route. D.C. already has
non-voting representatives in the House, so the mechanics should be
fairly easy. The main question would be whether D.C. should get no, one,
or two Senators; I would lean towards one, which would have the
advantage of eliminating ties, but any of the three could work. But of
course getting an Amendment drafted, passed, and ratified is a lengthy
process.
(2) Retrocession: simply return most of the land currently within the
boundaries of D.C. to the State of Maryland. (It's worth noting that the
original boundary of D.C. included Arlington and Alexandria in
Virginia, but they were long ago returned to Virginia, so this has been
done before.) We would probably want to keep the main government
buildings within D.C. itself, but it should be possible to draw a
line (though it might not be a very straight one) that did a pretty
good job of separating the core government buildings (and monuments,
etc.) from the residential areas, in order to make sure that basically
no one except the President actually resides in D.C. (The President
already gets to vote in his home state, as does his family, so they
aren't even affected by the lack of representation; though if the
original justification for the lack of representation applies to
anyone more than the President, I don't know who it would be.) This
could in principle happen much more quickly than an Amendment, since
it would only require an act of Congress, though the mechanics would
be more difficult to work out; for example, imagine switching half a
million license plates from D.C. to Maryland, rewriting a bunch of
real estate deeds, working out property taxes, and so on.
So, of course, when a solution was actually proposed in Congress,
it was...neither of the above. Instead, a bill was introduced that
would simply make the current D.C. representatives into voting
representatives, even though the Constitution specifically uses the
word "States" when it says who gets to elect voting representatives,
and specifically calls D.C. a "District" formed "by Cession of
particular States", i.e., not a State. (Note also that an Amendment
was required, the 23rd, to allow residents of D.C. to appoint Electors
to vote for President.) Someone actually asked Nancy Pelosi if this
was really constitutional and whether it might require an Amendment,
and if I remember correctly, her answer was "Are you kidding me?" So
the courts are certainly not the only ones taking a rather cavalier
view of the role the Constitution is supposed to play.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 12 Jul 2011 03:55 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Independence Day</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/independence-day</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/independence-day.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Two hundred and thirty-five years ago today, these words were approved by
the Continental Congress of the United States of America:
<blockquote>
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to
secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed.
</blockquote>
When I first read this as a child, I wondered about that word "unalienable".
At the time, it was explained as simply meaning a "natural" right, one that,
as
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights">this Wikipedia page</a>
says, is "not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs of any particular
culture or government." That seemed straightforward enough, but then why
didn't the Declaration just say "natural" or "innate" or something like that?
Then there was another wrinkle; some versions of the Declaration that I saw
in school used the word "inalienable" instead of
"unalienable". As a matter of fact,
<a href="http://images.travelpod.com/users/ditchthecube/3.1201399200.jefferson-memorial-inscription-1.jpg">this picture</a>
shows the inscription of the opening of the Declaration in the Jefferson
Memorial, which clearly uses the word "inalienable", not "unalienable",
even though the
<a href="http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html">official transcript</a>
in the US government archives clearly says "unalienable".
Is there a difference? The same definition was given to me for both words in
school, but
<a href="http://adask.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/unalienable-vs-inalienable/">this webpage</a>
quotes several law dictionaries that assign different meanings to the two
words. According to these definitions, an "inalienable" right is one that
cannot be given up or transferred except with the consent of the holder of
the right; an "unalienable" right is one that cannot be given up or
transferred period, even if the holder of the right wants to.
This is a significant difference. Either way, of course, there is
something more to our rights than just being "natural", as opposed to being
granted by law or custom; they can't be taken away from us without our
consent. But the original Declaration, by using the word "unalienable",
meant, I believe, to say that we can't give up these rights even if we
want to. In other words, they are not just rights that we should expect
others to respect; they are rights that we owe to ourselves, because they
are part of our nature as human beings, and thinking that we can choose to
give them up, or trade part of them for something else (such as security),
is like thinking that we can choose to have the laws of gravity not apply
to us.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Jul 2011 03:15 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Why I Use Python, Not Lisp</title>
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<description><![CDATA[
<div>
The answer can be summed up in one sentence:
<blockquote>
Not every data structure is a list.
</blockquote>
Don't get me wrong: Lisp is a powerful engine for
manipulating data structures. In fact, in one sense
Python (like every other programming language) is just
"syntactic sugar" for Lisp expressions; as Paul Graham
<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html">put it</a>, in Lisp
"you express programs directly in the parse trees that
get built behind the scenes when other languages are
parsed." That ability gives you extra control and
flexibility, but it comes at a price: since you're
explicitly writing parse trees, you have to express all
your data structures explicitly in terms of parse trees.
Python may be just a layer of syntactic sugar over that,
but syntactic sugar has uses.
In fact, ironic as it may seem, my reason for using
Python instead of Lisp is really the same as one of the
reasons for using Python instead of C: namely, that you
don't have to build your data structures "by hand"! This
will seem daft to those who believe that Lisp is a more
powerful language, but consider the following code
snippets in Lisp and Python:
Lisp:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>(setf mydict (init-hash-table ("a" 1) ("b" 2)))
</pre></div>
Python:
<div class="codehilite"><pre>mydict = {"a": 1, "b": 2}
</pre></div>
Obviously the Python version is shorter and easier to read
(in fact, in the Lisps I'm somewhat familiar with, Common
Lisp and GNU Scheme, there isn't even a way to initialize
a hash table in one statement, so I'm actually assuming
that someone has written an init-hash-table function to
enable the above code to work, otherwise the Lisp version
would be even longer and more complex). But the Python version
also provides a valuable layer of abstraction that the Lisp
version does not: it makes a dictionary, a mapping of keys to
values, a built-in data structure, rather than one that I have
to build "by hand". That may not seem like much for a
single mapping with just two entries, but my Python code
uses dicts all over the place, simply because it's such
an easy and useful data structure. If I had to write
init-hash-table and all those parentheses every time, I
might not use them quite so much.
I know, I know: you just have to "get used" to reading
Lisp and then it will seem easier, and writing all those
parentheses and init-hash-table every time won't seem so
bad once I've gotten enough practice. But why should I
have to reprogram my brain to fit the language? The fact
is that the abstraction I want is a dict, not a list
that's been gerrymandered into something that can act
like a dict. Programming languages are supposed to adjust
to fit programmers, not the other way around.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2011 02:20 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>What's Up With That? No. 1</title>
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<description><![CDATA[
<div>
This is the first of what will no doubt be many dispatches from the
"what's up with that?" department.
There was much rejoicing by many at the news yesterday that
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/25/new.york.gay.marriage/">New York has passed a law permitting same sex marriage</a>.
This post is not about that issue, though I will say that I support such
laws; "equal protection" is supposed to mean what it says, and if the state
is going to provide special benefits to people who make life commitments to
each other, it has no business saying that some couples can get them and
some can't. But that's for another post someday.
While watching coverage of the event on CNN, one item struck me: it will be
30 days before any same-sex couple can actually apply for a marriage license
under the new law.
Nobody who mentioned this seemed to find it worthy of
any further remark, nor have any of the print (or online) articles I have
seen. But think about this for a moment: what, exactly, is required in the
way of implementation of this law? All it says is that the state no
longer needs to check your gender when you apply for a marriage license.
Do they have to change the form to eliminate that block or something?
What, exactly, is preventing the state government from simply issuing a
memo to all state officials Monday morning that says they can now issue
marriage licenses to same-sex couples? Why does it take 30 days? It's not
like the vote was unexpected; they've been working on this for months, and
they certainly had all the press releases ready to go the moment the
governor signed the law.
Perhaps I'm making too much of this, but it seems to me that our standards
for what a large organization with a lot of resources ought to be able to
accomplish have lowered over the years. President Kennedy famously promised
a man on the Moon in ten years, and the Apollo program made the deadline
with room to spare. Now the US government has decided
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/31/AR2010013101058.html">not to even try to go back</a>.
Fortunately NASA is
<a href="http://www.virgingalactic.com/">not the only player</a>
<a href="http://www.xcor.com/">in this game</a>,
but it makes one wonder why no one even seems to care any
more that they're not the top player, as they used to be. Mind you, I'm
all for free enterprise, and I'm proud to live in the only country in the
world where people do manned spaceflight for fun, on their own dime. But
there's still something sad about NASA today compared with the NASA that
landed six missions on the Moon in the space of three years. Whatever
happened to "failure is not an option"?
We also seem to have forgotten what legislative power is supposed to mean.
I don't have a time machine to check, of course, but I strongly suspect
that if you told an average US citizen in 1790 (or even more an average US
legislator in 1790) that, in an age of instant global communication, it
would take 30 days for a law that does nothing but change one simple rule
to take effect, they would look at you like you'd grown a second head or
something. Back then a law took effect when it was passed, and that was
that. If you didn't like it, well, sometimes you lose. Or you start a
revolution. But that is an extreme measure, only to be used when
<a href="http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/">all other avenues have been exhausted</a>.
Certainly that's not the case here; this law is not the Stamp Act. It
imposes no burden whatsoever on people who do not want to participate in
a same-sex marriage. But there are plenty of people who will want to
comply with this law as soon as they possibly can. And yet it's like we
have to give people who don't like the law time to adjust, simply because
the law makes them feel bad and they need time to get over it before we
actually make it a law. I don't know, of course, that that is the primary
reason for the 30-day delay; as I noted above, no one has even remarked on
this at all, so no rationale for it has been discussed. But I wonder if
something like a "get over it" period is not part of the reason, at least
subconsciously.
It's true that, in the grand scheme of things, 30 days is insignificant.
People have been waiting for years for this, and there are plenty still
waiting in other states. I sincerely hope that people who get their New
York marriage licenses in 30 days will look back 30 years from now and
laugh at this last little quirk of the system before it gave them the same
opportunity to marry as heterosexual couples. At the same time, I can't
help but wonder what Americans of the past would think of the fact that
it will take longer for a simple new law to take effect in New York than
it took to change the course of the Revolutionary War in the
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Saratoga">Battles of Saratoga</a>.
How times have changed.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Sat, 25 Jun 2011 18:51 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Great Birth Certificate Controversy (Not)</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/obama-birth-certificate</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/obama-birth-certificate.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
CNN announced some time back that
<a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/27/white-house-releases-obama-birth-certificate/">the White House had released President Obama's birth certificate</a>.
Donald Trump claims that he was the one who pushed Obama over the edge,
but that's neither here nor there. I mention the story because just
yesterday, while browsing around the "Unqualified Reservations" blog,
I came across
<a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/08/open-thread-for-all-birthers.html">this post</a>
from last summer by Mencius Moldbug, in which he proposes two new terms,
"sealer" and "opener", to replace the traditional "birther" and
"anti-birther". A "sealer", according to Moldbug, is someone who
thinks Obama's birth documents should remain sealed.
Moldbug writes:
<blockquote>
As a sealer, you can reasonably be expected to answer three questions.
First: why do you think B.H. Obama is withholding his birth documents
and other vital records? Second: why do you feel these records should
remain sealed? Third: if B.H. Obama's records should remain sealed now,
at what point should they become accessible to historians? The end of
his term? The end of his political career? The end of his life, plus 100
years? The end of the Solar System?
</blockquote>
It's always fun when someone like Mencius, whose writing I enjoy
reading, takes a position that makes me want to argue. In this case, I
think the proper response to Mencius' questions at the time (of course
now they don't really need a response, but this is my blog and I can
pretend I saw his post when it was written) would have been to clarify
the proper usage of two particular words in his vocabulary:
(1) To say that Obama's records are "sealed" implies that nobody has
seen them except those few who are mentioned in Mencius' post (Obama
himself and the governor of Hawaii), or at least very, very few others.
Does anyone really believe this? Obama has a U. S. passport, so the
State Department has seen his birth certificate, and apparently
considered it sufficient evidence of citizenship to issue a passport.
Also, do you think the Democratic National Committee would nominate a
candidate without making sure their proof of natural-born citizenship
was in order?
(2) To say that Obama is "withholding" the documents implies that Obama
is somehow shirking an obligation to show his birth documents to any
yahoo who posts on the Internet or works as a talking head on TV. No
such obligation exists. As
<a href="http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/obamafake.htm">Steve Dutch noted</a>
back when the controversy was thick:
<blockquote>
The people whose opinion counts, the Democratic Party and the voters,
accept Obama's citizenship as genuine. He doesn't owe hard-core
denialists the time of day.
</blockquote>
And Dutch even goes on to anticipate the obvious rejoinder from birthers
(as you can see, I decline to adopt Mencius' revised terminology):
<blockquote>
B-b-but he's the President. He's answerable to the people. Yes. He's
answerable to their representatives in Congress, and ultimately to the
voters. But he's not answerable to every crackpot on the far fringes.
He's not answerable to 9-11 conspiracy theorists, or people who believe
we have frozen aliens at Area 51 (next to the <s>Ron</s> Mrs. Paul's Fish
Sticks). And he's under no obligation to produce an original birth
certificate to placate people angry because they couldn't win the
election the right way.
</blockquote>
As for why Obama didn't just release his birth certificate anyway a long
time ago, even if he wasn't obligated to do so, at least one commenter
on Mencius' post gave the obvious answer to that one: because it was a
great opportunity for Obama to make his opponents look crazy and waste
their energy on silliness instead of actually doing something
productive. Then why did he release it now? Probably because, as a
shrewd politician, he judged that he'd gotten about as much mileage out
of that strategy as he could, and it was time to put the issue to bed.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2011 22:43 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Don't Tread On Our Internet</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/dont-tread-on-internet</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/dont-tread-on-internet.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
In a <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3335">recent post</a>, Eric Raymond
describes an alternate history in which the Internet and the World Wide
Web never happened. In this alternate timeline, the DARPA research that
led to the Internet never got out of the "research curiosity" stage, and
instead of having one Internet, we have multiple "walled gardens" like
Compuserve and AOL. It's not a pretty picture: imagine not being able to
email, text message, or Facebook a friend just because you and they have
different ISPs. Imagine also that there is no Linux, no open source
software, no way for anyone except a dedicated hobbyist to have a
computer that doesn't run proprietary programs that you can't see the
insides of. Not to mention that censorship would be a lot easier on
networks that did not have infrastructure specifically designed to make
that as difficult as possible.
Apropos of that last point, soon after finishing Raymond's post, I came
across <a href="http://lozkayepirate.tumblr.com/day/2011/06/20">this post</a>
describing the French government's plan to, as the author puts it,
<blockquote>
...censor and block web sites to such a degree that commentators have
described it as "industrial scale". The ministries of Defence, Justice,
Interior, Finance, Health and Digital Economy will have sweeping powers
which will not have to be sanctioned by any judge. In fact, it is
difficult to see what part of public life is not covered by these organs
of the state.
</blockquote>
The post goes on to note that, in what seems to be the typical modus
operandi for such things, "it would seem that the French government was
intent on burying such complex measures" in the minutiae of an amendment
to an existing law. French President Sarkozy says this is an attempt to
create a "civilised Internet". I know the French are experts on what is
"civilized", but this is a bit much.
This French scheme is but one of a number of reminders we have had
lately that something like Raymond's alternate future could still come
to pass if we don't take continuing steps to protect the open Internet
we currently have. Raymond himself
<a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3331">posted recently</a> about the
<a href="http://i.tuaw.com/2011/06/20/apples-infrared-camera-kill-switch-patent-application-hits-a/">Apple patent for a phone camera "kill switch"</a>,
which could potentially allow third parties to control what you could
take pictures or video of with your iPhone. And of course there is the
<a href="http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/protect-ip-act-coica-redux">Protect IP Act</a>,
the latest in a long line of attempts in the US Congress to restrict
what you can do online in the name of preventing "piracy"; as I argued in
<a href="http://www.peterdonis.net/computers/computersarticle2.html">this article on DRM</a>
on my old site (and I'm sure I'll be posting more about such things here
as well), such attempts will not actually prevent "piracy", but they will
certainly impose undue burdens on people's honest use of the Internet.
In the right-hand column of this site you'll see an image with a link to
the Electronic Frontier Foundation's campaign to
<a href="https://www.eff.org/pages/say-no-to-online-censorship">say no to online censorship</a>.
As I noted on my <a href="http://peterdonis.net/">old site</a> when I first posted
the image there, Robert Heinlein once wrote that "the human race divides
politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who
have no such desire", and the fact that the Internet makes it much, much
harder for the first type to control the second type is a feature, not a
bug. Whether it's the government wanting a way to control online traffic
to censor a site like Wikileaks, or the RIAA and MPAA wanting draconian
DRM to avoid having to come up with a better business model, there is never
any lack of people of the first class. But in an online world, the liberty
to decide for ourselves what we will read, and just as important, what
we will post, is more important than ever.
And it's not just me saying this. Of course there's the First Amendment
to the US Constitution, but since the Internet is global, I'll quote
instead from the
<a href="http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</a>,
Article 19:
<blockquote>
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this
right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers.
</blockquote>
I think even the French President would have to admit that the Internet
qualifies under "any media and regardless of frontiers". So it looks to
me like what the French government is trying to do is against human
rights, pure and simple. But don't just take my word for it. Follow the
link and make up your own mind. Isn't it nice that we have an open
Internet where I can post that link, and you can read it, no matter what
any other person or government says? Of course I'm not posting defense
secrets or a torrent of the latest movie DVD or child porn. And as
Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in his famous Supreme Court opinion, the
right to free speech does not include the right to yell "fire" in a
crowded theater. But we already have a legal system for dealing with
cases where someone has a legitimate reason to seek redress for what
someone else posts. I didn't see any qualifications in the human rights
article above that said it's OK to go beyond that and restrict freedom
for everyone just because some people don't exercise their freedom
responsibly. However loudly and often governments ask for that kind of
power, we should not give it to them.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2011 23:29 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The Mismeasure of Stephen Jay Gould?</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/mismeasure-of-gould</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/mismeasure-of-gould.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
Quite a number of years ago now, I first read Daniel Dennett's book
Darwin's Dangerous Idea. This post is not about the central
topic of that book, which is evolution (I'm sure I'll get into
posting about that on this blog in time, but for now you'll have to
read
<a href="http://www.peterdonis.net/science/sciencearticle1.html">this article</a>
on my old site if you want to see where I'm coming from). Instead, I
want to talk about one particular claim Dennett makes in his book:
that Stephen Jay Gould did not believe in Darwin's dangerous idea,
the central premise of evolutionary theory.
Just to recap briefy, Darwin's dangerous idea is that every feature
of any living organism that looks like "design", i.e., like it is
adapted to a particular purpose, was produced through evolution by
natural selection. Actually, a better phrase to describe the process
is the one Richard Dawkins first used in The Selfish Gene: "the
differential survival of replicating entities." (Dennett calls it a
"dangerous" idea because, as he argues persuasively in the book, it
works in any domain, not just the evolution of living organisms. For
example, cognitive science is converging on a model of the mind in
which the same process is at work on several levels.)
Dennett's claim about Gould, then, is simply that Gould does not
believe that Darwin's dangerous idea actually explains why living
organisms are adapted to their environments. When I first read this
claim, I thought: "That's crazy! Gould doesn't believe in evolution?"
I will confess here that I liked, and still like, reading Gould's essays;
I like his writing style and his way of weaving in baseball and other
cultural references with his scientific discussions. So I was, to
put it mildly, surprised to find Dennett, whose writing I also like
and whose thinking I respect, making such a claim about Gould. Then
I read the actual critique, and followed Dennett's argument, and
realized why he said what he said, and thought: "He's right! Gould
really doesn't believe in evolution. Holy --!"
More recently, I came across a post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the "Less
Wrong" site entitled
<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/">Beware of Stephen J. Gould</a>.
It was only on reading this article that I fully realized just where
Stephen Jay Gould really stood in the minds of much of the academic
community, or at least the community of evolutionary biology. The post
begins thus:
<blockquote>
If you've read anything Stephen J. Gould has ever said about
evolutionary biology, I have some bad news for you. In the field
of evolutionary biology at large, Gould's reputation is mud. Not
because he was wrong. Many honest scientists have made honest
mistakes. What Gould did was much worse, involving deliberate
misrepresentation of science.
</blockquote>
As scathing as Dennett's critique of Gould was in his book, he didn't
go this far. But on reading through Yudkowsky's post, and reading the
further material he links to, I realized that something was certainly
afoot. In particular,
<a href="http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html">this letter to the editor</a>
of the New York Review of Books, by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (in
response to previous letters of Gould's) got my attention, with its
catalogue of ways in which Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely
false picture of the state of evolutionary theory", in the words of
John Maynard Smith. If these criticisms were accurate, and they
certainly seemed to hold water, Stephen Jay Gould was not what I
thought he was. But it seemed preposterous, all the same, to think
that Stephen Jay Gould, the poster boy for evolution in the eyes of
the lay public, was somehow a traitor to the cause.
Not that I thought Gould was always right, or that I always agreed with
what he said about evolution. As I noted above, I like reading Gould,
and I also am in his debt for introducing me to the world of
evolutionary theory. But I did start disagreeing fairly early on with a
lot of what I read him saying about it. For example, I never bought
his and Lewontin's case for "punctuated equilibrium" as any kind of
"alternative" to "standard" Darwinism; as Dennett argues in his book
(not that he is the only one to make this argument by any means)
"punctuated equilibrium" is just standard Darwinism looked at on the
appropriate scale. So even though I liked reading Gould, I felt a
vague uneasiness whose root cause I couldn't quite put my finger on.
Dennett's critique in the book goes further than simply discrediting
"punctuated equilibrium", though. He attacks and refutes Gould's
position on "adaptationism" in general. Part of the attack is to simply
be clear about what "adaptationism" is. It is not the claim (which
no reputable evolutionary biologist has ever made, as far as I know),
that all evolutionary change is the result of natural selection.
Now that we can look directly at DNA and other evidence at the
molecular level, it is clear that much evolutionary change has no
impact on adaptive fitness and is therefore "invisible" to natural
selection. In so far as Gould tried to argue that "adaptationism" was
committed to the view that all evolutionary change must be explicable
as an adaptation, he was simply setting up a straw man.
But Dennett also makes the point that, even if we restrict attention
to evolutionary change that is adaptive, we have to be careful not
to misunderstand what an "adaptation" is. An adaptation is any feature
that provides a selective edge, regardless of how it came about. In
particular, an adaptation does not have to be a step in a continuous
process of selection for the same function. A feature that has one
function in an ancestor can be "exapted" for a very different function
in a descendant, and that still counts as an adaptation.
I was surprised to read this part of Dennett's critique, because I was
sure I remembered Gould talking in his essays about precisely this
point, and being on the same side as Dennett is in the book. For
example, in one of his essays (I don't have his books handy to check
which one), he says something along the lines of, "Critics of evolution
often ask things like, What good is five percent of an eye? We argue
that a feature being five percent of an eye is irrelevant because the
ancestor who had the feature at that stage did not use it for sight."
In other words, exaptation is adaptation, exactly as Dennett says.
But as the examples Dennett tirelessly catalogues in his book make
clear, Gould was much more consistently on the other side of the
question, arguing for an extremely narrow view of what "counts" as an
adaptation, and inventing the term "spandrel" to apply whenever he
saw an "adaptationist" being too free with his labeling. Reading this
part of the book brought at least one part of my previous vague unease
about Gould into focus: Gould was not consistent in his arguments, and
often seemed to be more concerned with not agreeing with whoever he
was arguing with than getting at the truth.
The bit about "spandrels" also brings up another quality I had often
seen in Gould's writing, namely, that while he seemed to feel very
strongly that he was "against" something, it wasn't always clear what
that something was, or why he was against it, or what positive
position he held that drove him to refute whatever he was refuting.
You will look in vain in Gould's writing for any precise definition
of what a "spandrel" is, and the same goes for other terms that he
apparently thought were very important. Indeed, he never really gave
a precise definition even of "punctuated equilibrium". And on those
occasions when he did spell out reasonably precisely what he was
talking about, his argument was obviously bogus, as with his claim
that religion and science are "non-overlapping magisteria". (To see
why this idea of his is bogus, ask yourself how far you would get
with a sincere Christian by telling him that all that business about
Jesus being the Son of God is just metaphor and isn't supposed to
be actual historical fact, because historical facts are in a
different "magisterium" from religion.)
Still, inconsistency and imprecision are not the same as deliberate
misrepresentation. Is that more serious charge really justified?
Dennett's book, as I noted above, does not make that charge, and
does not really discuss the key omission from Gould's writing that
justifies it. That's why reading Yudkowsky's article was such an
eye-opener for me: because it was only then that I looked back at
everything I had read of Gould's, and realized that not once had
he made clear to me that evolution, at bottom, is about genes.
Gould talked about evolution in terms of individual organisms; he
also (in his vague way) talked about "group selection", the
(supposed) evolution of groups as separate "units of selection" from
individuals. But he never once got across to me the fundamental fact
that genes are the primary units of selection.
It is this omission that Yudkowsky discusses in detail in his
article. Gould essentially wrote as if the "gene's-eye view" of
evolution had never been invented, let alone won over the entire
field by its acknowledged superiority in making sense of the data.
In hindsight, this should have been a huge red flag to me; after all,
you can't read Dawkins, for example, for more than a minute or so
without some mention of genes, if not the actual phrase "selfish
genes". And I first read Dawkins not long after I started reading
Gould; not the entire book The Selfish Gene, but at least the
shorter article condensing its material, "Selfish Genes and
Selfish Memes", that appeared in the book The Mind's I. So it
wasn't as though I didn't know about genes and the role they
played in evolution.
Why did it take me so long to catch on to this? One possible reason
is hinted at in the closing of Tooby and Cosmides' letter:
<blockquote>
Yet in the final analysis, there are genuine grounds for hope in
the immense and enduring popularity of Gould. Gould is popular, we
think, because readers see in "Gould" the embodiment of humane
reason, the best aspirations of the scientific impulse. It is this
"Gould" that we will continue to honor, and, who, indeed, would
fight to bring the illumination that modern evolutionary science
can offer into wider use.
</blockquote>
I have already said that I found myself not really buying a lot of
what Gould said. Why, then, did I keep on reading him? I think it
was because I saw Gould the way Tooby and Cosmides describe readers
as seeing him; he was a symbol of science as a force for good in
the world, and he managed, among all the vagueness, to include some
eloquent statements of that ideal. For example, in The Mismeasure
of Man, even though he got a lot wrong when discussing the field
of IQ testing (for one thing, he described the field as it was
decades before he wrote, and critiqued IQ tests used during World
War I as though they were representative of current ones), he still
managed, in one sentence, to sum up why people get so concerned
about standardized tests, however "scientific" they seem. The
sentence was: "You can't judge an individual by a group mean." And
however wrong he may have been about the actual scientific status
of IQ tests (see for example
<a href="http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/200604071_issue_073_article_3.pdf">this review</a>,
with
<a href="http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/20060406_issue_075_article_10.pdf">Gould's response</a>
so that you can see his side of the story, or
<a href="http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/carroll-gould.html">this article</a>
discussing Gould's treatment of "factor analysis", the statistical
technique that underlies IQ tests), he was right that, in the eyes
of too many non-scientists, IQ tests have been nothing more than a
handy excuse to write off whole groups of people.
But if Gould did serve as a symbol of science fighting for good, that
only makes it more disappointing that he felt he had to misrepresent
his own field to do so. Tooby and Cosmides may have been more kind
than they wanted to be in their closing; as Yudkowsky notes at the
end of his post, "Many academic writers on Gould could not speak as
sharply as Gould deserved." For myself, I keep coming back to the
startling claim that I read in Dennett's book, that Gould did not
believe in evolution. Gould was also an atheist and a Marxist, so
apparently he also did not believe in the faith of his ancestors,
Judaism, or the political foundation of his country. Was he just
angry because others did not seem to share his particular brand of
unbelief? Or was he just another aspiring revolutionary, trying to
stir up the masses against the establishment? We'll never know.
Perhaps the best lesson we can learn from Gould is that science
does not need a "symbol"; it stands on its own, and the best thing
we can do to "fight for" it is to understand and use it properly.
The "Gould" that the lay public thought it was reading would have
agreed with that, whatever the real Stephen Jay Gould might have
said.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2011 03:47 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>KDE 4 Sucks</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">rants/kde4-sucks</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/rants/kde4-sucks.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
It's a well-known custom for Linux users to rant about some aspect of
their OS. Unlike the Mac community, which gushes about how wonderful
their OS is, or the Windows community, whose writings about their OS
often read like soldiers' letters home from a war zone, we Linux types
view ranting as a force for change. Or at least, as an explanation of
why we personally no longer use the festering pile of dung we are
ranting about.
The particular festering pile under the microscope in this post is
KDE 4.
A few months ago I gave in to long-standing temptation and
got a new computer. Another thing about the Linux world is the meaning
of that phrase, "get a new computer". It does not mean, as it does in
the Mac world, "go to the store and buy the One True Machine To Rule
Them All"; nor does it mean, as it does in the Windows world, "go to
the store and exercise your power of choice by picking one brand of
pre-packaged Windows machine that has the same bugs and misfeatures as
all the other brands of pre-packaged Windows machines". In my case, it
meant going to a computer show and buying a motherboard, a CPU (AMD,
not Intel), memory, and a power supply; going to Micro Center and
buying a hard drive (the show was all sold out, and Micro Center's sale
prices on hard drives are pretty low anyway); assembling the computer,
hooking up the keyboard, mouse, and monitor from my old computer,
turning it on, and installing Linux.
It was at the "installing Linux" phase that the fun started, the
issue being, of course, which Linux distribution to install. This is
another concept that is foreign to the Mac and Windows worlds, where
people simply can't grok that "Linux" is not a marketing label for
a corporation, it's just an operating system that can be packaged
in different ways for different purposes and preferences. I had run
OpenSuSE for years on my old computer, so that got the first try.
However, I ran into some issues with video drivers, and when I got
tired of digging around the OpenSuSE site looking for a fix, I
decided to try Ubuntu instead.
I already expected some friction because when I upgraded my old machine
from OpenSuSE 10.something to 11.something a while back, I found that
KDE 4 was now the default desktop, and I was astounded at how slow and
bloated it was compared to KDE 3 on that machine. I couldn't get KDE 3
up and running fast enough. If I wanted to be forced to upgrade my
hardware every few years just to keep up with software bloat, I'd run
Windows, thank you very much. (Apple is heading this way too, but not
to the same extent, at least not yet.)
But with the new machine, I figured the hardware ought to be fast enough
to handle it, so I decided to at least give KDE 4 an honest try. The
first thing I realized was that I have no use at all for all the "Plasma
Desktop" features that are supposedly so great that you won't be able to
resist them. Maybe at some point I'll find out that there is some killer
feature in there that makes it worth it, but I'm not holding my breath.
At least I can close all the "Plasma" windows on my desktop and just
ignore that whole subsystem. (But it was still cruft sitting there
taking up hard drive space, and processes taking up memory that I
couldn't just kill because I didn't know what else in KDE 4 depends on
them.)
The next thing I realized was that I can't stand Dolphin as a file
manager. (I already kind of knew that from my previous brief bout with
KDE 4 on the old machine, but now I have definite proof.) Konqueror was
fine, thank you very much. But of course the geniuses of KDE 4 had
removed Konqueror as a file manager from the standard menus, so I had to
remove all the Dolphin references and replace them with Konqueror
references by hand. Thanks a lot, I don't think.
However, even Konqueror turned out to be less likable than in KDE 3. For
one thing, there are irritating little bugs that weren't there in KDE 3,
and which relate to functionality that's been there forever, so you
wouldn't expect bugs to just appear out of nowhere. One example: delete
a directory in Konqueror when you have the directory tree displayed in
the left pane and the current directory in the right pane (which is my
normal way of operating). The right pane updates correctly to show that
the deleted directory is no longer there. The left pane does not; you
can hit "refresh" all day and it will continue to show the deleted
folder. Even after you have clicked on the deleted folder in the left
pane, and had Konqueror tell you that it's not there, it still
displays in the left pane. The only way to fix this is to exit and
then restart Konqueror. How could this basic piece of interface have
gotten broken? Don't they test these things? I ended up running the KDE
3 version of Konqueror under KDE 4 as my file manager, which meant yet
another round of adjusting menu items and settings by hand.
Then I discovered that, not only did the genuises at KDE 4 break
previously working functionality, they also flat-out removed
functionality that had been there in KDE 3. I discovered quite a
while ago that Kontact (at least, the KDE 3 version) lets you
store your calendar, contact list, to-do list, etc. in "groupware"
folders in your IMAP email. This is great; I can share all that stuff
among multiple machines (at a minimum, I need my primary desktop and my
laptop to both see the same data) without having to worry about setting
up separate network infrastucture for each one. I really don't want to
have to set up, say, an LDAP server just to share my contacts; IMAP
email is everywhere anyway, so why not use it for this simple, obvious
added functionality?
Well, guess what KDE 4 removed from Kontact? All of that IMAP
groupware functionality is gone. Well, perhaps that's a bit strong.
Technically, it's not quite gone, because digging around on Ubuntu's
forums turned up some ways to edit config files by hand to (supposedly)
enable the sort of thing that was easily set up through the standard
settings GUI in KDE 3. Now to me, if they went so far as to remove all
those settings from the standard GUI and make you edit config files by
hand, they might as well have removed it altogether. I run a GUI desktop
like KDE so I won't have to edit all those configs by hand. But even
so, I tried all that, and it still didn't work. Apparently, from the
forum traffic, I'm not the only one who has observed this. Maybe there's
some magic words I haven't put into the configs, and if I can find out
what they are, I could get this to work. But I don't have the time or
the inclination to go to all that trouble for something that should
never have been broken in the first place. Instead, I started running
the KDE 3 version of Kontact under KDE 4. (Are you beginning to see a
pattern here?)
I'm actually surprised, looking back, that I didn't switch back to a
full KDE 3 desktop session at this point. By that time, I did have a
fair number of settings established in KDE 4 that I didn't want to have
to re-establish in KDE 3, so I hoped that I could get away with running
a KDE 4 desktop but using KDE 3 versions of applications almost
exclusively. (Oh, yes, the pattern I just referred to kept on with a
vengeance. In fairly short order, I had to dump KDE 4 versions for KDE 3
versions of pretty much all the applications I use, because the KDE 4
versions kept throwing weird curve balls at me. I won't bother listing
them all here; you'd get bored. It's worth noting, though, that for one
application in particular I had to use the KDE 3 version from the start,
because there is no KDE 4 version at all: KEdit, the basic
"notepad-equivalent" text editor. This one just baffles me: wouldn't
that be the easiest application to port to a new version, not to mention
one of the simple, basic ones that you would never want to be without?)
But I should have known it was a vain hope.
What finally pushed me over the edge was when I found that, even though
I was running the KDE 3 version of Kontact, the "groupware" stuff I
talked about above ceased to work, simply because I was running it under
a KDE 4 desktop. I confirmed this diagnosis, of course, by starting a
KDE 3 desktop session (by this time I had one installed, something in my
subconscious having convinced me that the switch was inevitable) and
seeing that all the neat groupware stuff worked just fine. Let me be
clear: the groupware stuff had been working under a KDE 4 session, and
then it stopped, when I hadn't changed anything that should have had
any effect on that functionality. I had rebooted the machine because of
a kernel upgrade, but that shouldn't have affected Kontact, should it? I
was peeved enough that I actually spent some more time burrowing through
the various config files that deal with this functionality; all of them
looked the same as they had when it had been working under KDE 4, and
Googling and searching forums turned up nothing helpful. Once again, if
I wanted stuff that had been working to suddenly break for no apparent
reason, and to be unable to diagnose the problem and fix it even by
digging into config files by hand, I'd run Windows, thank you very much.
So here I am, writing and publishing this post in a nicely working KDE 3
desktop session, running nicely working KDE 3 applications. Are they
perfect? No, of course not. But they work well enough to meet my needs,
and after this experience with KDE 4, I don't think I'll see any reason
to change again any time soon.
Oh, to answer an obvious question that someone is sure to ask: no, I'm
not interested in switching to Gnome. I do have a Gnome desktop session
installed on my machine, but I only use it when I'm curious about how
some particular GUI I'm working on will appear in a Gnome desktop. I
have nothing in particular against Gnome; it just doesn't fit the way I
work. And once more, if I wanted to be forced to switch around the way
I work every time somebody came out with a shiny new desktop that I
just have to try, I'd run...well, this one could be Mac just as well
as Windows, but you get the idea.
(One other note: towards the end of the Odyssey recounted above, I set
up a Linux computer for a friend, and started him out with KDE 4, after
a brief period with Gnome, only because it's the default desktop on
Ubuntu and I didn't have a Kubuntu DVD handy, made it clear that it
didn't fit the way he was working with the computer either. He went
through the Odyssey much faster than I did; within a couple of weeks I
had installed and switched him to a KDE 3 desktop. That was another
factor that helped to finally push me over the edge for my own
machine; when your friend, a Linux newbie, has a machine running
smoother than yours does, something's gotta give.)
<h1>Postscript: 64-bit Linux Sucks Too</h1>
One thing I forgot to mention above is that, since I had a brand
spanking new multi-core 64-bit processor, I figured that I should
install a 64-bit version of Linux to take full advantage of it. In
fact, I did this twice, with both OpenSuSE and Ubuntu. What a
mistake. Even though 64-bit has been around for a number of years
now, there were still a lot of packages without 64-bit versions,
which takes away a lot of the benefit of running 64-bit in the
first place. But what finally pushed me over the edge and made me
wipe the hard drive and start again with 32-bit versions was that
the graphics in the 64-bit versions of both OpenSuSE and Ubuntu
simply sucked. The desktop themes were limited (and didn't include
the ones I preferred), the configuration options were limited (and
didn't include a number of options that I had spent considerable
time tuning on my old machine), and worst of all since I do a lot
of writing and programming, the font rendering was atrocious, even
when I had tried all possible combinations of settings for
smoothing and anti-aliasing and so forth.
I should make clear that none of what I'm ranting about caused me
any really serious problems, in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I
spent extra time getting my new computer set up, but I was expecting
to do that anyway. And I still had my old computer up and running
(in fact, it still is, though now it mainly just provides a filesystem
for storing backups), so I could still get things done while I was
messing around with the new one. Mainly it was just a big
disappointment; all the work that has gone into KDE 4 and 64-bit
Linux, and they're still not ready for prime time.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/rants</category>
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jun 2011 23:38 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Tolkien's World</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">opinions/tolkien</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/opinions/tolkien.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
A <a href="http://plover.net/~bonds/tolkien1.html">post at "Stephensplatz"</a>
describes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as "A Notable Work
of Children's Fiction" (that's the title of the post). As someone
who first read LOTR in seventh grade, and who has re-read it many
times since, this naturally got my attention. And since reading
Tolkien's writing was, in large part, what made me first think of
writing myself, it's fitting that a discussion of his work gets the
first "real" post on this blog.
Perhaps surprisingly, I could find almost nothing to disagree with
in the post linked to above. However, I was a bit confused by the
post's opening question:
<blockquote>
Why do Tolkien fans get so touchy when people refer to Lord of
the Rings as a children's book?
</blockquote>
That statement certainly does not make me "touchy", nor did anything
in the post. The author gives reasons for characterizing LOTR this
way, and from his point of view, the characterization is
reasonable. I have not read a great deal of literary criticism of
Tolkien's work, or much of what his "fans" write (for the most part
I prefer to read what Tolkien himself wrote, not what others write
about him), so perhaps I simply have not seen the sort of touchiness
that the post's author has. (I have read a fair number of critics
who get touchy when their particular pet interpretations of LOTR
are criticized by others, but that's not quite the same thing; I'll
come back to this point.)
Some of the post's comments are purely subjective: for example,
that "the early parts of LOTR are almost unreadable." They aren't
for me, but of course every reader's experience is different. And
"the Revised Standard (Catholic) Version" is not an unjustified
moniker for the work, though Tolkien does take pains to make the
Christianity in it subtle and not overt (for which I, personally,
thank him, since it allows me to read the book as an agnostic
without continually gritting my teeth, as I did when I tried to
read, for example, C. S. Lewis). When, for example, you look in the
Appendices and see that the dates of the Fellowship setting out from
Rivendell and of the destruction of the Ring are, respectively, December
25 and March 25 (and Tolkien says explicitly in a later Appendix that
those particular dates were intentionally chosen by him), of course you
understand the reference.
Other comments in the post are not subjective, exactly, but they
are perhaps not as important to me as they appear to be to the author.
For example, consider this comparison of LOTR to Wagner's Ring cycle,
and specifically Siegfried seeing a woman (Brunhilde) for the first
time:
<blockquote>
...entering the world of love and adult sexuality--that's real
white-hot terror, that's what separates the men from the boys. It's
a ring of fire Tolkien's fiction is too timid to cross.
</blockquote>
Siegfried was a courageous hero, yes, but he was also an idiot
(Anna Russell, in her hilarious "condensed" Ring cycle, calls him "a
regular Li'l Abner type"), and Wagner himself was not a model I would
recommend following in his relations with women. It is true that LOTR
has no sex in it, and almost no man-woman relationships of any sort
(Aragorn and Eowyn being the obvious "exception that proves the rule"),
and that did reflect, at least in part, Tolkien's own combination of
innocence and Victorian training in these matters. But it also reflects,
I think, a judgment that the kind of sexuality portrayed in, say, the
Ring cycle is ultimately rather superficial. (I am reminded of a story
about John Randolph, who was in the early US House of Representatives,
and was well known to be impotent. When another member made an
indirect reference to this disability, his reply was "Sir, you pride
yourself on an ability in which any ignorant barbarian is your equal and
any jackass immeasurably your superior.") Tolkien simply preferred to
concentrate on other aspects of human relations that, to him, offered
deeper possibilities. This is probably also a matter of taste, at least
to some extent.
The most interesting point in the post about the worldview of LOTR,
that it "projects a simplistic Sunday-school good vs. evil worldview",
is also not unjustified; and it may account for the touchiness the author
has observed, because a good deal of Tolkien criticism that I have read
is centered around the morality portrayed in LOTR and how, if at all,
it relates to the real world. Critics who defend the position that
the morality of LOTR does apply to real life do tend to get touchy
when that position is questioned. Years ago I came across a book of
critical articles called A Tolkien Compass, and I was struck by the
fact that the editor, Jared Lobdell, went so far as to use the word
"wrongheaded" to describe the view that "the morality of LOTR cannot
be applied volens nolens to real life." (To Lobdell's credit, he did
have the integrity to include articles on both sides of the question;
the word "wrongheaded" was used to describe his opinion of an article
in the same book.)
It is probably not a coincidence that critics who take the position
that LOTR's morality can be applied to real life tend to do so from a
Christian perspective. That was the case in A Tolkien Compass, and
it is also the case in a book a friend lent me recently, Following
Gandalf, by Matthew Dickerson. Most of the book is devoted to studying
in detail the morality portrayed in LOTR: that good and evil are
objective things in the world, and "it is a man's part to discern them"
and make the right moral choices. Also, the right choices should be made
even if they may lead to defeat; the Wise of Middle-earth all refuse to
use the Ring, and instead seek to destroy it, even though that risks
total defeat if the Ring-bearer's quest fails. But of course even that
would not really be "total" defeat, because ultimately the One is there
to judge all choices, good and evil, so this morality is ultimately
founded on the belief that what appear to be bad consequences of "right"
choices will be made right in the end.
Near the end of his book, Dickerson makes explicit the real-world
Christian implications:
<blockquote>
But if Tolkien is right--if the Christian story is true, as he (and
so many skeptical men) have come to believe is the case--then the
victory of salvation is possible.
</blockquote>
In other words, human beings can achieve moral victory not just in
Middle-earth, but in the real world, by applying the morality that
Tolkien's heroes apply in LOTR. Of course this belief, as it is
described here (and by Tolkien himself, whose writings Dickerson quotes
aptly throughout the book), depends crucially on the belief that "the
Christian story is true," and the author of the post I linked to at the
start might simply be flatly denying that belief. But that post also
describes differences between Middle-earth and our world that are
independent of where one stands on that question. For example, in LOTR,
"there's never any doubt who the good and bad guys are" as there is in
the real world. (A more accurate way to state this objection would be
that in LOTR, there's never any doubt what the good or bad actions
are. Dickerson in his book takes pains to draw this key distinction,
so that persons in LOTR can be morally ambiguous, not completely good
or bad. But each individual action in LOTR has a clear moral status,
whereas in the real world, we don't even have that much certainty.)
Is this simply an impasse, then? Both the Christian critics and the
author of the post above seem to think so, but I'm not sure. The post
hints at a deeper issue when it describes LOTR as
<blockquote>
...a little-England fantasy...where benevolent lords held sway and
servants contentedly knew their place--an ideal which Tolkien must
have known was a lie.
</blockquote>
This gets at another key difference between Middle-earth and the real
world, ethically/morally speaking: in Middle-earth there is such a
thing as an objective "right" to power, an objectively "rightful"
King or lord, as Aragorn is. In the real world, there is no such thing.
But it would be wrong to draw from that, as the post's author does,
the conclusion that Middle-earth has nothing to teach us about power
and politics. The error here is the flip side of the error made by a
number of critics (one example is another article in A Tolkien Compass)
who claim that the central theme or message of LOTR is that power
corrupts. The "message" of LOTR about power is nowhere near that
simple; but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Dickerson, to his credit,
avoids both errors in his book, and instead correctly observes that LOTR
distinguishes between power wielded justly, rightly, and power wielded
unjustly, wrongly, and only the latter kind of power is viewed as
corrupting. This is, of course, the whole point of the Ring itself, as
a symbol of the temptation to take shortcuts when using power, to just
make people do what you think is right, instead of using one's power
to enable them to freely choose for themselves.
And that concept is applicable to the real world, regardless of
where one stands on religion and theology. After all, having no
objective test for who "rightfully" has power in the real world does
not mean nobody has it; and enforcing responsibility when using power
is all the more important when you can't dictate any objective rules
for who "rightfully" has it. Every politician who wants to shortcut
the Constitution to "fix" some pressing social problem, every do-gooder
who wants to shortcut the lengthy (and often unsuccessful) process of
actually convincing people that taking care of the environment, say,
is a good idea, and just pass draconian legislation instead, every
Wall Street trader who sees nothing wrong with playing risky zero-sum
games with other people's retirement savings simply because they can, is
an urgent testimony to the need for some kind of countervailing force.
Perhaps Aragorn and Gandalf are not the absolutely best models to look
to for people who find themselves in such positions; but those people
certainly could do a lot worse, and mostly do. And that is anything
but "kid stuff."
<h1>Postscript: The Peter Jackson Films</h1>
The same author also has a <a href="http://plover.net/~bonds/lotrfilms.html">post</a>
about the Peter Jackson films of LOTR. Here I have even less to disagree
with than in the post about the books proper, above. In fact, in one
way I was even less enthused by the movies than this author was, since he
admits "to being moved by The Fellowship of the Ring on my first viewing,
but that's because I was watching the book, not the movie." I couldn't
even get that far; by about 30 minutes into FOTR, I was already telling
myself that I just had to accept that this was not the book I knew,
that it was a different work, a different story which happened to draw
on the material of the book, but which had to be taken on its own
merits. So I didn't even get much of a feeling of nostalgia. (I get that
by re-reading the books themselves, which I probably do, on average,
once every other year or so.)
I could also add other absurdities that aren't mentioned in the review:
for example, the fact that so much screen time is spent on cheap stuff
(e.g., in FOTR with Saruman creating the orcs, scenes which never appear
in the book at all), while many of the actual suspenseful events in the
book are omitted or glossed over. Or the fact that the elves, in
particular, just seem way too immature compared to Tolkien's originals.
All the characters suffer from this to some extent, as the post's author
notes, but it was particularly grating, for example, to see Elrond, who
is something like 6500 years old at the time of LOTR, acting like an
overwhelmed middle-aged father in a TV movie. (I had to wonder if Peter
Jackson even bothered to read The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, since his
portrayal of that whole subplot bears little if any resemblance to the
book.) Only Galadriel in the film gets across any sense of how much
history Tolkien's elves had already lived through by the time of LOTR,
and how much was riding on the outcome of the War. When she delivers the
great line "All shall love me and despair!" you actually do get a
sense that something really world-shaking is at stake.
One change from the book that I did not object to was putting Arwen
in Glorfindel's role. I understand why Tolkien wouldn't ever have
considered doing that, but even in the context of the book, it seems
extreme. And we don't even have to look at the obvious contrast with
Eowyn to see this. Galadriel clearly wields power and is not just a
female appendage of Celeborn, and by simple analogy one would not
expect her granddaughter to be just a female appendage either. So I
didn't mind that she wasn't in the movie; if nothing else, it makes
Aragorn's love for her more believable.
All that said, however, I should make clear that, once I had made the
perceptual shift I referred to above, accepting that the movies I was
watching were not of the same story as the one in the books, I
actually found that, in places, they do capture something of the
feeling of the books. One such place I have already referred to above,
at the Mirror of Galadriel. Another is the view we get of the charge
of the Rohirrim as they arrive at the Pelennor Fields, the great aerial
shot of a wave of riders breaking upon the besieging armies. Watching
that scene was every bit as moving as reading it was when I first read
the trilogy. And Aragorn's speech to his soldiers before the last battle
at the Black Gate seemed to me to have some echoes of Henry V's speech
before the Battle of Agincourt.
In the end, though, I think the movies are missing a lot of the richness
of the books. Some of that is probably unavoidable; Tolkien's books are
very, well, bookish, and much that is in them does not translate well
into other media. (Tolkien himself knew this quite well, as is made clear
in other writings of his, such as his essay "On Fairy-Stories".) But that
still leaves a lot that could have been truer to the books, and wasn't.
In particular, the movies do not capture at all the key lesson about
power, and the right and wrong ways to use it, that I discussed above
with reference to the books. The post goes so far as to say that
"Jackson, perhaps unwittingly, has produced a work that plays into the
hands of the neoconservative paranoiacs in the White House" (it was
written in 2007), which seems to me to be laying it on a bit strong.
But Tolkien's books, even if you don't agree with the viewpoint they
take, at least encounter the issue. The movies don't.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/opinions</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:36 GMT</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Welcome!</title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">general/firstpost</guid>
<link>http://blog.peterdonis.com/general/firstpost.html</link>
<description><![CDATA[
<div>
I've started this blog as an easier way to get my thoughts actually posted
to the web, instead of languishing in the "pending" area on my home machine
waiting to be put into the form of an actual "article" that could be added
to my <a href="http://peterdonis.net/">old site</a>. I will still post full-blown
articles from time to time, but I intend for this to be a place where I
can just post quick thoughts as they strike me, without having to worry so
much about how they're organized. We'll see how it goes.
NOTE: Right now there are no comments here, because that takes more work to
set up, and the whole point of this is to minimize work for me. If you have
comments, questions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to
<a href="mailto:feedback@peterdonis.com">email me</a>. I can't promise that I'll
answer, but I try to be open to interesting discussions.
</div>
]]></description>
<category domain="http://blog.peterdonis.com">/general</category>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jun 2011 03:07 GMT</pubDate>
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