Another day at school. Ho-hum. Two exams.#

Funny note from school. My Discrete Structures teacher said, "Back when I was in school... in 10 BC... BEFORE CALCULATORS, we had to this all by hand." I thought it was funny.

Dr. David Allen White on The Importance of Language, not sure where I got the link from. It's a piece of how image is replace word, and provides some ideas about how to fight this.#

This example [his niece not being able to read the original Winnie the Pooh books with him] illustrates the ongoing disaster happening in language and in narrative and its replacement by image and visceral incident. I am going to cover two areas: The difference between word and image; and the other between narrative and thrill. It is important that you understand I will be grounding this lecture in how I view the language I am going to be using. I am a teacher of English. This means that words matter to me, that I love words, that for these reasons I entered my profession. In teaching Shakespeare, I've been fortunate to deal with the greatest writer the English language has every known, a master of language who used it with precision, beauty, depth, and genuine spiritual insight.

(Also note, he's giving this lecture at a seminary it's very God-heavy.)

What happens to a world that begins to lose language? That is what is happening out there! Language is deteriorating, vocabularies are shrinking, people are less and less able to express themselves linguistically or have a pool of words to draw on to describe what they think and feel. As a result, in its place, they are often compelled instead to wordless action because they are blocked in their very nature. I suspect it has something to do with why there is an increased level of violence in the world. With words no longer available to us, we act physically because that's what we know and what we've seen.

There are a few very odd moments though. For example, who would call the Middle Ages the peak of civilization? Aren't they also referred to as The Dark Ages for their squalor?

Guttenberg ushered in the age of the printing press and suddenly books became more easily available. But did the common good of the population improve? I heard when I was growing up that old Protestant diatribe that "Catholics were not allowed to read the Bible." It's utter nonsense, of course, but we all share a false sense that the easy availability of books is a guarantee of an educated public. During the Middle Ages-the time of Aquinas and of Dante, that time many judge to be the peak of civilization-books weren't readily available. Only few people had books. There wasn't a Bible in every home, yet we commonly believe this era to be the Age of Faith. What was needed to be known was known. It was communicated. It was received. The Catholic Church in her wisdom was able to provide what was necessary.

He talks about the problems of the Internet a bit...

The computer is a medium for lies that we honor as truth because we are habituated to think, "It's right there on the screen; it can't be wrong; the computer knows everything." We can find everything on the Internet, yes, except the ability to rationally distinguish truth from a lie. That we cannot find on the Internet. In order to have and preserve the ability to reason, we must thoroughly know language. Those born and bred on the Internet suffer a lack of reasoning power and gradually become incapable of distinguishing.

I feel compelled to point out that this is certainly true with an unenthusiastic look at the Internet, particularly the older, but still popular, style of a non-interactive net. But, with a healthy blogosphere and the peer review it entails, as do other communities like Wikipedia, the information becomes more reliable. It gets to the point where it is no different than the written word of great books or the spoken word of plays--not perfect, not omniscience, but a useful piece of learning.

I do agree that the Internet can be used improbably as a crutch as described above, however.

This article is interesting, particularly if you can block out some of the wasteful Catholicism. Something can be intelligent and interesting without invoking God every other paragraph. He may be the Beginning and the End, but that doesn't mean the middle lacks expressive power and importance.

Jay Rosen posts a speech from 1993 about his journalistic philosophy and how the press can be a legitimate actor in democracy.#

The trouble, though, with saying "baseball is a business" is not that it's untrue. It's that the sentence may become true if we don't watch out-- if we don't understand baseball, preserve baseball, and demand that others respect baseball. Journalism is in a similar position. It is not a business. But it may become a business, nothing more than a department within the media, if we don't understand it, cultivate it-- and I would say, reinvent it.

He relates an interesting story from the 1992 campaign...

When George Bush scheduled an appearance in North Carolina, the Observer sent the campaign a list of 40 questions readers wanted to ask the President. The Bush operatives chose not to respond to the list. So, when the president came to the state the Observer ran a photo of Bush playing softball at a barbeque. Around the photo they printed the 40 questions from readers with blank spaces for answers-- as I said, a rather daring act.

François-René Rideau links to a short article from H. L. Mencken titled, Last Words from 1926.#

I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings!

Richard the Gwai-Lo Hearted linked to Stavros The Wonderchicken's Never mind the bollocks, here's the wonderchicken.#

I've been casting about for a way to frame my thinking about weblogs and weblogging lately, as I've watched with a mild dismay apparently shared by others down the street about the way in which the tang and tenor in our neighbourhood of neighbourhoods have been changing in these post-blogdiluvian times. I hadn't found the key I needed until this morning, and it was, amusingly, courtesy of Dave Winer.

[...]

Hell, he's been anointed by fucking Harvard, right? What else would I expect him to say? That weblogs are like snorting coke off the bellies of teenage hookers? You can't get much further from the punk DIY ethos than Harvard, right?

[...]

Do not listen to those who would tell you what they are not.

These people will destroy your soul. Classification is for insects.

Chip Gibbons links to Arther Silber who linked to Ayn Rand's Playboy interview from 1964.#

RAND: The important word in the statement you quoted is "fundamental." Fundamental guilt does not mean the ability to judge one's own actions and regret a wrong action, if one commits it. Fundamental guilt means that man is evil and guilty by nature.

PLAYBOY: You mean original sin?

RAND: Exactly. It is the concept of original sin that my heroine, or I, or any Objectivist, is incapable of accepting or of ever experiencing emotionally. It is the concept of original sin that negates morality. If man is guilty by nature, he has no choice about it. If he has no choice, the issue does not belong in the field of morality. Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will -- only to those actions which are open to his choice. To consider man guilty by nature is a contradiction in terms. My heroine would be capable of experiencing guilt about a specific action. Only, being a woman of high moral stature and self-esteem, she would see to it that she never earned any guilt by her actions. She would act in a totally moral manner and, therefore, would not accept an unearned guilt.

There is a part where Rand is asked about some novelists and she says this:

PLAYBOY: What about Nabokov?

RAND: I have read only one book of his and a half -- the half was Lolita, which I couldn't finish. He is a brilliant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill can justify them.

Something that Harold Bloom writes about in the Western Canon is about how aesthetics are independent of philosophy and morals. A problem that Bloom sees with modern literary critics and readers is that they try to learn from authors, rather than appreciate them. He argues that, yes, many great works are about evil, but this is okay because what's more important is whether it reflects beauty. I'm not sure how the two minds would mesh.

Adam Gessaman links to Garrett Hardin's essay The Tragedy of the Commons about the social problem of over-population and the methods that can't fix it.#

The methods that he says do not work are technological solutions , I expect he will propose social engineering and enforced child limits.

The class of "no technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment. It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem — technologically. I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe.

Under the heading, "Freedom to Breed is Intolerable."

If each human family were dependent only on its own resources; if the children of improvident parents starved to death; if thus, over breeding brought its own "punishment" to the germ line — then there would be no public interest in controlling the breeding of families. But our society is deeply committed to the welfare state, [12] and hence is confronted with another aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

In a welfare state, how shall we deal with the family, the religion, the race, or the class (or indeed any distinguishable and cohesive group) that adopts over breeding as a policy to secure its own aggrandizement? [13] To couple the concept of freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action.

His proposal:

Perhaps the simplest summary of this analysis of man's population problems is this: the commons, if justifiable at all, is justifiable only under conditions of low-population density. As the human population has increased, the commons has had to be abandoned in one aspect after another.

[...]

The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity" — and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.

This is very interesting to me. On one hand, he supports private property and abolishing the commons, but he doesn't seem to be very consistent with this. Specifically with regards to his treatment of pollution and property rights. He then talks about how if we are to solve the problem of population then the breeding commons must be lost.

His mention of the welfare state as an addiction seems to me a hint at what would really work: removing a child's "right to live," both at home and in foreign lands. But he doesn't actually say this, instead he talks about how the government must coerce people into not having many children. The proposal is this: Freedom, that is untraditional and may be uncomfortable. And Slavery, that is vile.

Going into reading this I assumed that it would communist/totalitarian crap, after reading it and seeing Hardin slightly propose that, I'm not convinced he believes it in.