I don't have a link for this, but on Friday one of the local newspapers had an article about some of the sorts of pastors in the area who were concerned about Harry Potter. There was one in particular that caught my attention: he said that he was worried about the books' influence on children because children didn't perform abstract thought the way adults did, but thought only concretely, all the time.
I find myself wondering how he intends to really teach Christianity to kids; they'll either grow up not thinking of religion has having abstract rules rather than concrete rituals, and not realizing that there are principals behind beliefs, or they'll gain an impression of Christians as "those people who didn't want me to think abstractly." I wonder if when the time comes and they finally are exposed to religion in a big way, they'll be ripe for conversion to either religions that do push abstract thinking, or religions that have more interesting sets of rituals.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that the LDS are one of the fastest growing religions in the world right now: they do expect their college age kids to be able to go out into the world and argue the merits of their religious beliefs with complete strangers of a variety of religions.
It's certainly something to ask some of the wiccans I've met who used to be fundamentalist christians.
For the general edification of my readers, the pages apparently missing from some copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are pages 787 through 818. In the affected copies they're simply second copies of pages 755 through 786.
Of course, if I had a copy of it with this defect, I would not exchange it for a non-defective copy, as has apparently been offered. I suspect it would be valuable some day.
OK, NOW I have time to discuss the issues in depth. In retrospect, I am not sure why I bothered trying a rushed response. It doesn't seem to work well. I'd get halfway through writing one response, and another talking head on the TV would say something else before I could finish. It seems that this week was some sort of "harmonic convergence" for people who didn't like small, non-centralized media, and I'm going to try to handle all three major statements at once.
To get things started, Perry De Havilland of Samizdata.net has posted on the European Council's proposal here, and no doubt purposefully pointed out one of the major problems with the proposal as currently written: there's no way to implement it. They said that they would not comply with the regulation, and furthermore:
And if the EU says we have to let you comment... tough shit, it ain't gonna happen. The people who write for Samizdata.net all now live next door to Samizdata Illuminatus, in Arkham, Massachusetts.
Which gets to the heart of the matter: it is unenforcable to any significant degree without either the cooperation of the legal authorities of most other countries on what we now call the internet, or the partition of Europe's internet from the rest of the world's. I find it difficult to envision a circumstance where the first will happen; it would require the conquest, from without or within, of the United States, and would require a protracted conflict. The second option, partition of the internet, has already happened once: The People's Republic of China already has a server cluster of web proxy filters, that will not allow users within the country to browse sites outside the country. It's not perfect, but it doesn't have to be. Fooling most of the people most of the time is a good enough solution. Several of the large institutional information brokers, such as Google, which could have been used to work around it thanks to their caching feature, have agreed for the moment to cooperate with the Chinese government regarding the Chinese-language versions of the site. I suspect that the language barrier also works in the favor of the authorities.
There is also the historical precedent of France's "Minitel" system, which was in effect a nationwide bulletin board system that operated over character based terminals I believe 40 x 24 characters across. The French government had subsidized this system, and it gained a lot of market penetration in France, which lasted longer than similar non-subsidized systems (which eventually co-opted the internet's features, or died off) in other countries. I've seen it argued, by several people, that this was a factor in keeping the French intellectually isolated from what was being said in other countries, at least until recently. Minitel usage via "dumb terminal" peaked as late as 1997, and currently statistics on the system are hard to come by, because it's now accessed via emulators connected via the internet.
Europe is a much more developed entity, at least for the moment, than China. The relative abundance of internet links, and the lack of language barriers, would make the "Great Firewall" route much harder. OTOH, if they wanted to build their own, incompatible version of the internet, they do have experience from Minitel that may be applicable in this area. I don't know that they will try either of these solutions, but without something along those lines, the debated rules are totally unenforcable. I have NO evidence that, for instance, "Dissident Frogman" is acutally in France, rather than being down the road somewhere in Chalmette or Shell Beach. That could cut both ways, if the authorities were trying to stifle him, because if he were anonymously posting from an american site, they could claim he was just a foreign propagandist.
I have no doubt that attempting either would eventually hurt their economy greatly. It would also have high political costs, and might fragment the EU along "Old Europe" and "New Europe" lines, even more so than now. The big question is, in my mind, are they thinking that far ahead, or not?
Which brings me to the next couple of trial balloons that popped up this week: two Americans, one a politician, the other a political commentator, have both decided they're thinking that far ahead, and have come up with what I consider to be unworkable schemes of their own.
The first proposal was from Orrin Hatch, Senator from Utah, he proposed that big media companies should be allowed to break the computers of people who they think violated their copyrights.
The second attack, which I'll describe in depth first, was a set of statements from Bill O'Reilly saying that small time news and/or opinion providers on the internet need to be regulated by the government; he was apparently miffed that a newspaper's web site had gotten some details wrong about his radio show, which was moved instead of being dropped. He then went on to complain about all the small sites out there:
Talking Points noted with interest the hue and cry that went up from some quarters about the FCC changing the rules and allowing big corporations to own even more media properties. But big corporations are big targets. If they misbehave, they can be sued for big bucks. These small time hit and run operators on the net, however, can traffic in perversity and falsehoods all day long with impunity. It's almost impossible to rein them in.
This statement bugs me immensely, since there's a logical "bait and switch" going on. He seems to discuss what is already legally actionable in this country (the FBI already prosecutes the sort of content he is complaining about, they have large numbers of agents dedicated to the task, not to sue the perpetrators, but to put them in prison), and conflates it with people saying things he doesn't like about his radio show. Well, actually, a big newspaper said something he didn't like, but that's in a way besides the point. The suprising thing is that he said the problem with internet sites is that the people running them didn't have enough assets for it to be profitable to sue them out of business.
Now remember, those who are committing criminal acts are already subject to prosecution, imprisonment, and civil forfeiture of assets, which is a different process, I thought, than lawsuits brought by private citizens. So who is he talking about suing? Is he suggesting a legal regime similar to that proposed by the European Council, or the sort of expansive libel laws the United Kingdom has? If any lawyers are reading this, and can clarify the situation, please write me.
But it almost sounds as if he's complaining that some people don't have enough money to be worth suing out of business.
This is a very strange thing for someone who works so hard to project a populist image to say. And I have the same sort of irritation towards him now as I did when Ted Turner was paying for fifteen minutes of ranting from Pat Buchanan to be broadcast on CNN during "Crossfire" every weeknight: who died and left him to be king of the populists? Shouldn't that be a contradiction in terms? Shouldn't conservatives, or populists, or progressives, or whatever, have the right to define themselves, and not have a leader appointed by a television network?
There are other ways the whole scheme is not very well thought out. Enforcing United Kingdom style libel standards in the US would have a detrimental effect on non-pseudonymous webloggers, but they would also have a detrimental effect on broadcast television too, especially on the sort of muckrackers O'Reilly projects himself as. Even if he could dance around enough things to avoid being sued, he'd probably lose credibility, and audience share, in the process. If he couldn't say controversial statements of consequence, a lot more people probably wouldn't bother tuning in. It would look like Buck Henry's television call-in show sketch on the old back-when-it-was-funny SNL.
The whole related phenomenon of public policy by lawsuit bothers me; it seems to be the recourse taken by political groups that have decided that they've already lost the political battle, and need to resort to the judgement of twelve random people chosen from the voter pool based on their ignorance of the subject in question. More famous cases involve gun control, tobacco use, and nuclear power plants, but I have in the past month or so seen references to cases involving offshore wind farms, launch vehicles of all types, and plutonium powered space probes. I vaguely remember O'Reilly ranting against this sort of thing in the past, and hopefully he will come to his senses and do so in the future.
Finally, Orrin Hatch, Republican senator from Utah, has proposed that those who repeatedly violate copyright should be subject to having their computers damaged by Big Media without the sort of due process usually attached to criminal trials. This scheme in particular bugs me because I'm part owner of a very small company, and although I am fairly sure I don't have copyrighted content that isn't covered by fair use provisions on my computer, I really have no idea about the other computers run by people in my office. I do not really have time to look, either. And if their systems aren't properly locked down, they might not, as well. Have you checked your system lately? How many files are there on an average installation of Windows XP? If you're talking about a system with vulnerabilities so that an outside person could wreck them, without due process, then they also have enough power to put whatever they need to on the system in order to justify wrecking it. Not to mention that I doubt there's a way of making everyday computer systems vulnerable to Hollywood hackers that wouldn't leave them vulnerable to other sorts of hackers as well.
Computer systems aren't vulnerable to outside attack so much as people made mistakes implementing the perfect design, they're vulnerable because of things that people think are features that really aren't, such as javascript, or ActiveX, or Outlook's recent problems with automatic display of html messages or attachments.
The 9-11 attackers chose the targets they did, among other reasons, in hopes of causing a large amount of economic damage to the country. In the world we live in, purposeful security vulnerabilities are bugs, not features.
It eventually turned out that Sen. Hatch not only had unlicensed code on his web site, but also a stale link of some sort to a porn web site. The first was discovered by Laurence Simon, author of the 'blog "Amish Tech Support." I wonder if Sen. Hatch is now going to drop work to audit his site, or have an aide do it, and what standards he's going to hold those of us to who neither have special aides or time (in case anyone's wondering, I'm writing this right now from the wreckage of two other posts I didn't have time to finish because I was very busy with work earlier this week), when he can't meet them himself. What real work would he have not get done so that the vast majority of people out in the real world could ensure themselves to be compliant?
This is positively mind boggling to me. I wonder how long it'll be until you can't read unapproved amateur US internet sites in Europe at all. Thanks to China and Sun (putting the fire in Great Firewall) it IS possible nowadays. Especially look at this comment.
On the surface, I'm sure it looks like something to make things more "fair," but as implemented, it'll just give the bureaucrats even more power to shape the debate.
I can't wait to see what Stephen Den Beste thinks of this. You know, I wonder if he's the intended target? :-)
Addendum: Isn't the whole point of a weblog that everyone and their cat can get one?
Addendum Part 2: Stephen Den Beste comments here on the whole issue, and links to a post at samizdata.net. And as a closing note, I shouldn't try to blog in the five minutes between the start of lunch and leaving to eat. It isn't enough to give the subject a proper treatment, which I will now attempt in the next entry.
I thought some more about the banning in Egypt of the movie "The Matrix Reloaded." When I saw it, I was irritated by some of the politically correct bull puckey that occured in the movie. The Bush image in the film montage of the "war and destruction" lecture by the Architect, and the casting of post-modernist college professors as leaders of the human world. (In case anyone's taking notes, I also disliked the fight between Neo and the army of Agent Smiths, sort of liked the freeway scene, and can't figure out how Neo can be such a priveliged entity unless the level of reality in which the Matrix is a simulation is itself another simulation.) But getting back on topic, the Wachowski brothers did a whole lot of the things that the compleat young rebel against US society would conclude would irritate the current administration, and endear themselves to its foreign critics. But the exact opposite happened.
I wonder if they're ever going to stop and think about why.
I found this article fairly interesting. Addendum: Thanks to Winds of Change for the link.
While I am in linking mode, I thought I'd also link to this article on Rantburg about the Three Gorges Dam in China. I hope the worst case scenarios being banded about there turn out to be wrong, for a variety of reasons.
I just wanted to link to the slashdot article about The Matrix Reloaded being banned in Egypt. In places it looks like the thread was actually getting interesting, before it hit the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" event horizon.
(If that statement doesn't bother you, stop and think about all the dozens of revolutions that have happened over the past hundred years or so, where the revolutionaries won but freedom didn't.)
I'm going to engage in wild speculation here, and suggest that Baghdad is a poor place to launch short-range anti-ship missiles from, and that the discovered missiles might be modified for unconventional uses. Whether this might include WMD,delivery, or reconnaisance (using them as a sort of cheap UAV) I don't know. I hope someone is checking the possibility.
(Why do I include the reconnaisance possibility? Well, I have read that in the war in '91, one of the major problems the Iraqis had was actually knowing where to aim their theoretically technically superior Gerald Bull built artillery pieces in order to actually hit allied troops.)
Posts here are going to be rare for the next week or so, because I have had a death in the family and I need to catch up on work. Before I go, however, I'd like to leave y'all with this .
See y'all next weekend.
After reviewing the previous two entries, I have noticed two things: I seem to be sticking my neck out with some of these statements this weekend, and writing acceptable prose in this medium seems harder than doing so in a usenet newsgroup or bulletin board. As to the latter, maybe I need to write these posts in a text editor or something before putting them up. Regarding the former, I don't know the reason. I think maybe I just wanted to post my beliefs of the moment before they were made obsolete by reality.
Just a quick link to the latest Robert X. Cringely column on the ongoing suit between SCO and IBM. I don't know how to reconcile his statements with the previous ones I read, that SCO code in the Linux kernel would require "wrappers" to adapt it to its new environment. I wish I could see their alleged evidence, not only for itself, but to see how large a fraction of the (guesstimating at 80 characters per line, which is rather conservative) 1,894,912 lines of code in the Linux kernel they're talking about. (Hmm, using "wc -l" on the tarfile of the 2.4.20 kernel yields 4.8 million lines of code). Finally, after perusing the SCO web site, I noticed that they're currently offering products that run on x86 compatible architectures only; Major non-x86 family linux kernel ports that I know of are: powerpc, arm/strongarm, alpha, (and checking debian ) sparc, mips, hp pa-risc, IA-64, and the s/390. And probably some others that I've overlooked, like the x86-64 port that's supposed to be floating around out there. I believe this would make, thanks to endian issues and the like, the linux and SCO kernels less compatible for code exchange than many would believe. It's also, to me, a strong indication that a whole lot more coding in general is going on in the linux kernel world than the SCO world.
In between reports of mass grave discoveries and the like in Iraq, there's been a lot of debate over the supposed absense of WMD discoveries of various types. Even Stephen Den Beste wonders here whether Saddam was conned into believing he had WMD when he really didn't.
I think speculation along these lines is mistaken. I believe Saddam did have WMD. There are too many reports that are difficult to explain otherwise.
For starters, this article at "The Command Post," about the drums of "pesticide." Why would someone bury drums of pesticide on a military base with NBC protective gear nearby? How easy would it be to make something that would be useful as a nerve gas, either immediately or with some additives, but would register as a pesticide in sophisticated laboratory tests?
And there's this post from the same place. If Iraq had no WMD's, where did the mustard gas come from?
Also keep in mind that the former regime did use the threat of poison gas attacks to put down areas in revolt, by dispatching troops in NBC protective gear, as recently as 1998. Much of the protective gear found by coalition forces came from western countries, some very recently. If he could buy the protective gear, in the past year or so, from Western countries, I wouldn't bet against him not being able to buy or make it.
As a closing note, I was able to find the second two links above in two minutes of searches. I would like to find a reference to the 1998 revolt, so if anyone out there knows, my email is somewhere off to the right.
ADDENDUM ADDED JULY 7: I probably should have written the sentence in the second to last paragraph as "If he could buy the protective gear, in the past year or so, from Western countries, I wouldn't bet against him not being able to buy or make WMD. Sorry for the poor wording.
OK, I talked it over with both of my readers thus far. One didn't like the blue-on-manila, which is why I switched to "stormy" (one of movable type's default style sheets, that I had based the blue-on-manila on). I briefly switched back to blue-on-manila and then back to stormy, to see what would happen if I went to the settings menu in Galeon and clicked on the "use own colors" option. In both stylesheets the colors changed to black text against a white background.
I'm leaving it in Stormy for now, because I want my reader with the astigmatism to see if it's any improvement, and if not, to switch to user-defined colors and see if that helps him. If neither of those are an improvement, I may try modifying the manila colormap, or switch to something more primal, like ye olde green on black.
Isn't this exciting?
There's been a fair amount of coverage in the "blogosphere" (and as an aside, I'm beginning to hate the word "blog" simply because it sounds too much like the language the smurfs use) about the recent survey on world attitudes towards Americans. Particular attention was paid to the fact that the elites of these societies seem to be the main driving force. This was pointed out in this article at Rantburg, along with some of the standard observations, including the "Kill My Neighbor's Goat" joke I've heard a hundred times before.
In my own opinion, however, despite all the great thinkers who have cogitated upon the subject, we still don't have that much of a clue as to why so many smart people do stupid things. I think part of the answer is that they're taught an elaborate structure of knowledge that halfway worked in the twelth century, FOR THEIR FAMILY, and assuming that works for modern societies as a whole.
OTTH, I have my suspicions that what gets taught as "the traditions handed down from the twelth century" in many parts of the world... isn't what they did back then. I don't think twelth century caravan traders would have survived very long if they had to follow the rules their descendants in the Arabian peninsula THINK they followed. When the Saudi-based, and Saudi-riches-funded, Al Qaeda pushed the Taliban to power in Afganistan, they managed to kill a lot of people, a disproportionate number of them female. For instance, in Moslem countries, there is often the rule that women must seek medical help only from female doctors. Combine this with a rule that women must not hold jobs at all, and you've effectively banned medical care for women. A lot of people simply weren't able to survive under those interpretations of the work rules. I really don't understand how this problem wouldn't have been worse in the twelth century, when one of the main pillars of the economy was trade carried by caravans from China to Iran. It seems to me the man of the house might be gone for months at a time. I just don't get it.
As per reader request I'll be switching to a more standard color scheme. If anyone here would like to suggest a color scheme that's good for both people with astigmatism (one of the readers thus far, possibly the only reader thus far :-) and people who can't handle black-text-on-white-computer-screen glare, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be using one of the standard templates.
One of the things I'd like to put together as one of the references on this site would be a list of links to any discussion that has happened on weblogs or elsewhere on the web regarding Eric Hoffer, 9-11, and the current crisis. I plan on rewriting an essay I wrote a while back, including more information on his writings, and I think linking to what others have said already would be useful.
To make a long story short, a lot of what people have been saying in general about fanaticism are echoes, whether they realize it or not, of what he was saying fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the WW2 and the start of the Cold War.
And it's disturbing to me how little he's been discussed lately, because he's as relevant now as he was then, and probably always will be. Maybe it's just that people don't like thinking about the fact that we're dealing with the same problem now that they did then, that naziism and communism then, and al qaeda now, are symptoms of.
And I did it again; I started writing the essay itself. I didn't mean to. Anyway, if you have written, or read, anything about Hoffer and the current crisis, please let me know; my email address is off to the left somewhere. Thank you.
Steven Den Beste writes here about a sense of feeling let down after the end of the official campaign in Iraq, and that somehow there's less of a need to write about things. While I have had writer's block before, and would rather he choose quality over quantity in his writings, I think there's still plenty to write about in the world at large.
I am not saying this to advocate the use of the US military in all, or even necessarily any, of these cases, there are still a large number of totalitarian or authoritarian governments out there in the world. At least some of them are actively hostile. We have prevailed in a conventional sense in Iraq, but winning the peace may be a harder task than winning the war. (To put that in perspective, I supported the war, and think we should be trying to win the peace.)
Outside of Iraq, the Arab Middle East, and Iran and Pakistan, still seem to have the sorts of societal problems they had back in the second week of March, before the battle began. It will be interesting to see if the recent bombings in Saudi Arabia cause the government there to start taking a more active role against Al Qaeda. Egypt still gets large amounts of aid from us, some of it in the form of military aid, but is inciting its population against both us and Israel, in what looks like preparation for war. Elsewhere, all the usual propaganda is taking place, about how the US is really taking orders from Ariel Sharon, or the Big Oil Companies. (You know, the usual, that war and policy happens for every reason in the world BUT ideological differences).
North Korea is, one supposes, trying to figure out ways to turn its bombs into money; Iran allegedly has a nuclear bomb construction program. I don't think the sort of military action we took against Iraq is possible or wise in either case. We fought the recent invasion of Iraq with what's basically a peacetime army, using a total of three divisions and some regiment-sized units, and whatever a Marine Expeditionary Force is (I'm not sure how big it is). In terms of overall number of deaths, the war was much smaller than some wars of the last ten years that are still ongoing (such as the Sudanese civil war). There's repression in Myanmar, which Den Beste pointed out in his next post, piracy in the South China Sea, chaos in Pakistan's border areas, and widespread civil war in Zaire or whatever it's called this week.
Now that I think about it, a list of the various wars that have been going on over the past ten years, and their death tolls and current death rates, would probably make an interesting topic for future discussion. I think it would be useful to put the current conflict, and other conflicts in the mideast, in perspective.
But the point remains; the world is still a dangerous and interesting (in the sense of the old chinese curse) place. It seems to me there's a lot of stuff to write about out there.
This is a test post. In the event of actual inspiration, I would have posted something worthwhile here. I have some things I want to post about, which is why I have set this up, I just need to get around to finishing them. In the meantime, I feel compelled to argue with one of Steven Den Beste's most recent posts, which I will in my next post.