On Game of Thrones

This will be some comments on changes from the book versions.

"Dance of Dragons", the book within a book in the last episode, isn't just about the horrible futility of choosing sides in a civil war between family members. It's about a couple of things:

a) The lengths people go to to achieve and maintain power, even sacrificing and fighting with their family members (hmm, wonder why that was in there with Shireen reading it).

b) The fallout from the civil war included a change to the gender politics of the Game of Thrones universe; namely that women were partially cut out of the line of succession, where sons would precede them as kings instead of queens. Regardless of whether they were better suited or not for ruling a kingdom.

One additional reason that matters: The Dornish subplot in the books includes, rather than an attempt on Myrcella's life (though that's implied too), an attempt to place her on the throne instead of Tommen. We've already been shown that the Dornish don't have the same sexual and gender politics as the rest of the kingdoms through the relationship between a prince of Dorn (Oberyn) and a bastard girl (Elleria), for instance. This could still manifest in the show though it doesn't appear to be about to so far. It would have made the usually tedious and ill-shot sequences in Dorn a lot more interesting (Bronn's singing is about the only viable portion of these).

We are seeing that women are just as capable of being quality rulers and just as deluded about their ability to do so. A contest between and within the Lannister family tree over proper claim to rule would be an interesting subplot. Even as their grip on power slides rapidly out of control without this, it would hasten the demise and provide more background to the "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes" mentality of the show, or as Dany calls it, the wheel grinding through the land.

We've also already been shown Cersei's life quest for power and then how poorly and incompetently she exercises it. And we've already been shown Dany's quest for power and how inexpertly she exercises it when she has it (Tyrion's line about killing and politics not being the same thing still matters), but also how well she learns various lessons about power, and the destructive ends that people go to wield it and whether that is appropriate or not (she tends toward not so much).

The show version just showed us the destructive ends that Stannis is willing to go to, and there are hints that this was somewhere the book version will end up going too. This isn't that far-fetched. He's being told by a set of religious fanatics that he's the one true hope for mankind, and just won a decisive victory at the Wall some weeks earlier to help cement that claim. What lengths wouldn't someone in those circumstances go to? He's been burning people alive throughout the show ever since he first appears (burning people at Dragonstone). Including Mance in the first episode of this very season. It's like people forgot this fact about him that was still in the background because he was correcting grammar and appeared to be a good (but stern) father for a few episodes after playing a badass finally by winning a battle that appeared lost. He can be terribly pragmatic and logical, but he's very single minded where his ambitions and purported destiny are concerned. "Thousands (will die)" at the Blackwater, he says during that battle. It is of no concern if the ends are met.

I'm generally very confused where people end up blaming the show runners (D&D to the internet) for things that are basically what Martin intended to do with the same material. All of this was built up throughout the season as Stannis' supposed redeeming quality, and a quality that he would have to sacrifice, and was told he would sacrifice by Melisandre to claim what is his. All they did here was heighten the emotional stakes for something terrible, as happened with the Red Wedding, and the Sansa's/Ramsay marriage and the assaults involved on her (instead of some nameless character). This is more or less what we'd expect a TV show to do.

Where I think they can be faulted is by submarining some of the other plots rather than by doing things that were always hinted at or intended. They've been touching on the gender politics of this world, but often very clumsily and without the overt signals of the past world to provide hints or clues to say that they're (probably) about to be overturned once again. They also buried the rise of some of the more egalitarian groups like the Sparrows (it's not made very clear how a bunch of religious fanatics would have amassed that much power in King's Landing even with Cersei's help), or the R'hollor worshipers, like Stannis, in the wake of a lot of violent political upheaval. We saw how horrible the road was by following Arya and the Hound around, but we haven't really seen how bad it is for regular people that they'd be turning to religious fanatics to protect them. I suspect these subplots concerning the plight of the regular folk matter quite a bit to Martin's themes, which is why several characters's POV arcs mostly consist of wandering around. These are naturally condensed because they're likely boring to portray on screen (Dany's season 2 arc showed us this), but they shouldn't be totally cut out either. That balance hasn't always been well-maintained.

Second bit I'd point out is that as much positive press as last week's episode got for delivering up fan favorite chats between Tyrion and Dany, and the half hour ice zombie slaughterfest, complete with a giant smashing wights and Jon's "I guess I've got one of those swords" look with the White Walker, the episode was not a positive one throughout or in its ending. Tyrion's "advice" to Dany mostly consisted of him telling her how wise she was in one breath and then telling her it's all going to come to a poor conclusion in the next, and the battle at Hardhome, though the crucial characters escape with their lives, is a total catastrophe. This is not a show (or a set of books) that's calculated for people to come away from an episode thinking the world they are watching is about to be spinning in the right way any time soon. It's a subversive show about the problems of both governance and the fantasy genre. And that means that happy ending scenarios are going to be few and far between.

If you think something awful is about to happen, you should be preparing for it if you're going to watch this show. Book readers have experienced this throughout, knowing that not only is some awful thing about to happen, but they know more or less what it will be, and only now are getting a few major twists and surprises.

Crime pays

For many of my gripes with Kleiman, he wrote a book on this topic a few years ago (When Brute Force Fails). Some of the same conclusions are involved. Example. For minor infractions like parole or probation violations instead of sending people to prison to serve out a lengthy term, they might go to jail immediately for some smaller period of time (a few days to a month), and then are released.

A crucial element that wasn't mentioned in the piece is that one of the major aspects of "successful" punishment is that it usually is not the length or severity that matters for people to get the point that they did something wrong and deter others from doing the same. Rather it is having available swift and sure possibilities for penalties to occur in the first place. In many cases prison sentences are increased because we don't have very sure or swift penalties for the criminal acts involved and it is assumed that the only way to provide deterrence is a stiffer penalty. People can commit these kinds of crimes with relative impunity. As a result we might also want to look at which crimes we could better deter with different police patrol patterns, more community involvement, a better focus on the use of our investigative resources to solve these crimes doing the most damage, etc.

People don't tend to randomly kidnap children in the US versus other many countries because it's extremely hard to pull off without getting caught (or at least this is the belief among many criminals, it's also pretty low on the totem pole of prison hierarchies to do pretty much anything to kids, which adds another wrinkle). It's almost always a family member in this country for that reason that abducts a child. Someone who probably doesn't care if they get caught because they're not rational involving their own children. This attitude of deterrence through the surety of penalties could be applied to any number of criminal acts (murder, robbery, fraud, etc) and should provide much more deterrent value than longer sentences. There will still be murders, but they'd be more and more acts of "passion"; sudden events that escalate to violence and less and less random acts of violence committed against strangers.

I think there's also a large sum of currently designated criminal behavior that isn't described or studied here that doesn't cost as much in the form of social damage (drug use/possession and distribution being one source), or where there is damage, using the prison system to deal with it probably isn't appropriate and is wasteful and costly versus the alternatives. This would also apply to many mental health problems. It sounds like this was a study or set of them that looked too linearly at the costs of prison itself rather than also including the costs of policing or the costs of basic health care, and the benefits of same, and so on. I find that many of our policy approaches are not "3-D", taking into account alternatives from outside the context of a narrow policy view. For instance, drug addiction (actual drug or alcohol addiction, not mere use of drugs that we find are socially disapproved) or mental health disorders could be treated as a medical problem rather than a criminal one. The narrow focus on the costs of these in criminal activity often precludes people from assessing how they might be dealt with more efficiently elsewhere. It is useful to know that X criminal act potentially costs us this much in social damage, and imprisoning a person for doing so costs Y dollars, but it is useful to know that because we can then evaluate it against other alternatives and also see if we will come away with fewer of X criminal acts in the first place using those alternatives, or if those alternatives have other positive benefits (better mental health for instance allows people to hold down regular employment easier, narrow policing focus allows police to push criminal activity into smaller and smaller spaces, thus making any remaining criminal activity less likely).

A point which need be made

Actually a couple.

First, I haven't quite figured out what Hunger Games is supposed to be about in the first place. Lord of the Rings had a clearer "rite of passage" sort of tinge to it, along with everything else in there. What's the thematic significance of tromping around in the woods for other people's amusement at risk of death? What's the agenda? Is there a message? Or is this just like a Twilight/Harry Potter type phenomenon and I should just give up thinking about whilst not having any interest in actually reading said objects (given that all points indicate poor writing styles, and the best summary of Harry Potter was something like "young ladies should fall in love with the first appealing young man who comes along". Maybe, maybe not, but I think we could make that point without several thousand pages of agonizingly bad phrases. Or rather, we shouldn't need words to make that point. Hormones kind of do that for us at that age).

As a broader related point, I'm not sure who or what decided there shall be a young adult fiction category, and that it shall be read by teenagers, but whoever decided that should also have foretold that no one shall be permitted to write for it lest they shall be a horrible and untalented author. I'm trying to remember if, as a teenager, I read anything of the kind, where I was the intended 12-15 year old audience member, and I'd have to say no. Sherlock Holmes maybe? I might have skipped this category of book. Or been reading it much earlier. When bad writing is less punishing on the mind. This might explain my indifference to it now.

Humorous footnotes

"Incidentally, I find it strange to recall that my education was utterly dominated by two stories: the Bible's and Rome's. Both were disappointing examples of history. One told the story of an obscure, violent and somewhat bigoted tribe and one its later cults, who sat around gazing at their theological navels for a few thousand years while their fascinating neighbors--the Phoenicians, Philistines, Canaanites, Lydians and Greeks--invented respectively maritime trade, iron, the alphabet, coins and geometry. The other told the story of a barbarically violent people who founded one of the empires that institutionalized the plundering of its commercially minded neighbors, then went on to invent practically nothing in half a millennium and achieve an actual diminution in living standards for its citizens, very nearly extinguishing literacy as it died. I exaggerate, but there are more interesting figures in history than Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar."

It's very possible that the (American) focus on Rome instead of Greece or the Phoenicians or Carthage, much less other powerful and/or influential historical cultures and states like the various Chinese dynasties, Shogunate Japan, Prussia, or the Ottoman Turks, in world history courses is due to the specific importance of Rome in the Christian dialectic and that these two end up twinned in over-importance. One obvious reason to note this is the decreasing importance of Rome in casual historical study as it moved to the East and became a Christian empire (the Byzantines). Almost nobody spends a lot of time looking at the sieges of Vienna or Constantinople in a high school history course, for example, relative to the amount of time spent on developments much further in our history, like the various Mesopotamian empires. So yes, when Assyria and Nebuchadnezzar take up more time than, say, Suleiman in our collective lore, there's a problem.

But, to be fair to Rome and Christendom, they're also very long-lasting developments and thus have considerable sway over history as a whole.

Zombies take over

International relations...

Best parts of this one

Realism means things are pretty much what they are. Even when the undead start to feast on human flesh, nothing much would change. While it's definitely an absurdist take on realism, it's actually not that far off. This was essentially my reaction to 9-11 for instance. Things would change, but they would more or less just shift around some national goals, put things like "invade Iraq" into the hopper for example. Things did not change in the sense of what posed real and existential threats to American hegemony. People didn't like hearing this, some people still don't. But it's not less true 10 years ago simply because more people are now aware it's true NOW. (what put a real threat to American hegemony was our expending trillions of dollars on fruitless wars to install pro-Western leaderships in unstable countries).

Fear is overrated. Give me a potential nuclear war, yes, that's a real threat deserving of national attention. Give me a terrorist network living in caves. Meh. Not worth ignoring, maybe a lead news story for a while, but it's not worth creating new and invasive powers, invading countries that had nothing to do with it, bombing others, and so on.

Speaking of "invade Iraq", there's also this segment which describes the neo-conservative worldview as including this darker "kill all Muslims" aspect to it. Because obviously this book was written with zombies as the stand-in for Muslims. Also there's the "everything is an existential threat" paradigm and problem for neo-cons. There's a reason realists don't get along with them, and that's largely it. (there's also the problem that neo-cons never bothered to explain how they would "inject freedom" and make this proposed antidote work. It was just assumed that democracy=freedom, when actually the reverse tends to be more true, that free institutions support a democratic regime and that corrupt institutions like those of Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, which just lacked institutions period, will mean electing a corrupt autocracy instead of a free liberal democratic one).

And finally there's the philosopher's joke.

58% of philosophers believe zombies are possible.
15% of them believe in god.

I would think a zombie in the sense philosopher's define it is actually plausible, as all it is is essentially an animated corpse lacking consciousness. They don't define them as wishing to feast on human flesh, or being a contagion etc. Those are far more specific qualifications to the zombie hordes than mere lack of consciousness. It's likely these would be more equal numbers under more rigorous definitions than the mere concept of a zombie versus the concept of a deity. But it's still amusing.

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped

The trouble comes when one side is right and the other side is wrong and doesn’t know it. The Shakespeare authorship page and the Shroud of Turin page are scenes of constant conflict and are packed with unreliable information. Creationists crowd cyberspace every bit as effectively as evolutionists, and extend their minds just as fully. Our trouble is not the over-all absence of smartness but the intractable power of pure stupidity, and no machine, or mind, seems extended enough to cure that.

Bloodlands

In between regaling its readers with the story of dreadful intra-familial cannibalism resulting from Stalin's deliberate policies in the Soviet Ukraine (millions perished from famine), I noticed something about the mindsets involved in the leaders who conquered, carved up, and virtually destroyed Eastern Europe and its peoples.

I see often a question posed by right-leaning, and especially conservative writers and people about the rhetorical hatred directed at Palin. There are several caveats. I do not think she was responsible for Jared Loughner. I do not think she (or most other right-wing nutjobs) has got some master plan for desiring to kill millions of people, because of their religion, nationality, or socio-economic status (though I am somewhat annoyed that she conflates economic necessities that she defends in stark terms as though liberals did have some master plan for desiring to kill millions of people, which I regard as equally ridiculous). While there are many who would compare the neo-conservative values of the Bush-Palin mindset to fascism and the statist police powers to those of Stalin, there's still a pretty big gap in the amount of statist controls they would use, and both the Nazi and certainly the Stalinist are much further to the left economically for state powers than most American liberals, much less American leftist politicians (such as Obama) and certainly most conservative right-wing politicians (even as non-free market as I see them at many occasions, tax breaks for oil companies and food subsidies in Iowa for example...). These comparisons are useless rhetorical demagoguery, of the sort that Palin herself engages in and I do not mean to make them as assertions that she would outlaw her political opponents or their views, or would undertake campaigns to eliminate them. I feel she, or rather the existence of her popularity among a subset of Americans, is quite scary enough without these underpinnings and I think it necessary to understand and attempt to explain why that is.

What I'm actually trying to address is not a comparison and equation between the political views and ideology, such as she has. But it is the mindset that interests me, and tends to annoy and frighten liberals, and that mindset seems remarkably similar.
1) A tendency to see very stark black and white terms on all fronts. Attempting to point out inconsistency of her very general rhetoric and factual errors within the talking points themselves tends to result in paranoid accusations of persecution. This is not on the order of pretending that Ukrainians were starving themselves because they hated world socialism and Stalinism and responding with brutal malicious state policies, but it's the same sort of reasoning. One could be forgiven for worrying what the execution of state powers would look like under a Palin government.
2) A tendency to shift those fronts in malleable contortions of unreason, which are followed faithfully by her supporters, but which are objectionable by anyone else, in part because the word salads that Palin has organised into speeches to defend herself and her positions are pretty badly in need of an editor and baldly in evidence as talking point vomit (must say something about "troops", and "socialism", and so on), but also because they are shifts in positions that do not present some ideological consistency or present some basis for the shift. Some actual reason for shifting other than that she now feels persecuted by this group or this person instead of that. So far as I can tell Palin's entire ideological belief structure seems to be her extreme religious views, an idolatry of "Real America" (a shapeless definition that means whatever she wants it to mean at a given point), and a hatred of media (and we can see this reflected by some of her choice of political allies during the last election, such as Joe Miller's detention and assault of journalists covering his campaign in Alaska). These reflect very few meaningful policy choices as a result and none of them particularly well regarded by liberals (free speech restraints on the press as well as citizenry, restrictions on homosexual rights and abortion, and targeting of immigrants and other "suspicious" bodies of people)
3) A tendency to demagogue her enemies, or the perceived enemies of "Real America". Us vs them thinking is very effective at gathering and maintaining a base of support, and for acting very quickly if that base is sufficient to take and assume power within a country. It is however very dangerous at gathering and maintaining political coalitions because it provides for no middle ground. In a diverse society like America, I think we have some fortune to see that it's likely not to work.

These are pretty much the mindsets that liberals, and not a few moderates, rightly are afraid of when they appear. I put this out there mostly to help conservatives who see her as persecuted victim understand why she's reviled by her political opponents. In large measure, because I don't see her backers and her populist rhetoric going anywhere and disappearing, I'd want them to understand that a) her two major speeches (resignation from governor of Alaska, and the defence she gave post-Tuscon) pretty much killed her political chances anyway with the mainstream of the country and even among many conservatives so you may as well have it catalogued and b) that the core of people who like her BECAUSE she annoys liberals and is so hated by them may understand what it is about her that they do not in fact like. There are specific political positions she has that are disgusting and insulting to liberals, and that's certainly at issue too. And to a libertarian, not only her positions on social matters, but her woeful understanding of basic economics (for instance her tweets about QEII and inflation) are very much insulting and hard to listen to (especially that she has been described as one of us for instance).

But it ultimately comes down to her mindset and activity since becoming a national political figure with a loyal and dogmatic following. There are political figures and pundits who I disagree with on some matters whom I can respect in their attempts to explain their views (Gingrich used to be one of these, not so much any more because he's gotten to having views which are blatantly bigoted or insipidly stupid and for which he should know better). And then there's the Palin-ites, practicing something else entirely as politics (Bachmann's another one, Angle, Miller, and a few others) and who seem utterly ready to divide the country into an us-them entanglement with right and wrong defined not as empirical or objective considerations, but as who's on my side and who is not. That bothers me a lot more than her actual political views.

I mention it because seeing the behaviors of Stalin and Hitler leading up to some of the worst atrocities in human history, the mental contortions that they and their cronies undertook, and the mindsets combined with a will to destroy their enemies, real or imagined, utterly and completely, immediately drew me to think of her methods as a politician and celebrity, or those of Beck and others like him. Perhaps it's because they themselves so commonly and recklessly draw on the imagery of Nazis and Stalinists (or Maoists for that matter) and the comparisons come easily to mind because they make them so readily already in talking about their own enemies. But it's also the same methodology, the same mindset, applied to much smaller goals than mass exterminations of people.

I note this also because I've seen that many of the people who agree, or who actively subscribe to her political views, do seem to have taken on eliminationist rhetoric, describing all Muslims as secret spies and terrorists and calling for the abandonment of rights and constitutional protections for Islamic peoples of any derivation, regardless of real or imagined threats they may pose individually in our communities, and seeing other active plots and conspiracies everywhere aiming to bring down America (Soros, Tides, etc), and describing liberals and indeed sometimes libertarians as enemies of the good, as unpatriotic and hateful of America and its values. This too should worry reasonable people. So far as I can tell, Palin's viability as a candidate for high office does indeed seem to be rejected as unreasonable. Perhaps on this basis, or perhaps on others. But if people really need to know why she's presented so poorly, and resented so widely, this is perhaps a hint of why. If in reading about some of the highest and widest crimes against humanity I should recognize even a glimmer of her behavior, her mindset, and her rhetorical tricks, I think that's a problem worthy of bringing up. She has none of the state infrastructure, the charismatic following of awe, or the ideological makeup to start and lead a grand crusade with designs of abolishing entire peoples, certainly, but she has the same sort of mental design and behavior as the people who did.

She sees and portrays herself as the persecuted victim rather than the aggressor representing some threat. The amount of contortions that many Americans go through to see themselves as imposed upon to tolerate gays being married, or narcotics (some of them) legalised seems overdone. And she's the singular figure into which these fears and underpinnings are represented through. The reason she gets picked on is that she's popular within that community in a way that other political figures are not and thus she represents an actual threat of unreasonable fears made manifest and into official state policy by a not-insignificant minority of the population. The real issue to me is that significant minority of the population, not her.

That there should be a body politic willing to support her strikes me as scarier. That I have occasion to defend her silliness out of necessity of free speech and other items of moral and legal consequence which she (and other political figures akin to her) seems strikingly ignorant of, also annoys me. I grow tired of it.

One way out?

The power of juries?

I just got a questionnaire for the local US district court for possible jury duty summons later on. Since a good amount of federal laws are things I disagree with (and drug laws are among some of the biggest disagreements... ), I'm already planning on staging a similar revolt if they call me in. There's some of these laws I'm not particularly worried about, but I'm not convicting on a drug charge. Period.

And, for no particular reason, but in case people need to laugh about something legal. I found this funny.

A history lesson

"Unlike so many of their predecessors and contemporaries, the first liberals treated disagreement and discord about the highest good as a given and then proposed that civil peace in a deeply divided society could best be established and maintained by excluding as much as possible the most divisive questions – metaphysical questions – from political life. Citizens would still have strongly held views about the highest good, but they would no longer presume that their neighbors or the political community as a whole would collectively endorse those views."

A curious notion. I wonder who proposed that concept.

Ahh yes...

Again, it's no wonder that religious zealots with a revisionist history of the founding of this country revile Jefferson with a passion. I have yet to see a proof that other Constitutional positions were explicitly evangelical as is often claimed either, but Jefferson's free exercise and establishment positions from the Virginia Constitution is poorly regarded for more obvious reasons. Namely that it stands in direct contrast to that vision of American history.

There are few things that really should be regarded as public sphere debates to be had out in political disputes. And there are any number of foolish regulations and laws considered by "well-meaning" conservatives or liberals that meddle with powers they couldn't possibly understand. But the idea that religious belief should alone inform those meddlings and command the same of others is especially pernicious because it is decidedly illiberal and dysfunctional. It is entirely unworkable in a democratic society with considerably different views on what even very similar religious perspectives (the vast number of Christian sects present, with some minor metaphysical perspectives like those of Jews, Muslims, even atheists to consider as well) would demand in the political and public sphere of life.

No sane reading of history would conclude then that a society of free men who often escaped various forms of religious persecution that extended for generations would have set up a theocratic enclave of their own trappings to command the peculiar religious beliefs that they themselves did not even share completely and fully of all in their dominion, but this is apparently what we're supposed to believe is the case with America.

When I get done with Smith

again...

This would be the next thing on the list.

There's a lot of blood out there. And it becomes important to realize that while exterminating Jews was among the most terrible atrocities in human history, it was basically just one among many busy efforts to kill many, many people in Eastern Europe. Lots of them. Ukrainians, Poles, Slavs, and so on.

Quotes for the day

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

"it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone."

"Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness."

"Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?"

"I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong. Than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil."

And that's the way it is.

"Lunch with lovers, past, present, or possible, enjoys an anarchy, a severing of our connections to life’s duties, rather like the sea voyages of former days, when self-limiting flirtations flourished and responsibility dropped from one’s shoulders"

Also from the book

"While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex—almost exactly the same time spent filling out tax forms for the government."

It was a good book after all.

I'm pretty sure the difference between those two acts isn't captured by that statement. That is, that most American adults probably spend a good deal more than 4 minutes a day devoted in some fashion to sex, but this would include things like: crude sexual jokes or sexually inflected innuendos, sexual fantasies, pornography, possibly masturbation (not sure what definition they used as "sex"), reading about sex or sexual technique. Plus related acts like physical affection expressions, or purchasing or considering types of birth control or protection against sexual diseases, or the ethical quandaries of our sexual relationships in general. Given that about half of our time per day is spent daydreaming, one can safely assume that part of that time is devoted to sex in some manner. Just isn't counted as actual sex on the time-management scale.

By contrast, I'm almost certain nobody devotes a good deal of time imagining filling out forms for the government. Otherwise the people who design the forms and the regulations requiring them would probably have made better forms that took less time or obviated the need for filling them out by not passing silly rules governing everything.

I suppose this assumes that contemplating or daydreaming or fantastic acts of creativity are correlated with improving the quality of the actual acts or processes that we are contemplating. Its possible that people are reflecting, but reflecting on the wrong things when they do so, given that so much of our humor is based on the premise that most people are apparently bad at sex and that most people must stand in lines to fill out forms. I would suggest that perhaps more people need to reflect on the effect they have on others more often and that this would do one of two things
1) increase the amount of time with actual sex relative to imagining it (per day). This may or may not be a good utilitarian outcome. Though one could assume that actual pleasures are better than imagined ones and that actual pleasures could reduce the demand for imagined ones. Or could exist alongside each other rather than occupying more time per day with our sexual interests and pursuits.
2) streamline our bureaucratic processes and make it easier to devote a couple more minutes per day to far more productive works. Or recreation. For example, they could change the hours the DMV is open to times where most people could more freely access it rather than times where people must cram in their dealings with the government in between work and kids and school.

Story I DO follow

"You have to be asleep to believe it."

Bigger problem is that it goes back decades. "All that is best in human life depends on a certain kind of self-respect, self-determination; a man who has allowed outside pressure to dictate the ends for which he shall live can never be more than a slave.

Our modern State education is mainly designed to produce convenient citizens, and therefore dare not encourage spontaneity, since all spontaneity interferes with system. There is a tendency to uniformity, to the suppression of private judgment, to the production of populations which are tame towards their rulers and fericious toward "the enemy"." - Bertrand Russell. 1923.

But the best part is this. Want to think? Don't go to school it seems. I'm puzzled however by the CEO effect. If they say they want creativity, why is creativity punished by workplaces? It often manifests itself in "inefficient" ways, like questioning methods, seeking improvements over status quo and authority, etc. One would think a good CEO would seek to reward innovative thinking to acquire more products or services under their aim. Instead, an army of middle managers are deployed to beat out of the system what was not crushed by the educational system. Very strange.

Russell's critique and advice still seems adequate, decades later.

"That a good community is a community of good men and women - of men and women, that is to say, who live freely but not destructively or oppressively."
"As things stand, we know the sins of our enemies, but not our own; thus indignation produces merely an increase of mutual enmity".
"...Given equal opportunity for all, we may hope that there will be much more of such work than there has hitherto been. But there will be none at all if the State, in its schools, sets to work to mould the minds of the young according to a uniform plan. There must be the utmost encouragement to freedom of thought, even when it is inconvenient to bureaucrats."
"The fight for freedom is not to be won by any mere change in our economic system. It is to be won only by a constant resistance to the tyranny of officials, and a constant realisation that mental freedom is the most precious of all goods. Mechanism has its place; its place is the in the material side of life, the provision of the food and clothes and houses without which we cannot live. But it has no place in what makes life worth preserving, in art and thought, in friendship and love, or in simple enjoyment. These things demand freedom - not only outward freedom, but freedom in our minds and hearts. Such freedom is too little respected in our schools and in the schemes of economic reformers. It is in danger of being lost through the tyranny of purely material aims. But no perfection of organisation can ever compensate for its loss: and nothing can prevent its loss unless we remember that man cannot live by bread alone."

Next book to read

Is about booze

Or rather people not wanting people to drink booze and the long and winding road we used to reach that point. And still failed.

The crucial historical point for me, since I live here. "In Ohio, the sacred cradle of the ASL, legislative districting and assiduous politicking put ratification over by a combined legislative vote of 105-42; however, when left to their own devices, Ohio voters rejected the very same measure in a referendum." - Man this is a fucked up state. The cradle of the Anti-Saloon League?

What hasn't this state used its power and sway to try to ban, restrict, or control?

Also a good selling point, the guy who wrote the book was apparently involved in creating some of the first Rotisserie baseball leagues.

But really the main issue is watching the series of things that had to click into place over time to make Prohibition possible in the first place happen. Anti-German propaganda and sentiments created by WW1, the passage of the Income tax (16th Amendment), Woman's Suffrage. Anti-Catholic/Irish bigotry, even the construction of sewage systems for increasingly urban populations was a key player. It is an astounding confluence of events over several decades that in the end seems to have only passed because of a set of corrupt or archaic political structures that were worked, and worked hard, by a few special interests in a concerted effort in spite of public support running contrary to the demands of the few.

And we're still seeing the same impact with drug warriors today, a confluence of "hard on crime" types, anti-Mexican/anti-Asian/anti-black sentiments, the ability of police to apportion more intrusive power to themselves through manipulating popular support, etc. The only thing we haven't carried over from that era is a demand to largely fund governments by taxing alcohol in relation to its actual cost. Which is, in part, what we did before it was banned. People still drank alcohol like water. Or rather, instead of water.

careful what you wish for

So that was a fun trip down memory lane.

Last night, I saw a line of storms coming in. I essentially knew the power was going out by looking at the radar screen. And zap it goes. No game six and back to candle light reading efforts for you sir. Power restored after the debacle and in the midst of sleep disrupted. Naturally.

Beware of China!

China, china everywhere!

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I suppose I should throw out my copies of the I Ching, collected workings of Confucius, and The Art of War now before people think I'm a Communist. And that Mao text on Guerrilla Warfare especially needs to go. Also Wo hu cang long and Ying xiong probably need to be tossed out of the DVD collection...

People. Are. Stupid. "English, pfft, I'm never going to England anyway." Seems like if we're going to be trading with China all this much, which we are, then why not learn how to speak and read some of the language? If we're going to be belligerent in attitudes toward China, then why not learn how their country operates and cultural traditions exist in order to better counter their international agenda? We had thousands of students studying Russian during the Cold War (to keep tabs on the Soviets) and I remember seeing all kinds of stuff about life behind the Iron Curtain as a child (as in, it was largely inane and insufferable). But no. There's no reason to study China when it's a rising economic and military powerhouse in the Far East.

The titles are meaningless

But the books probably aren't

This has been my week
1) Battle Cry of Freedom
2) Parts of Origin of Species
3) When Brute Force Fails (quick read, only about 200 pgs, mostly for facts and figures that weren't included in the thesis)
4) American Aurora.

DUToE #4

Signal processing. Which I will also refer to this as "kinetic societies". A theory which I'll explain at some point. Once I know what I mean by it.

I do notice this happening. I spent some of the day trying to unplug from the internet and finish reading my civil war book (all 800 pages of it). Certain subjects I can usually buckle down on and focus for long, often very long, stretches of attention. But reading has also become something that I do a lot of through digital mediums, like blogs. That's a convenience when I read some article or blog entry and think it worth a commentary. It becomes something else to do while I also concentrate on the topic itself for a few moments and chew it over mentally. It's less so when I flip through a book as I don't have tabs to use to make such notations mentally (although, it sounds like that's a huge disadvantage for memory processing anyway. So it's probably fine that I have to go from the book to my memory and then to the chewing stage. That I have a chewing stage is also an advantage of course).

What seems like the critical advantage is that when I'm "reading" in that way though, I'm actually focused on a increasingly limited set of channels. I have lots of different blogs I read regularly, but I'm now trying to trim down the number of entries per day that I read with interest and thus give them more attention. That gets around the F-type mind problem I think as it does less skimming when it's a subject I wanted to pick out and see what was going on about, but doesn't get around the "that's not something I'd usually read" problem. I've had to resort to picking more blogs to try to fix that one. It doesn't get around the way journalists write their articles, where I can indeed very often just read the first two lines, see what they think they were saying, and then skip to the bottom after a page of fluff and see what they actually said.

What really interested me about the subject is the social aspect of this kind of diffused behavior all taking place online. I have a cell phone. I have almost no use for it. Most things I'd need to keep tabs on people in their glories and failures are available online. Or can be, if they put it there. Social networks like that are indeed a form of addiction. But they also become a cloud source of data. People don't have to remember things. If you need to recall someone's birthday, well it's on their page (if they're nice enough to tell everyone, which I'm not). If you need to know the capital of Latvia or to bone up on organic chemistry or macroeconomic theory, well all that is in Wikipedia (a cloud sourced encyclopaedia) or the university of Google. Constellations and stars are on Droid phone apps (which was a pretty neat little thing I'm happy to have had a chance to play with).

I'm not sure how this will improve processing or analyzing the information to draw conclusions or make comparisons, but if it can be stored and recalled whenever we need it, that will make analysis easier for the people who can do it. And make it more accessible still as information becomes more and more "democratically" accessible. What's really the interesting part to shake out is how the information is collected or gathered by individuals who might want to process it themselves. That's a lot easier to do, but it's a lot harder to access the source material. When your compatriots were in the same town, with the same basic cultural norms, and the same basic outlooks on a variety of things, it is pretty easy to assess the quality of their information (subjectively speaking). That kind of filtering subroutine continues as people can reject information provided by people outside of approved sectors as invalid (whether or not it is, which it can be), and accept only filtered information within that same closed circle. The problem people are having with all this of course is that the social world is no longer simply that little village of same-minded people. It's everywhere at once. It's amazing to watch people who've lived in a cultural enclave all their lives throw up their ideas and watch them be obliterated, just as I assume this explains why people watch American Idol's first couple weeks because it demonstrates all those people who think they can sing. And can't. At all. Maybe this will ultimately help us think in a different and more efficient way. Or maybe we'll all just become paralyzed as we go from reading an article, to looking at photos of a friend's wedding, to youtube, to reading some random page on wikipedia. I haven't gotten that far into it. I at least can usually keep up with my random walk function. But I've seen it happen to good people. It'll be interesting if this internet revolution eventually has some sort of impact in evolutionary terms on the human brain in order to keep up with all the signal processing and better organise memory storage.

Or maybe everyone else will just have to become some version of autistic or aspie. Since they do seem better at pushing through the bullshit than most people. And if storing large social networks becomes increasingly a problem we turn over to clouds and computers, then that would leave more processing power for other things anyway. In theory.

Incidentally, while trying to go through all this mess, I was of course, dealing with an NBA finals game which has induced a few instances of yelling at the TV screen (in alternating good and bad yells), and of course, facebook (and twitter) was sitting there in the background hopping up with status updates until everybody finally went to bed when I yelled at them to leave me alone (not really, but my timing is impeccable). Fortunately the Blackhawks got up big in the NHL finals game so I could skip that one too as a source of diverted attention. Multitasking is not a fun time. It adds many hours to tasks that should take a few minutes. I at least have the luxury of partially blaming the last source for potentially destroying all human thought: television, and probably the first as well, in professional athletics.

April Fools

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says "But, doctor...I am Pagliacci." Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains. Fade to black.