Category: Uncategorised

It’s a sad reflection on the state of our politics that nobody is mentioning how useful redistribution of wealth/income would be from a purely economic perspective, in stimulating increased spending &c. AG touches on it here. but there’s doubtless much better information elsewhere.

Within the EU, Britain has the second-largest income difference between men and women. Things are worse only in Italy:


male-female-diff.PNG (PNG Image, 303×673 pixels) – Scaled (86%)

AG on the burqa:

“Will a surveillance team stake out the Gare du Nord or the Sunday market at Cergy? Will Eric Besson and Brice Hortefeux accompany the flics as they lay hands on the offending ‘agent of Islamism?’ Will she be taken for a garde �vue and, in the name of equality of women and public security, be stripped of her robes and headgear, searched, photographed, and displayed on the evening news? Will she be hauled into court and required to appear with face uncovered before her ermine-clad judges? Will she then express gratitude to the state for emancipating her from her oppressive culture?”

My attitude to Hunter S Thompson is that of the owner of an overindulged rottweiler, calling him a harmless softie while barely restraining the beast. For sure, much of the HST mythos is true: doubtless he was a drug-addled psychotic bastard who you wouldn’t want to turn your back on. Posterity may have literally turned him into a cartoon — both

Transmetropolitan

‘s Spider Jerusalem and

Doonesbury

‘s Duke are based on him — but there was plenty of crazy lingering there from the get-go. Beneath it all, though, there’s a touching melange of disbaused idealism and a surprising affection for those working less dramatically from within the system.

Even

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

is, Duke keeps telling us, a search for the American Dream. The intrepid heroes purgatory their torsos, strain themselves to the point of breaking, and through this mortification uncover the nature of their world. The apparent nihilism is the aftermath of broken dreams, the realisation that the chnage which had appeared to be beginning in California in the 60s had come to a juddering halt:

[in the mid-Sixties] there was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda….You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high—water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

This sense of disappointed idealism, and the quest to regain it, appears much more strongly in

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

. his report from George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. He’s striking in his affection for the young staffes and volunteers fighting for McGovern from within the system, even when their positions are far more centrist and pragmatic than anything Thompson would himself countenance.

I don’t understand music well enough to write more than a few lines about most songs. Seems a shame, though, to let them pass without any note. Start with tracks recommended by Troy, as ‘intensely passonate about unlikely topics’:

Numerology – These New Puritans (who really, really want to know what your favourite number is.)

That’s…surprisingly aggressive. I can kind of imagine being cornered in a dark alley by a gang of numerologists (triads?) and given this grilling. Somewhere between Tarantino and Monty Python. On a related topic, I give you a number romance. [do have a poke around on that site; I suspect at least some of it would appeal]

Fifty On Our Foreheads – White Lies (who are on a spaceship to the sun, and all going to die.)

ah, there’s nothing quite like an inexplicable science fiction dystopia. Questionable Content at one point had a motivational poster saying “Work harder, or we will fly you into the sun”. Now I know what they meant

Leechwife – Rasputina (cheating, as I already gave this to someone else, but on the other hand it really is intensely passionate about leeches)

I want to slip this into a school/university careers service, see if anybody takes up the suggestion.

Johnny On The Monorail – The Buggles (who are surprisingly intense for a song from that long ago. you know, about a monorail.)

oh, this is _fantastic_. I’ve spent most of my underground journeys this year in a state of inexplicable temporary bliss; now I have a soundtrack for it. Certainly my favourite of the five.

My Boy Builds Coffins – Florence & the Machine


Nice. I’d somehow avoided hearing any Florence & the Machine; I like. Had thought “hell, getting passionate about coffins, that’s hardly unusual”. Turns out it

s

.

My recent excitement at Kings, a modern, alternate-reality dramatization of chunks of the Old Testament, became disappointment when confronted with the reality of watching it. My main problem with it is how they’ve destroyed the character of David. He’s wet, naive, passive, and utterly devoid of ambition — pretty much the exact opposite of the biblical David. One of the most ruthless, scheming and driven OT personalities becomes a corn-fed Midwestern ingenue. All the sharp edges — all that is attractive or morally dubious — is stripped off him, and he — like all the other characters — is reduced to a standard American archetype. Hard to keep paying attention beyond that point.

In retrospect, I can’t quite understand my anticipatory excitement. Bible dramatizations are hardly new and, like anything else, have no guarantee of turning out well. That’s even without the problem of other people’s interpretations of stories with which you already have some emotional relationship.

Final post on the Scholastics — and this one will be short, because doing it properly would require enough research to lose myself in a library for a week. I’m very big on the defensibility of reasoning by analogy, in partial (prob. exaggerated, tbh) opposition to a Popperian understanding of science by development of hypotheses in a vacuum. The scholastic idea of analogy is a very limited and specific one, intertwined with the theology of man created in the image of god, and they’re sceptical of metaphor in general.

Again there’s an ancient Indian parallel to be drawn here, and again I’m too wooly-minded to make the case. But here is an article giving the basics of Nyaya ogic, and the classic example is easy enough to follow:

There is fire on a hill (called Pratijna, required to be proved)
Because there is smoke there (called Hetu, reason)
Wherever there is fire, there is smoke (called Udaharana, i.e. example)
There is smoke on the hill (called Upanaya, reaffirmation)
Therefore there is fire on the hill (called Nigamana, conclusion)

In brief: analogy good, mmkay?

And so to bed

While I’m on the subject of scholastics (I’ve just been listening to a lecture on the subject): had Ken Macleod been so minded, he could have found plenty o material in medieval theology to justify robot religion — perhaps starting with ideas of grace. In Aristotle’s conception, Grace is a form within the soul. That means it’s a shape, a pattern. The material in which it is embedded is irrelevant, just as a pot is a pot whether wooden or ceramic. Grace

in silico

would not be inferior to Grace

in vivo

**: robots would be as capable as humans of faith, hope and love.

* bear in mind, this entire concept remains somewhat new and alien to me; I’m almost certainly butchering some carefully-considered principle. In all honesty, I don’t much care.

** Doubtless you could concoct other arguments for robot inferiority, perhaps arguing that they weren’t created directly by good, and so are merely a shadow of a shadow of his Goodness. After all, Christians have plenty of experience justifying racism; justifying discrimination against machines would be an order of magnitude easier.

“Science envy” and “math envy” are perennial problems across huge swathes of the academic world. Mathematics and the hard sciences are seen as having achieved great leaps forward in understanding the world, and thus become objects for emulation whether applicable or not. Greek symbols start to fill up journal pages. It doesn’t matter if they demonstrate the argument more rigorously, they just need to look impressively sciency. Economics is currently the most seriously-afflicted discipline, although the other social sciences are rapidly succumbing as massive datasets become available online.

This is nothing new. As their name suggests, the social sciences have been built up by wave after wave of this imitation throughout the 20th century. Or even further back. The scholastic theology of medieval Christianity was largely a centuries-long case of ‘logic envy’. Theologians discovered Aristotelian logic in the 12th century, and proceeded to apply it to the bible in mind-numbing detail.

The indian case is even more interesting. Here the discipline to be emulated was grammar, then far more advanced than any other branch of knowledge (and pretty damn impressive even in a modern context). Grammatical terminology and forms of argument cross over into most other disciplines.

Ken MacLeod, The Night Sessions

. Near-future Scotland, recovering from a post-9/11 replay of the Wars of Religion. Churches are allowed to exist only on a private level, with the state studiously ignoring their existence. So when Detective Adam Ferguson begins to investigate the murder of his priest, his attention — and his superiors’ — is on the political and bureaucratic consequences almost as much as on the rapidly-escalating series of killings.

MacLeod’s science fiction is, among much else, a vehicle for satire on the preset. Here it’s most entertaining when confined to small details: Creationist theme parks, for example, or gangster-ridden “Capitalism with Russian Characteristics”. His broader swipes on religion mostly fall flat. Towards the end there is a particularly ludicrous conversion as a True Believer is confronted with the contradictions of the bible* — a shaky plot device on the biblical literalism which a certain kind of atheist shares with only the most extreme of protestant sects.

The science fiction elements are largely window-dressing, with the exception of the robots. Macleod’s robots are superior not only in strength and intelligence, but in their ability to understand human emotion. They unnerve people, even though they are no longer given humanoid form to avoid this very problem. Police robots are loyal and devoted sidekicks to their masters, and the strength of this bond is one of the assumptions driving the plot. And, finally, there’s the question of whether robots could be affected by religion.

These are all interesting questions, but the pace of the book prevents MacLeod exploring them. The Night Sessions is fundamentally a thriller and a police procedural, and theories of robotic personhood have to take a back-seat to that.

*

ETA

: later, it occurs to me that the nature of this is partly a comment on the human/robot comparison. The human is defeated in the same way robots are according to B-movie cliche: show them a contradiction, and wait for them to blow a fuse. Meanwhile the robots, emotionally advanced far beyond human level, have no trouble on this point.