Armed and Dangerous

2003-11-11T17:13:00.000-08:00

Comments have been closed on this blog:

I have closed comments, removed the archive index, and removed permalink references on this blog. Archives and blogspot/enetation comments on old posts are still available over at the new digs. Please read and respond there. Permalinks into this site should continue to work

2003-11-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

Call them werewolves

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It's time for a bit of meme-hacking. Let's see if we can displace terms like "insurgent" or "Saddam loyalist" with one that conveys the true depth of evil we are facing. I have a candidate to propose.

A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator — Adolf Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are very close.

It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein's autobiography that he admired Hitler's ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for themselves.

Call them werewolves. It's what they deserve.

2003-11-05T16:46:00.000-08:00

Advice for Democrats:

Well, the election results are in. The Democratic Party took a beating yesterday — a worse one, I think, than it has really assimilated. The Pew Research Center has analyzed the results. If you guys don't want your butts handed to you in 2004, I have a few suggestions.

First, a reminder for new readers or old readers in any doubt. I am not a Republican. I am not a conservative. There are some people who are going to think my giving advice to the Democratic Party is disingenuous or some form of point-scoring. They're wrong. Politics is an intrinsically evil game, but it might become at least less evil if the Democrats cleaned up their act. I'd like to see that.

The most important message the voters delivered yesterday is that running against George Bush is a fast road to failure. Where Republican candidates successfully tied themselves to national issues and ran on a boost-Bush platform (as in Kentucky and Mississippi) they won. Only where the Democrats were able to divert attention to local issues (like the FBI bug in Philadelphia Mayor Street's office) did they succeeed.

U.S. troops out of Iraq? Jobless recovery? War for oil? Tax cuts? Halliburton? All these favored taglines of the anti-Bush crowd got no traction at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. There is no evidence that they helped and some inferential evidence in the poll numbers that they hurt. The Democratic incumbant in Mississippi knew this was a'comin' — he actually worked at keeping Bill Clinton and the whole gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates out of his state. This didn't save him.

The Democrats had already lost southern conservatives. The Pew analysis says they're losing moderates, too. Republicans gained in every voter stratum except blacks — rich, poor, male, female, whites, and hispanics. The angry-left pitch not only doesn't work, it's accelerating a long-term tend of Republicanizing the South.

This has direct implications for 2004. The way the regional arithmetic of the Electoral College works makes it effectively impossible to take the White House without a strong showing in the South. If the 2004 elections were held today, Bush couldn't lose — and the trends favor Republican gains in the next year.

So. What can the Democrats do to win?

Support the war.

The U.S. is at war. We will continue to be at war until there is no credible threat from an alliance of WMD-wielding rogue states and the Islamist terror network. The American people have accepted this, and they will back George Bush's war policy unless or until it appears that he cannot competently execute it. Arguing that we should not have a war policy, or should have a less ‘unilateral’ one, just lost the Democrats two governorships and will almost certainly lose them a third in Lousiana on 15 Nov.
Stop trying to personalize the 2004 campaign.

The only loser bigger than running gainst Bush's war policy is running against Bush himself. The Bush-is-Hitler/Bush-is-a-moron thing has no zorch anywhere outside a set of bicoastal Brie-nibbler patches and university campuses that can be counted on one hand. The American people like and respect Bush, even when they question his policies. (I find this part difficult to understand myself, but the evidence is undeniable.)
Actively support gun rights.
Of all the single-issue blocs, gun owners are both the largest and would probably the easiest to pry loose from the Republican base (remember, Bill Clinton himself said gun control swung the last election cycle). Over 50% of American households own guns and their demographics cross over many narrower political classifications. A lot of swing voters like me simply will not vote for any Democrat without an actively pro-Second-Amendment record, but will give Republicans the benefit of the doubt on this issue. If you want us back, dump the gun-grabbers overboard.
Drop the prescription-drug entitlement

I pick on this one because there is just now no more obvious example of domestic-policy fecklessness. The American people said no to single-payer health care ten years ago. If you think they can't spot a multi-billion-doller Medicare boondoggle in the making, you're fooling yourself. Passing this turkey will bring no credit on either the Democrats or Republicans supporting it. Let it die.
Give us some presidential candidates who aren't jokes

I look at the Nine Dwarves and the first thing reaction that comes to mind isn't even disgust but a sort of weary incredulity. I think of P.J. O'Rourke's line: "What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck?" A major party in the wealthiest, most powerful, fourth most populous nation in the world can't do any better than these?

I think I have a lot of company in judging that these guys looked better six months ago, before they cheapened themselves with their endless indistinguishable yapping and their blatant pandering to the silliest barking moonbats on the fringe of the Democratic left. Bush has actually gained stature by comparison after every debate.

Nobody expects these guys to sound like Republicans — but, you know, once, there used to be a Democratic position that didn't sound like a petulant "Nyah, nyahhh". I haven't heard any credible plan for the war or the economy. Clue: Neither "Repeal the Bush tax cuts" or "Hand Iraq to the U.N. and the French" will fly to anyone who can string three facts together about economics or history. I don't think these characters even believe their own bullshit.

Sigh. You Republicans out there will be comforted by the thought that the Democrats are utterly incapable of taking this advice. I am not comforted by that thought — but you're probably right.

2003-11-04T08:22:00.000-08:00

The Whig Maneuver:

VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly likely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what replaces it?

The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it's been going on ever since the New Left captured the party apparat in the early 1970s. My first experience of political activism was standing athwart that particular tide of history, yelling "stop!", as a campaign worker for centrist Democrat Scoop Jackson in 1975. I think I already half-understood that he was doomed. What I didn't foresee was the completeness with which the Democrats would abandon their southern and rural wings to become a party run exclusively by Brie-nibbling urban elites. Call it the NPRization of the party.

Recently they've abandoned the private-sector labor unions as well. Just before 2000, a key Democratic strategist noted that party's demographic power base consisted solely of blacks and the public-employee unions. Bill Clinton, charming sociopath and perfect acme of the American political creature that he was, had managed to paper over that problem for a while. But it keeps getting worse. The liberal-Democrat lock on the national media is crumbling under pressure from talk radio, Fox News, and the bloggers. They're losing their ability to control the terms of political debate.

Finally, there is the notorious fractiousness of the smaller Democratic interest groups. While the black establishment has largely settled into the role of party wheelhorse and the trial lawyers play financial sugar daddy without demanding much except a complete block on tort reform, feminists and gays and the hard left continue to cause the party problems out of all proportion to their voting strength. The structural problem is that the small factions are disproprtionately strong in the Democrats' grass-roots organization; they therefore exert a big influence on party primaries and tend to pull the candidate list and the platform to the left.

Ever since the early 1990s, there's been a tug-of-war going on within the urban elites that now run the party; the Democratic Leadership Council versus the inheritors of the New Left. What's happening now with the Dean campaign demonstrates that the DLC has lost its grip. The left is winning. The trend that has taken the Democrats from solid majority status in my childhood to the point where it needs a Bill Clinton to win elections, if it continues, might very well result in it disappearing into history.

The DLC's most recent effort to reverse this tend — to stop talking about gun control — only highlights the depth of the problem. They know, because their own analysts and Bill Clinton have told them, that gun owners are the swing vote that cost them the 1994 and 2000 elections. And yet, the left, for whom hatred of civilian firearms is a religious absolute, has such a lock on the party machine that the DLC can only talk about spin, not about a substantive change in platform.

I expect the Democrats to lose heavily in today's elections. Like VodkaPundit, I expect the loss to change not a damn thing. The DLC will continue to wring its hands, and the New Lefties, comforted by convenient rationalizations in the major media, will continue to march the Democratic Party towards a cliff's edge.

Suppose they do succeed in self-destructing. What then?

No crystal ball is required to answer that question, just a look at the minor-party voting statistics. If the Democrats crumble, the big winners have to be the Greens and the Libertarians. The New Lefties who run most levels of the modern Democratic apparat would run to the Greens en masse; in fact, whatever organization emerges would probably view itself (with some justification) as the Democratic Party's successor. They'd probably take the public-employee unions with them.

The interesting question is whether the black establishment would follow. Blacks, as a voting group, are more conservative on social issues than Democrats as a whole -- heavily opposed to gay marriage, for example, and more in favor of school vouchers. The strain between general opinion among blacks and the strident leftism of many of their public figures has been growing. If the party of Lyndon Johnson were to disintegrate, it would become acute. I think the most likely scenario is that the Al Sharptons. Cynthia McKinneys and Carol Moseley-Brauns would run to the Greens, lose their popular base, and the black vote would fragment. Blacks would become a normal ethnic group, not tied to any one party.

The second-order effects on the Republicans would be just as interesting. The youth demographic Andrew Sullivan and others call "South Park Republicans" would bolt the GOP in a second if the Libertarians looked like a credible alternative. So, albeit more slowly and partially, would more traditional (and older) small-government/classical-liberal/free-trade types. The big question, given current pressures, is whether the Libs would remain isolationist or reluctantly slide into the pro-war camp and start behaving a bit more like a European party of the center or center-right.

In either scenario, the effect on the Republicans would be to resove their split-personality problem in favor of cultural conservatives and the hard right. They'd become a lot more like a Tory party. The really entertaining part comes when you look at how this change would tie in with regional demographics -- in this future, the Republicans would become the party of the old South!

UPDATE: My prediction came two-thirds true. Democrats got shellacked last night and the major media is making excuses for them this morning. Anyone want to bet against the last third (no change in the Democrats' platform)? No? I didn't think so...

2003-10-30T14:23:00.000-08:00

Administrivia

To those who've been complaining that my comments feature is broken, sorry about that. I think it's some screwup at enetstation, which I don't know how to fix. I'm going to be moving off blogspot to a site at University of North Carolina shortly, which should solve the problem.

2003-10-30T11:06:00.000-08:00

Great War II:

Donald Sensing has suggested that it may have been a bad thing that the Allies won the First World War, and sketched an alternate history. Stephen Green has replied.

Donald, I buy your scenario in the West (Germans go home, keeping Alsace-Lorraine) but I think Steve is right that your take on German war aims in the East was too benign. What we'd have been looking at here is a continuation of the Age of Imperialism, which in our history was finished off by the exhaustion of the victors after WWI and WWII.

Steve writes:

The situation in 1915 Europe would have been 1942 all over again, but with one important difference: The United States would never have gotten involved, never mobilized, and never had the opportunity to get used to the idea of acting like a Great Power.

Right enough. Let's carry this forward. As Donald has pointed out, the drive on Paris revealed serious problems in Germany's C3 and infrastructure. There would have been a pause of, I think, about six to eight years while the Germans consolidated their gains and built up their road and rail net. Their most serious internal problem in the short term would have been sporadic anti-German revolts in the eastern client states.

Meanwhile, after the defeat of the Allies, isolationist sentiment in the U.S. would have become stronger in the U.S. than it was in our history. The Wilsonian "War Party" and anyone associated with them would be completely discredited. American ethnic Germans who in our history were finished off as a coherent political force by WWII, would have gained more clout. President Lindbergh, maybe?

With the U.S. neutralized, the big fault line in geopolitics would have been the British Empire versus the German Reich. One important thing that would probably *not* have changed would have been the development of Italian Fascism -- but it wouldn't have taken root in Germany without the post-Versailles disaster.

The Tsarist regime in Russia was on its last legs. But Germany, as victory, would have been in a position to turn on its agent Lenin and back the White Russians just enough to keep Kerensky's govenment in power (but not enough for them to actually end the simmering civil war).

About 1922 or so, the line-up might have looked like this: The British Empire and a weakened, fractious Russia against a more powerful Imperial Germany allied with Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans. But there's something wrong with this picture; it ignores geopolitical rivalries within the Central Powers themselves. So, remembering the British grand strategy of sea control and alliances of convenience with land powers, I'm going to suggest that England's course would be to snuggle up to the Ottomans and pry them loose from the Axis. This would have made sense to the Ottomans, too; they would want to constrain the rising power of Germany and Austria, and I can imagine the British Foreign Office handing them back southern Persia as a sweetener.

So the next confrontation would open with an Anglo-Russian-Turkish alliance against a Germano-Austro-Italian one. France, even more seriously mired in defeatism than in our history, would hardly be a player. The U.S. would be neutral, possibly with a slight pro-German tilt.

Before general war broke out there would probably have been a pattern of escalating friction on the imperial margins. Germany would probably have flexed its muscles in Africa, first. Another leading indicator would be the size of the German fleet. With no Treaty of Washington in 1921, a serious naval arms race among Germany, England and Japan would have been pretty much inevitable.

Imperial Japan would have been in a much stronger position than historically, as well. With Russia weaker and the U.S. isolationist, her main rival for influence in the Pacific would be the British. So she would likely wind up on the Axis side, expanding onto the Asian mainland even more agressively than in our timeline.

So the eequivalent of World War Two would have have been a bigger and bloodier clash of empires.

UPDATE: Sombody commenting on VodkaPundit's blog said:

Take your scenario a little further. With France as the crippled defeated party, internal French politics mirror what historically happened in Germany. I think you get the rise of French fascists, who in turn blame French Jews for a "stab in the back" (Dreyfus redux). The Holocaust has a Gallic flavor. Instead of Teutonic efficiency, you get spontaneous mass killings by "citizen's commitees". Horrendous to ponder, but anti-semitism is not an exclusively German trait.

Very plausible. I can take this further: on their way to power the French Fascists have an ugly, low-level civil war with conservative royalists that resembles the Spanish Civil War in our timeline, except in this one Germany backs the royalists. The Spanish Civil War itself happens more or less on schedule, but plays out completely differently, too. Kerensky's Russians would have had neither the means nor the motivation to intervene that Stalin did, but the Germans might very well have still backed Franco in restoring the Spanish monarchy against the anarchists. So the likely outcome there was Franco taking power sooner, probably as a generalissimo under a weak Spanish king in Germany's orbit, glaring across the Pyrenees at France.

Where this is leading is that in Great War II, the France that joins the allies is Fascist...

FURTHER UPDATE: With Bolshevism dead in Russia, the beau ideal of the world's anti-monarchist left becomes not "scientific socialism" but anarcho-syndicalism on the Spanish model. At the extreme end this movement fuses with what's left of 19th-century romantic nihilism. As a result, terrorism becomes an important tool of the fringe left decades before the analogous development in our 1960s.

The British Labor Party turns increasingly syndicalist; in reaction, British Tories increasingly link arms with French and other fascist movements, which in this timeline are often genuinely reactionary rather than being Marxism with a nationalist/racialist paint job.

In the U.S., trade unions also increasingly turn syndicalist and anti-German. American conservatives tend to line up with the Bund and the Kaiser; when Great War II breaks out in 1923. American industrialists sell weapons to the German Empire. After a bitterly-fought election in 1924 U.S. policy begins to tilt pro-British, but the change is slow because many Americans are revolted by Fascist France.

2003-10-29T02:24:00.000-08:00

What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On?

Naomi Wolf's essay The Porn Myth strongly suggests that she lives on some other planet. It has been pretty well fisked over at Haight Speech and elsewhere. But so far, all of the people I've seen shredding it are women.

Perhaps this is because it's politically incorrect for us panting, grunting persons-of-testicle to trash-talk a feminist icon like Ms. Wolf or say anything nice about porn. But here at Armed and Dangerous, we are fearless — and, more to the point, we have cleverly prepared our ground by having previously written an essay entitled Why does porn got to hurt so bad? in which we analyzed in detail why most porn is so intensely ugly.

So I'm going to say a few words about Ms. Wolf's viewing-with-alarm, speaking as a man. A man who is quite in touch with his own desires, thank you, and has studied (yes, I mean studied) the effects of porn on his libido with some care.

In brief, my response to Ms. Wolf is: Haw haw haw har har hee hee hyuck *snort* giggle. Ma'am, you clearly have no freaking idea what you are talking about.

You show a young woman who makes herself sexually available but has trouble attracting the interest of a young man away from porn, and I'll show you a young man who is either homosexual or stone dead.

Well, OK, I can imagine one exception. If the young woman in question is hideously deformed, the can't-compete-with-porn insecurity you describe might be justified. But in general, it's safe to predict that an offer of pussy from any woman who is not aggressively ugly will easily outbid the young man's hand for the attention of his penis.

This is so not because young men are in any way enlightened, but because they are fizzing with hormones and instincts that are designed for the express purpose of inducing them to fuck...you know...women. Lots of them. Young men are not noted for being excessively discriminating in this regard. A biologist would explain this as r-type strategy — since his energy investment in reproduction is low, promiscuity is optimal.

Show me a young woman who thinks she can't compete with porn for a man's attention and I'll show you one of two things. Either (a), she's having galloping insecurity for some other reason and doesn't notice that the man enjoys having sex with real women a hell of a lot more than he enjoys porn, or (b) she's not having sex with that man.

There is one truth buried, oblique and nearly invisible, in Ms. Wolf's informants' reports. Sex with a real woman trumps porn, but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don't deliver. Again, this has nothing to do with enlightenment, and whether the dangling is a deliberate tease, a product of inhibition, or simple ineptness at the courtship dance doesn't matter much either. The most relevant causal fact is that young men get erections a lot, and when they get erections, having an orgasm tends to move to the top of the to-do-list and stay there.

Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who thinks she can't compete with porn. First item on the checklist: is she fucking him? If the answer is "no", then I regret to inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for flowing downhill.

On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this. I have a penis. I've been fucking women for nearly thirty years, and not once was I even remotely tempted to trade an actual roll in the hay for a fantasy image and my hand. Not even as a confused adolescent, and not even with the ones who were, relatively speaking, lousy in bed.

Any woman who thinks this is happening is evading a problem with the relationship, not with his sexual response. By pointing at porn, she is giving herself leave to ignore real issues. Like: am I joyful in bed? This has nothing to do with facials or Brazilian wax jobs — and, actually, as much to do with the capacity to receive pleasure from that man's touch as the capacity to give him pleasure.

Here's another secret about most men, most of the time: given a choice between a buff "porn-worthy" chick with a drawerful of sex toys who's grudging or unresponsive in bed, or a plain jane with rudimentary technique who orgasms easily and generously, plain jane is the one we're going to go back to. Again, this has a sound basis in evolutionary bio; orgasm is a sperm-retention behavior that increases the probability of conception, so an orgasming woman is saying pre-verbally "I want your child!".

Having delivered a smackdown on Ms. Wolf's silly thesis, I will now thump a number of her critics. Pretty much all of them report this exchange:

"Why have sex right away?" a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. "Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone," he said. "I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it's going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension."

"Isn't the tension kind of fun?" I asked. "Doesn't that also get rid of the mystery?"

"Mystery?" He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: "I don't know what you're talking about. Sex has no mystery."

Several of the fiskings I've read avoid Ms. Wolf's dim-bulbed ascription of that response to the insidious effects of porn only by writing off the kid as a callow, ignorant doofus. By doing so, they miss his point as completely as she did.

In fact, the kid is right. There is no mystery to sex. The mystery is in the stuff that is modulated onto sex like a signal onto a carrier wave, Relationships. Love. Intimacy. Mysticism. What this wise child is saying is that he wants to get the purely sexual tension out of the way so that he can get to the mystery.

Shame on Ms. Wolf for being in such a swivet about porn that she failed to notice this. But a greater shame on her fiskers, who had no single axe to grind and time for reflection — and thus, not even a bad excuse for their lack of perception.

2003-10-27T19:14:00.000-08:00

Stupid Like A Fox:

For the kind of articulate extrovert who tends to go into politics or the media, it can be very difficult to believe that a stumble-tongued, inarticulate man can be other than an idiot. As an articulate extrovert myself, I've had to struggle with this. Like most of our media and chattering classes, my instinct too was to write George W. Bush as an idiot who had stumbled into the Presidency through no merit of his own.

Events have forced me to nearly the opposite conclusion. George W. Bush is no idiot. In fact, he now appears to me to be an extremely cunning man who makes repeated and effective use of his opponents' inability to take him seriously.

Over and over again we've seen the pattern. Bush says he's gaing to do something. Opponents rant and rave and scream about what an idiot he is. Amidst all the name-calling, an effective opposition fails to materialize. When the smoke clears, events unfold pretty much according to the Bush script.

It's pretty much been that way on every issue bigger than judicial nominations. Now, mind you, in this essay I'm not going to express or even imply a judgment about whether or should be that way. What I'm trying to point out is that even the U.N. has pretty much ended up dancing Bush's tune. All of the Franco/German/Russian talk of thwarting that mad cowboy has come to this in the end: U.S, troops in control of Iraq, Saddam gone, and the U.N. formally committed by resolution to support the U.S. reconstruction without either a timeline or any U.N. authority over Iraq.

Once or twice could be luck. But Bush keeps doing this. He is such an effective political operator that his opponents find that their ability to block him has quietly vanished while they weren't looking. The pathological rage now endemic in Democratic circles is fueled by impotence. They know they were suckered, swindled, had somehow, but they can't pin down why or how the majority voters stopped listening. Bad enough to have Reagan pound the crap out of them — they thought he was an idiot too, but at least they could console themselves that he was a glib idiot. Being shellacked by a Republican who sounds like a moron behind a microphone is more than their blood pressure can take.

Well, Democrats, I've got news for you. Bush is using your rage to make you into idiots. I think, early in his political career, he somehow learned how to push this button reliably, and has been sucker-punching his opponents ever since. Clever of him — but then, as I belatedly realized when I was thinking this through. he has to be brighter than he looks. The dude flew fighter planes! Simpletons can't do that; the Air Force screens pilots for intelligence because it has to.

Want to stop Bush? Then, Mr. J. Random Democrat, call Dubya evil if you want — but accept that, on his record, he is pretty damn bright. Stop screaming, take his brains seriously, and outsmart him. That is, if you can.

2003-10-21T18:23:00.000-07:00

Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats:

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and I wasn't a target.

I'd ask what I've been doing wrong with my life that I missed out on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama's fuckwit brigade. But alas, I know full well wherein I failed. This is what I get for going on hiatus for months to finish my book and put multiple spokes in the wheels of SCO. I didn't maintain the momentum I had in 2002/early-2003, and fell off the moonbats' radar.

To all of you who were targeted -- Internet Hagannah, InstaPundit, Steve denBeste, Charles Johnson, and others: you have my respect and my thanks for what you do every day. The war against terror is a war of ideas as well as bullets. You do great service by unflinchingly exposing the lies of the terror network and its apologistsin the West. The Malaysian Moonbats, in recognizing this, have paid you greater tribute than I can.

Hmmm. Maybe I ought to update the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto. Think that'd piss 'em off enough that they's try to DDOS me?

2003-10-20T20:57:00.000-07:00

Why Howard Dean Won't Get My Vote:

After a previous post in which I called for the Democratic Party to walk the pro-firearms walk if it wanted to stop alienating freedom-loving independents like me, I was asked in comments what I think of Howard Dean — who, it is alleged, has an A++ rating from the NRA.

OK, I like the fact that Dean is pro-gun. In this, and in other ways, he's sane on subjects where Democrats are generally insane. But it is almost certain I will not vote for him. Because the next President of the U.S. must have a strategic vision for fighting the threat of Islamist terror and WMDs, and Dean has no such vision.

Note that I am not saying the next president must have George Bush's strategic vision — and don't bother with the Bush-is-an-idiot, it's-all his-handlers routine; Bush has routinely outsmarted people who underestimated him and as long as they delude themselves that he's a moron, it will be easier for him to continue doing so. But there must be some strategic vision, some sense of realpolitik. Dean ain't got it.

In fact, nobody on the list of Democratic presidential hopefuls appears to have any sense of the strategic stakes or possibilities, with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman. And supposing there were, no aspirant with a sane national-security program could make it through the gauntlet of the primaries to the general election.

And why? Because the Democratic Party apparatus has been captured by interest groups who are incapable of taking the war we are in seriously.

I'm not actually talking about the inmates of the asylum that is today's loony left: the retread Marxists, the po-mo academics, the anti-globalization crowd — what conservatives call with some justification the Blame-America-First brigades. Expecting anything but toxic babble from these people was always doomed. No, the trouble is that the Democratic interest groups that aren't outright insane have no way to fit an anti-terror strategy into their model of how to do politics.

How can feminists, gays, or the various skin-color cliques in the racial-problem industry cope? For these groups, politics is all about identity and grievance and maybe who gets the biggest slice in the next round of redistributing the domestic wealth — they've actually lost the very *concept* of the 'national interest', and are no more capable of grappling with the implications of 9/11 than they would be of speaking Sumerian.

Or the people who are *really* calling the shots in the Democratic Party — trial lawyers and the public-employee unions. (Forget labor in general. The Democrats stopped listening to the AFL-CIO about a nanosecond after it became clear that the private-sector unions could no longer keep most of their people from voting Republican.) Again, nothing about their relationship to the political game gives them anywhere to stand in foreign policy.

The Republicans don't have this problem. All of their major factions have commitments that don't stop at the water's edge. The so-called "national-greatness conservatives", the ideological free-traders, small business, big business, the Christian Right, even the Buchananite isolationalists — they may disagree violently on what the national interest is, but at least there is a place in their normal discourse about politics where they know that concept fits.

Not so most of the the Democrat pressure groups — which means that the terms of internal Democratic debate about foreign policy are being set by the loony left, because the people some of my warblogger colleagues call "barking idiotarian moonbats" are the only ones in the Democratic Party who actually care! They're the only Democrats with a world-view that involves thinking about the rest of the world as anything other than a passive backdrop for domestic politics.

(I'm actually convinced that the reason most Democratic politicians suck up to the U.N. and the French so assiduously is that following "international opinion" relieves them of the intolerable burden of having to think about foreign policy.)

Thus, Dean. Mostly a mainstream Democrat in that what he really wants to do is ignore foreign-policy issues — but the only way he's found to mobilize the angry-Left cadres who matter so much in the primaries is to bark like a moonbat.

That won't get my vote.

2003-10-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

Hey, DLC, Rethinking Is Not Enough:

The Democratic Party is getting hip to the fact that advocating gun bans loses them elections. Way to go, Dems! For a crowd widely touted in the media as the best and brightest, it has taken you far too long to wake up.

But there is still a weird feeling of unreality about the exercise. It seems to be mostly about spin rather than substance, mostly about making people believe that Democrats have reformed on this issue without actual reform.

Various bloggers have waxed acidulous about this, but nobody has stepped up and said, explicitly, what the Democrats' problem is and how to fix it. So. DLC honchos, you talk about being reality therapy for the rest of the party. Here is reality.

I am one of the independent, swing voters that could have won you the 2000 election. I do not consider myself a conservative, nor do I vote the Republican ticket.

I believe that the Founding Fathers of the United States bequeathed to me as a member of the unincorporated militia (that is, all citizens capable of bearing arms) the responsibility to remain armed and vigilent against both foreign enemies of my nation and domestic tyrants.

I am one of the people who will almost never vote for a Democrat, because I believe the Democratic Party wants to trash the Second Amendment, confiscate my guns, and destroy the balance of power between citizens and government that was intended by the framers of the Constitution.

I do not really trust either major political party on this issue, but whereas Republicans have less than sterling credibility, Democrats have negative credibility. That is, experience strongly suggests that when Democrats are quiet about firearms policy, they are concealing an anti-gun rather than a pro-gun agenda. Their silence is a lie.

Democratic pollster Mark Penn says "The formula for Democrats is to say that they support the Second Amendment, but that they want tough laws that close loopholes". Be aware that I will interpret any Democrat talking about "tough laws that close loopholes" as an anti-gun agenda being pursued by stealth and deception.

If the Democrats want my vote, it is not sufficient for the Democratic merely to refrain from pushing more firearms restrictions. The Democratic leadership must explicitly recognize the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual right, explicitly repudiate the gun-grabbers in their ranks, and make the abolition of firearms restrictions part of their formal agenda.

Negative credibility means you have a ways to go before you can even get to zero. Want my vote, and that of millions of independent gun owners like me? Start earning it with pro-gun action, not just talk...because if you don't, those millions of independents will have no realistic option but the Republicans, and the already serious decline of the national Democratic party may well become terminal.

2003-10-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Planets of Adventure

Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of some of the best stories of Murray Leinster — a writer once counted among science-fiction's reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten.

I come away from Planets of Adventure (pb, Baen 2002, ISBN 0-7434-7162-8) with a renewed appreciation of something I have long known. When John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein invented modern SF after 1938, Campbell perforce had to train a new crop of writers to produce it. Very few writers with established careers were able to meet Campbell's standards.

Murray Leinster (born Wil F. Jenkins) was one of a very few exceptions — and one of only two (with Jack Williamson) who actually managed to produce better work after Campbell than before him, rather than merely imitating previous pulp successes on a grander scale (as did, for example, the now-unreadable Edmond Hamilton and the still-enjoyable E.E. "Doc" Smith).

For this alone Leinster deserves more attention from the historians and critics of SF than he usually gets. I, personally, was ready to rediscover him because I had fond childhood memories of reading his work from the 1950s and early 1960s when it was not too difficult to find in the used bookstores of ten years later.

One of my sentimental favorites was the Med Service series, tales of a doctor making interstellar house calls to solve ingeniously constructed medical puzzles. I was delighted when Baen Books printed a Med Service omnibus a few months ago — but it is after reading Planets of Adventure that I am truly impressed with Leinster's achievement.

The first story, The Forgotten Planet is a fixup novel assembled from three novellas, published respectively in 1920, 1921, and 1953. The rest of the stories were published in the decade after 1947, the last quite coincidentally in the year I was born. In these stories we get a fine view in miniature both of SF's pre-Campbellian past and the most fertile period of the Campbellian Golden Age.

The first section of The Forgotten Planet, written in 1920, is deeply primitive. It's a dark thalamic adventure of regressed humans battling lethal fungi and giant insects in a fetid alien ecology. The only touches we can recognize as SFnal are a framing story Leinster added after the fact, in the early 1950s, which make the humands descendents of a crashed starliner — in origin, the story had been set on a far-future Earth. One feature of the original repays notice; Leinster referred to climate change via a carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. In 1920!

The end of The Forgotten Planet, as rewritten at the beginning of the 1950s, reads very differently. The stranded primitives, having struggled up on their own to barbarian status, are accidentally rediscovered by interstellar civilization. This is not merely a different story than Leinster had begun to write thirty years earlier, it is written in a profoundly different way, suffused with plucky optimism and cool efficiency. The protagonist, Burl, began the action as a a Joseph-Campbellian mythic hero; he ends it as the archetype of the John-Campbellian competent man, bestriding both his own world and that of his advanced galactic kindred with an ease that disconcerts the latter.

In the next section, The Planet Explorer, Leinster demonstrates a flawless command of the Campbellian idiom. These stories, written in 1955-56, are classic planetary-puzzle pieces of the sort that filled the pages of Astounding magazine. The protagonist solves life-threatening problems posed by conditions on alien worlds. These were intelligent stories when they were written and they're still intelligent today. One of them won a Hugo in 1956. Aside from a slight stiffness in the language, they read remarkably well.

And we're in for another surprise. The next story, Anthropological Note, dates from 1957. In it, Leinster captures perfectly the tone and style of the first post-Campbellian wave in SF, the social-science SF of the mid-to-late 1950s and pre-New-Wave 1960s. Truly this story could have been written by Fred Pohl or C.M. Kornbluth. The wry tone, the anthropologizing, and the not-so-subtle satirical edge are all there.

The story following that, Scrimshaw, is a creepy and dark little mood piece that manages to anticipate the New Wave of the mid-1960s by ten years. The rest of the anthology (Assignment on Pasik, Regulations and The Skit-Tree Planet) is mostly filler, workmanlike enough stuff from the late 1940s obviously written to pay bills. These stories are still readable, but of no special interest other than as a demonstration of consistent competence.

And there you have it. In these stories Leinster manages, with so little effort that you won't be aware of it unless you're looking, to span four eras of SF and meet all their demands with unobtrusive efficiency. I am unable to think of anyone else in the history of the field who can quite match that.

This observation is more interesting because Leinster was essentially a hack writer. Besides the SF, he churned out reams of pulp fiction -- formulaic Westerns, hard-boiled detective stories, jungle adventures — during a career that begain in 1917 and ended only with his death in 1975. It appears that the last thing he wrote was a Perry Rhodan novel which I have not read but which almost certainly stank to high heaven.

His SF, though, was not mere hack-work, or at least not usually mere hack-work. He was a genuine innovator in the form who invented the parallel-world story in 1934 and the first-contact story in 1945. It is impossible to read Leinster without sensing that to him, constructing Campbellian puzzle stories was a delight, and probably the closest approach to art for art's sake that he ever allowed himself. Certainly in Exploration Team, the story that won him the 1956 Hugo, one gets the sense that Leinster is using the story to think through some issues that are important to him — and they are not trivial issues, even today.

But for all that he helped invent some of SF's central tropes, Leinster never quite became an SF writer of the first rank. He was a solid midlist presence — the comparisons that leap to mind are his rough contemporaries James Schmitz and Ross Rocklynne. His novels tended to be uninspired; his best work (including the genre-defining First Contact and the hilarious and rather prescient A Logic Named Joe) was in short-story form.

What Murray Leinster does show us is that SF was as liberating for him as for his readers — that even a hack writer could take from SF the challenge and the invitation to be intelligent, and give back something a bit better than he might have written otherwise. I never got to ask him, but I strongly suspect that Wil F. Jenkins would be prefer to be remembered for the SF more than for anything else he wrote.

2003-10-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

Toxic Christianity, Round Two:

In the October 15th Best of the Web, James Taranto asks:

So let's see if we have this straight: The head of the Anglican Church is telling us that the wanton murder of thousands of innocent people [by Palestinian terrorists] is a sign of "serious moral goals," while the liberation of millions [of Iraqis] from one of the world's most vicious dictatorships is, as he has put it, "immoral and illegal."
Is this really what Christianity is all about?

Well, since you asked...yes, indeed it is.

To understand why, you first have to confront what Dr. Rowan Williams is actually doing. He is aligning himself with Islamic terrorists against individual Christians and against the liberation of Iraq from an Islamizing dictator by a predominantly Christian nation.

Now, why would the head of the second most prestigious of all Christian denominations do that? What is it in Christianity that could make him so confident in the morality of this position? What is it about the U.S.'s actions that make it so threatening?

A clue to the problem is that though the U.S. is demographically a mostly Christian nation, the effect of U.S. cultural hegemony is a secularizing one. American popular culture severs the bonds of fear and ignorance that hold people unquestioningly to their ancestral relgions. The American vision of each individual as an autonomous being who derives his rights from his humanness, from the simple fact of his capacity to assert them, is deadly antithetical to any religious tradition that vests moral authority in a transcendant God.

The Founding Fathers of the U.S. understood this antipathy full well. The pro-forma nods towards the distant god of the Deists in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Consitution failed to conceal the fact that the Founding Fathers were agnostics and atheists almost to a man. As George Washington and John Adams explained to the Knights of Malta in 1787 "The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion". It could not have been so founded without a fatal conflict with its aspiration to be a nation of freedom.

The Archbishop of Canterbury cannot be dismissed as a fringe figure as some are (incorrectly) wont to do of Pat Robertson. His enmity towards the U.S.'s anti-terror strategy, his willingness to line up with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden after no more than a pro-forma disclaimer of terrorist means, proceeds directly from this fundamental conflict. It is diagnostic of a deep sickness, an abiding evil in the heart of Christianity itself — the exaltation of obedience, the denial that humans can have any worth other than through the condescension of God.

Nietzsche called this one correctly. Christianity, which purports to be the religion of love, is only sporadically anything of the kind. It is primarily a religion of slavery and submission. Christian individualism, when it exists at all, is legitimized only by obedience to God. In a Christian worldview there is always someone to be obeyed, whether visible cleric or invisible Nobodaddy. You must submit; the only argument is about to whom your obedience is owed, and what humans under what circumstances may transmit the orders of God. Without that sinew of obedience the entire world-view disintegrates.

To a Christian cleric, a properly terrified and obedient Muslim is less of a threat than a person who has rejected the God of the Abrahamic faiths. The Muslim is still within the system of submission. Only a handful of symbols separate him from the Christian; the basic program is the same. Therefore, from the point of view of the operators of the religious obedience machine that is Anglicanism (or almost any other Christian denomination) Osama bin Laden is a more natural ally than any freethinker.

Am I accusing Dr. Rowan Williams of being part of a conscious totalitarian conspiracy? No; he is something far more dangerous — a leading figure in an unconscious totalitarian conspiracy, one which denies its own nature just effectively enough to fool others as well. That conspiracy encompasses every tyrant who has ever told human beings that their path to happiness lay in the exaltation of some authority, whether God or the State.

It is in this context that Dr. Williams's statement makes perfect and consistent sense. For him, better a thousand terrorist acts than even one human being waking up to discover that he need not after all fear the wrath of God.

2003-10-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

Mohammed was a Christian?

In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone called for sources. Here is what I know about this:

(First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian nor a Moslem, and in fact consider those two religions #3 and #4 in the Most Toxic Ideologies Of All Time sweepstakes, after Communism and Naziism. I have therefore studied the history of Christianity and Islam fairly closely, basically on the know-your-enemies principle.)

There is a scholar somewhere in Germany using the alias Christoph Luxenberg. He has published a book called Die syro-aramaeische Lesart des Koran; Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Quränsprache. He uses a pseudonym because he thinks many Moslems will want to kill him when they find out about it. In this he is undoubtedly correct.

What Luxenberg has done is applied the same methods of philology and linguistics to the Qur'an that were applied to the Christian Bible beginning in the mid-19th century. I have not read the book itself as I have no German, but when I read several summaries of its conclusions I was struck by the sense they made of some odd facts I had picked up over the years. Such as the datum that there is a Christian monastery in the Sinai which received a special immunity, apparently from Mohammed himself, under terms its abbots have kept mum about for 1400 years. And the curious resemblance (you have to have read both the Qur'an and some odd Christian sources to notice, but I have) between the rhetoric of the Qur'an and that of a now-forgotten group of Christian 'heretics' called Monophysites who were particularly strong in the Syria and Arabia of Mohammed's time. And the fact that early Muslims knelt to pray towards Jerusalem, not Mecca.

You can read this scholarly review for more. Another discussion, which was written before Luxenberg but is particularly telling on the evidence that Islam did not emerge as a separate faith until well after Mohammed's death, is at this atheist site. I'll give you a summary of the high points, some of which the reviewers (though not the atheists) tiptoe around.

Islam, the Qur'an, and classical Arabic all formed in a cosmopolitan culture of Syrio-Aramaic-speaking Arabs. The religious tradition that went with that language was Christian; in fact, the very word "Qur'an" probably derived from "queryana", a Syrio-Aramaic term for a kind of Christian liturgical text. The variant spelling "qur'an" for that word is attested.

Mohammed was probably a Christian of a Nestorian or Monophysite stripe, and the Qur'an originally intended as a commentary or gloss on the Syriac recension of the Christian Bible. The surah or section of the Qur'an that Moslems believe is the oldest contains an exhortation to take the Christian Eucharist.

In fact, it is almost certain that the concept of an Islamic identity separate from Syriac Christianity did not develop in Mohammed's lifetime; there are hints that it was a political creation of the Caliphate, constructed soon after Mohammed's death by the Caliph 'Othman. Notably, he had burned all recensions of the sayings of Mohammed other than the one prepared under his control.

Many textual difficulties in the Qur'an vanish once it is realized that a lot of the words in it are fossilized Aramaic. Luxenberg wanders deep into technical philology here and you have to know a lot of details about early Semitic writing systems, including the fact that they didn't record vowels. (I know enough to smell that Luxenberg has a hell of a strong case.) But the upshot is that you can go to Syrio-Aramaic vocabularies and extract clear readings from many passages that are maddeningly obscure if you're running under the assumption that they are written in the vocabulary of later Arabic.

Remember the brief rash of news stories about "72 virgins" actually meaning "72 white grapes"? That was Luxenberg reading the Qur'an in its original Syrio-Aramaic-derived vocabulary.

Islamic scholars of the Qur'an lost the knowledge of the Qur'an's Aramaic origins shortly after 'Othman's book-burning. There are hints of it in the oldest hadith (traditional saying of Mohammed) but the hints don't make any sense until you do the philology, at which point they snap into focus and startle the crap out of you. The traditional Islamic accounts of the Qur'an's origins are are best confused, and at worst pure inventions of the Umaiyyad propaganda machine that was busily turning Mohammed's reform of Syriac Christianity into a new religion as the basis for empire

One entertaining detail I didn't discover until I did my fact-checking for this essay is that Catholic theologians have been claiming Mohammed was a renegade Nestorian, or something like, for about a thousand years. It also turns out that there are scholar-priests in odd corners of the Christian world (notably among Maronites in Lebanon) who had pieces of Luxenberg's exegesis all along, but lacked the philological training to put them together. Now it turns out they were right. Who knew?

2003-10-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

Nuke 'em for Christ:

Pat Robertson, the same paragon of Christian virtue who has opined in the past that Wiccans like me should be burned alive the way they used to in the good old days, just created an interesting dilemma for me by suggesting that the State Department should be nuked.

As a pagan anarchist, I'm completely uninterested in being considered a paragon of Christian virtue. So I can admit to feeling a sneaking sympathy with Robertson's modest proposal. I mean, it wouldn't just be nuking the government, it would be nuking one of the more repulsive parts of same. The BATF and DEA are certainly a greater threat to liberty and happiness, but watching the Foggy Bottom crowd compete to see who can pander most abjectly to "international opinion" and a succession of enemies from the old Soviet Union to the France of today has been pretty nauseating.

But no. I have my own standards of virtue, and they don't quite stretch to vaporizing Foggy Bottom. Innocents (that is, persons who are not causally implicated in the government's normal practices of coercion and fraud) could be harmed. Cleaning staff, visiting children, that sort of thing. Shocking bad form to whack them, don't you know.

Now. Seriously. I've taken some flak in the past for implying that Christianity is just as vile and violence-prone a religion as Islam. Pat Robertson has made this point for me before and doubtless will again. Because, like Osama bin Laden, he really believes. He pays attention to all the bits of the Bible and doctrine and history that most so-called ‘Christians’ edit out — a maneuver that makes them better human beings, but worse Christians.

Christianity is sold as a "religion of love" but that is just as bogus as calling Islam a "religion of peace". What is far more important and fundamental to both is eschatological dualism, which Islam inherited through Mohammed's roots in Monophysite Christianity. (What? You didn't know that Islam started life as a mildly schismatic Christian sect? Yes, it's true.)

"Eschatological dualism" is fancy theologist-speak for the belief that history consists of a titanic struggle between God and the Devil, which will culminate at the end of time with a great sorting out — godly obedient people to Heaven, sinners to Hell. Eschatological dualism is the root of the "Kill them all, God will know his own" attitude that has always been rather more characteristic of both religions than "peace" or "love". Pat and Osama, brothers under the skin, are squarely in that grand old tradition.

Christianity, fortunately for all of us, has become quite decadent and weak these last 400 years or so — Robertson merely dreams of smiting the Devil's minions with Godly fire, rather than actually incinerating 3000 people on a fine autumn morning. But it may take another 400 before Christianity withers away sufficiently that my descendants need not fear being burned at the stake by a charismatic looney-tune like Robertson. Islam, 600 years younger, will probably remain deadly for rather longer.

2003-10-04T23:33:00.000-07:00

No Flies On The U.S.:

In his recent article Flypaper: A Strategy Unfolds, Andrew Sullivan trots out some confirming evidence for the theory that the U.S. is pursuing a “flypaper strategy” in Iraq — encouraging the Islamic terror network to fight American soldiers there so they won't be attacking American civilians here.

Mr. Sullivan's analysis is plausible. Plausible enough that my reaction to the article, especially the last paragraph in which he urges Bush to articulate the strategy as a way of scoring domestic political points. was: “OK, you've demonstrated your cleverness. Now would you kindly zip your lip before you undermine the strategy?”

The leaders of the Islamist terror network are certainly evil and arguably insane (if only in the general way that all religious believers are insane) but they're not stupid. If the President of the United States got on network T.V. and yelled “We have a flypaper strategy! We're encouraging all the world's nut-jobs to attack us in Iraq so they won't attack us in the U.S.”, just what do you suppose would be the result?

Would our favorite murderous ragheads nod agreeably, say “Peachy, we'll play your game and keep attacking you where you think you're strongest?” Or would they bend all their efforts to ginning up another mass-murder in the U.S. just to prove they can do it and the flypaper isn't working?

For anyone to talk about a flypaper strategy in public is irresponsible. For Sullivan to urge that Bush should cop to it in public in order to one-up his domestic opponents is beyond irresponsible into idiotic and feckless. The President of the U.S. would be profoundly derelict in his duty if he courted lethal danger to American civilians by doing any such thing.

I'm normally a fan of Andrew Sullivan. His writing is witty if occasionally a bit febrile, and he is clear-eyed on a handful of subjects that normally induce rectocranial inversion in conservatives. But today he should be ashamed of himself. He has engaged in the exact same error he has excoriated in others, which is treating the rest of the world as a mere backdrop to domestic American political feuds.

And I have some advice for him: Mr. Sullivan, next time you feel the urge to be clever in public, do us all a favor and ask yourself how many innocent lives you might be endangering by running your mouth. If the answer is more than zero, shut up!

2003-10-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

If Guns Are Outlawed, Outlaws Will Use Crossbows

This happened about 15 minutes from where I live:

Police in West Chester are looking for an assailant they believe used a crossbow to shoot a pedestrian from a passing SUV.

The victim, a restaurant worker who was walking home along High Street early Sunday morning, was shot in the stomach with a 16-inch hunting arrow. He was released Wednesday from the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.

Benito Vargas told police he was at the corner of High and Barnard Streets at about 1 a.m. when he saw the white SUV's driver-side window slide down, revealing the front part a crossbow just inside. Seconds later, he was lying on the ground.

[...]

"This thing would be silent. You wouldn't hear any noise," West Chester Detective Thomas Yarnall said. [...] Yarnall said the shooting appeared random [...]

Gives a whole old meaning to the phrase "looking for a quarrel", which in fact, originally referred to a crossbow bolt.

2003-09-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

Statism — Love It Or Leave It

For many years I've been seeing proposals for implementing libertarian reforms that look superficially appealing and plausible, but on closer examination run hard aground either on some pesky reality of politics as it is or the extreme difficulty of waging a successful revolution. Since I'm a libertarian, you may well imagine that I find this annoying. How do we get there from here?

For the first time, I think I've seen a path that is both principled and practical. Not the whole path, but some firm steps that both accomplish good in themselves and open up great possibilities. And the best part is that it's a path most statists can't object to, one that uses the premises of the existing federal system to achieve a fair first test of libertarian ideas within that system. Even opponents of libertarianism, if they are fair-minded, should welcome this reality check. Libertarians should cheer it on and join it.

I've had troubles with other libertarians recently. Too many have retreated into isolationism in the face of a war with terrorism that I do not believe we can or should evade. The isolationists judge that empowering the State when we use it as an instrument of self-defense has consequences for the long term that are more dangerous than terrorists' aims are in the short term. I sympathize with this view, but when all is said and done, Al-Qaeda shahids with backpack nukes from the 'stans are more of a danger than John Ashcroft has ever been. I have done my homework and if anything, I believe the U.S. Government is understating the danger we face.

But the dangers of empowering the State to fight a necessary war make it more, not less urgent that we pursue all possibilities for libertarian reform at home. Now, I think I see a workable one. What if, by perfectly legal and proper means, we could take over a small American state and actually try out our ideas there?

Yes, I thought it was a crazy idea when I first heard it. An entire state? How? But the Free State Project has done the math. I've looked at their arguments and trend curves, and I'm pretty much convinced. It can be done. We can do it. The key is very simple; enough of us just have to move there. Vote with our feet, and then vote in a bloc. And why a state? Becausr that's the only intermediate level of government with enough autonomy to make a good laboratory.

The Free State Project identified ten small states where 20,000 active libertarians would be a critically large voting bloc. They are signing up libertarians and like-minded people to vote on the target state and to move there when the group passes 20,000. The winning state will be announced on 1st October; they've signed up about 5400 people so far, on a classic exponential growth curve with a six-month doubling time that should get them there in late 2004.

What could be more American than migrating to a thinly-settled area to experiment with liberty? And this time we won't have to kill off the natives, because they're not going to be organizing any scalping parties. Most of the states under consideration have a strong local libertarian tradition, and none of them are going to look askance at the sort of bright, hardworking, highly-skilled people most likely to be pro-freedom activists.

Some people won't like this idea, though. The national media establishment, which is statist down to its bones even in the few crevices where it isn't leftist, will inevitably try to portray the Free State migrants as a bunch of racist conservative redneck gun-nuts (all these terms being effectively synonymous in the national media) intent on turning the poor victim state into one gigantic Aryan Nations compound (especially if it's Idaho, as it could be). Expect network-news interviews with locals teary-eyed with worry that the incomers will be hosting regular cross-burnings on the courthouse lawn. Awkward little inconsistencies like the libertarian opposition to drug laws, censorship, and theocracy will be ignored. This prospect is especially ironic because, in most of the possible target states, it is our lifestyle liberalism that is actually most likely to produce a culture clash with the natives.

The more intelligent members of the political class won't like this either. The brighter and better-able one is to extrapolate second-and-third-order effects, the more likely the potential success of libertarianism at a state level is likely to scare them — conservatives nearly as much as liberals, and conservatives perhaps more so when we challenge them to emulate our success with small-government policies that they speak but don't really mean.

But I don't think this will be easy to stop. Libertarian demographics being what they are, 20,000 of us in a small state will be a huge concentration of technical, creative and entrepreneurial talent. We'll found software businesses, studios, innovative light-manufacturing shops and engineering companies by the bucketload. We'll create favorable regulatory conditions for old-line businesses like financial-services houses and for bleeding-edge ones like the private space-launch industry. We'll attract more people like us. The lucky state, especially if it's depressed and mostly rural like a lot of the candidates, will experience a renaissance. And we'll get to make the difference.

The real fun will start when Americans elsewhere start asking "Why can't our state be more like this?"

Liberty in our lifetime? I think this might be how to get there.

2003-08-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Darl McBride

Mr. McBride:

Late yesterday. I learned that you have charged that your company is the victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM. You have urged the press and public to believe that the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are up in arms not because of beliefs or interests of their own, but because little gray men from Armonk have put them up to it. Bwahahaha! Fire up the orbital mind-control lasers!

Very few things could possibly illustrate the brain-boggling disconnect between SCO and reality with more clarity than hearing you complain about how persecuted your company is. You opened this ball on 6 March by accusing the open-source community of criminality and incompetence as a way to set up a lawsuit against IBM. You have since tried to seize control of our volunteer work for your company's exclusive gain, and your lawyers have announced the intention to destroy not just the GPL but all the open-source licenses on which our community is built. It's beyond me how can have the gall to talk as though we need funding or marching orders from IBM to mobilize against you. IBM couldn't stop us from mobilizing!

I'm not sure which possibility is more pathetic — that the CEO of SCO is lying through his teeth for tactical reasons, or that you genuinely aren't capable of recognizing honest outrage when you see it. To a manipulator, all behaviors are manipulation. To a conspirator, all opposition is conspiracy. Is that you? Have you truly forgotten that people might make common cause out of integrity, ethical considerations, or simple self-defense? Has the reality you inhabit truly become so cramped and ugly?

I'm in at least semi-regular communication with most of the people and organizations who are causing you problems right now. The only conspiracy among us is the common interest in preventing the open-source community from being destroyed by SCO's greed and desperation. (And we think it's a perfect sign of that desperation that at SCOforum you ‘proved’ your relevance by bragging about the amount of press coverage SCO generates. Last I checked, companies demonstrated relevance by showing products, not press clippings.)

Yes, one of the parties I talk with is, in fact, IBM. And you know what? They're smarter than you. One of the many things they understand that you do not is that in the kind of confrontation SCO and IBM are having, independent but willing allies are far better value than lackeys and sock puppets. Allies, you see, have initiative and flexibility. The time it takes a lackey to check with HQ for orders is time an ally can spend thinking up ways to make your life complicated that HQ would be too nervous to use. Go on, try to imagine an IBM lawyer approving this letter.

The very best kind of ally is one who comes to one's side for powerful reasons of his or her own. For principle. For his or her friends and people. For the future. IBM has a lot of allies of that kind now. It's an alliance you drove together with your arrogance, your overreaching, your insults, and your threats.

And now you cap it all with this paranoid ranting. It's classic, truly classic. Was this what you wanted out of life, to end up imitating the doomed villain in a cheesy B movie? Tell me, does that dark helmet fit comfortably? Are all the minions cringing in proper form? "No, Mr. Torvalds, I expect you to die!" I'd ask if you'd found the right sort of isolated wasteland for your citadel of dread yet, but that would be a silly question; you're in Utah, after all.

It doesn't have to be this way. Sanity can still prevail. Here's the message that Jeff Gerhardt read at SCOforum again:

In recent months, the company formerly known as Caldera and now trading as SCO has alleged that the 2.4 Linux kernel contains code misappropriated from it. We in the open-source community are respectful of intellectual-property rights, and take pride in our ability to solve our own problems with our own code. If there is infringing code in the Linux kernel, our community wants no part of it and will remove it.

We challenge SCO to specify exactly which code it believes to be infringing, by file and line number, and on what grounds it is infringing. Only with disclosure can we begin the process of remedying any breach that may exist. If SCO is truly concerned about protecting its property, rather than simply using the mere accusations as a pretext to pump its stock price and collect payoffs from Microsoft for making trouble, then it will welcome the opportunity to have its concerns resolved as quickly and with as little disruption as possible. We are willing to cooperate with that.

The open-source community is not, however, willing to sit idly by while SCO asserts proprietary control, and the right to collect license fees, over the entirety of Linux. That is an unacceptable attempt to hijack the work thousands of volunteer programmers contributed in good faith, and must end.

If SCO is willing to take the honest, cooperative path forward, so are we. If it is not, let the record show that we tried before resorting to more confrontational means of defending our community against predation.

Linus Torvalds is backing me on this, and our other chieftains and philosopher-princes will as well. Show us the overlaps. If your code has been inserted in our work, we'll remove it — not because you've threatened us but because that's the right thing to do, whether the patches came from IBM or anywhere else. Then you can call off your lawyers and everyone will get to go home happy.

Take that offer while you still can, Mr. McBride. So far your so-called ‘evidence’ is crap; you'd better climb down off your high horse before we shoot that sucker entirely out from under you. How you finish the contract fight you picked with IBM is your problem. As the president of OSI, defending the community of open-source hackers against predators and carpetbaggers is mine — and if you don't stop trying to destroy Linux and everything else we've worked for I guarantee you won't like what our alliance is cooking up next.

And in case it's not pellucidly clear by now, not one single solitary damn thing I have said or published since 6 March (or at any time previously for that matter) has been at IBM's behest. I'm very much afraid it's all been me, acting to serve my people the best way I know how. IBM doesn't have what it would take to buy me away from that job and neither do you. I'm not saying I don't have a price — but it ain't counted in money, so I won't even bother being insulted by your suggestion.

You have a choice. Peel off that dark helmet and deal with us like a reasonable human being, or continue down a path that could be bad trouble for us but will be utter ruin — quite possibly including jail time on fraud, intellectual-property theft, barratry, and stock-manipulation charges — for you and the rest of SCO's top management. You have my email, you can have my phone if you want it, and you have my word of honor that you'll get a fair hearing for any truths you have to offer.

Eric S. Raymond
esr@thyrsus.com
President, Open Source Initiative
Friday, 20 August 2003

2003-07-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

Brother, Can you Paradigm?

I just read an interview with my friend Tim O'Reilly in which he approvingly cited Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". There are some books so bad, but so plausible and influential, that periodically trashing them in public is almost an obligation. The really classic stinkeroos of this kind, like Karl Marx's Das Kapital, exert a weird kind of seduction on otherwise intelligent people long after their factual basis has been completely exploded.

Yes, Kuhn's magnum opus is one of these. When I was a bright and naive young sprat, full of zeal to correct my fuddy-duddy elders, I loved Kuhn's book. Then I reread it, and did some thinking and fact-checking, and discovered that it is both (a) deeply wrong, and (b) dishonest.

First, deeply wrong. Kuhn's basic model that paradigm changes are generational — you have to wait for the old dinosaurs to die — is dramatically falsified by the history of early 20th-century physics. Despite well-publicized exceptions like Einstein's refusal to accept "spooky action at a distance", the record shows us that a generation of physicists handled not one but two major paradigm shifts in their lifetimes — relativity and quantum mechanics — quite smoothly indeed.

Later in the 20th century, the paradigm shift produced by the discovery of DNA and the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary theory didn't require the old guard to die off before it was accepted, either. More recently, the discovery of things like reverse transcriptase and "jumping genes", which broke two of the central dogmas of genetics, were absorbed with barely a ripple.

I found many other examples once I started looking. It turns out that the kind of story Kuhn wants to tell is quite rare in the hard sciences. There are a few examples of paradigm shifts that fit his model — my personal favorite is Wegener and the continental-drift hypothesis — but they are the exception rather than the rule. Most theoretical upheavals, even most very radical ones, happen rather smoothly.

The soft sciences are a somewhat different story, and the reasons for this are revealing. Look at the post-Freudian upheaval in psychology or the clashes between social contructivism and the evolutionary-psych crowd and you will see something much more like a Kuhnian shock going on (I suspect we've got another one coming in linguistics when Noam Chomsky kicks off). But these fields are vulnerable largely to the extent that they are not science — that is, when the dominant model is poorly confirmed or untestable, and holds largely for reasons of politics and/or the dominance of a single charismatic personality.

One of the most pointed criticisms of Kuhn is that his book is a sort of soft-science imperialism, an attempt to project onto the hard sciences the kind of incoherence, confusion, and political ax-grinding we see in (say) sociology or "political science". In doing so, it does real science a profound disservice.

The dishonesty in the book is that Kuhn evades the question of whether paradigm shifts are an emic or etic phenomenon. In fact, he does this so neatly that it's possible to read the whole thing and not notice that the largest central question about the nature of paradigm shifts is being dodged. Do they change the world or just our description of it? Kuhn hints at a radical sort of subjectivism without ever acknowledging what that would actually mean.

Kuhn got me interested in the cultural history of science when I read this book around 1971. But the more I studied it, the more I became convinced that Kuhn's thesis is simple, appealing, and wrong. Among many other flaws, he erects a binary distinction between "normal" science and paradigm-shattering earthquakes that is not really sustainable except through a kind of selective hindsight. It plays to our human tendency to want to make heroic narratives out of history, but it misrepresents science as it is actually practised and perceived by the people who do it.

(For a demolition of Kuhn that focuses less on the factual holes in his thesis and more on the historical and logical flaws, see this New Criterion article.)

2003-07-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

The Myth of Man The Killer

One of the most dangerous errors of our time is the belief that human beings are uniquely violent animals, barely restrained from committing atrocities on each other by the constraints of ethics, religion, and the state.

It may seem odd to some to dispute this, given the apparently ceaseless flow of atrocity reports from Bosnia, Somalia, Lebanon and Los Angeles that we suffer every day. But, in fact, a very little study of animal ethology (and some application of ethological methods to human behavior) suffices to show the unbiased mind that human beings are not especially violent animals.

Desmond Morris, in his fascinating book ``Manwatching'', for example, shows that the instinctive fighting style of human beings seems to be rather carefully optimized to keep us from injuring one another. Films of street scuffles show that ``instinctive'' fighting consists largely of shoving and overhand blows to the head/shoulders/ribcage area.

It is remarkably difficult to seriously injure a human being this way; the preferred target areas are mostly bone, and the instinctive striking style delivers rather little force for given effort. It is enlightening to compare this fumbling behavior to the focussed soft-tissue strike of a martial artist, who (having learned to override instinct) can easily kill with one blow.

It is also a fact, well-known to military planners, that somewhere around 70% of troops in their first combat-fire situation find themselves frozen, unable to trigger lethal weapons at a live enemy. It takes training and intense re-socialization to make soldiers out of raw recruits. And it is a notable point, to which we shall return later, that said socialization has to concentrate on getting a trainee to obey orders and identify with the group. (Major David Pierson of the U.S. Army wrote an illuminating essay on this topic in the June 1999 Military Review).

Criminal violence is strongly correlated with overcrowding and stress, conditions that any biologist knows can make even a laboratory mouse crazy. To see the contrast clearly, compare an urban riot with post-hurricane or -flood responses in rural areas. Faced with common disaster, it is more typical of humans to pull together than pull apart.

Individual human beings, outside of a tiny minority of sociopaths and psychopaths, are simply not natural killers. Why, then, is the belief in innate human viciousness so pervasive in our culture? And what is this belief costing us?

The historical roots of this belief are not hard to trace. The Judeo-Christian creation story claims that human beings exist in a fallen, sinful state; and Genesis narrates two great acts of revolt against God, the second of which is the first murder. Cain kills Abel, and we inherit the ``mark of Cain'', and the myth of Cain — the belief that we are all somehow murderers at bottom.

Until the twentieth century, Judeo-Christianity tended to focus on the first one; the Serpent's apple, popularly if not theologically equated with the discovery of sexuality. But as sexual taboos have lost their old forbidding force, the ``mark of Cain'' has become relatively more important in the Judeo-Christian idea of ``original sin''. The same churches and synagogues that blessed ``just wars'' in former centuries have become strongholds of ideological pacifism.

But there is a second, possibly more important source of the man-as-killer myth in the philosophy of the Enlightenment — Thomas Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature as a "warre of all against all", and the reactionary naturism of Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics. Today these originally opposing worldviews have become fused into a view of nature and humanity that combines the worst (and least factual) of both.

Hobbes, writing a rationalization of the system of absolute monarchy under the Stuart kings of England, constructed an argument that in a state of nature without government the conflicting desires of human beings would pit every man against his neighbor in a bloodbath without end. Hobbes referred to and assumed "wild violence" as the normal state of humans in what anthropologists now call "pre-state" societies; that very term, in fact, reflects the Hobbesian myth,

The obvious flaw in Hobbes's argument is that he mistook a sufficient condition for suppressing the "warre" (the existence of a strong central state) for a necessary one. He underestimated the innate sociability of human beings. The anthropological and historical record affords numerous examples of "pre-state" societies (even quite large multiethnic/multilingual populations) which, while violent against outsiders, successfully maintained internal peace.

If Hobbes underestimated the sociability of man, Rousseau and his followers overestimated it; or, at least, they overestimated the sociability of primitive man. By contrasting the nobility and tranquility they claimed to see in rural nature and the Noble Savage with the all-too-evident filth, poverty and crowding in the booming cities of the Industrial Revolution, they secularized the Fall of Man. As their spiritual descendants today still do, they overlooked the fact that the urban poor had unanimously voted with their feet to escape an even nastier rural poverty.

The Rousseauian myth of technological Man as an ugly scab on the face of pristine Nature has become so pervasive in Western culture as to largely drive out the older opposing image of ``Nature, red in tooth and claw'' from the popular mind. Perhaps this was inevitable as humans achieved more and more control over their environment; protection from famine, plague, foul weather, predators, and other inconveniences of nature encouraged the fond delusion that only human nastiness makes the world a hard place.

Until the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, the Rousseauian view of man and nature was a luxury confined to intellectuals and the idle rich. Only as increases in urbanization and average wealth isolated most of society from nature did it become an unarticulated and unexamined basic of popular and academic belief. (In his book "War Before Civilization", Lawrence Keeley has given us a trenchant analysis of the way in which the Rousseauian myth reduced large swathes of cultural anthropology to uttering blinkered nonsense.)

In reality, Nature is a violent arena of intra- and inter-species competition in which murder for gain is an everyday event and ecological fluctuations commonly lead to mass death. Human societies, outside of wartime, are almost miraculously stable and nonviolent by contrast. But the unconscious prejudice of even educated Westerners today is likely to be that the opposite is true. The Hobbesian view of the "warre of all against all" has survived only as a description of human behavior, not of the wider state of nature. Pop ecology has replaced pop theology; the new myth is of man the killer ape.

Another, darker kind of romanticism is at work as well. To a person who feels fundamentally powerless, the belief that one is somehow intrinsically deadly can be a cherished illusion. Its marketers know full well that violence fantasy sells not to the accomplished, the wealthy and the wise, but rather to working stiffs trapped in dead-end jobs, to frustrated adolescents, to retirees — the marginalized, the lonely and the lost.

To these people, the killer-ape myth is consolation. If all else fails, it offers the dark promise of a final berserkergang, unleashing the mythic murderer inside to express all those aggravations in a gory and vengeful catharsis. But if seven out of ten humans can't pull the trigger on an enemy they have every reason to believe is trying to kill them, it seems unlikely that ninety-seven out of a hundred could make themselves murder.

And, in fact, less than one half of one percent of the present human population ever kills in peacetime; murders are more than an order of magnitude less common than fatal household accidents. Furthermore, all but a vanishingly small number of murders are performed by males between the ages of 15 and 25, and the overwhelming majority of those by unmarried males. One's odds of being killed by a human outside that demographic bracket are comparable to one's chances of being killed by a lightning strike.

War is the great exception, the great legitimizer of murder, the one arena in which ordinary humans routinely become killers. The special prevalence of the killer-ape myth in our time doubtless owes something to the horror and visibility of 20th-century war.

Campaigns of genocide and repressions such as the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's engineered famines, the Ankha massacres in Cambodia, and ``ethnic cleansing'' in Yugoslavia loom even larger in the popular mind than war as support for the myth of man the killer. But they should not; such atrocities are invariably conceived and planned by selected, tiny minorities far fewer than .5% of the population.

We have seen that in normal circumstances, human beings are not killers; and, in fact, most have instincts which make it extremely difficult for them to engage in lethal violence. How do we reconcile this with the continuing pattern of human violence in war? And, to restate to one of our original questions, what is belief in the myth of man the killer doing to us?

We shall soon see that the answers to these two questions are intimately related — because there is a crucial commonality between war and genocide, one not shared with the comparatively negligible lethalities of criminals and the individually insane. Both war and genocide depend, critically, on the habit of killing on orders. Pierson observes, tellingly, that atrocities "are generally initiated by overcontrolled personality types in second-in-command positions, not by undercontrolled personality types." Terrorism, too, depends on the habit of obedience; it is not Osama bin Laden who died in the 9/11 attack but his minions.

This is part of what Hannah Arendt was describing when, after the Nuremberg trials, she penned her unforgettable phrase ``the banality of evil''. The instinct that facilitated the atrocities at Belsen-Bergen and Treblinka and Dachau was not a red-handed delight in murder, but rather uncritical submission to the orders of alpha males — even when those orders were for horror and death.

Human beings are social primates with social instincts. One of those instincts is docility, a predisposition to obey the tribe leader and other dominant males. This was originally adaptive; fewer status fights meant more able bodies in the tribe or hunting band. It was especially important that bachelor males, unmarried 15-to-25 year-old men, obey orders even when those orders involved risk and killing. These bachelors were the tribe's hunters, warriors, scouts, and risk-takers; a band would flourish best if they were both aggressive towards outsiders and amenable to social control.

Over most of human evolutionary history, the multiplier effect of docility was limited by the small size (250 or less, usually much less) of human social units. But when a single alpha male or cooperating group of alpha males could command the aggressive bachelor males of a large city or entire nation, the rules changed. Warfare and genocide became possible.

Actually, neither war nor genocide needs more than a comparative handful of murderers — not much larger a cohort than the half-percent to percent that commits lethal violence in peacetime. Both, however, require the obedience of a large supporting population. Factories must work overtime. Ammunition trucks must be driven where the bullets are needed. People must agree not to see, not to hear, not to notice certain things. Orders must be obeyed.

The experiments described in Stanley Milgram's 1974 book "The Perils of Obedience" demonstrated how otherwise ethical people could be induced to actively torture another person by the presence of an authority figure commanding and legitimizing the violence. They remain among the most powerful and disturbing results in experimental psychology.

Human beings are not natural killers; very, very few ever learn to enjoy murder or torture. Human beings, however, are sufficiently docile that many can eventually be taught to kill, to support killing, or to consent to killing on the command of an alpha male, entirely dissociating themselves from responsibility for the act. Our original sin is not murderousness — it is obedience.

And this brings us to the final reason for the prevalence of the myth of man the killer; that it encourages obedience and legitimizes social control of the individual. The man who fears Hobbes's "warre", who sees every one of his neighbors as a potential murderer, will surrender nearly anything to be protected from them. He will call for a strong hand from above; he will become a willing instrument in the oppression of his fellows. He may even allow himself to be turned into a killer in fact. Society will be atomized into millions of fearful fragments, each reacting to the fear of fantasied individual violence by sponsoring the political conditions for real violence on a large scale.

Even when the fear of violence is less acute, the myth of man the killer well serves power elites of all kinds. To define the central problem of society as the repression of a universal individual tendency to violence is to imply an authoritarian solution; it is to deny without examination the proposition that individual self-interest and voluntary cooperation are sufficient for civil order. (To cite one current example, the myth of man the killer is a major unexamined premise behind the drive for gun control.)

In sum, the myth of man the killer degrades and ultimately disempowers the individual, and unhelpfully deflects attention from the social mechanisms and social instincts that actually underlie virtually all violence. If we are all innately killers, no one is responsible; the sporadic violence of crime and terrorism and the more systematic violence of governments (whether in "state" or "pre-state" societies, and in wartime or otherwise) is as inevitable as sex.

On the other hand, if we recognize that most violence (and all large-scale violence) arises from obedience, and especially from the commission of aggressive violence by bachelor males at the command of alpha male pack leaders, then we can begin to ask more fruitful questions. Like: what can we do, culturally, to disrupt this causal chain?

First, we must recognize the primary locus and scope of the problem. By any measure, the pre-eminent form of aggressive pack violence is violence by governments, in either its explicit form as warfare and genocide or in more or less disguised peacetime versions. Take as one indicator the most pessimistic estimate of the 20th-century death toll from private aggression and set it against the low-end figures for deaths by government-sponsored violence (that is, count only war casualties, deliberate genocides, and extra-legal violence by organs of government; do not count the deaths incurred in the enforcement of even the most dubious and oppressive laws). Even with these assumptions biasing the ratio to the low side, the ratio is clearly 1000:1 or worse.

Readers skeptical of this ratio should reflect that government-directed genocides alone (excluding warfare entirely) are estimated to have accounted for more than 250,000,000 deaths between the massacre of the Armenians in 1915 and the "ethic cleansings" of Bosnia and Rwanda-Burundi in the late 1990s. Even the 9/11 atrocity and other acts of terrorism, grim as they have been, are mere droplets besides the oceans of blood spilled by state action.

In fact, the domination of total pack violence by government aggression reaches even further than that 1000:1 ratio would indicate. Pack violence by governments serves as a model and a legitimizing excuse not merely for government violence, but for private violence as well. The one thing all tyrants have in common is their belief that in their special cause, aggression is justified; private criminals learn and profit by that example. The contagion of mass violence is spread by the very institutions which ground their legitimacy in the mission of suppressing it — even as they perpetrate most of it.

And that is ultimately why the myth of man the killer ape is most dangerous. Because when we tremble in fear before the specter of individual violence, we excuse or encourage social violence; we feed the authoritarian myths and self-justifications that built the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags.

There is no near-term hope that we can edit either aggression or docility out of the human genome. And the individual small-scale violence of criminals and the insane is a mere distraction from the horrific and vast reality that is government-sanctioned murder and the government-sanctioned threat of murder.

To address the real problem in an effective way, we must therefore change our cultures so that either alpha males calling themselves `government' cease giving orders to perform aggression, or our bachelor males cease following those orders. Neither Hobbes's counsel of obedience to the state nor Rousseau's idolization of the primitive can address the central violence of the modern era — state-sponsored mass death.

To end that scourge, we must get beyond the myth of man the killer and learn to trust and empower the individual conscience once again; to recognize and affirm the individual predisposition to make peaceful choices in the non-sociopathic 97% of the population; and to recognize what Stanley Milgram showed us; that our signpost on the path away from mass violence reads "I shall not obey!"

2003-06-14T17:51:00.000-07:00

Hacking and Refactoring:

In 2001, there was a history-making conference of software-engineering thinkers in Snowbird, Colorado. The product of that meeting was a remarkable document called the Agile Manifesto, a call to overturn many of the assumptions of traditional software development. I was invited to be at Snowbird, but couldn't make it.

Ever since, though, I've been sensing a growing convergence between agile programming and the open-source movement. I've seen agile concepts and terminology being adopted rapidly and enthusiastically by my colleagues in open-source-land—especially ideas like refactoring, unit testing, and design from stories and personas. From the other side, key agile-movement figures like Kent Beck and Martin Fowler have expressed strong interest in open source both in published works and to me personally. Fowler has gone so far as to include open source on his list of agile-movement schools.

I agree that we belong on that list. But I also agree with Fowler's description of of open source as a style, rather than a process. I think his reservations as to whether open source can be described as just another agile school are well-founded. There is something more complicated and interesting going on here. and I realized when I read Fowler's description of open source that at some point I was going to have to do some hard thinking and writing in an effort to sort it all out.

While doing research for my forthcoming book, The Art of Unix Programming, I read one particular passage in Fowler's Refactoring that finally brought it all home. He writes:

One argument is that refactoring can be an alternative to up-front design. In this scenario, you don't do any design at all. You just code the first approach that comes into your head, get it working, and then refactor it into shape. Actually, this approach can work. I've seen people do this and come out with a very well-defined piece of software. Those who support Extreme Programming often are portrayed as advocating this approach.

I read this, and had one of those moments where everything comes together in your head with a great ringing crash and the world assumes a new shape—a moment not unlike the one I had in late 1996 when I got the central insight that turned into The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In the remainder of this essay I'm going to try to articulate what I now think I understand about open source, agile programming, how they are related, and why the connection should be interesting even to programmers with no stake in either movement.

Now I need to set a little background here, because I'm going to need to have to talk about several different categories which are contingently but not necessarily related.

First, there is Unix programmer. Unix is the operating system with the longest living tradition of programming and design. It has an unusually strong and mature technical culture around it, a culture which originated or popularized many of the core ideas and tools of modern software design. The Art of Unix Programming is a concerted attempt to capture the craft wisdom of this culture, one to which I have successfully enlisted quite a few of its founding elders.

Second, there is hacker. This is a very complex term, but more than anything else, it describes an attitude—an intentional stance that relates hackers to programming and other disciplines in a particular way. I have described the hacker stance and its cultural correlates in detail in How To Become A Hacker.

Third, there is open-source programmer. Open source is a programming style with strong roots in the Unix tradition and the hacker culture. I wrote the modern manifesto for it in 1997, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, building on earlier thinking by Richard Stallman and others.

These three categories are historically closely related. It is significant that a single person (accidentally, me) wrote touchstone documents for the second and third and is attempting a summum bonum of the first. That personal coincidence reflects a larger social reality that in 2003 these categories are becoming increasingly merged — essentially, the hacker community has become the core of the open-source community, which is rapidly re-assimilating the parts of the Unix culture that got away from the hackers during the ten bad years after the AT&T divestiture in 1984.

But the relationship is not logically entailed; we can imagine a hacker culture speaking a common tongue other than Unix and C (in the far past its common tongue was Lisp), and we can imagine an explicit ideology of open source developing within a cultural and technical context other than Unix (as indeed nearly happened several different times).

With this scene-setting done, I can explain that my first take on Fowler's statement was to think "Dude, you've just described hacking!"

I mean something specific and powerful by this. Throwing together a prototype and refactoring it into shape is a rather precise description of the normal working practice of hackers since that culture began to self-define in the 1960s. Not a complete one, but it captures the most salient feature of how hackers relate to code. The open-source community has inherited and elaborated this practice, building on similar tendencies within the Unix tradition.

The way Fowler writes about design-by-refactoring has two huge implications for the relationship between open source and agile programming:

First, Fowler writes as though he didn't know he was describing hacking. In the passage, he appears unaware that design by repeated refactoring is not just a recent practice semi-accidentally stumbled on by a handful of agile programmers, but one which hundreds of thousands of hackers have accumulated experience with for over three decades and have in their bones. There is a substantial folklore, an entire craft practice, around this!

Second, in that passage Fowler described the practice of hacking better than hackers themselves have done. Now, admittedly, the hacker culture has simply not had that many theoreticians, and if you list the ones that are strongly focused on development methodology you lose Richard Stallman and are left with, basically, myself and maybe Larry Wall (author of Perl and occasional funny and illuminating ruminations on the art of hacking). But the fact that we don't have a lot of theoreticians is itself an important datum; we have always tended to develop our most important wisdoms as unconscious and unarticulated craft practice.

These two observations imply an enormous mutual potential, a gap across which an arc of enlightenment may be beginning to blaze. It implies two things:

First, people who are excited by agile-programming ideas can look to open source and the Unix tradition and the hackers for the lessons of experience. We've been doing a lot of the stuff the agile movement is talking about for a long time. Doing it in a clumsy, unconscious, learned-by-osmosis way, but doing it nevertheless. I believe that we have learned things that you agile guys need to know to give your methodologies groundedness. Things like (as Fowler himself observes) how to manage communication and hierarchy issues in distributed teams.

Second, open-source hackers can learn from agile programmers how to wake up. The terminology and conceptual framework of agile programming sharpens and articulates our instincts. Learning to speak the language of open source, peer review, many eyeballs, and rapid iterations gave us a tremendous unifying boost in the late 1990s; I think becoming similarly conscious about agile-movement ideas like refactoring, unit testing, and story-centered design could be just as important for us in the new century.

I've already given an example of what the agile movement has to teach the hackers, in pointing out that repeated redesign by refactoring is a precise description of hacking. Another thing we can stand to learn from agile-movement folks is how to behave so that we can actually develop requirements and deliver on them when the customer isn't, ultimately, ourselves.

For the flip side, consider Fowler's anecdote on page 68-69, which ends "Even if you know exactly what is going on in your system, measure performance, don't speculate. You'll learn something, and nine times out of ten it won't be that you were right." The Unix guy in me wants to respond "Well, duh!". In my tribe, profiling before you speculate is DNA; we have a strong tradition of this that goes back to the 1970s. From the point of view of any old Unix hand, the fact that Fowler thought he had to write this down is a sign of severe naivete in either Fowler or his readership or both.

In reading Refactoring, I several times had the experience of thinking "What!?! That's obvious!" closely followed by "But Fowler explains it better than Unix traditions do..." This may be because he relies less on the very rich shared explanatory context that Unix provides.

How deep do the similarities run? Let's take a look at what the Agile Manifesto says:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Yeah, that sounds like us, all right. Open-source developers will toss out a process that isn't working in a nanosecond, and frequently do, and take gleeful delight in doing so. In fact, the reaction against heavyweight process has a key part of our self-identification as hackers for at least the last quarter century, if not longer.

Working software over comprehensive documentation. That's us, too. In fact, the radical hacker position is that source code of a working system is its documentation. We, more than any other culture of software engineering, emphasize program source code as human-to-human communication that is expected to bind together communities of cooperation and understanding distributed through time and space. In this, too, we build on and amplify Unix tradition.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. In the open-source world, the line between "developer" and "customer" blurs and often disappears. Non-technical end users are represented by developers who are proxies for their interests—as when, for example, companies that run large websites second developers to work on Apache Software Foundation projects.

Responding to change over following a plan. Absolutely. Our whole development style encourages this. It's fairly unusual for any of our projects to have any plan more elaborate than "fix the current bugs and chase the next shiny thing we see".

With these as main points, it's hardly surprising that so many of the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto read like Unix-tradition and hacker gospel. "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Well, yeah—we pioneered this. Or "Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential." That's Unix-tradition holy writ, there. Or "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams."

This is stone-obvious stuff to any hacker, and exactly the sort of subversive thinking that most panics managers attached to big plans, big budgets, big up-front design, and big rigid command-and-control structures. Which may, in fact, be a key part of its appeal to hackers and agile developers—because at least one thing that points agile-movement and open-source people in the same direction is a drive to take control of our art back from the suits and get out from under big dumb management.

The most important difference I see between the hackers and the agile-movement crowd is this: the hackers are the people who never surrendered to big dumb management — they either bailed out of the system or forted up in academia or industrial R&D labs or technical-specialty areas where pointy-haired bosses weren't permitted to do as much damage. The agile crowd, on the other hand, seems to be composed largely of people who were swallowed into the belly of the beast (waterfall-model projects, Windows, the entire conventional corporate-development hell so vividly described in David Yourdon's books) and have been smart enough not just to claw their way out but to formulate an ideology to justify not getting sucked back in.

Both groups are in revolt against the same set of organizational assumptions. And both are winning because those assumptions are obsolete, yesterday's adaptations to a world of expensive machines and expensive communications. But software development doesn't need big concentrations of capital and resources anymore, and doesn't need the control structures and hierarchies and secrecy and elaborate rituals that go with managing big capital concentrations either. In fact, in a world of rapid change, these things are nothing but a drag. Thus agile techniques. Thus, open source. Converging paths to the same destination, which is not just software that doesn't suck but a software-development process that doesn't suck.

When I think about how the tribal wisdom of the hackers and the sharp cut-the-bullshit insights of the agile movement seem to be coming together, my mind keeps circling back to Phil Greenspun's brief but trenchant essay Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers. Greenspun proposes, provocatively but I think correctly, that the shift towards open-source development is a key part of the transformation of software engineering into a mature profession, with the dedication to excellence and ethos of service that accompanies professionalism. I have elsewhere suggested that we are seeing a close historical analog of the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Secrets leak out, but skill sustains; the necessity to stop relying on craft secrecy is one of the crises that occupational groups normally face as they attain professional standing.

I'm beginning to think that from the wreckage of the software industry big dumb management made, I can see the outline of a mature, humane discipline of software engineering emerging — and that it will be in large part a fusion of the responsiveness and customer focus of the agile movement with the wisdom and groundedness of the Unix tradition, expressed in open source.

2003-05-13T16:11:00.000-07:00

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress:

I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my friend Rob Landley, I've come up with a classification schema for the levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build competence.

The base assumption is that for any given user there is a maximum cognitive load any given user is willing to accept to use an interface. I think that there are levels, analogous to Piagetian developmental thresholds and possibly related to them, in the trajectory of learning to use software interfaces.

Level 0: I'll only push one button.

Level 1: I'll push a sequence of buttons, as long as they're all visible and I don't have to remember anything between presses. These people can do checklists.

Level 2: I'm willing to push as sequence of buttons in which later ones may not be visible until earlier ones have been pressed. These people will follow pull-down menus; it's OK for the display to change as long as they can memorize the steps.

Level 3: I'm willing to use folders if they never change while I'm not looking. There can be hidden unchanging state, but nothing must ever happen out of sight. These people can handle an incremental replace with confirmation. They can use macros, but have no capability to cope with surprises other than by yelling for help.

Level 4: I'm willing to use metaphors to describe magic actions. A folder can be described by "These are all my local machines" or "these are all my print jobs" and is allowed to change out of sight in an unsurprising way. These people can handle global replace, but must examine the result to maintain confidence. These people will begin customizing their environment.

Level 5: I'm willing to use categories (generalize about nouns). I'm willing to recognize that all .doc files are alike, or all .jpg files are alike, and I have confidence there are sets of actions I can apply to a file I have never seen that will work because I know its type. (Late in this level knowledge begins to become articulate; these people are willing to give simple instructions over the phone or by email.)

Level 6: I'm willing to unpack metaphors into procedural steps. People at this level begin to be able to cope with surprises when the metaphor breaks, because they have a representation of process. People at this level are ready to cope with the fact that HTML documents are made up of tags, and more generally with simple document markup.

Level 7: I'm willing to move between different representations of a document or piece of data. People at this level know that any one view of the data is not the same as the data, and lossless transformations no longer scare them. Multiple representations become more useful than confusing. At this level the idea of structural rather than presentation markup begins to make sense.

Level 8: I'm willing to package simple procedures I already understand. These people are willing to record a sequence of actions which they understand into a macro, as long as no decisions (conditionals) are involved. They begin to get comfortable with report generators. At advanced level 8 they may start to be willing to deal with simple SQL.

Level 9: I am willing to package procedures that make decisions, as long as I already understand them. At his level, people begin to cope with conditionals and loops, and also to deal with the idea of programming languages.

Level 10: I am willing to problem-solve at the procedural level, writing programs for tasks I don't completely understand before developing them.

I'm thinking this scale might be useful in classifying interfaces and developing guidelines for not exceeding the pain threshold of an audience if we have some model of what their notion of acceptable cognitive load is.

(This is a spinoff from my book-in-progress, "The Art of Unix Programming", but I don't plan to put it in the book.)

Comments, reactions, and refinements welcome.

2003-05-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

Mail troubles:

Note to friends: mail to esr@thyrsus.com may be unreliable until mid-Thursday. I had DNS problems. They're now fixed, but there is bad data in a bunch of caches out there.

For the next couple of days, mail to esr@catb.org instead.

2003-05-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

The Delusion of Expertise:

I learned something this weekend about the high cost of the subtle delusion that creative technical problem-solving is the preserve of a priesthood of experts, using powers and perceptions beyond the ken of ordinary human beings.

Terry Pratchett is the author of the Discworld series of satirical fantasies. He is — and I don't say this lightly, or without having given the matter thought and study — quite probably the most consistently excellent writer of intelligent humor in the last century in English. One has to go back as far as P.G. Wodehouse or Mark Twain to find an obvious equal in consistent quality, volume, and sly wisdom.

I've been a fan of Terry's since before his first Discworld novel; I'm one of the few people who remembers Strata, his 1981 first experiment with the disc-world concept. The man has been something like a long-term acquaintance of mine for ten years — one of those people you'd like to call a friend, and who you think would like to call you a friend, if the two of you ever arranged enough concentrated hang time to get that close. But we're both damn busy people, and live five thousand miles apart.

This weekend, Terry and I were both guests of honor at a hybrid SF convention and Linux conference called Penguicon held in Warren, Michigan. We finally got our hang time. Among other things, I taught Terry how to shoot pistols. He loves shooter games, but as a British resident his opportunities to play with real firearms are strictly limited. (I can report that Terry handled my .45 semi with remarkable competence and steadiness for a first-timer. I can also report that this surprised me not at all.)

During Terry's Guest-of-Honor speech, he revealed his past as (he thought) a failed hacker. It turns out that back in the 1970s Terry used to wire up elaborate computerized gadgets from Timex Sinclair computers. One of his projects used a primitive memory chip that had light-sensitive gates to build a sort of perceptron that could actually see the difference between a circle and a cross. His magnum opus was a weather station that would log readings of temperature and barometric pressure overnight and deliver weather reports through a voice synthesizer.

But the most astonishing part of the speech was the followup in which Terry told us that despite his keen interest and elaborate homebrewing, he didn't become a programmer or a hardware tech because he thought techies had to know mathematics, which he thought he had no talent for. He then revealed that he thought of his projects as a sort of bad imitation of programming, because his hardware and software designs were total lash-ups and he never really knew what he was doing.

I couldn't stand it. "And you think it was any different for us?" I called out. The audience laughed and Terry passed off the remark with a quip. But I was just boggled. Because I know that almost all really bright techies start out that way, as compulsive tinkerers who blundered around learning by experience before they acquired systematic knowledge. "Oh ye gods and little fishes", I thought to myself, "Terry is a hacker!"

Yes, I thought 'is' — even if Terry hasn't actually tinkered any computer software or hardware in a quarter-century. Being a hacker is expressed through skills and projects, but it's really a kind of attitude or mental stance that, once acquired, is never really lost. It's a kind of intense, omnivorous playfulness that tends to color everything a person does.

It burst upon me that Terry Pratchett has the hacker nature. Which, actually, explains something that has mildly puzzled me for years. Terry has a huge following in the hacker community — knowing his books is something close to basic cultural literacy for Internet geeks. One is actually hard-put to think of any other writer for whom this is as true. The question this has aways raised for me is: why Terry, rather than some hard-SF writer whose work explicitly celebrates the technologies we play with?

The answer now seems clear. Terry's hackerness has leaked into his writing somehow, modulating the quality of the humor. Behind the drollery, I and my peers worldwide have accurately scented a mind like our own.

I said some of this the following day, when I ran into Terry surrounded by about fifty eager fans in a hallway. The nature of the conference was such that about three-quarters of them were hackers, many faces I recognized. I brought up the topic again, emphasizing that the sort of playful improvisation he'd been describing was very normal for us, and that I thought it was kind of sad he'd been blocked by the belief that hackers need to know mathematics, because about all we ever use is some pieces of set theory, graph theory, combinatorics, and Boolean algebra. No calculus at all.

Terry then admitted that he had at one point independently re-invented Boolean algebra. I didn't find this surprising — I did that myself when I was about fifteen; I didn't mention this, though, because the moment was about Terry's mind and not mine. I think reinventing Boolean algebra is probably something a lot of bright proto-hackers do.

"Terry," I said, fully conscious of the peculiar authority I wield on this point as the custodian of the Jargon File, the how-to on How To Become A Hacker and several other related documents, "you are a hacker!"

The crowd agreed enthusiastically. Somebody handed Terry one of the "Geek" badge ribbons the convention had made for attendees who wanted to identify themselves as coming from the Linux/programming side. Much laughter ensued when it was discovered that the stickum on the ribbon had lost its virtue, and a nearby hacker had to ceremonially affix the thing to Terry's badge holder with a piece of duct tape.

Terry actually choked up a little while this was going on, and I don't think there was anyone there who didn't understand why. To the kind of teenager and young man he must have been — bright, curious, creative, proud of his own ability — it must have been very painful to conclude that he would never cut it as the techie he so obviously wanted to be. He ended up doing public-relations work for the British nuclear-power industry instead.

The whole sequence of events left me feeling delighted that I and my friends could deliver the affirmation Terry had deserved so long ago. But also — and here we come to the real point of this essay — I felt very angry at the system that had fed the young Terry such a huge load of cobblers about the nature of what programmers and hardware designers do.

I'm not referring to the obvious garbage about needing a brain-bending amount of mathematics. No; they fed Terry something much subtler and more crippling, a belief that real techies actually know what they're doing. The delusion of expertise.

The truth is that programmers only know what they're doing when the job is not very interesting. When you're breaking new ground in any technical field, exploration and improvisation is the nature of the game. Your designs are going to be lash-ups because you don't yet know any better and neither does anyone else. Systematization comes later, with the second system, during the re-write and the re-think. Einstein had it right; imagination is more valuable than knowledge, and people like Terry with a demonstrated ability to creatively wing it make far better hackers than analytically smart but unimaginative people who can only follow procedures.

The thought that Terry may have spent thirty years of working days grinding out press releases for the Central Electricity Generating Board because he didn't know this, rather than following his dreams into astronomy or programming or hardware design, bothers the crap out of me. If Terry was bright enough to invent Boolean algebra, he was bright enough to cut it in any of these fields. The educational system failed him by putting artificial requirements in his way and making him believe they were natural ones. It failed him even more fundamentally by teaching him a falsehood about the nature of expertise.

In doing this, it failed all of us. How many bright kids with first-class minds, I wonder, end up under-employed because of crap like this? How much creative potential are we losing?

OK, some might answer, so we got the Discworld fantasies instead...that ain't exactly chopped liver. The thing is, I'm not sure that was actually a trade-off. I'm enough of a writer myself to believe that you can't block a writing talent like Terry's merely by dropping him into a more demanding day job. It will come out.

On the other hand, one thing I am sure of is that you don't need intelligence or talents like Terry's just to do PR. One way or another, this man was going to do something with more lasting effects than soothing British farmers about radiation leaks. Inventing one of the funniest alternate worlds of the last hundred years during your free time is nice, and I devoutly hope he will get to keep doing it for decades to come — but in a society that valued and nurtured genius properly, I think Terry might have helped re-imagine the real world just as radically during his day job.

But he didn't. Tot it up to the cost of taking creativity too seriously, of undervaluing improvisation and play and imagination. And wonder how much else that error has cost us.

2003-04-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

Fascism is not dead:

Fascism is not dead. The revelations now coming out of Iraq about Baathist atrocities lend this observation particular point; Saddam Hussein was able to successfully imitate Hitler for three decades. Baathists using similar methods still run Syria, and elsewhere in the Islamic world there are militarist/authoritarian tendencies that run uncomfortably close to fascism.

Recent events — including the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime and Glenn Reynolds blogging on Pio Moa's The Myths of the Civil War have inspired me to dust off some research and writing I did a while back on the history of fascism. Some of the following essay is about the Spanish Civil War annd Francisco Franco, but much of it is about the history and structure of fascism.

Pio Moa's thesis is that the Spanish Civil War was not a usurping revolt against a functioning government, but a belated attempt to restore order to a country that had already collapsed into violent chaos five years before the Fascists landed in 1936.

I've studied the history of the Spanish Civil War enough to know that Moa's contrarian interpretation is not obviously crazy. I had an unusual angle; I'm an anarchist, and wanted to grasp the ideas and role of the Spanish anarchist communes. My conclusions were not pleasant. In short, there were no good guys in the Spanish Civil War.

First, the non-anarchist Left in Spain really was pretty completely Stalin's creature. The volunteers of the International Brigade were (in Lenin's timeless phrase) useful idiots, an exact analogue of the foreign Arabs who fought on in Baghdad after Iraqi resistance collapsed (and were despised for it by the Iraqis). They deserve neither our pity nor our respect. Insofar as Moa's thesis is that most scholarship about the war is severly distorted by a desire to make heroes out of these idiots, he is correct.

Second, the Spanish anarchists were by and large an exceedingly nasty bunch, all resentment and nihilism with no idea how to rebuild after destroying. Wiping them out (via his Communist proxies) may have been one of Stalin's few good deeds.

Third, the Fascists were a pretty nasty bunch too. But, on the whole, probably not as nasty as their opponents. Perceptions of them tend to be distorted by the casual equation of Fascist with Nazi — but this is not appropriate. Spanish Fascism was unlike Communism or Italian and German Fascism in that it was genuinely a conservative movement, rather than a attempt to reinvent society in the image of a revolutionary doctrine about the perfected State.

Historians and political scientists use the terms "fascist" and "fascism" quite precisely, for a group of political movements that were active between about 1890 and about 1975. The original and prototypical example was Italian fascism, the best-known and most virulent strain was Naziism, and the longest-lasting was the Spanish nationalist fascism of Francisco Franco. The militarist nationalism of Japan is often also described as "fascist" .

The shared label reflects the fact that these four ideologies influenced each other; Naziism began as a German imitation of Italian fascism, only to remake Italian (and to some extent Spanish) fascism in its own image during WWII. The militarist Japanese fascists took their cues from European fascists as well as an indigenous tradition of absolutism with very similar structural and psychological features

The shared label also reflects substantially similar theories of political economics, power, governance, and national purpose. Also similar histories and symbolisms. Here are some of the commonalities especially relevant to the all too common abuse of the term.

Fascist political economics is a corrupt form of Leninist socialism. In fascist theory (as in Communism) the State owns all; in practice, fascists are willing to co-opt and use big capitalists rather than immediately killing them.

Fascism mythologizes the professional military, but never trusts it. (And rightly so; consider the Von Stauffenberg plot...) One of the signatures of the fascist state is the formation of elite units (the SA and SS in Germany, the Guardia Civil in Spain, the Republican Guard and Fedayeen in Iraq) loyal to the fascist party and outside the military chain of command.

Fascism is not (as the example of Franco's Spain shows) necessarily aggressive or expansionist per se. In all but one case, fascist wars were triggered not by ideologically-motivated aggression but by revanchist nationalism (that is, the nation's claims on areas lost to the victors of previous wars, or inhabited by members of the nationality agitating for annexation). No, the one exception was not Nazi Germany; it was Japan (the rape of Manchuria). The Nazi wars of aggression and Hussein's grab at Kuwait were both revanchist in origin.

Fascism is generally born by revolution out of the collapse of monarchism. Fascism's theory of power is organized around the `Fuehrerprinzip', the absolute leader regarded as the incarnation of the national will.

But...and this is a big but...there were important difference between revolutionary Fascism (the Italo/German/Baathist variety) and the more reactionary sort native to Spain and Japan.

The Italo/German/Baathist varieties were radical, modernist ideologies and not (as commonly assumed) conservative or traditionalist ones; in fact, all three of these examples faced serious early threats from cultural-conservative monarchists (or in Baathism's case, from theocrats).

But Japanese and Spanish Fascism were a bit different; they were actually pro-monarchist, conservative in essence, aimed at reasserting the power relationships of premodern Spain and Japan. In fact, Spanish Fascism was mostly about Francisco Franco's reactionary instincts.

After the fall of the Second Republic in 1931 Francisco Franco had rather better reason than Hitler ever did to regard the Communist-inspired left as a mortal threat to his country; a wave of `revolutionary' expropriations, massacres, and chaos (unlike the opera-bouffe capitulation of the Italian monarchy or the relatively bloodless collapse of Germany's Weimar Republic) followed. Obedient to what remained of central authority, Franco sat out the undeclared civil war for five years before invading from Morocco with Italian and German help. His belief that he was acting to restore a pre-1931 order of which he was the last legitimate respresentative appears to have been genuine — perhaps even justified.

The declared portion of the Spanish Civil War lasted from 1936 to 1939. It has passed into legend among Western leftists as a heroic struggle between the Communist-backed Republican government and Nazi-backed Franco, one that the good guys lost. The truth seems rather darker; the war was fought by two collections of squabbling, atrocity-prone factions, each backed by one of the two most evil totalitarianisms in human history. They intrigued, massacred, wrecked, and looted fairly indiscriminately until one side collapsed from exhaustion. Franco was the last man left standing.

Franco had no aspirations to conquer or reinvent the world, or to found a dynasty. His greatest achievements were the things that didn't happen. He prevented the Stalinist coup that would certainly have followed a Republican victory. He then kept Spain out of World War II against heavy German pressure to join the Axis.

Domestically, Spain could have suffered worse. Spanish Fascism was quite brutal against its direct political enemies, but never developed the expansionism or racist doctrines of the Italian or German model. In fact it had almost no ideology beyond freezing the power relationships of pre-Republican Spain in place. Thus, there were no massacres even remotely comparable to Hussein's nerve-gassing of Kurds and Shi'as, Hitler's Final Solution or Stalin's far bloodier though less-known liquidation of the kulaks.

Francisco Franco remained a monarchist all his life, and named the heir to the Spanish throne as his successor. The later `fascist' regimes of South and Central America resembled the Francoite, conservative model more than they did the Italo/German/Baathist revolutionary variety.

One historian put it well. "Hitler was a fascist pretending to be a conservative. Franco was a conservative pretending to be a fascist." (One might add that Hussein was not really pretending to be about anything but the raw will to power; perhaps this is progress, of a sort.) On those terms Franco was rather successful. If he had died shortly after WWII, rather than lingering for thirty years while presiding over an increasingly stultified and backward Spain, he might even have been remembered as a hero of his country.

As it is, the best that can be said is that (unlike the truly major tyrants of his day, or Saddam Hussein in ours) Franco was not a particularly evil man, and was probably less bad for his country than his opponents would have been.

2003-02-20T22:46:00.000-08:00

No, I have not vanished from the earth:

The book is nearly wrapped up and I may be able to start blogging again shortly.

In the meantime, note that my website has moved. It is now at http://www.catb.org/~esr/.

2002-12-17T16:25:00.000-08:00

Some Christmas cheer:

Some deeply warped Christmas humor here . Now, this Santa might get me the presents I really want. Like, say, a custom-tuned Baer .45 semiauto. Or Liv Tyler, fetchingly attired in nothing but a pair of Arwen ears.

I actually did get a really peculiar Christmas present from a stranger this morning. It was a gourmet frying pan with a Tux-the-Linux-Penguin on it. And an earnest cover letter explaining that it is #8 of a special limited edition of 1024. Made by a German cookwares company that has gotten good service out of Linux and decided to commemmorate the fact.

Odd...

2002-12-16T23:14:00.000-08:00

And now for something completely different:

Still working on the book. But here is a touching essay by ace hacker Mike Taht on the rewards and trials of engineering.

UPDATE: Only 6 days after resorting to the internet for help - Michael Taht has found his nephew Josh! Read PostCards from the Bleeding Edge for details.

2002-12-12T04:35:00.000-08:00

Away from keyboard:

I've on hiatus for a bit while I wrap up my next book, The Art Of Unix Programming.

2002-12-04T21:20:00.000-08:00

Sneering at Courage:

One of the overdue lessons of 9/11 is that we can't afford to sneer at physical courage any more. The willingness of New York firemen, Special Forces troops in Afghanistan, and the passengers of Flight 93 to put their lives on the line has given us most of the bright spots we've had in the war against terror. We are learning, once again, that all that stands between us and the night of barbarism is the willingness of men to both risk their lives and take the awful responsibility of using lethal force in our defense.

(And, usually, it is men who do the risking. I mean no disrespect to our sisters; the kind of courage I am talking about is not an exclusive male monopoly. But it has been predominently the job of men in every human culture since Olduvai Gorge, and still is today. I'll return to this point later in the essay.)

The rediscovery of courage visibly upsets a large class of bien pensants in our culture. Many of the elite molders of opinion in the U.S and Europe do not like or trust physical courage in men. They have spent decades training us to consider it regressive, consigning it to fantasy, sneering at it — trying to persuade us all that it's at best an adolescent or brute virtue, perhaps even a vice.

If this seems too strong an indictment, consider carefully all the connotations of the phrase "testosterone poisoning". Ask yourself when you first heard it, and where, and from whom. Then ask yourself if you have slid into the habit of writing off as bluster any man's declaration that he is willing to risk his life, willing to fight for what he believes in. When some ordinary man says he is willing to take on the likes of the 9/11 hijackers or the D.C. sniper — or even ordinary criminals — them, do you praise his determination or consign him, too, to the category of blowhard or barbarian?

Like all virtues, courage thrives on social support. If we mock our would-be warriors, writing them off as brutes or rednecks or simpletons, we'll find courage in short supply when we need it. If we make the more subtle error of sponsoring courage only in uniformed men — cops, soldiers, firemen — we'll find that we have trouble growing the quantity or quality we need in a crisis. Worse: our brave men could come to see themselves apart from us, distrusted and despised by the very people for whom they risk their lives, and entitled to take their due when it is not freely given. More than one culture that made that mistake has fallen to its own guardians.

Before 9/11, we were in serious danger of forgetting that courage is a functional virtue in ordinary men. But Todd Beamer reminded us of that — and now, awkwardly, we are rediscovering some of the forms that humans have always used to nurture and reward male courage. Remember that rash of news stories from New York about Upper-East-Side socialites cruising firemen's bars? Biology tells; medals and tickertape parades and bounties have their place, but the hero's most natural and strongest reward is willing women.

Manifestations like this absolutely appall and disgust the sort of people who think that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a judgment on American sins; — the multiculturalists, the postmodernists, the transnational progressives, radical feminists, the academic political-correctness brigades, the Bush-is-a-moron elitists, and the plain old-fashioned loony left. By and large these people never liked or trusted physical courage, and it's worth taking a hard look at why that is.

Feminists distrust physical courage because it's a male virtue. Women can and do have it, but it is gender-linked to masculinity just as surely as nurturance is to femininity. This has always been understood even in cultures like the Scythians, Teutons, Japanese, and modern Israelis that successfully made places for women warriors. If one's world-view is organized around distrusting or despising men and maleness, male courage is threatening and social support for it is regressive.

For multi-culti and po-mo types, male physical courage is suspect because it's psychologically linked to moral certitude — and moral certitude is a bad thing, nigh-indistinguishable from intolerance and bigotry. Men who believe in anything enough to fight for it are automatically suspect of would-be imperialism &mdash, unless, of course, they're tribesmen or Third Worlders, in which fanaticism is a praiseworthy sign of authenticity.

Elite opinions about male physical courage have also had more than a touch of class warfare about them. Every upper crust that is not directly a military caste — including our own — tends to dismiss physical courage as a trait of peasants and proles and the lesser orders, acceptable only when they know their place is to be guided by their betters.

For transnational progressives and the left in general, male physical courage is a problem in the lesser orders because it's an individualizing virtue, one that leads to wrong-think about autonomy and the proper limits of social power. A man who develops in himself the grit that it takes to face death and stare it down is less likely to behave meekly towards bureacrats, meddlers, and taxmen who have not passed that same test. Brave men who have learned to fight for their own concept of virtue — independently of social approval or the party line — are especially threatening to any sort of collectivist.

The multiculturalist's and the collectivist's suspicions are backhanded tributes to an important fact. There is a continuity among self-respect, physical courage and ethical/moral courage. These virtues are the soil of individualism, and are found at their strongest only in individualists. They do not flourish in isolation from one another. They reinforce each other, and the social measures we take to reward any of them tend to increase all of them.

After 1945 we tried to separate these virtues. We tried to teach boys moral steadfastness while also telling them that civilized men are expected to avoid confrontation and leave coping with danger to specialists. We preached the virtue of `self-esteem' to adolescents while gradually abolishing almost all the challenges and ordeals that might have enabled them to acquire genuine self-respect. Meanwhile, our entertainments increasingly turned on anti-heros or celebrated physical bravery of a completely mindless and morally vacuous kind. We taught individualism without responsibility, denying the unpleasant truth that freedom has to be earned and kept with struggle and blood. And we denied the legitimacy of self-defense.

Rudyard Kipling would have known better, and Robert Heinlein did. But they were written off as reactionaries — and many of us were foolish enough to be surprised when the new thinking produced a bumper crop of brutes, narcissists, overgrown boys, and bewildered hollow men apt to fold under pressure. We became, in Jeffrey Snyder's famous diagnosis, a nation of cowards; the cost could be measured in the explosion in crime rates after 1960, a phenomenon primarily of males between 15 and 35.

But this was a cost which, during the long chill of the Cold War, we could afford. Such conflicts as there were stayed far away from the home country, warfare was a game between nations, and nuclear weapons seemed to make individual bravery irrelevant. So it remained until al-Qaeda and the men of Flight 93 reminded us otherwise.

Now we have need of courage. Al-Qaeda's war has come to us. There is a geopolitical aspect to it, and one of the fronts we must pursue is to smash state sponsors of terrorism. But this war is not primarily a chess-game between nations — it's a street-level brawl in which the attackers are individuals and small terrorist cells often having no connection to the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda other than by sympathy of ideas.

Defense against this kind of war will have to be decentralized and citizen-centered, because the military and police simply cannot be everywhere that terrorists might strike. John F. Kennedy said this during the Cold War, but it is far truer now:

"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."

The linked virtues of physical courage, moral courage, and self-respect are even more essential to a Minuteman's readiness than his weapons. So the next time you see a man claim the role of defender, don't sneer — cheer. Don't write him off with some pseudo-profound crack about macho idiocy, support him. He's trying to tool up for the job two million years of evolution designed him for, fighting off predators so the women and children can sleep safe.

Whether he's in uniform or not, young or old, fit or flabby — we need that courage now.

2002-12-04T03:42:00.000-08:00

Social Security and the Demography Bomb:

A friend of mine, Russ Cage aka Engineer-Poet, comments on my essay Demographics and the Dustbin of History:

People used to have children to take care of them in their old age. Social Security took care of this by socializing the benefits, but all of the costs still fell to individuals; worse, taking time out of the workforce to raise kids reduces your Social Security benefits. Rational actors will stop having kids to have a good retirement.

He's right, and this applies to all public pension schemes. It's a very simple, very powerful mechanism. When you subsidize old age, you depress birthrates. The more you subsidize old age, the more you depress birthrates. Eventually...crash!

It's not just Euro-socialism that's going to get trashed by demographics, it's the U.S's own welfare state. It might take longer here because our population is still rising, but it will happen.

Now that the effects of income transfer on demography are no longer masked by the Long Boom, this is going to become one of the principal constraints on public policy.

2002-12-02T02:34:00.000-08:00

Demographics and the Dustbin of History:

Karl Zinsmeister's essay Old and In The Way presents a startling — but all too plausible — forecast of Europe's future. To the now-familiar evidence of European insularity, reflexive anti-Americanism, muddle, and geopolitical impotence, Zinsmeister adds a hard look at European demographic trends.

What Zinsmeister sees coming is not pretty. European populations are not having children at replacement levels. The population of Europe is headed for collapse, and for an age profile heavily skewed towards older people and retirees. Europe's Gross Domestic Product per capita (roughly, the amount of wealth the average person produces) is already only two-thirds of America's, and the ratio is going to fall, not rise.

Meanwhile, the U.S population continues to rise — and the U.S. economy is growing three times as fast as Europe's even though the U.S. is in the middle of a bust! Since 1970 the U.S. has been more than ten times as successful at creating new jobs. But most impportantly, the U.S.'s population is still growing even as Europe's is shrinking — which means the gap in population, productivity, and economic output is going to increase. By 2030, the U.S will have a larger population than all of Europe — and the median age in the U.S. will be 30, but the median age in Europe will be over 50.

Steven den Beste is probably correct to diagnose the steady weakening of Europe as the underlying cause of the increasing rift the U.S. and Europe's elites noted in Robert Kagan's essay Power and Weakness (also recommended reading). But Kagan (focusing on diplomacy and geopolitics), Zinsmeister (focusing on demographic and economic decline) and den Beste (focusing on the lassitude of Europe's technology sector and the resulting brain drain to the U.S.) all miss something more fundamental.

Zinsmeister comes near it when he writes "Europe's disinterest in childbearing is a crisis of confidence and optimism.". Europeans are demonstrating in their behavior that they don't believe the future will be good for children.

Back to that in a bit, but first a look on what the demographic collapse will mean for European domestic politics. Zinsmeister makes the following pertinent observations:

Percentage of GDP represented by government spending is also diverging. In the U.S. it is roughly 19% and falling. In the EU countries it is 30-40% and rising.
The ratio of state clients to wealth-generating workers is also rising. By 2030, Zinsmeister notes, every single worker un the EU will have his own elderly person 65 or older to provide for through the public pension system.
Chronic unemployment is at 9-10% (twice the U.S.'s) and rising.
Long-term unemployment and drone status is far more common in Europe than here. In Europe, 40% of unemployed have been out of work for over a year. Un the U.S. the corresponding figure is 6%.

Zinsmeister doesn't state the obvious conclusion; Euro-socialism is unsustainable. It's headed for the dustbin of history.

Forget ideological collapse; the numbers don't work. The statistics above actually understate the magnitude of the problem, because as more and more of the population become wards of the state, a larger percentage of the able will be occupied simply with running the income-redistribution system. The rules they make will depress per-capita productivity further (for a recent example see France's mandated 35-hour workweek).

Unless several of the key trends undergo a rapid and extreme reversal, rather soon (as in 20 years at the outside) there won't be enough productive people left to keep the gears of the income-redistribution machine turning. Economic strains sufficient to destroy the political system will become apparent much sooner. We may be seeing the beginnings of the destruction now as Chancellor Schröder's legitimacy evaporates in Germany, burned away by the dismal economic news.

We know what this future will probably look like, because we now know how the same dismal combination of economic/demographic collapse played out in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Progressively more impotent governments losing their popular legitimacy, increasing corruption, redistributionism sliding into gangsterism. Slow-motion collapse.

But there are worse possibilities that are quite plausible. The EU hase two major advantages the Soviets did not — a better tech and infrastructure base, and a functioning civil society (e.g. one in which wealth and information flow through a lot of legal grassroots connections and voluntary organizations). But they have one major disadvantage — large, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places the police dare not go without heavy weapons.

We've already gotten a foretaste of what that might mean for European domestic politics. At its most benign, we get Pim Fortuyn in Holland. But Jörg Haider in Austria is a more ominous indicator, and Jean-Marie Le Pen's startling success in the last French presidential elections was downright frightening. Far-right populism with a racialist/nativist/anti-Semitic tinge is on the rise, an inevitable consequence of the demographic collapse of native populations.

As if that isn't bad enough, al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations are suspected on strong evidence to be recruiting heavily among the North African, Turkish, and Levantine populations that now predominate in European immigrant quarters. The legions of rootless, causeless, unemployed and angry young men among Muslim immigrants may in fact actually be on their way to reifying the worst nightmares of native-European racists.

One way or another, the cozy Euro-socialist welfare state is doomed by the demographic collapse. Best case: it will grind to a shambolic halt as the ratio of worker bees to drones goes below critical. Worst case: it will blow itself apart in a welter of sectarian, ethnic, and class violence. Watch the frequency trend curve of synagogue-trashings and anti-Jewish hate crimes; that's bound to be a leading indicator.

The only possible way for Europe to avoid one of these fates would be for it to reverse either the decline in per-capita productivity or its population decline. And reversing the per-capita productivity decline would only be a temporary fix unless it could be made to rise faster than the drone-to-worker ratio — forever.

Was this foredoomed? Can it be that all national populations lose their will to have children when they get sufficiently comfortable? Do economies inevitably grow old and sclerotic? Is Europe simply aging into the end stages of a natural civilizational senescence?

That theory would be appealing to a lot of big-picture historians, and to religious anti-materialists like al-Qaeda. And if we didn't have the U.S.'s counterexample to look at, we might be tempted to conclude that this trap is bound to claim any industrial society past a certain stage of development.

But that won't wash. The U.S. is wealthier, both in aggregate and per-capita, than Europe. A pro-market political party in Sweden recently pointed out that by American standards of purchasing power, most Swedes now live in what U.S. citizens would consider poverty. If wealth caused decline, the U.S. would be further down the tubes than the EU right now. But we're still growing.

A clue to the real problem lies in the differing degrees to which social stability depends on income transfer. In the U.S., redistributionism is on the decline; we abolished federal welfare nearly a decade ago, national health insurance was defeated, and new entitlements are an increasingly tough political sell to a population that has broadly bought into conservative arguments about them. In fact, one of the major disputes everyone knows won't be avoidable much longer is over privatizing Social Security — and opponents are on the defensive.

In Europe, on the other hand, merely failing to raise state pensions on schedule can cause nationwide riots. The dependent population there is much larger, much longer-term, and has much stronger claims on the other players in the political system. The 5%/10% difference in structural unemployment — and, even more, the 6%/40% difference in permanant unemployment — tells the story.

So what happened?

Essentially, Euro-socialism told the people that the State would buy as much poverty and dependency as they cared to produce. Then it made wealth creation difficult by keeping capital expensive, business formation difficult, and labor markets rigid and regulated. Finally, it taxed the bejesus out of the people who stayed off the dole and made it through the redistributionist rat-maze, and used the proceeds to buy more poverty and alienation.

Europeans responded to this set of incentives by not having children. This isn't surprising. The same thing happened in Soviet Russia, much sooner. There's a reason Stalin handed out medals to women who raised big families.

Human birth rates rise under two circumstances. One is when people think they need to have a lot of kids for any of them to survive. The other is when human beings think their children will have it better than they do. (The reasons for this pattern should be obvious; if they aren't, go read about evolutionary biology until you get it.)

Europe's experiment with redistributionism has been running for about a hundred and fifty years now (the beginnings of the modern welfare state date to Prussian state-pension schemes in the 1840s). Until recently, it was sustained by the long-term population and productivity boom that followed the Industrial Revolution. There were always more employed young people than old people and unemployed people and sick people and indigents, so subsidizing the latter was economically possible.

Until fairly recently, Euro-socialist governments couldn't suck wealth out of the productive economy and into the redistribution network fast enough to counter the effects of the long boom. Peoples' estimate of the prospects for their children kept improving and they kept breeding. In France they now call the late end of that period les trentes glorieuses, the thirty glorious years from 1945 to 1975. But as the productivity gains from industrialization tailed off, the demographic collapse began, not just in France but Europe-wide.

Meanwhile, the U.S. was not only rejecting socialism, but domestic politics actually moved away from redistributionism and economic intervention after Nixon's wage/price control experiment failed in 1971. The U.S, famously had its period of "malaise" in the 1970s after the oil-price shock ended our trentes glorieuses— but while in Europe the socialists consolidated their grip on public thinking during those years, our "democratic socialists" didn't — and never recovered from Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency after 1980.

The fall of the Soviet Union happened fifteen years after the critical branch point. Until then, Westerners had no way to know that the Soviets, too, had been in demographic decline for some time. Communist myth successfully portrayed the Soviet Union as an industrial and military powerhouse, but the reality was a hollow shell with a failing population — a third-world pesthole with a space program. Had that been clearer thirty years sooner, perhaps Europe might have avoided the trap.

Now the millennium has turned and it looks like the experiment will finally have to end. It won't be philosophy or rhetoric or the march of armies that kills it, but rather the accumulated poisons of redistributionism necrotizing not just the economy but the demographics of Europe. Euro-socialism, in a quite Marxian turn of events, will have been destroyed by its own internal contradictions.

2002-11-28T05:20:00.000-08:00

Today's treason of the intellectuals:

The longest-term stakes in the war against terror are not just human lives, but whether Western civilization will surrender to fundamentalist Islam and shari'a law. More generally, the overt confrontation between Western civilization and Islamist barbarism that began on September 11th of 2001 has also made overt a fault line in Western civilization itself — a fault line that divides the intellectual defenders of our civilization from intellectuals whose desire is to surrender it to political or religious absolutism.

This fault line was clearly limned in Julien Benda's 1927 essay Le trahison des clercs: English "The treason of the intellectuals". I couldn't find a copy of Benda's essay on the Web. but there is an excellent commentary on it that repays reading. Ignore the reflexive endorsement of religious faith at the end; the source was a conservative Catholic magazine in which such gestures are obligatory. Benda's message, untainted by Catholic or Christian partisanship, is even more resonant today than it was in 1927.

The first of the totalitarian genocides (the Soviet-engineered Ukrainian famine of 1922-1923, which killed around two million people) had already taken place. Hitler's "Final Solution" was about fifteen years in the future. Neither atrocity became general knowledge until later, but Benda in 1927 would not have been surprised; he foresaw the horrors that would result when intellectuals abetted the rise of the vast tyrannizing ideologies of the 20th century,

Changes in the transport, communications, and weapons technologies of the 20th century made the death camps and the gulags possible. But it was currents in human thought that made them fact — ideas that both motivated and rationalized the thuggery of the Hitlers and Stalins of the world.

Benda indicted the intellectuals of his time for abandoning the program of the Enlightenment — abdicating the search for disinterested truth and universal human values. Benda charged that in abandoning universalism in favor of racism, classism, and political particularism, intellectuals were committing treason against the humanity that looked to them for guidance — prostituting themselves to creeds that would do great ill.

And what are the sequelae of this treason? Most diagnostically, mass murder and genocide. Its lesser consequences are subject to debate, equivocation, interpretation — but when we contemplate the atrocities at the Katyn Forest or the Sari nightclub there can be no doubt that we confront radical evils. Nor can we disregard the report of the perpetrators that that those evils were motivated by ideologies, nor that the ideologies were shaped and enabled and apologized for by identifiable factions among intellectuals in the West.

An intellectual commits treason against humanity when he or she propagandizes for ideas which lend themselves to the use of tyrants and terrorists.

In Benda's time, the principal problem was what I shall call "treason of the first kind" or revolutionary absolutism: intellectuals signing on to a transformative revolutionary ideology in the belief that if the right people just got enough political power, they could fix everything that was wrong with the world. The "right people", of course, would be the intellectuals themselves — or, at any rate, politicians who would consent to be guided by the intellectuals. If a few kulaks or Jews had to die for the revolution, well, the greater good and all that...the important thing was that violence wielded by Smart People with the Correct Ideas would eventually make things right.

The Nazi version of this disease was essentially wiped out by WWII. But the most deadly and persistent form of treason of the first kind, which both gave birth to intellectual Naziism and long outlived it, was intellectual Marxism. (It bears remembering that 'Nazi' stood for "National Socialist", and that before the 1934 purge of the Strasserites the Nazi party was explicitly socialist in ideology.)

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1992 broke the back of intellectual Marxism. It may be that the great slaughters of the 20th century have had at least one good effect, in teaching the West a lesson about the perils of revolutionary absolutism written in letters of human blood too large for even the most naive intellectual idealist to ignore. Treason of the first kind is no longer common.

But Benda also indicted what I shall call "treason of the second kind", or revolutionary relativism — the position that there are no moral claims or universal values that can trump the particularisms of particular ethnicities, political movements, or religions. In particular, relativists maintain that that the ideas of reason and human rights that emerged from the Enlightenment have no stronger claim on us than tribal prejudices.

Today, the leading form of treason of the second kind is postmodernism — the ideology that all value systems are equivalent, merely the instrumental creations of people who seek power and other unworthy ends. Thus, according to the postmodernists, when fanatical Islamists murder 3,000 people and the West makes war against the murderers and their accomplices, there is nothing to choose between these actions. There is only struggle between contending agendas. The very idea that there might be a universal ethical standard by which one is `better' than the other is pooh-poohed as retrogressive, as evidence that one is a paid-up member of the Party of Dead White Males (a hegemonic conspiracy more malign than any terrorist organization).

Treason of the first kind wants everyone to sign up for the violence of redemption (everyone, that is, other than the Jews and capitalists and individualists that have been declared un-persons in advance). Treason of the second kind is subtler; it denounces our will to fight terrorists and tyrants, telling us we are no better than they, and even that the atrocities they commit against us are no more than requital for our past sins.

Marxism may be dead, but revolutionary absolutism is not; it flourishes in the Third World. Since 9/11, the West has faced an Islamo-fascist axis formed by al-Qaeda, Palestinian groups including the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, the rogue state of Iraq, and the theocratic government of Iran. These groups do not have unitary leadership, and their objectives are not identical; notably, the PA and Iraq are secularist, while al-Qaeda and Hamas and the Iranians and the Taliban are theocrats. Iran is Shi'a Islamic; the other theocratic groups are Sunni. But all these groups exchange intelligence and weapons, and they sometimes loan each other personnel. They hate America and the West, and they have used terror against us in an undeclared war that goes back to the early 1970s. The objectives of these groups, whether they are secular Arab nationalism or Jihad, require killing a lot of people. Especially a lot of Westerners.

Today's treason of the intellectuals consists of equating suicide bombings deliberately targeting Israeli women and children with Israeli military operations so restrained that Palestinian children throw rocks at Israeli soldiers without fearing their guns. Today's treason of the intellectuals tells us that because the U.S. occasionally propped up allied but corrupt governments during the Cold War, we have no right to object to airliners being flown into the World Trade Center. Today's treason of the intellectuals consists of telling us we should do nothing but stand by, wringing our hands, while at least one of the groups in the Islamo-fascist axis acquires nuclear weapons with which terrorists could repeat their mass murders in New York City and Bali on an immensely larger scale.

Behind both kinds of treason there lurks an ugly fact: second-rate intellectuals, feeling themselves powerless, tend to worship power. The Marxist intellectuals who shilled for Stalin and the postmodernists who shill for Osama bin Laden are one of a kind — they identify with a tyrant's or terrorist's vision of transforming the world through violence because they know they are incapable of making any difference themselves. This is why you find academic apologists disproportionately in the humanities departments and the soft sciences; physicists and engineers and the like have more constructive ways of engaging the world.

It may be that 9/11 will discredit revolutionary relativism as throughly as the history of the Nazis and Soviets discredited revolutionary absolutism. There are hopeful signs; the postmodernists and multiculturalists have a lot more trouble justifying their treason to non-intellectuals when its consequences include the agonizing deaths of thousands caught on videotape.

It's not a game anymore. Ideas have consequences; postmodernism and multiculturalism are no longer just instruments in the West's intramural games of one-upmanship. They have become an apologetic for barbarians who, quite literally, want to kill or enslave us all. Those ideas — and the people who promulgate them — should be judged accordingly.

UPDATE: Some alert readers noted that I had the dates of the Ukrainian famine wrong, ten years too early. I think I was confusing it with the Volga famine, which may not have been deliberately engineered but was certainly made worse by Communist policy.

2002-11-28T02:07:00.000-08:00

Against cocooning:

After evaluating the Rittenhouse Review's charges against Little Green Footballs, I have decided that my protest action will be to add LGF to my blogroll.

2002-11-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

When to shoot a policeman:

A policeman was premeditatedly shot dead today.

Now, I don't regard shooting a policeman as the worst possible crime — indeed, I can easily imagine circumstances under which I would do it myself...if he were committing illegal violence — or even officially legal violence during the enforcement of an unjust law. Supposing a policeman were criminally threatening someone's life, say. Or suppose that he had been ordered under an act of government to round up all the Jews in the neighborhood, or confiscate all the pornography or computers or guns. Under those circumstances, it would be not merely my right but my duty to shoot the policeman.

But this policeman was harming nobody. He was shot down in cold blood as he was refueling his cruiser. His murderer subsequently announced the act on a public website.

The murderer said he was "protesting police-state tactics". If that were his goal, however, then the correct and appropriate expression of it would have been to kill a BATF thug as the thug was in the process of invading his home, or an airport security screener, or some other person who was actively and at the time of the protest implementing police-state tactics.

Killings of policemen in those circumstances are a defensible social good, pour encourager les autres. It is right and proper that the police and military should fear for their lives when they trespass on the liberty of honest citizens; that is part of the balance of power that maintains a free society, and the very reason our Constitution has a Second Amendment.

But this policeman was refueling his car. Nothing in the shooter's justification carried any suggestion that the shooter's civil rights had ever been violated by the victim, or that the murderer had standing to act for any other individual person whose rights had been violated by the victim. This killing was not self-defense.

There are circumstances under which general warfare against the police would be justified. In his indymedia post The Declaration of a Renewed American Independence the shooter utters a scathing, and (it must be said) largely justified indictment of police abuses. If the political system had broken down sufficiently that there were no reasonable hope of rectifying those abuses, then I would be among the first to cry havoc.

Under those circumstances, it would be my duty as a free human being under the U.S. Constitution not merely to shoot individual policemen, but to make revolutionary war on the police. As Abraham Lincoln said, "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it."

But the United States of America has not yet reached the point at which the political mechanisms for the defense of freedom have broken down. This judgment is not a matter of theory but one of practice. There are not yet police at our door with legal orders to round up the Jews, or confiscate pornography or computers or guns.

Civil society has not yet been fatally vitiated by tyranny. Under these circumstances, the only possible reaction is to condemn. This was a crime. This was murder. And I would cheerfully shoot not the policeman but the murderer dead. (There would be no question of guilt or due process, since the murderer publicly boasted of his crime.)

But that this shooter was wrong does not mean that everyone who shoots a policeman in the future will also be wrong. A single Andrew McCrae, at this time, is a criminal and should be condemned as a criminal. But his case against the police and the system behind them is not without merit. Therefore let him be a warning as well.

2002-11-22T03:20:00.000-08:00

Countermeasure against the mystery attack

I think I may have invented a countermeasure against the mystery attack alluded to in the redacted postings below. I'll have to discuss it with the persion who thought it up tomorrow.

Now, who do we pass a report on the vulnerability and the countermeasure?

Hey! Over the radio as I write comes the news that Abd Al-Nasiri, the guy who built the explosive device that blew up U.S.S. Cole and planned the attack on the French tanker, is in U.S. custody and singing like a bird. I hope they squeeze him dry and then stake him out for the fire ants.

2002-11-21T22:34:00.000-08:00

It's called "Armed and Dangerous" for a reason..."

[Portions of this item have been redacted to protect another blogger]

A correspondent is concerned that by revealing that I know a diabolically effective attack plan, I have made myself a potential target of kidnap and torture by terrorists who would very much like to know what [CENSORED] cooked up, so they can do it.

My civilization is at war. I am not a coward. I'm not going to hand our enemies vital information gratis merely to secure my personal safety.

I'm not going to discuss my security precautions in detail, for obvious reasons. But my readers may be reassured that I am not a soft target. Nor is my wife.

Osama, dude? If you're listening? I would just love a shot at a few of the vicious goatfuckers on your string. Send them over; I'll give them a very painful and very short education in what the wrath of Allah is really like. Then I'll bury them in pigskin.

2002-11-21T20:21:00.000-08:00

Security by obscurity:

[This post has been redacted to protect two other bloggers. I regret the necessity, but lives could be at stake.]

My name and work have been [CENSORED] are some possible modes of terror attack that should not be discussed in public.

With all respect to [CENSORED], I think it is wrongheaded of him to imply that my arguments against software security by obscurity necessarily apply to all other kinds of defense against vandalism and terror. Software is a special case; the low cost of distributing software patches is what makes shaming software vendors with public disclosure an effective tactic. When defense is very difficult or impossible, [CENSORED] is probably right that security through obscurity is a correct response. At least, he's not obviously wrong.

[CENSORED] has described to me in detail the attack he is concerned about. He is right that it would be trivially easy to execute. He is right that it would be enormously, horribly disruptive. I am not certain that it is as impossible to defend against as he supposes; we are discussing potential countermeasures now.

One of the most important possible countermeasures involves lots and civilians keeping an eye out for the attack — and both a firearm and a cellphone handy to stop it. If [CENSORED] and I decide that's an appropriate counterstrategy, it may be necessary to go public in order to stimulate action. But I'm not going to say anything until we've thought the scenarios through further.

[CENSORED] has thought up a way that fifty people in two-to-five-man cells operating independently and could — using ordinary tools available everywhere, with very little effort and almost no risk to themselves — cause hundreds of casualties, cripple large sections of the economy and maybe [CENSORED].

Yes, folks, it's that serious.

2002-11-21T14:48:00.000-08:00

What a responsible American Left would look like:

The congressional Democrats have made Nancy Pelosi their leader. Whether or not this is conscious strategy, it means they're going to run to the left. And very likely get slaughtered in 2004.

It's truly odd how self-destructive the American Left has become. They're like that famous line about the Palestinians, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And there are so many opportunities! So many good things Republican conservatives can never do because they're captive to their voter base.

Herewith, then, my humble offering of a program for the American Left. This is not sarcasm and I'm not trying to score points here, these are issues where the Left could take a stand and gain back some of the moral capital it has squandered so recklessly since the days of the civil rights movement.

Support war on Iraq, but insist on nation-building afterwards. Saddam Hussein is a genocidal fascist tyrant, exactly the sort of monster the Left ought to be against. Support deposing him — then be the conscience of the U.S., insisting on our duty to help rebuild Iraq as a free country afterwards. Push us to win the peace, not just the war.
Derail the Homeland Security Act and other intrusions on civil liberties. The left hates John Ashcroft. So why don't we see more Left opposition to the law-enforcement power grab that's going on right now, or to the gutting of the Freedom of Information Act? Many American would respond well to this.
Stop the War on (Some) Drugs. This is a civil-rights issue. Blacks and other minorities are disproportionately victims both of drug prosecution and of the criminal violence created by drug laws. It's a civil-liberties issue for many reasons too obvious to need listing — how can any self-respecting liberal countenance no-knock warrants and asset forfeiture? For too long the Left has gone along with conservative anti-drug hysteria out of a craven fear of being dismissed as a bunch of dope-loving ex-hippies. Time to stand up and be counted.
Support school vouchers. Another civil-rights issue — it's precisely minorities and the poor who most need to escape the trap that the public-school system has become, and black parents know this. Yes, it will be hard to take on the teachers' unions — but you're in serious danger of losing the black vote over this issue, so switching would be not just the right thing but a way to shore up your base as well.
Speak up for science. Religious conservatives are up to a lot of anti-scientific mischief — banning stem-cell research, excising evolutionary theory from textbooks. Make a principled stand for science, secularism, and the anti-Establishment clause. Remind the world that the U.S. is not a Christian nation, and seek to have the tax exemption for religious organizations ended because it puts the U.S. government in the position of deciding what's a religion and what is not.
Stop the RIAA/MPAA from trashing consumers' far-use rights. The Left claims to be on the side of consumers and against corporate power elites. So where was the Left when the DMCA passed? If the RIAA and MPAA have their way, personal computers will be crippled and consumers will go to jail for the `crime' of copying DVDs they have bought for their personal use. Young people, who are trending conservative these days, care deeply about the RIAA attack on file sharing. Wouldn't you like to have them back?

2002-11-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

Conspiracy and prospiracy:

One of the problems we face in the war against terror is that al-Qaeda is not quite a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It's something else that is more difficult to characterize and target.

(I wrote what follows three years before 9/11.)

Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good propaganda and excellent satire (vide Illuminatus! or any of half a dozen other examples). As guides to action, however, they are generally dangerously misleading.

Misleading, because they assume more capacity for large groups to keep secrets and maintain absolutely unitary conscious policies than human beings in groups actually seem to possess. The history of documented "conspiracies" and failed attempts at same is very revealing in this regard — above a certain fairly small size, somebody always blows the gaff. This is why successful terrorist organizations are invariably quite small.

Dangerously misleading because conspiracy theories, offering the easy drama of a small group of conscious villains, distract our attention from a subtler but much more pervasive phenomenon -- one I shall label the "prospiracy".

What distinguishes prospiracies from conspiracies is that the members don't necessarily know they are members, nor are they fully conscious of what binds them together. Prospiracies are not created through oaths sworn by guttering torchlight, but by shared ideology or institutional culture. In many cases, members accept the prospiracy's goals and values without thinking through their consequences as fully as they might if the process of joining were formal and initiatory.

What makes a prospiracy like a conspiracy and distinguishes it from a mere subcultural group? The presence of a "secret doctrine" or shared goals which its core members admit among themselves but not to perceived outsiders; commonly, a goal which is stronger than the publicly declared purpose of the group, or irrelevant to that declared purpose but associated with it in some contingent (usually historical) way.

On the other hand, a prospiracy is unlike a conspiracy in that it lacks well-defined lines of authority. Its leaders wield influence over the other members, but seldom actual power. It also lacks a clear-cut distinction between "ins" and "outs".

Prospiracy scales better than conspiracy, and thus can be far more dangerous. Because anyone can join simply by buying the "secret" doctrine, people frequently recruit themselves. Because the "secret" isn't written on stone tablets in an inner sanctum, it's totally deniable. In fact, members sometimes deny it to themselves (not that that ultimately matters). What keeps a prospiracy together is not conscious commitment but the memetic logic of its positions.

As an exercise (and to avoid any appearance of axe-grinding), I'll leave the reader to apply this model for his or herself. There are plenty of juicy examples out there. I'm a "member" of at least two of them myself.

2002-11-13T09:20:00.000-08:00

The Charms and Terrors of Military SF:

I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle's SF as "conservative/militarist power fantasies". Pournelle uttered a rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy and his patriotic instincts. I can hardly argue that point, since I completely agree with it; that tension is a central issue in almost eveything Heinlein ever wrote.

The differences between Heinlein's and Pournelle's military SF are not trivial — they are both esthetically and morally important. More generally, the soldiers in military SF express a wide range of different theories about the relationship between soldier, society, and citizen. These theories reward some examination.

First, let's consider representative examples: Jerry Pournelle's novels of Falkenberg's Legion, on the one hand, and Heinlein's Starship Troopers on the other.

The difference between Heinlein and Pournelle starts with the fact that Pournelle could write about a cold-blooded mass murder of human beings by human beings, performed in the name of political order, approvingly — and did.

But the massacre was only possible because Falkenberg's Legion and Heinlein's Mobile Infantry have very different relationships with the society around them. Heinlein's troops are integrated with the society in which they live. They study history and moral philosophy; they are citizen-soldiers. Johnnie Rico has doubts, hesitations, humanity. One can't imagine giving him orders to open fire on a stadium-full of civilians as does Falkenberg.

Pournelle's soldiers, on the other hand, have no society but their unit and no moral direction other than that of the men on horseback who lead them. Falkenberg is a perfect embodiment of military Fuhrerprinzip, remote even from his own men, a creepy and opaque character who is not successfully humanized by an implausible romance near the end of the sequence. The Falkenberg books end with his men elevating an emperor, Prince Lysander who we are all supposed to trust because he is such a beau ideal. Two thousand years of hard-won lessons about the maintainance of liberty are thrown away like so much trash.

In fact, the underlying message here is pretty close to that of classical fascism. It, too, responds to social decay with a cult of the redeeming absolute leader. To be fair, the Falkenberg novels probably do not depict Pournelle's idea of an ideal society, but they are hardly less damning if we consider them as a cautionary tale. "Straighten up, kids, or the hero-soldiers in Nemourlon are going to have to get medieval on your buttocks and install a Glorious Leader." Pournelle's values are revealed by the way that he repeatedly posits situations in which the truncheon of authority is the only solution. All tyrants plead necessity.

Even so, Falkenberg's men are paragons compared to the soldiers in David Drake's military fiction. In the Hammer's Slammers books and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances attached to it all. "Carnography" is the word for this stuff, pure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There's boatloads of it out there, too; the Starfist sequence by Sherman and Cragg is a recent example. Jim Baen sells a lot of it (and, thankfully, uses the profits to subsidize reprinting the Golden Age midlist).

The best-written military SF, on the other hand, tends to be more like Heinlein's — the fact that it addresses ethical questions about organized violence (and tries to come up with answers one might actually be more willing to live with than Pournelle's quasi-fascism or Drake's brutal anomie) is part of its appeal. Often (as in Heinlein's Space Cadet or the early volumes in Lois Bujold's superb Miles Vorkosigan novels) such stories include elements of bildungsroman.

The Sten sequence by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch was both a loving tribute to and (in the end) a brutal deconstruction of this kind of story. It's full of the building-character-at-boot-camp scenes that are a staple of the subgenre; Sten's career is carefully designed to rationalize as many of these as possible. But the Eternal Emperor, originally a benevolent if quirky paternal figure who earns Sten's loyalty, goes genocidally mad. In the end, soldier Sten must rebel against the system that made him what he is.

Cole & Bunch tip their hand in an afterword to the last book, not that any reader with more perception than a brick could have missed it. They wrote Sten to show where fascism leads and as a protest against SF's fascination with absolute power and the simplifications of military life. Bujold winds up making the same point in a subtler way; the temptations of power and arrogance are a constant, soul-draining strain on Miles's father Aral, and Miles eventually destroys his own career through one of those temptations

Heinlein, a U.S naval officer who loved the military and seems to have always remembered his time at Annapolis as the best years of his life, fully understood that the highest duty of a soldier may be not merely to give his life but to reject all the claims of military culture and loyalty. His elegiac The Long Watch makes this point very clear. You'll seek an equivalent in vain anywhere in Pournelle or Drake or their many imitators — but consider Bujold's The Vor Game, in which Miles's resistance to General Metzov's orders for a massacre is the pivotal moment at which he becomes a man.

Bujold's point is stronger because, unlike Ezra Dahlquist in The Long Watch or the citizen-soldiers in Starship Troopers, Miles is not a civilian serving a hitch. He is the Emperor's cousin, a member of a military caste; his place in Barrayaran society is defined by the expectations of military service. What gives his moment of decision its power is that in refusing to commit an atrocity, he is not merely risking his life but giving up his dreams.

Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov have a dream, too. The difference is that where Ezra Dahlquist and Miles Vorkosigan sacrifice themselves for what they believe, Pournelle's "heroes" sacrifice others. Miles's and Dahlquist's futures are defined by refusal of an order to do evil, Falkenberg's by the slaughter of untermenschen.

This is a difference that makes a difference.

2002-11-09T12:10:00.000-08:00

My first fisking:

Ta-daa! In ritual obeisance to the customs of the blogosphere, I now perform my very first fisking. Of Der Fisk himself, in his 8 Nov 2002 column "Bush fights for another clean shot in his war".

"A clean shot" was The Washington Post's revolting description of the murder of the al-Qa'ida leaders in Yemen by a US "Predator" unmanned aircraft. With grovelling approval, the US press used Israel's own mendacious description of such murders as a "targeted killing" — and shame on the BBC for parroting the same words on Wednesday.

One wonders which word in the phrase "targeted killing" Mr. Fisk is having problems with. Since he avers that the phrase "targeted killing" is "mendacious", we can deduce that he believes either the word "killing" or the word "targeted" to be false descriptions.

We must therefore conclude that in Mr. Fisk's universe, either (a) members of al-Qaeda can be reduced to patch of carbonized char without the event properly qualifying as a "killing", or (b) the drone operators weren't targeting that vehicle at all — they unleashed a Hellfire on a random patch of the Hadrahamaut that just happened to have a half-dozen known terrorists moseying through it at at the moment of impact.

How about a little journalistic freedom here? Like asking why this important al-Qa'ida leader could not have been arrested. Or tried before an open court. Or, at the least, taken to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation.

One imagines Mr. Fisk during World War II, exclaiming in horror because the Allies neglected to capture entire divisions of the Waffen-SS intact and subject each Aryan superman to individual criminal trials.

Mr. Fisk's difficulty with grasping the concept of "warfare" and "enemy combatant" is truly remarkable. Or perhaps not so remarkable, considering his apparent failure to grasp the terms "targeted" and "killing".

Instead, the Americans release a clutch of Guantanamo "suspects", one of whom — having been held for 11 months in solitary confinement — turns out to be around 100 years old and so senile that he can't string a sentence together. And this is the "war on terror"?

Yes, Mr. Fisk, it is. It's a war in which our soldiers gives individual enemy combatants food, shelter, and medical care for 11 months while their terrorists continue mass-murdering innocent civilian women and children.

But a "clean shot" is what President Bush appears to want to take at the United Nations. First, he wants to force it to adopt a resolution about which the Security Council has the gravest reservations. Then he warns that he might destroy the UN's integrity by ignoring it altogether. In other words, he wants to destroy the UN. Does George Bush realise that the United States was the prime creator of this institution, just as it was of the League of Nations under President Woodrow Wilson?

Interesting that Mr. Fisk should mention the League of Nations. This would be the same League of Nations that collapsed after 1938 due to its utter failure to prevent clear-cut aggression by Nazi Germany? One wonders how Mr. Fisk supposes the U.N. can possibly escape the League's fate if it fails to sponsor effective action against a genocidal, murdering tyrant who has stated for the record that he models himself on Hitler.

I congratulate Mr. Fisk on the phrase "destroy the U.N.'s integrity"; it is very entertaining. In other news, George Bush is plotting to destroy Messalina's chastity, William Jefferson Clinton's truthfulness, and Robert Fisk's grasp on reality.

Supposing that the U.S. was the prime creator of the U.N., and supposing that was a mistake, is Mr. Fisk proposing that we should not have the integrity to shoot our own dog?

"Targeted killing" — courtesy of the Bush administration — is now what the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon can call "legitimate warfare". And Vladimir Putin, too. Now the Russians — I kid thee not, as Captain Queeg said in the Caine Mutiny — are talking about "targeted killing" in their renewed war on Chechnya. After the disastrous "rescue" of the Moscow theatre hostages by the so-called "elite" Russian Alpha Special forces (beware, oh reader, any rescue by "elite" forces, should you be taken hostage), Putin is supported by Bush and Tony Blair in his renewed onslaught against the broken Muslim people of Chechnya.

We note for the record that should Mr. Fisk be captured by terrorists, he would prefer to be rescued by non-elite forces; perhaps a troop of Girl Scouts waving copies of The Guardian would satisfy him. I would defer to Mr. Fisk's evident belief that "non-elite" rescuers would increase his chances of surviving the experience, were it not that I dislike the sight of dying Girl Scouts.

I'm a cynical critic of the US media, but last month Newsweek ran a brave and brilliant and terrifying report on the Chechen war. In a deeply moving account of Russian cruelty in Chechnya, it recounted a Russian army raid on an unprotected Muslim village. Russian soldiers broke into a civilian home and shot all inside. One of the victims was a Chechen girl. As she lay dying of her wounds, a Russian soldier began to rape her. "Hurry up Kolya," his friend shouted, "while she's still warm."

In other words, Russian soldiers behaved like al-Qaeda terrorists, and this is a bad thing. Excellent, Mr. Fisk; you appear to be showing some sign of an actual moral sense here.

Now, I have a question. If you or I was that girl's husband or lover or brother or father, would we not be prepared to take hostages in a Moscow theatre — Even if this meant — as it did — that, asphyxiated by Russian gas, we would be executed with a bullet in the head, as the Chechen women hostage-takers were — But no matter. The "war on terror" means that Kolya and the boys will be back in action soon, courtesy of Messrs Putin, Bush and Blair.

Ahh. So, Mr. Fisk is taking the position that the Russians' atrocious behavior in Chechnya justifies hostage-taking and the cold-blooded murder of hostages in a Moscow theater. Very interesting.

Let's follow the logic of just retribution here. If the rape of a dying girl in Chechnya by Russian soldiers justifies terrorizing and murdering hostages in a Moscow theater, then what sort of behavior might the murder of 3000 innocent civilians in Manhattan justify?

We gather that Mr. Fisk thinks it does not justify whacking half a dozen known terrorists, including the organizer of the U.S.S. Cole bombing, in the Yemeni desert. We conclude that Mr. Fisk concedes the righteousness of retribution, all right, but values the life of each al-Qaeda terrorist more than those of five hundred unsuspecting victims of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Let me quote that very brave Israeli, Mordechai Vanunu, the man who tried to warn the West of Israel's massive nuclear war technology, imprisoned for 12 years of solitary confinement — and betrayed, so it appears, by one Robert Maxwell. In a poem he wrote in confinement, Vanunu said: "I am the clerk, the technician, the mechanic, the driver. They said, Do this, do that, don't look left or right, don't read the text. Don't look at the whole machine. You are only responsible for this one bolt, this one rubber stamp."

Mr. Fisk apparently believes that Mr. Vanunu had no responsibility to betray his country's defensive capabilities in the presence of enemies bent on its utter destruction. Or did I somehow miss the incident in which Israel aggressively atom-bombed a neighbor?

Kolya would have understood that. So would the US Air Force officer "flying" the drone which murdered the al-Qa'ida men in Yemen. So would the Israeli pilot who bombed an apartment block in Gaza, killing nine small children as well as well as his Hamas target, an "operation" — that was the description, for God's sake — which Ariel Sharon described as "a great success".

Mr. Fisk, whose love for legalism and international due process commends giving al-Qaeda terrorists individual criminal trials, seems curiously unaware of that portion of the Geneva Convention relating to the use of non-combatants as human shields.

One wonders if he would be persuaded by the Geneva Convention language assigning responsibility for these deaths not to Israel, but to Hamas.

One suspects not. In Mr. Fisk's universe, it's clear that there is one set of rules for Israelis and another for terrorists. Hamas terrorists committing atrocities are justified by Israeli actions, while Israelis committing what Mr. Fisk prefers to consider atrocities are evil and the behavior of Hamas completely irrelevant.

But we know, from Mr. Fisk's famous report of his beating in Afghanistan, what his actual rule is: hating Americans justifies anything.

These days, we all believe in "clean shots". I wish that George Bush could read history. Not just Britain's colonial history, in which we contrived to use gas against the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq in the 1930s. Not just his own country's support for Saddam Hussein throughout his war with Iran.

This would be the same Iran that belligerantly and unlawfully seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979, correct? And held Americans hostage for four hundred days, committing an act of war under the international law Mr. Fisk claims to so scrupulously respect?

It would be entertaining to watch Mr. Fisk argue that Saddam Hussein was not then fit to be an ally of the U.S. against its enemies, but is now — after twenty years of atrocities and aggressive warfare — such an upstanding citizen of the international community that we should stand idly by while he arms himself with nuclear weapons.

The Iranians once produced a devastating book of coloured photographs of the gas blisters sustained by their soldiers in that war. I looked at them again this week. If you were these men, you would want to die. They all did. I wish someone could remind George Bush of the words of Lawrence of Arabia, that "making war or rebellion is messy, like eating soup off a knife."

I wonder if Mr. Fisk can point to any instance in which George Bush ever stated that he expected the war with al-Qaeda to be "clean"? If I recall correctly. "clean shot" was the Washington Post's phrase.

Can Mr. Fisk fail to be aware that the Post's editorial board is run by ideological enemies of George Bush, persons who would, outside of wartime, hew rather closer to Mr. Fisk's positions than George Bush's?

Mr. Fisk, I don't think any American policymaker doubts that war is hell. Nor that terrorism is even worse.

And I suppose I would like Americans to remember the arrogance of colonial power.

We have quite vivid historical memories of the arrogance of Mr. Fisk's particular colonial power, in fact. We recall fighting a revolution to deal with it.

If Mr. Fisk could point out any American colonies in Iraq, or Iran, or Palestine, or Chechnya, we would be greatly educated.

Here, for example, is the last French executioner in Algeria during the 1956-62 war of independence, Fernand Meysonnier, boasting only last month of his prowess at the guillotine. "You must never give the guy the time to think. Because if you do he starts moving his head around and that's when you have the mess-ups. The blade comes through his jaw, and you have to use a butcher's knife to finish it off. It is an exorbitant power — to kill one's fellow man." So perished the brave Muslims of the Algerian fight for freedom.

Ah. Did I miss the part where Americans were using guillotines as a method of execution, then?

No, I hope we will not commit war crimes in Iraq — there will be plenty of them for us to watch — but I would like to think that the United Nations can restrain George Bush and Vladimir Putin and, I suppose, Tony Blair. But one thing is sure. Kolya will be with them.

Mr. Fisk's surety that American troops will while away their time in Baghdad raping dying Iraqi girls appears to come from the same eccentric brain circuitry that supposes U.S. to be a "colonial" power and to be in imminent danger of performing botched executions with guillotines and butcher knives.

Mr. Fisk neglects an important difference between U.S. soldiers and al-Qaeda terrorists.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, U.S. soldiers found guilty of such behavior can be — and, on the rare occasions it has occurred, frequently have been — court-martialed and shot. Not that it seems Mr. Fisk would be likely to acknowledge the existence of this law, or that it is ever applies.

To Mr. Fisk's inability to grasp the terms "targeted" and "killing" we may therefore add an inability to grasp the terms "barbarism" and "civilization".

2002-11-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

Libertarianism and the Hard SF Renaissance:

When I started reading SF in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the field was in pretty bad shape — not that I understood this at the time. The death of the pulp-zines in the 1950s had pretty much killed off the SF short-fiction market, and the post-Star-Wars boom that would make SF the second most successful genre after romance fiction was still years in the future. The core writers of the first "Golden Age", the people who invented modern science fiction after John Campbell took the helm at Astounding in 1938, were beginning to get long in the tooth; Robert Heinlein, the greatest of them all, passed his peak after 1967.

These objective problems combined with, or perhaps led to, an insurgency within the field. The "New Wave", an attempt to import the techniques and imagery of literary fiction into SF, upset many of the field's certainties. Before it, everyone took for granted that the center of Campbellian SF was "hard SF" — stories, frequently written by engineers and scientists, which trafficked in plausible and relatively rigorous extrapolations of science.

Hard SF was an art form that made stringent demands on both author and reader. Stories could be, and were, mercilessly slammed because the author had calculated an orbit or gotten a detail of physics or biology wrong. The Campbellian demand was that SF work both as story and as science, with only a bare minimum of McGuffins like FTL star drives permitted; hard SF demanded that the science be consistent both internally and with known science about the real world.

The New Wave rejected all this for reasons that were partly aesthetic and partly political. For there was a political tradition that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by its chief theoretician (Campbell himself) and his right-hand man Robert Heinlein, the inventor of modern SF's characteristic technique of exposition by indirection. That tradition was of ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political ideologizing with suspicion.

At the time, this very American position was generally thought of by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one. But the SF community's version was never conservative in the strict sense of venerating past social norms — how could it be, when SF literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social arrangements? SF's insistent individualism also led it to reject racism and feature strong female characters long before the rise of political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms of art.

After 1971, the implicit politics of Campbellian hard SF was reinvented, radicalized and intellectualized as libertarianism. Libertarians, in fact, would draw inspiration from Golden Age SF; Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, H. Beam Piper's Lone Star Planet, and Poul Anderson's No Truce With Kings (among many others) would come to be seen retrospectively as proto-libertarian arguments not just by the readers but by the authors themselves.

The New Wave was both a stylistic revolt and a political one. Its inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.'s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave's later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.

But the New Wave was not, in fact, the first revolt against hard SF. In the 1950s, a group of young writers centered around Frederik Pohl and the Futurians fan club in New York had invented sociological S.F. (exemplified by the Pohl/Kornbluth collaboration The Space Merchants). Not until decades later did the participants admit that many of the key Futurians were then ideological Communists or fellow travellers, but their work was half-understood at the time to be strong criticism of the consumer capitalism and smugness of the post-World-War-II era.

The Futurian revolt was half-hearted, semi-covert, and easily absorbed by the Campbellian mainstream of the SF field; by the mid-1960s, sociological extrapolation had become a standard part of the toolkit even for the old-school Golden Agers, and it never challenged the centrality of hard SF. But the New Wave, after 1965, was not so easily dismissed or assimilated. Amidst a great deal of self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few jewels — Phillp José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage, some of Harlan Ellison's work, Brian Aldiss's Hothouse stories, and Langdon Jones's The Great Clock stand out as examples.

As with the Futurians, the larger SF field did absorb some New Wave techniques and concerns. Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the stature to really break it, in his 1961 Stranger In A Strange Land.

The New Wave also exacerbated long-standing critical arguments about the definition and scope of of science fiction, and briefly threatened to displace hard SF from the center of the field. Brian Aldiss's 1969 dismissal of space exploration as "an old-fashioned diversion conducted with infertile phallic symbols" was typical New Wave rhetoric, and looked like it might have some legs at the time.

As a politico-cultural revolt against the American vision of SF, however, the New Wave eventually failed just as completely as the Futurians had. Its writers were already running out of steam in 1977 when Star Wars took the imagery of pre-Campbellian space opera to the mainstream culture. The half-decade following (my college years, as it happened) was a period of drift and confusion only ended by the publication of David Brin's Startide Rising in 1982.

Brin, and his collegues in the group that came to be known as the "Killer Bs" (Greg Bear and Gregory Benford), reasserted the primacy of hard SF done in the grand Campbellian manner. Campbell himself had died in 1971 right at the high-water mark of the New Wave, but Heinlein and Anderson and the other surviving luminaries of the Campbellian era had no trouble recognizing their inheritors. To everyone's surprise, the New Old Wave proved to be not just artistically successful but commercially popular as as well, with its writers becoming the first new stars of the post-1980 boom in SF publishing.

The new hard SF of the 1980s returned to Golden Age themes and images, if not quite with the linear simplicity of Golden Age technique. It also reverted to the libertarian/individualist values traditional in the field. This time around, with libertarian thinking twenty years more developed, the split between order-worshiping conservatism and the libertarian impulse was more explicit. At one extreme, some SF (such as that of L. Neil Smith) assumed the character of radical libertarian propaganda. At the other extreme, a subgenre of SF that could fairly be described as conservative/militarist power fantasies emerged, notably in the writing of Jerry Pournelle and David Drake.

Tension between these groups sometimes flared into public animosity. Both laid claims to Robert Heinlein's legacy. Heinlein himself maintained friendly relationships with conservatives but counted himself a libertarian for more than a decade before his death in 1988.

Heinlein's evolution from Goldwater conservative to anti-statist radical both led and reflected larger trends. By 1989 depictions of explicitly anarcho-libertarian future societies were beginning to filter into mainstream SF work like Joe Haldeman's Buying Time. Haldeman's Conch Republic and Novysibirsk were all the more convincing for not being subjects of polemic.

Before the 1980s changes in U.S. law that reversed the tax status of inventories and killed off the SF midlist as a side effect, a lot of Golden Age and New Wave era SF was pretty continuously in print (though in sharply limited quntities and hard to find). I still own a lot of it in my personal collection of around 3,000 SF paperbacks and magazines, many dating back to the '50s and '60s and now long out of print. I read it all; pre-Campbellian space opera, the Campbellian classics of the Golden Age, the Futurians, the New Wave ferment, and the reinvention of hard SF in the 1980s.

In some respects, it took me thirty years to understand what I was seeing. I'm one of Heinlein's children, one of the libertarians that science fiction made. Because that's so, it was difficult for me to separate my own world-view from the assumptions of the field. In grokking the politics of SF, I was in the position of a fish trying to understand water.

Eventually, however, a sufficiently intelligent fish could start to get it about hydrodynamics — especially when the water's behavior is disturbed by storms and becomes visibly turbulent. I got to look back through the midlist at the Futurian ripples. I lived through the New Wave storm and the pre-Startide-Rising doldrums. By the time cyberpunk came around, I was beginning to get some conscious perspective.

Cyberpunk was the third failed revolution against Campbellian SF. William Gibson, who is generally credited with launching this subgenre in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, was not a political writer. But Bruce Sterling, who promoted Gibson and became the chief ideologue of anti-Cambellianism in the late 1980s, called it "the Movement" in a self-conscious reference to the heady era of 1960s student radicalism. The cyberpunks positioned themselves particularly against the carnographic conservative military SF of David Drake, Jerry Pournelle, and lower-rent imitators — not exactly a hard target.

Despite such posturing, the cyberpunks were neither as stylistically innovative nor as politically challenging as the New Wave had been. Gibson's prose has aptly been described as Raymond Chandler in mirror-shades. Cyberpunk themes (virtual reality, pervasive computing, cyborging and biosculpture, corporate feudalism) had been anticipated in earlier works like Vernor Vinge's 1978 hard-SF classic True Names, and even further back in The Space Merchants. Cyberpunk imagery (decayed urban landscapes, buzzcuts, chrome and black leather) quickly became a cliche replicated in dozens of computer games.

Neal Stephenson wrote a satirical finis to the cyberpunk genre in 1992's Snow Crash, which (with Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix and Walter John Williams's Hardwired) was very close to being the only work to meet the standard set by Neuromancer. While most cyberpunk took for granted a background in which late capitalism had decayed into an oppressive corporate feudalism under which most individuals could be nothing but alienated and powerless, the future of Snow Crash was a tellingly libertarian one. The bedrock individualism of classical SF reasserted itself with a smartass grin.

By the time cyberpunk fizzled out, most fans had been enjoying the hard-SF renaissance for a decade; the New Wave was long gone, and cyberpunk had attracted more notice outside the SF field than within it. The leaders of SF's tiny in-house critical establishment, however (figures like Samuel Delany and David Hartwell), remained fascinated on New Wave relics like Thomas Disch and Philip K. Dick, or anti-Campbellian fringe figures like Suzette Hadin Elgin and Octavia Butler. While this was going on, the readers voted with their Hugo ballots largely for writers that were squarely within the Campbellian tradition — Golden age survivors, the killer Bs, and newer writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and Greg Egan (whose 1998 work Diaspora may just be the single most audacious and brilliant hard-SF novel in the entire history of the field).

In 1994, critical thinking within the SF field belatedly caught up with reality. Credit for this goes to David Hartwell and Cathrerine Kramer, whose analysis in the anthology The Ascent of Wonder finally acknowledged what should have been obvious all along. Hard SF is the vital heart of the field, the radiant core from which ideas and prototype worlds diffuse outwards to be appropriated by writers of lesser world-building skill but perhaps greater stylistic and literary sophistication. While there are other modes of SF that have their place, they remain essentially derivations of or reactions against hard SF, and cannot even be properly understood without reference to its tropes, conventions, and imagery.

Furthermore, Gregory Benford's essay in The Ascent of Wonder on the meaning of SF offered a characterization of the genre which may well prove final. He located the core of SF in the experience of "sense of wonder", not merely as a thalamic thrill but as the affirmation that the universe has a knowable order that is discoverable through reason and science.

I think I can go further than Hartwell or Kramer or Benford in defining the relationship between hard SF and the rest of the field. To do this, I need to introduce the concept linguist George Lakoff calls "radial category", one that is not defined by any one logical predicate, but by a central prototype and a set of permissible or customary variations. As a simple example, in English the category "fruit" does not correspond to any uniformity of structure that a botanist could recognize. Rather, the category has a prototype "apple", and things are recognized as fruits to the extent that they are either (a) like an apple, or (b) like something that has already been sorted into the "like an apple" category.

Radial categories have central members ("apple", "pear", "orange") whose membership is certain, and peripheral members ("coconut", "avocado") whose membership is tenuous. Membership is graded by the distance from the central prototype — roughly, the number of traits that have to mutate to get one from being like the prototype to like the instance in question. Some traits are important and tend to be conserved across the entire radial category (strong flavor including sweetness) while some are only weakly bound (color).

In most radial categories, it is possible to point out members that are counterexamples to any single intensional ("logical") definition, but traits that are common to the core prototypes nevertheless tend to be strongly bound. Thus, "coconut" is a counterexample to the strongly-bound trait that fruits have soft skins, but it is sorted as "fruit" because (like the prototype members) it has an easily-chewable interior with a sweet flavor.

SF is a radial category in which the prototypes are certain classics of hard SF. This is true whether you are mapping individual works by affinity or subgenres like space opera, technology-of-magic story, eutopian/dystopian extrapolation, etc. So in discussing the traits of SF as a whole, the relevant question is not "which traits are universal" but "which traits are strongly bound" — or, almost equivalently, "what are the shared traits of the core (hard-SF) prototypes".

The strong binding between hard SF and libertarian politics continues to be a fact of life in the field. It it is telling that the only form of politically-inspired award presented annually at the World Science Fiction Convention is the Libertarian Futurist Society's "Prometheus". There is no socialist, liberal, moderate, conservative or fascist equivalent of the class of libertarian SF writers including L. Neil Smith, F. Paul Wilson, Brad Linaweaver, or J. Neil Schulman; their books, even when they are shrill and indifferently-written political tracts, actually sell — and sell astonishingly well — to SF fans.

Of course, there are people in the SF field who find this deeply uncomfortable. Since the centrality of hard SF has become inescapable, resistance now takes the form of attempts to divorce hard SF from libertarianism — to preserve the methods and conceptual apparatus of hard SF while repudiating its political aura. Hartwell & Kramer's 2002 followup to The Ascent of Wonder, The Hard SF Renaissance, takes up this argument in its introduction and explanatory notes.

The Hard SF Renaissance presents itself as a dialogue between old-school Campbellian hard SF and an attempt to construct a "Radical Hard SF" that is not in thrall to right-wing tendencies. It is clear that the editors' sympathies lie with the "Radicals", not least from the very fact that they identify libertarianism as a right-wing phenomenon. This is an error characteristic of left-leaning thinkers, who tend to assume that anything not "left" is "right" and that approving of free markets somehow implies social conservatism.

All the history rehearsed so far has been intended to lead up to the following question: is the "Radical Hard SF" program possible? More generally, is the symbiotic relationship between libertarian political thought and SF a mere historical accident, or is there an intrinsic connection?

I think I know what John Campbell's answer would be, if he had not died the year that the founders of libertarianism broke with conservatism. I know what Robert Heinlein's was. They're the same as mine, a resounding yes — that there is a connection, and that the connection is indeed deep and intrinsic. But I am a proud libertarian partisan, and conviction is not proof. Cultural history is littered with the corpses of zealots who attempted to yoke art to ideology with shallow arguments, only to be exposed as fools when the art became obsolescent before the ideology or (more often) vice-versa.

In the remainder of this essay I will nevertheless attempt to prove this point. My argument will center around the implications of a concept best known from First Amendment law: the "marketplace of ideas". I am going to argue specifically from the characteristics of hard SF, the prototypes of the radial category of SF.

Science fiction, as a literature, embraces the possibility of radical transformations of the human condition brought about through knowledge. Technological immortality, star drives, cyborging — all these SFnal tropes are situated within a knowable universe, one in which scientific inquiry is both the precondition and the principal instrument of creating new futures.

SF is, broadly, optimistic about these futures. This is so for the simple reason that SF is fiction bought with peoples' entertainment budgets and people, in general, prefer happy endings to sad ones. But even when SF is not optimistic, its dystopias and cautionary tales tend to affirm the power of reasoned choices made in a knowable universe; they tell us that it is not through chance or the whim of angry gods that we fail, but through our failure to be intelligent, our failure to use the power of reason and science and engineering prudently.

At bottom, the central assumption of SF is that applied science is our best hope of transcending the major tragedies and minor irritants to which we are all heir. Even when scientists and engineers are not the visible heroes of the story, they are the invisible heroes that make the story notionally possible in the first place, the creators of possibility, the people who liberate the future to become a different place than the present.

SF both satisfies and stimulates a sort of lust for possibility compounded of simple escapism and a complex intellectual delight in anrticipating the future. SF readers and writers want to believe that the future not only can be different but can be different in many, many weird and wonderful ways, all of which are worth exploring.

All the traits (embrace of radical transformation, optimism, applied science as our best hope, the lust for possibilities) are weakly characteristic of SF in general — but they are powerfully characteristic of hard SF. Strongly bound, in the terminology of radial categories.

Therefore, hard SF has a bias towards valuing the human traits and social conditions that best support scientific inquiry and permit it to result in transformative changes to both individuals and societies. Also, of social equilibria which allow individuals the greatest scope for choice, for satisfying that lust for possibilities. And it is is here that we begin to get the first hints that the strongly-bound traits of SF imply a political stance — because not all political conditions are equally favorable to scientific inquiry and the changes it may bring. Nor to individual choice.

The power to suppress free inquiry, to limit the choices and thwart the disruptive creativity of individuals, is the power to strangle the bright transcendant futures of optimistic SF. Tyrants, static societies, and power elites fear change above all else — their natural tendency is to suppress science, or seek to distort it for ideological ends (as, for example, Stalin did with Lysenkoism). In the narratives at the center of SF, political power is the natural enemy of the future.

SF fans and writers have always instinctively understood this. Thus the genre's long celebration of individualist anti-politics; thus its fondness for voluntarism and markets over state action, and for storylines in which (as in Heinlein's archetypal The Man Who Sold The Moon) scientific breakthrough and and free-enterprise economics blend into a seamless whole. These stances are not historical accidents, they are structural imperatives that follow from the lust for possibility. Ideological fashions come and go, and the field inevitably rediscovers itself afterwards as a literature of freedom.

This analysis should put permanently to rest the notion that hard SF is a conservative literature in any sense. It is, in fact, deeply and fundamentally radical — the literature that celebrates not merely science but science as a permanent revolution, as the final and most inexorable foe of all fixed power relationships everywhere.

Earlier, I cited the following traits of SF's libertarian tradition: ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that values knowing how things work and treats all political ideologizing with suspicion. All should now be readily explicable. These are the traits that mark the enemies of the enemies of the future.

The partisans of "Radical Hard SF" are thus victims of a category error, an inability to see beyond their own political maps. By jamming SF's native libertarianism into a box labeled "right wing" or "conservative" they doom themselves to misunderstanding the deepest imperatives of the genre.

The SF genre and libertarianism will both survive this mistake quite handily. They were symbiotic before libertarianism defined itself as a distinct political stance and they have co-evolved ever since. If four failed revolutions against Campbellian SF have not already demonstrated the futility of attempting to divorce them, I'm certain the future will.

2002-11-06T12:55:00.000-08:00

Post-postmodern politics:

The Democratic Party fell off a cliff last night. Never mind their shiny new governorships — the `smart' money pre-election was on them picking up an absolute majority of governor's seats, and at the Congressional level they took a shellacking nearly as bad as 1994's. The races Terry McAuliffe targeted as most critical — notably the Florida governorship — were all lost. And the big Democrat losses bucked historical trends — the mid-term election and the weak economy should have helped them.

We're going to hear a lot of gloating from Republicans and soul-searching from Democrats in the aftermath. The easy explanation is that 9/11 did the Democrats in; that American elected to get behind a president who seems to be handling the terror war with decisiveness, prudence, and strategic acumen.

I think this conventional wisdom is wrong. I think 9/11 merely exposed a longer-term weakness in the Democratic position, which is this: the Democrats have forgotten how to do politics that is about anything but politics. They're a post-modern political party, endlessly recycling texts that have little or no referent outside the discourse of politics itself.

The disgusting spectacle they made of Paul Wellstone's funeral is diagnostic. We were treated to trumpet calls about honoring Wellstone's legacy without any discussion beyond the most superficial cliches of what that legacy was. All the ritual invocations of time-honored Democratic shibboleths had a tired, shopworn, unreal and self-referential feel to them — politics as the literature of exhaustion.

The preconditions for paralysis had been building up for a long time; arguably, ever since the New Left beat out the Dixiecrats for control of the party apparat in 1968-1972. Caught between the blame-America-first, hard-left instincts of its most zealous cadres and the bland dishwater centrism recently exemplified by the DLC, the Democrats found it more and more difficult to be about anything at all. The trend was self-reinforcing; as Democratic strategy drifted, the party became ever more dependent on cooperation between dozens of fractious pressure groups (feminists, gays, race-baiters, the AARP, the teachers' and public-employee unions), which made the long-term drift worse.

Bill Clinton was the perfect master of political postmodernism and James Carville his prophet. For eight years they were able to disguise the paralysis and vacuum at the heart of Democratic thinking, centering party strategy on a cult of personality and an anything-but-Republicanism that was cunning but merely reactive. The Republicans cooperated with this strategy with all the naive eagerness of Charlie Brown running up to kick Lucy's football, perpetually surprised when it was snatched away at the last second, repeatedly taking pratfalls eagerly magnified by a Democratic-leaning national media.

But Bill Clinton was also a borderline sociopath and a liar, a man whose superficial charm, anything-to-get-elected energy, and utter lack of principle perfectly mirrored the abyss at the heart of the Democratic party. The greedy, glittery, soulless Wellstone-funeral fiasco was the last hurrah of Clintonism, and it cost Walter Mondale his last election fight.

Reality had to intrude sometime. The destruction of the WTC reduced all the politics-about-politics rhetoric of the Democrats to irrelevance. They stood mute in the face of the worst atrocity on American soil since Pearl Harbor, arguably the worst in U.S. history. The superficial reason was that their anti-terror policy was hostage to the party's left wing, but the deeper problem was that they long ago lost the ability to rise above petty interest-group jockying on any issue of principle at all. The most relevant adjective is not `wrong', or `evil', it's `feckless'.

Republicans, by contrast, forged a workable consensus during the Reagan years and never quite lost it. They've often been wrong, frequently been obnoxious as hell, and have their own loony fringe (abortion-clinic bombers, neo-fascists like Pat Buchanan, and the Christian Coalition) to cope with. But when Osama bin Laden demonstrated a clear and present danger to the United States of America they were able to respond.

They were able to respond not merely with reaction, but by taking a moral position against terrorism that could serve as the basis of an effective national strategy. Quarrel with "Homeland Security" all you like — but then imagine Al Gore in charge of defeating Al-Qaeda and shudder. He would actually have had to take the likes of Cynthia McKinney and Maxine Waters seriously.

I think these 2002 elections are going to turn out to have been much more of a turning point than the aborted `Republican Revolution' of 1994. Unless Bush's war strategy completely screws the pooch, he is going to completely walk over the Democratic candidate in 2004. The Democrats show no sign of developing a foreign-policy doctrine that can cope with the post-9/11 world, and their domestic-policy agenda is tired and retrogressive. Their voter base is aging, and their national leadership couldn't rummage up a better Wellstone replacement than Walter "What decade is this, anyway?" Mondale. The Democratic party could end up disintegrating within the decade.

This is not a prospect that fills me with uncomplicated glee. Right-wing statism is not an improvement on left-wing statism; a smug and dominant GOP could easily become captive to theocrats and know-nothings, a very bad thing for our nation and the world. And, unfortunately, the Libertarian Party has courted self-destruction by choosing to respond to 9/11 with an isolationism every bit as vapid and mindless as the left's "No War for Oil!" chanting.

Welcome to post-postmodern politics. Meaning is back, but the uncertainties are greater than ever.

2002-11-04T10:27:00.000-08:00

The Anti-Idiotarian-Manfesto is officially released:

It's out. The Manifesto site is here. The Manifesto has been submitted to PetitionOnline. To show your support, please add one of thw web buttons to your splash page.

2002-11-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

That bad old-time religion:

It's official. The anti-war movement is a Communist front.

No, I'm not kidding -- go read the story. Investigative reporter David Corn digs into last Saturday's D.C. antiwar rally and finds it was covertly masterminded by a Communist Party splinter originally founded in support of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. For good later, he further digs up the fact that one if the principal organizers of the inane "Mot In Our Name" petion is a revolutionary Maoist.

Words almost fail me. There are just too many levels of delicious, deadly irony here.

For starters, the U.S. revolutionary Communist movement has been reduced to organizing demonstrations in support of a fascist dictator with a history of brutally suppressing and murdering Communists in Iraq. OK, so there's precedent for this; the CPUSA organized anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. during the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939-41. It's still bleakly funny.

More generally the American Left seems bent on fulfilling every red-meat right-winger's most perfervid fantasies about it. All those earnest anti-war demonstrators were actual communist dupes! Oh, mama. Somewhere. Tailgunner Joe McCarthy is smiling. Who was it who said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce? (Turns out it was Karl Marx...)

Farce because, of course, Communism as an ideology capable of motivating mass revolutions is stone-dead. (Well, everywhere outside of Pyongyang and the humanities departments of U.S. universities, anyway.) At this point one can contemplate vestigial organs of Stalinism like the Revolutionary Communist Party with a sort of revolted pity, like portions of a vampire corpse still twitching because they haven't yet gotten the message about that stake through the heart.

If I were a conservative, I'd go into a roaring, vein-popping rant at this point. And, secretly I'd be damn glad for them Commies. They simplify things so much. Because there will be more stories like this one. All the Communists can accomplish by organizing the anti-war movement is to thoroughly discredit it — a fact our reporter (quite typical of U.S. journalists in that he both leans left and is too ignorant to notice how much of his world-view is Communism with the serial numbers filed off) notes with poorly-veiled regret.

So, by supporting a militarist fascist in Iraq, them commies are very likely to wind up increasing the influence of precisely the `reactionary' element in U.S. politics that they most abominate. Congratulations, comrades! Welcome to the International Capitalist Conspiracy!

2002-11-02T12:17:00.000-08:00

Another silly quiz:

What's *Your* Sex Sign?
More Great Quizzes from Quiz Diva

Hm. First I come out as "Lust" in the Seven Deadly Sins quiz, now this. Do we sense a pattern forming here?

2002-10-31T16:39:00.000-08:00

Armed children:

The Bear of Considerable Brain writes: "This does not mean every man, woman and child should roam the streets packing heat, much as some of my more rabid hoplophile colleagues in the Blogosphere might enjoy the sight."

N.Z. was probably thinking of me as one of his "rabid hoplophile colleagues."; I'd be rather disappointed if he weren't, actually. I endorse all his good sense about citizen miltias and the necessity of a decentralized response to decentralized threats; in fact, I wrote an essay on that topic the day of the WTC attack. Establishing it as normal custom that adults go armed strikes me as an excellent idea, and not merely as a tactic against terrorism and crime either. "The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave."

I was originally going to respond to His Ursinity's remark by tossing off some denial that I contemplate universally arming children as a response to terrorism. But I've decided it would be more interesting to attack the question from the opposite side: under what circumstances should children be armed?

If your answer is "Never!" than consider that this is actually quite a radical position. In large parts of the U.S., rather young children have and use BB rifles. In much of rural America, including most of my own state of Pennsylvania, boys learn to hunt early, and to accept both the weapons and responsibilities of men when barely into their teens.

The bloody slaughters nervous urban liberals would expect from this policy somehow never materialize. Kliebold and Harris, the Columbine shooters, were the exception that demonstrates the rule; they were not taught to use firearms within approved contexts by their parents and other adults, but instead developed a pathological, isolated relationship to weapons that mirrored their pathological, isolated lives. Their victims were not killed by the rural gun culture, but by its absence.

So part of our answer is this: children should be armed, at least part of the time when in company with responsible adults, in order to prepare them for the responsibility of arming themselves as adults and participating in civilian defense against terrorism and crime.

The next logical question is: under what circumstances should children be trusted to carry weapons for self-defense without direct adult supervision? Again, "Never!" would be a radical and historically exceptional answer. It would also be unfair to the children, especially poor children who live in areas where the chance of encountering criminal or terrorist predators is significant.

It's worth bearing in mind that most decisions about using a firearm in self-defense are pretty simple. They don't tend to involve complicated ethical abstractions — the relevant question is usually "Am I or a defenseless person I am responsible for in imminent danger of being assaulted, abducted or killed?" If the answer is no, you don't even draw your weapon.

Of course, the capacity to make those judgments varies from child to child. I have known intelligent, precocious children as young as eight years old who I would sooner trust with my .45 than, say, an adult alcoholic with an impulse-control problem. In fact, I wouldn't consider most adult pro-gun-control voters as trustworthy as the children I have in mind; people who project fear of their own behavior with weapons onto others make that spot between my shoulderblades itch.

At the other extreme, it's pretty obvious that pre-verbal children don't have the apparatus to make even the simplest ethical decisions about lethal force. They don't know enough about the world yet. The standard models of childhood development tell me the same thing as my experience of real kids; the on average, possibility of ethical competence sufficient for self-defense decisions opens up at around twelve years old. It is not invariably present at that age, but the possibility deserves to be taken seriously.

I can say this. If a person who is legally a minor but twelve or over shows signs of continuing responsibility (including either holding down a job or applying him/herself to make steady grades in school), and does not have a history of substance abuse or other self-destructive or criminal behavior, and wants to accept the responsibility of going armed — then I think custom should support that.

Finally, I want to point out that we may be doing children no favor by `protecting' them from the decisions that go with bearing arms. Thomas Jefferson once wrote to his teenage nephew as follows:

"As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives [only] moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion to your walks."

This was no aberration. I have developed elsewhere the theme that the practice of bearing arms was not important to the Founding Fathers merely as a counter against crime and overweening government, but as a school of moral character in the individual citizen.

The retreat of American gun culture from our cities and suburbs has coincided with the the fetishization of adolescence and the infantilization of our entire society. To reverse that trend, we need to remember the ways we used to use to encourage people to acquire self-discipline, character, and maturity. One of those ways was — and in large parts of the U.S., still is — the healthy use of lethal weapons.

2002-10-31T10:51:00.000-08:00

The capsaicinization of American food:

Consider spicy-hot food — and consider how recent it is as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. In 2002 many of us cheerfully chow down on Szechuan and Thai, habaneros and rellenos, nam pla and sambal ulek. Salsa outsells ketchup. But it wasn't always that way.

In fact it wasn't that way until quite recently, historically speaking. I've enjoyed capsaicin-loaded food since I was a pre-teen boy in the late 1960s; I acquired the taste from my father, who picked it up in South America. In those days our predilection was the peculiar trait of a minority of travelers and a few immigrant populations. The progression by which spicy-hot food went from there to the U.S. mainstream makes a perfect type case of cultural assimilation, and the role and meaning that the stuff has acquired on the way is interesting too.

(Oh. And for those of you who don't understand the appeal? It's all about endorphin rush, like a runner's high. Pepper-heads like me have developed a conditioned reflex whereby the burning sensation stimulates the release of opiate-like chemicals from the brainstem, inducing a euphoria not unlike a heroin buzz. Yes, this theory has been clinically verified.)

Baseline: Thirty years ago. The early 1970s. I'm a teenager, just back in the U.S. from years spent overseas. Spicy-hot food is pretty rare in American cuisine. Maybe you'd have heard of five-alarm chili if you'd lived in Texas, but chances are you'd never have actually eaten the stuff. If you're from Louisiana, you might have put Tabasco sauce on your morning eggs. Aside from that, you wouldn't have tasted hot peppers outside of a big-city Chinatown.

It's actually a little difficult to remember how different American cooking was then. Those were the years when Kool-Whip was cool and the casserole was king, an era of relentless blandness well-skewered by James Lileks's Gallery of Regrettable Food. Mom didn't know any better. Well, most moms didn't, anyway; mine had acquired a few clues overseas.

But most Americans of that day inherited the pale hues of British and German cooking. What zip there was in our cuisine came from immigrants, especially (at that time) Italians. Thai, Vietnamese and Ethiopian had not gained a foothold. Chinese was on educated peoples' radar but only eaten in restaurants; nobody owned a wok yet.

Indeed, Chinese food had already caught on in a few leading-edge subcultures by the mid-1970s: science-fiction fans, computer hackers, the people who would start to call themselves `geeks' fifteen years later. But most of what was available was Americanized versions of the blander Shanghainese and Cantonese varieties; restaurants that made a point of authenticity and advertised Szechuan and Hunan cooking to round-eyes were not yet common.

This all began to change in the early 1980s. The yuppies did it to us; experimentation with exotic and ethnic foods became a signature behavior of the young, upwardly mobile urban elite, and the variety of restaurants increased tremendously in a way that both met that demand and stimulated it. More importantly, cooking techniques and ingredients that hadn't been traditional in European cuisine started to influence home cooking — white people started buying woks. And Szechuan fire oil.

The first vogue for Cajun cooking around 1984 was, as I recall, something of a turning point. Chinese cooking was popular but still marked as `foreign'; Cajun was not. Spicy-hot gumbo joined five-alarm chili on the roster of all-American foods that were not only expected but required to deliver a hefty dose of capsaicin zap. I remember thinking the world was changing when, in 1987 or '88, I first saw spicy Cajun dishes on the menu of a white-bread roadside diner. In Delaware.

This diner was never going to show up in Michelin's or Zagat's; in fact, it was the next thing to a truck stop. Something else was going on in the 1980s besides yuppies buying woks — and that was the embrace of spicy-hot food by the small-town and rural working class, and its coding as a specifically masculine pleasure.

This probably evolved out of the tradition, going back at least to the late 1940s, of defining barbecue and chili as what an anthropologist would call a "men's mystery". Despite the existence of male professional chefs and men who can cook, most kinds of domestic cooking are indisputably a female thing — women are expected to be interested in it and expected to be good at it, and a man who acquires skill is crossing into women's country. But for a handful of dishes culturally coded as "men's food", the reverse is true. Barbecue and chili top that list, and have since long before spicy-hot food went mainstream.

For people who drive pickup trucks, spicy-hot food went from being a marked minority taste to being something like a central men's mystery in the decade after 1985. I first realized this in the early 1990s when I saw a rack of 101 hot-pepper sauces on display at a gun-and-knife show, in between the premium tobacco and the jerked meat. There's a sight you won't see at a flower show, or anywhere else in women's country.

The packaging and marketing of hot sauces tells the same story. From the top-shelf varieties like Melinda's XXX (my favorite!) to novelty items like "Scorned Woman" and "Hot Buns", much of the imagery is cheeky sexiness clearly designed to appeal to men.

Nor is it hard to understand why the association got made in the first place. It's considered masculine to enjoy physical risk, even mostly trivial physical risks like burning yourself on a sauce hotter than you can handle. Men who like hot peppers swap capsaicin-zap stories; I myself am perhaps unreasonably proud of having outlasted a tableful of Mexican college students one night in Monterrey, watching them fall out one by one as a plate of sauteed habaneros was passed repeatedly around the table.

There's a sneaky element of female complicity in all this. Women chuckle at our capsaicin-zap stories the same way they laugh at other forms of laddish posturing, but then (as my wife eloquently puts it) "What good is a man if you rip off his balls?" They leave us capsaicin and barbecue and other men's mysteries because they instinctively grok that a certain amount of testosterone-driven male-primate behavior is essential for the health of Y-chromosome types — and best it should be over something harmless.

This gastronomic pincer movement — Yuppies pushing spicy food downmarket, truckers and rednecks pushing it upmarket — coincided with the rise in cultural influence of Hispanics with a native tradition of spicy-hot food. In retrospect, it's interesting that what mainstream America naturalized was jalapenos rather than Chinese-style fire oil. Tex-Mex assimilated more readily than Szechuan, as it turned out.

We can conveniently date that mainstreaming from the year salsa first passed ketchup in sales volume, 1996. Perhaps not by coincidence, that's the first year I got gifted with a jar of homegrown habaneros. They came to me from an Irish ex-biker, a take-no-shit ZZ-Top lookalike who runs a tire dealership in the next town over. He'd be a great guy to have with you in a bar fight, but nobody who would ever be accused of avant-garde tastes. I guess that was when I realized spicy-hot food had become as all-American as apple pie.

2002-10-28T18:53:00.000-08:00

Why We Fight — An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto:

This is the final draft version; changes since version 5 have been slight and editorial in nature, as will be any further changes. Thanks to the hundreds of people who contributed feedback and helpful suggestions. I'm contemplating where and how to permanantly host it now.

Brian O'Connell has supplied this excellent button for JavaScript-aware browsers:

And Erica from Sperari has suppiled a very tasteful static button:

WHEREAS, the year since the terrible events of 9/11 has exposed the vacuity and moral confusion of all too many of the thinkers, politicians, and activists operating within conventional political categories;

WHEREAS, the Left has failed us by succumbing to reflexive anti-Americanism; by apologizing for terrorist acts; by propounding squalid theories of moral equivalence; and by blaming the victims of evil for the act of evil;

WHEREAS, the Right has failed us by pushing `anti-terrorist' measures which bid fair to be both ineffective and prejudicial to the central liberties of a free society; and in some cases by rhetorically descending to almost the same level of bigotry as our enemies;

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of the anti-idiotarian position:

THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery, slavery, and fanaticism;
THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated the scope of their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;
THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any signicant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace and discredit those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacable assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

IN GRAVE KNOWLEDGE that the state of war brings out the worst in both individual human beings and societies, we reject the alternative of ceding to the world's barbarians the exclusive privilege of force;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT speedy American and allied military action against the rogue states that support terrorism, both as a means of alleviating the immediate threat and of deterring future state sponsorship of terrorism by the threat of war to the knife.

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot and should not be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and duty to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrow of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Left -- the moral blindness that refuses to recognize that free markets, individual liberty, and experimental science have made the West a fundamentally better place than any culture in which jihad, 'honor killings', and female genital mutilation are daily practices approved by a stultifying religion.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

WE ARE MEMBERS OF A CIVILIZATION, and we hold that civilization to be worth defending. We have not sought war, but we will fight it to the end. We will fight for our civilization in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.

WE HAVE AWAKENED; we have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much to enable and excuse their evil. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL REMEMBER that the West's keenest weapons are reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted and hollow, sowing trouble for the future.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to win their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states:

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			28 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

2002-10-20T04:16:00.000-07:00

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 5):

Changes are deliberately not marked. Read the whole thing, this is a final pre-publication draft. Most of the changes from version 4 are deletions of excess verbiage.

Counting email, this now reflects approximately 200 comments from across the blogosphere. Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. Since this process has to close sometime, I'm declaring that there wuill be at most one pre-publication draft.

I will post a fair copy of the final version. For legal purposes, this work is ©2002 by Eric S. Raymond. Email me for distribution terms -- I'm not especially interested in making money from it, but I want some artistic control of how it's used.

However, this may not happen for a week, as I am about to go on the Linux Lunacy Caribbean cruise.

Brian O'Connell has supplied this excellent button for JavaScript-aware browsers:

And Erica from Sperari has suppiled a very tasteful static button:

These buttons will be included with the final version.

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the premises of the anti-idiotarian position:

THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
THAT the terrorists and their state sponsors have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues: against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery, slavery, and fanaticism;
THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated the scope of their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;
THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamist terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE DECLARE that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of mankind, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and duty to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			17 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

2002-10-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

A request to web artists:

I am planning on publishing the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto soon, via petitiononline.com and possibly other channels. My hope is that enough bloggers will sign it and talk about it to get the position it describes some notice in the more blog-friendly of the mainstream media.

Towards this end, I'm seeking volunteers to design a web button for the Manifesto. Use your imagination -- but I'm thinking a design using the letters A I M in red, white and blue might be appropriate.

2002-10-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 4):

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue; changes from 3 to 4 are marked in purple.

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and by their own culture's failures;
THAT the terrorists have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from savagery, slavery, and fanaticism;
THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;
THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as rabid dogs are.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the forcible overthrowing of the governments of Iraq and of other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction; and the occupation of those nations until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a a Christian-chauvinist political agenda that echoes the religious absolutism of our enemies.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians, who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL DEMAND as citizens and voters that those we delegate to lead pursue the war against terror with an unflagging will to victory and all means necessary — while remaining always mindful that in the process of fighting the enemy we must not stoop to the enemy's level of contempt for human rights and dignity, must not become what we fight;

WE SHALL REMEMBER that in this struggle more than previous conventional wars, the West's keenest weapons are reason and the truth; that it is our obligation as citizens to insist on reason and the truth; that we must shine a pitiless light on the lies from which terrorist hatred is built; and that we must also be vigilant against the expedient lie from our own side, lest our victories become tainted and hollow, leaving root causes unaddressed and sowing trouble for the future.

WE HAVE FAITH that we are equal to these challenges; we shall not be paralyzed by fear of the enemy, nor yet by fear of ourselves;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			17 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

2002-10-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 3):

(Please see my main page for the latest version 4)

Substantive changes from version 1 to 2 are marked in red; changes from 2 to 3 are marked in blue. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal to a wider audience it is necessary to excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable with.

I have removed the paragraph about profiling, not out of political correctness but because I have been presented with good arguments that profiling is easy for terrorists to game against (and apparently they have often done so in Israel).

It has been suggested that I should add the heroes of Flight 93 to the list of those we swear shall not have died in vain. But they had already achieved that; they saved many lives and provided a moral example which shall not be forgotten.

Congratulations to the trivia spotters who identified "to be dealt with as wolves are" as a quote from H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. Jerry Pournelle did, I believe, quote it in Prince Of Sparta. I had always assumed Piper was referring to the Viking sentence of outlawry, in which the outlaw was declared a "wolf's head". Apparently there is a 1703 historical cite from the US as well.

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to the enemy is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and Islam's failures;
THAT the terrorists have declared and are pursuing a war not against the vices of Western civilization but against its core virtues; against the freedom of thought and speech and conscience, against the life of reason; against the equality of women, against pluralism and tolerance; against, indeed, all the qualities which separate civilized human beings from bestiality, slavery, and fanaticism;
THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;
THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger in combination with them, a danger demonstrated by his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm airline pilots, and to recognize as well the ordinary citizen's right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian-identity chauvinism that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our enemies.

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

2002-10-16T23:12:00.000-07:00

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto (version 2):

(Please see version 3 on my main page.)

Substantive changes from version 1 are marked in red. I think the changes largely speak for themselves. I will say that I think some of the criticisms I received reflect a conservative bias in the blogosphere population, and that for appeal to a wider audience it is necessary to excoriate the Right a little harder than a lot of people here will be completely comfortable with.

Major trivia points to anyone who can identify the source of the phrase I was quoting in my first draft, the longer form of which reads "we declare them the enemies of all men, to be dealt with as wolves are". And no, a Web search won't do it.

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to the enemy is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and Islam's failures;
THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice even without weapons of mass destruction;
THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as feral beasts are.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness' requires us not to notice the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the population.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members of the Islamo-fascist terror network;

WE SUPPORT, in recognition of the fact that the military and police cannot be everywhere, efforts to meet the distributed threat with a distributed response; to arm not merely airline pilots but ordinary citizens, and to recognize the citizen's right and obligation to respond to terrorist aggression with effective force.

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear/chemical/biological blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent ideologies from the face of the Earth.

THIS WE SWEAR, on the graves of those who died at the World Trade Center; and those who died in the Sari Club in Bali; and those who died on the U.S.S. Cole; and indeed on the graves of all the nameless victims in the Middle East itself who have been slaughtered by terrorism and rogue states;

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

			Eric S. Raymond
			16 October 2002

			____________________
			(your signature here)

2002-10-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

Draft for an Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto:

Note: I have left this up for the record, but there is a version 2 now with improvements suggested by feedback. See my main page for the new version).

WHEREAS, even many of the Libertarians from whom we expected more intelligence have retreated into a petulant isolationism, refusing to recognize that, at this time, using the state to carry the war to the enemy is our only practical instrument of self-defense;

WE THEREFORE ASSERT the following convictions as the basis of the anti-idiotarian position:

THAT Western civilization is threatened with the specter of mass death perpetrated by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons placed in the hands of terrorists by rogue states;
THAT the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attack, and its lesser sequels, are motivated by a combination of religious fanaticism and a smoldering resentment of the West's success and Islam's failures;
THAT no adjustments of American or Western foreign policy, or concessions to the Palestinians, or actions taken against globalization, or otherwise worthy efforts to alleviate world poverty, are of more than incidental interest to these terrorists;
THAT, upon their own representation, they will not by dissuaded from their violence by any surrender less extreme than the imposition of Islam and shari'a law on the kaffir West;
THAT, as said terrorists have demonstrated the willingness to use civilian airliners as flying bombs to kill thousands of innocent people, we would commit a vast crime of moral negligence if we underestimated their future malice;
THAT they have sought, and on plausible evidence found, alliance with rogue states such as Iraq and North Korea; states that are known to have active programs working towards the development and delivery of weapons that would multiply the terrorists' ability to commit atrocities by a thousandfold;
THAT Saddam Hussein poses a particularly clear and present danger through his known efforts to develop nuclear weapons, his use of chemical weapons even on his own population, his demonstrated willingness to commit aggression against peaceful neighbors, and his known links to the Islamic terror network in Palestine and elsewhere.

WE THEREFORE AFFIRM that both the terrorists and their state sponsors have made themselves outlaws from the moral community of man, to be dealt with as wolves are.

WE FURTHER AFFIRM that the `root cause' of Islamo-fascist terrorism lies in the animating politico-religious ideas of fundamentalist Islam and not in any significant respect elsewhere, and that a central aim of the war against terror must be to displace, discredit, and destroy those animating ideas.

WE REJECT, as a self-serving power grab by the least trustworthy elements of our own side, the theory that terrorist depredations can be effectively prevented by further restrictions on the right of free speech, or the right of peacible assembly, or the right to bear arms in self-defense; and we strenuously oppose police-state measures such as the imposition of national ID cards or airport-level surveillance of public areas;

WE REJECT the theory that `fairness' requires us not to notice and use the dominant gender, age range, ethnic character and religion of our terrorist enemies; and we urge the systematic use of such profiling to both make anti-terrorist screening more effective and reduce the overall intrusiveness of anti-terror measures on the majority of the population.

WE SUPPORT the efforts of the United States of America, its allies, and the West to hunt down and and capture or kill individual members of the Islamic terror network;

WE SUPPORT, as an alternative greatly preferable to future nuclear blackmail of the West, the conquest and occupation of Iraq and other nations that combine sponsorship of terrorism with the possession of weapons of mass destruction, until such time as the root causes of terrorism have been eradicated from their societies.

WE DEFINE IDIOTARIANISM as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and dictators operating outside it.

WE REJECT the idiotarianism of the Right -- whether it manifests as head-in-the-sand isolationism or as a Christian religious chauvinism and bigotry that all but mirrors the Islamo-fascist fanaticism of our self-declared enemies.

WE HAVE AWAKENED. We have seen the face of evil in the acts of the Bin Ladens and Husseins and Arafats of the world; we have seen through the lies and self-delusions of the idiotarians who did so much both to make their evil possible before the fact and to deny and excuse it afterwards. We shall not flinch from our duty to confront that evil.

WE SHALL SHED the moral cowards and the appeasers and the apologists; and we shall fight the barbarians and fanatics, and we shall defeat them. We shall defeat them in war, crushing their dream of dominion; and we shall defeat them in peace, using our wealth and freedoms to seduce their women and children to civilized ways, and ultimately wiping their diseased and virulent culture from the face of the Earth.

YOU SHALL NOT HAVE DIED IN VAIN.

					Eric S. Raymond
					16 October 2002

					____________________
					(your signature here)

2002-09-25T00:44:00.000-07:00

Failsafe:

I just sent the following letter to the Boston Globe after reading Elaine Scarry's excellent piece Failsafe!:

Congratulations on having the bravery to publish Elaine Scarry's "Failsafe". She is right to point out that distributed threats require distributed countermeasures. She is right to point out that centralized defense of the U.S. massively failed us. She is right to point out that the founders of the U.S. envisioned citizens, not standing armies, as the backbone of the nation's defense.

After all that argument and build-up, it is only unfortunate that she stopped short of the logical conclusion: that to prevent future hijackings, the logical course is to arm the passengers.

The extension to other situations involving crime, terrorism, and politics (insofar as the three are distinguishable at all) is left as an exercise for the reader.

2002-09-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

Defeating Hussein Without Government:

The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.

For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America could be better defended by have no government than by the system we have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but with the capability to inflict a world of grief on an invader -- and with nobody having the authority to tell them to surrender. We could have a home defense better than Switzerland's, our larger population and longer distances doing for us what mountainous terrain does for the Swiss.

There would still be a place in an anarchist America for professional soldiers -- not many, but a few heavy troop formations would be kept on retainer by consortia of insurance companies. Yes, I said insurance companies, that's because how free markets socialize shared risks. Normal law enforcement would be funded by pools set up by vendors of crime insurance looking to reduce their payouts; national defense and overseas power projection (to the extent the term still had meaning in a stateless society) would be funded by people who bought war insurance (say, businesses with overseas assets to protect).

These measures, I was and am convinced, would stop conventional wars of conquest dead in their tracks. Invade a nation of 350,000,000 libertarians, most of them routinely armed? Yeah. Right. Any War-College-trained military officer will tell you that urban warfare against guerrillas on their home ground chews up armies faster than anything else. Witness Stalingrad.

Without a government, many of the reasons people might go to war against America would also vanish. No entangling alliances, no foreign policy to object to. Conventional terrorism would become a lot dicier proposition in a libertarian anarchy, too -- as in Israel, where armed civilians have on numerous occasions thwarted attempted massacres by shooting back. And, of course, the WTC would probably still be standing if the passengers had been armed...

I grew up in the shadow of the Soviet threat. Theirs was an evil, evil system, but they were at bottom geopolitically rational. They calculated their chances very cold-bloodedly, and never pushed the big red button. An ungoverned America would have stood them off, I believe, long enough for the inevitable Hayekian collapse to remove the problem.

But now we face the prospect of weapons of mass destruction dropping into the hands of people who are behaviorally indistinguishable from stone psychotics. That prospect poses problems of a different nature than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever did. Because what Al-Qaeda wants is not driven or constrained by geopolitics, by pragmatism, by a rational estimation of risk and reward. They have no population to answer to even in the limited sense that Hitler and Stalin did. They were madmen, but they were constrained by the necessities of leading a country.

Under the present system, I see no alternative to state action as a way to suppress this threat, up to and including conventional warfare and the proconsular occupation of significant parts of the Arab world. I am not happy with this evaluation; war is the health of the State, and statism is the most lethal enemy humanity will ever know short of a giant meteor strike (those who think this statement hyperbolic are recommended to read Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror"). The question that drives this essay is whether, supposing the U.S. were to become a market anarchy, there would be other means to the same end.

It's a tough case. Al-Qaeda would not hate us any less; it is not, at bottom, U.S. policy that enrages them, it is the fact of our wealth and freedom and refusal to submit to the One True Way of Allah. An ungoverned America, more wealthy and more free by the exact measure that its productive capacity is spent efficiently on a network of security agencies and judicial associations rather than being wasted on the support of parasitic government, would hardly enrage them less.

Al-Qaeda in itself is not an exceptional threat; in a properly armed society the 9/11 hijackers would never even have tried their stunt, because they would known that the certain outcome was death in a hail of civilian bullets. It is the combination of Al-Qaeda-like suicidal fanaticism with state sponsorship (specifically the ability to produce chemical/biological/nuclear weapons) that strains the anarcho-libertarian theory of national self-defense, It does so by dramatically lowering the cost of aggression for both sets of bad guys; the fanatics get the capability to strike a hammer-blow at the Great Satan, and their state sponsors get deniable cat's paws.

It is worth pointing out, however, that it strains the statist theory of self-defense almost as badly. A governed U.S. has the neo-imperialist option (conquer Iraq, install Colin Powell as miltary governor, and try to transform the place as we transformed Japan), and that may even appear to be the option with the lowest odds of catastrophic failure, but we don't actually have any clue whether this will actually work -- Al-Qaeda might well be able to get their bombs from the failing states of former-Soviet Central Asia, or from North Korea. The historical situation is truly unprecedented.

Harder than the theoretical problem, perhaps, is the practical one. How to oppose that expansion of state power without acting as an unwilling enabler for the terrorists? In some ways that's easy; pushing to abolish all the police-state bullshit at airports is a no-brainer, since tiger-team tests of the system consistently show that none of it has made smuggling weapons on board more difficult (now, as before 9/11, approximately 30% of attempts succeed).

In a wider sense, though, it's a very difficult question. One I will be thinking about -- and possibly writing about -- in the coming months.

2002-09-19T03:02:00.000-07:00

Imperialists by necessity?

Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does). I think he is also right to say that our long-term objective must be to break, crush and eventually destroy this culture, because we can't live on the same planet with people who both carry those memes and have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will hate us and seek to destroy us not for what we've done but for what we are.

I wonder if Steve sees what this implies in the longer time horizon, though? The cultures that produced Al-Qaeda, despite swimming in oil wealth that should have made it easy, have failed in all essential ways to join the modern world. They mutilate the genitalia of the female half of their population, they educate only a vanishingly small number of scientists and engineers, and their politics is a perpetual brawl conducted by tribes with flags. Their capability to get with even the 20th century on their own has been tested and found wanting, let alone the 21st.

Steve may well be right that the only solution to a festering boil like Iraq or Saudi Arabia starts with military defeat, Western occupation, and a forced restructuring of society along the lines of what Douglas MacArthur did to the Japanese after 1945.

I used to think we could corrupt Islamism out of existence, make it fat and lazy with cheap consumer goods and seduce it with porn. Maybe that would be the best way to go if we had two generations to solve the problem. But if the likes of Hussein is breeding botulism and about to get his hands on nukes, we've run out of time. We can't afford the soft option if the price of futzing around might be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, or over Tel Aviv.

We must win. And we must impose our will and our culture on the losers, not for old-fashioned reasons like gold or oil or craving conquest, but because the likely alternative is nuclear megadeath, plague in our home cities, and the smell of Sarin in the morning. Is there anyone left who doubts that Saddam Hussein, who nerve-gassed Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands in the 1980s, would use nukes if he had them?

There's a word for the process of conquering a third-world pesthole and imposing your culture on it. It's called imperialism.

In the 19th century, the Western powers built empires for prestige and economic advantage. In the 21st century, we may be discovering that we need to get back into the imperialism business as a matter of survival. It may turn out that the 20th century was an interlude doomed to end as cheap transportation made the world smaller and improving weapons technology made large-scale destruction inexpensive even for barbarian thugs like Saddam Hussein.

Envy the British of Sir Richard Burton's time. They could conquer half the world for simple gain without worrying about the Fuzzy-Wuzzies or the Ndebele aerosol-dropping pasteurella pestis on Knightsbridge. We -- and I mean specifically the U.S. now -- may have to conquer the Islamic world a second time, simply because the risks of war and the moral hazards of imperialism are less threatening than the prospect of some Allah-crazed Islamofascist detonating a knapsack nuke on the Smithsonian Mall.

I'm not joking about the moral hazards of imperialism, either. They may be a more serious danger to a free society than the short-term exigencies of war. Witness the fact that I, a radical libertarian anarchist for more than twenty years, find myself arguing for a position not all that easy to distinguish from reactionary military expansionism. Urgent survival threats make strange bedfellows. And it is all too plausible that. if we take this path, we might degenerate from imperialists by necessity to imperialists by habit and predilection.

Still. Reality is what it is. If there's no way short of straight-up imperialism and nation-building all over the Islamic world to prevent a holocaust on American or European soil that would make 9/11 look like a garden party, then that's what we're going to have to do -- civilize the barbarians at the point of a gun.

There is precedent; the British did a pretty good job of civilizing India and we did a spectacularly effective one on Japan. And the U.S. would be well equipped to do it again; our economy is now so large that we could run a globe-spanning empire from the petty-cash drawer. Seriously. The U.S, a hyperpower so dominant that no imaginable coalition of other nations could defeat it at conventional warfare, spends a ridiculously low percentage of GNP (3%) on its military.

Civilizing the barbarians needn't even be a bloody process if you start the job right after their will has been smashed by a major defeat in war. The U.S. burned essentially every major Japanese city except Kyoto to the ground with incendiaries during World War Two and then atom-bombed two of them. This seemed to help. It would be nice if we didn't have to get so drastic this time, but it might come to that yet; judging by measures like relative GDP and number of Nobel prizes earned, the Arab/Islamic world is actually further behind the civilization curve than the Japanese were in their militarist phase. They may need to be smashed flatter before a latter-day MacArthur will be able to do anything with them.

Some of my readers will be screaming in horror. Imperialism? Barbarians? How dare I use such language? How dare I argue that the U.S. has the right to commit deliberate cultural genocide?

There's a big hole in the ground in Manhattan. That's my argument.

If Pearl Harbor was good enough reason for us to conquer Japan and run it like a proconsulate until the Japanese learned manners, then 9/11 was damn good and sufficient reason for us to do the same number on the Islamists. That meant Afghanistan, it means Iraq, and down the road it may mean Saudi Arabia as well.

History is not over.

2002-09-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

So, Howell Raines Isn't a complete waste of air:

The NYT ran a pro-Linux editorial today.

That's good. They had to slip their "communitarian" spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping Mother Jones readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.

Hah. If they only knew. I'm not going to say my gun-toting red-meat libertarianism is typical, because it isn't. Actually the mass centroid of hackers' politics is a lot like the blogosphere's, a sort of soft-libertarianism-leaning-towards-conservatism or vice-versa (the centroid used to be further left but a lot has changed in the last decade). Much less radical than me, but still enough to give the likes of Raines a bad case of the vapors.

But let's keep that our little secret, OK? If Raines wants to believe that open-source people are some kind of cross between Greenpeace and the Ethical Culture Society, that's just fine. We'll take the Gray Lady's backing. It's another small step on the road to world domination.

The day will come when we will be the guys running the world's entire digital infrastructure (not such a stretch; we already run the Internet). Our example will teach Howell's kids stuff about the power of decentralization and voluntary cooperation, all the things leftists pay lip-service to until the last second before they'd have to actually apply them. And the world will change out from under him. Subtly. Powerfully. And in ways he can't guess at yet.

It should be a fun ride.

2002-09-17T03:37:00.000-07:00

Living With Microsoft:

In today's episode of the Microsoft follies, we learned that Media Player 9 is un-uninstallable. Deliberately.

A Microsoft spokesthing confirmed that Media Player 9 is so deeply integrated into the operating system that it cannot be removed without doing a `system restore'. Which, incidentally, will wipe out your Office installation.

It's at times like this that, contemplating Microsoft users, one feels as though one is wandering among people lashing themselves with stinging nettles until blood runs off them in rivulets. One wants to know why they don't just stop. One is told "But it's the standard!"

One shakes one's head bemusedly.

They pay heavily for the privilege of lashing themselves, too. Except for those blessed, blissful occasions on which they pay still more, grease themselves, bend over, and prepare to be buggered by a chainsaw. That's called a "System Upgrade".

One contemplates the uptime figures on one's Linux box and feels — admit it! — a bit smug.

2002-09-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

I have spawned, or respawned, something:

I've just been informed that I now have a second blogchild. Cigar, anybody?

2002-09-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

When there's nothing left to say, self-parody is the way:

I'm just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of the 1960s and 1970s. I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and I disagree with the anti-war Left's agitation against a war on Iraq today. But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag these days, I wonder if I'm getting old and allowing a golden haze to cloud my recollection of past decades. Because I find myself feeling almost nostalgic for the anti-Vietnam-war Left.

Yes, yes, I still think "Hanoi Jane" and her crowd were basically wrong. Wrong about the consequences of a North Vietnamese victory (Communists turn out to be murderously repressive — what a shock!); wrong about the motives and interests of the U.S.; wrong about almost everything except the level of incompetence, buffoonery, and myopia afflicting the generals and politicians running that war.

But there was one important difference. The anti-Vietnam-war Left may have been deluded and prone to masturbating in front of Che Guevara posters...but if you sifted through enough of their ranting you could detect the outlines of a principled case, or several principled cases. There was one argument on which they persuaded me; though I was not of draftable age, I found I agreed with them that the military draft was an intolerable form of slavery years before I encountered Robert Heinlein's pithy objurgation that "A nation that cannot find enough volunteers to defend itself will not survive — and does not deserve to."

But try as I might, I can't detect a principled case anywhere in today's anti-war Left. Which is all the more curious since I think they could be making one. Several, in fact: starting with the argument that we should abandon the path of war not even because of what it does to our enemies but because of what it does to ourselves. At every level from the personal to the political, warfare is a brutalizing experience that erodes our freedoms and empowers the nastiest elements of human psyches and societies.

There are principled responses to that case, but that particular argument is not my point. My point is that today's anti-war rhetoric, as exemplified by reports on a planned September 11 "Teach-In and Panel regarding Oppression" at UCLA, never seems to even confront the question of whether war against Afghanistan and Iraq is justified by the Islamist threat. Instead, the topic is "U.S. Law and Policy Against Immigrants of Color", as if there is any kind of equivalence between the U.S.'s border policies and the catastrophic mass murder of 2,500 people.

There is a curious kind of evasiveness at work here. We can see it at work in the arid deconstructionism of Susan Sontag's NYT op-ed, Real Battles and Empty Metaphors. Even the title announces that she's going to lucubrate about the relationship between language and reality, not confront reality itself. A similar denial is evident it the rhetoric of Noam Chomsky; prodded for commentary on the war, he recites a litany of past American wrongdoing as if that somehow banishes the question of how soon Saddam Hussein will have nuclear weapons and what he will do with them when he gets them.

Maybe I'm getting senile, but it seems to me that the Left of my teens was in better contact with reality than today's crew. There really was a military-industrial complex and the desire for war profits probably did drive some of the political support for the Vietnam war. The military-industrial complex is still with us today, but the Left seems to have forgotten even the little it once knew about political economics and isn't even bothering to raise that issue. Perhaps this amnesia is a post-traumatic effect of watching Marx take a header into the dustbin of history; we've come to strange days indeed when I have to conclude that my libertarian self could easily write a better Marxist critique of Dubya's war propaganda than anyone on the Left has yet issued in public.

Instead, what we're seeing is a rhetoric that is half a retreat into language-chopping and half an expression of contempt for the U.S. — contempt so out of balance that it's doomed to be tuned out by anyone less far to the left than the unlamented former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.

When did the Left descend into such empty self-parody? And why?

Watching "real existing socialism" self-destruct must have been part of it. I speculated on the psychological effects of that political collapse in a previous essay Socialists to the Stars, about Scottish SF writers Ken McLeod and Iain Banks. But something weirder and more diffuse happened to the Left on this side of the pond, and I'm not sure what it was.

Some days I wonder if Greg Egan, the reclusive West Australian author who has produced some of the best hard SF of the last decade, may not have called it right in the following passage from his novel "Teranesia":

"Feminism was working, and the civil rights movement was working, and all the other social justice movements were getting more and more support. So, in the 1980s, the CIA [...] hired some really clever linguists to invent a secret weapon; an incredibly complicated way of talking about politics that didn't actually make any sense, but which spread through all the universities in the world, because it sounded so impressive. And at first, the people who talked like this just hitched their wagon to the social justice movements, and everyone else let them come along for the ride, because they seemed harmless. But then they climbed on board the peace train and threw out the driver."

"So instead of going to the people in power and saying, `How about upholding the universal principles you claim to believe in?' the people in the social justice movements ended up saying things like `My truth narrative is in conflict with your truth marrative!'. And the people in power replied `Woe is me! You've thrown me into the briar patch!' And everyone else said `Who are these idiots? Why should we trust them when they can't even speak properly?' And the CIA was happy. And the people in power were happy. And the secret weapon lived on in the universities for years and years, because everyone who'd played a part in the conspiracy was too embarrassed to admit what they'd done,"

Egan's account is implausible only because it seems unlikely that the CIA is quite that subtle. But he's right in pointing out that the rise of the language of postmodernism — the sterile, involuted, pseudo-profundity famously skewered by the Sokal Hoax — seems to be an important correlate of the decline of the American Left.

Self-parody is where you end up when you have nothing left to say. And when all you can talk about is `discourse' that's a damn short road.

2002-09-10T22:59:00.000-07:00

One year later...

One year ago today, the World Trade Center fell in flames. And that very day, just a few hours after the event, I wrote the following:

Some friends have asked me to step outside my normal role as a technology evangelist today, to point out in public that a political panic reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack could do a great deal more damage than the attack itself.

Today will not have been a victory for terrorism unless we make it one. If we reward in any way the Palestinians who are now celebrating this hideous crime in the streets of the West Bank, that will have been a victory for terrorism. If we accept "anti-terrorism" measures that do further damage to our Constitutional freedoms, that will have been a victory for terrorism. But if we learn the right lessons, if we make policies that preserve freedom and offer terrorists no result but a rapid and futile death, that will have been a victory for the rest of us.

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer. At least four separate terror teams were able to sail right past all the elaborate obstacles -- the demand for IDs, the metal detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly useless -- and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center lies the proof of their failure.

We have learned today that increased surveillance is not the answer. The FBI's "Carnivore" tap on the U.S.'s Internet service providers didn't spot or prevent this disaster; nor did the NSA's illegal Echelon wiretaps on international telecommunications. Video monitoring of public areas could have accomplished exactly nothing against terrorists taking even elementary concealment measures. If we could somehow extend airport-level security to the entire U.S., it would be just as useless against any determined and even marginally competent enemy.

We have learned today that trying to keep civilian weapons out of airplanes and other areas vulnerable to terrorist attack is not the answer either -- indeed, it is arguable that the lawmakers who disarmed all the non-terrorists on those four airplanes, leaving them no chance to stop the hijackers, bear part of the moral responsibility for this catastrophe.

I expect that in the next few months, far too many politicians and pundits will press for draconian "anti-terrorist" laws and regulations. Those who do so will be, whether intentionally or not, cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to destroy our way of life -- and we should all remember that fact come election time.

As an Internet technologist, I have learned that distributed problems require distributed solutions -- that centralization of power, the first resort of politicians who feed on crisis, is actually worse than useless, because centralizers regard the more effective coping strategies as threats and act to thwart them.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best hope for preventing recurrences of today's mass murders almost certainly lies.

If we learn that lesson, perhaps today's deaths will not have been in vain.

As I reread the above, it does not seem to me that we have yet learned our lesson. We have taken steps towards arming pilots, but not passengers. Tiger-team probes of airport security have shown that the rate at which weapons can be smuggled through remains 30% -- unchanged since before 9/11. A year later, therefore, the frisk searches of little old ladies and the no-sharp-edges prohibitions have bought us no security at all.

The scorecard is not entirely bleak. Al-Qaeda has not been able to mount another successful mass murder. Post-9/11 legal changes through the Patriot Act and related legislation have been troubling, but not disastrous. And the war against the Taliban was a rather less complicated success than one might have expected -- civilian casualties minimal, no uprising of the mythical "Arab Street", and Al-Qaeda's infrastructure smashed. Osama bin-Laden is probably dead.

Still, the war is far from over. Islamic terrorism has not been repudiated by the ulema, the college of elders who prescribe the interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith. The call to violent jihad wired into the foundations of Islam has not yet been broken or tamed into a form civilization can coexist with. Accomplishing that is the true challenge that faces us, one greater and more subtle than merely military victory.

2002-07-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

Right back at ya, Captain:

Last Saturday morning in San Diego I had breakfast with Steven den Beste, the redoubtable captain of U.S.S. Clueless. One of the side-effects of that meeting was a long critique of open-source development. Herewith my response.

Steve and I agree on the scaling problem that has pushed software development efforts to the ragged edge of what is sustainable even by corporations with lots of money. Software project sizes are roughly doubling every eighteen months, and for reasons Steve alluded to the expected bug count per thousand lines is actually rising.

My assertion is that software development has reached a scale at which (a) even large corporations can often no longer afford to field enough developers to be effective at today's project scales, and (b) traditional methods of software quality assurance (ranging from formal methods to internal walkthroughs) are no longer effective. The only development organizations that seem to thrive on today's complexity regime are open-source teams.

Note that I am not claiming that open source is a silver bullet for the software-complexity problem. There are no silver bullets, no permanent solutions. What I am claiming is that at the leading edge of large-scale software, closed-source development doesn't work any more. The future belongs to open source plus whatever other practices and technologies we learn to use with it to develop at ever-higher scales of complexity.

Steve's analysis of the open-source phenomenon is very intelligent, but doesn't quite understand either the mode of organization, the associated technology, or the factional politics within the movement. Diagnostic of the slight disconnect is when he writes "For [the zealots], the only true "Open Source" is governed by the strong form of the GPL, and all other forms and licenses are harmful dilution of the concept." In fact, the people he's talking about reject the term "open source" entirely and insist on the ideologically-loaded term "free software".

A more serious error is when he writes "It is plausible that an OSS project would require each participant to sign an NDA before being given access to the source." It is not plausible. The licenses and community values of the open-source community would not permit this. His two bullet points characterizing open source are missing its most important characteristic: the entire practice is designed to facilitate scrutiny by people with no institutional or contract relationship to the core development team. The astringent effect of peer review by people who have nothing to lose by reporting bugs is precisely the point of the whole game.

Steve doesn't undertand the importance or the power of this effect. This slightly skews his whole essay; much of it is talking past what open-source people do, rather than addressing us. He's also unaware of a lot of the real-world evidence for the success of the method. Some of the things he thinks are technologically or economically impossible are actually being done, routinely.

He's correct when he says that most contributors are self-selected and self-motivated. He overestimates the cost of training newbies, though. They self-train; normally, the first time a core developer hears from a newbie is typically when the newbie sends a patch -- self-evidence that the newbie has already acquired a critical level of knowledge about the software. The "sink or swim" method turns out to work, and work well.

It's incorrect to imply, as he does, that open-source development is unsustainable because the people doing it are flaky amateurs. Steve hasn't absorbed the implications of the Boston Consulting Group study that shows that about 40% of contributors to core projects are professionals getting paid for working on open source by patrons who need to use the results. In fact, what the open-source community is evolving into is something very like a huge machine for bringing newbies into apprenticeship contact with experienced developers and professionalizing both groups.

He also writes "OSS by its nature tends to be reactive rather than predictive. It doesn't look into the future, try to predict a problem which doesn't exist now but will exist then, and be ready with a solution. Rather, it tends to see problems that exist now and work on solutions for them." This is false -- or, at any rate, no more true than it is for closed-source development.

The open-source community built the Web and the Internet before it had acquired a name for itself and full consciousness of its own practices. Today, the cutting-edge work in operating systems languages, desktop user interfaces, relational databases and many other areas is being done either within the open-source community or in cooperation with it by academics. These prodigious efforts of imagination dwarf any "prediction" produced by closed-source software development in the last two decades.

Steve's "open source is reactive" claim strikes me as ironically funny, because I can remember when the standard knock on my crowd was that we're great at innovation but can't actually field product. How quickly they forget...

He's right enough about the difficulty of planning and high cost of face-to-face meetings, though. These are real problems. It's a testimony to the power of our practices that we manage to ship large volumes of high-quality software despite these obstacles.

What Steve called "player-killer" tactics have been tried -- there was a famous incident a few years back in which a TCP-wrappers distribution was Trojaned. The crack was detected and the community warned within hours. The black hats don't seem to bother trying this any more; our reaction time is too fast for that game to be very rewarding. The technical design of Linux helps here in ways that I won't go into here -- suffice it to say that it's intrinsically much harder to get a Trojan to do anything interesting than it is under Windows or other single-user operating systems.

So far, the supply of open-source developers seems to be pretty elastic -- we're not limited much by lacking bodies. Other factors loom much larger; patents, the DMCA, intrinsically hard technical problems. I don't understand why this is as well as I'd like to, but the facts are undeniable; the community is ten times the size my wildest high-end scenarios predicted a decade ago and seems to be growing faster as it gets larger.

Steve's whole argument that open-source can't win in embedded systems is very curious, since it predicts exactly the opposite of what is actually happening out there. Linux is taking over in embedded systems -- in fact, many observers would say it has already won that space. If Steve had worked in the field within the last three years he would probably know this.

Here are some data about the demand; the only non-general-purpose open-source software magazine in existence is the Linux Embedded Systems Journal. Open-source embedded developers like Monta Vista Software are bucking the recession by growing like crazy. The first cell-phone prototype running entirely open-source software just entered beta testing.

I was in California to meet Steve partly because Real Networks wanted me to be on stage when they announced the open-sourcing of their RTSP engine. Their CEO, Rob Glaser, was quite frank about the immediate business reasons: they needed to get ports to forty different Nokia cellphones and just couldn't figure out how to muster the resources for that short of inviting every stakeholder on the planet to hack the problem. Scaling bites. Hard.

In fact, some of the very characteristics that Steve thinks make embedded systems like cellphones safe for closed development seems to be the factors that are driving increased open-sourcing. The close tie to hardware actually decreases the value of secrecy, because it means the software is typically not easily re-usable by hardware competitors. Thus open sourcing is often a great way to recruit help from customer engineers without a real downside risk of plagiarism.

In fact, it's an open secret in the industry that the most important reason most closed-source embedded and driver software remains closed is not nerves about plagiarism but fear of patent audits on the source code. Graphics-card manufacturers, in particular, routinely swipe patented techniques from their competitors and bury them in binaries. (This is generally believed to be the reason nVidia's drivers aren't open.)

Another trend that's driving Linux and open-sourcing in embedded stuff is the shift from specialty embedded 8-bit processors to 32-bit chips with general-purpose architectures. Turns out the development costs for getting stuff to run on the 8-bit chips are sickeningly high and rising -- partly because the few wizards who can do good work on that hardware are expensive. The incremental cost for smarter hardware has dropped a lot; it's now cheaper to embed general-purpose chips running Linux because it means you have a larger, less expensive talent pool that can program them. Also, when your developers aren't fighting hardware limits as hard, you get better time to market (which, as Steve observes, is critical).

Steve is right about the comparative difficulty of applying open-source methods to vertical applications. But the difficulty is only comparative; it's happening anyway. The metalab archive carries a point-of-sale system for pizza parlors. I know of another case in which a Canadian auto dealership built specialized accounting software for their business and open-sourced it. The reasons? Same as usual; they wanted to lay off as much as possible of the development and maintainance cost on their competitors.

This is the same co-opetition logic that makes the Apache Software Foundation work -- it's just as powerful for vertical apps, though less obviously so. Each sponsoring company sees a higher payoff from having the software at a small fraction of the manpower cost for a complete in-house development. The method spreads risk in a way beneficial to all parties, too, because the ability of separate companies to sustain development tends to be uncorrelated -- unless they all sink, the project endures.

The way to solve the problem of not exposing your business logic to competitors is to separate your app into an open-source engine and a bunch of declarative business-rule schemas that you keep secret. Databases work this way, and websites (the web pages and CGIs are the schema). Many vertical apps can be partitioned this way too -- in fact, for things like tax-preparation software they almost have to be, because the complexity overhead of hacking executable code every time the rules change is too high.

Steve thinks the differences between Apache and Mozilla are bigger than they are. In fact, the core groups of both projects are full-time pros being funded by large users of the software.

So, let's address Steve's objections point by point:

For embedded software, OSS has the following problems:

It can't be scheduled; timely delivery can't be relied on.

Timely delivery can't be relied on for any software; see De Marco and Lister's excellent book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams on the delusion of deadlines, especially the empirical evidence that the "wake me up when it's done" strategy of not setting them actually gets your project done faster (also the implication of a recent Harvard Business School study of software project outcomes).

Open source is at least not noticeably worse than closed-source on this axis. Arguably it's better, because the rapid release cycles allow users to pick up on project results as soon as they're good enough.
Debugging requires access to custom hardware which usually can't easily be accessed across the net.

There aren't good solutions to this problem yet, but the increasing use of "overpowered" 32-bit processors using standard busses is tending to reduce it in scope. The development tools and interface hardware used in embedded stuff are rapidly getting more generic and closer to what's used in general-purpose computers.
Active participation even for junior people requires substantial amounts of project-specific knowledge which isn't easily acquired, especially remotely.

This one puzzles me, because I think Steve ought to be right about it -- but I'm not hearing the kinds of noises that I'd hear if it were slowing down the move to Linux and open source significantly.

At least part of the answer is that embedded-systems work is getting de-skilled in a particular sense -- more of it's being done by application specialists who are training up to the required level of programming, rather than programmers who have acquired expensive application-specific knowledge.
A great deal of proprietary information is usually involved in the process, and if that's released the company can be seriously harmed.

It's a question of tradeoffs. As RealNetworks found out when costing its Nokia contract, the choice is increasingly between giving up control of some of your proprietary IP and being too resource-bound to ship at all.

There is no market for secrecy. There's a market for product. If you can't ship product, or your customers aren't confident that you can maintain it after shipping, all that proprietary IP amounts to is a millstone around your neck.

There will be more stories like RTSP in the future. Count on it. In fact, the day will come when most of your contract partners simply won't accept the business risks of having someone else hold proprietary rights on the embedded software they use.
It's nearly impossible to do embedded software without common impromptu face-to-face meetings with co-workers, either to ask questions or to brainstorm. Doing this electronically is sufficiently different as to not be practical.

Yeah. They used to think that about operating systems, too. Obviously the Linux kernel is impossible, and therefore doesn't exist.

(At which point Oolon Colluphid disappeared in a puff of logic.)

For vertical apps, the objections are:

Security, security, security. You want me to trust my billing system to code written by anyone who happens to come along and volunteer to work on it, without any kind of check of credentials or checks on trustworthiness?

One of the lessons the business world has been absorbing is that open-source projects are dramatically more secure than their closed-source competition -- anybody who compares the Bugtraq records on Apache vs. ISS defacements, or Linux vs. Windows remote exploits, will notice that real fast.

It's not hard to understand why this is -- I've found that even corporate executives grok the theory pretty quickly. I won't do the whole argument here, but this article on Kerckhoff's Law holds the crucial clue. When you rely on the obscurity of source code for security, it means that the bad guys find the bugs faster than you can plug them -- there are more of them, and they have entropy on their side. Open source evens the odds for the good guys.
Recruitment: for most of the kind of people involved in OSS, vertical apps are boring. (Unless they want to figure out how to steal from it.)

This remains a problem. On the other hand, open source makes it easier to train domain specialists to be good enough programmers to get the job done. It's easier for physicists to learn to hack than it is for hackers to learn physics.
It takes a lot of knowledge of the specific aspects of the problem to make a significant contribution, which means things like observing the actual process of guests checking in at the front desk of the hotel.

This just reinforces the tendency for vertical-app developers to be obsessives about something else who learn to program, rather than obsessives about programming who learn something else.

Professional programmers tend to bridle at this thought. Well, better learn to live with it. As software becomes more pervasive, the amount of it done by application-specialist "amateurs" is going to increase.
The industry is full of horror stories of vertical apps which ran badly over budget and over schedule; the idea scares the hell out of business people. They're unlikely to be very enthused by the use of a process which by its nature *cannot* be reliably scheduled. (Remember that Mozilla ran two years long.)

Schedules -- and the belief that deadlines make software happen faster -- are a delusion in the mind of management, one not supported by the actual evidence about project outcomes. This delusion is so entrenched that managers fail to interpret the 70% rate of project failures correctly. It's as if people were so determined to believe the Earth is flat that they ignore what their eyes tell them when ships sink over the horizon.

No software larger than toy programs can be scheduled. Tactics aimed at doing so normally have the actual effect of increasing the time to market. `Aggressive' schedules effectively guarantee failure. The sooner we learn these objective truths, and that the illusion of control that schedules give is not worth the real costs, the sooner rates of outright project failure will dip below 70%.

Go read Peopleware. Now.

For short life apps:

Schedule is everything. If you're six months late, you're dead.

See above. There are reasons open sourcing is less applicable to short-life applications, but this turns out not to be one of them.
Secrecy is everything else. If you're on time but your competitor knows what you're doing a year ahead, he'll wipe you out.

This argument has more force for short-life apps than for Steve's other categories, but remember that increasingly the alternative to open source is not being able to ship at all. Your competitor is in the same boat you are.
How do you make money selling what anyone can get for free from any developer? If your product was developed out in the open, who exactly buys it afterwards?

Steve has a stronger point here. It's one that people used to think applied to almost all software, but which turns out to be mainly a problem for short-life apps. Actually the distinguishing characteristic isn't expected lifetime per se, but something correlated with it -- whether the product needs continued downstream work (maintainance and upgrades) or not.

Long-life, high-maintainance apps create niches for service businesses. That's the main way you make money in an open-source world. It's harder to make that work with a short-life app. Sometimes it's immpossible. Life is hard.

For long life apps:

Will the participants be willing to work on what our marketing analysis says we need, or will they insist that they know what is required and try to add that instead? We don't need feature creep, or people trying to change the direction we're moving.

In open-source projects, the function of "marketing analysis" tends to be taken be direct interaction with the user community. We find we do better work without a bunch of marketroids getting between us and our customers.
There is major learning curve involved in making a reasonable contribution to these kinds of programs; you don't learn how a circuit board router works in a few days of study. In most cases you have to be conversant with the way that the package's customers do what they do, and most programmers don't know these things and can't easily learn them.

See my previous remarks about application specialists and the democratization of programming. And every time you're tempted to say "But they couldn't possibly get away with that in application area X" remember that they once said that about all the areas where open source now dominates.

It's just not smart to bet against the hackers. Not smart at all. We generally end up having the last laugh on the naysayers. As recently as 1990, "serious analysts" laughed at the idea of ubiquitous Internet. As late as 1996, they said Unix was dead. We showed them -- and there are more of us now, with better tools, than ever.

Steve is right that one of the most effective ways to head off bugs is to have a core group of professional engineers do a clean design. Where he's mistaken is in believing this truth has anything to tell us about open vs. closed development. Us open-source guys, it turns out, are really good at clean design.

This something to do with the fact that, as individuals, we tend to be exceptionally capable and self-motivated -- an elite selected by dedication to the art of programming. It has more to do with not having managers and marketroids pissing in the soup constantly, telling us what tools to use, imposing insane deadlines, demanding endless checklist features that don't actually benefit anyone.

But mostly it has to do with the ruthless, invaluable pressure of peer review -- the knowledge that every design decision we make will be examined by thousands of people who may well be smarter than we are, and if we fail the test our effort will be pitilessly discarded. In that kind of environment, you get good or you get gone.

2002-07-20T16:18:00.000-07:00

Run Silent, Go Feep -- Adventures in Quieting A Computer:

Warning: The following blog entry provides way more than the recommended daily allowance of geeking. If you don't have a serious propeller-head streak, surf outta here now before it's too late.

I'm mainly a software guy, but occasionally I build PCs for fun. Design them, rather; the further away I stay from actual hardware the happier it usually is for everybody. Last year, I designed an Ultimate Linux Box; the good folks at Los Alamos Computers built it and will cheerfully sell you one. It was a successful design in most respects, but unpleasantly noisy. This year, as we do the 2002 refresh, I'm going to be working hard at getting the most noise reduction I can without sacrificing performance. I'm experimenting now with ways and means.

So I spent a couple of hours today disassembling the case of my wife Cathy's machine (minx.thyrsus.com) and lining three sides of it with Dynamat, a kind of stick-on rubber acoustic insulation often used in car-stereo installations. The malevolent god that normally attends me when I futz with hardware must have been off tormenting some other hapless ex-mathematician; no hardware was destroyed, no blood was shed, and I'm typing this on the selfsame reassembled machine.

Minx is a pretty generic mid-tower system made with cheap Taiwanese parts in mid-2002 by my local hole-in-the-wall computer shop: I spent only $150 to have it built, recycling a few parts from an only slightly older machine. It has a 300W power supply, Athlon 950 mobo with stock CPU cooler fan, one 80mm case fan, 7200RPM ATA drive. I succeeded in lining both 14"-square side panels and the case top; this used up the 4'sq piece I bought so efficiently that there was only about 10"sq in two small piece left over. I used those to cover the only exposed solid section of the back panel.

If you want try this yourself, the tools I found useful were a utility knife and a metal footrule, the latter useful both for measuring to fit and as a cutting guide.

I took before and after measurements with the db meter. dbA scale, measurements made with the probe one inch above the center-rear edge of the case.

Machine off:	44dbA
Machine on, before:	63dbA
Machine on, after:	61dbA

In other words, only a 2dbA drop -- marginal when you consider that the meter is only rated 1.5dB accurate! but it's worth bearing in mind that the scale is logarithmic; 2dbA is more than it looks like.

I have studio-engineer ears and sensitive musician fingers. I took before-and-after measurements with those, too, listening to the sound tambre and feeling for case resonance.

My ears tell me that the box is only slightly quieter, but the noise spectrum has changed. The proportion of high-frequency noise has dropped; more of what I'm hearing is white noise due to turbulant airflow, less is bearing noise. This is a good change even if total emission hasn't dropped much.

My fingers tell me that the amount of case resonance has dropped quite dramatically, especially on the side panels.

Was it worth doing? I am not sure. There would probably be more benefit on a system emitting more bearing noise from 10K or 15Krpm drives. On this one, I think the power supply is emitting most of the noise, and acoustic lining can't do much against that.

In fact, my clearest take-away from this is that the big gains in noise reduction on conventional PCs are likely to come from obsessing about power-supply engineering -- including details like whether the fan blows through a slotted grille or a cutout with a wire-basket finger guard (the latter will generate less turbulence noise).

I'd like to retrofit minx with a Papst 12dbA muffin fan and see if that makes a measurable difference. But the best change would probably be one of the Enhance 300W PSUs that are supposed to only emit 26dbA. I'll bet that would win big.

2002-07-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

Traveling in Texas:

I was on the road in Texas last week, addressing Linux user groups in Dallas and Austin. I always enjoy visiting Texas. It's a big, wide-open place full of generous people who cultivate a proper appreciation of some of my favorite things in life -- firearms, blues guitar, and pepper sauces.

And, of course, one of the biggest things Texas has going for it is barbecue. And not the pallid imitation served up by us pasty-faced Yankees here where I live (near Philadelphia, PA) but the real thing. Barbecue, dammit. Red meat with enough fat on it to panic a health-foodist right out of his pantywaist, slow-cooked in a marinade sweeter than a mother's kiss and eaten with sauces hot enough to peel paint. Garnish with a few extra jalapenos and coleslaw and wash it down with cheap soda, lemonade, or beer. Food of the gods.

I swear your testosterone level goes up just smelling this stuff. After a few mouthfuls of Rudy's carnivoral bliss you'll be hankerin' to cultivate a drawl, wear a Stetson and drive a pickup truck with a gun rack. (I draw the line at country music, though. A man's got to have some standards.)

At a real barbecue joint like Rudy's ("Worst barbecue in Texas!") they serve you piles of beef, pork and chicken wrapped in butcher paper in a plastic basket. No plates, just more butcher paper and bread. And, unfortunately, the bread is where this gustatory Nirvana nearly crashes back to earth. Because the bread at real barbecue places is invariably utter crap -- spongy sliced white with all the taste of building insulation.

Here in Philadelphia we can't make barbecue worth a damn, but we know better than to put a hot sandwich on American bread. One of our regional-food glories is the Philly steak sandwich, fried beef and onions and mushrooms (and usually cheese, but I don't eat cheese) nestled in a foot-long Italian roll. The bread is important. It's tasty, it's chewy, it's got a crust on it. It's worthy of respect.

One of the reasons you can't get a decent steak sandwich more than fifty miles from Billy Penn's hat is that bread. It depends on an Italian baking tradition that just doesn't exist outside the mid-Atlantic metroplex, and is found in its highest form only in Philly and South Jersey. Philadelphians laugh at the pathetic imitations of "Philly steaks" offered elsewhere for the same reason Texans laugh at barbecue made north of the Mason-Dixon line. And both groups are right to laugh. It just ain't the same.

Every time I order up a mess of barbecue at a place like Rudy's or County Line or Dick's Last Resort I think to myself "Someday, one of these barbecue outfits has got to start offering decent bread. Their sales would go through the roof." I've been waiting for the market to correct this problem for more than twenty years now -- and it hasn't happened. And thereby hangs a mystery.

The mystery is the curious persistence of regional food differences in a country with cheap transport and the best communications network in the world. There are places in the U.S. where you can reliably get really good bread -- mostly the coastal metroplexes. There are places you can get real barbecue, in the heartland South and Southwest. And these zones just don't overlap. (Yes, they have a gourmet-bread bakery in Austin. I suspect, if I went there, I'd find it a lot like the Chinese food in Ann Arbor -- impressive to the locals, maybe, but only because their standards are so low.)

I could multiply examples. Sourdough bread -- I've had it everywhere you can get it and it just doesn't taste right outside of San Francisco. The East Coast versions are competent, but lack some subtle tang. Yeast strain? Something in the water? Who knows?

Cheesecake. There's a good one. Anybody who has lived in New York won't touch most cheesecake made elsewhere at gunpoint, and with good reason. Next to a traditional New-York-style baked cheesecake (the kind you can stand a fork in because it has the approximate density of neutronium) all others are a sort of pathetic, tasteless cheese gelatin. In this case the recipe is clearly what matters.

Or deep-dish pizza. Try to get that done right anywhere but Chicago. Good luck. Actually, the Philly/South Jersey area may be the only other part of the U.S.that can almost make this nut, and our thin-crust pizza is better. But why? Why don't the good techniques go national and drive out the weaker competition?

The obvious answer would be that nationwide, tastes differ too much for one regional variant to dominate. But many cases there isn't even any dispute about where the best variant comes from; the superiority of "New York style" cheesecake. for example, is so universally understood that restaurants elsewhere often bill their cheesecake that way even when it's actually half-composed of "lite" garbage like ricotta or cottage cheese. Nobody who has ever tasted one doubts that Philly steaks are the acme of the art. And nobody -- but nobody -- who can get both passes up Texas barbecue for what they make in New Haven or Walla Walla.

So you'd think that the market would have propagated Texas slow-cooking, San Francisco yeast starters and the Philly steak roll all over the country by now. But some food technologies travel better than others, and some seem curiously unable to thrive outside their native climes. Cheesecake recipes may survive transmission relatively well, but the mysteries of good barbecue are subtle and deep. Pizzas rely on elaborate oven and dough-mix technology that probably tends to conserve regional variations simply because it's too capital-intensive to mess with casually.

I've meditated on the matter and still can't decide whether I think that's a good thing or not. The approved thing for travel writers to do is wax lyrical about the wonderfulness of regional variety, as if it would somehow fail to be an improvement in the world if I could get decent bread with my barbecue. The hell with that kind of sentimentality; I'd rather have a better meal.

But there's a point buried there somewhere -- something that isn't about the bread or the barbecue, but about what it feels like to sit in a dusty roadside joint like Rudy's,surrounded by cases of Red Pop and overweight rednecks in tractor caps and checked shirts, with the food of the gods melting in your mouth, and thinking "Damn, this place is tacky, but I hope it lives forever."

And you know what? I suspect that kind of barbecue joint will live forever, or as close to forever as humans manage, anyway. They've probably existed since the first proto-hominids roasted mammoth haunch over a slow fire, washing it down with some badly-made tuber-beer equivalent of Red Pop. And their equivalents will probably persist in the zero-gee arcologies and Dyson spheres of the year 3000. Even if they get hip about the good bread, somewhere in the universe there will always be a Texas. And that's a good thing.

UPDATE: Some respondents have reminded me of the Piedmont (and specially North Carolina) tradition of pulled-pork barbecue. Let me state for the record that I find it equally delicious. Both the Texas and Piedmont versions are so damn good that there is no call for petty disputation about which is superior. But for those of you who know what I am talking about, I am quite partial to burnt ends.

UPDATE: Jane Galt has commented in her usual witty and illuminating fashion.

UPDATE: The mystery of San Francisco sourdough, was, as it turns out, solved in 1970. You can buy a starter with the proper symbiosis of bacteria and yeast -- and, contray to myth, local bacteria won't overwhelm it. Of course this makes it harder to understand why the stuff isn't everywhere...

2002-07-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

Like Scum, Rising To The Top:

I've joined the ranks of 'Large Mammals" in N. Z. Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem standings. 82 links, up from 66 in the last update. Excellent; at this rate I'll be breathing down Den Beste's and Lileks's and Sulllivan's necks in another month. :-)

(Why those three? They are, in my opinion, the top thinker-essayists in the blogosphere. If I can provoke as much thought as they do, I'll figure I've won the game. It's hard to know directly how much I'm stimulating peoples' minds, but the blogroll count seems like a reasonable proxy.)

2002-07-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Diet Considered as a Bad Religion:

A current New York Times news story, What If It's All Been A Big Fat Lie, entertainingly chronicles the discovery that low-fat diets are bad for people. More specifically, that the substitution of carbohydrates like bread and pasta and potatoes for meat that we've all had urged on us since the early 1980s is probably the cause of the modern epidemic of obesity and the sharp rise in diabetes incidence.

I have long believed that most of the healthy-eating advice we get is stone crazy, and the story does tend to confirm it. One of my reasons for believing this is touched on in the article; what we're told is good for us doesn't match what humans "in the wild" (during the 99% of our species history that predated agriculture) ate. The diet our bodies evolved to process doesn't include things like large amounts of milled grain or other starches. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate wild vegetables (especially tubers) and meat whenever they could get it.

I've always had to suppress a tendency to laugh rudely when vegeterians touted their diet as "natural". Vegetarianism is deeply unnatural for human beings; it's marginally possible in warm climates only (there are no vegetarians in Tibet because the climate kills them), and only possible even there because we're at the near end of 4,000 years of breeding for high-caloric-value staple crops.

So what's the natural diet for human beings? Our dentition (both slashing and grinding teeth) and the structure of our digestive system (short colon, no rumen) is intermediate between that of herbivores like cows and obligate carnivores like cats; both systems resemble those of non-specialized omnivores like bears. Actually, the earlier hominids in the human ancestral line were designed for a more vegetarian diet than we; they had large flat molars and powerful jaws designed for grinding seed-cases. The increase in brain size in the hominid line correlates neatly with a shift to a more carnivorous dentitition and skull structure.

Physical anthropologists will tell you that the shift from hunter-gatherer existence to sedentary agriculture enabled human beings to live at higher population densities, but at the cost of a marked deterioration in the health of the average person. The skeletons of agricultural populations are shorter, less robust, and show much more evidence of nutritional diseases relative to their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

For twenty years I've consciously been trying to eat what I think of as a caveman diet -- heavy on the meat and raw vegetables, very little sugar, light on the starches. I'm a bit overweight now, not seriously so for a 44-year-old man, but enough to notice; what this NYT article tells me is that I didn't follow my own prescription strictly enough and ate too much bread and potatoes.

But the evolutionary analysis only tells us what we probably should be eating. It doesn't explain how the modern diet has come to be as severly messed up as it is -- nor why the advice we've been getting on healthy eating over the last twenty years has been not merely bad but perversely wrong.

The answer is, I think, implicit in the fact that "health food" has a strong tendency to be bland, fibrous, and nasty -- a kind of filboid studge that we have to work at convincing ourselves we like rather than actually liking. Which is, if you think about it, nuts. Human food tropisms represent two million years of selective knowledge about what's good for our bodies. Eating a lot of what we don't like is far more likely to be a mistake than eating things we do like, even to excess.

Why do we tend to treat our natural cravings for red meat and fat as sins, then? Notice the similarity between the rhetoric of diet books and religious evangelism and you have your answer. Dietary mortification of the flesh has become a kind of secular asceticism, a way for wealthy white people with guilt feelings about their affluence to demonstrate virtue and expiate their imagined trangressions.

Once you realize that dieting is a religion, the irrationality and mutual contradictions become easier to understand. It's not about what's actually good for you, it's about suffering and self-denial and the state of your soul. People who constantly break and re-adopt diets are experiencing exactly the same cycle of secondary rewards as the sinner who repeatedly backslides and reforms.

This model explains the social fact that the modern flavor of "health"-based dietary piety is most likely to be found in people who don't have the same psychological needs satisfied by an actual religion. Quick now: who's more likely to be a vegetarian or profess a horror of "junk food" -- a conservative Christian heartlander or a secular politically-correct leftist from the urban coasts?

The NYT article tells us that the dominant dietary religion of the last twenty years is cracking -- that the weight of evidence against the fat-is-evil/carbs-are-good theory is no longer supportable. Well and good -- but it won't necessarily do us a lot of good to discard this religion only to get stuck with another one.

I say it's time to give all bossy nutritionists, health-food evangelists and dietary busybodies the heave-ho out of our lives -- tell the sorry bitches and bastards to get over themselves and go back to eating stuff that tastes good and satiates. And enjoy the outraged squawking from the dietarily correct -- that, my friends, is the music of health and freedom.

2002-07-03T01:47:00.000-07:00

Winning the War Against Terror:

(Final essay of the series.)

In previous essays in this series, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden's goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason Americans have trouble comprehending the scope of the threat, and I have explained why Western-style diplomacy is next to useless in this situation. In this final essay I'll suggest paths towards a solution.

In order to win, we must begin with realism about the scope of the war and the objectives of the enemy. We must realize that although in theory and theology al-Qaeda is making war on the entire infidel West, in practice they are only interested in attacking the U.S., the `hyperpower' that leads it.

There is no possible gain for al-Qaeda in attacking Europe and risking a change in the pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian tilt of the EU (which has just resumed support payments to the Palestinian Authority despite conclusive evidence that the money is diverted to pay for massacres of Israeli children). Nor can al-Qaeda gain any leverage by attacks on the remainder of the world. The theaters of the war will include the U.S. and terrorist base areas in the Islamic arc stretching from Morocco through the Maghreb through the Middle East to Pakistan, and perhaps in Indonesia and the Phillipines as well.

To people who view the entire world through the lens of the Western tradition, the strategy I will outline is doubtless going to sound bellicose and regressive. It is not; it is founded on a cold-blooded realization that Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest of the Islamic world) regard victory in war as a sign of Allah's favor and regard compromise and concession as a sign of weakness.

The war against Islamic terror must be fought on three levels: homeland defense, military power projection, and cultural subversion. We must foil terrorist acts; we must imprison or kill the terrorists who plan and execute them; and we must dry up the pool of potential recruits before they become terrorists who can only be stopped by being imprisoned or killed.

Homeland defense includes all those measures designed to make the attacks on U.S. civilians less likely to succeed. These will include conventional police and security measures. It must also include a revival of the role of the unincorporated militia and the armed citizen. Al-Qaeda has limited resources, but the advantage of choosing where they will strike; since the police and military cannot be everywhere, civilians (like the passengers of flight 93) must take anti-terrorist defense into their own hands.

Military power projection includes direct military action against terrorist bases and havens. As an anarchist, I would prefer a world in which private security agencies under contract to insurance companies pursued al-Qaeda; persons of some other political persuasions might propose supranational agencies such as the U.N. Unfortunately, under the current world system there is no alternative to governments to do this work. The U.S. has begun it in Afghanistan; the war must continue in Iraq, and it is likely to encompass Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia as well.

The goal of military power projection must be twofold: physical and psychological. The physical goal must be to destroy the physical infrastructure of terrorism -- the headquarters, bases and training camps. While this is important, the psychological goal of humiliating and crushing jihadists is even more important.

Islamic armies and resistance movements are fanatical in attack but brittle on the defense. When motivated by the conviction that Allah guides their arm, suicidal bravery is routine. On the other hand, when the fortunes of a cause decline past a certain point, Arabs tend to consider the will of Allah to be manifest and abruptly abandon it. These tendencies form part of the cultural background that includes even secularized terrorist movements (such as Yasser Arafat's al-Fatah) in the Islamic world.

The U.S. was able to exploit this brittleness effectively in Afghanistan. By moving in overwhelming force when it moved at all, the U.S. was able to intimidate many warlords affiliated with the Taliban into switching sides -- an important reason the campaign involved so little actual fighting.

We must repeat this maneuver on a larger scale. We must teach the Dar-al-Islam to respect and fear the power of the West. We must not negotiate or offer concessions until it is clear from the behavior of governments, the umma, and the "Arab street" that the public will to support jihad has been broken.

Our most important long-term weapon against Islamic terrorism, however, will be cultural subversion. That is, to break the hold of the Islamist/jihadist idea on the minds of Muslims. To do this, it may be necessary to discredit the entirety of Islam; the question depends on whether any Islamic figure will be clever enough to construct an interpretation of Islam purged of jihadist tendencies, and whether that version can propagate and displace the Sunni-fundamentalist varieties now dominant in the Islamic world.

I can do no better than to quote Michelle Efird, the woman who inspired my essay We Are All Jews Now. In private mail afterwards (quoted with permission) she wrote:

I don't want to appease them, I don't want to understand them, I don't want to let them reap the benefits of our liberalism while plotting our destruction. Like most Americans, I would have been more than happy to let them pretend the last 400 years of progress never happened, as long as they didn't force their warped-vision goggles on anyone else. But since they brought the war to us, let's pave the middle east with outlet malls, fast food franchises, and Disney Mecca. Let's infect their entire population with personal liberty and dissension and critical thinking. And if that doesn't work, let's flood them with porn spam.

Osama bin Laden may, in the end, have materialized his own worst fears. The ideology of jihad has created its mirror and opposite; the dawning sense that we in the West have the right, the power, and the duty to wipe bin Laden's brand of religion from the face of the earth before it destroys us all.

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear has wriitten an excellent essay on memes and cultural subversion.

2002-06-30T13:48:00.000-07:00

Why Diplomacy Is Doomed:

(Fourth essay of a series.)

In Mirror, Mirror: Why Americans Don't Understand the Threat of Jihadism, What al-Qaeda Wants and The Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden's goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy. I have analyzed the reason Americans have trouble comprehending the scope of the threat. Now I'll explain why diplomacy is not a path toards a solution.

The Western tradition of diplomacy, which originated from the "balance of power" model for coexisting nation-states in Renaissance Europe, stigmatizes the use of arms as an admission of failure and elevates good-faith negotiation as a virtue of the strong. Westerners think of a plurality of nation-states with conflicting interests as the natural and right way of the world, and Western diplomacy is themed around compromise as a way of allowing the members of that plurality to continue in more or less peaceful coexistence.

Arab cultures (and the Arabized cultures of the rest of the Islamic world) are very different. The Western idea of a plurality of nation-states is considered iniquitous, a sign that men have turned away from Allah. Islam promotes a world united under a single Caliph with absolute authority in both secular and religious matters.

Further, Arabs respect strength in war. Several features of the Islamic worldview -- including fatalism and the belief that Allah guides the arm of conquerors -- reinforce this. Extending an olive branch or seeking compromise, on the other hand, is read as a sign of weakness, inviting more pressure and more attacks.

Applying the assumptions of Western diplomacy to Islamic-world conflicts, therefore, tends to have perverse results. The utter failure of diplomacy in the Israeli/Palestinan conflict is a perfect example. Yasser Arafat and his followers interpreted every Israeli compromise not as a sign of virtue requiring a reciprocal response, but as a sign that that their terror campaign was working. As the Israelis conceded more and more legitimacy to Palestinian political objectives, the terror actually intensified in pitch.

The U.S.'s refusal to negotiate with the Taliban for anything less than the unconditional surrender of Osama bin Laden, by contrast, seemed harsh to apostles of the Western diplomatic tradition but was exactly correct in terms of Islamic psychology. Backing a clear, hard-line position with the threat of force actually gave the U.S. a moral advantage it had lacked when our policy was seen as weak and vacillating. The expected furor of the "Arab street" never materialized.

Diplomacy or negotiation are in any case of very limited use in curbing state terrorism and no use in curbing non-state terrorism. For the forseeable future, the U.S.'s capability to project military power into Third World terrorist havens will be so much greater than that of other members of any imaginable coalition of allies that having a military alliance at all will be almost pointless. Diplomacy need therefore be aimed only at preventing military opposition by nearby nation-states.

Third parties who urge `diplomatic' solutions to problems like Iraqi, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian sponsorship of al-Qaeda should be ignored. In the Islamic cultural context, force and the threat of force stand some chance of obtaining useful results. Talk does not.

(To be continued...)

2002-06-27T06:50:00.000-07:00

I have a blogchild!

The first post on Michelle Efird's Shellshocking references my quote of Ms. Efird in We are all Jews now!.

UPDATE: Oh oh! The shellshocking truth about Dawn Olsen's and my adulterous lovechild has been revealed!

2002-06-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

Mirror, Mirror -- why Americans Don't Understand the Threat of Jihadism:

(Third in a series.)

In What al-Qaeda Wants and the first essay in this series, The Mirage of Moderate Islam, I have described Islam as a warlike and bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist revival. I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden's goal as nothing less than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global Islamic theocracy.

I have further explained why it is difficult for anyone living within the Islamic worldview to reject or argue against these goals. Jihadism -- the belief that Muslims have not merely the right but the duty to smite the infidel and propagate the Faith by force -- proceeds direct from the Koran and is accepted as a core religious duty by almost all Muslims.

These are simple truths, readily discernable from reading the words of the Koran, the study of even an outline of Islamic history, and the propaganda of Osama bin Laden himself. Yet they are truths that almost no one in the West is speaking in public, in plain language. In this essay, I will examine the reasons Americans are not yet ideologically prepared to fight the war against terror as it must be fought if we are to win.

First, the U.S. government is telling a Big Lie for diplomatic reasons. It is trying to sell the idea that Islam is a `religion of peace', with al-Qaeda representing only a small fringe of extremists. Part of this is in order not to be seen attacking the religion of our Arab allies in the Middle East.

But domestic politics is an even more important motive for this Big Lie. U.S. policymakers in the know may well fear that if they described the relationship between terrorism and Islamic doctrine accurately, the current broad consensus on war policy might collapse under a hailstorm of accusations of bigotry, prejudice, and intolerance by the bien pensants who run the national media and academe. In a political climate where directing extra scrutiny at young male Middle Eastern air travellers is attacked as unacceptable `racial profiling', this fear would be well-grounded.

Second, the academy has failed us. Americans are almost universally ignorant of Islamic doctrine and history. Most of the few who have some knowledge of the area cannot connect that knowledge to current events. The Islamic-studies and Middle Eastern history establishment completely, utterly failed to anticipate al-Qaeda's revival of jihadism, ignored or rationalized the decade of anti-American terrorist acts that led up to 9/11, and is presently incapable of supplying any significant analytical help to defeating the terrorists.

The exact anatomy of this failure is well described in Martin Kramer's Ivory Towers On Sand. One background problem was a Marxist-influenced tendency to see political change as all-important and dismiss religious fervor as a spent force. Another was a reluctance to confront or discuss the continuing phenomenon of terrorism at all except through the lens of `post-colonial theory' that excused it as a legitimate tactic of the Palestinian or anti-imperialist struggle. Yet a third was the postmodern belief that objective truth is impossible. In effect, the Marxist/multiculturalist/postmodernist preoccupations of the Islamic-studies establishment rendered it incapable of seeing, thinking, or passing judgment. Confronted by the smoking hole where the World Trade Center used to be and Osama bin-Laden's gloating videos, the academics had no way of connecting their theoretical abstractions to the brutal facts and nothing to say. Nine months later, they still doesn't.

Americans outside of universities have few grounds for smugness, however. While most of the rest of us have not had our critical faculties rotted out by Marxism, multiculturalism and postmodernism in their explicit forms, a lower-grade version of the same infections has done much to damage our capacity to understand the threat of jihadism.

Americans have always had the odd parochial habit of assuming that, down deep underneath, everyone is basically like us -- sharing our historically peculiar mix of pragmatism and idealism; valuing honesty and fair dealing; tolerant, materialistic, freedom-loving, open-minded, tending to value comfort and success over ideology. We reflexively believe that everyone can be reasoned with essentially in our own terms. Most Americans don't understand fanaticism and violent evil. We have a tendency to be `fair' by assuming that in any dispute there must be some right and some wrong on both sides. It's telling that we use `extreme' as a political pejorative.

Since at least the end of World War II, this parochialism has become so acute that it has almost blinded us to serious threats. While more of the left-liberals who shilled for the Soviets and Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot during the Cold War were closet Communists than is yet publicly admitted, a good many were honest dupes who simply couldn't believe that Communists were actually motivated by the sinister craziness of hard Marxism, and therefore assumed that America must somehow be at fault. Conservatives apologizing for unsavory pro-American strongmen mostly weren't closet fascists, either; a good many of them had obvious trouble seeing caudillos as more than cigar-chomping CEOs running a particularly tough business, and never mind the gold braid and funny hats.

The see-no-evil tendency in American folk psychology created fertile ground for the rather less benign dogmas of multiculturalism ("all cultures present ways of living that are equally morally valid") and postmodernism ("there is no objective truth"). Originally constructed by Marxists (and one ex-Fascist) as part of a program to ideologically disarm the West against the radical evil of Communism, these dogmas have both outlived their original ends and seeped into American pop culture. Their effect is that many of us can no longer bring ourselves to think of any political movement, religion, or culture as radically evil unless it is safely part of history (and, for political correctness, was run by dead white European males when it was alive and kicking).

This was a relatively harmless form of self-delusion between 1992 and 2001, the decade of self-indulgence bracketed by the fall of the Soviet Empire and 9/11. No longer. We are at war. Western civilization is under attack by a foe that revels in the wholesale slaughter of civilians, one that proudly announces its intention to bring a second Holocaust of fire and blood down upon us all.

If our civilization is to survive, we will need to recover the moral judgment needed to recognize radical evil, the language in which to condemn it, and the determination to act.

In a perverse way, al-Qaeda has made this easy. They have murdered thousands in a single attack on one of our heart cities, they have attempted to unleash biological weapons on us, and have actively planned to detonate nuclear/radiological weapons in our population centers. Those who cannot recognize even this as radical evil -- those who persist in arguing that the 9/11 attack was somehow justified by something United Fruit did in Guatemala or the Israelis did in Lebanon -- are rapidly dealing themselves out of the game of deciding how we shall respond.

Having recognized al-Qaeda's behavior as radically evil, we must next recognize that its motivating ideology is evil, too. And the first step there is recognizing that Islam's apologists are systematically lying to us about what they believe and intend. Outside of a few fringe groups like the Dauri Bohras and a tiny minority of intellectual reformers who generally dare not speak their ideas in their own home countries, there is simply no constituency in Islam prepared to recognize Western concepts of peace, tolerance, and pluralism.

We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until we understand the following things:

Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.
The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon the will to profile accordingly.
We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances against America or the West.
Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere short of surrender and submission to shari'a law.
Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.

The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda. It is in fact the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.

We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam (purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers.

This is a problem for Americans; first, because we have been taught that we that we must not be intolerant of other peoples' religions; and second, because fully grasping the nature of the danger Islamic poses to Western civilization requires thinking uncomfortable thoughts about the dominant Christian religion of our own culture.

The reader is at this point invited to learn more about the developing alliance between Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms. Then, to learn all about Kissing Hank's Ass. Before 9/11, "Kissing Hank's Ass" was an edgy joke. Today it demonstrates why ending the threat of religiously-motivated terror will require us to confront and destroy the fundamentalist/jihadist impulse not merely in Islam, but also in Christianity and all other eschatological monotheisms where it finds a natural home.

Christianity, like Islam (and unlike almost all of the other religions of the world) has violent intolerance of other religions and the impulse to conversion by the sword wired into its doctrinal DNA. Most Americans have trouble believing the Koran means what it says about the duty of jihad because for most Christians, the parallel Christian duty to smite the infidel is a historical dead letter. But counterparts of al-Qaeda such as the Christian Identity Movement exist in the West, imbued with all of al-Qaeda's rage. Christian fundamentalists express the same hatred of modernity and determination to jam the world back into a medieval mold that motivates Osama bin Laden.

To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly distinguish it from ethical self-defense. We must be prepared not merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of thought that make fanatics in the first place -- whether they occur in the other guy's religion or our own. Islam has declared itself the immediate adversary of modernity -- but more than one world religion will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in peace.

UPDATE: a reader sent me a pointer to an al-Qaeda statement, Why We Fight America that directly shows al-Qaeda to be motivated by a drive for Islamic hegemony, rather than grievances about American behavior.

(To be continued...)

2002-06-20T19:45:00.000-07:00

World's Smallest Political Quiz:

My results:

This should explain rather neatly why that guy over at Global News Watch couldn't manage, for all of his grunting and straining, to force me into either a `right-wing' or `left-wing' box.

You can take the quiz here. Thanks to VodkaPundit for reminding me of it.