Input Junkie

NPR is interviewing an anti-torture guy from the ACLU, which is fine. Someone calls in to say that terrorists treat people really badly, so why should we do anything differently? The anti-torture guy says, "Because we're Americans."

I have this werid belief in universal values. I would like Americans to not torture because they have some respect for people and for truth and for the long run. I want Americans to behave decently because it's worth doing, not because it's a special American thing.

It looks as though fish oil is good for me. Might it be good for the cats (one with dry fur, one possibly depressed, one young and healthy who might as well get anything possibly useful and harmless)?

I've googled, but most of what I've found is commercial sites. What I want is either scietific studies or personal accounts on a site that isn't biased. I did see a couple of studies, but they were for specific skin conditions. There was also one statement that fish liver oil is a bad idea for cats--too much vitamin A.

I've seen the theory a time or two that the Democrats could have won the 2004 election if they'd given up on gun control. However, I think everyone I've seen promoting that theory is against gun control anyway.

So, do those of you who are want gun control and who also would like the Democrats to win think that it could conceivably be worthwhile to give up on gun control, or is gun control a non-negotiable core issue?

On the other side, if Democrats said they were giving up on gun control, would pro-gun-ownership people believe them?

We're closer to wild animals or they're closer to us. Afaik (with an exception of Bisson's non-realistic "Bears Discover Fire), science fiction has assumed a fairly sterile future, even when it became obvious that anything that can kill a 100-pound deer can also kill a person, and that there's no good way to keep deer out of the suburbs, especially if you're going to insist on having woods anywhere near where people live, and people do seem to be insisting on that.

Also, I strongly suspect that we've been selecting wild animals for intelligence.

And the predictions about computers were pretty indequate. E.M. Forester had it in "The Machine Stops" (1909) that people would use computers for chatter--but the field completely forgot that insight.

No one guessed what would be easy and what would be difficult--grand master chess has turned out to be a more solvable problem than vision and walking. Once upon a time, science fiction writers seemed to think that your first problem with a computer was keeping it from trying to take over the world rather than getting it to to work at all.

And no one had the foggiest that there would be whole sections of books for the general public on dealing with computers, nor that computers would make it reasonably easy for people to have a combined printing press and post office at home and this would be problematic.

Afaik, no one in science fiction has taken a real crack at just how complicated nanotech is going to be.

Back in the 70s, one of Timothy Leary's books had the idea that the center of wealth goes westwards--it started in the Egypt and Babylon, then went to Greece, Rome, Western Europe, the Eastern US, and then the Western US. IIRC, at the time I read it, California was still ascendent with Japan doing well, so I remembered the theory as something to keep an eye on. (There are some obvious weak points in the theory--I don't know if it has anything useful to say about pre-modern Asia and it doesn't explain how the Italian penninsula got lucky twice.)

Since then....the Little Tigers and China, and things are getting better in India. The EU may be the next superpower.

Leary, cheerful soul that he was, didn't discuss what happens in countries the center of wealth is moving away from--do they necessarily do gratuitously stupid things instead of declining gracefully? Or do people always do gratuitously stupid things, but the effects are more visible when you aren't lucky?

Leary didn't offer a plausible mechanism for the center of wealth going west, and I can't imagine what such an explanation would look like.

The good news (if there's anything at all to the theory) is that the center doesn't just go west, it's accelerating. The acceleration was part of the theory in the 70s, and it's still part of the pattern. Things may well improve dramatically (though maybe only for a couple of years) here on the East Coast of the US in a decade or so. Eventually, the center of wealth will be zorching along around the planet so fast that people will make their investments exactly timed to accomodate it.

To listen to some leftists, you'd think there's something filthy about doing things to make a profit. After all, anything that's done for profit is going to be the worst feasible quality offered for the highest possible price.

However, when I look at much of what I buy, I see that much of what I buy is decent stuff and not terribly expensive

To listen to some libertarians and right-wingers, you'd think that government is nothing but theft and murder and power-grabbing, and all it can do is spread misery.

However, I can see that a lot of government services are at least decent and genuinely useful.

What's going on? After all, the leftists and the libertarians are pointing to some real incentives and processes.

People I've floated these ideas to have suggested that government keeps business from being as awful as it might be. Government does exert *some* pressure on price and quality (not always in the direction one would wish--see price supports), but there isn't nearly enough government to *make* companies offer stuff that's fit to buy.

I believe that what's mostly going on for both business and government is a combination of the desire to do things well (distributed through all levels of the organizations) and habit/tradition/inertia which can lead to defaults of accomodating the people one is dealing with.

If my theory is correct, you want organizations which are somewhat responisive to incentives, but complete responiveness to simple incentives is *not* what you want. See this article about Walmart--they keep squeezing their suppliers till some of the suppliers lower quality or go out of business.

Here's my prediction about Walmart (I was wrong about the election, but that isn't going to stop me)--they'll keep squeezing their suppliers until Walmart becomes known as a place to buy crap, and it will gradually go under itself. Maybe they can prevent this by focusing on quality as well as price, but that would take a huge change in company culture and it's hard to imagine doing it successfully.

On the government side, you want them to care about elections, but you can't afford to have that be the only thing.

There's a bit in Gregory Bateson about how living systems never try to maximize just one thing.

There's a completely spectacular site about Tam Lin. It's got links to versions of the ballad, text about and related to Tam Lin (including scholarly work, fiction, related web sites, and fan fiction>, sheet music and discography....and on and on. Check out if you like Tam Lin or just want to see how extensive an interest in one cool thing can make a site.

One side effect of poking around the site is that I think I'll be getting back to playing the recorder. The net and the internet had supplanted recorder playing in my life. Little did I realize that the net is full of sheet music!

In particular, there's a jig called Tam Lin--nothing to do with the ballad, apparently, but the Tam Lin site has a link to it anyway. A small mystery--the comments describe the jig as going from D minor to A minor, but it sounds to me as though it goes to C major. (It's the same notes either way, afaik it's a question of whether you think it sounds cheerful or not. That's a big afaik, and I bet music theorists think about it some other way.)

It was remarkably little trouble. There was no line. I'm hoping that means we have enough polling stations in the area (or that most potential voters are at work or school at this hour) rather than that no one is bothering.

I showed the card which had been mailed to me which identifies my polling place before I was asked for anything. I wasn't asked for any other ID. Imho, all voters *should* be asked for ID. My impression is that the default of no ID is based in the idea that people live in the same place long enough that they'd be known to the poll workers. This is no longer reliably the case.

I wore a fresh-made "Hold your nose and vote for Kerry" button--got one compliment and handed out two business cards, one of which may have been welcome.

I forgot to check on whether the voting machine was a Shouptronic (as promised by mypollingplace.com), but it has a nice clean interface. You press a spot next to your preferred
candidate's name, and it lights up. Unfortunately, there was no paper trail.

If I'd realized how few candidates I was dealing with, I might have done more research. As it was, I voted for Kerry, Spector (Senate, moderate Republican, seems harmless), and Bradly (House, Democrat, voted against handing suspects over to foreign governments to be tortured). Since Philadelphia is Kerry country and my other two votes are for incumbants, I'm relatively sure that my vote will be counted.

I'm apparently not as nice and civic-minded as the typical person who writes about politics. I care more about who you vote for than whether you get out and vote.

If you just can't bring yourself to vote for Kerry--you might dislke any number of things about him or just feel unsure of him or have bought into the idea that a Democrat is a certain sort of a person and you're not so you just can't vote for a Democrat--don't vote for Bush. And if it means you not voting, I can live with it.

If you don't vote, you can still complain. Complaining is a fundamental human, pre-human, and non-human right, recently guaranteed by the First Amendment. Your odds of getting listened to are fair-to-middling, and not dependent on whether you vote.

I'm not doing any sort of emotional blackmail around this election. I do not intend to lose any friends over it (though it's hard when I get really pissed at someone's reasons as well as their choice).

Now for some reasons for not voting for Bush. My reasons center on civil liberties. The American justice/penal system was already pretty bad (I can't see the difference between a plea bargain and a coerced confession), and I don't think we can afford an administration which is philosophically committed to the idea that it's ok to disappear people--to hold them indefinitely without naming or charging them. It doesn't surprise me that people so held are kept in bad conditions or that whether they are any danger to the US wasn't investigated promptly. Don't kid yourself, being a US citizen will not protect you against that sort of thing if it's standard practice.

Niemoller's quote ("first they came for the Jews/Communists/trade unionists) doesn't have the edge it should because it's about people who are now either respectable or at least semi-ok. Try it as "first they came for the drug dealers and terrorists" and I think you'll get more of the point.

Now we get to Abu Graib. While it's a natural outgrowth of the way a lot of Americans think about prisoners (if you're accused, you're guilty, and if you're guilty, whatever treatment you get is your own fault), it was an enthusiastic and especially stupid application of those theories.

Unqualified Offerings (page down to "faithless electors") has a fine rant on the evils of war. It's not just a matter of the war being pursued incompetently. I will add a small point. We've gone ballistic over 3,000 dead out of a population of 300 million. Is it entirely reasonable to expect Iraqis to be good sports about at something between 5 and 33 times as many dead out of 27 million?

Still, incompetence is more fun to write about. Here's one that may have gone past you in the recent news overload. Josh Rushing was the Marine who was featured in the movie The Control Room.

Since the link is to a longish chunk of audio, here's a summary. Rushing was a Marine, and intelligent and dedicated. What he wasn't was an expert on Iraq. Much of what he knew about the country he learned from _Iraq for Dummies_ which he read on the plane trip to the country. He didn't know Arabic.
As junior officer, he was given the job of speaking for the US to Al Jazeera, a major news source for some 45 million Arabs. He wasn't even given his own translator. Now, this isn't the fog and hurry and desperation of war. This is the people in charge just not bothering to pay attention.

When Rushing showed up in The Control Room (when he was interviewed for the movie, he thought it was just a student project and had no idea it was going to be shown at Sundance), he was given orders not to speak about it, and to tell his family not to, either. His family didn't obey, and he got so frustrated with not being allowed to defend the military (many people who saw the movie interpreted him as a lone voice of sanity), he left the Marines.

Bush is the President who doesn't think he'd do anything differently in Iraq if he could do it over. Please don't vote for him.

I came down on the wimpy, "Well, it doesn't have to be a disaster" side. To be fair, it still doesn't have to be a disaster, but it sure doesn't look good.

I have an allergy to most right-wing writing. That "I'm going to tell you what you have to do and pretend that it's the universe imposing obligations" tone drives me up the wall. Logically, it's no worse than the left-wing "I'm going to tell you what you have to do to be a decent person and pretend that it's a universal obligation", but my emotional reaction is very different. There's plenty of evidence that many people have the opposite reactions, but I have to take what they say on faith--I can't imagine what it's like to be them.

In any case, I only notice flaws in things I can pay attention to, so I was reading left-wing anti-war stuff and noticing some flaws. In particular, they say "Iraq is a sovreign nation!" and I'd think, "But Germany and Japan were rebuilt successfully". It seemed to me that they were expressing something as a general principle which was only true some of the time.

They'd say, "WWII was different", but if anyone published a list of the ways that WWII was different (especially if it was published before the war in Iraq), I'd be quite interested in a link. At this point, I think of "WWII was different" as parent-speak--the state in which one may be saying something true, but where it seems so utterly obvious that one doesn't offer any convincing explanations. I try to avoid parent-speak, but even without children, it becomes more tempting as the years go by.

Also, people seemed to be saying both that Bush was a puppet and that he was insisting on a war in Iraq because of his own psychological motivations. No one seemed to notice that these can't both be true. This lack of attention to logic made the anti-war side seem less credible. In theory, the puppet masters could have been using/amplifying Bushes stuff about Iraq for their own nefarious purposes, but I don't remember anyone saying that.

There were some people saying, "It doesn't have to be a disaster, but the people running it are blithering idiots"--I wish I'd listened more carefully to that part.