I’ve been admiring Ta-Nehisi Coates off and on for some time, but now he’s on my every-day list. I was just staggered by this post today, on the burden of self-justificatory myths.

I want to focus on . . . the South’s psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don’t mean defeat in the war, so much as I mean lagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.

I’ve actually long overlooked that last point by noting to myself that virtually all societies practiced slavery. But in the 1850s, the South was only bested in the scale of its slavery, by Russian serfdom. Thus this country was not merely a moral offender among many, but a moral offender on a grand scale, plying its trade at a point when much of the rest of the world had moved forward.

It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. . . .

Nathan Bedford Forrest (pictured above) is beautiful. Again, dig those steely eyes, that dead serious countenance, the warrior’s beard. His story is American–the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he’s noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time.

Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry–too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest).  To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK. . . .

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it’s painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn’t just “lost,” it’s barely a cause.

This is a beautiful piece of writing - and the long version is better. (He’s not just crapping on the South, much as they deserve it. He notes the experience of overcoming his own myths, and how liberating that can be.) Coates often sees right to the heart of things, and has a clean and pointed way of expressing that. And not rarely, he tees one up and hits it right out of the park. He needs to be read.

I’m also going to make a point of looking for the book he references, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.

KTK has asked me a couple of times to write a review of the Kindle, and since the new version appears to be coming out soon, I thought this might not be a bad time. The short review is that it is great. The longer review is a bit more complicated.

The Kindle is not a book replacement; it is a library replacement. People keep talking about it as if it was just a book replacement and I think that misses some of the key benefits of the machine. It is, to get that out of the way, a very good device to read books on. I hate reading on a back lit screen; after a time, it does hurt my eyes and can even give me headaches. the Kindle has no such problems because of the e-ink screen. It really is just like looking at paper. The contrast is slightly lower, but it is not something I notice in day to day use and you can adjust the text from teeny to “are you blind?” levels. The slight delay when you turn a page is noticeable at first, but after a few days of usage it disappears. The form factor is fantastic. I read mine in a cover, and even with that cover, it is still lighter and thinner than most books that I read and having the page-turn buttons on either side makes finding a comfortable position easy. I am too the point where I actually prefer to read on the Kindle rather than anything but the slimmest books. It is such a nice way to read that we had to buy one for my wife because I had gone about three weeks without being able to use mine.

If the Kindle were just a nice reading device, I probably would not have purchased one, but, as I mentioned, it is actually a library. Anyone who is an avid reader knows the feeling of looking around and noticing that not only do you not have enough shelf space, you don’t have anywhere to put new shelves. My wife and I had long passed that point and the kids were rapidly closing in on it. The Kindle helps eliminate that problem. Between the on-board storage and the memory card, you can store an enormous number of books. Amazon will even keep all copies of the books you bought for you online, accessible from anywhere. It is really like having a library in the cloud. And just like a library, you can try out books in the form of a downloaded sample. A feature which has saved me some money and lost time. It has also introduced me to books that I would not have tried if I had had to buy them first. And, since it is Amazon, it has a much wider range of books than my local library to choose from. Just like a library, it has magazines and newspapers that I can read. Just like a library, it has a dictionary and an encyclopedia (well, okay, Wikipedia, but still ..). Except in the case of the Kindle, looking up a word just requires selecting the word and choosing a menu option. And, unlike a library or any other bookstore, when I am done with one book I can start the next right away, regardless of time or place. Several times I have been at home after store hours or in some waiting room and gone purchased a new book right then and there. It is an amazing level of convenience.

That is made possible by the built in, free, wireless connectivity. Without a computer, you can access the Amazon store and download samples or buy books anywhere you have a connection in something like a minute’s time. You can get your magazine or newspaper subscriptions sent right to your device, ready for you when you wake up in the morning. In addition, you can get books and documents form other sources converted and set directly to your Kindle, for a small fee. Fortunately for cheapskates like myself, the Kindle also operates like an external hard drive when attached to your computer (Mac or Windows — haven’t tried Linux yet): get a file in the appropriate format and drag and drop. So you don;t have to rely on Amazon for your books. I have copies of Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, The Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Works of William Shakespeare on my Kindle, all from Feedbooks and all for free.

The device is not perfect, of course. First, it is expensive. Three hundred and sixty dollars is not cheap, and I think a large part of that price is the cost of the wireless connectivity. This is somewhat made up by the fact that the vast majority of books are 20-60% cheaper on the Kindle than in paper, with the biggest discounts being on books still in hardcover; my wife and I read enough that we have already saved enough on books to pay for both of the Kindles. But the pricing plan is not always that generous — some books sell for what is very close to cover price and not much, if any, cheaper than the usualy book store sales. Same with magazine subscriptions — some, like Time and Newsweek and the Nation, are great deals. Some, like Asimov’s, are not. And, of course, not every book is available on the Kindle. A good chunk, especially new titles, are, but it is nowhere near the level of, say, music and MP3s.

The wireless is nice, but it is essentially useless for web browsing. Only the most text heavy sites work at anything approaching an acceptable rate. Colored pictures are an impossibility, so magazines like, say, Discover that rely on graphics, charts and photos to convey core information don’t work at all. Same with picture books for children. Children’s books in general are one area where the Kindle’s selection is very poor, especially chapter books. It does not support PDF naively, though it can convert the format. And the way the Kindle organizes books can use some more flexibility.

More importantly the books are DRM’ed to within an inch of their lives. I am not an anti-DRM zealot, but there is the potential that if Amazon abandons this program, by books go away when the hardware dies. I imagine that if it came to that, someone would quite easily crack the Kindle DRM (if, indeed, it has not already happened), but there is no guarantee of that. I just finished The Game by Ken Dryden and I think tgirsch would like it. But I cannot just lend it to him without lending him my Kindle. He will have to buy it himself. I can share among Kindles I own, but not with other people who own Kindles.

Still, I think those are minor flaws, even the DRM issue. The Kindle is a great reading experience and a lot more. Coupled with the wireless connectivity and the extraordinary storage space, and it is the most helpful, useful and enjoyable consumer electronic product I have bought in a long time. If you are an avid reader, I think it is a worthwhile purchase.

if I get a chance, I will go over the specs for the new Kindle and see if it seems worth upgrading.

The Wall Street Journal and the Cato Institute continue their unremitting self-parody with today’s clueless editorial touting . . . (yes, get ready for it) . . . Ayn Rand’s turgid, melodramatic novel Atlas Shrugged.

Proving that Cato really is peopled exclusively with surly 15-year-old prep schoolers, Stephen Moore says with a straight face that:

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

He explains that everything predicted by prescient genius and self-annointed uberfrau Rand is really truly The Way Things Are, and we’re all going to realize it Any Day Now.

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit. . . .

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008. We already have been served up the $700 billion “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” and the “Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act.” Now that Barack Obama is in town, he will soon sign into law with great urgency the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” This latest Hail Mary pass will increase the federal budget (which has already expanded by $1.5 trillion in eight years under George Bush) by an additional $1 trillion — in roughly his first 100 days in office. . . .

The [book describes an event] eerily similar to an event late last year when six bank presidents were summoned by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to Washington, and then shuttled into a conference room and told, in effect, that they could not leave until they collectively signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government. The Treasury folks insisted that this shakedown, too, was all in “the public interest.”

Ultimately, “Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of the entrepreneur, the risk taker and the cultivator of wealth through human intellect. Critics dismissed the novel as simple-minded, and even some of Rand’s political admirers complained that she lacked compassion. Yet one pertinent warning resounds throughout the book: When profits and wealth and creativity are denigrated in society, they start to disappear — leaving everyone the poorer.

Leave aside the whiny doomsaying and petulant self-justification (the book was an “instant hit” among self-absorbed grandiosities and remains a joke otherwise, and there is a reason people call Randites compassionless). Skip the sheer boneheadedness as well (in Atlas Shrugged, the true capitalists are all strong-jawed individualists, the “parasites” are weak, sniveling, beggars; the capitalists withdraw from society, solemnly take a literal oath not to contribute to charity, retreat to a secluded mountain valley, and establish their own strictly libertarian and capitalistic society on the gold standard; naturally, the entire rest of the world collapses into anarchistic chaos as soon as the CEOs of several banks, railroads, and mining companies decide to take a vacation). And even ignore the deliberate distortions required to make Randianism even plausible (how is it that the ultra-capitalist objects to the government taking an equity position in the companies it’s giving money to? - that’s no more than basic business sense; note also that nobody was forced to take any money from the government - they demanded it after they had driven their own businesses into bankruptcy, and then didn’t like the terms on which it was offered - but to Moore, that’s just the same as confiscation without compensation; and perhaps it’s best just to pass over any evaluation of how our modern-day Dagny Taggarts have “cultivated wealth through intellect”, as their entire industries go bankrupt through corruption and mismanagement). What’s remarkable is how blind Moore is to the collapse of the empty myth the Friedmans and Rands of the world comforted themselves with - a collapse he documents but does not notice.

He’s right, in some sense, that the world - and the United States in particular, the homeland of fuck-you libertarianism - has steadily become ever less Randian in the 52 years since her risible amorality play was published. We grow ever closer to the rest of the civilized world by creating and extending retirement and healthcare programs that provide for all citizens, increasing support for the disabled and special education, improving emergency services (and rightly condemning those who undermine them in times of need), and guarding against ruin by regulating the financial speculators who first destroyed the stock market in the 20s and, again absent appropriate regulations, did the same to the housing mortgage and securities-derivatives markets today. Every such program has bettered the lives of Americans, and all are popular and increasingly in demand. Again and again, unbridled capitalism (and its political lapdog the GOP) has proven it cannot be entrusted with what really matters in people’s lives - it’s great with Pet Rocks, Britney Spears videos, and the Thighmaster, but it kills people or condemns them to misery when entrusted with their healthcare, retirement savings, mortgages, school funding, environment, or public safety. Again and again, prudent regulation and oversight have proven to be necessary, and usually beneficial. And the more obvious that becomes, the more idiotic Rand’s self-aggrandizing fantasy appears.

Look around . . . the economy isn’t collapsing because of the GI Bill, Medicare, the interstate highway system, or FDIC insurance for bank deposits. Those are among the few parts of the economy that worked rightly, and still provide protections for those most in need, and most in danger of ruin at the hands of the businesses they trusted not to destroy them. The economy is collapsing because “the smartest guys in the room” were either insanely stupid or just plain vicious crooks. We’re not going to get out of this by giving those people more freedom to do what they’ve done with even less control or oversight. We’re going to get out of this - like every economy does (”there are non-Keynesian economists, but there are no non-Keynesian economies”) - by spending to stimulate growth, support for the needy to prevent tragedy, and regulations to protect the vulnerable and prevent another incompetent, criminal meltdown like this one. And when we come out the other side, as we will, after we’ve muzzled the crooks, the creeps, and the silver-spoon “rugged individualists” who got us here, we’ll keep the regulations needed to keep them in line until they think of yet more ways to evade them and create another mess later, and we’ll keep the support programs and social services needed to protect the people when they do. It’s what civilized societies do, and it’s what’s necessary when you let capitalists off the leash.

In a way, we have the Randians, the Friedmanites, and the Cato clowns to thank for this last necessary push over the hump into the decently mixed, appropriately regulated economy with robust social services that I hope and expect will arise from the Obama administration. They’ve proven they can’t be trusted with anything as serious as real-world economic policy. Better to leave them to their unreadable books and delusional mutual admiration, while their fantasy world crumbles around them and they don’t realize it.

I am once again out of books. Read anything good lately?

Yes, it’s Banned Books Week again - time to mourn, and to celebrate. It’s especially poignant that this year, Banned Books Week coincides with the date of the Vice Presidential Debate for Campaign 2008, one of whose participants, as almost her first act in elected office, tried to ban books in her city library.

The upside to Banned Books Week, as Nicole Belle points out in her lovely post linked above, is that it is as much a time to fight back against ignorance, intolerance, and the enemies of freedom of thought as it is to beware their perpetual campaign of oppression. We have seen in too many ways in recent years the dangers of complacency and an unfounded confidence in progressive values. It is important to remind and re-energize ourselves about the alternatives that constantly stalk us in politics, social policy, and our private lives. And looking on the upside, one of the delicious satisfactions of this year’s remembrance will be the chance to see the party of book-banning and the religious war on tolerance get their ass righteously handed to them at the polls, at long last. That’s going to be worth celebrating.

Until then, the usual suspects:

The most frequently challenged books of 2007

The following books were the most frequently challenged in 2007:

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom received a total of 420 challenges last year. A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.  According to Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the number of challenges reflects only incidents reported, and for each reported, four or five remain unreported.

The “10 Most Challenged Books of 2007” reflect a range of themes, and consist of the following titles:

1) “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
[NB: A factually correct non-fiction book about a baby penguin parented by two male penguins. What is it with right-wingers and the penguins?]
Reasons: Anti-Ethnic, Sexism, Homosexuality, Anti-Family, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

2) “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Violence

3) “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes
Reasons: Sexually Explicit and Offensive Language

4) “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman
Reasons:  Religious Viewpoint

5) “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
Reasons:  Racism

6) “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language

7) “TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou
Reasons:  Sexually Explicit

9) “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris
Reasons:  Sex Education, Sexually Explicit

10) “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons:  Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

Some clown named Andrew Klavan has an essay at the conservative New York City Journal chock full of his insights into family, media, and culture. Predictably, in telling us what’s wrong with all the above, he mostly just tells us what’s wrong with Andrew Klavan.

Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned in last week’s random book blogging that TOR was giving away free books. Blogassm tracked down some more information about why TOR wanted people to give them them their email addresses:

Tor Books, a major science fiction and fantasy publisher, announced recently that it would offer free weekly ebooks of its print titles if you sign up for its email newsletter. But this is just part of a larger online expansion that will include social networking and the publication of original short fiction and nonfiction, sources familiar with the project told me.

Two sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity said that it’s intended to be a “go-to site, a central community” for science fiction and fantasy fans. A few authors have already been approached to submit original short fiction to be published online. Tor is paying upwards of 25 cents per word for these stories and right now is only dealing with solicited authors.

According to one of the sources, this website will act in part as a form of branding and promotion for Tor book titles, “with an eye towards leveraging traffic into advertising revenues, down the road.” The project is being largely organized by Patrick Nielson Hayden, a senior editor at Tor.

So far the details of this site have remained a secret, hence why the sources spoke on condition of anonymity.

In an email on Friday, Nielsen Hayden confirmed many of these facts.

Via Making Light is this odd, nerdy little story about an amnesiac trapped in a phone both buried in concrete.

John Scalzi is auctioning off a pre-publication copy of is next book, Zoe’s Tale, to support the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust. I am not a big fan of military sci-fi, but the man did win a Campbell and he apparently sells like a million or so of ech book he writes, so he probably has at least some small measure of talent. You can find the auction itself here and Scalzi’s post on the matter here. You can give to the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust directly here.

A look at the Clinton Rules via an index.

Does anyone know how many books are actually sold?

The Nation has an interesting look at two books that ask how the Russian Revolution, which was born from actions taken by local worker and soldier’s councils that were as democratic than anything at the time in the West, ended up in one of the worst dictatorships the world has ever known.

This won’t make much sense unless you he been reading this, but it is a lot of fun if you have. And if you aren’t reading Fred’s Left Behind series, you are missing out.

Tor is giving away free ebooks in exchange for your email address.

Steven Brust has written a Firefly novel and is giving it away for free. This is not acceptable. I want my next Vlad novel and he cannot write that if he is writing Firefly novels.

It is free book week in genre-land. Neil Gaiman, in celebration of his blog’s seventh birthday, is giving away one of is books away as an ebook. Which one will be determined by fan voting.

In less happy news, Caitlan Kiernan is ill and and in serious financial trouble as a result. You can help here if you are a fan or just a nice person.

Dave Sim? Still bug-nuts crazy. He’s kinda like the Platonic Form “Misogynist” at this point.

You’re The Things They Carried!
by Tim O’Brien
Harsh and bitter, you tell it like it is. This usually comes in short,
dramatic spurts of spilling your guts in various ways. You carry a heavy load, and this
has weighed you down with all the horrors that humanity has to offer. Having seen and
done a great deal that you aren’t proud of, you have no choice but to walk forward,
trudging slowly through ongoing mud. In the next life, you will come back as a water
buffalo.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Now, I love this book, but I am not really that dark and cynical, am I? Plus, the idea of being a water buffalo doesn’t appeal that much to me.

Link via Lance Mannion, who got a worse book

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is a remarkable book. Ostensibly, it is about what would happen if human being were removed from the planet in some sudden and total apocalypse (imagine, Weisman suggests, that the believers in the Rapture or in alien kidnappers are right). And that tale is fascinating. Weisman has done an enormous amount of research, talking to everyone from New York City subway engineers to insect experts to world renowned chemists. He weaves that research into haunting and amusing tales of decay and destruction. He takes the reader through the gradual destruction of their homes and the more spectacular destruction of New York City. He chronicles the attempts of large game, nearly extinct now, to re-colonize the suddenly human-less Earth and t sad fate of cockroaches who have followed humans too far north. The vignettes are well told, even moving on occasion, but they are not the point of the book; the research they are based upon is.

Weisman spends most of the book taking us through the research that lead to each chapter’s tale of a person-less world and that research is the real point of his book. Weisman isn’t really interested in the end of the human world, he is interested in preventing that end. The chapter on which African large animals can survive the end of humans is actually about the effect human settlement patterns are having on African wildlife. The chapter on what would and would not decay quickly without human care is actually about the enormous waste that modern industrial society produces. The chapter on how plastics will affect marine life and bacterial evolution is actually about how humans have rushed headlong into changes, the impact of which they don’t come close to understanding. Because the book touches every continent and almost every aspect of modern industrial civilization, Weisman is able to cover almost every aspect of environmental degradation, including those that receive almost no media attention despite their importance. Because the research is weaved into a mystery — what would happen if humans disappear — the tone of the book never approaches stridency or fear-mongering. Instead, it is matter of fact and curious and brings the reader along to its conclusions gently, even subtly.

Weisman’s conclusion is the only area of the book that falters. His proposed solution may be logically compelling, but it is not practical in anything like a reasonable timeframe using anything like reasonable methods. There is no doubt that Weisman suspects as such and so the reader is left with the nagging, depressing suspicion that Weisman doesn’t have any other alternatives to offer. But that is a minor flaw in an otherwise extraordinary book. Weisman has written an environmental call to arms that is literary, engaging, curious, and serious without being strident. The World Without Us is perhaps the best environmental book of the last several years and I strongly recommend it.

Cass Sunstein is back, this time with a new book claiming that the Internet is bad for democracy because it allows like minded people to hang out with other like minded people, and thus they all become partisan zombies and thats bad, because, umm, because people aren’t supposed to have strong positions on things? The meta-argument kinda loses me there, as you can probably tell. I haven’t read the book so I cannot speak to its in depth argument, but Mr. Sunstein is blogging at TMP Cafe this week and his first post is not a particularly impressive one.

Here is the core of his post:

As the experiment was designed, the groups consisted of predominantly liberal or conservative members—with the liberal groups coming from Boulder, and the conservative groups from Colorado Springs. (The groups were not mixed together.) It is widely known that Boulder tends to be liberal and that Colorado Springs tends to be conservative. The groups were screened to ensure that their members conformed to these stereotypes. (For example, if people in Boulder liked Vice President Cheney, they were cordially excused from the experiment.) People were asked to state their opinions anonymously both before and after a period of group discussion, and also to try to reach a public verdict before the final anonymous statement. What was the effect of discussion?

The results were simple. In almost every group, members ended up with more extreme positions after they spoke with one another. Discussion made civil unions more popular among liberals; discussion made civil unions less popular among conservatives. Liberals favored an international treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favored it more strongly after discussion. Conservatives were neutral on that treaty before discussion; they strongly opposed it after discussion. Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action before discussion, conservatives became even more negative abou affirmative action after discussion.

A couple of things here. Even assuming that the degree of the effect was as intense as Sunstein implies, this is a poorly designed experiment, or, from Sunstein’s description of it, this is a poorly designed experiment. He doesn’t link to it or give us enough details to track down where it was published, so I cannot be one hundred percent certain. but there is no mention of what happens after the groups are shuffled and the rations are more 50-50. In other words, Sunstein assumes that the effect he describes is permanent without actually offering any evidence that it so. If your contention that the Internet makes partisanship worse, shouldn’t and one of your supporting arguments is that groups in isolation become more partisan and have less internal differences, shouldn’t you design an experiment that actually attempts to answer that question? Unless you assume that the groups always remain in isolation, the first thing you have to do is to determine whether or not that affect is lasting and to what degree it persists. This experiment as described does not do that.

And groups do not remain in isolation. People go to work, they go to Church, they go to movies and ball games and professional conferences. It is literally impossible for me to not be aware of the conservative view of the world, both because of the prevalence of conservative viewpoints in the mainstream media and because of the fact that I live a normal human life that brings into contact with other people all the time. Some of those people are conservatives, and some of those people talk about conservative issues. It’s probably easier for conservatives, but even they would have a hard time going through life without exposure to liberals.

The second problem assumes that increased partisanship on the issues in questions is a bad thing. First, any argument that assumes “extremism” is a label that can be applied to civil unions is suspect in and of itself. Civil unions are the compromise position between the current level of discrimination and full equality before the law. So in Sunstein’s experiment, the liberals became more strongly in favor of the compromise position. Describing that as an increase in extremism is ridiculous on its face. (UPDATE: Ted points out that this is not entirely accurate. It implies that Sunstein is labeling civil unions explicitly as extremism, when the text doesn’t really support that; I misread the way he was using the word. He still seems to be implying that civil unions are the opposite of the current inequality, but he isn’t really stating it explicitly, so I could be mis-reading his intention.) But its part and parcel of the problem with the underlying assumption. Sometimes, the compromise solution is not a viable one. Global warming, another area where “extremism” increased according to Sunstein is a good example. Either global warming is a large problem that has to be dealt with quickly and forthrightly or its an overblown ghost story that doesn’t justify the material investment required to prevent its worst effects from occurring. Neither side is much served by a split the middle, compromise is always good attitude. Half measures may be better then nothing form the global warming perspective, for example, but they won’t solve the problem and at the end of the day you still have to work to convince people to take the real steps required to prevent the worst form occurring. At best, compromise buys a little more time for such convincing — the kind of convincing that went on in Sunstein’s experiement — to continue. Affirmative action is less an all or nothing position than global warming, but it, too, can be argued that the compromise position is useless for both sides in the argument: a little affirmative action is either an unnecessary violation of rights or a useless tool that does not achieve the very real and needed societal changes.

It seems odd to argue that an increase in partisanship is bad without examining the actual merits of the questions involved; i.e. is one side already supporting a compromise position, as in the case of civil unions, or if a compromise position could have more than a minimal effect on the problem as in the case of global warming and affirmative action and is thus a rational choice for the players involved or not. Sunstein’s experiment assumes that any two positions are equally extreme, that the group dynamic demonstrated is persistent, and that compromise is always the rational position. All three of the assumptions are dubious and the fact that they form the underpinning of his experiment leaves his grander thesis, to the degree that he is going to support it based on this example, on very shaky ground.

J.K. Rowling has a wonderful gift for pushing the religious wingnuts’ “insane gibber” button, seemingly without trying. Her Harry Potter series consistently ranks among the books most frequently targeted for banning by the winger legions, and now she’s got them in a sex panic over what must be the most sex-free coming-of-age stories on record. I like her more and more.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have any profound comments about her place in literature or her works. I just know that they were very good and brought me a great deal of pleasure in my childhood. We should all do so well.

Via Scalzi.

Hilarious comment from Roxanne of Rox Populi:

The Fountainhead, in Brief

Anakin Skywalker goes to architecture school.

That’s great, but somehow I’m not quite sure it fits.

Maybe . . . “‘Dr. Evil’ goes to architecture school”? “Dick Cheney goes to architecture school?”

And how would you summarize Atlas Shrugged?

“Grover Norquist goes to urban planning school”?

What do you think?

So I’ve been slowly reading The Areas Of My Expertise by John Hodgman (you know him as the PC from the Mac commercials, or as the “resident expert” on The Daily Show). The book is hit-or-miss, and to be quite honest, it’s a whole lot more “miss” than “hit.” However, the section on the 51 states (long story) is quite good, and this bit, on New Hampshire, made me laugh out loud (especially the state motto):

New Hampshire

Nickname: The State Liquor Store State
Motto: “Live Free of Motorcycle Helmets and Seat Belts or Die.”
Notes: For centuries, a giant, craggy profile of a man could be seen in the cliffs of Cannon Mountain. Beloved and occasionally worshiped by the citizens of New Hampshire, he was dubbed “The Old Man of the Mountain,” and his profile still appears on the reverse of the New Hampshire state quarter. Sadly, in May of 2003, scientists determined that “The Old Man of the Mountain” was not in fact a giant man, but just rocks. The citizens of New Hampshire were so enraged by this betrayal that they tore the face off the mountain with picks. Remaining tourist attractions include: Olde Portsmouthe Towne, Libertarians, and tax-free wine and spirits. However, due to the state’s famous civic frugality, visitors are asked to provide their own roads.

He also dubs Missouri “The Demonstrate Your God-Damned Thesis State,” and gives Georgia’s nickname as “Where Every Street Is Named Peachtree,” which is funny if you’ve ever been there.

When I was a kid, my parents had a simple system for paying bills. They had a cheap, plastic bill holder — a hunk of puke colored plastic with fins of various sizes rising from it’s base. Bills to be paid went on the left half of the holder, already paid ones went on the right, waiting for stamps. The bills themselves could be anything — actual bills from a real company, notes written on scraps of paper to remind my parents to donate to the charity of the day, even bank statements to serve as a reminder to move money form checking to savings, or vice versa. It worked very well for my parents and they still use it — having replaced the ugly bill holder with slots in their elegant computer desk — to this day. It is also a system that is very hard to replicate in a computer.

Computers and human beings do not think the same way. For a human, concepts like “next Tuesday” and “a meeting every other week, on Thursdays” and “this piece of paper is both a piece of mail and a reminder to put a check in the mail on the 13th” are both easy to remember and easy to understand. The same is not true for a computer. Computers store data differently than the human brain and making certain associations is not as easy for programing languages as it is for human beings. This fact, that the human brain isn’t really a biological computer, is the cause of almost all frustration people have with software. We expect our tools to “think” in the same fashion we do, and they don’t. Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, is is the story the failure of programmers and engineers to bridge the gap between they way we think and what our tools can do, using the Chandler project as an example.

I want Chandler, but I will probably never see it. As described in the book, the Chandler group wanted to a create a personal information manager that would store and manipulate data in a fashion much more similar to how we hold information in our brains. In traditional programs, data is separated into categories or “silos”. Email is one kind of data, and so goes in one spot. An appointment on a calender is another kind of data and so goes in another. But as we already discussed, humans don’t operate like that. That email form my boss is also a change in schedule. That status report is also a reminder that the widget problem needs to be solved before we can decide on a release schedule. That calendar appointment is also a mile high stack of paperwork I have to get done before the meeting with the security audit. In small doses, this is easy for me to remember. It is progressively harder to do the more I have to remember, which is why we use programs to help us remember in the first place. But due to the discrete nature of computer data, building in those kinds of relationships among disparate kinds of data is not easy to do. Eventually,you pay a price in performance, in data size and robustness, and in user experience. Rosenberg details how the Chandler team encountered and dealt with — or failed to deal with — those problems. He also, at appropriate points, ties in the decisions that the Chandler team made or fell into to past discussions and fads about the best way to create software.

This is an area where the book really shines. Making software is still hard to do. Its rare for a large project to come in on time, under budget, and with the original feature set. This has been true since the invention of large scale software projects, right after the Second World War, and millions of tress and billions of electrons have given their lives in the search for why this is so. Rosenberg ties the Chandler team’s current problems to discussion of programming efficiency and software engineering from the past, using their problems to bring to life the consequences of popular theories and methodologies of software creation. None of these methodologies or theories has been anything resembling a large scale success. There are many reasons for this, from the iinabality to accurately and objectively measure programmer performance (this is a rant of a separate post, but if you are trying to measure programmer efficiency by some measure like lines of codes or number of bugs reported or fixed, then you are setting yourself up for a colossal failure) to the difficulty in brining new people onto a software project. Rosenberg uses the individual experiences of the Chandler people to illuminate a given set of theories, weaving their personal frustrations and triumphs as a touchstone to a more academic discussion of the history and qualities of software engineering methodologies. It is a very effective tactic, the difference between telling you that Picasso could paint and showing you a print.

This is not just a book for programmers. Anyone who designs, writes code, or manages programmers will be well served by reading the book, of course. Rosenberg has written a kind of meta case study. Not only does Rosenberg highlight what went wrong and right (and much more went wrong than went right), he also highlights what those failures mean for various software engineering theories and methodologies. It is an illuminating look at the topic. But this is also a tail for everyone else. More and more of our lives our intimately tied to software. Everything from how we get our entertainment to how we do our work to how our cars’ safety systems function is dependent upon software. The soul of Rosenberg’s book is the struggles of the Chandler team members to take what happens in their heads and turn it into a software. Understanding that struggle is one of the best ways to come to terms with the failures, compromises, and limitations of the software that runs your life.

The blogosphere lost another good blogger today — Michael Berube is hanging it up. Berube is one of two blogging professors (Jeff Cooper was the other) of whom I ever thought, “it would be fun to take a class from him”. I am going to miss reading him. I guess now I have to buy his book ….

On Easter Sunday, 1873, white men — mostly former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, surrounded the courthouse where a group of black men where holed up. The black men represented the legal government of the county, the white men represented the absolute refusal of whites in Louisiana to treat blacks as anything even resembling human beings. The white men attacked the out gunned blacks and beat them back into the court house, where they used a captured black to set fire to the building. The black men were allowed to burn to death. Most of the captives were executed the next day.

In 1921, the town of Colfax put up a monument to the battle. It read:

In Loving
Remembrance

Erected
To the Memory
Of the Heroes

…

Who Fell in the Coulfax
Riots Fighting For
White Supremacy

April 13, 873

I left the names of the three whites who died in the massacre. After reading this book, you would too. It is the tale of how the civil war was finally lost, at least in Mississippi and Louisiana. In essence, Whites in the South refused to treat freed slaves as anything other than, well, slaves. They expected their former chattel to behave as if the chains still existed, and when Blacks attempted to claim for themselves the rights all people are entitled to, Whites killed them. They killed them without provocation, without reason, without mercy. They killed for the explicit reason of making sure that Blacks could not vote, could not participate as the equals of Jim Crow was not a system of laws; it was the pale reflection of the violent will of the White South. Former Confederate soldiers and the cream of Southern society banned together ot impose its will upon the

Nicholas Lemann tells this story through the history of Adlebert Ames, former war hero and eventually Senator and Governor of Mississippi, and tells it well. His research is impeccable; events are told with the backing of a wealth of period source documents. His prose is sparse and clear and the more powerful for it. And Lemann never flinches from the true horror of the period. This is an infuriating book. If your blood doesn’t boil over the depredations described in this history, then there is something wrong with you. Leman does a good job not only of cataloging what happened but also what it meant to the people involved. The horror of the time is abundantly clear. If the book has a flaw, it is that it does not always do a good job of making clear how much the events in Mississippi mirrored those in other parts of the South. The book leaves the reader with the impression that Mississippi was representative of the Reconstruction South, but it doesn’t always prove the contention.

The impression, though, is reinforced by history. In the end, the murders and terrorists won all over the South — the North was too tired of war and too racist itself to beat back the Klan and other White Supremacy organizations like the White Lines. Despite the struggle of people like Ames and others from the North — the “carpetbaggers” so reviled in Southern mythology — the North was unwilling to force the surrender at Appomattox to mean both Union and Freedom. In the end, the noble Lost Cause, the heritage that I am told over and over again I should respect, degenerated into barbarism, murder, terrorism, and the explicit goal of making sure that no Black would ever live a life of anything other than complete and abject subservience to Whites. That fact and the mythology that grew up to excuse that fact dominated American politics until at least the 1980s. You can see the outline of almost every piece of racial politics in this country in Reconstruction Mississippi, especially in the refusal of Whites to accept that Blacks were full human beings and in the easy recourse to violence by Whites in service of that bigotry.

Lemann has written a depressingly comprehensive history of how the Civil War was lost to the forces of racism and hate in Mississippi. If you want to understand the Reconstruction — and thus the last hundred and forty years of American history — you should read this book.

1491 is a re-examination of what life was like in the Americas before the permanent arrival of Europeans. It is based on the most recent scientific work and is written by someone who knows how to explain even the most complicated scientific process in a clear and enlightening fashion. And I didn’t enjoy it anywhere as much as I think I should have.

The story itself is fascinating. The Americas before the arrival of Europeans turn out to have been much more populated than is generally understood. Places that we traditionally think of as largely empty — the Amazon and the interior of North America, for example — where actually the home of large, complex, city-building cultures. Those cultures were destroyed ahead of European history by the diseases that the first European explorers and their animals brought with them. The final numbers are in dispute, (a dispute covered very fairly by the author) but up to 95% of the original population of the Americas could have been killed by diseases and the resultant societal collapse. What is not in doubt that is that entire cultures disappeared after their first contact with European explorers. Further, the coastal Native Americans in North America more than held their own against European incursions for the first few decades of contact. It was only after diseases had shattered those nations that the conquest of North America could begin in earnest.

The portions of the book that focus on the lost cultures and the history of interaction between European invaders and Native Americans are the best portions of the book. The discussions of the science, as I mentioned, are nearly as interesting. Unfortunately, the book spends too much time dealing with the personalities behind the science. I am sure that most of the people profiled are nice, smart, and love kittens. But they are not one tenth as fascinating as the cultures they re-discovered, and time spent on them is time that could have been spent giving more detail about the fascinating and doomed cultures of the Americas.

It is th examination of those cultures — in many case, cultures that no school textbook has ever introduced you too — that make this book worth buying. For all its fault’s, 1491 does a marvelous job of conveying a sense of the lost cultures and a sense of the magnitude of that loss. And entire world, with cultures that were sometime much more enlightened (and some times not; 1491 is no hagiography of Native Americans), was destroyed in a handful of decades by greed, religious bigotry, and a terrible quirk of biology. 1491 is a good first attempt to explain what was lost and how it was destroyed.