Ideology, American style

Earlier today, my colleague Jeff Kesselman posted a piece in which he despaired of the myopia of many Americans; of the way in which, at best, they can’t see where their interests lie, and at worst actively work against them. He wrote:

Not long ago I had someone look at me in all seriousness and say, “You don’t have kids. Why on earth do you want to pay for public schools?” Now there are all kinds of good reasons for having top quality schools. Reasons in my self-interest having to do with the health of the American economy, our ability to globally compete, and the ability of the masses to do any kind of justice to this thing we call democracy. For this person though I realized a more down to earth explanation was going to be necessary and I simply said, “If your kid has a good job, he won’t steal my stereo.”

On reading this, I was reminded of the fascinating piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine: the first in a series of articles by Bernard-Henri Lévy entitled In the Footsteps of Tocqueville. I’m going to quote at greater length than usual, because the online copy is for subscribers only; I encourage you to pick up a print edition. Here he writes about visiting the Republican Convention in New York last summer; the emphasis is mine:

These people who say ‘values matter more’; these activists for whom the struggle against Darwin is a sacred cause that should be argued in the schools; this blue-collar man from Buffalo to whom I explain that the promise of the current president to reduce federal taxes will have the automatic effect of impoverishing his native city even more, who replies that he couldn’t care less, because what matters to him is the problem posed by inflation in a quasi-Soviet state. These are men and women who are ready to let the questions that affect them most directly take second place to matters of principle that — in the case, for instance, of the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts — do not have, and never will have, any effect on their concrete existence. Aren’t they reacting as ideologues would, according to criteria that have to be called ideological?… What’s the matter with Kansas? Since when has politics stopped obeying the honest calculation of self-interest and personal ambition? How can knowledgeable, reasonable, pragmatic men work for their own servitude, thinking they’re struggling for their freedom? That, Thomas Frank, is what is called ideology. That is precisely the mechanism that La Boétie and Karl Marx described in Europe, which we, alas, have experienced only too often. Now it’s your turn, friends. And as we say in France, À votre santé!—To your very good health!

What kind of person could think that a couple of gay men getting married in Provincetown, MA, was more important than putting books in the school library and cops on the streets? The same species that can’t understand why a childless man would support public education, I guess.

To Prius or not to Prius….

I’m thinking of replacing my trusty Mercury Cougar (I’ve had it 7 years), and I’ve been doing some preliminary research. While I’ve always had a soft spot for the Subaru WRX, and the Scion tC looks like an amazing value, and the Mini Cooper is… well, a Mini, the geek in me keeps coming back to the Toyota Prius. Any Prius owner care to supplement (or contradict) the ecstatic opinions of the motoring press? Does that amazing powerplant work as well as they say?
(Of course the fact that my latest fill-up was at $2.29 a gallon has nothing to do with my thinking. It’s the Prius’s optional Bluetooth support….!)

Arithmetically challenged Google?

According to the Guardian: “Google is celebrating the first birthday of its free email service Gmail by doubling users’ capacity to two gigabytes, with a promise to boost its email storage further in future.” Sounds good. But why does my Gmail page say that I have only 1479MB? Am I not worthy?:

You are currently using 67 MB (5%) of your 1479 MB.

UPDATE: Thanks to Robin and Mark for pointing out that Google is doling out the additional space a few megabytes at a time. I’m now up to 1540 MB, and there’s a cute graphic on the Gmail login page that explains what’s going on. To infinity and beyond, I guess…..

The angels cheer: "They killed Kenny!"

kennysmall.jpgNo, I don’t normally watch “South Park”. I’m not sure why – we used to have an awesome “South Park” pinball machine here in the Labs. Anyway, the buzz was that yesterday’s “South Park” was going to be a very special one – and it was. Andrew Leonard tells all over at Salon: “But wait! Kenny isn’t dead! Doctors manage to resuscitate him! With a feeding tube! He’s in a ‘persistent vegetative state.’ Heaven is doomed!… The feeding tube is pulled. ‘They killed Kenny,’ the angels cheer! Heaven is saved, as Kenny, using a gold-plated PSP given to him by Peter, defeats the forces of Satan.”

Brilliant. Tasteless? Sure, but it’s a breath of fresh air after the recent media circus.

And coincidentally Kenny popped up again today, over at Boing Boing: trench art from Iraq. (See thumbnail.) Full size pic at Flickr.

Caught by the marketing machine: Moby "Hotel"

On the strength of a slick sampler download from iTunes, I bought Moby’s new album “Hotel”. Oh dear. (British understatement, that.) Kelefa Sanneh wrote an unsparing review of the album in today’s New York Times: This music isn’t just dull, though. Like much of what Moby has produced since “Play,” it’s condescending, too. Much of it sounds like the work of a producer who thinks pop music is supposed to be kind of idiotic, and who thinks pop audiences should be glad that he deigns to give us what we want. Do we like sex? O.K., here’s “I Like It,” four singularly unpleasant minutes of heavy breathing. Do we like songs about how the world is happy and sad and good and bad? O.K., here’s “Slipping Away,” with a wispy beat and Moby crooning, “Open to everything, happy and sad/Seeing the good when it’s all going . . .” – you can finish the couplets yourself. And, knowing that we like familiarity, Moby has his collaborator, Laura Dawn, sing a slowed-down version of the New Order hit “Temptation.”

Fortunately, my car has a 6-disc CD changer, so it was a matter of a click of a button to get away from this stuff to music with real soul – Final Straw by Snow Patrol, or Sunday 8 PM by Faithless. And now Chris tells me I should pay attention to The Futureheads, and from the videos on the website he’s right. And the Pickle thinks I should dive into the Avenue Q Soundtrack and accept that It Sucks To Be Me and Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist. So much music, so little time.

Serendipity: Irshad Manji

This evening I emerged from my philosophy class and turned on my cell phone to call back in to a meeting in California. Instead, I saw an unfamiliar message: No service: SOS only. What to do? irshadmanji.jpgI decided to join Dan Dennett and others in attending a talk and book-signing by Irshad Manji, the author of The Trouble with Islam Today : A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. And I’m really glad I did. She’s an excellent speaker: energetic, passionate, witty, uncompromising. Dennett asked her how she dealt with critics who saw her open discussion of Islam with “infidels” as a betrayal; how she negotiated that “fine line”. She rejected the premise: she’s not interesting in balance, in compromising with bigotry. She’s not trying to convince those who disagree with her: she’s seeking to empower and encourage those who share her beliefs but are afraid of speaking out.

No, I don’t share her faith, nor do I agree with her qualified support for the invasion of Iraq, but I applaud her commitment to universal human rights, her integrity, and her courage. A wonderful event. Do hear her if you get the chance.

What does this mean for iWork?

Many, many Sun employees are now working from their homes in every corner of the USA world. Many have chosen to live in low-tax states. How is this New York ruling (reported in Slashdot) going to affect this? Will Alaskan telecommuters wind up paying California income taxes if their VPN connections terminate in Menlo Park? Once again, technology meets tax policy, and the result is going to be a mess….

“hal9000(jr) writes ‘The Boston Globe is running this story on an out-of-state programmer working for a New York company who had to pay state taxes. ”New York has the right to tax 100% of a nonresident employee’s income derived from New York sources,’ according to the 4-3 decision by Court of Appeals. The court relied on a fairness rule called the ‘convenience of the employer’ under law that says a worker’s income is taxable if he chooses to live outside the state, as opposed to if he or she was transferred there.’ “

Playing it safe

I just submitted my first written coursework since – oh, I don’t know, 1974? – for my PhilOfMind course at Tufts. The format was a dialogue between three philosophers on a particular topic. The choices were limited: I couldn’t simply pick any philosophers and any topic. I chose Fodor, Millikan and Paul Churchland on mental representations.

I started off routinely – read the lit, capture what each participant had to say on the topic, figure out a sub-topical flow that I could use to organize their ideas. And then I read some exchanges (Fodor & Pylyshyn vs. Smolensky on systematicity in connectionist models) that I thought would be a great way of contrasting Fodor and Churchland. A priori language of thought, symbolic, and pristine on the one hand; distributed representations, activation vectors, fuzzy combinations on the other. There were only two problems: I couldn’t see a role for Millikan in the debate, and at least 80% of the dialogue would be fictitious: there wasn’t a lot of material I could directly quote.

Which to do? Safe but pedestrian, or edgy but speculative and incomplete? In the end, I played it safe – but I think I’ll write up the other one anyway, just for my own satisfaction.

Getting a sense of perspective

In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: “Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn’t yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: ‘It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.’“

Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we’ve known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There’s no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

But then Walden brings in religion. “A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense – a belief in the value of human life. [Don’t use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what’s permissible and what isn’t. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don’t mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn’t survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency.”

I’m all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I’m not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We’ve just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody – bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians – seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It’s going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.

If Walden wants to talk about “religion in its widest sense”, I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion’s historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology “chills him to the bone.”

Thought for the day: “When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

The dirty little secret of the computer biz

I spent several hours on Saturday replacing the CPU fan on my wife’s computer. The old one had started making a noise like a vacuum cleaner that you could hear all over the house. It’s an middle-of-the-road PC, a bland eMachines box with a ~900MHz Celeron. We talked about replacing it with a Mac Mini, but there’s plenty of life in the old system and it seemed wasteful to replace it unnecessarily.

While I was disassembling the innards to get at the CPU, I took the opportunity to clean out the dust from the power supply fan and replace the video adapter with something a little more functional. When it was all back together, I ran some tests and spent a few minutes upgrading her copies of Firefox and Thunderbird to the latest releases. Nothing earth-shattering: the parts cost about $60 at CompUSA. The biggest challenge was bending the spring clip on the fan to fit more securely onto the tabs on the CPU’s ZIF socket.

The point is, there’s no way she could have done all of this stuff herself: it’s just too complicated. A nice piece on the BBC website makes the point: “But all the people who called me had one thing in common: they were at their wits’ end because they had bought computers after being seduced by advertising into thinking that they would be easy to use and fun, but had found them to be much more complicated than they had expected. And most importantly, none of them knew what to do or where to turn for help.”

I’ve decided that in future I’ll recommend that people get laptops. Not because they need the mobility, not because it’s cheaper (it isn’t) or more comfortable (most laptop keyboards suck), but because if when things go wrong, they can simply fold up the computer and carry it to a human being, to get help.