Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I don’t know enough history yet to really argue this coherently, but: when did Africa and Asia become the Other to Western eyes? St. Augustine was born in what is now Algeria, Ptolemy’s famous library was located in Alexandria, and for that matter it’s called Alexandria because Alexander the Great ruled over it in the waning days of Athens’s greatness. It looks as though Alexander conquered as far east as Beas, in Punjab. The capital of the Eastern Roman Empire was in modern-day Turkey, of course, so the bounds of what Romans considered strange must have been east of there.

So without much data to go on, I’d be willing to hypothesize that the “Orient” and “Middle East” are fairly modern labels; at one time, I have to imagine that they were considered no more strange than Eastern Europe.

Does anyone have any more solid evidence in this direction?

From the New York Times the other day:

Democrats, who have found themselves on the losing end of the national security debate the past two national elections, said the changes to the bill had not yet reached a level that would cause them to try to block it altogether.

“We want to do this,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. “And we want to do it in compliance with the direction from the Supreme Court. We want to do it in compliance with the Constitution.”

Today:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Democratic vote in the Senate on Thursday against legislation governing the treatment of terrorism suspects showed that party leaders believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished.  . . . 

Over all, 32 Democrats voted against the measure while 12, including some of those in the most difficult re-election fights, backed it. Among the latter was Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, whose perceived support for Mr. Bush has brought him political trouble at home.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the discrepancy could be explained like so: when it mattered how they voted, the Democrats didn’t even try to filibuster. But once its victory was assured, they voted against it. They did so knowing that the Times would then make some noise about how maverick they were, and that the majority of Americans would only look at the final vote.

This has been disgusting from the start. I only hope that the Supreme Court protects us. My more cynical side says that Alito was appointed expressly because he would side with the Bush administration on fundamental human-rights questions like this one.

P.S.: Some reason for hope.

Some time ago, Paul Krugman wrote that reading Henry Kissinger’s book A World Restored had given him a shiver when he realized that, in Kissinger’s terminology, the Bush administration was a “revolutionary power.” I’ve now gotten the same shiver:

For powers long accustomed to tranquility and without experience with disaster, this is a hard lesson to come by. Lulled by a period of stability which had seemed permanent, they find it nearly impossible to take at face value the assertion of the revolutionary power that it means to smash the existing framework. The defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy but overstated its case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane, for they have all the good “reasons” on their side: the arguments accepted as valid in the existing framework. Appeasement, where it is not a device to gain time, is the result of an inability to come to grips with a policy of unlimited objectives.

But it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion.

(A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22, 1964 edition, pp. 2-3.)

One of the major virtues of blogs is their ability to specialize in a way that television and newspapers cannot. When you’re a broadcast medium, you have to invest an enormous amount in the fixed costs of operation — printing presses or studios, say — so you’ll necessarily do whatever you can to maximize your audience. In practice, what this means is minimizing the quantity of disturbing material you put out and maximizing consumer-friendly stuff that doesn’t bother people too much as they munch on their Sunday-morning toast.

Blogs, just by their economics, can be different. Their production costs are nearly zero, so they don’t have the same incentive to draw a huge audience. One of the consequences of this is that they can specialize to a degree that newspapers and television cannot.

(Yochai Benkler says all of this more carefully and in greater depth in The Wealth Of Networks. I’ve recently been remembering this argument, and I’ve been trying to figure out why it doesn’t also argue for books being fountains of pabulum.)

One of the more frustrating side-effects of this is that blogs can obsess about what are, as far as I can tell, really unimportant details. “Rathergate” was one of these. (Why must every semi-scandal since Watergate end in “-gate”? This habit is scandalous, I tell you. I call it  . . .  Gategate.) All the recent George-Allen-is-a-racist hoo-ha seems to me to be another.

But what really gets me about it is how much time Josh Marshall, in particular, spends on it. Marshall has the 58th-most-popular blog out there, among some millions of them. To me, it seems obvious that he ought to be devoting his attention to things that actually matter — for instance, the fact that we’re about to make torture official U.S. policy.

Now, one of the nice things about specialization is that people can focus on what they want to focus on, and the nice people at Balkinization can be our Torture Reporters. Everyone doesn’t have to talk about torture. But it really is the single most important thing happening in this country right now, and whenever I see newspapers talking about which famous person had intercourse with which other famous person, I scream internally that no one should be talking about anything but our torture policy. It should be on the cover of every paper, and every blogger ought to be railing against it until it stops. We ought to avoid euphemisms like “detainee” and “abuse,” and call it what it is: torture as official policy, that will very soon encompass American citizens.

So Marshall can obsess about what he wants to obsess about. It’s just a shame that someone with relatively high stature isn’t using it for things that really matter.

Do we have any reason to believe that the U.S. is not on the road to a dictatorship? What makes us immune? As the days go by, I become more convinced that it will happen here.

Full article below the fold.

(more…)

I can do no better than to quote Yale Law professor Jack Balkin in his entirety:

Spineless Democrats Deserve to Lose

JB

From the New York Times:

Democrats, who have found themselves on the losing end of the national security debate the past two national elections, said the changes to the bill had not yet reached a level that would cause them to try to block it altogether.

“We want to do this,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. “And we want to do it in compliance with the direction from the Supreme Court. We want to do it in compliance with the Constitution.” I’m afraid it’s already too late for that, Senator Reid.

I am puzzled by and ashamed of the Democrats’ moral cowardice on this bill. The latest version of the bill blesses detainee abuse and looks the other way on forms of detainee torture; it immunizes terrible acts; it abridges the writ of habeas corpus— in the last, most egregious draft, it strips the writ for alleged enemy combatants whether proved to be so or not, whether citizens or not, and whether found in the U.S. or overseas.

This bill is simply outrageous. I doubt whether many Democratic Senators or staffs have read the bill or understand what is in it. Instead, they seem to be scrambling over themselves to vote for it out of a fear that the American public will think them weak and soft on terror.

The reason why the Democrats have not been doing very well on these issues, however, is that the public does not believe that they stand for anything other than echoing what the Republicans have been doing with a bit less conviction. If the Republicans are now the Party of Torture, the Democrats are now the Party of “Torture? Yeah, I guess so.” Not exactly the moral high ground from which to seek office.

The Democrats may think that if they let this pass, they are guaranteed to pick up more seats in the House and Senate. But they will actually win less seats this way. For they will have proved to the American people that they are spineless and opportunistic— that, when faced with a genuine choice and a genuine challenge, they can keep neither our country nor our values safe.

The current bill, if passed, will give the Executive far more dictatorial powers to detain, prosecute, judge and punish than it ever enjoyed before. Over the last 48 hours, it has been modified in a hundred different ways to increase executive power at the expense of judicial review, due process, and oversight. And what is more, the bill’s most outrageous provisions on torture, definition of enemy combatants, secret procedures, and habeas stripping, are completely unnecessary to keep Americans safe. Rather, they are the work of an Executive branch that has proven itself as untrustworthy as it is greedy: always pushing the legal and constitutional envelope, always seeking more power and less accountability.

If the Democrats do not stand up to the President on this bill, if they refuse to filibuster it or even threaten to filibuster it, they do not deserve to win any additional seats in the House or in the Senate. They will have delivered a grievous blow to our system of checks and balances, stained America’s reputation around the world, and allowed an obscenity to disfigure the American system of law and justice. Far worse than a misguided zealot is the moral coward who says nothing and allows that zealotry to do real harm.

I’m very, very happy to note that one of my oldest and best friends, Matt Flynn, is now on the web. I can’t wait to read his thoughts on stuff, and also on things.

I just started reading Nietzsche last night. I am amazed — particularly coming off of Eisenstein’s book which, while thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening, is painfully academic. Here’s one paragraph from Nietzsche’s “Attempt At A Self-Criticism,” which is a commentary on his own Birth of Tragedy written 16 years after it was originally published:

Perhaps the depth of this antimoral propensity is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the whole book — Christianity as the most prodigal elaboration of the moral theme to which humanity has ever been subjected. In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I never failed to sense a hostility to life — a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths” — all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a “will to decline” — at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life. For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral — and, eventually, crushed by the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire and altogether worthless. Morality itself — how now? might not morality be “a will to negate life,” a secret instinct of annihilation, a principle of decay, diminution, and slander — the beginning of the end? Hence, the danger of dangers?

(Kaufmann’s footnote omitted; italics in original.)

I can’t testify to the truth or falsehood of this claim, given how little I know about Christianity. But the prose fairly crackles. You have to love a man who writes a book entitled Twilight of the Idols: or How To Philosophize With A Hammer.

I intend to read Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist fairly soon.

Note to self and others: monologues reciting what one television character said to another are not interesting. It’s even less interesting to hear about how some (television) news event mirrors something that happened on a police drama.

Television, more generally, is not interesting. If you bring up TV in a conversation with me, know that I will smile but that I am internally squirming and hunting desperately for a point of departure to a different topic.

Thank you.

From the Wikipedia entry on Arthur Koestler:

Koestler’s most famous work, the novel Darkness at Noon about the Soviet 1930s purges, ranks with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a fictional treatment of Stalinism.

Anyone who’s read 1984 after high school will realize that it’s not actually about Stalinism. It’s about that, but about centralized states of all kinds. This is obvious within the first few pages, unless you’ve programmed yourself to read it as an anti-Stalinist broadside.

Thank you for your attention.

One of these days, I will know how to prove the Prime Number Theorem. And when I do, that will be awesome.

In the meantime, I’ll be reading Erdös’s “elementary” proof of it on the train to New York City tonight, and presumably giggling when I realize how strikingly his definition of “elementary” differs from mine.

P.S. (28 September 2006): A friend very generously sent me a copy of “Newman’s Short Proof of the Prime Number Theorem”, which has proved to be really useful. I think I might be able (finally) to tackle Niven and Zuckerman’s number-theory textbook, and maybe one of these days Koblitz’s Course in Number Theory and Cryptography. Both have lain fallow on my bookcase for years, which is a shame; I hate having unread books on my shelf.

I have to write in Python for work, so I’ve got a bunch of questions about how to code Perl idioms in Python. Normally that’s the wrong question to ask, because languages’ idioms are tuned to what those languages do well. I’ll try to avoid asking any of the wrong sorts of idiom questions.

As I find answers, I’ll post them here. For now it’ll just be questions.

• Perl’s got a nice simplification, where if you do

  perlscriptname.pl arg1 arg2 … argN 

  you can then write in your script:

  while(<>) { doSomethingToTheArgs(); } 

  and Perl will interpret it as though you had done something like

  foreach(@ARGV) { open( INFILE, "<$_" ); while(<INFILE>) { doSomethingToTheArgs; } close INFILE; } 

  I wonder how to get this degree of simplicity from Python.

• Python’s print statement appends a newline by default. So while in Perl you’d have to do

  print "string\n"; 

  , in Python you can just do

  print "string" 

  It looks as though the readlines() method sucks in lines along with their newlines, so that if you do

  fh = open(filename) for line in fh: print line fh.close() 

  you’ll get two newlines per line of the file. To solve this in Perl, you’d use chomp(); in Python, it seems as though you use rstrip().

From ThinkProgress:

A national black conservative group is “running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers.”

That right there is a nice clear synopsis of everything that’s wrong with the media today. “Researchers claim Dick Cheney eats the fetid corpses of babies.” “But that’s just not true!” reply experts.

Eisenstein addresses some points that illustrious laniels.org reader mrz has made, namely that much of the scientific revolution arose from scientists casting off Aristotelian ideas. Eisenstein’s point is that this is only true in hindsight. The Renaissance was largely a process of recovering ideas that Western society had forgotten; only after those ideas were recovered could knowledge actually advance.

The better question, Eisenstein says, is to imagine what would have happened had Renaissance scholars not rediscovered Aristotle; she asserts that we would have been thrown back into a new dark age.

(Her point is actually a bit broader than Aristotle; it applies to Aristotle, all of the scholastics, Galen, and all the conceptual fathers of the Renaissance.)

I thought this would be a good little nugget for everyone to dig into.

Word to the wise: GDBMFile will totally screw you up if you expect to use hashes like you normally want to. I had a little code thingy like this, whose purpose was to build a map of all the (MD5s of) files under a given directory:

use File::Slurp qw/readfile/; use File::Find; my % find( sub { my $thisfile = $File::Find::name; return undef unless( -f $thisfile ); my $thisstring = readfile($thisfile); my $digest = Digest::MD5->new->add($thisstring)->b64digest; push @{$md5map{$digest}}, $thisfile; } , $dirName); 

It pushes onto the array because it’s possible that multiple files have the same MD5. But note that when it pushes, it’s treating $md5map{$digest} as a reference to an array (see perlref).

The trouble is that GDBMFile can’t deal with arrayrefs; for the purpose of committing files to disk, I believe that everything has to be a string. So it converts $md5_map{$digest} to a string. The next time it encounters a file with a digest that it’s already seen, Perl throws an error (at least if you’ve got use strict turned on, which you should) that it can’t use a string as an array ref. The string in question looks like “ARRAY(0xFFFFFFFF)”. So it’s super-confusing: Perl’s telling you that you can’t use something that’s very obviously an array reference as an array reference.

Nowhere does the documentation tell you that you’ll be unable to use hashes like you normally would. My assumption was that when I tied my hash to a GDBM file, everything would be identical to the program with an untied hash, except that the backing store for the hash would be a file rather than a block of memory.

If I figure out how to get what I need from one of the DBM libraries, I’ll post it here.

I’d love to see a study of the historical relationship between Christianity and the ruling power structure — when Christianity is not itself the power structure. Because to see Christians supporting torture makes me ill.

Then again, conservative American Christian groups are, it seems, a peculiarly pathological strain, and it’s of course unfair to believe that the Vatican takes similar stands.

Josh Marshall gets David Broder perfectly:

Shorter David Broder: Bush is a lawless president at war with the constitution. Also, Gore and Kerry, who opposed him, are know-it-alls I don’t like. Hopefully Republican moderates and Lieberman can all get reelected so the country can be saved.

That’s actually a perfect summation of the Broder article linked therein. I’d also like to point out two of Broder’s wording choices:

The center is beginning to fight back. Michael Bloomberg, the Republican mayor of New York, is holding a fundraiser for Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Democrat running as an independent against the bloggers’ favorite, Ned Lamont.

I don’t know how this “bloggers defeated Lieberman” meme ever got started. I think it reflects some deeper fear of bloggers amongst the commercial media. That’s all I can figure.

And then there’s

The revolt of several Republican senators against President Bush’s insistence on a free hand in treating terrorist detainees signaled the emergence of an independent force in elections and government.

When you call them “terrorist detainees,” you are stacking the deck in favor of a particular outcome. As far as we know, in fact, most of the Guantánamo detainees have done nothing wrong.

I stopped reading Broder years ago. I think I’ll have to restart that tradition today.

Quick reminder: if you want to read all posts except those from specific categories, we have the architecture to do that.

(My brother expressed some sadness this weekend that he has to scroll through innumerable Perl posts. I imagine this is a frequent lament.)

Quick note on Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: it starts very slowly for non-historians, to the extent that I could actually identify the point where the book became interesting; it was around page 200. In no small part this is because she believes the printing press has been wholly neglected in studies of historical change, and she has to spend a large amount of time laying conceptual groundwork that other historians have neglected. So the first 200 pages are largely about debates among historians; for non-historians, I can’t imagine much that’s less interesting.

Once she gets rolling, though, her book is great and thought-provoking. She views herself as a historical materialist, using the very concrete deployment of the printing press to explain the beginnings of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. (She annoyingly always calls it “the so-called ‘Scientific Revolution’”. It’s one thing to doubt the Revolution’s existence, but she also thinks the Renaissance might well be an illusion. Yet she never calls it “the so-called ‘Renaissance’.” I think that’s because doing so would drive even air-quote-obsessed readers batty.) In her view, historians have always avoided concrete explanations of historical sequences, preferring vague concepts like “the spirit of the Renaissance.” One by one, she shows how the printing press could explain the modernization of the western world much more simply than most other models. Her presentation, when it’s not painfully academic, is simple and straightforward.

It does presuppose that you’re a historian, I think. When it quotes anything, it’s normally quoting secondary sources from fairly obscure specialist studies. It assumes — though casual tossoffs — that you know about the Waldensian and Lollardian heresies, and much else from Catholic history besides.

Maybe without meaning to, Eisenstein provides enough context through these tossoffs that you can, eventually, find your way around; but it’s slow going at first. Once you’re over the hump, it’s great. She mentions hundreds of little things that I wouldn’t have considered. Among them:

• Translating Bibles into the languages of individual nations helps to make them more universal in one sense — more people have access to the same material — but less universal in the sense that Latin is no longer a universal language that everyone can fall back on. In one sense, then, print can actually atomize nations and pave the way for nationalism.

• Along similar lines, print can atomize individuals. When one doesn’t learn about Christianity through one’s priest, but in the quiet of one’s own home, the focus shifts from communities to families or even to oneself. This could be one contributor to the liberal-democratic ideas that spread in the West in the 18th century. (Eisenstein is careful not to overplay the case: this is but one contributor. The book’s philosophical strength and stylistic weakness is its refusal to take strong stands.)

• Print might contribute to dogmatism. When most ideas are conveyed in speech, and conveyed to far fewer people, it’s easier to withdraw your ideas later on. (The moving hand having writ, etc.) Print also makes your opponents’ ideas more concrete, perhaps setting up a stronger divergence between your thoughts and theirs.

In its way, Eisenstein’s book is a great work of philosophy. Like David Potter’s The Impending Crisis, it resuscitates basic questions that we may have forgotten about; when appreciated in all its depth, it’s a radical reorientation of the way we look at the world.

Very briefly: the headline reads, “Senators Seek Compromise on Terror Cases,” subtitled “The Bush administration and three prominent Republican senators opposing its detainee proposal gave signs of seeking compromise today.”

The implicit tone behind all of this is positive. Compromise is positive. Sides on opposite sides of an argument should come together to reach a solution that works for both of them.

There can be no compromise with evil. Torture is evil. A just society does not torture. A society that willfully does evil cannot be wholly just. James Grimmelmann says, quite correctly, “If the president’s bill becomes law, we will not be men but monsters.”