Vox Popoli

John Hawkins has an idea:

This is John Hawkins from Right Wing News & Conservative Grapevine. On Tuesday of next week, I am going to be putting up an article entitled, “Right-Of-Center Bloggers Tell Us Who Is Screwing Up America” (The list for the left-of-center bloggers will be going up one day later). This whole idea was inspired by a book being written by Bernard Goldberg called “100 People Who Are Screwing Up America.”

There’s a lot of potential candidates, of course, but I think Alan Greenspan has to top the list. Between the economy and the bipartisan push for the Trans-Americas Union, it’s a tough choice, but I would argue that it is the distortions created in the former that are creating the latter imperative.

Of course, if his public pronouncements are any indication of what is to come, it’s entirely possible that his likely successor, Ben Bernahnke, could be worse.

We had fallen out, as friends sometimes do, over some nickle-nothing nuance of human behavior.

The White Buffalo once observed that women seldom maintain long friendships outside their families. I don’t know if this is true or not, although my own observations tend to be similar. In any case, Maralyn Lois Polak offers anecdotal evidence for the WB’s take.

It is amazing what suffices to end some friendships. When I think about it, there’s nothing an enemy has done or said to me that one of my best and oldest friends hasn’t managed to top. Easily.

Let’s face it. An enemy might punch you in the face and break your nose. A friend will punch you in the face, break your nose and laugh at you. More importantly, an enemy won’t remind you of it every chance he gets for the next 20 years.

Bastards. Now that I think about it, I may need to reconsider the potential benefits of this whole female falling-out thing.

From WND:

Therefore, be it resolved that the 33rd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America encourages all her officers and members to remove their children from the public schools and see to it that they receive a thoroughly Christian education, for the glory of God and the good of Christ’s church.

This likely won’t pass, but it’s a healthy sign that more and more Christians are turning their backs on the public schools. Of the 40-60 kids in our Minnesota social circle, Space Bunny estimates that about a third are homeschooling while almost all the rest are sending their young children to church-based private schools.

What’s exciting about this is that ten years ago, most of these parents had never heard of homeschooling, much less considered it a serious educational option. And far from being maladjusted social misfits, these are children that complete strangers regularly praise for being “delightful” and “well-behaved” kids that the parents are “lucky to have”.

Paul Greenberg excoriates a literary crime:

Theodore Dalrymple, M.D., devotes his article in the current issue to a literary scandal that wasn’t one. It seems that in the 1980s a feminist publishing house, Virago Press, put out a book (“Down the Road, Worlds Away”) by one Rahila Khan. In a series of short stories, she told about the lives of Muslim girls and white working-class boys who are thrown together in a certain kind of hardscrabble English neighborhood. It sounds like a finely written, sensitive book.

So? Well, it turns out that Rahila Khan was the pen name of the Reverend Toby Forward, a Church of England vicar who was reared in just such unlovely surroundings in the cities of the English Midlands, and so knew what he was writing about.

The professional feminists were not pleased. And when Virago Press found out the author’s identity, its literary judgment of his/her work (“hard-eyed realism and poignant simplicity”) no longer mattered. He was the wrong sex. Virago Press destroyed all copies of the book it had on hand (thus making the remaining ones quite valuable), and demanded that he return his advance and pay the printing costs.

I’m glad to say that the Reverend Forward has done nothing of the kind. Indeed, his story would make any sensible observer ask just whose conduct is scandalous here.

Why didn’t the vicar submit the stories under his own name? Well, he’d already had some experience along those lines. When the Rev. Toby Forward sent the stories about working-class boys to the BBC, he got a less than polite brush-off. When he submitted the stories about the girls as the work of Rahila Khan, the response was warm and encouraging. Lesson learned.

This is the sort of thing I mean when I refer generally to feminists being stalinists, as opposed to the literal Stalinism of Betty Friedan, a youthful supporter of the Soviet dictator before turning her attention to writing fiction about the mythical Patriarchy.

For all that they are publishers, organizations like the Virago Press are anti-literary. To successfully create a convincing character that is not autobiographical is one of the heights of literary achievement; we honor Dostoevsky for giving us a glimpse into the mind and morality of a murderer, we do not disdain him for failing to have had the good taste to kill someone in order to lend credibility to his right to write on the subject.

The identity police of literature, like all totalitarians, wish to control human thought and behavior. It is this, more than their execrable and reliably unreadable prose, that makes them so loathesome.

From the Washington Times:

A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush’s first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is “bogus” and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

Considering that the architect of the buildings was recorded on tape as saying “pull it down”, that no plane hit Building No. 7 and that the government has been proven to lie about nearly everything from Pat Tillman’s death to Private Jessica’s heroics, it should hardly come as a surprise to learn that even the administration’s officials don’t believe the administration’s official story.

This doesn’t prove anything with regards to government complicity, of course, although it’s hard to imagine how the building’s owners would have been so prepared to “take it down” on such short notice. As an economist, it seems unlikely that Reynolds would be privy to any information that isn’t already widely available, but his statement nevertheless raises some serious questions about what the government is hiding, and why.

It is always important to remember two things. First, the unthinkable is a lot more thinkable to those who are forced to spend their days thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong around the world. Second, there are thousands of conspiracies that are established in the historical record. It defies to belief to assert that mankind has somehow evolved past such activity.

MA feels the need to share:

One problem that human nature ultimately faces when it begins to preen itself under the light of notoriety is the disease of not being able to see the forest for the trees. Malignant hubris is also a condition that can seduce a writer, actor, politician, preacher. social worker…into a euphoric sense of self-worth.

That’s the human condition and none of us are exempt from it. The only way to minimize it is to humbly stay on our knees before God and ask Him to continually beat it out of us when it begins to affect what He has called us to do.

Personal opinion is cheap. Every one of us has it. But a man who stays on his face before his Creator until he’s inspired to write from an eternal perspective is the man who can most influence temporal events.

That said, I must ask, is your opinion about the war fashioned by your seeking after God’s wisdom or are your opinions nothing more than your own heady perceptions? If there yours, I’m not interested.

I’m sure we all appreciate being informed what does and does not interest MA. My question is this: if he has no interest in personal opinions, what is he doing reading the Commentary page?

Jeff Jacoby has the vision:

From issues of sexuality and religion to the broad themes of US history and politics, public opinion is fractured. Secular parents square off against believers, supporters of homosexual marriage against traditionalists, those stressing “safe sex” against those who emphasize abstinence. Each wants its views reflected in the classroom. No longer is there a common understanding of the mission of public education. To the extent that one camp’s vision prevails, parents in the opposing camp are embittered. And there is no prospect that this will change — not as long as the government remains in charge of educating American children.

Which is why it’s time to put an end to government control of the schools.

But why wait for the government to do your job for you? There’s next to nothing preventing most parents from pulling their kids out of the public schools today. The classroom approach is idiocy anyhow; when I coach soccer, it’s necessary to pull a maximum of four or five kids out from the rest if I want to teach them anything more complicated than “dribble around those cones”. The classroom suffices for basic drill and learning how to sit down and shut up, almost everything else requires work alone or one-on-one interaction.

Of course, the government has an inherent self-interest in instilling a willingness to sit down and shut up in the citizenry, that’s why totalitarians from Marx to Mao have believed in the nececessity for mandatory public schooling.

Charles Stross explains the origins of Accelerando:

“Accelerando” is a creature of its time, and that time is the late 1990s. I spent most of the 90s on a kind of sabbatical from writing fiction (my first love), with my head stuck up the fundament of the software industry. In the early 90’s I worked for SCO (back when it was a UNIX company, rather than the unholy terror that came back from the dead to haunt the free software movement). Then I discovered the web, back around 1993. I remember a wee daily email bulletin titled “what’s new on the web” that came from an address at NCSA; I used to visit all the interesting new web sites every day, until the volume grew too great some time in late 1994. I was supposed to be writing UNIX manuals, but I distracted myself by learning Perl – and was inadvertently responsible for the development of the robot exclusion protocol (by writing a web spider that annoyed people who knew more about what they were doing than I did). I moved to Scotland to join a web startup that went bust, freelanced for a couple of years while writing a web architecture book, landed myself a magazine column about Linux, and joined another start-up that turned into a successful dot com, went public, and much to my surprise is still in business.

The last sentence covers a multitude of sins. I signed on with the company two weeks before its official formation, and left two months after the IPO – three and a half years later. Along the way I bolted together about thirty thousand lines of object oriented perl that swallowed credit card numbers at one end and talked to obscure British banking systems in strange protocols. And it had a psychotherapy bot wired into the middle just to help me de-stress when things got too heavy, which was almost every other day, because …

You’ve probably never had to work inside a business that’s growing of 30% per month. Take it from me, it’s an experience you don’t need. Especially when you’re not a brilliant programmer, you know damn well your code has bugs in it – it’s actually a prototype that they pressed into service six months too early – and it’s handling millions of pounds of other people’s money. If things go wrong they scream at you. And exponential growth means the workload is always growing faster than the budget for hiring minions to do the donkey-work. At first it’s fun, a buzz like a caffeine high: but it goes on too long and you get old and feel stupid, and at some point you find you can’t stop running because your feet are locked to the treadmill and there’s a wall of spikes right behind you.

The germ of “Accelerando” dates to that time. To be specific, it dates to a particularly bad month in early 1999, when I was trying to brainwash Datacash into talking to a French credit card system (and if you think obscure 1970’s-vintage British credit card protocols sound awful, you’ve never dealt with the French equivalent). I was under a lot of pressure, not aided by the French bank programmers not actually wanting to expose the guts of their communication protocol to, gasp, developers who were trying to communicate with their servers … things were not looking good. One Thursday when things had been not been going well in an especially emphatic manner, I wandered over to my boss the CTO’s desk and said, “I’m taking tomorrow off.”

“But what if we need you – ” he began.

“I’ll be in Amsterdam.”

He looked at me. Then he did a double-take: “Amsterdam. Okay.” I hadn’t taken any vacation time in the preceding year, my caffeine intake was measured in the direction of gallons of coffee per day, and I was developing an uncontrollable facial tic and a tendency to jump at loud noises. “Take tomorrow off.”

This was very sensible of him. Most directors of a company that’s going public in six months and has a server development team consisting of 1 (one) geek who is developing an incontrolable facial tic and demanding days off in Amsterdam might actually get a little bit nervous about the idea of said server development team fleeing the country on short notice. But my prepared fallback position to taking a long weekend somewhere with lots of beer and no French bank managers to scream at was to try to quit on the spot, and if that failed I was going to spring a full-scale nervous breakdown … and it probably showed.

“Just come back on Monday,” he said.

I think I nodded, but maybe it was just the caffeine pulling my strings.

Anyway, I was wandering around Amsterdam the next day – on a rainy Friday – trying not to fall apart at the seams. I’d spent the whole night lying awake, looping on re-drafting my resignation letter, and I had the shakes. Then my phone rang.

“What’s gone wrong?” I asked, my heart sinking.

It was my boss the CTO. “The French fuckwits,” he said.

I got that sinking feeling. “What have they sprung on us now?” I asked.

“Their parent institution is so unhappy with them that they’re being shut down! I thought you might like to know …” (In the background, I could hear the entire office cheering.)

I immediately headed for the nearest pub, and my girlfriend and I celebrated in time-honoured fashion. For a couple of bright hours in the middle of a rainy afternoon, the high pressure bubble in the core of the dot com boom actually looked like an optimistic, cheerful place to be. And something about the sudden release of stress took root, and began to germinate. I got far enough away from the coal seam to blink, look at it in amazement, and ask once more the classic science fictional question, what happens if this goes on? What happens if you keep piling on the changes? What kind of person can actually live on the edge of a singularity, keeping pace while all around them the world is melted down and re-forged monthly, daily, hourly?

I pulled out my Psion 5MX and scribbled a brief paragraphs about a very strange guy named Manfred. Then I proceeded to get side-tracked by beer for the next couple of days.

It has taken me nearly five years (until early 2004) to finish answer the question. The soil in which the seed sprouted had long since withered, the bust following the boom; the dot com IPO didn’t make my fortune, but it left me with “Accelerando” by way of payback And I’m not unhappy about that outcome.

Nor am I. I can state with unequivocal assurance that if there is one book you buy in the next year, it must be Accelerando. I will not debate this. And I say that despite being one who has what appears to be a pretty decent novel coming out myself during that time and the fact that Umberto Eco’s new novel has just been translated into English. Stross, one of my favorite SF writers, is always good, but in Accelerando, he delivers an onslaught of visionary brilliance that blows you away, makes you question your assumptions and forces you to kick your overloaded synapses into a higher gear.

Don’t miss it.

RWN is down with suckling etiquette:

You can tell it’s a relatively slow summer when breast feeding starts to become a topic of interest in the blogosphere. First it was Vox Popoli and now The Corner.Well, never let it be said that a relatively unimportant non-political subject was discussed on political blogs without John Hawkins chipping in his two cents….

To me, breast feeding is the much less awful equivalent of the handful of 70 year old guys at the gym I used to go to, who, unlike anybody else there, seemed to always be walking around the locker room completely naked. Sure, it’s a locker room and you’re allowed to do that, but that doesn’t mean you should.

I’m quite confident that I’m on the correct side of this debate, in no small part due to the speed with which the breastfeeding irgundwo und uber alles crowd was reduced to diagnosing psychosocial disorders on the part of everyone who disagreed with them.

But it doesn’t really matter why people don’t like you doing something around them. The point is, they don’t, so don’t do it around them. Despite my own inclination towards the occasional verbal vulgarity, I try to avoid indulging myself around people who are less linguistically casual when I am in public or on their turf.

Today, I found myself sitting ten feet away from a pair of bead-wearing hippy revivalists who were making out as if the sidewalk on the corner was the girl’s basement couch. It took some self-control to resist the urge to walk over, unzip my pants and start taking a piss right next to them.

Hey, what’s it to you, man? Just doing my thing, dig?

Alternatively, perhaps I should have engaged in some chest-beating primate display, bared my teeth, driven away the lesser male and mounted her right there on the sidewalk, all the while shrieking like a rabid chimpanzee on meth.