Horizon

... And I Feel Fine

Timothy Noah with a useful corrective to the If-It's-Tuesday-It-Must-Be-The-End-Of-The-World school of thought. A happy and cautiously optimistic New Year, everyone.

Merry Merry

In the immortal words of Kinky Friedman, "may the god of your choice bless you." Or anyway may you take a good walk in some nice chilly weather, eat too much, and see lots of family and friends.

End of a World

There's a good article in Wired on the days before the planned demolition of an online gaming community. From the version on the author's blog:

The economy has also tanked. . . . High-powered character accounts used to sell for as much as $500, but the online auctions have gone silent. That's partly because, as the end nears, Turbine is tossing out some freebies and giving away more "rare" items, making them less rare. Without a sense of a future, capitalism ends. There's no demand in a condemned world.

See also the observations in the comments.

"Let a part of the population get rich first."

More news from China.

A fairly large part of private entrepreneurs were former farmers or labourers. Many of them made their fortune by grasping opportunities generated by China's transition from the old economic system to a market economy, while the market mechanisms had not yet grown mature enough to replace the old administrative rules to ensure a fair, reasonable distribution of resources and social wealth.

Memories of past suffering plus the experience of making quick profits through speculative moves have led these under-educated private businesspeople to develop an unhealthy attitude towards wealth. They have more interest in enjoying a luxurious life than honouring their responsibility to society; they may even have no concept about this responsibility at all.

Driver Beware

China's latest crime epidemic: the theft of manhole covers.

Orwell's Afterlife

I just got around to trying out the Google book search and, naturally, my first search was for "Orwell".

Came across a book which I'm sure some here have read: The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology. I read the first few pages of the introduction, and so can you.

She makes some interesting points and some puzzling ones which I assume would be clarified if I read more of the book. Some parts that stuck out for me:

"The premise of this book is that the essential ideology at the heart of Orwell's work as a writer and a thinker can be understood only by exploring his ideas about masculinity and femininity."

"The major strategy that has evolved over the past few decades for dealing with the problem of Orwell's frequent less-than-decent verbal assaults is to briefly acknowledge, only to brush aside, this aspect of his writing, as if it were a minor and perhaps regrettable lapse but no serious reflection on the man."

"To cite Orwell in support of one's position is, therefore, to assert the self-evident rightness of that position."

"...his writings were useful to the antisocialist cause as early as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), with its violent attack on socialist cranks."

Well, obviously I can't say anything about the book after three pages, but thought these were interesting claims that might spark some discussion.

Shirer's Blacklisting

If you're a relatively unread youngster like me, you may associate the McCarthy era with governmental persecution in the form of HUAC, and assume the "blacklist" was something circulated among movie studios covertly. If so, William Shirer's account is a real eye-opener:

[Shirer describes his diary entries.] I recounted being listed in Red Channels. For the first two or three days I did not, I could not, take it seriously. Then I began to circulate around New York, especially around Madison Avenue where the ad agencies and CBS were. And I learned to my utter astonishment that to be listed with one hundred and fifty others in this obscure publication as being involved with Communism or Communists was to be blacklisted from employment in broadcasting, the entertainment world, and journalism in general. Unbelievable! This two-bit publication had become the bible of Madison Avenue and the networks. If your name was in it, no advertising agency — and in those days they produced many of the leading shows on radio and TV — and no network executive would hire you. You were condemned to unemployment in your field — with no chance of explaining or defending yourself.

[...]

It became obvious that CBS was the main target of the publishers of Red Channels and of their weekly sheet, Counterattack. The latter had charged that "all networks let some Communists and Communist fronters get on their programs, but CBS is the worst of all." The response of CBS to this shocked many. It hired the publishers of the scurilous sheet that had attacked it to investigate the loyalty of tis employees! [...]

What was this Red Channels, which dictated to the mighty moguls of the advertising agencies, the networks and even the movies whom they might employ?

It was the work of three former FBI men, Theodore C. Kirkpatrick, John G. Keenan, and Kenneth M. Bierly, who had resigned from the agency shortly after the war. Early in 1947 they had set up a firm called Americna Business Consultants. [...] To increase its profits and prestige, in June 1950 American Business Consultants brought out Red Channels in magazine form, under the subtitle "The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television" and with an illustration on the cover showing a large red-stained hand clutching a microphone. There were one hundred and fifty-one names listed, and after each name was noted the organization the person was "reported as" having once belonged to or supported. Declarations that the suspects were "reported" as subscribing to were also listed. The publishers obviously got their list from the House Un-American Activities Committee [...], the Tenney Committee in California, and the Daily Worker[....]

To avoid libel suits, the publishers printed a disclaimer to the effect that they were not accusing any of the listees of being a Communist or even a Communist sympathiser. They also stated their belief that in screening personnel, every safeguard must be used to protect the innocent. They did not say they had followed this practice. Obviously they hadn't, for none of those listed — I later found — had even been questioned by them. Amazingly, some courts of law would, in the Red-baiting hystaria of the early 1950s, accept as sincere these phony disclaimers.

A portion of Shirer's entry in Red Channels can be seen here.

Possibly of Interest

On Monday, the Vatican promulgated decrees concerning (among other things) "34 martyrs of the religious persecution that took place in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War." The folks at The Hagiography Circle have already added them to their list:

the martyrdom of the Servants of God VICTOR CHUMILLAS FERNÁNDEZ, professed priest, Franciscan Friars Minor; born on 28 July 1902 in Olmeda del Rey, Cuenca (Spain), and killed in odium fidei on 16 August 1936 in Boca de Balondillo, Fuente el Fresno, Ciudad Real (Spain); and 21 COMPANIONS from the Franciscan Friars Minor of the archdiocese of Toledo, priests and religious, who were killed in odium fidei in 1936 during the religious persecution in the Spanish Civil War

the martyrdom of the Servants of God ANTERO MATEO GARCÍA, layperson of the archdiocese of Barcelona, married; member, Lay Dominicans; born on 04 March 1875 in Valdevimbre, León (Spain), and killed in odium fidei on 08 August 1936 in Sant Andreu de Palomar, Barcelona (Spain); and 11 COMPANIONS from the Dominican Second and Third Orders of the archdiocese Barcelona, who were killed in odium fidei in 1936 during the religious persecution in the Spanish Civil War;

On Tuesday, The Scotsman published news of Joseph Stalin's plans to breed a race of super-warriors from men and apes. Technorati takes us on a tour of the blogosphere's reaction: Clayton Cramer describes the story as typical of communism and goes on to draw parallels with the modern Left. Tim Riley observes that it's interesting Stalin used volunteers. Secondhand Smoke compares Stalin's effort to Joseph Fletcher's suggestions.

RMS on Politics and Movements

There's an excellent interview with Richard Stallman over on ZNet today. He wanders into politics a bit more than usual, and I thought this exchange was worth quoting:

JP: It is interesting that you used the term "escape' at the beginning of the interview. Most people who think about "movements' think in terms of building an opposition, changing public opinion, and forcing concessions from the powerful.

RMS: What we are doing is direct action. I did not think I could get anywhere convincing the software companies to make free software if I did political activities, and in any case I did not have any talent or skills for it. So I just started writing software. I said, if those companies won't respect our freedom, we'll develop our own software that does.

Via Slashdot

Some food for thought

I think Echidne has a point here.

Heresy?

Yes, apparently one can still be literally tried by the Catholic Church for the crime of heresy. At present it does appear the California Penal Code would preempt canon law if any auto-da-fes were contemplated, but who knows what the new Supreme Court could decide next?

Insert Predictable Curmudgeonly Rant Here

From the preface to A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt, 1960:

The style I eventually used was a bastardized version of the one most recently associated with Bertolt Brecht. This is not the place to discuss that style at any length, but it does seem to me that the style practiced by Brecht differs from the style taught by Brecht, or taught to us by his disciples. Perhaps they are more Royalist than the King. Or perhaps there was something daemonic in Brecht the artist which could not submit to Brecht the teacher. [...] I am inclined to think that it is simply that Brecht was a very fine artist, and that life is complicated and ambivalent. At all events I agree with Eric Bentley that the proper effect of alienation is to enable the audience reculer pour mieux sauter, to deepen, not to terminate, their involvement in the play.

Simply to slap your audience in the face satisfies an austere and puritanical streak which runs in many of his disciples and sometimes, detrimentally I think, in Brecht himself. But it is a dangerous game to play. It has the effect of shock because it is unexpected. But it is unexpected only because it flies in the face of a thoroughly established convention (a convention which goes far beyond naturalism; briefly, the convention that the actors are there as actors, not as themselves). Each time it is done it is a little less unexpected, so that a bigger and bigger dosage will be needed to produce the same effect. If it were continued indefinitely it would finally not be unexpected at all. The theatrical convention would then have been entirely dissipated and we should have in the theatre a situation with one person, who used to be an actor, desparately trying to engage the attention — by rude gestures, loud noises, indecent exposure, fireworks, anything — of other persons, who used to be the audience. As this point was approached some very lively evenings might be expected, but the depth and subtlety of the notions which can be communicated by such methods may be doubted. When we use alienation methods just for kicks, we in the theatre are sawing through the branch on which we are sitting.

Wheels Within Wheels

Jonathan Reynolds on Cliopatria notifies us that the Wikipedia culprit has been identified, resigned from his job, and delivered a handwritten apology to John Seigenthaler. What's interesting about this flap is the role of cranks — a prankster, a public overreaction, and a Wikipedia-stalker who exposes the prankster.

This section of Slashdot comments identifies Daniel Brandt as founder of both "Google Watch" and "Wikipedia Watch". Apparently he's something of a litigious publicity-hound, or at least that's how Google Watch Watch describes him.

Let's hear it for the transparent society! Who will watch the watchers? Why, the watcher-watchers, of course.

New Eileen letters

Charles just wrote to point out today's DJ Taylor article in the Guardian on a new trove of letters by Eileen O'Shaughnessy.

Patrons

From Life After Lapham:

The Atlantic has lost money for all of living memory, and The New Yorker was unprofitable for most of the last two decades. So are all the little weeklies. Call it cultural philanthropy or call it vanity publishing, but without rich guys willing to take financial baths, magazines of literary and political journalism and belles lettres would scarcely exist in America.

I wonder how true this is?

(Via Done With Mirrors)

Wrathful Dispersion

The latest battle in the culture wars:

In lieu of offering any evidence for their own proposal, most Wrathful Dispersionists prefer to devote their energy to attacking the evolutionary approach to historical linguistics, which they generally refer to as Grimmism. Much of their animus is directed against the lone figure of Jakob Grimm, whom they depict as having made up the idea of linguistic evolution off the top of his head, and they delight in pointing out novel "exceptions" to Grimm's Law, such as the fact that English has the word paternal where Grimm's Law obviously predicts fathernal. The evolutionists respond that paternal was a later borrowing into English from Latin, to which the Wrathful Dispersionists reply triumphantly, "So your trees and waves can't explain everything!"

(Currently making its way around the linguistics web.)

Missionaries

in whitest Texas.

The White Whale

Finished Moby-Dick last night. Among other things was wondering how it would have been different to read the book online instead of in comfy old falling-apart paperback. And does anyone think Joyce's "Nighttown" might have an ancestor in the way Melville turns some chapters into stage-plays? And where does Melville get all those visits with allegorically named ships -- Homer? Pilgrim's Progress?

One more thing: the Dec. 1 NYRB has an article on Melville. It's three bucks online. I haven't read the thing yet in print but would it be helpful to report back on same?

Divorce, Internet Style

After weeks of slacking I finally decided I couldn't take it anymore. My internet karma was surely growing blacker by the minute. I could not allow this blog to be infested with spam.

So, I went regular expression fishing, something I have to admit I enjoy on an overcast morning. I typed words and patterns into Blacklist, trying to find the sweetspot -- the patterns which returned the largest amount of old spam with the fewest false positives.

Spam is such a new and interesting phenomenon; if there isn't an army of corpus linguists already doing research into it there should be. For one thing, spam gives essentially random words and phrases ominous, incantatory weight. Who would have ever thought that "ringtone" would become a dirty word? Yet I have this superstitious sense of dread just typing it out.

Spam is probably the single largest incentive in human history to develop new kinds of nonsense patterns. Gigantic lists of words developed by computer scientists for experiments into natural language processing and AI have really come into their own as noise generators for spammers. And in general, spam is the only human activity I can think of where incoherence and obfuscation is the key to success.

I can't help but find something slightly chilling about the use of a channel for human communication in which the most important thing is to make sure nothing is communicated. Well, no, that would be one thing, what I find a little creepy is that spam has to use nonsense, but it also needs to be similar enough to human speech to trick machines. It shows us human language through a computer's eyes. Unlike a lot of email spam, comment spam is truly parasitic: it does not address the hapless blog owner, but a machine known as Google.

Spam also has the intriguing effect of loudly advertising what before presumably would remain in the shadows. Who would ever have guessed that someone would maintain a series of websites on every imaginable flavor of divorce? Canadian divorce, military divorce, pretty much any kind of divorce you're into, they've got it. I want to meet the person who maintains these sites.

I didn't take careful notes of the results of my fishing, but here are some patterns which worked surpisingly well:

hi
hello
cool
interesting
asd, sdf, etc. (patterns bound to appear when someone mashes the keyboard)
/ (letter)

By the way, we all use "interesting" far too often. If we would agree to stop using it weeding out old spam would be much easier. Besides, it's such a filler word. In fact, if a word shows up consistently in spam (and it isn't related to genitalia or brand names), then it's a good bet that it's an overused filler word.

Incidentally, I also found a lot of one-off comments calling us idiots, most of which I suspect we never see because they were added long after the original post.

Wikipedia

Both Cliopatria and Slashdot have had interesting discussions of the limitations of Wikipedia lately. I've been an occasional editor since early 2002, and done a bit of dabbling on the related Wikisource sites as well. In that process, I've formed some opinions about the strengths and weakness of wikis in general, and Wikipedia in particular.

1. Consensus: It might be reasonable for someone to assume that the open editing process encourages articles to be filled with inaccuracies — certainly the stories about Wikipedia that make the news emphasize this. This is rarely the case, however. In practice, a group of people who are interested in an article monitor changes to it on their watchlists, and intervene rapidly to revert vandalism and proofread additions. Their changes are in turn checked by the other editors watching the article, and so a sort of consensus builds around the article's content. This consensus will not permit changes that diverge widely from its editorial viewpoint to stand. For example, an edit to the article on Nineteen Eighty-Four that replaced any negative reference to Stalin's USSR with one about Roosevelt's USA was reverted within an hour.

   One problem with this editorial process is that because the watchers of an article are self-selected, if they are strongly in favor of a subject or strongly opposed to it, an article will drift in that direction. The articles on Noam Chomsky and Attachment Parenting follow a cycle in which a criticism is posted, a rebuttal to the criticism is added, then slowly the criticism itself is edited out. Perhaps more serious is the inability of the article's editors to make useful judgements about the factual validity of statements that do not directly contradict their editorial consensus. See, for example, my long and painful argument about Orwell's inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four to understand the limitations of an article's editors ability to judge the validity of certain types of statements.

2. Inaccessability of Sources: Many of Wikipedia's critics seem to be lamenting that an Appeal to Authority doesn't work there. There are no credentials, and editors who attempt to cite their own generally have weak arguments. This really ought to be a strength of Wikipedia; who wouldn't hope for an encyclopedia in which the most coherent synthesis, the most complete description of a subject prevailed?

   This often does occur, but the places in which it doesn't are telling. It's a commonplace criticism of Wikipedia that technical subjects and pop culture are well covered, while the humanities are not. Many critics attribute this to the nature of the internet's users, but I think that accessiblity is to blame. Old Star Trek episodes and RFCs are availible to anyone who has access to Wikipedia. Literature — especially non-fiction — is not. I've seen contentious articles packed with nonsense resolve themselves into decent essays when each editor had access to the relevant literature and was capable of judging whether the article's synthesis was valid. Unfortunately, making this literature availible required a Herculean effort. Perhaps the efforts by Google and others to digitize entire libraries will fix this.

3. Time-wasting Lunatics: Cranks do tend to get edited out of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this is a never-ending job, and editors get tired of it. Worldwide access means that the lunatics appear in unexpected places. In the Code of Hammurapi article, I've mediated feuds between one crank who insists the Code proves the historicity of Abraham and another who believes redactor theory implies that the Torah was composed ex nihilo in the fifth century. Any article on the northern frontier of Ancient Near Eastern civilization will attract partisans from the Georgian/Abkhazian conflict, for whom the linguistic classification of Hurro-Urartean assumes the importance of our Confederate Flag disputes mixed with the English-Only debate. As none of these cranks are actually vandals, they can only be countered by appeal to literature and persuasion. After a bit of this, even a hobbyist like me begins to wonder if this is the best use of his time.

The three flaws I've discussed all stem from the limitations of the user community and its interactions. That said, one of Wikipedia's great strengths is its early formalization of appropriate conduct, and enforcement of that conduct. There are rules we all might remember when debating on the net: assume good faith, no legal threats, don't bite the newcomers.

I've pretty much quit editing on Wikipedia, and only check back occasionally on the subsections of articles I've participated in. I still feel the pull that first attracted me, though, and that pull is the desire to fix inaccuracies. A sentence in the Nineteen Eighty-Four article by someone apparently unaware of the Molotov-Ribbentrop act. The use of archaic Hebrew names for the verb stems in Akkadian language. They're all waiting, begging to be fixed.

"The Banana is Great, but the Skin is Greater"

Charles of Charles's George Orwell Links has added two reviews of the notorious A Modern De Quincey by H.R. Robinson: the familiar 1940s text by his old Burma Police colleague Eric Blair, and a new review by one Daniel Cooper.

Awards

Horizon has been nominated for "Best Group Blog" in the Cliopatria awards.

I find this a bit surprising, not least because our output has been so low lately. It would be easy to blame this on the intrusions of Real Life — books, babies, and travel — but I've got another theory. Fundamentally, we are all curmudgeons whose M.O. is to lie in wait for someone to make a positive statement we can pounce on. This really doesn't lend itself to vigorous editorial output.

Cavalcade of Bad Nativities

'Tis the season

(Via Amy Welborn)