Learning a Bit More About Prohibition (2025-07-21)

Anti-prohibition marchers in 1920s chicago, taken from an angle suggesting the photographer was not impressed by them. The original is held in the united states library of congress. Reproduced here via wikimedia commons from its public domain image collection.

While it is not difficult to find photographs and digitized film clips showing dramatic scenes from the "prohibition era" in the united states, it is mightily hard to find sensible assessments of what the people advocating for alcohol prohibition were responding to or trying to achieve. Unfortunately this has as much to do with most study of it being based on the united states as it does with how emotive discussions of the use and abuse of consciousness-altering can become. The state of things is improving as the time between the primary years of national prohibition in the united states, from 1916 to 1933, gets longer, and accounts of prohibition at various scales in other places including canada improves. Contrary to popular belief, prohibition did not massively inflate organized crime or fail to make a longterm change in levels of alcohol consumption. Nor was prohibition primarily called for by white middle class women who were supposedly obsessed with interfering in the lives of others. In line with popular belief, prohibition was and is entangled with controversies about sex role stereotypes, class, and conflations of public health policy with perceived or actual infringements on the rights of individuals or sub-national bodies such as states or provinces. There are a range of articles and papers available online about this, among the earliest Jack S. Blocker's 2006 Did Prohibition Really Work? Alcohol Prohibition as a Public Health Innovation in the American Journal of Public Health. In 2019 Vox magazine updated its "explainer" on prohibition, Prohibition Worked Better than You Think, but I would recommend starting with the excerpt from Mark Lawrence Schrad's biography of Carry Nation, Hatchet Hantion: It's Time to Reconsider One one the Most Ridiculed Women in American History.

Schrad's examination of Nation's anti-alcohol activism is a thoughtful one, and does a much better job of setting out real issues than even Blocker's article, which gets a bit lost in repeated claims about prohibitionists who expected to interfere with others' drinking while continuing to drink themselves. It is true that Blocker also is very clear about how the national prohibition amendment did not reflect what the broad expectations of those who voted for it expected, and that it was repealed not because it didn't work but because the socio-economic context of it had changed. There is an implication in his article that when it was repealed during the great depression, the repeal in part reflected despair and perhaps a decision to subtly encourage self-medication by those most hard-hit. By which I don't mean Blocker is implying it, it is the timing and context of the repeal of national prohibition in the united states that suggests this. Still, a significant plurality of united states citizens voted for it and stuck with it, only losing a broader-based commitment to it under extreme circumstances. Turning to Schrad's article helps demonstrate why. Setting out Carrie Nation's motivations for her activism, which enabled her to continue despite suffering physical assaults and ridicule, Schrad writes:

Carrie was always clear that her attack was not against the booze in those bottles, nor the pitiable addicts getting drunk at 8:30 that Thursday morning, but against the predatory liquor traffic and the government that abetted it. "The smashing in Kansas was intended to strike the head of this nation the hardest blow, for every saloon I smashed in Kansas had a license from the head of this government which made the head of the government more responsible than the dive-keeper," she wrote. "I broke up three of these dives that day, broke the windows on the outside to prove that the man who rents his house is a partner also with the man who sells."

Well now, this is not a person who is condescending to force moral uplift on drunkards whom she sees herself as superior to. She had much a deeper and more challenging critique. The fomenting and profiteering from drug trafficking by governments and profiteers was hardly new to the united states or indeed britain. Both were involved in the infamous opium wars by which they trafficked that drug into china when they had no real products the chinese wanted tp trade for, and before that they were busy trafficking tobacco. Encouraging addiction and then supplying the addicts is very profitable.

The latest iteration of this terrible cycle is today's methamphetamines and opioids, both widely available in both "respectable" which today means under prescription, and not so respectable street drug form. The sad fact is the Sacklers, the infamous opioid sellers may be officially out of the business, but they fundamentally got away with it. The abuse of ADHD drugs is now all too common due to their perceived utility for improving focus and productivity. All of these drugs have a spectacular level of mark up, and are all too readily adulterated to deadly effect. None of this is new or unique to modern drugs. In an earlier thoughtpiece, Intemperate Views on Temperance, I quoted artist Charles Russell, who described the effects of the adulterated trade liquor on those who drank it. Indeed, I have also heard similar accounts from friends about the remarkable effects of certain types of common store bought alcoholic drinks, including specific brands and drinks notorious for fuelling fights.

A question not yet explored when it comes to alcohol consumption today, is the resurgence of what we could call modern "small beers" and non-alcoholic versions of wine and cocktails alongside the legalization of marijuana in an increasing number of jurisdictions. Cannabis and alcohol are widely known to be incompatible sources of intoxication, unlike the once macho-coded combination of distilled liquor and tobacco. Now more people are also apparently eschewing alcoholic drinks in favour of their non-alcoholic versions because they like the taste but not the intoxication, and not necessarily because they are smoking marijuana. Are these changes in themselves also related to a willingness to challenge the preconception that prohibition didn't succeed? (Top)

About Those AI Crawlers (2025-07-14)

AI crawlers aren't as helpful as these earth worms, not even compared to the dew worm species that spoils lawns. Original image from 2010 PLoS ONE article 'DNA Barcoding Reveals Cryptic Diversity in Lumbricus terrestris L., 1758 (Clitellata): Resurrection of L. herculeus (Savigny, 1826)' via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Recently the Moonspeaker suffered the dubious distinction of its first DDoS attack. Based on my study of the server logs, this was by no means personal or even necessarily intended as a DDoS attack as such. Rather, it was the product of random misfortune combined with a script kiddie playing with a widely available python tutorial in how to write web crawlers. These semi-generic looking crawlers stood out sharply from the background mosquito scripts constantly trying to find unsecured wordpress and cpanel logins. The notable miscreant seemed to have some sort of bug, as it was apparently tuned to go through all the image files it could find, getting tangled up parsing the site's rss feed and then going into an infinite loop requesting the same handful of images again and again until it used up all the site's bandwidth and it went offline. That was bad enough. On further assessment, besides taking steps to block the script kiddies to the extent possible in this iteration of bad behaviour, I also began taking more aggressive steps to block so-called "AI" bots. These execrable pieces of crap code not only steal code and web pages without attribution of any kind, they do so in a manner that slurps down site bandwidth like there is no tomorrow in their own right. The main culprits run at the same intervals in the same week each month, and they represent the dregs of the latest tech bubble rush. The specific issue of bandwidth abuse is not merely an issue for a relatively small and obscure site like this one that happens to win the unwanted script kiddie lottery. It is far bigger than that.

ReadtheDocs published an important blogpost documenting the issue on 25 july 2024, AI crawlers need to be more respectful. The author, Eric Holscher, seems committed to being obfuscatory on who the agent is here in the name of being diplomatic. I would say far less diplomatically that the assholes who code and deploy crawlers primed to locate and copy websites to feed their large language models need to fuck off. The fundamental issue is the engineers and their bosses don't care whose website they throw offline or whose bills they blow up so long as they can pretend to have a good pile of data to calculate correlations from. Nevertheless, I appreciate the succinct description of the issue in the first sentence, "In the last few months, we have noticed an increase in abusive site crawling, mainly from AI products and services," and the subsequent technical analysis. While I was unlucky in my encounter with an annoying script kiddie, I was an absolute winner in comparison to what the team at ReadTheDocs had to deal with. Holscher writes,

One crawler downloaded 73 TB of zipped HTML files in May 2024, with almost 10 TB in a single day. This cost us over $5,000 in bandwidth charges, and we had to block the crawler. We emailed this company, reporting a bug in their crawler, and we're working with them on reimbursing us for the costs.

Thank heaven for small mercies, in the Moonspeaker's case it was a gigabytes-sized download and my hosting plan has a "shutdown when bandwidth is exceeded" setting instead of the alternative. This approach of course would not be the best fit for a site like ReadtheDocs, as it hosts documentation projects for thousands of software development teams. Their site can't just lock up for the rest of the month until their bandwidth bank resets. It's kind of amazing how diplomatic the blogpost is, actually.

Among the issues raised by the behaviour of these crawlers is what may even be agent name spoofing, although what the ReadtheDocs engineering team found, and so did I, is the problem crawlers use a wide range of ip addresses. To me this suggests a deliberate determination to crawl sites heedless of any robots.txt file or htaccess file, even though the main reason webmasters resort to them is to curb abusive practices like those exemplified by these "AI" crawlers. If anybody running a web crawler for any reason doesn't want to get blocked, a basic and reasonable starting point is to not absorb all of a site's bandwidth to start. It is not a given any crawler is being blocked purely due to ethical and/or copyright concerns. (Top)

Well, That's Ironic (2025-07-07)

Image of a wood engraved print of a portrait of Cornelius Agrippa by Theodor de Bry held in the Wellcome Collection, via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Not too many people look into Cornelius Agrippa's work these days, or necessarily realize why he is referenced by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's character Victor Frankenstein in his brief account of his undisciplined early reading. Even the version of her novel "Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds" released by MIT press for the two hundredth anniversary of the book has little to say about him. The editors see his introduction in the story as a marker of how Frankenstein's experiments and fascinations were not "modern" for the time, the early nineteenth century. Yet I can't help but wonder if Wollstonecraft Shelley had her tongue somewhat in cheek as she wrote Frankenstein's story, considering among his books is Declamatio de nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. I chased down the basics of Agrippa's biography and summaries of his books in order to make better sense of Frankenstein the novel, and left it at that until I stumbled upon an article in the online science magazine nautilus by literature professor Renée Bergland. The person whose job was to make an eye catching title did an excellent job, coining Magic Died When Art and Science Split. Setting aside any quibbles with what the title claims, it accurately suggested an intriguing article to follow. Bergland has recently completed a book that juxtaposes poet Emily Dickinson and scientist Charles Darwin, Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science. Accordingly, her article teases the book by pulling out some juicy bits to consider.

Bergland's book resonates with a theme in Laura J. Snyder's 2011 work, The Philosophical Breakfast Club, the key and often lost or at least minimized role of women in science. In the early pages of Snyder's book, she recounts the origins of the word "scientist" in a review by William Whewell referring to Mary Somerville, a prominent astronomer, mathematician, and painter who wrote and translated foundational textbooks for use in universities. Born in 1780, Somerville pursued her writing and scientific career against all odds to the ripe age of 91, passing away in 1872. She published her most famous book, The Mechanism of the Heavens, in 1831, the same year as the final edition of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft Shelley lived until 1851, while Darwin lived from 1908 to 1882, Dickinson only from 1830 to 1856, struck down by kidney disease. What was happening to science in the nineteenth century, so often sloppily referred to as "the victorian era," as Bergland rediscovered and discusses, in part was a change from science being "for girls" to professionalization and reconstruction as "for boys." Bergland discusses this shift as part of a process of disenchantment and separation of science from poetry, including the end of the study of "natural theology." Her article concludes in part, "Darwin, the great scientist, and Dickinson, the great poet, witnessed the separation of science from art, but they did not accept it for themselves. They resisted disenchantment."

Neither Snyder, whose book I have read, nor Bergland so far as I can tell not having read her book yet, discuss the "desexing" (in the nineteenth century women were still referred to as "the sex" in english as if men weren't sexed beings themselves) and disenchantment of science as an example of or part of its professionalization. Nevertheless, the sequence of developments follows that found for other recognized fields of study today, including history. Almost always the process begins after women have found a way to consistently make a living by pursuing an undervalued line of work. Today the role of women as the creators and popularizers of the modern novel in english is approaching commonplace knowledge again, but that of women in making science accessible and encouraging interest and investment in scientific research not so much. Once it looks like not just money but prestige and social influence may come of some woman's skill or line of research, it doesn't take long for men to show up with a sudden interest in establishing formal clubs, societies, colleges, and courses to make it easier for them to join in. It seems more than likely that in the science case, separating it from poetry and art was an important stage in order to better reframe science as appropriately "masculine" according to the latest nineteenth century sex role stereotypes. Accordingly such early men associated with the earlier ways of studying and understanding nature in europe, including Cornelius Agrippa and Albertus Magnus were reframed as foolish mystics and alchemists. Wollstonecraft Shelley's famous novel catches this movement as it is picking up momentum.

So here we are today, when in almost complete opposite practice compared to the nineteenth century, girls are regularly turned away from science in general or specific sciences in particular, especially physics and mathematics. Then again, in common with the nineteenth century, girls are regularly discouraged if not outright prevented from studying ancient greek or latin, unless perhaps they are preparing to go into medicine. This in itself is rather surreal, because today many of the up and coming scholars working in what is now widely referred to in english as greek and roman studies are women. (Top)

Storied Comics (2025-06-30)

A bit of sample artwork from Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse website, accessed 15 august 2024.

Among the casualties of the total consolidation of mainstream newspapers into corporate propaganda conglomerates is the original comics aka funnies page. The selection of comics, some more or less overtly political, ranging from Cathy Guisewhite's Cathy to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury, others not so obviously political such as Charles Schultz's Peanuts and Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. Some older favourites that didn't quite make it to the 2000s have had minor revivals more recently, including Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County and Gary Larson's The Far Side. Of course, none of these are particularly recent comic strips. The rogue's gallery today is quite different, including Betty which I admit to having no idea is the co-project of Gary Delainy and Gerry Rasmussen and the to me rather odd Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott. Times certainly change, with particularly successful comics often spawning minor entertainment industry branches. Apparently Peanuts is now a staple of ComicCon, and Lynne Johnston's For Better or For Worse is in multinational syndicated reruns. Indeed, it may be among the only such productions to have a canadianisms page, which is both short and revealing. In any case, I found myself looking up For Better or For Worse to check after a particular detail that may actually have come from a different comic strip, and while I was spending time down that internet rabbit hole, came upon a june 2021 interview with Lynne Johnston by staff at the vancouver sun.

I must confess to being gratified by Johnston's observations about today's newspaper comics, made in response to a question as to her feelings about them. She answered, "I'm not impressed. The problem for cartoonists working in newspapers now is that the pages are smaller, which means the amount of space they leave for cartoons is far too small! The art has to be so simple now that real imagery is impossible. I have a saying: "There is a size-laugh ratio." This means that the smaller a cartoon is, the less funny it becomes. This is true! Read a cartoon in a Herman collection book for example and you will laugh out loud." I make no claim to having any clue about size to laugh ratios, but have noticed the lamentable shrinkage of the newspaper comic even in online form. Now I wonder if Bill Watterson could see this development coming and how it would make it impossible to produce decently laid out Calvin and Hobbes strips. All the more reason for artists to pursue other options if this works for them, and as indeed many have including both Johnston and Watterson. Yet reading further on in Johnston's interview, I was particularly struck by Johnston's description of some of the tasks involved in overseeing her comic strips as they are reproduced in newspapers around the world, including "We have to do some editing. We have to put helmets on the skiers, we have to put seatbelts on people in cars, we have to remove cigarettes if somebody's smoking. We're being politically correct for the 2021 era." I found this subtly, or perhaps not so subtly, disturbing. To be clear, not the part where Johnston oversees the reproduction of her work and makes decisions about that to her satisfaction. That is too rare even today in what is reputedly the ultimate individualistic age of the so-called west. No, it's the editing part.

Comic strips, especially those printed in newspapers, may be read or at least looked at by people of all ages. In some countries, certain storylines would not be deemed appropriate. So understandably, an artist has to make decisions about how to handle requests or requirements to make a comic "kid friendly" or to avoid content not allowed more generally in the context of a newspaper. "Kid friendly" is one of those profoundly vexed notions, however it is labelled or understood. I can vividly remember instances of rereading older comics (among other things) I first encountered as a child or teenager, and being quite startled at what they actually said or implied. More often than not quite racy innuendos whooshed over my head without so much as disturbing a hair on it. This happened in cases where I could read the speech bubbles or captions as well as those I saw when still too young to do so. On this obviously not widely sampled basis, the idea what is generally accepted as a newspaper daily comic strip needs to be edited to be "kid friendly" does not convince me. "Kid friendly" is not the same as "politically correct" though, and maybe it is the "political correctness" aspect that is bothering me. Since For Better or For Worse is a parallel universe mostly realistic comic in which Johnston aged the characters over time, there is a great deal of wonderful historical snapshotting in it. I think it would be unfortunate to lose that quality, but then again, that is not what Johnston is saying, she isn't suggesting the original versions are going to vanish or otherwise become generally unavailable in reprints or collections. But "political correctness" has spurred far too much by way of ahistorical editing and interpretation to leave me totally at ease with Johnston's invocation of it. Being both a historian and modestly involved in education, I appreciate when an older comic strip or photograph shows things such as that at one point hockey players did not wear helmets, and this was true more broadly.

I doubt Johnston was kicking the hornet's nest in her choice of words, and would probably be open to an eventual study of how internationalization can work with comic strips, which sounds really interesting to me not being part of the industry. With "political correctness" being an inevitably moving target, it will remain grimly interesting how it plays out in comic strips still in newspapers today in current production as well as in reruns. They do constitute quite a different genre than the growing numbers of edgier work independently published both on and offline. (Top)

More Adventures in Program Documentation (2025-06-23)

Illustration from the Franklin ACE 1000 computer manual by Frank Williams, text by Sal Manetta, 1982. This manual and its predecessor were featured in a great essay by David Friedman on his substack 2 january 2023.

Look, I get it, I really do. Documentation is hard. It's a nightmare even for annoying modular furniture from stores like the infamous ikea with its strangely lunatic assembly booklets. (Somebody explain why, why, why the packets the ikea hardware comes in – always multiple little packets – are not printed consistently with the hardware item's identifier number? This didn't used to matter until they began to use several closely similarly sized versions of the same hardware piece, but I digress...) I am well aware the libreoffice suite's copious documentation is a truly heroic effort and an impressive achievement. It includes multiple thick manuals in multiple electronic formats and languages. If the most recent online version doesn't work properly for some reason, the previous version is usually close enough to answer basic questions at least for the word processor. Excellent stuff. Alas, it is still insanely difficult to figure out how to use much of the office suite unless following exactly the examples in the document, preferably in the windows versions because that is where most of the screen shots come from. Unfortunately the documentation team seems to be quite microsoft windows based, which sometimes leads to interesting problems locating menu items when working with libreoffice on gnu/linux. What led me to reflect on the challenges of documentation again from a less theoretical direction was my recent experience trying to make substantial use of libreoffice base. I don't like to say it, but my conclusion is if you are considering using libreoffice base, especially if what you need is a basic flat database, don't. If you definitely want a free/libre program with a reasonably good reputation for stability and data integrity for such a use case, then the best answer I have found so far is kexi, which is part of the qt-based kde family of applications and has readily available gnu/linux and windows versions, plus a homebrew port for macosx.

A major part of the challenge with libreoffice base is how on one hand, it will run without a java runtime environment enabled, however, on the other it is basically impossible to do anything with it. This is not at all evident from reading the documentation, so many people will have to sort this issue out first, especially if they are not using a gnu/linux system. This is not hard to do necessarily, just not evident. A solid overview of how the design team set up the wizards and what they do in libreoffice base is up at makeuseof.com in How to Create a Data Entry Form in LibreOffice Base. What it comes down to is unless you are already a very experienced database maven, perhaps even someone who intends to use libreoffice base to work on an externally hosted database, you need these wizards, yet they also do some quirky things. So far I have replicated these things in both gnu/linux and macosx, so there is something creative going on. For instance, the "timestamp" datafield does not consistently apply customized format strings, so for anything like that it is necessary to explicitly set up separate date and time fields. This is a minor gotcha of course, annoying, not a crisis by any means. The deadly issue in the end was the embedded database option, which sadly only seems to work.

After a great deal of research and digging, I found a number of comments on libreoffice fora to the effect that the embedded database is "only a toy" and "not meant to be used for real work." Add to that a solid slab of contempt for people who aren't coding SQL databases, and you'll have the gist down. Following such commentary came a selection of orders to go away and contribute to the code to make it work then. I wasn't surprised to see such a thing after my much earlier experience trying to find a means to set up documents with parallel columns, though the orders were not quite as rude. Now, in fact, I don't think the embedded database option is meant to be a toy. However, it is so grievously unstable and quick to drop data it is simply isn't usable for much. It may be possible to correct this by installing updated libraries and then switching libreoffice base's default file paths to point at them, but when I was fortunate enough to get an explicit error message rather than silent data loss, the error left me unsure this would resolve the issue, and I really don't have time at the moment for further testing. What I can definitely tell is the issue lies in the process of saving and storing the changes on closing the database. From my research it appears this includes a compacting operation, and that is a delicate operation that can go wrong, precisely because it is about releasing unused memory and putting the database indexes and data together more efficently. Either the program is running out of memory, which seems unlikely because it does not crash as a whole, or there is a memory pointer or addressing bug leading to at least somewhat consistent error messages referring to null pointers. (Having learned more about database compacting, it seems memory pointers are the most probable culprit.)

Currently libreoffice base appears to be getting very little attention, with few people working on it, which no doubt has as much to do with how much demand there is for the program as it does with funding. The team at kexi has opted to use an embedded sql-lite server rather than HSQLDB or Firebird, which are used in libreoffice base. On further experimentation, I suspect there may be an issue in libreoffice calc adding to the challenges in base, as a fairly large calc document with three sheets I was working with began manifesting surprisingly similar issues to the test embedded database I was testing. The spreadsheet and database in question were not connected, have separate names, are not on the same computer, and were created separately. (In other words, I created each spreadhseet fresh, not by copying and pasting data from elsewhere.) After a series of edits, the spreadsheet suddenly threw a "this document cannot be saved" error, though luckily I could copy the main data sheet out to save in a fresh document. The error message was not forthcoming, and so I cannot rule out autosave problems as the ultimate source of trouble, although autosave has thrown this sort of issue in other programs in the past. Ironically, autosave issues are fairly easy to work around, as they can often be avoided by turning off autosave and saving by hand every few minutes or so, just like in the old days. Plus, there is typically a temporary version available to restore the majority of the data from if all else fails. I could not find a similar fallback for libreoffice base, nor could I finagle it into exporting its tables once it began dropping data. This was really a shame, because it looked just possible that the embedded database option could work, just not for editing in the usual way. It was only an appearance unfortunately. My best guess is it would probably not be trivial to adapt kexi's sql-lite approach to embedded flat databases, or perhaps the libreoffice base team would have tried it out by now.

At the moment there is a serious gap in the software available for anyone who needs little more than flat databases with an associated entry form for data management. Perhaps many developers assume there is no middle between spreadsheets and behemoths with no appropriate single-seat pricing for home use like filemaker. It may be many of them consider the various "cloud-based" options good enough for most people who don't want to deal with external database servers or spin them up separately from the program they use to do the editing, especially if they would prefer to do so using a GUI. This seems consistent with the relatively immediate abandonment of bento by clarisworks, the consumer grade mini-me of filemaker, alongside the stubborn refusal to update hypercard before that. I understand many people may rely primarily on applications like music players to catalogue albums and such, but this is of no use for actual hard copy media. The small scale embedded database programs are almost exclusively oriented to digital files, and not amenable to customization. Which leads back to kexi again.

There is kexi documentation, yet compared to libreoffice base the documentation is sparse, remarkably laconic, and not yet available in as many languages and electronic formats. I must admit it is also not fully updated to match the current version of kexi. Yet it is nevertheless much easier to interpret and apply what it says. The main thing that gave me pause at the start was not the documentation so much as the interface, and sorting out the slightly different labels for items other than tables and forms. I also found it easier to track down specific information about data stability and integrity in the documentation itself, rather than buried in a somewhat obscure series of forum posts. It may well be the libreoffice documentation team is also experiencing a version of the tyranny of the habitual documentation approach, following a model that suits another program reasonably well, in their case libreoffice writer, which does not fit libreoffice base nearly as well because database software perforce behaves in a different way during data entry and subsequent saving. (Top)

The Strange Life and Times of Grue (2025-06-16)

Artist's rendition of a grue from the classic text adventure game Zork, courtesy of the Zork Library.

Back in the olden days, when we ran computers by having little dinosaurs run on treadmills to spin the motor wheels for our electricity generators, the real killer app on the command line was a cleverly designed text adventure game called Zork. It was among the earliest recreations of "choose your own adventure" books on computers, which I have the stubborn impression is related to some of the earliest non-business, non-military computer programming coming out of labs working with dialects of lisp. I suspect this has more to do with coincidence of timing and the excellent 2011 book Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski, which features a sample text adventure game as one of its major exercises which gradually becomes a framework to describe all of the major structures and concepts of common lisp. To this day I am not able to track down the version of a zork-inspired text adventure game playable in the terminal application of a much older computer of my experience where if the player perseveres long enough they will discover the virtual world they are exploring is a map of the central processing unit. (Since the computer in question was neither an early macintosh nor some form of unix box, my best guess is it may have been a commodore 64, as it was in an elementary school computer lab.) In any case, an important denizen of the Zork universe is the grue, which according to the Jargon File as curated by Eric Raymond is defined and historied as follows:

[from archaic English verb for "shudder," as with fear] The grue was originated in the game Zork (Dave Lebling took the name from Jack Vance's Dying Earth fantasies) and used in several other Infocom games as a hint that you should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of light source. Wandering into a dark area would cause the game to prompt you, "It is very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue." If you failed to locate a light source within the next couple of moves this would indeed be the case.

The grue, according to scholars of the Great Underground Empire, is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its extreme fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few have survived their fearsome jaws to tell the tale. Grues have sickly glowing fur, fish-mouthed faces, sharp claws and fangs, and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They are certainly the most evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they are touchy is a dangerous understatement. "Sour as a grue" is a common expression, even among grues themselves.

All this folklore is widely known among hackers.

Evidently I have ready access to the Jargon File, so a person might wonder why I went off on a merry rabbit hole dive on the topic leading to finding the illustration above, apart from the obvious and ever-ready motivation of champions: procrastination. It is undeniable that procrastination played a role, but also puzzled curiosity, because I stumbled upon a reference to "the Grue-Paradox." It turns out this refers to a thoroughly respectable problem explored by philosophers exploring questions about counterfactual statements, notions of plausibility, how we use inductive reasoning, and how we can tell when we can depend on it. (Among many other questions about human understanding and empiricism.)

According to the various articles I was able to examine, the philosophical grue story begins with a brief paper by Nelson Goodman in the Journal of Philosophy from 1946. It is a bit trickier to access Goodman's original article, although luckily I found a more recent 2016 paper by Wolfgang Freitag in which he discusses "the disjunctive riddle for induction," and so also describes the grue paradox. (It is in Dialectica 70(2): 185-200.) Freitag sets up his description of the grue paradox by describing a scenario in which he and we readers draw 99 balls from an urn. The balls we take out are the sampled balls, and the rest are more or less mysterious to us. Except now, "the rest" is just one ball, and the ones we have sampled are all green. Freitag continues,

Define "grue" as follows. It applies to an object [if and only if] it is either sampled and green, or not sampled and blue. Suppose now that we have examined the 99 sample balls and found them green... Our evidence then yields perfect inductive support for the general hypothesis that all balls from the urn are green. Moreover, if the samples are green, they are by definition also grue. That is, our evidence equally confirms the hypothesis that all balls, the final one included, are grue. Yet obviously we cannot maintain both hypotheses, since an unsampled grue ball is blue, not green. This constitutes [Nelson] Goodman's paradox.

The english language is good for producing this sort of linguistic coincidence, in this case a fictional creature of indeterminate appearance though definitely unpleasant nature, to go with Goodman's paradox.

Just to round out the coincidental parallels, we can turn to Lewis Carroll's long nonsense poem, "The Hunting of the Snark." The poem is tied together by a highly elaborated pun on the word "be" and subtle anxieties on the question of existence and its relationship to names. The captain of the ill-fated hunt describes five signs of the snark which provide no real information about how the creature actually looks, and the reader is left to wonder how the hapless Baker knows he has found a snark when he does. If he doesn't know what he is looking for, how does he find it? It is probably not a coincidence that Lewis Carroll in his day to day life was a mathematician specializing in logic, and among his most best known writing on the subject are his logic paradoxes. He developed these in the course of debates in the journal Mind about hypotheticals, including that of Achilles and the Tortoise featured and discussed by Douglas R. Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach. The article on Carroll in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy neatly draws out how he wrestled with how and then whether to make use of arguments from existence to find solutions to such paradoxes. (Top)

The Illegal Immigration Problem (2025-06-09)

One of Henrique Alvim Corrêa's illustrations from a late nineteenth century edition of H.G. Wells' novel War of the Worlds. Image courtesy of oldbookillustrations.com.

Never accept at face value a designation of a specific group of people as "a problem." This is not done as overtly as it used to be these days. Nobody in the media at least is so crass as to refer to "the Indian problem" or "the negro problem" or "the woman problem" or whichever group of people might be the focus of the speaker or writer's annoyance anymore. No, the capacity of english to obfuscate is now applied in full force, especially in the technique of nominalization. So today there is no "immigrant problem" or "illegal immigrant problem" or even "refugee problem." No indeed. Such terms are too obviously racist. Instead, the present term of art is "illegal immigration" and careful avoidance of that give away word "problem," at least at first. Maybe it creeps in anyway via the front of the sentence, as in "the problem of illegal immigration," but this is not ideal because the passive construction is too obvious and a bit too awkward. Yet it still does the trick of deflecting the unwary from asking the more important question of why people are leaving their homelands for other places so ill-equipped to receive them and help them take up dignified and safe lives again. This doesn't make sense. People don't just leave their homelands for no or frivolous reason, unless they are so wealthy they can arrange to have multiple passports and the like. Those people are notoriously few in number. The people leaving their homelands don't make a point of heading straight to places unable to properly support them in adjusting to a new home where they likely need to deal with both a new language and a very different culture on top of the challenge of finding appropriate and self-supporting work. The people most worried about because they are "illegally immigrating" are not, contrary to scaremongering, organized in armed bands or outright armies and rushing across "poorly secured borders." Falsified film and video of supposed mobs breaking through armed checkpoints are not new, nor are notoriously sexualized posters meant to inflame every possible sexist and racist stereotype around.

The timing and context of controversies about "illegal immigration" are also notorious in their consistency. When the working class is under growing pressure due to whatever the current iteration of the richest people's means of stealing is making it more and more untenable for the working class to survive, out come the racist tropes. Lightly revised to apply to the "right" group according to political expedience, the grimly familiar sequence of racialized nonsense begins to run through mainstream media and less mainstream but happy to reinforce the messages media. Usually things seem to start small, with stories about how the local authorities "had" to seize children from a family recently who has recently fled or economically migrated to the country. All the better if there is something about their day to day dress or skin colouring to provide orientalizing images for the camera. Best of all if they are both darker skinned and not dressed in the unofficial western uniform of jeans and a t-shirt. If not that, then the stories may begin with lamentations about a supposed rise in petty theft, muggings, or vandalism, always mentioned close to a discussion of the increased number of newcomers in a once sleepy neighbourhood or isolated town. Do that for awhile, and then start pointing at "increased immigration" and rising unemployment, while implying "they" are coming to take "our" jobs. After fomenting that for awhile, it is just a matter of watching for some opportunity to begin inveighing against racialized men who are only out to defile local women. Somehow these immigrants are insistently coded as all male, but if women immigrants should be so unfortunate as to draw attention, then depending on the country accusations of prostitution and welfare benefits abuse are rarely far apart.

This is utterly grotesque stuff. Yet it is somehow encouraging that more and more often, the people who are supposed to be gulled by this crap, and presumed to be default racists ready to be bought off from the reasonable anger about the mess their communities and countries are in by being offered a scapegoat they can abuse, are none of these. It is no longer so easy, if even possible now, to hide that the vast majority of refugees would gladly have stayed in their homelands, if only western countries would stop instigating warfare and overthrowing their governments. Nor is it so easy to hide how economic warfare is used to deindustrialize one country in order to generate a desperate flow of economic migrants who hope to send remittances home and thereby save their families from abject poverty. For most western countries or federations, such economic warfare is now turned inward, with corporations playing off one part of the country or federation off against the other to completely evade paying taxes or following health and safety regulations, among other things. It seems many more people have put two and two together about how these things actually work, in part due to yes, so-called "social media" and alternative news sources. I think there is also an element of revelation from the paradoxical state of enforced idleness suffered by the un- and underemployed. Not everyone dealing with such circumstances ends up depressed or exhausted, or necessarily stays that way. Many end up frustrated, angry, and observant. They end up asking practical questions about how they could be dealing with such circumstances, especially since they are generally willing and able to work. What else can be concluded from the shocking numbers of people holding down more than one part time job and also going to school in hopes of completing a qualification to help them into steady, full time work? Or the growing numbers of people who are both employed and homeless? There is a reason that the racist, anti-immigrant and anti-outsider generally messaging is most effective in places where people are isolated, unable to get independent information, and too exhausted and/or malnourished to think.

I can't help but conclude that since the loudest and most obnoxious purveyors of "anti-immigration" propaganda are part of or affiliated with the small number of especially wealthy jerks, the ones usually exemplified by people like Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet, that there is an important element of bad conscience involved. Or at least discomfort, a worry about how to keep the dance going until they are well out of harm's way. It often makes me think of the grotesquely revealing H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds, which expresses the inverse of the "white man's burden" so very well, in the desperate fear of invasion by aliens and the even more desperate hope that the germs go the other way. (Top)

Interpretation Gone Sideways (2025-06-02)

Running sanderling, photograph by Rhododendrites, august 2023. Image via wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

In the course of researching for other writing, I happened upon Ana Deumert's diggit magazine piece from 2020, On Racism and How to Read Hannah Arendt. Unfortunately, being a brilliant philosopher is not a guarantee that said philosopher will necessarily apply their ideas consistently. Otherwise, no philosopher could or would be bedevilled by racism or any other form of prejudice. Philosophers in "western mainstream" cultures are often able to lean on the posthumous reputation of earlier practitioners to maintain a claim to being some form of conscience of society or challenger to the misbehaviour of the state. But at least so far as I know (after all I have certainly not read every philosopher or about every philosophy out there), no philosopher, let alone psychologist or even neurologist has come up with a foolproof way to catch when the supposedly "common sense" notions of a society are leading anybody, let alone professional thinking types like philosophers, astray. As Deumert observes, Arendt, like the vast majority of her social circle, took for granted the assumption that non-european racialized people were somehow lesser human beings who should accept the good that civilization was supposed to do for them. (They had basically the same attitude to the working class.) This includes an assumption that if such lesser humans are striving towards freedom from oppression, they are only doing so because they are aping some badly behaved europeans. The uncanny power of such "common sense" ideas to apparently prevent or at least numb any cognitive dissonance is no joke. But this is not the main point of Deumert's article, as its title aptly indicates. The main point is to intervene in the still ongoing issue of "cancel culture." I was especially struck by this section, where Deumert discusses elements of a talk by university of connecticut philosopher Lewis Gordon delivered in 2019 at Hannah Arendt centre in new york.

Reflecting on his experience of teaching Arendt's work, Gordon notes that sometimes, when he points out the anti-black racism in her writings, his colleagues and students interpret this as meaning that 'we should not read her work'; that he wishes to remove Arendt from the reading list.

Gordon calls this 'a white response': it is a response typical of those who had the privilege of being surrounded by scholarship that is not offensive to their being. Yet, the world is different for Black scholars: it would be weird if canonical (Western) texts did not contain any racism.

Gordon's explanation provides a different perspective on the various iterations on "cancel culture" in evidence throughout "western" history as such, although of course, especially its present iteration. This commentary makes sense of why the predominantly "white" people demanding cancellations speak and behave in ways that express not mere aggression or intolerance, but a tone of aggrieved insult. They regularly give off an air of "How dare anybody or anything disturb what I believe should be the way of the world." And yes, this is intended as an accurate reflection of their responses, not a satirical one, and no, I am not including the frankly unhinged responses of the most extreme men claiming to be "cancel culture" warriors. It is quite clear those men are taking advantage of the apparent license to physically attack people they don't like without fear of legal or social consequences. No, I am thinking of the various "cancel culture" mavens who aren't interested in that sort of behaviour, the apparently reasonable, and generally law abiding ones.

Another striking element of Gordon's comment here is his observation of how colleagues and students interpreted his reflections on Arendt's racism. While it is true we cannot strictly control how other people interpret what we say and do, although under good conditions we may influence their interpretations, reading this surprised me. After all, it indicates that Gordon's comments were interpreted as if he must be thinking and responding in the same way as people who think they are white. To put it in simplified terms, the "white" interpretive rubric here seems to be: "pointing out something negative about a person's work is always a demand to stop engaging with that work." This seems to be the case in the united states with its vaunted first amendment to its constitution as much as any other anglophone if not more generally european country.

Without intending to be flippant, it wouldn't just be "weird if canonical (Western) texts did not contain any racism," it would be downright astounding if any such text didn't frustrate or even embarrass somebody today. Times and social contexts change, and as I wrote at the start of this thoughtpiece, philosophers are hardly immune to bad "common sense" ideas. I certainly did not always appreciate this, in part due to lack of life experience, in main because like the vast majority of my peers, there was little real instruction about "history" in my elementary or secondary school years. That leaves even more tendency to either inappropriately project present values into the past, or to reject all information from the past because it is different from the present. Both are wrongheaded, but understandable if a person has not developed a conscious sense of how people can be different in the past and not therefore somehow less human or stupid. Nevertheless, even when my understanding of such things was at best blurry, I was perforce quite used to having to read or hear all manner of things that at best annoyed me and at worst infuriated me. If I had laboured under the illusion of the world, let alone scholarly documents having to suit my sensibilities by default, the illusion was taken away very early on.

The stubborn puzzle remains, how to do we keep our interpretations of others from going awry? Or at least, how do we recognize we have started out with a wrong interpretation and go about correcting it? It seems like this should be easy, because presumably evidence of variance between our interpretations and real world actions and evidence should induce useful cognitive dissonance. The again, maybe I have formulated the question wrong. In fact, I think this first version is definitely wrong. No, the question is, how do we resist the dangerous temptation to ignore or cover over our sense of cognitive dissonance when it applies to a deeper aspect of our thinking and belief, one integral to our sense of how the world should work and how other people must behave? I can't claim to have a glib answer let alone a detailed one, but I can say this is one of the questions that lead me to keep reading and learning about philosophy and philosophers. (Top)

Say What? (2025-05-26)

February 2010 photograph by Rexness via wikimedia commons, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

As a general rule, I don't spend much time on reading the local newspaper, as it tends to not have much local news (I realize that sounds contradictory, but it is true). During forest fire season and similar it can be good for situation round ups, and sometimes a good fallback to check on the misbehaviour of planes and ferries on routes between the two major southern cities where I live. It used to be good for announcing the deaths of public figures and succesful artists besides celebrities, but this is no longer the case. I admit to occasionally giving in to the temptation to see what silly thing the editors chose to print in order to rile readers up and hopefully get more ad impressions or something. Occasionally, because by this means I am reminded why this is not my regular habit. What caught my eye the other day however, was an item bundled in with various COVID-19 half-baked follow up items however, was specifically something not intended to be provoking at all. Far from it, the person quoted and the reporter alike apparently presumed this comment was common sense. Thanks to COVID-19, the commercial real estate sector and those business owners who depend upon it are deeply bothered by persistent alterations in where people work and how many people are eating in restaurants, stopping by take-away windows and such. The business owner quoted claimed card swipe data from office buildings indicated far fewer provincial and federal employees are working in offices than private-sector employees. The business owner then decries what he claims is a failure by the province to force more employees who can work from home to work more days in the office instead. Quoting the reporter's quote of the business owner, "So in that respect, we feel the province isn't supporting businesses by making those decisions."

What an intriguing overall assumption this business man is making, to wit, that he and other businesses dependent upon day to day discretionary purchases are owed a living or a profit, by office workers. Among the lesser assumptions are: most office workers have no choice but to spend money at businesses like his when they are at the office for the day, and governments should force office workers to support those businesses. Left unstated are the many important differences between sectors of office work, which means differences in wages, hours, and whether a person is on short or longterm contract, or holds an effectively permanent job. I live in a tourism-distorted city, which makes for a vast excess of over-priced restaurants and coffee shops. (Souvenir shops are becoming an endangered species, as most of the major tourism traps have their own and incude the same bric-a-brac.) It is tell-tale the businesses most affected by the decreased office worker discretionary dollar are those running the sorts of places tightly tied to eating out, and probably dry cleaners. I have observed the steady closure of smaller dry cleaning outlets where I live, but have not found additional articles or analysis indicating this is a wider phenomenon. It may be as much if not more of an outcome of ongoing moves away from dry cleaning due to its dependence on noxious chemicals including hydrocarbons, which has a specific valence here that may not be in play to the same degree elsewhere.

Obviously I don't think anyone owes the quoted business owner or others in these sorts of discretionary spend places a living. Depending primarily on discretionary spending to pay bills is a high risk endeavour. Alas this guy comes across as an entitled asshat, rather than somebody who tries to make a living from capturing discretionary spending because they have to. (Hence my decision not to give their name here.) Then again, most of the people in that position are not business owners, they are the clerks and waitstaff who can count on always being on the losing end when the chips are down in such businesses. Quite apart from COVID-19, the economy is not doing well and hasn't been for some time. More and more people are having to cut back discretionary spending, no matter whether they work in an office or not. Therefore they are bringing lunches made at home and setting up shared coffee and tea if the office doesn't already provide it by informal subscription. More people are doing their ironing at home, buying work clothes they can wash in regular machines, and even learning the practicalities of fabric. In other words, people are tightening their belts. On top of that, take away food prices in particular are so high for such bad quality, the places really taking off are grocery stores within walking distance of offices. A cautiously appointed grocery deli can certainly out compete a restaurant oriented to fast turnover coffee and lunches. There's a reason the survivors so far in this area are big chains dealing predominantly in coffee and donuts, though starbucks is certainly collapsing in on itself for a whole range of reasons.

Meanwhile, if the province isn't anteing up, it seems the municipality is busy with its own ideas, cloaked under a claim of trying to deal with "the homelessness problem." They try not to talk about "people experiencing homelessness" as a problem, while failing miserably. What the municipal council is exercised by is a growing hostility to public space, any space where people are not forced to pay to use. After all, if people are paying to use the space, then those small business owners who demand office workers subsidize them no matter what won't make money. The paradox of making public space effectively private and closed to locals also cutting into the features bringing in paying tourists is an issue they don't talk about. So despite the high visibility of a few new public washroom facilities, these have limited hours of operation and public washrooms generally are being removed outright. Any place people may sit in the downtown core is arranged with such amenities as sculptures in the middle of benches, benches and seats with extra handles to prevent laying down and arrangements so people can't comfortably sit together and talk. I have recently learned there is far more of this, much of it developed explicitly to attack the homeless, via the blog Needs More Spikes, which includes important original research. In the end it is all too easy to forget how coercion supposedly to curb the visibility of homeless people (in a place vastly short of shelter space or meaningful options to help homeless people to find respectful and respectable homes) has an almost complete overlap with anti-democratic policies impacting everyone. This shit always starts with those deemed unable to resist for whatever reason.

Oh, and those small business people thinking that forcing people to work in offices will mean their businesses can't fail are also all in on the new so-called "defensive architecture" making more and more public space unusable to everyone. The image that comes to mind is of a dog stubbornly chasing its own tail after a less than pleasant human yanks on it. The dog is fooled into spending a lot of energy on action that doesn't work and likely makes it feel dizzy and a bit sick, while not appreciating it's been had. (Top)

So-Called "Hunter-Gatherers" Can't and Don't Just "Wander" (2025-05-19)

Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson for an 1895 edition of Richard Haring Davis' book About Paris, courtesy of oldbookillustrations.com.

Having used the dread scare quotes in the title, any reader could ask why there should be any at all. A more hostile reader might just roll their eyes if they have noticed various Feminist posts or essays on the site already. Funny enough, while I do question use of the term "hunter-gatherer," it is not just about the presumed sex role stereotypes embedded in the term as composed in english. Over time I have come to seriously question both parts of it. "Gatherer" elides knowledge, experience, and repeatedly recorded and identified conscious practices of replanting, pruning, and calibrated harvest applied by peoples whose cultures and economies do not centre on mass monocrop agriculture. Bringing together the necessities of life requires extensive cooperation and longterm socio-cultural memory. In the long run, it is more efficient in terms of getting those necessities with more insurance against mishaps, disasters, and inevitable human error than systems focussed on maximum exploitation until the destruction of the original sources of those necessities. Humans among many other surviving lifeforms on planet Earth have figured out delayed gratification. But none of this works if the people (or other living beings in question) just wander. To wander around at random is to inevitably, at best, starve to death, at worse end up dead by more violent means. The only people who have managed to "wander" and have at least the richest and most ruthless survive are colonizing cultures that enact the processes mythologized in science fiction as "terraforming." The thing is, those people have no choice but to wander, because fundamentally, they shit where they eat.

The persistence of terminology like "hunter-gatherer" reflects the fact that the main people pretending to know about these things are all in on colonialism and its attendant insistence that "westerners" are superior human beings who are supposed to make other humans better by enforcing "uplift" on them. This is all supposed to be passé yet somehow the actual words and actions give the game away. After all, it is just so damned convenient for the people who want to make a buck quick at the expense of others to insist anyone who can be called a "hunter-gatherer" or who lives off the land without destroying it can do the same thing anyplace. Such people don't have "real" connections those capitalist fundamentalist boosters, who sound curiously like christian fundamentalist boosters, insist. After all, supposedly people who actually live off the land without ruining it therefore have no connection to the land in the first place. I don't think Frank Herbert meant it as a playbook or an expression of his literal personal belief, yet it must be admitted that he put his finger on a profound truth of "western" cultures in the original Dune novels when a character says that being able to destroy a thing means a the destroyer has power over it. Taking every possible action available to reduce others to poverty, misery, and death, according to all anglophone mainstream media, is an expression of power. More than this, it is declared an expression of power without which happiness is impossible. This is the same mindset leading ostensible clergymen to write about how in heaven the blessed would eagerly watch the damned being tormented forever, typically in sexually explicit ways, in hell. The same clergymen deemed women's cries of pain in childbirth "god's due" for which read, something they expected men to get sexual pleasure from.

With this sort of twisted view of "power" and how to live with other beings, of course then people who live with the land rather than as destroyers of it will easily be declared "wanderers" who don't really have culture, history, or serious commitment to the lands where they live. It also feeds directly into ridiculous romanticizations like the supposedly inherently "environmental indian." Yes, this is a foolish image generally deployed not to respect Indigenous people but to rationalize oppressing them so more. Notice how above I mentioned cooperation, longterm social memory, and so on? Well, if Indigenous peoples did not develop such knowledge, and yes indeed, "hunter-gatherer" is one of those terms used to try not to admit who is really being discussed in mainstream conversations about "hunter-gathering lifestyles" – then they could not have survived. The Indigenous peoples who lacked these things, or even refused them, which humans have the perverse gift of being able to do, the didn't survive. I suspect a major reason for the deeply held Indigenous value of non-interference and eschewing of proselytization is deep memory and knowledge of how dangerous it is when everyone is doing the same thing and depending on exactly the same sources of the necessity of life. Under such conditions, one disaster wipes out the community, or in worst case scenarios, multiple communities due to warfare or disease. If the neighbours have a terrible and terrifying experience that wrecks their community, everybody else hopefully responds with an alarmed, "Holy, don't let's do that!" It sounds simple, and it it sort of is. The excellent and better ideas will catch on, no missionaries or armies necessary.

Oddly, one of the outcomes of the way "western" culture has developed is that it seems all but impossible to live with anybody who seriously adheres to what it has become. At this point we are seeing probably the closest it is possible to get to an "ideal" wandering society in "the west," where the majority of people are atomized and more and more impoverished, incentivized to go wherever the work is. Among the people dealing with the horrible pointy end of this are the growing numbers of working homeless, who struggle desperately and defiantly not to let the sick juggernaut of dying imperialist colonialism crush them. The more affluent are more and more hostile to them, because they are visible and demonstrate the grim ultimate logic of this system. The poorer you are, the more desperate the effort is to run to stand still, as it becomes more and more impossible to afford hard-wearing but needed clothes and shoes, yet it ultimately costs more to get cheaper stuff, and on and on. To wander for work is to constantly struggle to maintain access to other necessities associated with having a stable home. The technology and how people participate is different, but the drive to meet basic needs is the same. It isn't possible to do this if you "just wander," what wandering does is use up your reserves and exhaust you to death. Everybody knows this, not just Indigenous people. (Top)

Supposedly Invisible Mothers (2025-05-12)

One of many now widely shared so-called victorian era 'invisible mother' photographs, this one came from pinterest. Accessed 18 may 2024.

One of the persistent pleasures of the actual web, as opposed to the advertising parasite that tries to overwhelm it, is reading genuine articles that draw together a series of related posts and articles elsewhere. An intriguing one recommended by an acquaintance is Ellen O'Connell Whittet's discussion of victorian-era "invisible mother" photographs. To be honest, I found the article itself a bit uneven, perhaps in part because it was edited down to fit a preferred length on the site. If so, this is certainly too bad, because there is clearly more to O'Connell Whittet's analysis of these older pictures and her own experiences of new motherhood and how in the present women are encouraged to keep themselves out of photographs of their children. This sort of thing is not actually universal even in english or british-derived cultures, and tends to follow who is considered the "natural" person to handle the camera. I was also utterly fascinated that O'Connell Whittet never bluntly states the obvious about these photographs, that far from making the mothers or the occasional father, or in wealthier families the nanny, invisible, it made them hyper-visible, but difficult to impossible to identify as individuals. These photographs are genuinely weird, and truth be told I don't find them hilarious or mildly amusing. No, they strike me as strange and unsettling, and therefore contrary to O'Connell Whittet's response to the debate on The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things blog that their debate about whether some of the photographic subjects were dead is not horrifying. (There are two posts with comments on the topic, one from 5 january 2012 and the other from 5 july 2012.) It does not surprise me the question came up because of how odd these pictures look to a present-day sensibility. I can appreciate O'Connell Whittet's negative response to this though, considering her angle of encounter with these photographs.

Part of what makes these pictures so strange is a combination of how excruciatingly clumsy some of the efforts are, and awareness of how much photographers could actually do to manipulate photographs even then. There are many examples where in the end the photographer apparently decided to just throw the edge of a blanket or curtain over the mother's head. In some cases the mother was apparently directed to hold up the curtain or blanket over her head and stretched out at the side to create a fairly even backdrop. That almost makes sense, as then the photo could be cropped down to focus on the child or children (but usually just one child on their mother's lap). Many of the examples of these photographs online are not in a frame, which begs the question of whether originally they were, and if so whether it was a thicker frame or a photo album with a smaller window the photograph showed through. In other words, are we actually seeing the photographs as intended in many cases, or the result of pulling them out of their frames or albums and scanned? Then again, sometimes even the framed ones leave the not-so-hidden mother quite obviously in frame, and occasionally someone after developing the photograph resorted to a splotch of paint or chemical to block out the mother's face. (Mind you, at Deceptology they suggest this might be because the photographer's assistant was the one holding the child, and so they did not want that person's face in the picture.) In at least one example reproduced at wikimedia commons, the resulting photograph makes it look as if the mother was decapitated.

Lauren Collins of the new yorker magazine refers to the hidden mothers as "human furniture" which is both true in the context of these photographs, and undeniably winceworthy. As Collins and many others have observed, women are otherwise everywhere in public images, though she did not add, "Just not in any way that would suggest they are mothers." No indeed, most published photographs of women use them as sexually suggestive fodder to sell products of all kinds. If they are heads of state, they will be shown at formal gatherings if the press likes them and their official images are the most commonly reproduced. If they are politicians and/or heads of state, if they are liked by the press they will be shown in dignified poses that hide the ridiculous high heels most of them wear. If disliked, they will be photographed almost inevitably stumbling or struggling to walk in those terrible shoes, or else with their mouths open in mid-word during a speech or debate exchange. The majority of "women as mother" pictures seem to inevitably feature athletes who are being trotted out to demonstrate their conformant heterosexuality ("See, she has kids, and cooks the dinner and serves the man at home while winning olympic medals!").

Some writers try very hard to insist that all of those nineteenth century not so hidden mothers were all agents in this means of trying to feature just the children in the photographs. Again, I can see why. These sorts of photographs are still taken today when babies are too small to sit up on their own, and their mothers specifically want to have a first formal picture of the new baby to send out to the family. This needn't be restricted to children that small, especially for earlier forms of photography that required long exposures. I am not at all convinced by the upbeat claim in a july 2021 boston globe article that "Nannies, servants, and enslaved women often tried to make themselves invisible so that other women's kids could be seen." Erm, as if those women had a choice! Nevertheless, that opinion piece writer has put their finger on a major motivation at the time for most of these photographs, which were well beyond the means of anybody who was not wealthy. And the wealthy more often than not had nannies, servants, and/or enslaved women depending on the decade who provided most day-to-day childcare. Hence, they were indeed not intended to be invisible, because they were after all, part of the evidence of their employer's wealth. But they were supposed to be anonymized. (Top)

A Quiet Signal Re-Boost (2025-05-05)

Photograph of world war ii era gas mask and accessories by Pierre Verrier dated june 2012, courtesy of wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

In light of the grave events of the past several years, including increasing levels of warfare, general social unrest, and the appalling necessity to find ways to counter the destructive impact of so many western governments revealing themselves to be authoritarian oligarchies, many people are worriedly discussing tactics. If the ballot box is not directly useful, if voting is not an effective influence on the people currently exercising a monopoly on force and control of the economy, what do we do instead? It never fails, as soon as the question of meaningful opposition comes up, people immediately leap to the real and virtual microphones to bleat that we must not be violent, we must never be violent, we must only use non-violence. To be blunt, the people saying this are either cowards or stupid. A person who fights back against an attacker is undeniably being violent, but self-defense is ethical and appropriate, and that can be extended to societies. Certain societies and governments are treated as having the right to self-defense all the time, no matter what they do, and others do not. It is also undeniably true that resorting to violence has many ramifications, including significant impacts even on people who may have nothing to do with condoning or enacting the violence. Therefore it is a potent, many-edged tool, one that is difficult to wield responsibly and should never be taken up lightly. And in fact, this is also true of non-violence. There are non-violent and violent tactics, and whether they should be used is a tactical decision, not just an ethical one.

I am well aware that people of christian background especially have been taught and told over and over again that martyrs change the world and it is a trip straight to heaven and sainthood to be tortured to death or executed somehow while being super-holy. However, this messaging comes from a version of that faith wed to the notion that this present world will always be terrible and there is no way that injustice will ever be corrected, so it is just as well to wait quietly to die because the reward for the oppressed is all in heaven anyway. While this is a great way to feel good about doing nothing, it is telltale that a significant number of even the most obedient christians don't accept this and instead try to take action in the world to counter injustice. It is also more than a little telltale that oppressors love, love, love this notion, because they can count on being able to kill such noble people convenienty while feeling smart.

We seem to have an all manner of information readily available to us about warfare and how to deploy violence, at least so long as "we" are part of an authoritarian society and inclined to continue with authoritarianism. The information on non-violence as a tactic is not so plentiful, and as set out is often inflected in ways that if they are not conveniently dishonest, they are less than realistic or fairly applied. We need a sensible understanding of who the doyens of non-violence as a tactic are, the context of their writings, and some genuine analysis of when non-violence is the best tactic, including when and if it should be combined with other tactics. There are excellent, thought-provoking and practical sources to read and consider. By thought-provoking, yes I do include uncomfortable thoughts right up to, "I could never agree with that!" Such a response is incredibly useful when followed up with a consideration of why that is. It is important to be clear on why we are rejecting a tactic, to refuse the easy outs we are encouraged to deploy instead of actually thinking the matter through.

• Churchill, Ward. Pulse Media: Lecture on Pacificism as Pathology, 25 january 2009.
• Churchill, Ward and Ryan, Michael. Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America, Third Edition. Oakland: PM Press, 2017.
• Smith, Marcie. Change Agent: Gene Sharp's Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One), 10 may 2019.
• Smith, Marcie. Change Agent: Gene Sharp's Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part Two), 29 december 2019.
• Podur, Justin. Asking the Oppressed to Be Nonviolent Is an Impossible Standard That Ignores History, 17 february 2023.
• Podur, Justin. The Myth That India's Freedom Was Won Nonviolently Is Holding Back Progress, 11 april 2024.
• Podur, Justin. Palestine 2018 Proved the Futility of Anticolonial Nonviolence, 25 April 2024.
• Welsh, Ian. State & Police Vulnerabilities In An American Insurrection Scenario, 12 june 2025.

Of course, this is a tiny selection of what is out there, and I will keep adding items. And yes, I am aware of Ward Churchill's checkered background (though plagiarism is not in fact one of his faults) and that any analysis of jewish resistance to the nazis written without an understanding of the baleful influence of zionists is at best incomplete. The point is, are we selecting a tactic in order to feel better as individuals without taking a risk, or are we selecting a tactic in order to have a genuine, principled impact? Do we properly understand the earlier applications of the tactic and whether critiques of the application of violent or non-violent tactics are well-founded? And full disclosure, my perspective on the influence and reputation of Gene Sharp has very much been shaped by the intense declaration by an experienced, committed, and profoundly honest and determined activist that she had lost every battle she had ever fought. She had lost every battle she had ever fought. While recommending studying the writings of Gene Sharp on how to be an activist applying non-violent tactics.

And she had lost every battle she ever fought. (Top)

The Military Would Really Like Us to Forget the Metadata Problem (2025-04-28)

Illustration of M.C. Escher's famous print 'Drawing Hands' courtesy of the BYU Museum of Art blog, 15 february 2018.

Just because every effort has been taken to persuade us to forget about Edward Snowden and Wikileaks and all the other whistleblowers and indications of how much metadata about is collected and abused, does not make it harmless. If it were, there would not be a still burgeoning market for it and the ever more obvious folding of advertising corporations into the military industrial complex to get around laws meant to prevent governments from spying on citizens. Nor would there be a constant drum of cracking exploits against deliberately backdoored by the manufacturer microsoft systems to extract more specific data in hopes of selling the data to those hoping to use it for phishing campaigns and other nefarious purposes. But the latter is always going to be around in some form where a society has to use some form of shared secret to manage transactions, whether those transactions be of money, or goods, or sensitive information. Metadata is the special interest and trade item of spies and the strangely distorted minds of people engaged in the oxymoronic work of "military intelligence." In reality, the majority of metadata is collected with a view to manufacturing pretences for oppressing people. This is unfortunate, because there is a genuine role for metadata collection and analysis in the early stages of criminal investigations in the context of having to meet such standards as making a proper case to successfully apply for a warrant filed on the public record and so on. But metadata is nastily powerful stuff, more akin to toxic waste and often treated as a dispensation for imposing arbitrary penalties and collective punishment on whoever happens to be at a certain place or interested in a politically sensitive topic. Hence, metadata remains a problem. A far from new problem.

There are a pair of nearly ten-year-old blogposts reiterating the last point by sociologist Kieran Healey. The original 9 june 2013 post went viral (and includes links to datasets to analyse), Using Metadata to find Paul Revere. Not being from the united states the fuss over Paul Revere was originally a mystery to me, so that this blogpost made sense of that detail as well as providing a clever and amusing introduction to metadata as something that can be revelatory indeed. His follow up, which sounds a bit annoyed and sheepish, Following Up On Paul Revere, looks to have been needed to deal with less than fair critiques of the original post. I suspect he got a noseful of people striving to cut down the tall poppy that the first post represented. That's truly unfortunate, because it looks like after that the discussion tipped away from the broader issue about metadata of interest here. Nevertheless, Healey worked on several other intriguing metadata-related projects in contexts where the data was publicly available and useful for non-sinister reasons, such as his visualization work in A Co-Citation Network for Philosophy. Note here the metadata set is deliberately shared for practical reasons under widely agreed upon conditions. This is not what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as something like digital exhaust or smog we involuntarily emit when using the internet. The trouble, as Zuboff notes, is that we are in effect forced to emit data, even if only metadata, whether we want or intend to or not.

Neither the internet in general, nor the web in particular needs to work like this, and there are many ways to obfuscate or minimize involuntarily released metadata. Socially engineered releases of excess metadata, let alone more specific, personally identifiable data is a different challenge. The means to cut down access to metadata and its overall emission are evidently available. Otherwise we would not be seeing the current corporate stampede by the executives of the so-called "tech companies" towards imposing Bill Gates' original vision of a dumb terminal in every home incapable of running any software locally, and riddled with either subscription-only "services" or wall to wall advertising and datamining to "pay" for software and internet usage. This is not going to work, in part because it is for them mostly a last effort to wring profits out of a dying capitalist economy, in the main because what people cannot afford and therefore cannot depend upon, they will abandon. They won't have any choice. In this capitalist fundamental age, the only way around that is to provide bugged devices from a central repository, and that will only work so long as a profit can be wrung out of it. We are already seeing that isn't working out, although undeniably the corporate minions are doing all too much damage before the system craters.

The most acute aspect of the present manifestation of the metadata problem, is that metadata is too easy to collect by too many irresponsible entities. It is being abused in the same way religion was and is abused to this day, as a means to claim to have the right to imprison, steal, and murder, and even to claim these are just and righteous actions. The best, and indeed only, way to not have this problem, is not to collect the metadata, and to render what is collected beyond what people consciously share for practical and constructive social reasons into something that has an extremely limited half-life. Of course, this does not give us an escape from the challenge of sorting out what is practical and constructive, but this is something we must do consciously and as a society, not delegating it to a bunch of sociopathic techbros and greedy politicians. (Top)

Stories That Haunt You (2025-04-21)

Cover of Alice Sheldon's collection of short stories, Star Songs of an Old Primate, courtesy of wikipedia, file dated july 2013.

One of my great hopes is that in the near future there will be a full-on omnibus edition of Alice Sheldon aka James Tiptree, Jr. aka Racoona Sheldon's stories in one big book. (To my knowledge there is only one collection of 18 of her stories recently in print.) Sheldon lived a remarkable life, summarized in a brief JSTOR Daily article by Matthew Wills in july 2018, The Woman Behind James Tiptree, Jr. With no sense of irony or dissonance, Wills describes Sheldon's unconventional for a man but in fact quite conventional for many women career, including women who did not share Sheldon's feminist or adventurous leanings. For example, she earned her PhD in psychology after returning to post-secondary education in her forties. She worked at diverse jobs to make sure ends met, from her famous time in the united states cia and before that working in world war ii intelligence, to chicken farming and women's time-honoured and pioneered career of professional writing. Sheldon had a knack for pithy statements, and Wills picks up on one of them that is fascinating in its combination of bluntness and ambiguity. This is a feature of Sheldon's writing that for me at least is one of the most distinctive aspects of her style.

One of those statements comes up, as it inevitably will again and again as it did in Wills' article, in the explanation for her most famous pseudonym. On why she chose it and then deftly concealed herself behind it for years, she commented "I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation." Sure enough, the words say what she meant on the surface, fair enough. And yet, and yet – it is hard not to notice there are additional reverberations. It's not just about Sheldon herself. She was well-read, fiercely observant, and one of the most brilliant feminist science fiction or speculative fiction writers in english to date. Sheldon knew good and damned well that the likelihood she really was "the first woman in some damned occupation" was small. She was part of a community of women writers, and in the relatively new genre of what I think is reasonably called speculative fiction, she could draw on a long line of women's novels of psychological exploration, philosophical theorizing, and social commentary.

The other statement I'd like to mention comes from one of Sheldon's most famous short stories, Houston, Houston, Do You Read? which I originally encountered as a quote in an essay by Joanna Russ. The speaker is one of the women dealing with three men who have made their way back to a very changed Earth, to one of the men. "But the fighting is long over. It ended when you did, I believe. We can hardly turn you loose on Earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems." This was so evocative that it was one of the first story references to persuade me to figure out the open hours of special collections at my local university library so I could request the anthology this story comes from to read it. Oh yes, that's right, all of her books are available only in the local university library, and all only as part of a locked up special collection. Hence my earnest wish for a proper reprint of the lot. I highly recommend the story, because even with this telling statement excerpted, the point of the story is not spoiled. It has even more layers in context.

All this said, I can appreciate why, in our present age of gaslighting and weak-charactered lies, Sheldon's stories are only barely in print, although otherwise available. Several months ago, I came upon the story "Morality Meat" in a feminist science fiction anthology. It is a brilliant story. It is a haunting story. It is among the very few stories in my experience where my reaction was and is, "Dammit, I wish I had never read that story. But, no, it's not the story I wish I had never read. It's the searing point the story makes that I wish was not true." Sheldon doesn't mechanically do the same thing in every story by any means, though it is clear she crafted and rewrote to carefully capture a key image or sentence in just the right place. She had a carefully honed sense of the apparently ordinary, "nothing to see here" sort of detail that when turned just so to appreciate its context and what it indicates about the conditions that led to it being there leave the reader with something to think about, maybe even be haunted by. What a profound gift. (Top)

Some Festive Thoughts (2025-04-14)

A woodcut from a 1483 edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by William Caxton courtesy of wikimedia commons.

For many understandable reasons, people in canada and the united states alike are deeply concerned about social cohesion, its apparent lack, and what we are going to do going into more difficult social and environmental conditions. I admit to being annoyed by many of the loudest, or at least most signal-boosted by the mendacious mainstream press when they sound off on the subject. These never fail to be the same people who insist that fundamentalist capitalism is the only way to run an economy, the only way to live, so people should just expect to move for work or starve, and they should pull their own weight, not expecting assistance from their families. These are the same people who insist that the only good government spending is for the military and to subsidize costs for those supposedly oh so independent capitalists. Then they complain that women are not being forced out of the paid workforce to provide the basic reproductive labour of society somehow for free, while also insisting that all property should be private property. Pro tip on trying to somehow make a living "for free," it takes endless hard work and depends on access to the land in order to achieve some semblance of secure access to safe food and water. Another thing these most signal-boosted proponents of rugged individualism don't like very much is any sort of communal event where people share food or dance together, or heaven forfend, both. There are explanations that make sense of the apparent illogic of such pundits, but I found an unexpected clarification of the role of festivals and how positive social bonds were maintained in england before the "protestant reformation."

In her 2022 book on "english food" (which despite her determined effort still seems to me to consist of – toast – but do read the sections on historical use of spices and condiments in england especially, lots of fun and mythbusting there) Diane Purkiss observes, "But when reformed Protestantism put paid to the medieval festival calendar, fairings and their like burst out of their festive bounds and invaded the everyday.... The abandonment of licensed periods for gluttony led to an expansion of luxury, into an everyday commodity, to be consumed when wealth allowed." Let us take note of how the protestant influence has affected Purkiss herself, in her description of "licensed periods of gluttony." The term "fairing" refers to special foods made and shared during those festivals, often made with a surplus of the main ingredient and therefore a marker of shared good fortune and abundance. Today it is widely acknowledged that the medieval festival calendar included much of the original pagan calendar, so as per usual religious intolerance played a big role in interfering with the continuance of any of its elements. But we should not miss the point that removing the fairings from festivals facilitated their enclosure away from goods broadly shared and part of a controlled means of community redistribution, to a means by which merchants profited and the rich flaunted their money. Here we have a nasty proto-version of what has developed since into the evil cycle of blocking ready or any access to desirable things, then using some form of advertising in hopes of seeding dissatisfaction outside the "elite." Then, if all works to plan as we know, people no matter how hard up they are, find ways to acquire the more desirable stuff.

I am not suggesting that festivals in either their modern, hollowed out form or their earlier medieval era form were or are somehow moments of social perfection. Even in the medieval period, much closer to times when people even in england still had some positive ongoing connection to the land and were not under such heavy surveillance and risk of state violence as to be unable to govern themselves, festivals did not magic away trouble. By themselves, festivals did not create or maintain social cohesion, but they were one of many important means communities used to achieve it. In an actual community, it is no easy thing not to contribute to a festival, the whole point is everyone pitches in somehow. Today many wellknown festivals have become gatherings of strangers who come from all directions to participate, and while they may well create a notable temporary community for the duration, this is very different from a consistent group of neighbours getting together. I suppose the closest thing more often than not at least in the places I have lived is the block party, but these seem most common where the neighbourhood has many young children in it, which tends to bring the various parents together.

But I should be more specific about what festivals could do for a community then or now, especially an ongoing community such as that represented by a neighbourhood or town. Besides giving people opportunities to get to know each other and perhaps arrange for things like tool swaps, collections for recycling, road clean ups and so on, there is a more important planning element. Project planning and coordination of action is hard work, at times frustrating work. We are very much encouraged in the present authoritarian age to give up this work to whoever is the bossiest, so that we may learn to be helpless without an authority to order us around. However, this is not a sensible state to be in when faced with any sort of challenge or outright emergency, and people won't go along with such pressure unless they are juggling other problems. Community festivals are a great way to get practical experience at planning and coordinating to get something done without having to take on life or death stakes. As the climate throws us more curveballs, communities will likely have to do more deliberate drills to practice getting together to handle fires or extreme weather events. Sad as that need is, the practice runs can help people with handling a real emergency, while also closing with effectively a mini-festival.

A tricky element in these ongoing pandemic times is how to have such gatherings when we need to do our best not to create a super-spreading event. Tricky, but not impossible. Everybody used to know how to do this, because originally the vast majority of full on festivals were held outdoors. This is why in places with a distinct winter or otherwise stormy season, their original festival calendars are busiest during the better months in terms of warmth and not too much rain. For jobs needing many people working together, an impromptu festival was a tried and tested technique, and again these were usually outdoor types of event. (Top)

Nice Try, No That's Not What Happened (2025-04-07)

Quote of one of the least offensive "diverse" images Benj Edwards received from google's at best unfortunate hurried attempts to make a fancy and profitable "ai" before the bubble pops. The original february 2024 ars technica article this is quoted from is relatively calm compared to much of the contemporary coverage in the media.

When I began to hear the first rumblings of the latest google public relations debacle in the form of an "AI" image generator so tuned to be "diverse" it produced multiple images of racialized people as nazis, honestly I thought it couldn't be true. No, I was sure what had happened was a decontextualized portion of an article from The Onion or some other satirical publication was showing up in my news feeds. Not a few of the better of these do produce headlines and stories that end up being shockingly similar to the truth after a few months or years, but this just sounded too good to be an example. Besides showing up google, which should probably stop wasting time and money on the "AI" scam while it still has some credibility and real computer programmers left, it hit all the hot buttons of the moment. These include reasonable concerns about the ways in which "DEI" initiatives are abused in the workplace to create an appearance of improvement while actually making matters worse and poisoning the workplace instead. So I spent some time looking into it, and was astonished to find out that no, no, this was not satire but a real issue. Google's latest clever marketing gimmick in the form of an image generating computer program labelled an "AI" had produced "diverse" nazis. The cries went up across the more right-leaning news and blogosphere about supposed "anti-white racism" and google's presumed distorted human resources policies. The sad fact is "right-leaning" includes most mainstream media these days, so it was pretty much impossible to avoid these claims. While google's "human resources" policies no doubt are a mess, they are a red herring on this specific issue.

The image quoted for this thoughtpiece is among the least bad examples I saw. Truth be told, it is so close to being likeable, yet has disturbing elements of wrong in it that spoil it. If a person just pointed me to it with no other context and said, "Here is a machine-generated illustration for the latest fantasy novel by so and so," I would have to concede it is not a bad stand in for artwork by a real person. A sort of image "lorem ipsum" except for how pointless it is to waste so much electricity on generating such stuff. These programs simply cannot cope with hands, somehow in all the statistical cleverness and tuning the programmers impose on them, these programs constantly lose any weighting to help them not to generate hands with too many fingers or other distortions. I suppose we should thank heaven for small mercies that these programs don't regularly add extra eyes or mouths – or maybe they do, I certainly haven't seen enough examples to be sure. So what happened?

Well, I think the most plausible explanation is at least threefold. First, the programmers under the pressure of management demands, or in a policy of malicious compliance, apparently lost track of a key problem with these image generation programs and models. It is excruciatingly difficult to keep the models within bounds of plausibility at any time, especially with image generation models. Other applications of computer modelling in contexts such as simulating geologic or climate change still have more constraints on them than these trendy image models. Run within a test environment on only selected terms by a team of programmers who know what they want to get, the results of these models will tend to look pretty good and even thoroughly predictable. In other words, the test environment is providing the constraint that such things as the laws of physics provide in other types of complex computer models. Released from the constraint, to a world including many people who will immediately seek to break the model or get it to generate something embarrassing or otherwise appalling, is a recipe for at minimum, a public relations disaster.

The actual results of releasing the image generator into the wild suggests that google management expected people to prompt the program within narrow bounds. For instance, they apparently expected generation requests to focus on making images consistent with the demands of present-day united statesian identitarian politics. While it is a good thing to have an image generator not produce say, a fictional image of a cocktail party or the crowd at a kid's soccer game with only white males in it, such queries are evocative of the present. On top of that, it seems the braintrust at google, many of whom, despite the hype and the claims about "DEI" hires are male if no longer only "white," have forgotten that teenage boys can be total jerks. They, and often young men just a bit older, enjoy wrecking things just because they can. The techbro crowd has been busy creating mean-spirited skins and pornographic levels among other things using tools provided in video games for literally decades already. It is difficult to curb this sort of behaviour, but should have been a known risk and mitigated to the extent possible.

To be sure, google has problems with its corporate culture, and it is far from the only advertising corporation or other large organization with such problems. But the ones specifically wreaking havoc on google's half-baked efforts to scoop up money by roping in suitable marks via claims about "AI" are not the ones most often cited. (Top)

Peculiar Resonances (2025-03-31)

Graph of resonance between two standing waves by HinnevdZant, june 2011. Image via wikimedia commons, used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Unfortunately, here is another thoughtpiece on the theme of less than desirable echoes of past events, actions, and ideas. I did not expect there to be another one, in spite of the events of the past several years, including proxy wars, heinously and deliberately mishandled pandemics, and canada's new and growing reputation for having quietly resurrected the notion of "life unworthy of life" via its "medical assistance in dying" program. (For a very brief introduction to that debacle, see David Moscrop's 2 may 2024 article in jacobin, The Canadian State Is Euthanizing Its Poor and Disabled.) No, that is not what I expected at all when finally getting to a collection of notes and queries waiting for attention, among them a baffled note to self asking, "what the heck is 'cultural marxism' supposed to mean? It is yet another insult, that is obvious, but it seems to be otherwise content free." The "content free" descriptor is one I have learned to recognize as a warning that something dishonest and probably also reckless is going on. Thanks to an excellent discussion thread on it at the economics blog naked capitalism, I wended my way to fair.org's treatment on it from 4 june 2019, 'Cultural Marxism': The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope. Now here was a connection I did not expect to find at all, heedless of how common it is to overextend the Godwin's law internet meme. As Ari Paul writes in the fair.org article, "cultural marxism" began as the nazi propaganda term "cultural bolshevism," and accordingly was and is redolent of antisemitism, and I would add, anti-labour sentiment.

There is nothing reasonable or appropriate about the way nazi tropes, ideas, and social policies have been snuck into acceptable discourse via a nastily skillful veneer of localization and ostensible "modernization." But to acknowledge that is what is going on, more people currently in positions of power and influence in the self-vaunted "west" would have to admit that the reason such a thing is even possible is because of how much nazi policy and terminology was and is the same as what they advocate themselves. Whether committed to such labels for themselves as "libertarian," "liberal," "conservative," or even "democratic" or "populist," the mindset the people sneaking these tropes back into circulation share is an authoritarian one. Authoritarianism is the besetting and foundational sin of so-called "western" culture with its commitment to missionization and killing people to "save" them and make them "live right" for the "greater good." Few writers have captured this mindset in a pithier way than activist and philosopher Minnie Bruce Pratt, who referred to it as an expression of "right makes might." The starting point is always the dangerous, monomanical belief in having the one truth, the only truth, and therefore a right to do whatever it takes to impose that supposed truth for the better of the world. The people who hold such beliefs are at least as dangerous as those who take advantage of them to use their fervour to their own ends.

Nothing about this is inevitable, nor indeed hopeless. The young people so often sniped at in the press and physically attacked when they protest the latest enactments of nazi practices in the world have proved that with emphasis. Those young people come from across social classes, but I think it is important that so many come from the wealthier classes, especially the ranks of the professional managerial class. In effect they are rebelling against the pressure to become complicit in evil at home or abroad. For all the effort taken to divert them irretrievably into destructive identity politics, the pharmaceutical profiteering complex, and neoliberalism, an incredible and heartening number of them have and are now anything but diverted. Not a few have realized they have been diverted and understanding that are getting out of the subsequent cul-de-sac. It isn't easy, cognitive dissonance and I suspect considerable personal disruption goes with it between loss of friends and potential problems with employment and access to education as a result.

There are many important elements to the current historical conditions we are all facing. Yet the impact of how many people are facing destitution and from what they can see no real prospects due to climate change, incessant and growing war, increasing authoritarianism, and economies so distorted by greed they are imploding is regularly papered over in the mainstream media by flinging insults. Protesters are labelled "cultural marxists" or somehow brainwashed by "cultural marxism" for instance. Never mind that in fact they are facing realistically grim prospects, and feel their backs are against the wall, and so they must protest, protest, and fight. (Top)

On Supposed Space Travel (2025-03-24)

Circa 2011 image of the international space station, taken from the nasa space shuttle discovery. Public domain image courtesy of wikimedia commons, 2024." title="Circa 2011 image of the international space station, taken from the nasa space shuttle discovery. Public domain image courtesy of wikimedia commons, 2024.

With the recent developments in the unexpectedly long functional life of the Voyager I space craft, which is apparently on the verge of being reprogrammed to work around corrupted memory sectors so that it can continue transmitting data back to Earth at least a little longer, interest in space travel has received another fillip. After all, aren't humans dealing with what is more and more undeniably at minimum highly disruptive and fast-moving climate change? And haven't humans explored the whole Earth? Space must be next! We must go to Mars, insist a curiously homogeneous group of hyper-rich men who I strongly suspect use "we" in a firmly exclusive sense. There seems to be a strong current of people who are scientists, authors of speculative fiction, or both, who in their reflections on the potential for space travel declare doing so an absolute necessity. Not a necessity to survive the changes on Earth, but in order to not have "limited lives" on Earth. This is the way it reads to me, and I must confess myself mystified by this theme. The desire to continue learning, the excitement of experiencing the utterly unfamiliar and new I do understand, and share. I share it, with the usual sensible caveats including not abusing the gift of ability to learn and experience by willfully hurting other people. It sounds annoyingly cliché, but yes, it is true what the Spider-Man comic says, with great power comes great responsibility.

I don't intend disrespect or an unrealistic perspective on our present challenges when observing that we are entering times which will indeed face us with plenty humans have not experienced in recent memory, and maybe even in handed down memory from our ancestors. It seems to me that a good deal of the unknown is coming to us right here at home. And we emphatically need to get our good sense and learning abilities turned back on and directed toward reality, not tempting idealized fantasies.

In 2003, scientist and speculative fiction editor and author extraordinaire Athena Andreadis published an eloquent and thoughtful essay providing a different perspective on the "why" for space travel unfamiliar to me. Andreadis generously includes a pdf of this essay, "The Double Helix: Why Science Needs Science Fiction" on her website, Starship Reckless. As the essay draws to a close, Andreadis writes,

Quest for knowledge in general, but particularly the desire for space exploration so extolled in Star Trek, is the large goal, the last goal, if only because it guarantees our long-term survival. Earth is beautiful, but it won't live forever, even if we husband its finite resources with infinite care. We humans may drown in our own refuse, or run through the finite lifespan vouchsafed to all species unless we speciate. We may get extinguished by an asteroid hit or the lethal radiation of a nova explosion. Even barring such statistically likely events, eventually our sun will exhaust its fuel, turn into a red giant and engulf the inner planets.

Before any of these outcomes happen, we'd better be able to take to the stars, whose fiery engines created the elements that comprise our bodies. From the stars we came, and to the stars we must return. And though science will build the starships, it's science fiction that will make us want to board them.

I admit to hesitating to contradict Andreadis' excellent writing here, because it is thought-provoking, as it should be, and visionary, which it should be too. If delivered as a speech, the audience would cheer at the end, and understandably so. Yet there'd be a few of us, probably accidentally annoying our applauding and excited neighbours in the crowd, sitting rather baffled and admiring the quality of the speech and the argument while wondering about the premises it rests on.

Of course I have no argument with the precis of the most probable fate of the Solar System, or the ultimate necessity for humans to speciate. Indeed, I expect we will regardless of whether we deem it necessary. Where I bump into trouble is the rather surreal notion that humans will be any sort of witness to the end of the Solar System in the first place. Whether we aren't there because of having left the Solar System behind via death, or becoming some other form of life, or even space travel, the end of the Solar System is on a time table on the order of billions of years. Its end strikes me as profoundly irrelevant to our present reality as a guide to where we should focus our present research and technology development efforts. Long before there is any point to building some sort of ersatz spaceship, I think we are better served by spending more effort getting to know the present extraordinary spaceship we didn't even have to build, and that we share with so many other beings, the Earth. Then again, I am also not quite so worried about humans having a finite run as a species. By all accounts, this is the fate of the vast majority, if not all species we know about. Why should humans be different? Nevertheless, I am certainly on board with doing all we can to leave a constructive and honorable legacy to the future, to our own descendants, and to other beings who may be able to make sense of what we leave behind and choose to do so. That's a mind boggling thought! Yet I don't see how this demands we should "go to the stars." Nor do I see how we are limited as humans if perchance we never go to the stars in the flesh, but only in feats of imagination in the form of speculative fiction and yes, unexpectedly long-lived probes and satellites.

Perhaps what troubles me most about the idea of an "imperative" to go to the stars under our present social and political conditions is its resonances, albeit often unintended ones, with colonialism. The major driver of "exploration" in recent history has not been a desire to learn or experience, but a greed for riches and coercive power unappeasable by any limit. Some means of breaking through or at least fending off a limit must be found at all costs because the habits of colonization and expansion are not self-fuelling. The fuel must come from elsewhere, because the colonizers inevitably run through what they already have and would prefer not to give up what they see as their entitlements. This a sickness that has no cure in abandoning a presumed used up or otherwise destroyed Earth or Solar System as a whole. At its best, speculative fiction, and especially science fiction is certainly not a form of escapism nor an unsubtle encouragement to recommit to a mode of living that is not sustainable. Far from it. But I am not convinced that space travel as framed in much of science fiction is in fact guiding humans in general or scientists in particular to more constructive ways of living, inventing, and yes, exploring. (Top)

A Humane Art (2025-03-17)

Letter writing before computers, which was about more than just using pen and paper. Old illustration from the collection provided with the Dover Steampunk Sourcebook, 2010.

One of Virginia Woolf's last essay collections, The Death of the Moth, includes a brief essay reflecting on eighteenth century english politician Horace Walpole's letters, "The Humane Art." Brief though the essay is, it includes some wonderful turns of phrase, such as the observation that letters are "the humane art which owes its origin to the love of friends." She asks directly and indirectly important questions about the professionalization of writing and the subsequent effects on letter writing. "Was it, then, the growth of writing as a paid profession, and the change of focus brought with it that led, in the nineteenth century, to the decline of this humane art?" Woolf isn't just asking about letter writing, but also about the impact of the transformation of human relationship into a source of copy, and how what is left after all the other forms of media like newspapers and advertising to place in letters is "what is most private; and how monotonous after a page or two the very private becomes!" Quite apart from the relevance of such comments to the question of today's scourge of so-called social media, there is something else to think with here. I must admit to finding my way to Woolf's essay via a surreal route that began with a determination to ferret out the evil origins of the five paragraph essay.

Five paragraph essays are horrible, tedious things. I have read comments to the effect that they are an offshoot of the puritan sermon format, and these in turn harken back to Cicero in form. It is easy to conflate "to Cicero" with "Cicero's speeches." Except when I followed up on this idea, going back to the books and selections from latin and greek classes, it turned out that most of what my classes included were from his essays, many of which were cast as letters. It is easy to miss during fast moving classes where students or directed quickly to famous collections of letters by Seneca and the younger Pliny. After further consideration it finally came clear to me that the unfortunate five paragraph essay is actually an offshoot of the personal letter. This sort of essay is one carefully redesigned for a stranger to read, and so must be very structured and deliberate. It cannot take for granted the copious amounts of shared knowledge common to letters between friends or letters written for reading aloud to families. The rather disembodied letter permits easy expansion, as indeed we can readily observe in multiple venues. Today columnists continue the traditional of professional letter writing in the form of regular essays included in periodicals such as newspapers and magazines. Web blogs are yet another later development of the form.

All of this is not to suggest that developing a sort of "generic letter" into a brief essay format for broad audiences is bad. It isn't and has an important place. Indeed, the same pattern of a form for the group with shared knowledge versus form for the people who are not part of that group reappears again and again in storytelling, the eventual development of tables of contents, introductions and conclusions and plays with formal opening and closings. These developments are in themselves at root forms of humane art. At the moment however, it seems that matters have shifted from one extreme to the other. It is no longer common for elementary school students to learn how to write letters or five paragraph essays. Despite my grousing against five paragraph essays, it is important and useful to learn how to write them, and it turned out I had to do some backfilling to learn to write important types of formal letters, especially those necessary to look for work and handle business matters.

Among the more recent developments around "social media" is I think a growing realization that quite apart from the noisome issues of privacy violation and algorithmic interference and distortion, even at its best it is no good for what letters were and are good for. It seems many people have come to the uncomfortable realization of Woolf's observation of "how monotonous after a page or two the very private becomes" even if the "very private" is flaunted from the lives of celebrities. And if we are serious about the meanings of "humane" rather than making an appearance of it, how humane is it really to spread the very private out before the general public, when our individual "very private" is never in fact solely about us alone? (Top)

Troubled Techbros (2025-03-10)

Swabian knotted man's hair from a bog body recovered from south of the town of dätgen in germany, photographed by Bullenwächter. Photograph from wikimedia commons under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

In the process of cleaning up a collection of very old bookmarks, identifying them again, deleting the now superseded ones and so forth, I found a link to a book, Better Without AI by David Chapman. I have no real argument with the blunt claim of the title, and had intended to have a closer look at the arguments Chapman presents and for what he had in mind as alternatives. Rather to my surprise, this book comes across as a sort of intellectualized version of Elon Musk having an attention-getting tantrum in public about the risks of "AI." Even though Chapman intended to thoroughly puncture lots of silly scenarios, by spending so much time and text on them he undermines his own points there. Truth be told, I found his additional section Gradient Dissent better focussed and much more instructive in terms of arguments against what is being referred to as "AI," what this "AI," actually is, and proposals for better research paths and applications of computers to automation. The contrast was such that I found myself wondering, who the heck is this guy? One book comes across in surprising part as being at best over his skis. The shorter piece excerpted from that is excellent. There is an "about me" page in the website for Better Without AI, understandably focussed on his history in the field of AI research and development, including that he did a whole PhD on it and then walked away due to ethical concerns. But this still left me wondering about his perspective.

The questions kept niggling, because Chapman repeatedly sneers at philosophers and anybody else who wrestles with the meaning and definition of yes, maddeningly inexact english words including "intelligence" and "agency." While I can relate to not necessarily finding philosophical papers and arguments helpful, I have learnt enough to appreciate that a great deal of the time this reflects a jargon barrier, added to philosophers' use of earlier works I haven't read. Chapman seems thoroughly pissed that the articles in good online philosophy encyclopedia like stanford's are not the sort of thing a person can skim over and get all the needful points, or not ready with a quick and easy conclusion to cite. He seems quite angry that he might have to learn something to understand them. Nevertheless, his ultimate determination that philosophical arguments and analysis were not actually relevant to his project strikes me as quite reasonable on the main basis he emphasized, which is dealing with the practical observations of the impact of the marketing and propaganda boondoggle that is vaunted as "AI." He wants to focus on code, engineering, analysis, and safety constrained experimentation and getting away from the present free-for-all to that instead. This seems quite reasonable, irregardless of whether he or I or anyone else can make sense of technical articles in a philosophical encyclopedia. It was the puerile tone that surprised me I think, which was different again from when he was writing with wry humour.

Chapman provides a few other links, mostly to his social media, but I wanted to see his actual main website. The format and framing of Better Without AI indicated there certainly was one, yet there was no direct link. In the end I wound up finding it by using a nitter instance to check his twitter profile. Skimming over just the first screen of his tweets, he sounds like he may have other interesting stuff on his main website, and he was also starting to sound somehow familiar. At long last I managed to get to his website, called Meaningness. On further digging in my archives I couldn't find any other links or bookmarks to his articles, although there is another site I am aware of with a rather similar visual design. In any case, there he provides another rundown of his interests, accomplishments, and an introduction to his other longer written online works. At almost the very bottom of that about page he notes in the last paragraph specifically about him, "I have founded, managed, grown, and sold a successful biotech informatics company. That may explain a certain practical orientation, and lack of interest in philosophical theories that depend on the world being very unlike the way it appears."

With that, a great deal becomes much clearer. Here we have another member of that curious fraternity of clever techbros who got rich quick and have come away from the experience absolutely convinced of their intellectual superiority. All of that is combined with a petulant annoyance with ways of thinking that challenge his beliefs about the world, and an absolute conviction that anything he needs to study must be beneath him. Meanwhile, he is very interested in what go figure, is actually a philosophy he calls the skill of meta-rationality, and buddhism. I am not quite sure what to make of a man who views taking account of contexts and purposes as something rather new and shiny, although it strikes me as consistent with the typically limited practical life experience of individuals of his particular background and professional experience. Perhaps in the end the moments of surprising petulance are actually responses to that rather narrow experience. (Top)