"Architecture follows metaphor"

David Sifry, founder of Technorati, made this comment in an interview in the Economist.
Thanks to James Murray (ATTAC) for putting me onto this.

Force scrollbars

This is a geek post.
Some v. ugly code for forcing scrollbars to appear.
Convenient if you've got a centred nav bar, which bounces around as you move between pages which have more or less than one screenfull of content.

<style>
<!-- html {height : 100.1%;} -->
</style>

Please, if you have something as easy to remember, but less crass. Let me know.

J

Why are some responses to evil immoral?

I haven't posted for a while, because I've actually been working quite hard, and not reading the paper. This just goes to show why...

Everytime someone tries to link terrorism to the foreign policy of Western government, someone takes up the job of calling such a connection immoral. Normally, in the SMH, Gerard Hendersen is the first with his hand up, but on Wednesday Christopher Kremmer got his moment in the sun. (Immoral to blame the West for London bombings, Opinion, July 13, 2005)

Here's what he wrote:

Few serious analysts would argue that Western policies towards the Middle East have not contributed to the political decay that afflicts the region. The 1953 coup in Iran, which eliminated the middle ground and paved the way for Khomeini's mullahs, and our failure to heal the running sore of the Israeli-occupied territories are but two examples.

But to link a reasoned critique of Western foreign policy blunders to a justification for the killing and maiming of innocent commuters in the London peak hour endows murder with an aura of morality and reason it does not deserve.

I'm sure I must have misunderstood Christopher somewhere along the way, but it's the word "justification" that seems so out of place here. First, he tells us that what is immoral about Ali's comments is that he is blaming the West for acts of terrorism. But then he goes on to explain why it's immoral by saying that it provides a justification for that terrorism.

You see my problem? I can't understand why Tariq Ali would blame the West for something that he believed to be justified. You can't have it both ways, Christopher. Either Ali is blaming the West for an act he takes to be immoral, or he's justifying the act and not blaming anyone. Since it's pretty clear that Ali is blaming the West for something - this is, after all, what Kremmer's own headline says - he must be holding them responsible for something he does not endorse.

There's a lesson here for all of us. We could avoid getting ourselves into these logical difficulties if we just abandoned a rule that has been routinely adopted by opinion-piece moralists like Christopher and Gerard. I call it the one-bad-thing-at-a-time rule. Bad things - for example, terrorism and the West's contribution to political decay in the Middle East - are entirely unrelated and should not be thought together.

Another way of articulating this rule might be: bad things don't have causes, they only have perpetrators. Putting it this way makes it easy to see why people who embrace this rule are also disposed to talking in terms of concepts like freedom and evil. Freedom in the sense that the perpetrators' actions do not require causal explanation in terms of economic or political relationships between them and us. Nothing we could ever do could be the cause of their actions, which is another way of saying their actions are pure evil.

Does that mean that those who wish to render such actions intelligible by tracing their causes don't think terrorism is evil? No, but they do respond to it differently. An important part of this is a responsibility to honestly ask ourselves whether and how we might share in the blame. Christopher Kremmer's dispute with Tariq Ali is an example of a clash within our own civilisation over how to respond to catastrophes - what Susan Neiman calls "the problem of evil".

In her book, Evil in Modern Thought, Neiman argues that Western thought since the enlightenment - despite its preoccupation with the possibility of certain knowledge - may actually be better characterised as looking for a way of dealing with the problem of evil. She points to two events that had incredible importance for the development of modern thought: the earthquake and ensuing tsunami which destroyed Lisbon in 1755, and in the last century, the death camps of Auschwitz. She offers the following insight in the preface (which you can read at the link above):

Two kinds of standpoint can be traced from the early Enlightenment to the present day, regardless of what sort of evil is in question, and each is guided more by ethical than by epistemological concerns. The one, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands that we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Jean Amery, insists that morality demands that we don't.

The debate between Ali and Kremmer isn't about the justification of evil. Neither side is attempting to justify these acts. It's about the intelligibility of evil. Both perspectives are, as Neiman rightly points out, ethically motivated.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make them any more compatible with one another. It should be pretty obvious that (for the moment at least) I'm leaning more toward Rousseau, Arendt and Tariq Ali than Voltaire, Amery and Kremmer. In fact, I think Kremmer is a good example of why I'm reluctant to embrace the anti-intelligibilist position (to coin a bloody awful phrase). In my opinion, it opens the door to irrationalism in general. It's not so easy to partition off evil from everything else, and so you can't help treating a whole bunch of things as unintelligible that we could respond to quite rationally. What's more, it creates a blank check for any political authority which has the power to designate what counts as evil (e.g. first Al-Qaeda, then Saddam and now Iran and Syria, but not CIA assassinations, capital punishment or torture).

It may be that, from a God's eye view, mere mortals are incapable of fully understanding evil, but it's just because we are mere mortals who are governed by mere mortals, with all the lust for power that entails, that we had better not act as though evil is beyond an intelligent and self-critical response.

Radio and/or new media? Pt I

In her April 4 Online Opinion piece, Sophie Mason proposed that the proliferation of blogs has

had the weird effect that we hardly ever listen to radio any more, at least in terms of news, when before we would have clicked on both morning and evening. Perhaps it’s radio that’s going to be the most immediate sufferer in the fallout of the new media, at least in terms of news gathering. The immediacy of radio, and its nimbleness in updating stories, was once what gave it a huge advantage over print - an advantage that, of course, the new media have captured.

Mason includes this as part of her opinion "as a reader" rather than as
a creator / writer of blogs.
It is no wonder though that radio appears old-fashioned when the only
perspectives are that of reader or writer.
After all, radio is about listening.

It seems that hearing has lost its place as a medium of information, and
is now restricted solely to recreation.
Ironically, these days "having your voice heard" involves keeping
entirely shtum and pounding away on that keyboard of yours.

Listening is hardly dead though - witness for example the proliferation
of MP3 players. Nor for that matter is radio as a political medium -
John Howard has after all built his media strategy around the
effectiveness of talk-back radio for by-passing mainstream media.

The question is: why hasn't there been a similar proliferation of spoken
content, when written content has become so widespread and diverse?

Presidential environmentalism

Got this from an article by Mark LeVine.
The quote comes from War in Context:
http://warincontext.org/2004_08_01_archive.html#109154511052385325

"Let's suppose that the next president decides he's going to launch
an initiative to protect America from global warming. If the war on
terrorism provides a paradigm, the solution should be obvious: As
the icecaps melt, build an ocean barrier around every coastal city
in America; focus public awareness on the effects but avoid talking
about the causes; above all, reassure the nation that the only way
to be safe is to be strong. Meanwhile, enjoy the beach but don't
forget the sunscreen."

Jevons paradox, oil and the money supply

"The Jevons Paradox, named after its discoverer, William Stanley Jevons, states that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource may increase, rather than decrease. In particular, Jevons' paradox implies that the introduction of more energy efficient technologies may, in the aggregate, increase the total consumption of energy." (Wikipedia)

Following a link on Downing Street Says (there's a link in the list on the right), I found myself reading a presentation on Peak Oil to the US Congress by Conservative Senator Roscoe Bartlett, Chairman of the Projection Forces Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee.

The report is interesting in its own right, because here is a conservative senator realising that there ain't gonna be no more oil, and instead of avoiding the issue, is actually saying: hell, how are we going to buy time to achieve sustainability? You can read the presentation at Energy Bulletin (http://www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=4733).

I want to talk about Bartlett's take on the Green Revolution, which I think is fascinating, not only because I hadn't heard this angle before, but also because it reminded me a mind-blowing conversation I had with my resident economics expert James Murray a few weeks ago. But we'll get to that in a sec.

In particular, Bartlett mentions the Jevons Paradox. Bartlett's point is that people responded to the oil crisis of the 70s, and the emergence of the Green movement, by taking responsibility, i.e. by reducing their personal consumption. While this appears to be the appropriate (if not the only) moral action to take, it has only made matters worse, because of the fact that their voluntary increase in efficiency (reduction in personal consumption in one form) will only ever promote an overall increase in consumption.

Bartlett gives the following example:

"Let me give one little example. Suppose there is a small businessman who owns a store. He is really concerned about peak oil, and he is concerned about energy, and he wants to do something. His little store is using $1,000 worth of electricity a month, and he decides that he can really cut that use. So he does several things. He gets a storm door. He puts on storm windows. He insulates more. He turns down the thermostat, and he asks his workers to wear sweaters. And he is successful because he reduces his electric bill from $1,000 to $500. Almost no matter what he does with that $500, he has just made the situation worse by doing that.
[...]
One of the things that he may do, and it is a natural thing for a small businessperson to do, he may decide, I could hire more people and have a bigger business if I expanded. And so now he will expand, and he will still be using as much energy. Or if he decides to invest his money, if he invests his money in the bank, the bank will lend his money out five or six times, and at least some of those loans will be to small business people. And what the small business people will do is to create jobs and use energy. So the store owner is concerned about energy and the environment and being a responsible citizen, cutting his use of electricity, because everybody did not do it, because only he did it and nobody took advantage of the opportunity that was presented because he used less energy, he really contributed to the problem.

Because after he expanded his business, he would be using still more energy. Or if the money was lent out by the bank and small businesses created more jobs and they used more energy, the situation would have just gotten worse.

All that the "green revolution" did was temporarily extend the caring capacity of the world. If we think about that, ultimately if we cannot do something about it to stabilize it, the green revolution just made matters worse.

[..] what we have done with the green revolution is to permit the population of the world to double and double again. So if we cannot now make sure that we stabilize population and bring it to the point where it can be supported by a technology where there is not what was ordinarily perceived as an inexhaustible supply of oil, there will simply be more people out there to be hungry and starved if we cannot meet their needs. So we have got to make sure that whatever we do to solve this problem that Jevons Paradox does not contribute."

Perhaps that is interesting enough, but it's the next paragraph that really made me twinkle:

"...Albert Einstein was asked this question: Dr. Einstein, you have now discovered the ability to release energy from the atom. We get just incredible amounts of energy from the atom. A relatively small amount of fuel in one of our big submarines will fuel it for 33 years now. Enormous energy density. And they asked him, Dr. Einstein, what is the most energy-intensive thing in the world? He said, "It is compound interest."

Now, I can find no solid evidence that Albert Einstein ever said this, but I'm not really interested in the authenticity of the quote. What intrigues me is the connection between Jevons Paradox and compound interest.

...more coming...

Book Condencension

Another Eno quote from a 2002 Interview:

"I recently read Richard Sennett’s book The Uses of Disorder. It’s a very intelligent anti-planning book, and I thought, “This is fantastic, but nobody’s ever going to read it.” So I decided to condense it. I wanted to present the argument of the book in three thousand words. I went through it with a yellow highlighter, marking the bits that really got the germ of the idea. Then I photocopied all the parts I’d marked and collaged them together. After that, I had this idea that every serious book should be published in two forms. There should be the full version, but preceding it by a month or so should be the filtered version."

Note that Eno was not trying to write a review.

He's talking about distribution and accessibility, not digestion and criticism.
This is plagiarism in its best form - as invitation.

Circle geometry - a life without Pi

Disappointed by the irrationality of Pi?
I wasn't until I read about Jesse Yoder's "Circle Geometry" article here.
Jesse's "Diminishing Circle Argument" purports to show us lay-people how to live a life without Pi, once and for all.

It argues that, by making circular paths primitive, you can show that the diameter of a circle is the same length as half the circumference.

That's right, you can do away with the familiar (and yet so inelegant)
C = πD = 2πr
and replace that π with a beautiful 2.
C = 2D = 4r.

For my graphical description of the argument, go here.

Thanks to Jack Barton for putting me onto this.

Don't theorise, accessorise

You know what I like about Brian Eno?
He talks in aphorisms, not in theories.

A little while ago, a guy I know said to me: Don't theorise, accessorise.
I didn't like the idea at the time. I thought he was taking the piss.
It's growing on me now though.
I find myself desparately trying to disabuse myself of a will to authority.

Authority is utterly incompatible with truth, because truth is not a thing or knowledge you can possess.
Truth is more like a kind of vigilant humility. It's an ethic, not a moral law.
(Perhaps that is why we insist on talking truth to power. It's a way of
reminding power of its contingency, it's dependence on forms of coexistence.)

Anyway, aphorisms you can carry around. Theories are more like abodes. A theory is somewhere you take up residence, a territory that you may have to defend. Aphorism is to theory as nomad is to city.

What sustains an aphorism is good will. What sustains a theory is mastery.
We invite relations that sustains us, and I'd rather be inviting
relations of good will than mastery.

Abbott's nurturing side!?

So, it's good to see Tony Abbott taking such an interest in his son's wellbeing now.
Of course, on the left, we understand how he could find himself putting his child up for adoption. Raising a child is very hard work, and a very great commitment.
It's a pity he can't look to his own experience of being an unprepared parent when telling women they don't need abortions, or single parents that they don't need support.