Before you watch, read John Perricone’s Series preview. He likes the Giants, which can be discounted, since he is enough of a Giants’ fan to outfit his blog in the nasty reddish browns that pass as the team colors; but his reasoning is sound, he agrees with me, and besides, he asked.
I, like everyone else, read Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless regularly. But he often writes at great length. Herewith, in the tradition of Mickey Kaus’s Series-Skipper™, and with thanks to Mark Wickens for the idea, the digested version. Not sure if you want to wade in? Stop here first and then decide!
Stardate: 20021016.1616
Title: It’s OK To Be Wrong
Word Count: 3,940
Impetus: Various correspondents criticizing him for not doing “research.”
Thesis: The blogosphere is a sort of hive mind, where ideas can be circulated and corrected quickly. Den Beste, in particular, runs his blog this way. He’d rather write something quickly that he’s reasonably sure of and have others correct it than spend weeks researching and polishing it. He wants, in engineering parlance, to ship. (And boy, does he ever ship!)
Engineering Analogy: “Egoless programming” — the philosophy, in software, that the individual programmer does not own the code he has written, but that the whole team owns the whole product. Every piece of code and document is reviewed by other team members, to catch mistakes as quickly as possible. This is what bloggers are doing when they talk about “fact-checking his ass.”
Best Quote: “The most fundamental rule in engineering, even more basic than Murphy’s Law, is: Everyone fucks up.“
Bonus Irony: Den Beste does not permit comments on his blog. In fairness, he is probably too popular to do so.
You know those idiots you see waiting in long lines to get into Star Wars movies and rock concerts and sporting events? Well maybe you don’t, but I do! My friend Michael Krantz, an occasional God of the Machine guest commentator, was first in line for Giants World Series tickets.
Nice work. Nice hair too.
Why do so many libertarians seem to have it in for open source software? Why does the government still insist on using Microsoft? Julian Sanchez explains.
Montana’s Libertarian Party candidate for Senate has turned blue. Like the Human Rights Campaign, I deplore any attempt to make a political issue of a candidate’s sexual orientation, or color. Still, he is awfully blue. (Link from Mindles Dreck.)
In the grand tradition of Martin Amis, Ron Rosenbaum decides that aligning oneself with people who still can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the millions killed by Communism maybe isn’t such a hot idea. (Link from No Treason.)
Arthur Silber, an Objectivist who runs an excellent blog and has been kind enough to recommend me into the bargain, and whom I’m about to pay back with my usual graciousness, complains that “our foreign policy still lacks overall, long-term principles.” And he tells us what these principles ought to be, viz., that the U.S. ought to consider only its own interests; and that the U.S., being the freest country in the world, has the moral right to invade any country that systematically oppresses its own citizens, which definitely includes Iraq.
Fine. I agree with Arthur. I daresay most of Arthur’s readers agree with Arthur. I think most sentient people this side of Noam Chomsky agree with Arthur, as Arthur himself acknowledges when in the same post he points out the declining respectability of the “self-determination” argument. Almost everyone agrees on these principles because it is safe to do so, since they provide no practical guidance whatever. Arthur is flogging a horse that, if it isn’t quite dead, is at least very ill. On the critical question of whether we should actually invade Iraq, Arthur concludes, resoundingly, that he has no idea:
I don’t spend a great deal of time analyzing whether we ought to invade Iraq or Iran, as opposed to helping those people and groups passionately committed to replacing those countries’ current regimes, or as opposed to some other kind of military action, either overt or covert. Let me be clear: certainly I want a ruler like Saddam Hussein gone — and yesterday, if possible. And I view him as a very serious danger to us, and to the entire civilized world. But I view the question as to exactly in what manner to achieve this end to be one of military tactics and strategy — and I am certain there is a wealth of information, which is undoubtedly highly classified, that is critically relevant to answering this question. Thus, I simply don’t have the required information to reach an informed conclusion. This certainly doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in the answer; of course I am. I only mean that, in the context of knowledge available to me, I simply don’t have sufficient information to reach a conclusion that I myself would find satisfactory.
I respectfully submit that we have a good deal of information already. We know that Saddam pays off people who kill Americans. We know that he has colluded to have Americans murdered. We know that he murders his own people by the hundreds of thousands. We know that he is pursuing nuclear weapons. What theoretically classified information would allow Arthur to reach a conclusion on Iraq? And what — subject to the facts, of course — would that conclusion be?
Objectivists are often loath to discuss foreign policy because foreign policy is largely a matter of strategy and tactics, which are so grubby and, well, unphilosophical. This is fine for Objectivism — a philosophy need not be a foreign policy. It is not fine for Objectivists. For the next several years the most serious issue facing this country will be how to deal with Islamo-fascism, and what is in “the self-interest of the United States” will involve messy, ineluctable questions of strategy and tactics, not just lofty philosophic generalities. Arthur asks why we should invade Iraq, as opposed to North Korea or China. In the realm of philosophy that is impossible to answer: none of these regimes is “better” or “worse” than the others in any intelligible sense. But in the realm of politics it is easy to answer: the Middle East is making the most trouble for us these days, Iraq is in the middle of it, eliminating Saddam will destabilize the other dictators down there, and none of this will happen by itself. These are all unphilosophical arguments, but that’s foreign policy.
To be fair, Arthur acknowledges that his foreign policy views are a work in progress and has promised to write further on the subject, and I look forward to his sorting some of these matters out.
Carl McCall has been looking especially dour lately. You almost have to feel sorry for a Democrat who makes “education” (cf. The Children™) the chief theme of his campaign and then can’t convince the New York City teacher’s union to endorse him. Then you read to the bottom of the story and see this:
Meanwhile, McCall backed restoring thousands of city apartments to rent control. He said he would reverse a 1997 law signed by Pataki that removes controls if the monthly rent hits $2,000 and the tenant earns at least $150,000.
No rent deregulation, in New York, is so mild that it escapes the wrath of some friend of the working man. The direct beneficiaries, whose rent is controlled, and the indirect beneficiaries, who own, always gang up on the victims, who rent, or who can’t afford to move here at all because the housing market is so absurd. The constituency for rent control here is so firmly entrenched that it doesn’t bother with arguments any more. (Full disclosure: I own my apartment. Nice try.)
This kindles fond memories of State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno’s oh-so-radical proposal, a few years ago, that rent-controlled apartment go back on the market when their current residents died. The one semi-serious argument in favor of rent control was the “widows and orphans” problem — all those poor people thrown into the street, eating out of garbage cans, the minute rent controls were lifted. Well, you’d think Bruno’s proposal would dispose of that, right? Wrong. It was soundly defeated, and we haven’t heard a word about rent deregulation in New York City since.
What would I be if I were a product?
god of the machine is a hearing aid that makes amusing belching noises, uses the Amazon API and checks your spelling.
That’s actually pretty close. (Link from Spleenville via Cut on the Bias.)
Torch flickers unseen,
a firefly in afternoon,
except noisier.
(Update: Will Warren kipples at Torricelli’s expense.)