Samizdata

Ian Bennett made an interesting comment on an article published the other day that is worth making a discussion point. It actually makes two points… firstly that politicians will say whatever they think they need to say to stay in power… I regard this as a truism and so not really worth discussing other than to say “indeed”. The second point however was more contentious:

Religion is unconditionally dangerous, simply because it is irrational; the distinction between “extreme” and “moderate” adherents is a false one, and is better regarded as “consistent” and “inconsistent”. The inconsistent moderates may not actually call publicly for the murder of non-believers (despite that being a core dogma of their faith), but they provide the context in which the consistent extremists operate, namely that adherence to a religion is a perfectly acceptable way of life. Eating only fish on a Friday “because God tells me to” is no different in its motivation from committing any other act “because God tells me to”. If we accept the performance of an act which has no rational underpinning simply because of its motivation (“God told me to”), we must accept the performance of all acts with that same motivation. This is what consistent, “extremist”, religious adherents do.

I sort of agree… which is to say, yes but no but…

I think the nature of what “God tells you to do” is a non-trivial distinction between religions and whilst even Buddhism has gone through militant phases, some religions default suppositions are broadly positive (i.e. if you are actually being ‘consistent’ you really cannot justify slaughtering the Cathars based on anything Jesus said), whilst others have clearly negative default suppositions (i.e. yes you really can justify slaughtering apostates based on what Mohammed said and there really is not a lot of wiggle room if you are being consistent).

As a atheist myself, I regard God as nothing more than a psychological artifice, but it also seems demonstrably true that many believers are nevertheless entirely capable of rational moral judgement that is not of any practical difference to my God-free moral theory based way of going about things. Indeed many of the writers for Samizdata are people with religious beliefs.

Is this simply what Ian describes as the difference between consistent versus inconsistent believers? Not so sure. If a religion can include “God says be rational because you are responsible for your actions due to having free will and are not merely God’s meat puppet” and also says “you will roast in eternal hellfire if you murder anyone, so put that gun down dude!”… well I think a ‘consistent’ follower of that particular God will find it rather harder to say “Kill ’em all for God will know his own”. Indeed it seems rather inconsistent even if slaughtering Cathars is very much The Done Thing these days.

So I think maybe religions are conditionally dangerous rather than unconditionally so. When following “the word of God”, it is fairly important what that particular God has to say… and clearly contrary to what many adherents claim, the God Jesus was referring to and the one Mohammed was referring to have about as much in common as Freyja and Shiva.

Discuss.

From time to time I do Samizdata postings about how rapidly technology is advancing these days. Recently I stuck up an SQotD on the subject. Here is another such posting. Basically it’s two pictures.

The first is a picture of my first proper computer (I do not count the Sinclair Spectrum), purchased in about … 1981? This computer, an Osborne 1, consisted of a very small screen, a keyboard, and about half a ton of electrical gubbins, including two disk drives, each accommodating disks that were, I seem to recall, 256kb in capacity. 256kb was a lot of kb in those days.

The second picture is of my latest computer, which is a Google Nexus 4, plus a couple of bits of plastic to prop up the Google Nexus 4, plus a keyboard:

For me, the killer app of all computers has always been word processing, the ability to type a piece of writing into a machine, and then to modify and expand the piece at will, and only when it’s nearly finished have it automatically printed out. And then printed out again if you need that, as you almost certainly will. Amazing. (This being the twenty first century, you may want to read “print out” as “publish”.)

My first “word processor” (the inverted commas because word processing as we now use that phrase was exactly what it couldn’t do), which I used for about a decade, was an Olivetti typewriter. For this I paid twenty five quid, which is about the same as what I recently paid for the Google Nexus 4 after you include inflation. For those who do not know what a “typewriter” is, the basic rule was that the only way you could store the words you had thought of, in the order you wanted them in, was to print them all out, one letter at a time, as you thought of them. The switch from that to the Osborne 1 remains the single most exciting technological leap of my life, although the arrival of blogs runs this a close second.

As for the smallness of the screens of both these computers, well, each to his own, and I entirely get why many would hate to process words on such a tiny thing as the Google Nexus 4 or with a screen as tiny as that of the Osborne 1. But I loved the small Osborne screen. There was something very appealing to me about those tiny little letters, so much more so than the big clunky letters on other computers of that era. Me being short-sighted, the distinction that really matters to me is not big-screen-versus-small-screen; it is screen (however big) far away: bad, versus screen (however small) near: good. And if the Osborne was not in any very meaningful way “portable”, it was at least, to use a word from those days, “luggable”, from one work top to another, as and when the need arose, which for me, then, it often did.

And just as I loved the tiny old Osborne screen, I now rather like the Google Nexus 4 screen. But of course what I really like about the Google Nexus 4 screen is that, since a tiny screen is all that it is, it is so light and so small that I am happy to carry it around in case I need it to process any words, even if I never actually do, on that particular expedition. For me, in my present aging and physically weakened state, the difference between a computer too heavy to carry around without being irritated by it unless I use it, and a computer so light that its weight is not a problem even if I don’t touch it all day long, is a big difference. Even today’s small laptops – minute compared to the Osborne – fail this test, for me, now.

The beginnings of this posting were mostly typed into the second of the two computers pictured above, before being transferred into my regular non-portable computer, the one that resides permanently in my kitchen. I am still amazed at how well this transfer worked, the very first time I tried it. While I was doing the transfer, it looked as if all the paragraphing would be lost, but when I pasted everything into a text file on the kitchen computer, there it all was, just as it began. Magic.

In addition to being a word processor, the Google Nexus 4 is also, as already noted, a telephone. And like all mobile telephones these days, it can also send what used to be called telegrams. It is also an A-Z Guide to London, and a map of the Underground. The map even works, unlike an A-Z of London, when I venture outside of London. It tells me when the London bus I await will reach me. It is a mini web-browser, a mini-Kindle, and a means of posting relatively straightforward postings to my blog or (when I have worked that out) to this blog. It is a gadget for identifying music recordings just by it listening to them, being just as good at identifying classical recordings as it is a identifying pop. It is even a rudimentary camera. All of which makes it that much more likely that I will use my Google Nexus 4 for something during just about every expedition I go on. The old Osborne 1 could do none of these things. But you knew all that, and much else besides which I have yet to discover. You get the pictures.

I am, of course, not the only one who has noticed how well technology is doing these days compared to politics. If you look for this particular meme, you see it everywhere. Here is a whole book with that notion as its starting point, linked to recently by Instapundit. (Who, by the way, also linked to and recycled that SQotD. I thought he might like that one.) Says the author of this book, Kevin Williamson:

Why are smart phones so smart – getting better and cheaper every year – while our government is so dumb? Is there a way to apply the creative and productive institutions that produced the iPhone to education, public schools, or Medicare?

He thinks there is, as do I. More from and about Williamson here.

LATER: Instapundit quotes Williamson again:

We treat technological progress as though it were a natural process, and we speak of Moore’s law — computers’ processing power doubles every two years — as though it were one of the laws of thermodynamics. But it is not an inevitable, natural process. It is the outcome of a particular social order.

Among the many newspaper reports from Connecticut on the massacre of children in Sandy Hook is one in the Times by David Taylor, remembering an earlier crime:

Sixteen years ago I witnessed the same phenomenon in Dunblane where another school lost a group of children. The sadness seemed to seep out of the stones of the Scottish town after Thomas Hamilton opened fire.

From what abyss does such a crime come? I was searching on the internet for the words of the 130th Psalm, De profundis clamo ad te, domine – Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord – and found the letter written from prison by Oscar Wilde which was later given the title De Profundis by his literary executor. I have not yet read it all but the opening words resonated for me because of the contrast between the depths of grief (Wilde describes hearing the news of his mother’s death while in prison) and a happy season:

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

Inevitably on a blog such as this in a world such as this there will, and should, be discussion of motives, diagnoses, policies; debate about what should and should not be done. For us outside, motion will begin again.

As I do tire of pointing out, belief in the free market no more obliges you to approve of every single transaction than belief in free speech obliges you to approve of every word spoken.

The eBay account of our very small business was hacked into recently and a bunch of non-existent stuff sold in our name. The direct results of this have been sorted out and the victims of the scam repaid. However at some point eBay and/or Paypal (Paypal is a subsidiary of eBay) wrongly compensated us for some of these “purchases”. Our Paypal account currently has coming up to a thousand pounds more in it than it should have. Do Paypal want to know? No they do not. There is something wrong with a company so complacent that it cannot even rouse itself to take back its own. To be fair, the young Irish people I talk to when I ring up Paypal try to help. If my customer service experience stopped there it would still be ghastly because all possible customer service experiences in all possible worlds are ghastly but it would be ghastly in a comparatively good way. Unfortunately they do not have the authority to relieve me of the burden (it is a burden) of nearly a thousand quid, so they pass the buck to eBay central, over in one of the lesser circles of Hell staffed by resentful demons who failed to qualify as incubi and succubi. Their task is to choose whichever of six formulaic replies bears least resemblance to the actual situation and email it to me overnight.

eBay and Paypal could do with some competition.

Last night I attempted to describe what I thought of this (which I photoed about an hour before photoing that Pedibus):

But I feared that my efforts of last night might get Samizdata sued for libel by Santander, so I had to start again. Maybe Santander really do practise all that they are here preaching, on this bloke’s back.

But, Santander aside, what is it about corporate proclamations of this sort that makes them so vomit-inducing? (See what I mean.) I mean, you don’t have to run about London in a T-shirt like this, do you? Nobody pointed a gun at this bloke, or I do not suppose so. And if you really hate having to endure this kind of verbiage at work, you can always get some other sort of job, can’t you?

Maybe not. Maybe if you are an office worker, in a city like London, of a certain rank, doing a certain sort of work, then insincere verbiage exuding fake enthusiasm and moral ambition that is relentlessly out of line with what they actually reward you for doing and fire you for neglecting to do is something that cannot be avoided, no matter where you work. Besides which, moving from one job to another, although perhaps possible, is quite an upheaval. For many, another job that covers the outgoings would be hard to come by, in times like these.

Now I entirely realise that a T-shirt that I don’t like does not register very highly on the evilometer. It is nothing, for instance, compared to the kind of skullduggery that Johnathan Pearce’s piece earlier today, about Fast and Furious, alludes to. Nevertheless, I’d be interested if readers here are as put off by this kind of thing as I am.

I don’t think it’s just me. I have a number of friends who are, right now, being driven almost insane with suppressed rage by employment which (a) they would prefer to hang on to, despite it (b) involving lots of the usual tiresome crap that you have to put up with when you have a job, but which also includes (c) occasional bouts of psychological torture when, often at vast expense and involving huge amounts of travel, everyone is subjected to interminable out-of-hours company propaganda – propaganda that cannot simply be screened out, because it demands “involvement”, the content of which is insultingly disconnected from the daily grind. It’s a kind of spiritual bullying, and yet my friends just have to put up with it. If they said what they really thought, they’d be fired for insubordination on the spot.

I’m out of all this now, but my own most memorable experience of this kind of psychobabble company bullshit, so to speak, was actually very positive. But that was a long time ago, before this kind of stuff got way out of hand. And the person doing it to us really knew what she was talking about, did so with total honesty and lack of waffle or of third-hand verbiage she had got from a book that she didn’t understand, and she knew how to make it stick. And she was in general the absolute opposite of the kinds of bosses from hell who combine being mediocre with being mad that my friends now complain about.

It seems that Alain de Botton, who I might add is a weapons grade plonker of the first order, has finally come up with a good idea.

As his next project, the philosopher and founder of The School of Life is aiming to revolutionise pornography. Driven by the way society has been saturated by explicit images and videos, de Botton is asking ‘what next for porn?’. The writer intends to meet with leaders in porn and the arts in order to bring about a better kind of pornography.

Well I am all for anything that leads to better products. And perhaps he will use this opportunity to point out to these “leaders in porn” that boob implants are to porn what McDonald’s is to fine dining.