I was talking to a friend about The Grand Inquisitor, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the other day and was reminded that I had not read it for quite sometime, so I decided I would read it today.#

The premise of the story is that Jesus has come back for his Second Coming during the worst years of the Spanish Inquisition. Because of His peace and compassion, people immediately recognize Him as something wonderful when He walks through Seville...

"He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognised Him. That might be one of the best passages in the poem. I mean, why they recognised Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His heart, and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. He holds out His hands to them, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with Him, even with His garments. An old man in the crowd, blind from childhood, cries out, 'O Lord, heal me and I shall see Thee!' and, as it were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees Him. The crowd weeps and kisses the earth under His feet.

Then the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, sees what it is going on and throws Him into jail...

"There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church -- at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the 'holy guard.' He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on' The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison- in the ancient palace of the Holy, inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, 'breathless' night of Seville. The air is 'fragrant with laurel and lemon.' In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.

Once they are alone, the Inquisitor talks to Him about why he feels that he has to burned him like other heretics. The G.I. believes that because He will not demand that the people worship him, that He actually values their freedom and gives it to them as a true gift, then He is a threat to the authority of the Church. And the G.I. feels that the Church, not the teachings or Man's kindness by Free Will, is what makes the world work.

Here the G.I. says that if He would only perform miracles to get the people to worship him then everything would be easier, but because He does not do that He is a heretic.

"Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread -- for nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread." But Thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, "Who can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!" Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger? "Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!"

The assumption is that authority is something that Man craves with more power than the unwavering Love that God offers.

"'This is the significance of the first question in the wilderness, and this is what Thou hast rejected for the sake of that freedom which Thou hast exalted above everything. Yet in this question lies hid the great secret of this world. Choosing "bread," Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity -- to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it.

But it is only an offer of Love, He will not force it into the hands of those who demand it and because of that will not honour any kind of authority that attempts to coerce Man.

Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men, acting as though Thou didst not love them at all -- Thou who didst come to give Thy life for them! Instead of taking possession of men's freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings for ever.

Liberty and Free Will is the essential gift of God and the entire premise of Christianity, and life at all. To establish authority to coerce yourself (or others) would be to attempt to deny that gift and replace it with slavery and servitude. The only authority is the authority that rests within ourselves, Love. The true goal of a Church or spiritual community should be to give each other strength and guidance in each other's quests, not to coerce one another into succumbing to the will of some temporal law that has no meaning beyond the world of the flesh.

I've just finished reading The Divine Comedy, Part 2: Purgatory by Dante Alighieri (Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers) and I want to write my thoughts about it down like I did in the past with The Inferno.#

The Purgatorio is very different from the Inferno in that it focuses more on ideas and deep meaning as opposed to the detail and mythology of the Inferno. Dorothy talks about how many people view it in the opening pages of the Introduction of the book.#

There is another reason why we may not approve of what Dante is doing in the Purgatory - a reason succinctly phrased by one critic in the poignant cry: "Then the sermons begin." There are long passages which can only be classed as didactic poetry - versified statements of plain theological or scientific fact; these are more numerous in the Purgatorio than in the Inferno, and still more numerous in the Paradiso. The inhabitants of hell are not remarkable for any great interest in morals or divinity - naturally enough, since they have "lost the good of the intellect"; the pass their eternity in a bustle of purposeless activity and have no use for thinking. And since there are twenty-four circles to be hastened through, over a very rough road amid a perpetual and distracting clamour, Dante and Virgil themselves have but little leisure for improving conversation. This, after all, is as it should be. It is not while undergoing the foretaste of damnation that one can engage in abstract speculation; it is much if one can endure and come through unscathed. Only when one has squeezed out from Hell's suffocating bottle-neck to "look once more upon the stars" can the mind resume its discursive and contemplative functions, and the vast intellectual movement of the Commedia begin to be unfolded in direct speech with a figure. [pg. 11]

I think this is a very accurate characterization of what happens on Mount Purgatory and it was important to know this up front so I could pay more careful attention to what was being said while on the Mount. The Divine Comedy is more than an adventure through Hell and Heaven to find a lost love, it makes you wonder about the nature of those places and how to better live on Earth.

A major problem that Dorothy says that Dante must have faced was in organizing Purgatory and making sure it was not too symmetric to Hell. That it was not so repetitious to the point of inflicting boredom. Of course it has to be slightly similar as they are both concerned with the same Sins. Dante succeeds in this by his categorization and understanding of the two places' nature.#

It has the further great advantage that the use of two distinct systems of classification emphasizes the essential distinction between Hell and Purgatory: in the former, acts of sin produce their cumulative effects, the soul remaining at the lowest point of degradation to which it has unrepentantly willed to descend; in the later, the stain of sinfulness is cleansed, the penitent soul shedding off successively all those imperfections which cling to it against its better will. Hell is concerned with the fruits, but Purgatory with the roots, of sin.

In any case, whether the arrangement of the Inferno as we have it was the offspring of first or second thoughts, we are still brought up against the problem with which we started; the Purgatorio must again exhibit souls who are suffering the penalty for sin, and the poet must somehow contrive to avoid a mere repetition of his effects. [pg. 15]

This was the first inkling for me about the difference between Hell and Purgatory... although they seem on the surface to be very similar (the nature of the punishments are the same) there is something very different about them. The souls in Hell have essentially given up, although they don't feel that they've given up because they are where they want to be. And the souls in Purgatory are still on the quest for repentance because they are not satisfied with the temptations and imperfects that still lie inside them. One is eternal and distraught, and the other is temporal and filled with hope of someday-salvation.

It has been well said by a great saint [St. Catherine of Genoa] that the fire of Hell is simply the light of God as experienced by those who reject it; to those, that is, who hold fast to their darling illusion of sin, the burning reality of holiness is a thing unbearable. To the penitent, that reality is a torment so long and only so long as any vestige of illusion remains to hamper their assent to it: they welcome the torment, as a sick man welcomes the pains of surgery, in order that the last crippling illusion may be burned away. The whole operation of Purgatory is directed to the freeing of the judgment and the will. Hell is the fleeing deeper into the iron-bound prison of the self - for the damned also, after their manner, seek their own torment. [pg. 16]

And said again elsewhere in reference to how the toils of Purgatory cannot be understand by any soul in Hell because they are a state of mind:

That is the mark of Purgatory, the thing which Hell cannot understand, and which turns to folly earth's fumbling attempts to discriminate between retributive and remedial punishment. Their desire is turned to the torment as aforetime to the sin; the suffer no coercion but their own unwavering will: "my heart is fixed, O Lord, my heart is fixed." [pg. 21]

One of my favourite parts of the Commedia as I've so far read is how Beatrice is the perhaps the one thing that keeps Dante going when he is faced with a wall of Fire or a ride on a demon's back. Without ever hearing here described before the final Cantos of the Purgatorio you have the intense feeling that she is beyond beautiful.#

And there, beneath her veil, beyond the stream,
Her former self, methought, she more outshone
Than here, with others, she once outshone them

Her unveiled beauty passes the wits of poets to communicate; and as it rises from sphere to sphere of Heaven it glows with an ever more radiant splendour. So Dante says: if he says it, it is because he means us to believe it, and our refusal does him no honour. [pg. 29]

I think that we all have our own Beatrice, the one for whom the Sun rises each day to compete with bringing it's sun rises and sun sets to challenge and forever being defeated by the slight smile that grows across her face when your eyes meet. You know who mine is. Who's yours?

Dorothy talks a great deal in the introduction about the nature of Dante's Love for Beatrice and how it enters into his philosophy of the Divine, whether he seeming "worship" interferes with his beliefs.#

We must come, then, to Beatrice with an open mind, prepared to see what the poet chooses to show, and to accept as his "real" intention that which he has backed with the whole power of his art, and the labour of a lifetime. Of all the loves he had known - [...] and he had known love in many kinds [...] - this is the one which, with will and judgement assenting, he declares to be a revelation of divine truth. [...] It is a love who joy - and therefore its fulfillment - consists in the worshipful contemplation of that which stands over and above the worshipper. True to its origins in courtly love, it finds its entire happiness in being allowed to do homage to its acknowledged superior. [pg. 43]

This seems to be similar to the opinion that I have grown that the truest form of Love is the unveiling of Truth and the realization that happiness lies within sharing happiness and homage with the center of your Truth and Love.

The Beatific Vision is the eternalizing of that moment in the contemplation of that Perfection beyond which nothing greater can be conceived for desiring. [pg. 44]

So before we impart into Purgatory, remember that the purpose of Purgatory is to improve the soul so that it is deserving of the privilege to share in the Divine Love and Truth that awaits it in Paradise. It is the process that the soul goes through to properly give homage to its Love, because muddy hands cannot clean and care at the side of the pristine.#

So long as there remains in the soul the least trace of consent to sin, this clouding and coarsening remain to fetter the will and judgement. Only when the clear sight and tender conscience are restored is the soul set free to stand before the unveiled light of the presence of God, which otherwise it could not endure. It is this which underlies Dante's great statement, that when the soul feels itself free, it is free. Purgatory is not a system of Divine book-keeping - so many years for so much sin - but a process of spiritual improvement which is completed precisely when it is complete. "God is satisfied when we are satisfied." [pg. 58]

And secondly, that the heart of everything that Man is capable of is Love, the gift imparted by God.

His argument rests upon the great Augustinian premiss that evil in itself is nothing and can originate nothing positive - not even sin. It can only be a parasite upon the good which God has created. Man has a natural impulse to love that which pleases him. This impulse, which is the root of all virtue, can be perverted, weakened, or misdirected to become the root of all sin. Thus, all the Capital Sins are shown to derive from love for some good, either falsely perceived, or inadequately or excessively pursued. [pg. 66]

Robert Dean quotes an article from John Keegan, and I lift his quoting:#

How to dispose of a fallen dictator is a problem of immense complexity for victor states. Dictators have been sovereigns, as Saddam was, de facto if not de jure. Sovereign states shrink from disposing peremptorily of sovereign rulers. The process, whichever is chosen, always threatens to set inconvenient precedents. Since 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia created the principle that sovereign states, and therefore their sovereign heads, are both legally and morally absolute, there has been no legal basis for proceeding against such a person, however heinous the crimes he is known to have committed.

[Brief discussion of Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, various Axis dictators, which should not be missed.]

None of these precedents seems likely to spare Saddam. He may, de facto, have been head of state but, by fleeing his capital and office at the outset of the last Gulf War, he effectively abandoned whatever constitutional status he enjoyed. The power vacuum he left has been filled by the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council, which, very conveniently last week, announced the establishment of a tribunal empowered to try any Iraqi citizen - and that Saddam unquestionably is - for crimes under domestic law. Prima facie, Saddam has to answer for many crimes, including murders he has himself committed, large-scale episodes of murder and torture of his fellow citizens, and organised extermination of minorities, particularly Kurds and Marsh Arabs, inside his own country.

Dowingba writes the "idiot's" guide to catching Bin Laden.#

Apparently "criticize Bush" is an effective way to catch Bin Laden, because he lays out no actual plan. And I'd like to know what he means by "focus on terrorism and not on nation states." So the military is just gonna walk through countries asking each person "Are you a terrorist?" and after all the terrorists are dead, announce "Now, no one else become a terrorist now! We're on the honour system here!"

How does someone living in reality combat terrorism? Bring peace to the Middle East. End of story. Bring the place out of the 8th century. Bringing democracy to Iraq is an integral piece of the puzzle. It's fine if he says he won't "cut and run" from Iraq. Then, of course, the billions of dollars already spent there would have been in vain, bringing no more security to the USA than they already had. Dean says over and over how the Bush administration has "lost its way", how they're actually making it less safe by invading Iraq. His reasoning for this is "There's Al Queda there and there wasn't before." First of all, there is alot of evidence leaning to the fact that Al Queda was in Iraq beforehand. Second of all, I'd rather Al Queda be in Iraq, surrounded by the world's best military, than say, in planes flying toward skyscrapers in USA.

Rob Courtney writes about Creative Commons 2.0. (Flash link.)#

Prof. Lessig spent part of his time on the podium discussing the "Ibex problem" - a reference to his own experience with a vitriolic troll in a Yale cyberlaw discussion forum, and its deleterious effects on community building. As CC gets bigger, there's a risk of it becoming a bigger target, and FUD could become a real issue. As an example, Lessig cited a nasty letter from the legal department of an unnamed recording company claiming (I'm paraphrasing) that the rights provided by CC were but a pale shadow of the rights provided under copyright law (which they are. aren't they? isn't that the point?) and ordering CC to cease contacting recording artists.

If record company lawyers are the Ibex problem, then CC seems pretty resistant, since its whole ethos is to work alongside, and not replace, copyright. If you want the broad rights provided under copyright, then go! Take them! They're yours! CC can continue. CC right now seems less resistant to possible Ibexes within the community, and here I'm thinking about creators who become dissatisfied with the terms under which they've licensed their work or with the outcome that licensing has had. What will happen if (when?) a photographer sees her CC-licensed photographs adorning some cruelly offensive web site or other publication? Will CC licensing continue to seem like a good idea? Will the community hold? I sure hope so.

Courtney writes about how to be happy and what that means using the words of the ancients.#

One of my favorite quotes by Ralph Waldo Emerson is: "The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well." The problem is, I'm not entirely sure that I believe what he says, at face value. I'm rather more inclined to believe Aldous Huxley: "Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness."

I cannot spend all my time worrying about making other people happy, even if what I am doing is useful, honorable, and compassionate — even if I am making a great difference. No, I need to remember wise words by the Russian, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: "Happiness does not await us all. One needn't be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another."

Eric Raymond writes about good Hollywood movies with an emphasis on The Last Samurai.#

Secondly, the movie is seriously anti-historical in one respect; we are supposed to believe that traditionalist Samurai would disdain the use of firearms. In fact, traditional samurai loved firearms and found them a natural extension of their traditional role as horse archers. Samurai invented rolling volley fire three decades before Gustavus Adolphus, and improved the musket designs they imported from the Portuguese so effectively that for most of the 1600s they were actually making better guns than European armorers could produce.

But, of course, today's Hollywood left thinks firearms are intrinsically eeeevil (especially firearms in the hands of anyone other than police and soldiers) so the virtuous rebel samurai had to eschew them. Besides being politically correct, this choice thickened the atmosphere of romantic doom around our heroes.

Another minor clanger in the depiction of samurai fighting: We are given scenes of samurai training to fight empty-hand and unarmored using modern martial-arts moves. In fact, in 1877 it is about a generation too early for this. Unarmed combat did not become a separate discipline with its own forms and schools until the very end of the nineteenth century. And when it did, it was based not on samurai disciplines but on peasant fighting methods from Okinawa and elsewhere that were used against samurai (this is why most exotic martial-arts weapons are actually agricultural tools).

Michael Hanscom links to the Movie Blog that links to The Spider-Man 2 Trailer.#

An amazing haiku from Best Kung Fu.#

The World Wide Web is
the Sum of Human Knowledge
Click Here for Free Porn

Real Live Preacher continues the Christmas Story Uncut.#

Angels appear, now and again, in the pages of the bible. They are bringers of tidings and aid. You can forget those pictures of fluffy white characters with halos and wings. Real angels mostly scare the hell out of people. You'd be more likely to fill your pants than be filled with joy were you to meet one.

And then sometimes they look like regular people, and no one recognizes them at all.

The writer of Hebrews thought this a serious enough matter that he gave this dire warning:
"You better be kind to strangers, because some have entertained angels and never known it."

Ms. Lauren gives her top 10 feminist influences.#

1. My older sister. From my earliest days, my sister taught me that cheerleading, at least in high school, gives young girls a "legitimate" excuse to jump around half-clothed in front of an audience. She told me I should play a sport instead of being a spectator. Thanks for that, sis. Although I played softball for over ten years and am still afraid of the ball flying haphazardly at my face, I nevertheless learned how to interact with a group of strong women, respond to authority, and use my cleats for greater purposes.

3. Susan Faludi's "Backlash" was given to me by my other sister when I was far too young to read it. I was also too uninformed about the beginnings of feminism to draw and make connections with Faludi's research. The book sat on my shelf for years gathering dust. I pulled the book back out during my angry feminist days and seethed over most of her findings. Relatedly, Faludi's "Stiffed" opened my eyes to the other side of the coin, helping me to recognize the Male Code of Conduct and how sexism still rules the Land of Man.

6. Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto for reminding me where feminism can go if unchecked by other important theory, mainly that simple ol' thing called human rights.

Binary Circumstance write about how dictators come to power.#

As the talking heads on TV speculate about how Saddam Hussein will be tried and punished, there are great opportunities for scapegoating, blaming Saddam Hussein for all the brutality of his regime when there is no evidence that he personally committed many of the crimes that he will no doubt be tried and found guilty of. Did Saddam personally gas all those Kurds? Did he single-handedly torture and execute the tens of thousands of individuals who died under his rule? The answer, of course, is no.

He gave orders and others carried them out rather than turning their guns on him.

Dictators do not come to power in a vacuum; they are nurtured by the needs of those who have a psychological and philosophical need for the existence of supreme beings to obey, and seek approval from, just as the God-concept is nurtured by those who have a psychological and philosophical need to believe that some great, supernatural power exists to take care of them and punish them when they are bad.

Hamed Seyed-allaei writes about how dicatorships evolve from democracies.#

Democracy is just a side-effect of a very simple process, the only real rule of nature, the rule of primitive jungles, survival of the fittest. This is reality. It is enough to look around and see democratic states and their leaders. If they are not evils, they are not saints either. They use any possibility to go above the law to gain more fitness.

How a paradise-like society could be established by politicians who take care of only their own personal benefits?

Suppose there is not something like religion, as it is assumed in secular states. Therefore, there is not any measure to show what is good and what is bad. Thus, for an individual, good will be something toward his/her personal interest and bad will be something against it.

Assume there is a very strong group in a country, who no one can resist against them. The results is obvious, they will take the control. When it is against their interest, They won't respect to any laws and rights, like all dictators in the world. It doesn't matter who they are and how they take the power. In fact even a president who has 90 percent of votes is a potentioal dictator.

The Observer reviews Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, and is not impressed.#

Whatever other crimes it committed or covered up in the twentieth century, the Left could be relied upon to fight fascism. A regime that launched genocidal extermination campaigns against impure minorities would be recognised for what it was and denounced.

Not the least of the casualties of the Iraq war is the death of anti-fascism. Patriots could oppose Bush and Blair by saying that it wasn't in Britain's interests to follow America. Liberals could put the UN first and insist that the United States proved its claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the court of world opinion. Adherents to both perspectives were free to tell fascism's victims, 'We're sorry to leave you under a tyranny and realise that many more of you will die, but that's your problem.'

The source of the title is Wendy Koslow.#

play with the word VAGINA in the title isn't going to sully their hearts and minds. The word VAGINA is proper and anatomically correct and you should be teaching it to your children before they can read. Particularly girls, since they have one (even before they can talk!), but also boys, who also need to be taught the real names for their various interesting anatomical parts.

Simon Phipps writes about why he doesn't want Microsoft out of business and about a ecological way of thinking of companies.#

I recognise the "they're out to get us" paranoia that Robert expresses and which I've noted before seems characteristic of Microsoft's poker-game approach to business (which I first read about in 'Hard Drive' and seems intact even today). The way I've taken to thinking about this involves imagining how ecosystems might develop in canyons and on open plains (caveat: IANABiologist).

In a canyon, there's not much room for similar species. Once an animal takes up residence, similar species are unwelcome and may become prey or be chased away - it's live-or-die becuase (apparently) the habitat has limited resources. On the plains, there's room for everyone and animals learn to live together (albeit uncomfortably for prey animals) or ignore each other. Canyon-dwellers want to win - plains-dwellers want to flourish. Plains- and canyon-dwelling creatures have a hard time understanding each other - they are starting from such different places that the basic mindset of the other seems ridiculous. Sun is a plains-dwelling creature and as such is used to co-existing. Microsoft is a canyon-dwelling creature and only total victory counts as success.

Robert Scoble replies and apologizes for the initial jab.

He's right to take me at task for that attitude. Keep in mind I've only been at Microsoft for seven months. My attitude in that post existed before I got here to Microsoft. In Silicon Valley salespeople and managers play to win (and they often play dirty -- I have tons of stories from inside Silicon Valley's major companies that I can't repeat now on my weblog cause I'll be seen as attacking competitors). I've never been in a meeting down in the valley where a salesperson or a manager said "hey, let's only go for part of the business so that the other company can win too." In fact, I see a lot more "canyonlike" behavior down in the Valley than I do up here in Redmondland. Why? Because it's economically tougher down there. The empty buildings in downtown Palo Alto are testament to that.

Les links to a fan made MEGA MAN movie trailer. So cool.#

Robla of Kuro5hin.org compares Howard Dean to Harry Truman and the election of 1948.#

The polls and the pundits all thought that Truman's efforts were for naught, and pulled back from reporting on the already-decided election. Famously, the Chicago Tribune went home early on election night, having printed "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" as their headline for the morning paper.

The primary lesson learned here is that the best defense is a good offense. Truman didn't shrink from criticizing Dewey and the Republicans, while Dewey tried to be above mere politics. It was clear then (and should be clear now) that elections are about politics, and the advantage went to the candidate who went on the attack. A lot of Democrats today are as spineless as Dewey was in '48, and seem to think it's smart to run a Dewey-like candidacy (regardless of how disastrous it was for congressional Democrats in 2002). Al Gore's endorsement of Dean may partly be the result of learning from history.

Of course, even if the Democrats come out fighting this election, they won't have it so lucky in 2004 as they did in 1948. The Bush campaign of 2004 will not remotely resemble the Dewey campaign of 1948. Bush will dump his $200 million warchest into a viciously partisan campaign. They will try to paint Dean as another McGovern. The gloves will be off. The silver lining here is that when the Republicans fight back, they sometimes aren't very smart.

Faré on Saddam's capture.#

One national socialist dictator down the drain. When will they come and garbage collect the rest of them? From Cuba to Zimbabwe through North Koreaand Palestine, there are a lot of them...

Jessica writes how holiday letters and blogs.#

Yesterday while I was skiing so I wouldn't have to write the letter, I thought about writing about all the activities I do during a typical month. "Oh! I could tell them about the blog group I'm in and all the interesting people I've met ..." then I solemnly realized that I'd spend the entire letter explaining what a blog is to most of my family. And do I really want to let them know that I blog? Am I ready for that? Not that my personal confessions are contained herein, but there's something about certain relatives reading my blog ... maybe you know the feeling. (No, Mom, not you. You can keep reading.)

Of course, I could just give them the URL and say, "Your holiday letter is here," then they could read about some of the things I've been doing since the end of April. And if they keep reading my blog through the next year, then I won't have to write a long holiday letter and mail it to them because they'll know what I've been doing.

Blogs are nice... you can passively tell people things and know everything your friends have been doing without actually talking to them.

Michael Feldman links to some great European kids.#

BERLIN (Reuters) - Three German teenagers were being investigated for fraud Friday after they spent $160 million in a two-hour Internet shopping spree because they were "bored," authorities said Friday.

The 19-year-olds splashed out on light aircraft, patents, industrial machinery, restaurants and artwork after hacking into an account on an Internet auction site.

"They gave boredom as the motive and made no attempt to disguise what fun they had buying only the most expensive things," according to police in the western town of Limburg

Matt Stoller announces the second Blogging of the President Blog Burst.#

This week, there's a new topic. Saddam Hussein. Everyone's talking about him, so I have to guide the conversation more narrowly this time or else I'll have to link the whole internet. So here's the question, with some background: The Tet offensive in Vietnam is widely considered a terrible loss for the Vietnamese in purely military terms, but a dramatic political victory that led to America's ultimate withdrawal because it turned the media and the American public against the war. Does the capture of Saddam Hussein bear a sort of 'anti-Tet' moniker, cooling the increasingly powerful (yet still minority status) anti-war narrative? And what does the proliferation of blogs and foreign news sources mean for the media cycle around the capture of Saddam Hussein? Is his capture more or less 'spinnable', and who's doing the spinning?

Joshua Koenig wrote some great about Music for America and THE transformation.#

The budding movement of participation is about more than presidential campaigns; it's also about our role in the world as people, the meaning of life itself. It's about our culture, how we live our daily lives. Participation is what you get done in your short time in this universe, and it would seem that people are increasingly discontent to spend their time merely as spectators.

And my favourite part:

I believe in Woodie Guthrie's description of his guitar, "this machine kills fascists." Music for America -- the organization I find myself devoting my life to -- exists to return this consciousness to millions of people in my generation. We want people to turn on (to the fun of participation) in addition to turning out (to vote). We believe that the way to do this is to use the cultural power of music and musicians to awaken young Americans to the fact that this is not as good as it gets, that another world is possible, and that the window of opportunity is open.

The world can always be better and when we think we're "done" we are just blinding ourselves willingly and accepting the injustices directed at us.

Richard talks about Halley's "selfishness" and of blogrolls.#

No, really. And let's not forget people with sidelinks who link to great weblogs with commentary. Would you rather a simple link to the front page with no indication as to their quality, or a link to a poignant or funny post from a favourite blogger? Sure, blogrolls are tacit agreement with the authors' viewpoints, or at least an indication of how good they are, sure, but in the end, they're just simple lists, sometimes categorized, but usually not. Lists are almost always inexaustive. My blogroll is inexaustive. If you have a blogroll, so is yours.

As if weblogs themselves aren't a selfish activity. They're supposed to be unedited voices of individuals—nevermind that it's not possible to have an unedited voice. Besides, being arrogant is the whole point of weblogs. (Denying arrogance is a a pretty arrogant attitude, if you ask me.) The absense of a blogroll may be the product of an arrogant assumption, but starting a weblog is a far more arrogant act than the decision of whether or not to have a silly list of links on the sidebar to weblogs you may or may not read yourself.

I do not think either is "evil." Whether you have a blogroll or not is pretty irrelevant to me. I do agree with Richard though that actually linking to individual entries that are of high quality is better than just always having a link somewhere. Although a bit biased towards what I do, I think people would benefit if they linked to every post of someone else's that the read and enjoyed whether they wanted to quote, comment, or not. Then if you read someone every day then they'd get a link every day and it would be somewhat like a blogroll but not quite a "reply" to the post.

Meh, do whatever you want with your blog and I'll do what I want with mine.

Martin Pool links to a great bug.#

Joel Spolsky writes about Biculturalism and The Art of UNIX Programming.#

By now, Windows and Unix are functionally more similar than different. They both support the same major programming metaphors, from command lines to GUIs to web servers; they are organized around virtually the same panoply of system resources, from nearly identical file systems to memory to sockets and processes and threads. There's not much about the core set of services provided by each operating system to limit the kinds of applications you can create.

[...]

What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.

This is, of course, a major simplification, but really, that's the big difference: are we programming for programmers or end users? Everything else is commentary.

I like the point that it does not make sense to say which one is "better" because there are completely different values at play and they don't necessarily inter-operate.

Surana has an interesting idea about project plans.#

One interesting idea I ran across is that HP is using a futures market to help predict their sales revenue. Rather than ask mid-level sales manager for their sales forecasts, HP's electronic market allows sales people to anonymously bet on the upcoming sales numbers. If you bet correctly, you make money. Rather than ask a sales person for their revenue forecasts directly (they will feel pressured to deliver optimistic numbers), an anonymous market is the best way to aggregate information from all relevant employees into a single forecast number.

The same idea could work to determine when a software project will be complete. Rather than ask developers when they'll be done, allow them to place bets on the date a project will be complete. Developers, testers, field support and project management would all trade on an electronic market and the date with the highest value is the cumulative best guess. Even better would be to allow internal developments teams to bid on subprojects and include a penalty if they fail to meet the contract terms. For most software shops, the developers feel little or no pain if they are late. Why would they choose to improve?

John Wiseman links to a very pretty picture of a flower.#

Joi Ito comments on your (not YOURS) weblog's audience.#

This is the difficult question that many of us deal with because sometimes we end up with unintended audiences or our contexts collapse. danah and I have been discussing this issue a lot in the context of Goffman and managing the facets of your identity. rebecca's ten tips are a good place to start because you'll never be able to manage developing a facet of your identity unless you have enough passion about what you are writing to do it frequently and rigorously enough to make your blog interesting. If you focus on your passion, it's likely you will attract the audience you are looking for. Having said that, sometimes contexts do collapse and you get unintended audiences. This can tend to cause a chilling effect and make it difficult to write freely. If your blog becomes popular, this is inevitable. Having said that, it often adds more rigor and forces you to research more thoroughly before posting, which is a good thing.

Joey deVilla links to his secret identity who links to chromatic on Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves.#

One persistent misfeature of open source development is thoughtless mimicry, copying the behaviors of other projects without considering if they work or if there are better options under the current circumstances. At best, these practices are conventional wisdom, things that everybody believes even if nobody really remembers why. At worst, they're lies we tell ourselves.

Perhaps "lies" is too strong a word. "Myths" is better; these ideas may not be true, but we don't intend to deceive ourselves. We may not even be dogmatic about them, either. Ask any experienced open source developer if his users really want to track the latest CVS sources. Chances are, he doesn't really believe that.

In practice, though, what we do is more important than what we say. Here's the problem. Many developers act as if these myths are true. Maybe it's time to reconsider our ideas about open source development. Are they true today? Were they ever true? Can we do better?

Philip Greenspun writes about the advantage of a country with one big city.#

In Argentina people move to B.A., if they aren't already there, when it is time for university. After graduation, they stay in B.A. to work at high-level jobs. If you make friends in college, chances are that they'll be living within an easy Metro or taxi ride for the rest of your life. Unlike Americans, Argentines don't sag in the evenings, exhausted from their jobs. Perhaps there is some napping at 6 or 7 but your friends might call you up at 9 pm and a big group will meet for dinner at 10.

Compare to the U.S. Friends gather in, say, the Boston area for college. They disperse for graduate school, each taking the most advantageous offer regardless of location from universities that might be anywhere in the 50 states. After graduate or professional school, people who might have become friends disperse again, each one taking the best-sounding job offer regardless of location. We achieve a lot in our careers and make reasonably good use of our vast territory but wouldn't it be nicer if our friends weren't strewn out across a 3000-mile wide continent?