I Love Stephen King

I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.
Stephen King: Tax Me for F@%&’s Sake!

Wendell Berry

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific achievements. Some people are moved, now and again, to deplore one abomination or another. Others–and Hayden Carruth is one–deplore the whole list and its causes. Must protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvements and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protestors who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depends on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
On Difficult Hope by Wendell Berry, a reflection on Hayden Carruth’s poem “On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam”

Libertarianism and Society

As Ron Paul continually runs for higher office more and more people are hearing some of his policies, and thus the word libertarian. This post isn’t about Ron Paul. Nor do I imagine that people who aren’t following politics, but now hear “libertarian” actually know what this political philosophy is actually founded on. I sure didn’t, but I saw a very in depth discussion on Reddit (yes, deal with it). So I wanted to dissect the underpinnings

The poster goes on to describe libertarianism as wholly wrapped around the defense of personal property (which includes ones person) and pure utilitarian ends. Any action undertaken by anyone — including the state — to remove personal property (which, in some way, includes currency) is understood to be immoral. Taxation is thus immoral. The poster goes on to suggest that a privatized court and police is a system that will work. I want to stop and consider these elements (ignoring his talk on education, with which I am fairly sympathetic).

First, I am surprised that a political system would revolve, wholly and purely, around property rights. This means that the political system will inherently favor those with more property over those who have less. It is a system devised explicitly for the powerful. A person with more property can gain more property easier than a person with less (Especially when the property in question is land and resources).

Second, I am surprised that any political system could ever describe state-printed currency as “property”. The currency would not exist without the state, just like “free” markets. All historical societies we have studied have no markets, and no currency until a state creates them. “Primitive currencies” are not currencies at all, and are traded to resolve issues of status, dignity, and un-payable debts. If the state prints the currency it has the ability to extract from the state-created markets a percentage of that currency for creating and maintaining said currency and markets.

Third, I am surprised by the naivety of the libertarian belief that “every man is an island” is demonstrably false. We have always, are now always, and continually will always be in relation to the other around us. To act as if that is not the case is naive and ignorant. This is, again, born out by the evidence of all communities which care about one another. In the case of communities that are bound together there is often a social interplay of resolving of debt – but there is the unquestionable motive to care for the other as one’s self. With the understanding that they will do the same when it is necessary.

Fourth, I am utterly shocked by the proposition that a private court and police system will work. We have seen the slide of previously “free-er” markets into very rigged and non-free markets (as the poster admits). First, any state or private entity capable of enforcing penalties must be powerful enough to violate the guilty’s defense of personal property. Why would you trust a private system rather than a public one? I understand the argument of “once a private company violates trust they’ll lose in the marketplace”. But if the private company is capable of violating personal property rights how do you stop them? Other companies step in? What happens in the case of collusion between companies? This system slides right back down into rigging the game.

There is a nice correlation between government corruption and the rise of powerful multinational corporations which can donate endless to the political cycle. It seems only a public, and transparent state, staffed by citizens which can, and must, be mindful of how much power the state acquires. Only with true and accurate information about these people can we choose (ostensibly through voting) who to trust with dispensing the state’s abilities. The troubles with our democratic and representative system is that our voting systems, districts, etc are rigged to hold power, those elected are not representative whatsoever (either in ideology or in material wealth), and the inability — likely due to both of these factors combined with corporate money — to get true and accurate information about the people and the process.

It seems to me that property ought not be the central issue of a political philosophy — especially in our digital age when “property” is becoming a very gray area.

The End of History and the Last Man

Where Marx differed from Hegel was over just what kind of society emerged at the end of history. Marx believed that the liberal state failed to resolve one of the fundamental contradiction, that of class conflict, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Marx turned Hegel’s historicism against him, arguing that the liberal state did not represent the universalization of freedom, but only the victory of freedom for a certain class, the bourgeoisie. Hegel believed that alienation–the vision of man against himself and his subsequent loss of control over his destiny–had been adequately resolved at the end of history through the philosophical recognition of the freedom possible in the liberal state. Marx, on the other hand, observed that in liberal societies man remains turned into man’s lord and master and controls him. The bureaucracy of the liberal state, which Hegel called the “universal class” because it represented the interests of the people as a whole for Marx represented only particular interests within civil society, those of the capitalists who dominated it.
Fukuyama, pg 65

It seems that Marx was correct: within a liberal democracy the capitalists can exert mastery over others through economic means. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat need to be defined by this relationship – not by any analogizing to histories examples. Mastery and control are what Occupy Wall Street is protesting. It isn’t about jealousy. I keep seeing discussions like “We need to get rid of money” within Occupy. I think the sentiment is correct, while the details wrong.

Money is just economic fungibility. I might be able to trade writing, or fixing a bike, or moving furniture, for food. But I can’t trade web software for it. It’s too large and unwieldy to break down into small bits. This is why money/currency is created, for fungibility. To create equivalency between work. Whether the payment is deserving or just is a whole different argument (because that isn’t the argument I’m talking about). Money needs to exist.

One thing that popped into my mind while thinking about this section – What if money and capital were not related? Capital is what exerts mastery and control. A person with $100k/yr income doesn’t have mastery over someone who makes $50k/yr, or even $30k/yr. $100k isn’t capital, its just a bunch of money. Capital is just a resource that moves institutions, powers, businesses, industries, and people. Right now, capital ends up being a lot of money. But does it have to be money? What if it were a combination of trust, responsibility, and integrity. We obviously can’t pay people with these traits. But if you think money holds back things with trust, responsibility, and integrity you’re living in the old days. See Occupy for instance. New York has half a million. Another example purely outside politics: Kickstarter.

Money is just fungibility. Capital is the problem. Once we remove the fact that money makes up capital, perhaps we’ll have achieved a solution to Marx’s paradox of the liberal democracy.

Control is Fear

There was an odd confluence of mental events this weekend. Yesterday I had a brief, but interesting conversation with some friends about cars, cyclists, and pedestrians (abbreviated as “peds”). And this evening I decided to relax by watching The Dark Knight. To me the Joker is one of the single greatest characters conceived and executed on film in my time. The main character in the movie is not Batman at all – its the Joker. The mental explosion occurred during the scene where the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent. This conversation results in the psychological creation of the villain Two Face in the mind of Dent. I couldn’t find a transcription of the speech, so I transcribed it:

Do I really look like a guy with a plan?

You know what I am, I am a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what with it one I caught it. You know, I just do things. The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon has plans. They’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I’m not a schemer. I try to show the schemers have pathetic their attempts to control things really are. So, when I say that you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know that I’m telling the truth.

It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer and had plans, and uh, look where that got you.

I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even when the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot, or a truck load of soldiers is going to get blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die then everyone loses their minds.

Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos. Its fear.

The more I follow politics, rhetoric, and watch the American culture the more I realize that fear is its true disease. And the symptom of fear is control. But I want to describe how these two events from this weekend coalesced to show me this.

There have been psychological tests to show why people in cars are less observant: it is because they are sitting in an entirely concealed box and thus removed from the world. And the more gadgets we add to cars (full suspensions, automatic transmissions, anti-lock brakes, navigation systems, automatic parking systems) the more we are removed even from the car itself. Experienced cyclists, however, are hyper-aware (as this recently posted comic points out). Taking a pothole with my full weight will hurt my ass (perhaps even the family jewels) if I’m not paying attention and get off the saddle. Peds, cars, dogs, and doors are all things that can seriously hurt me. I hear the car approaching me from the rear. I stare down the driver approaching on the side street so they don’t roll all the way into my lane. I even talk to myself as if they can hear me. I can feel my tires reacting to the road surface, and how that changes when I roll over paint, because I don’t have a full suspension. Because of the design of bikes I am forced to be hyper-aware of my situation. While my abilities control the bike – I have very little control over the situation and am one of the most vulnerable people on the road. As the driver of a car there are a million systems and you only have partial control over your vehicle. Because you are in a climate controlled box you are disconnected and only partially attentive to the real world outside your car. But they feel as if they are in total control. Until someone, like a cyclist weaving through gridlocked rush hour traffic, shows them they are not in control. Not at all. They’ve just built a box of illusion to keep them from their fears (other drivers, inclement weather, poor driving skills, etc.)

But perhaps the single best example of this control phenomenon is the American government. We are always told that our country is the best country (whatever that might actually mean). We are “exceptional”. And we know what that means when we see how we act. The United States can act unilaterally without any repercussions on the world stage. The only repercussions are the hate we have created around the world for our government. The government sets up puppet regimes, has military bases all around the world, and has bombed every region of the world. Why? One word: control. They need to control other governments. They need to control markets. Markets aren’t “free”. They are only allowed to do what we say they can do. Which is fundamentally true as we make the market. They market doesn’t objectively exist. We cause it to come into existence. However, as in 2008, we are finally seeing what matters. The government saved the fundamental money-making mechanisms from failing. But they didn’t save anyone else from the fallout. Not home-owners. Not business-owners. Not municipalities. Not pension plans. No one else get saved. The fear was not “what will happen to these people”, but “what will happen to our money-making mechanism”. This also goes for the auto-industry (no matter how much other influence we can attribute to our love affair with cars) we need to have a car industry for control.

It is clear, at least to me, how much the GOP thinks they need to control: almost every other country on earth (“Let’s bomb Iran”), down to every women’s uterus. I have no concept of what a small government could possibly look like when you fundamentally need to control that many different points of interest. The democrats also have their control issues. But both issues are rooted in deep-seeded fear. And this is why I love The Dark Knight’s Joker so much.

As his speech goes: “You know, I just do things.” He is doing what he is innately driven to do. He is entirely free. It is sad to watch what his freedom is being used for, but it is freedom nonetheless. The 500 channels of TV, 4 GOP candidates, and multitudes of genres within which to re-style ourselves (whether it be hipster, thug, geek, gamer, cyclist, chic, anglophile, steampunk, stoner, jock, popped-collar or whatever) are not freedom. Freedom of choice does not equate to freedom. Freedom is the condition of a person. Civilization has never been geared towards being free. Sometimes we find it where we are. Other times we have to go get lost in order to find it. But being free is the all-important bit, not the proliferation of meaningless choices. The Joker is free from having to control, because he is not afraid. The institutions of the world are deathly scared of losing their grip, their place, and their meaning. Because of that they are incredibly controlling. They have power and they will use every last bit of it to keep their place.

I grew up in a distinct culture of religious fear which required a great degree of control. It took me a long time to realize there isn’t a single reason I should be seeking control over anyone else. I was very afraid of people. All the people around me implicitly taught it to me by how much fear of others they had. So long as everything is going according to the plan we are fine. But as soon as the accepted order is disrupted we have a lot of problems. Once we were forced to look at something in the microscope it took over our entire minds to re-order the world.

It is a funny thing that we, as a civilization, are determined to control the world. When, if the biblical narrative can tell us anything, it tells us that God isn’t controlling. God acts. There is a big difference. We believe that the God we believe in is sovereign yet we approach that sovereignty with such an ignorance to believe that God must act as we do.

“You wanted God’s ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father.” Søren Kierkegaard

This is not a more sophisticated attempt at the pithy: “God works in mysterious ways”. Perhaps the other way around. God is sovereign by his being, not by his action or non-action. God is not fearful and therefore does not seek control. I am not fearful, and therefore I do not seek control. I simply act. I do what I desire to do. And when that means I take my life into my hands by riding my bike through traffic with the meager skill I do have, I am free. And that freedom is why I get so much joy from doing what I desire to do. Because I am not afraid that I don’t have control over everything else. Because I don’t need that control. A truly free man is dangerous, just as the Joker was dangerous. This is why protests are violently quelled. People sitting on their couches enamored with their freedom of choice don’t see their chains. The people yelling in the streets have thrown off their chains.

If I had no joy, then I would be desperately afraid to hold on to the meager materials that I do have in order to be merely content. Content is the enemy, the illusion, of joy.

Client Side Thoughts – All the Rage These Days

A programming post! I know, its a bit unusual considering all thats happening in the world. But this one is worth it. All the rage these is a gorgeous, smooth, animating, fully javascript-enhanced experience for web applications. And I’ve been building them. There really interesting part is the choice of technologies to use – particularly on the backend. We’ve stayed with the tried and true django. Which, out of necessity, requires that certain decisions be made. And django is a wonderful platform I truly wouldn’t imagine working without.

Lots of the current javascript enhancements are going on with “slimmer” backends (Mongo, Couch, Cassandra, etc). Which means that a lot of the traditional things a backend framework does are not done. So their front-end has to pick up the slack. In many cases this means defining models, and url routes. For those of us using beefy backends this definition is already done, and to replicate it on the front end would be ridiculous. So I feel that the beefy backends of the world are being left out by the adventures in javascript. It should not be so.

I’m already templating on the client side with @getify’s HandlebarJS. That brings along with it a nice Promise pattern implementation. And he has also written a nice Gate pattern implementation as well that I use. Of course I’m using jQuery, along with ajaxForm to handle form posts asychronously. And now we are using Plupload to deal with uploading media (ajaxForm does this with an iframe hack that is not very pretty). I’ve written some nice utilities for dumping django model data into JSON, a Command pattern implementation, and a Databinding implementation on the client side as well.

The trick that I would like to work on, is packaging all this goodness into a unified package that takes advantage of django in a much cleaner way. Getting class information and URL route information onto the client side is the first step. Wrapping the JSON returned from the server with this class info and URL routes, tied together to the Databinding interface gets you a model layer, with instance caches. While that model layer is defined in django. With a couple more nice additions a lot of maintenance/house-keeping code won’t need to be written.

The next thing that has jumped into my mind is pushState. But I haven’t played with it enough to know how to implement it in a “framework” type of way.

This client should be written to be entirely decoupled from the actual backend client. You are dealing in URLs, JSON blobs, DOM elements, forms, events and async calls. The fact that django provides this is inconsequential. You could start with a django backend because of all its benefits of getting up quickly. And you can migrate over to other sharded DBs or non-relational DBs or other data sources (e.g. memcache) as you need to scale.

This project’s first philosophical belief is to get up and running without duplicating your work on the client side (D.R.Y.). It’s second would be to work purely with native types as much as possibile (strings, JSON, DOM). It’s third would be modularity/loose coupling. Since its built on native types as much as possible you can use the parts you want, and only the parts you want.

Someone Please Explain

Why no one else seems to think this is valid?

Reflections on How To Live

Thus my “spirituality” is to learn how to live in a material world that is everywhere more than I can see or know. For such a life I need a guide. Without a guide I am left to the devices of my own imagination. My parents were not raised in such a situation. They were not teachers in this matter. It is the life of the Church, the way of knowledge that is the lives of the saints that teaches me how to live. They help me eat (or not eat) in a manner that reveals God. They teach me to read, to honor icons, to forgive enemies, to hold creation in its proper, God-given place. I am an Orthodox Christian. Who else remembers how to live in the world, holding that Christ is come in the flesh?
Fr. Stephen

Things Unseen

I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day — and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen. Edge.org – David Eagleman

Ecclesia as Diaspora

For the Christian community to join with Israel in the diasporic work of mission is to insist that the work by which we ‘seek the peace of the city’ and according to which we await the New Jerusalem to come is no less a concrete flesh-and-blood reality than the singular event of Christ’s cross and resurrection. For it is only as such that the Christian is given over to the excess of God’s perfect agape that is the Spirit’s work in history. At the same time, to make the Christian messianic claim is to insist that Israel’s obedience to Jeremiah’s command to seek the peace of the city was itself always-already an embodied sign of the coming reign of God. So it is precisely by way of the reality of and her participation in Christ’s apocalyptic historicity that the Christian joins with Israel in embodying the coming of God’s reign as a mode of apocalyptic hope. For only as it joins Israel in diaspora does the Christian ‘not yet’ become something other than a theological dilemma concerning the ‘delay’ of the parousia and become rather the condition for the political cry of ‘come’, a cry for the messianic inbreaking to occur everanew, in the very contingencies of our own ongoing histories, into the reality of the ‘already’.

Christ, History, and Apocalyptic by Nathan Kerr, p187