Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Ubuntu the Helpful

There are plenty of things in this world to get choked up about, but this probably isn’t one of them:

Nevertheless, I found myself battling tears when Ubuntu made this gracious offer. I still have deep regrets about the many hours of my youth I wasted trying to get Slackware to recognize my soundcard, or read a CD, or not destroy my monitor when I misconfigured the refresh rate. So now, in 2010, when a Linux distro does something more than laugh derisively and erase my hard drive when I issue a command it doesn’t know about, I think it’s perfectly natural — and totally understandable — for me to get a bit misty. ¹

Interview with Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange

“Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.” As soft-spoken a revolutionary as you’re ever likely to see.

Fiction & Empathy

Sometimes you hear people say that they don’t read fiction. Not that they don’t usually read fiction, or haven’t read fiction in a while, or don’t enjoy reading fiction. They don’t, as a matter of principle, read it at all. Nonfiction is ok, because nonfiction has facts, and you can use facts to improve yourself. But why waste your time on stuff that isn’t true? What’s the point?

Well: even though the question (a) gives truth way more credit than it deserves¹, and (b) is, to my mind, slightly ludicrous — like asking about the point of breathing — I’ve never managed to cobble together a good answer. No, it’s totally got a point dude! almost never seems to do the trick.

Thankfully, David Foster Wallace has already addressed this, brilliantly:

I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

It’s such a beautiful idea, this notion of fiction as a gateway to empathy. Empathy always seems to be in short supply — and it’s such a terrible resource to lack, since you can trace much of the harm that we do to one another to its absence. You see the phenomenon everywhere, from easy behind-the-back calumny to the casual belligerence of online “discourse” to the Dresden firebombings. Distance — physical, emotional, experiential — helps defeat the simplest tenets of morality and good behavior.

Which is to say: the problem with being skullbound creatures is that we can’t figure out what’s going on inside all the other skulls. What we “know” about other people isn’t just speculative — it’s filtered through a veil of preconception and self-regard that taints and colors everything. If our entire view of the world consists of fleeting glimpses between the battlements, then we’re screwed: it’s not just possible to be cruel, it’s inevitable.

We have more than that, of course. Love and family and religion and civilization are all at least in part attempts to defeat this ugly segregation. But, even with all that, it’s fundamentally impossible to fully transcend our barriers — contra Donne, every man really is an island. What we can do is gather into archipelagos of common purpose, and link hands over the narrow straits that divide us, and give it our best shot.

I used to think that Jesus’ exhortation to love your neighbor as yourself seemed to kind of miss the point — shouldn’t you be preaching a path to love that doesn’t involve narcism? But lately I see the wisdom of this: you have to take your own narrow worldview as a given, and then use it as a template for getting into other people’s heads.

And that’s what fiction gives us: a way to import the lives of strangers into the walled cities of our minds, and experience them as our own. It spurs our imagination. If we can imagine, we can understand. If we can understand, we can empathize.

That’s the point.

Also, girls dig guys who read fiction.

Michael Moore

I’ve always admired Michael Moore immensely, but after watching his extended talk with the folks at Democracy Now, I’m dangerously close to upgrading my admiration to hero worship.

Here’s why: a good portion of the interview is devoted to the Oscar speech he gave in 2003 — after he won Best Documentary for Bowling For Columbine — and its aftermath. He used his 45 seconds onstage to condemn Bush and the just-started Iraq War, and got an angry chorus of boos for his trouble — before he was completely drowned out by swelling emergency Oscar music and ushered offstage.

I remember all that. What I’d forgotten was how thoroughly he was ostracized by everyone afterwards — and not just the usual suspects, but people who should have known better, from Keith Olbmermann to Al Franken to the New Yorker. He was absolutely right, of course, and in retrospect everything he said seems not just uncontroversial but blindingly obvious — at the time, though, five days into the war, what he did in front of billions of people watching all over the world amounts to an immense act of bravery.

And he suffered the consequences: death threats, assaults, crazies plotting to blow up his house. He had to hire bodyguards to protect himself from people who were (literally) coming at him with knives and pipes and scalding cups of coffee. But what’s so remarkable about the interview is his account of how scared he was throughout — his apprehension about giving the speech; the trembling walk off the stage; the hour he spent that night flipping through channels, watching newscaster after newscaster pronounce his career over; his concern for his family; his quiet admission that, if he had to do it all over again, he very probably wouldn’t have. What emerges is a portrait of a human being with the same fears and doubts and weaknesses as the rest of us, doing courageous, principled things.

I don’t want to descend too far into hagiography. Moore has his faults, like everyone else. But he’s devoted a good deal of his life to pointing out the injustices all around us, and trying to make people’s lives better — always in the face of fierce condemnation, and worse. He’s not fearless, though: fearless is easy. He’s brave.

Also, Simile of the Year

The winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which applicants compete to write the worst first sentence of novel:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.

The award goes to Molly Ringle, an actual writer who writes actual, non-terrible, novels. Bravo.

Maniacal Chortling Fail

My mom’s notebook has been running dog slow of late, so I logged onto it last night to troubleshoot. I used iChat’s remote screen sharing feature, which lets me control her computer and chat with her at the same time, all from the comfort of my own home.

Now — one thing I like to do when Mom gives me this kind of god-like control is change her desktop image to a picture of Hillary Clinton, who she loathes with the heat of a billion suns. Sometimes I use Nancy Pelosi, but for maximum impact you’ve got to go with Hillary.

So that was naturally my first order of business, after Mom granted me access and went off to do some paperwork. I also did a little gleeful cackling, and a lot of detailed, Bond-villanesque explaining of my evil plans — to my wife, in this case, who happened to be nearby, ignoring me (as is right and proper when I get into cackling exposition mode).

Anyway — there I was, chortling maniacally, searching Google for just the right Hillary portrait, when the phone rings. It’s Mom. I say: “Hi Mom!” She says: “I can hear you.”

Because I’d forgotten about the “chat” portion of the screensharing-and-chat thing, of course. I’d muted my end of it, but Mom hadn’t. She’d been listening the whole time.

My first impulse was to lie, but that wouldn’t have done me much good — because my cacklings had also drawn her back to her desk, where she’d been watching me look for Hillary pictures. On her computer.

My second impulse was to collapse into more or less uncontrollable laughter, which is what I did. I’m laughing still.

A Little Gratitude

Penn Jillette, commenting on the frequent bashings that Christians receive on his Showtime program:

Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.

I spend my fair share of time saying things about Christianity that would have gotten me killed, in interesting and horrific ways, back in the 18th century. I don’t say this enough, but I’m profoundly grateful to live in a place and a time where I don’t have to die for stating my opinion.

Apple Splits Hairs, Insults Our Intelligence

So Apple appears to have tweaked section 3.3.2 of their draconian iOS license agreement to distinguish between “non-compiled code” and “meta-platforms” — the former being acceptable, the latter naughty. Flash CS5 is still forbidden, but games built on libraries that use interpreted languages are ok — or might be ok, if Apple deigns to give its consent.

This is in addition to some recent hairsplitting regarding who can and can’t advertise on their platform — the blanket ban has been lifted, but only if you’re an “independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads”. Which is to say, if you’re owned by a company whose name is not Google.

From the beginning, it’s been pretty clear that these “general” policies were just thinly veiled maneuvers to eject Adobe and Google from the iOS ecosystem. But now, as Apple hones their license agreement to alleviate some its unintended consequences, the veil is becoming increasingly, diaphanously, scandalously thin.

Apple and its apologists will tell you that this is just business. Capitalism is tough, man. And, besides, Google started it! But if these kinds of exclusionary policies are really ok, then why not just come out and ban Flash CS5 and AdMob, and whoever else you find threatening? Why go to all this trouble building papier-mâché frameworks around your real intentions?

The question answers itself. Apple is playing a painfully obvious game of cat and mouse here, both with their public image and — more importantly — with the various regulatory agencies whose ears are beginning to prick up. Apple now has the second-largest market cap of any company in the US. They might have been able to fly under the radar with this kind of bullshit in the bad old days. But those days are over.

Specious Argument Watch

Jonathan Chait pretends to make a reasonable argument about the Gaza tragedy:

I consider settlements a very major problem. I do think, though, that the more important problem is the refusal of Palestinians to accept the legitimacy of any Jewish state. In a 2009 poll, 71% of Palestinians said it was “essential” to have a state that encompasses all of present Israel and the West Bank. Only 17% of Israelis said it was essential to have a Jewish state controlling all that territory.

In other words: “Wait, we’re continuously building settlements on Palestinian territory, imprisoning the residents of Gaza in what little land they have left, cutting off their access to the rest of the world, and throttling their supply of basic goods and services … and they still don’t like us?”

Massive Chutzpah Spill

From the chutzpah files:

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

So tell me again why the company that has caused what may be the greatest ecological calamity in a generation, and has no idea how to stop it, gets any say in the matter? Big Government? Hello?