I’ve got an essay about Edgar Allan Poe, called Leaky Graves, in the latest issue of Weird Tales:
It’s part of the magazine’s Growing Up Poe feature, in which a bunch of us write about what Poe meant to us when we were kids. Here’s Cherie Priest’s excellent contribution.
I just finished reading Obama’s remarkable Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. There’s some really lovely stuff in there, especially towards the end, where he tackles the gulf between the ideals of the great peacemakers in history — the Martin Luther Kings, the Ghandis — and the ugliness of human nature:
But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
The art of seeking peace in a world choked with violence, hatred and apathy has to be premised on something like this: a pure, naked hope that both rises above and obviates the hard truths of the world — that exists free of the taint of the real. This is what religion, in its purest form, gives us: a transcendent hope that survives every kind of setback, because it’s based not on the here and now but on the cherished future: on what’s possible.
But, having said all that — the rubber has to meet the road somewhere. Ideals are worthless if they don’t eventually lead to something concrete. And this is where Obama’s speech falls grievously short.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world … to say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
The sting of all this is softened somewhat by what follows, but the points he’s making here are at least as important as all his subsequent peans to peace and hope: because they lay out a justification for war based not on necessity, but on morality:
We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
I’m certainly not quibbling with the notion that violence is inevitable, and ubiquitous. But all the violence in the world does not in any way justify an ideology that deems war — the absolute apex of violence — moral. War is, by its nature, a crime. The United States and its allies have killed thousands upon thousands of civilians — in Dresden, in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in Laos, in Fallujah, in Afghanistan — in pursuit of its wars. The question of whether these murders were justified in the grand scheme of things is a subject for a different debate. But even if we manage to rationalize the killings, we really can’t call them moral. There’s a difference between calling something moral and calling it necessary.
This isn’t semantic hair-splitting. Words matter, because the ideas behind them matter. If you raise a child to believe that slaughtering thousands of blameless Japanese civilians was a moral good — because, the argument goes, it prevented the death of thousands more by cutting the war short — then you plant the seed of the notion that killing someone can be a moral act. If, on the other hand, you tell your child that children just like him were murdered in cold blood, and that this murder was an immoral act, offset and justified by a desire to prevent death elsewhere — then, yes, you’ve introduced that poor kid to the excruciating world of moral compromise. But you have not taught him that killing all those people was morally justified. Only that it was an immoral act, justified by temporal, human, ratiocinations.
There is only one moral imperative that matters here: killing people is wrong, no matter who does it, or why.
The same goes for the notion of moral wars. Once you lay out a framework for justifying wars based on morality, it’s incredibly easy to slot other wars into that framework — because in stretching out and distending the definition of “moral” to meet your present needs, you’ve laid the groundwork for further redefinitions. All recent wars have been justified as moral imperatives, from the first Gulf war, to the second, to present-day Afghanistan.
I think this is one of Hitler’s unacknowledged sins: giving people who want to believe in moral war something to hang their hat on. It’s basically impossible to argue that our entry into World War II was wrong: it came in response to an actual honest-to-god military attack on our country, it delivered a large swathe of Europe from Nazi domination, and it halted a systematic — and, yes, evil — campaign to extinguish the jews. But, ever since then, Hitler has been used as a justification, by proxy, for all manner of wars. The first and second Bush administrations told us that Saddam Hussein was like Hitler. The neocons bolster their case for bombing Iran by manufacturing an Ahmadinejad/Hitler analogy. And, most depressing of all, Obama compares Al Qaeda to Hitler in his Nobel speech, in order to justify a war in a country in which Al Qaeda no longer resides:
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.
I admire Obama’s honesty in tackling this stuff head-on, in a speech that was supposed to be about peace: it’s to his credit that he chose not to ignore the elephant in the room. But I wish he hadn’t decided to justify his escalation by constructing a framework around it. If he feels that this war is necessary, he should simply say that it’s necessary, in this case, and then tell us why. In positing a whole category of “moral” wars, he justifies not only this war, but all the ones that are to follow.
Just ran across an infuriating column1 from David Pogue, whose stuff I usually love. It’s a review of Dragon Dictation for the iPhone, an amazing app that transcribes speech into text with genuinely impressive fidelity.
Unfortunately, Pogue devotes half of the column to a rant about the “paranoid” people who are complaining about the app’s privacy issues:
Pogue’s reaction to the controversy is, sadly, a bunch of completely-missing-the-point hokum of the usual variety: who cares if they’re storing your data, it’s on secure servers anyway, there are already many other services that do the same kind of thing, etc, etc. I found this particularly galling:
OK, first of all, this business of your audio being sent to Nuance for transcription rings a very familiar bell. Remember the Gmail brouhaha? When Gmail debuted, it offered a fantastic e-mail account, paid for by small text ads on the side whose subjects are matched to the e-mail contents.
At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.
There is so much wrong with these two paragraphs. For one thing, the fact that people have stopped screaming about google’s practice of reading your email to target ads at you does not in any way remove the actual problem. People have other things to worry about, are not generally concerned about their privacy, and are constantly bombarded with “paranoia” propaganda by well-meaning people like Pogue, who should know better.
Second, this line of argument depends on trusting implicitly the claims of the corporations who are harvesting your data. Pogue quotes the makers of Dragon Dictation on this point:
Nuance says nope, it’s just a bunch of computers, maintained in a secure facility,
Oh good! That should be fine, then. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that personal information stored in impregnable data strongholds by organizations that will suffer absolutely no legal consequences for losing that data is completely safe.
Third, it’s just incredibly short-sighted. The fact that we are not at the moment under the thumb of a corporate/government megalopoly tells us nothing about what’s going to happen in the future. Have any of us really thought deeply about what it means to have our lives tracked by entities whose entire purpose is to profit from what used to our private information? Yes, this is already happening. And yes, it can get much much worse. And will, if we already assume that the game is lost.
Ok. Having said all that, I’m very aware of the fact that we are sliding inevitably into a future where a good portion of our lives will be stored in the cloud. The “cloud” is a terrible metaphor, incidentally, if for no other reason than it suggests concealment, of a sort. We can’t afford to assume that anything that leaves the confines our computers is in any way concealed. I’d rather we just cut through the crap and say what we’re really doing here: storing data in the open.
But, again, fine — that ship has sailed, and there are real advantages to decentralized data storage. What bugs me about this is the sneakiness. It’s probably ok that Dragon Dictation uploads what you’re saying into the ether, because most stuff people say is innocuous, and because the coolness that Nuance has achieved on an underpowered computer like the iPhone just wouldn’t be possible otherwise. It’s less ok that they upload your contacts, but, since it’s just the names — they claim — maybe no harm done here either.
But, for the love of god, tell us that’s what you’re doing! And I don’t mean tell us in your EULA, which, like all EULAs, is painstakingly engineered to ensure that absolutely no one reads it.2
When the application starts, the first thing you should see is a question:
In order to improve our voice recognition capabilities, we’d like to upload the names of your address book contacts to our servers. We won’t send anything but the names. Is that ok?
The app should only send your stuff up if you click Yes.3 By the same token, before they do the first transcription, they should pop up a message telling you that everything you say will be transmitted to their servers. Just so you know.
Which gets us back to the terrible, ubiquitous canard that people often fall back on in these situations: “But everyone else already has all our data.” It manifests this way in Pogue’s column:
What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits?
It’s a specious argument. The point isn’t that other services are already listening in. It’s that a layman wouldn’t expect this particular application to be transmitting your words into the open in order to do what it does, and we certainly wouldn’t expect it to be sharing our contacts, unbidden.
This is the real battle: not how to turn back this tide of stored-in-the-Cloud information, but how to enter into the new world with our eyes open, understanding the consequences of everything we do. If we’re going to blast our data out into the great beyond, then we have to know that we’re doing it. Any application that doesn’t go to great lengths to inform us of the consequences of our actions is an application we should avoid.
Jeff Atwood tooted something along these lines yesterday:
He’s talking about Facebook’s byzantine and sometimes deceptive privacy settings, but the principle applies in general.
This line of reasoning used to freak me out, but now I think it’s really the only way to go: assume that everything you do that has an online component will be visible to everyone, and act based on that assumption.
Pogue would call this paranoia, I suspect. I call it prudence.
We can (and should) operate under that assumption now, of course. But there are limits to even this simple recipe. As the lines between our personal computers and the ether blur, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s being made public, and what’s not. Which is why applications like Dragon Dictation have an obligation to tell us.
The original text here was “infuriating bit of sophistry”, but I pulled it because it’s unfair: I don’t think Pogue is intentionally trying to deceive anyone here. He’s just bought into the common narrative. ↩
The text of this EULA is particularly weasely: “Any and all information that you provide will remain confidential and may also be disclosed by Nuance to your wireless carrier, if so requested, or to meet legal or regulatory requirements …” Etc. Note the use of the word “and” after the clause in which they assure us that our data will remain confidential — it seems like “but” would be the better conjuction here, given that the clause that follows is a series of ways in which Nuance will not keep our data confidential. Slimy. ↩
Nuance says they’re going to add a checkbox somewhere to allow you to opt out of sending your contacts data. If they go with this approach, it really should be an opt-in. ↩
Sarah Palin, answering a question on whether she thinks she’s qualified to be president:
And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fact resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership.
I’m not sure what question she was answering there, actually, or whether this really qualifies as an answer — or a sentence, for that matter. But it’s marvelous. It made me wonder what it would look like if she interviewed for a job as a software developer.
Interviewer: Can you describe the pros and cons of the Spring framework?
Palin: Yes, of course. Now, some people would say that the “Spring framework” is not a framework at all but perhaps rather an attempt by software bureaucrats to tell hardworking American programmers how they should write their software for example. And you know me I’m just a backwoods Alaska girl and honestly I don’t spend much time listening to the “experts” and the “elites” because sometimes you just have to go with your gut.
Interviewer: [pauses] So you don’t like it?
Palin: It’s not a question of liking or to not liking, Charlie, it’s a question of standing up for what’s right. Can I call you Charlie?
Interviewer: My name’s Phil.
Palin: Great! Imagine, Charlie, that you were getting ready to sit down in your own home or perhaps in your own yard in your own neighborhood wearing your own pajamas and you wanted to make code with your computer. The kind of thing that average moms and dads who love their kids and America do every day. Right?
Interviewer: I’m not sure.
Palin: Now imagine that you’re typing away at your codes and then suddenly some government bureaucrat swoops in and says stop Charlie! Stop, darn it! Because you’re not perhaps typing it the way that the “hive mind” wants you to type it. You’re typing it in a way that’s individual to yourself and that just doesn’t sit well with the socialists and the communists and the media elites. How would that make you feel?
Interviewer: I’m in the yard? In my pajamas?
Palin: In your own pajamas that you bought with the labors of your hard earning. And now this guy who never probably even shot anything with his own hands perhaps wants you to write it his way. The “spring” way, whatever the heck that is. [laughs]
Interviewer: So you’ve never used it before?
Palin: Chad, whenever I hear the work “framework”, you know what I see? I see a crowd of hardworking American men and women slaving away their whole lives stuck like dead butterflies on a communist scaffolding working for the State. I see welfare mothers with fifteen babies snorting coke that they bought with our money, Chad. I see the whole nation bent under the burden of socialized healthcare while Mexicans pour over the border and take jobs away from good American workers. And for what?
Interviewer: I’m not sure.
Palin: For the Spring framework, Chuck. When I had my son, Spork, me and my husband Todd looked each other in the eyes and we said to each other: “Never again. Never will we let the tyranny of French monarchy scar the shores of this great land.” Our men and women are overseas fighting for our freedom against the forces of Hitler or perhaps some Hitler-like entities while in our own country ACORN workers are free to go into our schools and hand out pamphlets about how to do abortions and Nancy Pelosi wants to nationalize Christianity and illegal immigration and what are we going to do about it? I’ll tell you what, Chris. We need to stand up and be the Americans that our founding forefathers and foremothers and little founding forebabies wanted us to be. By turning our back on the Sling framework, Chuck! But standing up for what we believe in and for what’s good and right and then for example traditional values which.
Interviewer: [pauses] It’s the Spring framework.
Palin: Exactly. Now, you can do whatever you want. You can use the Sling framework or the Euro framework or the Lenin framework or whatever you want! This is America. But if you do then the will of the people will rise up and crush you like a bug and that’s what makes America great.
Interviewer: Well, Ms Palin. It’s been very nice talking to you.
I used to eat at the Cthulhu takeout joint down the street. The food was ok, but, honestly, I found the messages in their fortune cookies a little offputting. Some examples:
A secret admirer will soon send you a sign of affection, in the seething form of the worm god Rlim Shaikorth, who will eat your soul.
Love conquers all — if by “love” you mean Othuyeg, the Doom-Walker, whose great tentacled eye will carve a bloody path through the ranks of the weak and leave in its wake the mangled remains of the damned.
The voices you hear in your head are real. Their owners will soon be coming for you.
In the end there are four things that last: faith, hope love, and the Dark Silent One Zushakon, who will eviscerate the first three things and consign their steaming viscera to the infinite void.
The one you love is closer than you think. You have just eaten him.
When I complained, the owner suggested I try adding in bed to the end of them. That didn’t help at all. I finally stopped going when the eyeballs in the hot and sour eyeball soup started looking at me.
From Paul Graham’s fantastic piece on the iPhone App Store:
The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they’ve ever done. Their reputation with programmers used to be great. It used to be the most common complaint you heard about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically. The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.
How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak
I popped the SIM card out of my iPhone last week and put it in back in its old home, an aging (but loyal) Motorola Pebl. A pointless gesture, yes — Apple doesn’t give a shit if I use their phone, especially since I haven’t shackled myself to their reprehensible partner in crime — but, then again, it’s not really a gesture. Apple’s App Store policies have been making my skin crawl lately, and using their phone has become genuinely unpleasant. It’s no fun any more.
And the bad feelings are leaking over into the rest of the Applescape. I got rid of an AppleTV recently, and for the first time in a long time feel no real desire to own any of their increasingly lovely computers. Evil is a turn-off. Graham again:
But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced “Don’t be evil” so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
It would be one thing if Apple was just screwing over its own ecosystem — but what if this horrible software distribution model leaks out into the wider world, and we have to start buying all our stuff through dictatorial, single-channel gatekeepers? It would stunt the industry, hurt software, throttle innovation.
Anyway. It’s weird rooting for Apple to fail, but I sincerely hope they do, and fail hard. The iPhone’s a more or less perfect device, but perfect is no substitute for good.
From a BoingBoing post about über-crank Ignatius L. Donnelly, who Charlie Pierce profiles in his book Idiot America:
“Cranks are noble,” Pierce says, “because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.” It’s like the difference between kitsch and dreck–people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better–they’re in it for the money and the power and the fame.
I really really love this kind of semantic hair-splitting. This is where vocabulary really gets interesting: at the shifting hairs-width border between not-quite-synonyms. Our relentlessly Darwinian culture tends to pound the crap out of this kind of “extraneous” nuance — the difference between “less” and “fewer”, for example, is quickly disappearing, and the farther/further distinction is just an annoyance these days. Lots of dictionary definitions seem more like quaint archaeological artifacts that pertinent, present-day concerns.
Still. English is a borderless country on an infinite plane of possibility, and it will gladly absorb anything you dump into it. So there are always new gems to find, if you’re willing to dig.
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