Politicians--Why We Hold Them In Such Low Regard

Over-egging the Pudding

The Labour Party has announced some new initiatives about the internet.  If it is elected to government, Nanny will provide internet access to all human souls in the country.  It will become part of a government guarantee.  How do we know this?  Because Labour is promising to do the very same. 

Citizens will have their access to the internet guaranteed . . .

What will that mean?  Don't know really.  Hints are contained later in the grand policy announcement:

Accessing the internet is now an essential part of modern life. Labour will explore means of increasing public internet access –such as through libraries and Wi-Fi hotspots – to ensure all Kiwis can go online when they need to.

Wait a minute.  Exploring means of  increasing access to the internet is not a guarantee of access.

Bye, Bye Facebook

The Big Bad Ban is Coming

The ban is coming back.  It is a long favoured tool of centralist authoritarian governments; it was well favoured by the previous Labour regime.  The most recent Labour leader, Helen Clark tried to ban incandescent light bulbs, long showers, and human kindness.  The present aspiring Labour regime is promising to bring out the big ban all over again.  But bans associated with global warming are so passe.  Now the ban is going to go after the really big fish.  Labour is talking about banning the internet.

Normally one associates such draconian controls with totalitarian countries, such as China, North Korea, or Saudi Arabia.  Labour wants New Zealand to join these esteemed ranks.  This, from 3News:

The Big One

The Panoptican State Is Actually Operational

Yesterday the "big one" dropped.  The Guardian reported that the US and UK spy agencies have conspired together to gain control over on-line encryption, so that it is able to be cracked by them at will.  The Guardian also reports that internet companies known as the Big Four (Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook) are all complicit.

Through "covert partnerships with tech companies, the spy agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities into encryption software", reported the Guardian. 

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves. Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.

The bottom line is this: the United States and the UK (so far--there may be more) can access any and all internet communications and material by private citizens and corporations and all non-government entities at will.

SS Facebook Floats Then Sinks

Take the Money and Run

Did you get some Facebook shares?  Well, good for you.  You will now be part of the glorious rags to riches story.  But maybe not.

There are some uncomfortable rapids ahead.  Firstly, an old sage once observed that only fools and horses buy initial public offerings (IPO's).  OK, so you are going to miss a bargain occasionally.  But the whole purpose of a public offering in almost every case is to dress the company up for sale, hype it, promote it, tell all the goods news that is to come so as to get the best possible share price. IPO's parade mutton dressed as lamb.

Thus with Facebook. And that leads to our second point: Facebook shares at the IPO were priced at one hundred times current earnings.  That means, if earnings stayed the same as today, you would have to hold the shares one hundred years just to earn back the price you paid--let alone get a return on your investment.  Care to hang around that long?  No, of course not, you say.  Why not?

Great Work We'd Rather Not Have

 Unpaid Government Agents

Zen Tiger has written an important piece on the increasing trend to make businesses an administrative and enforcement arm of government.

The current stoush is over controlling the Internet.  In the latest piece of legislative coruscation, the US Congress has been considering bills which would appear to make all internet businesses legally responsible if they do not take positive action to shut an offender down and out.

A wartime moral equivalent would be that if a village did not rush to dob in a resistance fighter, the entire town would be wiped out.  Au contraire.  Any government which contemplates such moral and legal monstrosities should be shown the door.  Immediately.  By democratic means, of course.

Unfortunately, as Zen points out, the principle is now accepted, and is expanding.  It's an inevitable result of Big Government.  All the citizenry, in the end, becomes unpaid workers for the Big Guy, Sharkey.  Or else.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The Good of Affluence

Written by Douglas Wilson

Calvinism, Eschatology, and the New Media

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Jesus is the Lord of history, and this is why we don't need to be afraid of Twitter. Or Facebook. Or teenagers typing with their thumbs. Jesus is the Lord of history, which is why we don't need to worry about Google making us stupid. Don't mistake me. Google does make many of us stupid, but only in the same way that libraries have made us stupid for many centuries. Libraries make a handful of people really wise, and provide many others with artificial props for their footnotes. Everywhere the human race goes, it drags a bell curve around with it. We put on airs because of where we are on the existing curve (or we feel bad because of where we are on it), but we fail to recognize that a blue collar auto mechanic today is working with sophisticated electronics that would have completely stumped Aristotle on one of his good days. One half of all medical doctors graduated in the lower half of their class, right? We live in a time of tremendous innovation, development, and apparent chaos. There are many opportunities to worry about it all, and so I want to lay my cards on the table, and talk about why I am excited about the future. This is going to sound funny, but I am excited about the future because I am a postmillennialist. And I am a postmillennialist because I am a Calvinist who believes that the sovereign God over all things is truly, inexhaustibly, and fiercely good. He keeps His promises. We also need to remember that the eschatological future promised by the prophet Isaiah, and the future that was shaped by industrial revolution, and will continue to be shaped by the digital revolution, are the same future. I don't believe in an invisible spiritual future, shaped by the Holy Spirit, full of sweetness and light, and an actual historical future shaped by the Devil, Halliburton, the Illuminati, and Murphy's law. The world, this world, is presently going where Jesus is taking it. Be wise, but stop worrying. Part of being wise is that we do not forget the doctrine of sin. Sin is radical and deep, and capable of many cultural grotesqueries. We see them all the time, and we read about them all the time. Welcome to the spiritual war. Belief that we will win the war is not a denial of the reality of that war. My optimism is not of the kind that denies the existence of the battle. My optimism is of the kind that maintains that we are winning the battle. To change the metaphor, to believe that the car is gassed up, running fine, and on the right road, does not keep the kids from squabbling sinfully in the back seat.  This means that every new development presents us with opportunities to sin, and, in a sinful world, the initial impulse is to sin. Wealth gotten by old-fashioned labor is sustained. Wealth gotten the frothy way, dissipates quickly (Prov. 13:11) And so here is my central thesis: technology in all its forms is a type of wealth. The Bible contains no warnings about technology as such, but is crammed with warnings about the bias of wealth. Which way does wealth set us up? The Bible says that the wealthy are tempted to hubris, self-sufficiency, lack of concern for the poor, oppression, and the rest of that sorry lot. Wealth is a good thing, but it brings temptations. A lot of wealth is a lot of a good thing, but it brings with it a lot of temptations. Say a man comes into wealth, and the first thing he does is join three of the swankiest country clubs. Not a good harbinger. The same thing is true of the guy who gains his wealth, and who runs off to the inner city to join a new monastic community. That's a bad sign too. It does not profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul in the process (Matt. 16:26). This remains true even if the world is in the process of gaining the world, but loses its soul on the way. Wealth is not a substitute savior. It is a good thing, a creational good, and it is one which we are tempted to set up as an idol (Eph. 5:5; Col. 3:5). Until the resurrection, wealth is a good thing which always tends to distract us from our love for Christ, and the task at hand. Now, what we are seeing with the multitude of silly applications of Facebook, and Twitter, and music downloads, and research with Google books, and every new app you can think of, is the response of the noveau riche to windfall wealth -- a response that is as old as dirt. There is nothing whatever that is new about this. There is nothing new under the sun. We have always had worriers. Plato worried about the written word. At the birth of the modern era, others worried about the typeset word. Now we worry about the digitized word. And, let it be said, the worriers always have a point. There are always examples of folly that they can point to, and they are not making it up. But the fact that you are not making up the bad examples does not mean that you are fitting those bad examples into the right paradigm of interpretation. A good example of an erudite worrier would be Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. But for every book like that, given the propensity of Calvinists to worry needlessly, I would recommend that you read three like Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies, and Ridley's The Rational Optimist. Why should Calvinists worry? In the collision between the sovereignty of Jesus in history, and the influence of sin in history, sin is the certain loser. Now some will object that the books I have cited are not by believers. And I will point out in reply that things have gotten really bad when unbelievers can see what Jesus is doing more accurately than believers can. When unbelievers by common grace are reading history right side up, why should we reject that in favor of believers who are reading their Bible upside down? We worry about the course of history because we are not in control of it, and we like to pretend that this means no one is in control of it. But this follows not. Jesus is the Lord of history. He is the Lord of this. This will end well. It does not mean that everything ends well for everybody, but simply means that folly become apparent over time. In the long run, stupidity never works. You complain that some stupid teenager is exilarated because he has 28 superficial "friends" on Facebook. Okay, that's dumb, but how is it different from our practice of writing old-fashioned letters to a mortal enemy, making sure the letter begins with a term of endearment, "Dear . . ." Dear? Keeping moving, people. Nothing to see here. Nothing new here. Nothing new under the sun. Some are wise, and many are (comparatively) foolish. The only question before us now is whether or not we will be among the wise or the foolish. Carping criticism from outside, from the Unabomber cabin, is not an effective response. It is not wise -- even if you are gracious enough for it to be a Wendell Berry cabin instead. Jesus is the Word, and by His Incarnation He has sanctified the right use of words for all time. The Internet has given us a torrent of words -- what else is new? And the fact that the torrent has increased so much should fill us with a sense of exhilaration. Our responsibility as people of the Word is to give ourselves to the study and practice of how all this can be used wisely. If your use of Twitter is limited to informing all your followers that you are rummaging in the fridge for some Dr. Pepper at two a.m., then sure, quit that. But suppose you tell your followers that poverty and shame come to the one who refuses instruction, what now? How is that an abuse? It is a godly word. The constant and ever present temptation in the Church is the gnostic temptation of locating sin in the stuff, sin in the matter, sin in the wealth, sin in the technology . . . instead of locating it where it belongs, in the heart of man.

Degenerate Discourse

Shaky Ground

In the course of argument it is generally true that the weaker one's case, the more likely spite and vituperation against one's opponent will surface--quickly. Academics appear to be especially prone. Or so Theodore Dalrymple argues.

He observes that Richard Dawkins has recently experienced the syndrome.

Not every devotee of reason is himself reasonable: that is a lesson that the convinced, indeed militant, atheist, Richard Dawkins, has recently learned. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that he has learned it the hard way, for what he has suffered hardly compares with, say, what foreign communists suffered when, exiling themselves to Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, they learnt the hard way that barbarism did not spring mainly, let alone only, from the profit motive; but he has nevertheless learned it by unpleasant experience.

He ran a website for people of like mind, but noticed that many of the comments that appeared on it were beside the point, either mere gossip or insult. So he announced that he was going to exercise a little control over what appeared on it - as was his right since it was, after all, his site. Censorship is not failing to publish something, it is forbidding something to be published, which is not at all the same thing, though the difference is sometimes ill-appreciated.

The torrent of vile abuse that he received after his announcement took him aback. Its vehemence was shocking; someone called him ‘a suppurating rat’s rectum.’ He replied to this abuse with admirable restraint:

"Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, overreacting so spectacularly to something so trivial."

Some would suggest that Professor Dawkins was experiencing a particularly poetic form of justice, since in his public career he has been known to hurl gratuitous insults, mockery, and scorn at his opponents from time to time, and imply they were lagging behind the higher stages of human evolutionary development, of which he considers himself an avatar. But we digress.

Dalrymple goes on to observe that vituperation appears to be particularly prevalent in internet discourse, and that he himself has suffered it.

For example, I received unpleasant abuse for articles I wrote about Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw. I am the first to admit that what I wrote was not emollient, indeed it strongly attacked both these figures to whom some people are strongly attached. But while I might have been mistaken in what I wrote, I do not think I am being partial in my own defence when I say that it was at least rational in the sense that it was based upon evidence culled from what they wrote. I quoted them at some length precisely to avoid the accusation of quotation out of context.

It is not necessary to repeat here what I said about them, but I shall give just one example. I pointed out that George Bernard Shaw never believed in the germ theory of disease (possibly the greatest advance in medical science ever made), regarded it as a delusion, and called Pasteur and Lister – two of the greatest benefactors of mankind, if one is prepared to admit that there can be such – impostors and frauds who had no idea of scientific method, unlike George Bernard Shaw, presumably. This was a preposterous, but not untypical, misjudgement of his, and one which he never recognised as such. Indeed, he went on re-publishing his libels on their memory until quite late in his life.

I suspect that he had that contrarian mindset that supposes that the truth must be the opposite of what everyone thinks, instead of the judicious mindset that supposes that the truth might be the opposite of what everyone thinks.

From the quality of the replies that I received, you might have supposed that I had animadverted on the moral qualities of the mothers of Latin American sons. No one ever wrote a reply (on these subjects, at any rate) claiming that I had misquoted them, quoted them out of context, misrepresented the totality of their work, overlooked their good qualities etc. I do not think I did these things, but still such replies would have been reasonable. No; I just received abuse, some of it unprintable and quite a lot of it vile.

Now, from whom did the bile eruct? Dalrymple says it was largely and particularly from university professors.

Indeed, much of the abuse, even the vilest, came from university professors. Almost to a man (or woman), they said that what I had written was so outrageous, so ill-considered and ill-motivated, that it was not worth the trouble of refutation. On the other hand, they thought its author was worth insulting, if their practice was anything to go by. I didn’t know whether I – a mere scribbler – should feel flattered that I was deemed worthy of the scatological venom of professors (not all of them from minor institutions, and some of them quite eminent).

What struck me most about these missives is the sheer amount of hatred that they contained. It was not disdain or even contempt, but hatred.

The question is begged as to why this should be. Dalrymple observes that prior to the internet he used to get critical letters, but few containing the venom expressed via digital electronic media. He suggests it has something to do with the immediacy of the internet. It is hard to sustain venomous ire while sitting down and writing a letter, which in the nature of the case takes longer and forces one to be more deliberate. The features of immediacy and instantaneous release, he suggests, help facilitate ad hominem bile in internet discussion. Maybe.

But one would have thought that the professional stock-in-trade of academics was to critique analytically and that, even if brief, academics who were supposed masters of their subjects and craft, would be both adept at and used to employing pithy rejoinders. But alas, it would seem not. Instead unremitting ad hominem appears to be the order of the day when academics post on the internet.

Dalrymple thinks that the immediacy and relative anonymity of the medium is to blame.

So it seems to me at least possible that easy access to public self-expression tends to make people more bad-tempered and ill-mannered than they would otherwise have been. It releases people from inhibitions, and allows them to breach psychological barriers. Even wit suffers, for it is far easier to insult than to think of a really damaging, but amusing, witticism. To write to Professor Dawkins that one feels ‘a sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails down your throat’ is easier than to explain succinctly why he is wrong, if he is wrong.

Moreover, the fact that one can vituperate using a virtual rather than a real address promotes such verbal intemperance.

But it seems to us that these features may exacerbate, but are not themselves the cause or fundamental explanation for the syndrome. Ad hominem and personal vituperation is the first preserve of weak argument and shaky rational ground. In general academia in the West has claimed for itself (and been granted) virtual infallibility. Having denied God, the West looks for infallibility and certainty elsewhere, and its intellectual elites are it.

As Frank Furedi and others have argued, it has turned to "experts" who are always clothed with the garb of intellectual academia. Conformity to group-think and consensus has replaced argument, debate, and critique as ways of doing business because of the place in society in which academics sit and the functions they are expected to perform. Infallibility and debate do not sit well together. Society prefers certainty, not argument, when it wants to know "what to do". It therefore finds academic consensus much more congenial and consistent with its own narrative of the virtual infallibility of academic experts. It quickly becomes impatient with debate.

Academics, cloistered amongst group think and consensus, can inevitably find it difficult to cope with contrary views, which can quickly become typecast as blasphemous. Ad hominem, easily facilitated by the internet, becomes the response of choice. But what it betrays is that all the "learning", all the "knowledge" is built upon marshy foundations. Repetition and reiteration has been masquerading as truth. When one's familiar prejudices get exposed, vituperation is the reflexive response.

The outpouring of venom tells us far more about the true state of academia in the West than it does about the limitations of the internet.