Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

A Pack, Not A Herd

5 Comments

Some sense from across the pond, on the policy foolishness of disarming the citizenry. As Mumbai showed, it only makes people helpless victims against the enemy. And in broad terms, the enemy is anyone who worships entropy and mayhem. As Alfred said in Dark Knight, “Some men just want to see the world burn.” And they will get their wish if we don’t defend ourselves against them.

Rhetoric about standing firm against terrorists aside, in Britain we have no more legal deterrent to prevent an armed assault than did the people of Mumbai, and individually we would be just as helpless as victims. The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

Nineteenth-century London (and India) was much better suited for civil defense against monsters like this than the twenty-first century version.

Education, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Appalling State Of Higher Education

9 Comments

This is a depressing story about the inability to enforce rules against plagiarism, and the comments more so. I don’t think it was this way when I was in school.

And of course, it’s of a piece with a general decline of ethics among the young. And why should they care? The system doesn’t. I’m starting to think that Glenn Reynolds is right — academia is the next overfunded speculative, empty bubble about to burst.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

We Know What We Like

1 Comment

Lileks has a meditation on modern art:

It’s not the humanism that ruined art, it was humanism that divorced itself from the possibility of transcendence. Which would be bad enough if it hadn’t decided to splash around in the gutters as well.

Ah, but why was it influential? It recontextualized the commonplace and made us see it as Art, a process that continues to this day every time you see a book with a title like “The Art of Bread” or “The Art of Toad Sexing” or whatever else has to be elevated to the status of marble sculpture to make the user feel they’re living a rarified life. It played a joke on the Stuffy Academics, which is something the adolescent temperament never tires of doing. This is not encouraged any more, since the Academics are on the side of Truth and Modernity, however defined today. Although I once knew an architecture student who took perverse and boundless glee in shocking his teacher by putting a pointy roof on the house each student had to design. A pointed roof. In other words, a useful roof, a functional roof that didn’t collect rain water. Everyone else had a flat roof, of course. Machine for Living and all that. This was just around the time Post-Modernism made it okay to quote history, as long as everyone saw you wink, or could understand that your overscaled grotesque excretions were meant ironically.

An instructor might not know what to make of a house with a point roof, but if you called it “House In The Time of Reagan” he’d understand.

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Administrative, Education, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

A User-Hostile Service

18 Comments

As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I’ve been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.

I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven’t actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).

But that’s not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.

When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

[message from unnamed service…]

In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).

The response was:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

Hi

Your reply was blank. I’m assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.

Oh. OK.

They were serious.

They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn’t want to see their response in my response.

Is it just me, or are they nuts?

Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):

One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:

1) not include my response in your response and

2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?

Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it’s almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).

WHY DO YOU DO THIS?

Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?

This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.

The response?

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.

Here is my response:

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
==========================================================

Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive…

It is important because I would like to have some context for what I’m responding to, and you should have some context for what you’re responding to, in the email to which you’re responding. If I want to find out what we’re talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we’re talking about. If you don’t find this annoying, I don’t frankly understand why. If you don’t want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That’s how it worked on Usenet for years.

===========================================================

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
===========================================================

Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.

Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I’ve been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn’t, but you can’t imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.

That’s where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?