Danger! 1533!!!

I just read a scary article about how Amazon can remotely delete content on customers' e-readers.
Aye caramba! Of course, the author says this could lead to real consequences resembling Orwell's "1984", but any real sci-fi geek would know that Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" is a much better analogy.

Anyway, I gotta go polish my pocket protectors and anagram some Asimov.

Duden, where's my vocab?

First, I'd like to thank Ms. in Tuba Town for the HTML makeover. I'm so glad the job wasn't entrusted to me, and it's awful snazzy. Woohoo!

Second, I wrote yesterday about the pros and cons of choosing a single language for Europe, and I said that languages were "the original spontaneous social order". I take this truth to be self-evident, but the news this morning reminded me that many would beg to differ. It seems a new Duden has been published, and the German conjugating classes are all atwitter because they can now officially use words like "Twitter", "Bad Bank" and "Flatrateparty" without making a mockery of themselves. Other words, like "Jahrweiser" (archaic word for "calendar") and "Cochonnerie" have been cut from the starting lineup of German vocabulary.

The interesting thing is that most Germans would most emphatically disagree that language is a self-organizing phenomenon, and I think it has to do with the German love of rules. When Germans talk about human rights or international law, it's as if they're talking about the laws of thermodynamics - naturally instituted, utterly clear and beyond dispute. It was a real pain in the @$$ back in my days as an English teacher, because Germans would often ask why Americans use "have" and the English use "have got", why there are multiple spellings for sceptical/skeptical or honour/honor, and who allows the regulator to be so careless. They could hardly conceive of the careless casuistry in the idea that the English language is simply what English speakers say and write.

Germans prefer a different system. There is an "Institute for German Language", which was actually tasked with devising a unified German spelling system. The result is pretty much universally despised, but most Germans, even the loudest critics, tend to complain more about the IGL's final product than questioning their legitimacy even to try. Most Germans will similarly tell you, if asked about the source of their words, that the Duden might not invent them, but it is the supreme criterion of acceptability. Again, they talk about these institutions and processes as if they are necessary and perfectly natural, ordained elements of Creation. Many of them would have an absolute hissy fit if they stopped and considered the fact that they have ceded final say of their vocabulary to a privately owned publishing house. Not only is that haphazard and undemocratic, it could lead to profit! Horror!

What the Germans, and most others too for that matter, might not realize is the extent to which all languages and vocabularies are sub-contracted to marketing types and ad-men. I had a discussion with Mrs. Klein this morning about whether or not the adjective "knackig" (crispy like a ripe apple) had any meaning when used as a modifier on interest rates. What the he11 is a crispy interest rate? She maintained that it is just a synonym for "good", but that implies that it can mean high or low with reference to interest rates, and I have a hard time with any adjective whose meaning is that flexible. Is any instrument that blunt worth having? The point, though, is that this was inspired by an ad, and some seem to accept immediately that crispy can apply to interest rates if it's been thusly printed somewhere. Let's not forget that "Twitter" is a brand name, and "tweeting" is a word invented by a company to describe interaction among its customers. The name of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing, was explicitly devised to encourage people to use it as a verb, just like "googling" (itself another verb née brand name).

To take things full circle, does any of this help with yesterday's quandary of whether it would be more liberal to harmonize European languages or to maintain memetic diversity. Absolutely! I reckon there are two ways to solve the problem liberally. First, we can let nature take its course and see which languages prevail. In a process of creative destruction, new terms, dialects and languages emerge where others fade. This is kind of Burkian conservative liberalism, because it allows for novelty by preserving the traditional process, which creates without being pushed. Second, we could all vote on what counts as a word and whether or not any given word ought to be welcomed into our common lexical repertoire. Letting everyone vote on new words and usages might sound like a hugely bureaucratic idea requiring all kinds of new standards about who's competent to vote, what the criteria would be and who's going to pay for it all. That's true, but only as long as you, like the Germans, want the process to be centralized. If, however, you're willing to let the process occur at a more grassroots, distributed level, well then, isn't that what we do already?

Haustiere! Update II

Fish!

I wanna be the yellow one!

Update:

I found a much better pet. We can edit all of the colors and background image and everything. Right now a fly is released every minute, but if you click in his box, a fly appears and he eats it :-)

@Claire: If you want to change the settings you have to reembed the applet. click on the link in the frog cage and you'll get to the website..


OK, I'm obviously just playing around now and im going to stop. Just added a little translation bar to the website: click the language and google translates our blog. Its kind of funny (and occasionally surprisingly accurate) to read what google translates. It seems to leave out a lot of verbs....

Anyway, feel free to vote on whether to keep this stuff, or just remove it outright..

Later

Google Rocks!

I'm trying to game the system on the Google search engine with our title..

We now come up number 5 on the search for "Exit port A" on google...

Unfortunately, if you don't use the quotes you get all kinds of other websites (appropriately mostly from the US and other immigration sites about entering and leaving the country). :-)

Keep linking the site places, like Facebook, StudiVZ, twitter and all that. Maybe we can get to 4th place!

United We Stand, Divided We Fall?

Today I was going to use Sarah Palin as a vehicle to bash the current state of the Republican party, but I quickly had the unpleasant feeling of beating a dead horse. Luckily, something else caught my eye.


As a polyglot living in a foreign country and studying spontaneous social order, it's hard to get around language. Language is the original spontaneous social order. There's a well-worn debate about how the EU should manage the fact that it has 23 official languages and should arguably have more. Leaving the technical, short-term efficiency arguments aside (i.e. how much easier would it make communication in the EU, and how much money would be saved, if there were a single language or a lingua franca), I'm torn between two longer term arguments for and against a single European language.


The long-term argument in favour relates to the potential to build a common identity. Showing cavalier disregard for standards of semantic rectitude, Americans would probably call this the "more perfect Union" argument, and it goes something like this. Most people, if they were sitting on a bus in Belgium, couldn't tell the Flemish from the Walloons. Ditto Catalans, Castellians, Basques. The same even applies across countries, which is clear if you've ever been to a big European tourist event (e.g. Oktoberfest, Love Parade, Bastille Day) and have heard the variety of languages spoken by spectators/participants. Similarly, many Europeans have pretty similar palettes with variation at the margins. Not everyone in Europe will enjoy regional delicacies like Swabian sour tripe or Czech fried cheese, but spaghetti, baguettes, schnitzel, kielbasa, and paella are welcome pretty much everywhere. Europeans used to fight about money, religion, borders, and ideology. Now they have a common currency, secularism (more or less), Schengen, and trans-European political parties. One of the few elements of European identity that still serves to create "otherness" and let Europeans make scapegoats of each other is language. Serbo-croatian is, for all intents and purposes, one language for everyone who doesn't speak it or is only learning. This is a very controversial statement, however, for native speakers. Greeks worry about Macedonian and Bulgarian migrants, but they would be hard pressed to identify these Balkan bugaboos if they all spoke a common tongue. In short, you can't understand people unless you understand people; a common language would unify European identity and induce greater social harmony. And if you agree that a common language would be a good thing, choosing which one should be a simple coordination problem.


The other side has banal and interesting variants. The banal form rails against monoculture and wishes to celebrate diversity. This is often accompanied by vapid sentiments amounting to a desire to use tie-dye as a social Leitmotif. The more interesting argument is pretty evolutionary. The Slovaks have a fantastic saying that, "With every language you learn, you gain a new soul." This is true in many ways. Every language seems to be able to express things that are ineffable in others. "Transitoriness" totally misses "Vergänglichkeit". "Whimsical" is not even a poor man's "rigolo". Thinking about words as organisms and semantic meaning as genes, you would want a certain amount of diversity to maintain a healthy population. Harmonizing language would restrict the number of possible ideas and their combinations. If you've ever tried to read Goethe or Rimbaud in English (never mind Shakespeare in German), you'll know what I mean. For much business and government, this is likely to be splitting hairs. A health care mandate is close enough to a Gesundheitsvorsorgeverpflichtung as to make no odds, but there's a lot of humanity that exists outside the technical categories. If we encourage politicians to harmonize their communication in the interest of harmony or efficiency, they might be inspired to encourage everyone else to do the same. Would this be the ideational equivalent of burning down rain forests or letting the Great Barrier Reef die?


And though I'm not concerned with being 'a good liberal' in anybody else's eyes, I can't for the life of me decide which is the better liberal argument.

Response

I'm posting my response to Ben's post here, because the interface is so much nicer that the little comment box...I wonder if that can be changed somewhere..

Anyway, I guess my first response to Ben's post is that the problem only arises if you accept the liberalist position that everyone does (or should) start from an equal position. Rawls does this in his theory of Justice and its exactly what bothers me about it: the assumption that to get an ideal system of justice everyone has to start at the same point. Not only does this render his theory practically usless (until he bends it to fit the real world later in Law of Peoples), the same problem lies at the base of all those philosophers' theories. If you start from an obviously idealized position its pretty hard to get back to reality.

Having said that, I don't think that a concept of political liberalism hinges on that concept. I would emphasize it as the goal of liberalism to acheive parity of opprotunity for everyone, and the acceptance of a paternalist state that limits our freedoms to try and acheive that goal. I think you can still retain a good chunk of liberalist theory if we could just accept that they start in the wrong place, but end up with the "right" (in my liberal relativist nihilist opinion) kinds of ideas about how government should work in relation to people and personal liberties.

The Elephant in the Liberal Salon, or All Who Were Created How?

The best definition of liberalism I can think of says that it's the disposition to assume that humans need and deserve as much freedom in their personal affairs as possible, and to ask what kinds of constraints are necessary to preserve that freedom. A sheep in a pen full of wolves isn't "free" in any meaningful sense, so some measures, like free education, free healthcare, a justice system and defence establishment are necessary to make sure that everyone has a fair shot at structuring their own lives as they see fit. This is list is illustrative, not necessarily comprehensive.

A big assumption here is that everybody starts off with equal means. To the extent that individuals' success or failure rests on their own decisions, the system is fair. You bet on a long shot and lose, it's your own fault; you play it safe and eke by, good for you; you strike it rich (whatever "rich" might mean contextually), well done! This system works really well so long as we can work with abstract assumptions about "human nature" in the style of the greats, like Kant, Smith, Hume, Mill, &c. For lack of knowledge how people are, we make an educated guess and extrapolate. The liberal idea would encounter serious trouble, though, if we had reason to believe that we don't all start on a level playing field, that the deck is systematically stacked in favour of some, that some of us are sheep and the rest are wolves.

There is trouble on the horizon. There was a piece in Slate a while back talking about genetic differences on IQ test results, and Steven Pinker has made a similar and more informed argument on similar lines. Some of arguments out there paint race as a big factor, but depending on your definition of race (and there are several ), I'm mixed race, so I don't have a stake in how that game, nor do I really want one. But it doesn't necessarily have to be about race at all. We've all interacted with people who just didn't seem to be able to keep up or who seemed to do effortlessly what we could only do with considerable toil. Our understanding of liberalism will work so long as the inherently disadvantaged or privileged are just marginal quantities. Most developed countries can deal fairly well with their own mentally handicapped. It would also be fine if everyone had a valuable skill. Modern service economies, which is the direction everybody seems to be moving, value only certain types of skills, and it seems that these might not be randomly distributed nor that there is a huge hump of mediocrity with a few high fliers and knuckle-draggers on either end. Rather, it seems that people are spread out in terms of intellectual ability, the distribution might depend on certain predictable factors, and intellectual ability seems to count extra relative to other abilities, at least in any country I'd want to live in.

Given that this could be the case, liberals have a lot of soul searching to do. The first big question is: does this represent a threat to the liberal way of doing things? If no, how can society be considered fair (without too much sophistry)? If yes, can liberalism or the system be reconfigured to deal with it? I mean, genetic engineering should make this a technical problem, provided everyone has equal access to improvements (note: these improvements would probably have to be chosen prenatally, so you'd be stuck with your parents' choice, like your name - is that any more liberal?). If everyone were engineered to have similar qualities, what could we still consider meritorious? Did you really earn it if you were designed from (before) birth to achieve it? If the status quo remains, the question of merit remains too, and it circles back to affirmative action-type arguments. Is a runner-up actually more deserving than the winner because the winner had inherently better odds of winning?

Without wanting to anticipate any easy answers, I'd like to get the debate rolling.

First Question

Since Ben and I have talked about Mathew Yglesias a bit and referenced him in the e-mail chain that led to this blog, I thought I should link something of him to get a bit of discussion going:


http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/07/ben-nelson-attributes-his-zeal-for-defending-the-interests-of-rich-people-to-the-public-at-large.php



He discuses one of the problems of our government and more practically as one of the major obstacles of getting Obama's reforms passed: the lazyness and general inertia of senators in particular to get off their asses. Yglesias picks on conservative demoracts in particular, but I think the same thing could be said for all moderates, even the republicans. Surely there are some republicans that would support health care reform in some way, but the all at like the probelm is so damn hard and huge so they never begin anything.

Anyway, i guess the question is, how can we change this aspect of the US political system? I would venture to sy that this sort of inertia (for lack of a better word) is intrinsic in many governments, but I'll leave that kind of statement to the political scientists. Are there practical measures to be taken to minimize this sort of behaviour? Is it even undesirable for the government to be like this sometimes
(hopefully not all the time, right?)?

out..

Oh yea, Oh yea

I'm on a boat motherfucker!

Its amazing how quickly a vague idea can take shape when you get a few like minded folks together who have an interest in projecting their brain farts into the ether.

I'm glad to be here, glad you guys are here, and love the name...

-A