I heard on the radio this morning that Gordon Brown wants to introduce voting for 16-year-olds. This makes sense, I thought. Children live in a socialist utopia*: it’s basically to each according to his need, from each according to his ability the whole time they’re growing up. To each food, shelter, toys, TV, a lift to school; from each the odd chore (but with no important consequences for being unable to be bothered with chores because although you might get shouted at, the food, shelter, toys, TV and lifts to school will still come).
All of which means children are more likely to vote for a socialist government. Or does it? One far more insightful than me pointed out that Gordon Brown is not very cool, and in any case children are likely to either vote for who their parents vote for or rebel and vote for the guy their parents hate. Students are more likely to be left wing, it was granted. This, I said, is because they are net beneficiaries of the state. They’ll soon change their minds when they have to go out and work. Perhaps, I suggested, instead of allowing children to vote, the opposite should be done: only allow people to vote who are net givers to, and disallow voting by net takers from the state coffers. And then, coincidentally, I saw this on Samizdata:
I quite like the idea “you can either work for the state and live off other people’s money or you can vote, but not both”.
Seems like a great idea to me. After all, the connection between children and socialism runs the other way. The handouts and the ‘ealth ‘an safety and the victim and identity politics are all ways of treating people like children. Eager to return to the comfort of the womb, they vote for it.
* I remember seeing an episode of an American sitcom once, perhaps it was The Cosby Show. In it there is some kind of disagreement between the teenaged son and his dad about being treated like a grown-up. Son comes home one day, and Dad’s there with a list of chores and the amount of money the son can earn for doing them. The son is pleased at how much he can earn; he’s going to be rich! When he gets to his room it’s empty, the furniture has all been stripped out. What’s going on? Dad hand’s him another list with prices for furniture, rent, food and so-on. It would be a great child-raising idea, I think, to try this at least once!
Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 3:46 PM EST
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On the way home to visit my parents at the weekend, I spotted a building site on fire. I could see the fire engines coming down the road, so I stopped to take some photos of the boys doing their work.
I might have all the gear, but I’m not a professional. A professional wouldn’t have accidentally set his camera to JPEG mode instead of RAW, and left the exposure compensation on -1.3EV, producing underexposed shots. A bit of photoshop work has straightened them out, though — such is the joy of digital!
And they were good enough that a couple of local papers took me up on my offer to print some of them. The Southampton Echo has already printed one with my name under it, and the South Hants edition of the Hampshire Chronicle and its associated free paper NewsExtra will be printing one each this Thursday. Fame at last!
Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 12:45 AM EST
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I’m thoroughly engrossed in Neal Stephenson’s (a name I first heard on Samizdata) Cryptonomicon. It’s got everything: fascinating and educating descriptions of crytographic techniques; characters so geeky I can relate to them and so cool I want to be them all at the same time; philosophical asides; complicated and intricate jokes; complicated and intertwined plot-lines; history; economics; paranoia; war; you name it.
Stephenson’s writing style is sublime. Here’s an excerpt on the wierd relationship between religion and sex:
He’s going to church, and not exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his works, but because he wants to fuck Mary. He almost can’t help flinching when he says (to himself) this terrible-sounding thing. As long as he goes to church, he can want to fuck Mary as much as he wants, he can spend all of his time, in and out of church, thinking about fucking Mary. He can let her know that he wants to fuck her as long as he finds a more oblique way of phrasing it. And if he jumps through certain hoops (hoops of gold) he can even fuck Mary in actuality, and it will all be perfectly acceptible — at no time will he have to feel the slightest trace of shame or guilt.
On the environment (from the point of view of a character who’s just spent some time actually in the environment):
All that’s out there is jungle, which has two sets of connotations going for it now. One is the spooky Tarzan/Stanley & Livingstone/”The horror, the horror”/natives-are-restless/Charlie’s out there and waiting for us kind. The second is the more modern and enlightened sort of Jacques Cousteauian teeming-repository-of-brilliant-and-endangered-species, lungs-of-the-planet kind. Neither really works for Randy anymore, which is why despite the state of hibernatory torpor he shunted into the moment his ass impacted on the navy blue leather of the seat, he feels a little spike of irritation every time one of the other passengers, peering out a window, pronounces the word “jungle.” To him, it is just a shitload of trees now, trees going on for miles and miles, up the little hilly-willies and down the little hilly-willies. It is easy, now, for him to understand tropical denizens’ shockingly frank and blunt craving to drive through this sort of territory in the largest and widest available bulldozers…”
On Aztecs vs. Spaniards (the text is littered with thought provoking stuff like this):
“The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days.”
“Why?”
“Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don’t know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that’s why.”
Here’s an example of the humour and the surprising plot development:
“The lethal radius of this bitch is a good sixty feet,” Shaftoe says. He is hauling mortar bombs out of the crate and stacking them next to the hatch. “Or maybe it’s meters, I can’t remember.” The bombs look like fat footballs with tailfins on one end.
“Feet, meters . . . the distinction is important,” Root says.
“Maybe it’s overkill. But we have to get back to Norrsbruck and take care of Julieta.”
“What do y0u mean, take care of her?” Root says warily.
“Marry her.”
“What?”
“One of us has to marry her, and fast. I don’t know about you, but I kind of like her, and it’d be a shame if she spent the rest of her life sucking Russian dick at gunpoint,” Shaftoe says. “Besides, she might be pregnant with one of our kids. Yours, mine, or Gunter’s.”
“We, the conspiracy, have an obligation to look after our offspring,” Root agrees. “We could establish a trust fund for them in London.”
“There should be plenty of money for that,” Shaftoe agrees. “But I can’t marry her because I have to be available to marry Glory when I get to Manila.”
“Rudy can’t do it,” Root says.
“Because he’s a fag?”
“No, they marry women all the time,” Root says. “He can’t do it because he’s German, and what’s she going to do with a German passport?”
“It would not be savvy exactly,” Shaftoe agrees.
“That leaves me,” Root says. “I’ll marry her, and she’ll have a British passport. Best in the world.”
“Huh,” Shaftoe says, “how does that square with your being a celibate monk or priest or whatever the fuck you supposedly are?”
Root says, “I’m supposed to be celibate–”
“But you’re not,” Shaftoe reminds him.
“But God’s forgiveness is infinte,” Root fires back, winning the point. “So as I was saying, I’m supposed to be celibate–but that doesn’t mean I can’t get married. As long as I don’t consumate the marriage.”
“But if you don’t consumate it, it doesn’t count!”
“But the only person, besides me, who will know that we didn’t consumate it, is Julieta.”
“God will know,” Shaftoe says.
“God doesn’t issue passports,” Root says.
“What about the church? They’ll kick you out.”
“Maybe I deserve to be kicked out.”
“So let me get this straight,” Shaftoe says, “when you really were fucking Julieta, you said you weren’t and so you were able to remain a priest. Now you’re going to marry her and not fuck her and say that you are.”
“If you’re trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very complicated, I already know that, Bobby.”
“Let’s go, then,” Shaftoe says.
Here’s a description of airport security (he describes exactly how I feel when dealing with these goons):
The most Kafkaesque moment is, as always, when the customs official asks what he does for a living, and he has to devise an answer that will not sound like the frantic improvisations of a drug mule with a belly full of ominously swelling heroin-stuffed condoms. “I work for a private telecommunications provider” seems to be innocuous enough. “Oh, like a phone company?” says the customs official, as if she’s having none of it. “The phone market isn’t really available to us,” Randy says, “so we provide other communications services. Mostly data.” “Does that involve a lot of travelling around from place to place then?” asks the customs official, paging through the luridly stamped back pages of Randy’s passport. She makes eye contact with a more senior customs official who sidles over towards them. Randy now feels himself getting nervous, exactly the way your drug mule would, and fights the urge to scrub his damp palms against his pant legs, which would probably guarantee him a trip through the magnetic tunnel of a CAT scanner, a triple dose of mint-flavored laxative, and several hours of straining over a stainless-steel evidence bucket. “Yes it does,” Randy says.
It’s almost as if Stephenson is an old friend who has written a book specifically for me, such is the extent to which I can appreciate his mindset. The quality never lets up. He could write about paint drying and it would be a compelling read. I can tell I’m going to spend many more happy hours devouring the rest of his work.
Related links: Stephenson’s description of a market; Stephenson interviewed on Slashdot; official web site (via which, incidentally, I found an article about introverts which Stephenson says he is); personal web site.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links, Reviews at 12:08 AM EST
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The law, as ever, seems a bit illogical to me. You can go about threatening to kill people and the police will stand quietly by. You can go about selling things to people who want to buy them, and that lands you in jail. (Even eating the wrong things can land you in jail).
As it happens I don’t think you should be sent to jail just for holding up a sign, no matter what it says, for the same reasons that Joshua outlines in comments on a Samizdata article (”If we let the government automatically label all such displays as “inciting to violence,” then we’ve effectively allowed them to ban a certain kind of opinion”). It does strike me as odd, though, that some people can get away with that, and some people can’t. You can even get arrested for goading the people holding the signs saying they want to kill people. (”The only arrests made were of two men found carrying cartoons of Mohammed.”) You can even get fined for insulting horses or speed cameras.
It’s all a bit daft. It’s about time people adopted some consistent principles instead of squabbling over who said what to whom.
Update: I listened to the Iranian world band broadcast in English last night, and there was no mention of any cartoons. They were too busy bashing America for interfering in their nuclear plans.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties, News at 8:21 PM EST
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The Alan Bown Set Before and Beyond
