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2001-11-30

I'm sad about the death of George Harrison. His songs with the Beatles have always impressed me -- there is a twist to them, a style of words and melody that sets them apart from those of Lennon and McCartney. It's hard to put my finger on what makes "You Like Me Too Much" different from "The Night Before", "Think For Yourself" different from "Another Girl", "Something" different from "Because" (to choose some songs at random), but to me a Harrison song has always been distinctive (even aside from a song like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", which is sui generis). I also admire songs like "For You Blue", "Old Brown Shoe", and even his Indian-influenced songs (especially "The Inner Light" with its lyrics from Lao Tzu). And this is not to mention his guitar-playing, which as a sometime guitarist myself I've always appreciated.

Posted on 2001-11-30 at 20:50. File under music.

~ link ~

It's amazing what a little poke can do. I emailed Doc earlier today and already the SuitWatch archives are working. So now you can read his SuitWatch for November 29th, referred to below. Thank you, Doc!

Posted on 2001-11-30 at 20:04. File under technology.

~ link ~

Speaking of Jabber, there's a good discussion going on at Linux Journal about Doc's recent article there entitled Jabber Asks the Tough Question. Doc's November 19 blog entry is also of interest. I need to read all this stuff and catch up on the conversation!

Posted on 2001-11-30 at 13:56. File under jabber.

~ link ~

I can now mention that James Barry has been named CTO of Jabber, Inc. (my employer). Although I've worked with James a bit in the Jabber Software Foundation, I'm excited about the opportunity to work more closely with him. He's a smart, enthusiastic, experienced person and I think he'll bring a lot of value to our Jabber efforts (both commercial and open-source). Plus he said he's going to start blogging soon, which will be great because we need more Jabber folks publishing their thoughts out into the ether (right now I think it's just me and Andre, though Doc often mentions Jabber, too).

Posted on 2001-11-30 at 13:25. File under jabber.

~ link ~

The latest issue of SuitWatch from Doc Searls is incendiary. Literally. He writes:

• Markets are conversations
• Conversation is fire
• Marketing is arson

Unfortunately, the SuitWatch list archive at http://www.ssc.com/pipermail/suitwatch/ is not working so I can't link to his article. Maybe I'll poke Doc about that. But by all means sign up for SuitWatch -- it's well worth the reading!

Posted on 2001-11-30 at 10:42. File under technology.

~ link ~

2001-11-27

In the last few days I've fixed up two more of my essays on Ayn Rand: The Death of Taxes and Objectivism and the Meaning of Life. I'm now hoping I can finish, and perhaps even publish, this collection by the date of the Ayn Rand centenary (2005-02-02). Ah, the mental life of a recovering Randian. :-)

Posted on 2001-11-27 at 21:52. File under personal.

~ link ~

Bob Ewegen of the Denver Post has published a follow-up article to his piece on "Libertarian Leadville". Although I'm not much for organizations, I'm thinking I might get involved in the Colorado LP. The national party is screwed up (as has been detailed in the pages of Liberty magazine) and I will not join it, but I think I'd be comfortable supporting state and local affiliates of the LP. However, I don't think I'll spend as much time on LP activities as I did back when I lived in Essex County, New Jersey and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Posted on 2001-11-27 at 12:41. File under politics.

~ link ~

2001-11-24

As an indication of how far back into reality I've been pulled by recent events, I've even started thinking about politics again! Although I've always felt that politics is only one aspect of life (and not nearly the most important), that did not stop me from becoming heavily involved in the Libertarian Party back in the mid-1990s, writing numerous letters to the editor on topics of the day, and the like. Last night I started doing some reading related to an essay I've long wanted to write entitled "Anarchy, State, and Objectivism". As might be expected, partly I just like that title (evocative as it is of Robert Nozick's famous book on political philosophy), but more seriously I would like to figure out where I stand politically, and how that relates to the philosophy of Objectivism (there is not a little of "Objectivism, c'est moi" in my writings, I suppose).

In my teens and early twenties I was probably best characterized as somewhere on the Randian Right, then I discovered libertarianism as a political movement, then I became officially apathetic for a few years (which, conveniently, enabled me to pretty much tune out the Clinton presidency) -- for a while there I even thought of writing an essay entitled "In Praise of Apathy"! I still think there is wisdom in some degree of political apathy, since it can bespeak a healthy regard for pursuing one's own life and goals rather than losing oneself in the body politic.

Posted on 2001-11-24 at 21:41. File under politics.

~ link ~

2001-11-21

I've been doing some reading and thinking of late about religion. For instance, last night I read Zia Sardar's book Introducing Muhammad. I've enjoyed some of his essays about Islam and the West, but I must say this book was a disappointment. The general tone was one of jingoistic breast-beating, in which all things Muslim are good and original. As noted in a previous blog entry, I'm well aware that the modern West owes a debt of gratitude to the open society that flourished in the Islamic world during the (European) Middle Ages. But to ascribe all intellectual and material progress in the modern West to precursors in the Islamic world is wrong-headed, not to mention unnecessary. The reality of those contributions (from mathematics to medicine) is tarnished by the presence of outright falsehoods such as Sardar's claim that in 623 CE or thereabouts Muhammad created the world's first written constitution when such documents existed about one thousand years earlier in ancient Greece. Yet it's clear that Islamic society contained much of value. Probably it still does, but unfortunately the spirit of open inquiry characteristic of that society up until the 1100s or 1200s died out. One of the strong contributing reasons seems to have been the rise of the Asharite school of Islamic theology, which strongly criticized and eventually vanquished the Mutazilite school. The Mutazilites, led by great scholars such as Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ibn Rushd, had sought to integrate Greek learning (and especially Aristotelian philosophy) with Islamic thought, much as Aquinas did somewhat later (and probably on the Mutazilite model) in integrating secular Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. Unfortunately the Mutazilites were overwhelmed by the Asharites, who argued that reason was strictly limited and that human beings were incapable of creative activity. The ascendance of such views led eventually to the closing of the Islamic mind. I wonder if the more reason-oriented views within the Islamic tradition can be rediscovered. Renaissance, anyone?

In the last few days I also re-read Abraham Maslow's book Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. I've liked Maslow's perspective on things ever since I discovered his works in college. He has a naturalistic approach to the spiritual life that I find appealing and refreshing, and on which I'll write at greater length sometime. Here are two representative quotes:

Small 'r' religion is quite compatible, at the higher levels of personal development, with rationality, with science, with social passion. Not only this, but it can, in principle, quite easily integrate the healthily animal, material, and selfish with the naturalistically transcendent, spiritual, and axiological. [Preface]

I want to demonstrate that spiritual values have naturalistic meaning, that they are not the exclusive possession of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them, that they are well within the jurisdiction of a suitably enlarged science, and that, therefore, they are the general responsibility of all mankind. [Introduction]

Which reminds me of a quote from Victor Hugo: "Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God. True philosophy turns aside from religions, and pushes forward to religion." (A Post-Script to My Life, section 8, Life and Death)

Posted on 2001-11-21 at 20:52. File under philosophy.

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Victor Davis Hanson on some lessons of military history. His conclusion? Once finished in Afghanistan, we must train our guns on Iraq and topple the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein.

Posted on 2001-11-21 at 19:59. File under society.

~ link ~

CNET says the open-source approach fades in tough times. More food for thought on open source. I've long thought that the Sendmail and Covalent model (mentioned in the article) is a great one for Jabber, Inc. to follow: grow the adoption of open-source implementations while selling proprietary technologies that interoperate with open standards to companies with deep pockets. Happily, it seems to be working for my employer, too. Jabber, Inc. is the only company that can do this in the IM market because Jabber is the only IM technology built on an open standard, much as Sendmail is built on SMTP and Apache is built on HTTP and HTML. There's a lot we need to do in the Jabber world to encourage adoption of the Jabber protocol, though -- that's something on which Jabber, Inc., the Jabber Software Foundation, and major adoptees of Jabber technology will be working hard over the next year or two.

Posted on 2001-11-21 at 13:46. File under technology.

~ link ~

Eric Norlin worries:

Is Jabber going to end up in the dustbin of "independent commercial developers"?? I guess I'm just really wondering how they're gonna jump the massive chasm that lies in front of them. (oh btw, answers to questions like this are *how* you get small consulting shops like mine to push stuff like Jabber...ie, we don't wanna install it on 30 client systems if we think it won't be here in a year.)

Not to worry, Eric -- Jabber will be there. Why? Because Jabber is not an independent commercial developer. Rather, Jabber is an open protocol for instant messaging and (more technically) for routing XML between any two points on a network. There happens to be at least one commercial implementation of Jabber (created by Jabber, Inc.), but there is also at least one open-source implementation (created by the team at jabber.org before commercializing this technology was a glimmer in some entrepreneur's eye) -- and the open-source implementation meets the needs of most of the market for an open, interoperable IM product/service. Ergo: you can install it on 30 client systems and know that it will be here in a year. Makes you sleep well at night, doesn't it? :-)

Posted on 2001-11-21 at 13:34. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Lots of ferment going on in the blog world regarding open-source software, with Doc Searls, Dave Winer, and Eric Norlin (among many others, I'm sure) weighing in. I've been thinking quite a bit about open source as well, of late, mostly in relation to Jabber, naturally. I may even post a longer essay on the topic tonight.

Posted on 2001-11-21 at 13:02. File under technology.

~ link ~

On this date last year, I started keeping a journal, which I'd never done before, even though my personal website went live in early 1996. And after September 11th I starting keeping this weblog, so now I'm webbing and journalling and blogging -- oh my!

Posted on 2001-11-21 at 12:23. File under personal.

~ link ~

2001-11-20

Ari Armstrong has put together a web page containing reflections on the September 11 atrocity from various individuals who are broadly within the libertarian tradition. Interestingly, the perspectives range from rabidly pro-war (e.g., hard-core Randian Leonard Peikoff) to rabidly anti-war (e.g., long-time anarchist and two-time LP presidential candidate Harry Browne). Does libertarianism truly overcome the supposedly specious distinctions between left and right? Sometimes I wonder....

Posted on 2001-11-20 at 21:36. File under politics.

~ link ~

Yet more interesting reading: historian Paul Johnson on why West is best. His list of key inventions and social practices behind the rise of Western civilization makes sense to me, and comports with the findings of books like How the West Grew Rich.

Posted on 2001-11-20 at 20:43. File under society.

~ link ~

Surfing around the website of the Libertarian Party of Colorado, I came across this interview with LP founder David Nolan. He has an interested theory, which I saw him give a speech about on C-SPAN once, regarding the cycles of American political history and the probability that we'll witness a political and cultural sea-change in 2004 or thereabouts. In fact he thinks that the events of September 11th make such a radical change more, not less, likely -- and he argues that, unfortunately, the change will likely be in an authoritarian or fascistic direction, not in the direction of freedom.

Posted on 2001-11-20 at 20:28. File under politics.

~ link ~

Hmm, is this a real-life Galt's Gulch? Not quite, but it does warm my heart to learn that the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado now has a Libertarian majority on the city council. At one time I was heavily involved in the Libertarian Party (I even started a run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996), so it's good to see them having some success. Even though Leadville is small, it is, at 10,152 feet above sea level, the highest incorporated town in the U.S., so you could say that the Libertarian Party now commands the heights! :-) I'm thinking perhaps Elisa and I will take a drive up to Leadville over the holiday weekend and see what all the fuss is about. I emailed a bit with the author of the above-referenced article and he said Leadville is a town with real people in it, unlike so many Colorado mountain towns (can you say Aspen?). Sounds good to me.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "Do not let it be your aim to be something, but to be someone." (A Post-Script to My Life, section 12, Thoughts)

Posted on 2001-11-20 at 19:56. File under politics.

~ link ~

2001-11-16

Loyal readers of this weblog (yes, all three of you!) may wonder why every day I include a quote from Victor Hugo. Well, 26 February 2002 will be the 200th anniversary of Hugo's birth, so I suppose you could say I'm starting the celebration a little early. Over the last few years I have read nearly every scrap of Hugo that has been translated into English, during which process I have gathered many quotes from his writings. Rather than force people to read all those quotes at one sitting, I figure I'll parcel them out day by day and address them to the topical (or not-so-topical) issues I discuss here. Naturally what is topical today will become obscure tomorrow, but I hope that the quotes I've gathered from Hugo will remain of value when I revisit these pages in years to come.

Today's quote: "History is night. That which is no longer on the stage immediately fades into obscurity. The scene is shifted, and all is forgotten." (The Man Who Laughs, II.8.iii)

Posted on 2001-11-16 at 21:02. File under literature.

~ link ~

I found two older articles by Zia Sardar that are quite good, one pointing out that terrorism is anti-Islam and another describing his fatwa on the fanatics. I notice he has written a book on Islam entitled Introducing Muhammad, which through the wonders of information technology I've just reserved at the Denver Public Library.

Posted on 2001-11-16 at 20:30. File under society.

~ link ~

Jim Robbins describes Bin Laden's failed strategy, while Victor Davis Hanson describes his failed ideology.

Posted on 2001-11-16 at 20:03. File under society.

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Thomas Friedman continues his reflections on the present and future of the Muslim world, quoting an open letter from Izzat Majeed to Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani newspaper The Nation.

Posted on 2001-11-16 at 16:39. File under society.

~ link ~

2001-11-15

The other night I posted a new essay at the Monadnock Review, the literary webzine I edit. This essay contains some thoughts of mine on the purpose of art, refracted through a contrast between Ayn Rand and Victor Hugo. There's much more I could have said about Hugo and Rand, but I didn't want to make the essay too long or academic. I see this essay fitting into my ongoing project of a collection of essays on Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

The Economist has a good perspective on the supposed conflict between the Christian West and Muslim East. I've been skeptical of assertions by writers like Paul Johnson and John Derbyshire that we're witnessing the continuation of centuries-old Christian-Muslim conflict, dating back at least as far as the Crusades.

My old friend Jim Robbins is at it again (and again). He's an entertaining writer. Jim's comments about what would happen if Osama Bin Laden were tried in American courts if captured alive are instructive. I wonder if it's the spectre of such a farce that has goaded Bush into seizing the dictatorial power to try foreign nationals in military courts using any rules the administration deems convenient -- certainly a dangerous precedent and a serious step on the road to tyranny.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "Despotism violates the moral frontier just as foreign invasion violates the geographical frontier." (Les Miserables, IV.13.iii)

Posted on 2001-11-15 at 19:43. File under philosophy.

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2001-11-10

Victor Davis Hanson strikes again, this time with a devastating indictment of the "America Can Do No Right" school of cultural and political criticism.

Posted on 2001-11-10 at 20:36. File under society.

~ link ~

Now playing: the music of Enrique Granados. Gorgeous.

Posted on 2001-11-10 at 20:32. File under music.

~ link ~

Cool. The Economist is running a feature on the beneficial effects of technology diffusion in Third World countries. I'll have to look at the print version to get the whole story, though. I don't subscribe to magazines anymore, but The Economist is the one magazine for which I keep thinking I'd make an exception.

Posted on 2001-11-10 at 20:03. File under society.

~ link ~

Last night I created a new entry in my journal, completing my reflections on the plays of Henrik Ibsen (whose last play, When We Dead Awaken, I read a few nights ago).

Posted on 2001-11-10 at 18:15. File under literature.

~ link ~

I've been reading, quite enjoyably, the essays of E.B. White. In Here is New York he wrote the following lines, so prescient as to spook the reader:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistable charm.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "When events, which are variable, ask us a question, justice, which is immutable, calls on us to answer." (Ninety-Three, III.6.ii)

Posted on 2001-11-10 at 17:33. File under society.

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2001-11-07

Thomas Friedman on fighting Bin Ladenism.

Posted on 2001-11-07 at 21:18. File under society.

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Charles Krauthammer on the real new world order. Michael Young on Arabs, Anger, and America.

Posted on 2001-11-07 at 20:49. File under society.

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Voters in my locality (Denver) showed some sense in this year's election. Funding for a new $500 million "justice center" was rejected, as were a sales tax for undefined children's programs (we have to do it for the children!) and a $50 million feasibility study for building a monorail to wealthy ski areas up in the mountains.

Posted on 2001-11-07 at 20:31. File under politics.

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Laissez Faire Books has an interesting interview with philosopher Robert Nozick. I keep meaning to re-read his book Philosophical Explanations...

Posted on 2001-11-07 at 20:14. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Yesterday I temporarily joined an unmoderated Randian discussion list (temporarily in order to discuss my friend Chris Sciabarra, who is currently in the hospital undergoing surgery for a serious kidney ailment). I haven't been on one of these lists in a while and now I remember why! One of the first messages I read was from someone who said he likes Chris' work even though "I don't agree with him on everything..." I have seen this phrase so often in Randian circles that a few years ago I began to wonder about it. Is there some special value to be found in agreeing with someone on everything? Does this phrase assume that "agreement on everything" is a kind of default case, requiring caveats if full agreement does not obtain? What would agreement on everything even look like or feel like? Would agreement on everything require an identity of minds? Heck, I don't think even that could be true, because I know that I don't even agree with myself on everything (at least historically -- e.g., I have been known to change my mind about things). Reminds me of those bumper stickers that read "Ayn Rand Was Right" -- about everything??? Even when she contradicts herself?

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "Nothing equals the power of voluntary deafness in fanatics." (William Shakespeare, III.1.iii)

Posted on 2001-11-07 at 19:27. File under personal.

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2001-11-06

Victor Davis Hanson on the dogs of war. Damn but he can write!

Posted on 2001-11-06 at 21:38. File under society.

~ link ~

Last night I read both Ayn Rand's novel Anthem and the penultimate Ibsen play: John Gabriel Borkman. The latter is a strong play for Ibsen's later efforts, with quite a bit of irony and even some comedic elements. Once again we find some of his major themes (the folly living through others, the importance of independence, the evasion of honesty in living), with the focus this time being on Borkman's son Erhart, whom Borkman, his wife Gunhild, and Gunhild's twin sister Ella all pin their hopes and lives on. Erhart will have nothing to do with it and leaves them all in the lurch by running off with a strong-headed, fun-loving, thirty-something divorcee named Fanny Wilson (why is it that so many of the life-loving characters in Ibsen's plays come from outside Norway, usually it seems from England or America?). Erhart and Wilson recognize that their relationship may not last forever, but as he says "I only want the chance to live" -- a chance he was always denied by his suffocating family. So I have one more Ibsen play to read: When We Dead Awaken, the last play he wrote (in 1899). By the way, I'm reading Ibsen's prose dramas in the translations by Michael Meyer, which I have found to be the most natural translations of Ibsen's plays into English.

As for Anthem, on re-reading it for the umpteenth time so soon after reading Christopher Collins' analysis of Zamyatin's novel We, it strikes me that other than some surface-level similarities between the two novels (both are set in far-future dystopias, have characters with numbers instead of names, are narrated by their protagonists in diary form, etc.), they really are quite different. That's not to say that Rand wasn't influenced by Zamyatin, because I think she was. Indeed it's quite possible that some aspects of Anthem are intended as refutations of some of Zamyatin's premises -- I'm thinking specifically of the lack of technology in Anthem as opposed to the advanced technology present in We, which the latter has in common with 1984. But there's more to chew on here....

Now playing: Renaissance, Tales of 1001 Nights. After Yes, Renaissance is my favorite rock band -- though with their creative mix of rock, folk, and classical it's perhaps not quite right to call them a rock band. I think of them as "progressive folk". Right now I'm listening to a song of theirs about Solzhenitsyn -- not your typical rock'n'roll fare!

Posted on 2001-11-06 at 20:48. File under literature.

~ link ~

Cool -- a Jabber service in Turkey!

Posted on 2001-11-06 at 12:33. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Facts are stubborn things. Randolph Bourne said that war is the health of the state. We need to face the fact that his insight is still true, and that the U.S. federal government is grabbing immense powers right now (probably state and local governments are, too). Unconstitutional institutions like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are thriving. Government officials and media pundits are openly discussing the use of torture. Those who disagree with current policies are being singled out. Around the country, police forces are lifting traditional restraints in pursuit of terrorists. The government isn't even saying how many people remain in custody after September 11th. Crackpot notions like Larry Ellison's national ID card scheme are getting a serious hearing (as if a national ID card would stop terrorists!). Even traditionally "dovish" women are pro-war. Although some are worried that government officials have acquired too much power, most Americans are willing to give up essential liberties for the sake of temporary security. Is it any wonder that gun sales are up? Adequate weaponry is traditionally just about the only defense against tyranny (not to mention terrorism).

Well at least you're free to think, if not much else.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "To look facts in the face is the duty of every sensible person." (The Man Who Laughs, II.4.iv)

Posted on 2001-11-06 at 11:50. File under politics.

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2001-11-04

Diamondbacks 3, Yankees 2. A great ending to a great Series. I thought all along that the Diamondbacks would be the champions -- the Yankees just didn't play (or, to be precise, hit) well enough to win. And I can't begrudge Arizona their victory -- they were a class act throughout the playoffs.

Posted on 2001-11-04 at 21:52. File under personal.

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In doing research for my paper on Zamyatin and Rand, I'm working my way through all the interpretive works I can get my hands on regarding Zamyatin. Thanks to inter-library loan, I'm currently reading Christopher Collins' short book Evgenij Zamjatin, which contains some good analysis of Zamyatin's dystopian novel We among other things. There are definite parallels between We (written in 1921, first published, in English, in 1924) and Rand's dystopian novel Anthem (1938), as noted by Zina Gimpelevich in an article she published in 1997 in the Canadian journal Germano-Slavica. Zamyatin's essays are also of great interest to me, since they advocate a 90-proof individualism as well as the integration of realism and fantasy/symbolism/romanticism in literature (a position that finds an echo in Rand's dedication to "Romantic Realism" -- which may mean something quite different from what her disciples say it does).

Today's quotes from Victor Hugo can be found in the preface to his play Hernani: "Romanticism, so often ill-defined, is only ... liberalism in literature." "Liberty in art, liberty in society: behold the double end towards which consistent and logical minds should tend." "Let the principle of liberty work, but let it work well. In letters, as in society, not etiquette, not anarchy, but laws."

Posted on 2001-11-04 at 16:58. File under literature.

~ link ~

2001-11-03

Ouch. The Yankees are experiencing a serious drubbing at the moment. I stopped watching after the third inning, when the score stood at 12-0. I figured at least I could get something productive done this evening.

Which I'm happy to say I did. Among other things, I finished formatting my Abelard paper and submitted it to the editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. The formatting requirements say that the document must arrive in Windows-compatible MS Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, which requirements I'm proud to say I was able to meet using all open-source tools: DocBook SGML as the source file, exported to RTF using the native Linux DocBook converter, and then polished (double-spaced lines and all that) using AbiWord. Who needs Windows? Not I.

Last night I did indeed read Ibsen's play Little Eyolf. It's a serious, if at times satirical, meditation on freedom, responsibility, and living for (and through) others. I found the ending less than fully satisfying, though, since it seems inconsistent with the creed of self-actualization Ibsen displays in his other plays: the two main characters, following the death of their son, decide to devote their lives to others by converting their house into an orphanage. It could be that that's the best they can do given how they have lived their lives to that point (both were self-centered in rather unhealthy ways), or it could be that Ibsen underwent a change of heart late in his life. Since I'm almost done with this chronological sequence, I suppose I may find the answer in his last two plays: John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken.

Now playing: "Dvorak for Two", music for piano and violin performed by the brother-and-sister team of Gil and Orli Shaham.

Speaking of music, the latest installment of the SuitWatch column by Doc Searls contains some ruminations on the future of Internet radio inspired by the success of (and open-source tools behind) radio station KPIG and related sites. That has me thinking about the possibility of a really good classical radio station for the web. Something that wouldn't play just the warhorses, but rather would dig deep into the repertoire to play a wide range of art music -- including, all-importantly, new music that people would actually want to listen to -- not the bleeping twelve-tone garbage, but real music created by people like my friends Eric Nolte and Jeffrey Lindon. Everyone knows that classical music is dead -- the record companies are pulling back on support of new artists, lesser-known performers (and even established artists like Daniel Barenboim) are losing their contracts if they ever had one, and somewhere right now Willie Nelson is probably singing "Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Composers". But the Internet may provide a way for a plethora of fine musicians to be heard and appreciated and, yes, even paid.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent." (William Shakespeare, I.2.iv)

Posted on 2001-11-03 at 21:29. File under personal.

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2001-11-02

I've finally started my essay comparing Zamyatin and Rand. Since I just completed an essay on Abelard and Rand, I guess you could say that I'm covering the topic from A to Z. :)

But I've had enough typing at the computer for the week. I think I'll read Ibsen's Little Eyolf this evening....

Posted on 2001-11-02 at 21:01. File under personal.

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How many Muslims live in the U.S.? Widely-quoted "guesstimates" have put the number as high as 8 million. But Daniel Pipes reports that two recent, and seemingly objective, studies put the number around 1.8 million.

Speaking of Muslims, Robert Tracinski is calling for a war on Islam. I certainly question his assertion that "dogmatism and religious tyranny are endemic to Islamic culture". Having studied a bit of history, I know that from about 500 CE to 1600 CE, the Islamic world was quite intellectually open, and maintained and extended the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, especially in the sciences. At the same time that Christian Europe was enduring almost 1000 years of near-barbarism, Muslims had the most open society on earth. If it had not been for Islamic culture, the West would not be where it is today because the Renaissance would have had an extreme paucity of materials to work from. So I am far from convinced that Islam is by nature any more bloodthirsty than Christianity, although it does seem that at this time in history Islamic culture is facing a crisis of confidence, and is deeply infected by the notion that it is a victim of the West when in fact its problems are mostly self-caused.

On a related theme, here's a new perspective on the Crusades. Thomas F. Madden argues that the Crusades were actually a great success for the Islamic World. Food for thought.

Jon Basil Utley argues that the war on terrorism is a certain loser and that the best strategy is to stop intervening in Middle Eastern politics.

It certainly seems that civil liberties are going by the boards. Here's a story about a British journalist who was arrested in Munich for trying to board a plane while carrying a book by Karl Marx!

Meanwhile, over at Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo exposes Bin Laden's connections to Bosnia and Kosovo. Could it be that bombing the hell out of the Serbs directly helped the cause of Islamic terrorists allied with or under the tutelage of Bin Laden? Crazy.

Despite the insanity of U.S. foreign policy past and present, I still can't agree with those who put the blame for the September 11th attacks on the USA. The responsibility lies squarely with the terrorists.

Today's quote from Victor Hugo: "That which separates man from the brute is the notion of good and evil.... Hence that great and twofold sentiment in man of his liberty and his responsibility. He can be good or he can be wicked. That is an account he will have to settle. He can be guilty; and that -- it is a striking fact, and one upon which I insist -- is his greatness." (Napolean-le-Petit, VI.7)

Speaking of greatness, albeit in a strictly delimited realm, how about those Yankees? The last two games have been unreal. To take one game by tying it with two outs in the ninth and then winning it in extra innings is incredible enough, but to do so two nights in a row is simply unreal. They still have to win one game in Arizona against either Randy Johnson or Curt Schilling, though, so the famous Yogi-ism applies: it ain't over till it's over. Even if you hate the Yankees (perish the thought!), you still have to admire the fact that they never give in.

Which reminds me of another Victor Hugo quote: "Nearly the whole secret of great hearts lies in this word, perseverando. Perseverance is to courage what the wheel is to the lever, it is the perpetual renewing of the fulcrum." (The Toilers of the Sea, II.2.iv)

Posted on 2001-11-02 at 19:46. File under society.

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