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Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:59:34 -0800

Yes, Kanthan, there were food banks between Zimbabwe and Cape Town (not Johannesburg, I got that wrong). Adonis Musati (I don't know) perhaps was a proud and macho cop who didn't want a hand-out.

But: farm produce from Zimbabwe may be flowing to South Africa (missing Musati of course) because the desparate white and black farmers of Mugabe's kleptocracy have, like Irish landlords of the 1840s, to send their produce to people who have jobs in Cape Town and Durban and who can PAY.

Your "supply chain" has another name. It's the way in which the cash nexus separates us.

The problem is that, as my homey Zizek knows, absent the supply chain and its alienation, in which we shop freely at Wellcome while, perhaps, poor people in Guangzhou go without their greens, you need a monstrous, weirdly psycho-analyzed, "new socialist man" without ego.

[Oughta locked that guy Zizek up. Oughta lock me up. The truth hurts: we need your alienating supply chain so I can drink Starbuck's coffee without worrying about its producers.]

But: I'm damned, young Kanthan, if there is any sort of equivalence between Zimbabwe and the USA. Call me a patriot if you like (I've already been the target of some really nasty anti-Americanism from some fat limey bastards here on Lamma Island), I will wear the name with pride, because what Robert Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe was NOT done to the people of the USA.

Dammit, Kanthan, the railways in the Congo were designed exclusively to extract gold and diamonds for shipment to Belgium. The railways in my country were built to transport my ancestors to the wastes of the middle west and give them a shot.

Mugabe is what you get when for years you irresponsibly, through Ian Smith, insist on nonsensical racial separation, and nobody gave the Brits any credit for trying to get him to sod off.

He's a monster and my country never produced anyone like him.

Hey Kanthan!

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:47:27 -0800

Let us not speak falsely now, the hour is much too late.

Princeton University: I'm sitting at one of those damn meetings that our mutual supervisor liked so much and conducted so well, with a true humanism and consideration for people's feelings that was indeed refreshing after the corporate horseshit parade.

But, I'm thinking, look, if you use a "tilde" to delimit the file you people, with your drama and English degrees, are "designing" as an "email separator", it's dollars to donuts that someone is going to use a "tilde" in the text of an "email", and then there will be an "error".

In particular, if the email is a record of our discussion, it WILL probably contain a tilde in a way that would amuse a Turing.

But (I think on), what's the point of sticking my neck out? The point will be "shot down" by the Bluestockings, two ladies who've read Jane Austen from cover to cover and like putting likely lads like myself in their place as their dogs body not considered to have a critical intellect.

It will be renarrated as "academic" or in some way going too far, being too technical, too precise, too male.

Besides (think I on) the real cheesecake here, at Princeton University, is departmental computing. Each and every senior faculty member I've spoken to speaks with horrors of a bygone era (the 1970s) when he had to fight for slices of time on the IBM mainframe with people from disciplines remote from his own.

This business (I soliloquize on, in an inner monologue a part of which I'd favor you in those bygone days) of "supporting" faculty and students smart enough to figure things out on their own is the mother of all dead end careers.

But, I'm jiggered if I will take young Kanthan's advice. He is in love with technology whereas when I was repairing Fortran compilers in object code only form while he was getting rowdy against apartheid, I said to myself, what rough beast.

They're going to use a tilde as a separator, pat me on the head for being so surprisingly literate as well as a mere programmer, and from Roosevelt no less, and send me on my way. If I get rowdy I will get them in trouble for being my friend. Leon Trotsky got his Mom and Dad thrown into the Gulag.

Kanthan: you saw what sort of dump I could afford in Kingston and said it wasn't enough space for one person; this was a person from South Africa speaking. My kids walked in in 1990 on their "visitation" and said, "it stinks in here".

I went to the Housing Director at Princeton in 1992 to see if Princeton couldn't get me the sort of housing that was being provided to attorneys on their staff. The housing director told me icily that they weren't there to help me, and as soon as I hung up, called Jacqueline to tell her that one of her lowly staff had gotten uppity with her.

Not deigning to speak with me, Jacqueline went to our supervisor to complain, and our supervisor, once again trying her best to back her staff, spoke to me.

I quit, going to work for IBM and doing very well (letter of commendation) but after only three months Akers discovered a 3B loss and heads rolled, my "temp" head amongst them.

Plus ca change? I'd say it's a triumph to remain in one piece in a form of homeostasis, and not become a Beast of Burden, dehumanized by this shit. Indeed, my art at the Saatchi site (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Edward+Nilge...) is a proud assertion of the line, a classicism of the self that as Socialist Realism insists upon boundaries.

There may be a lot in common between me, and a guy who I heard about on the BBC. He fled Mugabe's kleptocracy and was desparately seeking work in Jo'burg but ran out of money and died of starvation. Chap too decent to steal? Hope I'd have the heart. I was completely out of money when I got to Hong Kong, as you knew, because I was calling you from Lamma Island with madcap schemes.

Naomi Klein claims that when Mandela et al. were faced by Clinton with the withdrawal of international development aid, they revised South Africa's constitution, significantly lowering assistance to ordinary working people.

What do you think?

Nothing in the works that I know of

Daniel Read — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:09:29 -0700

Hi Neuro,

There's nothing in the works that I know of, sorry. I have not had any time to work on what I subsequently learned is a "lazy web request" on my part--I love that term since it describes perfectly what I was hoping for: that someone else would take my idea and run with it. :-) Unfortunately, even if this RAE thing is a good idea, I fear that the amount of momentum required to make it happen would be an major impediment.

Best,
Dan

Redundancy Aware Email

Neuro — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:40:52 -0700

Very interesting. I totally agree with you and would find this very helpful. Is anything like this in the works?

Virginia Tech Shootings

Guest — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 06:44:23 -0700

My theory is that the problem was not the Virginia Tech administration but the VT English department. The young man's energy was channeled in the wrong way and I personally think that his problems were not treated in a confidential way while he was there. I think that if it had not been for memebers pf the Englsih department this could have been avoided.

E.; D. Klemke

Edward G Nilges — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 08:02:46 -0700

Dr. Klemke in later life preferred his last name only to be used but he is in Elysium and would not mind "Elmer".

Please note that communication between myself and Bill Moor has once again ended as it did years ago. This was because in a private communication Moor dismissed Klemke as an original philosopher and by implication my hero worship.

This brought back old troubles between myself and Moor who was a graduate student when I matriculated at Roosevelt University. Initially friendly, he quickly enough started to use his quick wit in ways that I began to realize were destructive of others.

I didn't realize it but I threatened his dominance.

In particular, I'd had a friend, a woman who could not see well but who was heroically struggling to get a Master's in sociology. She was sweet, and funny, romantic and idealistic. She is now a successful sociologist.

She saw me through the glass windows of the bookstore where both Moor and I worked to support our studies and smiled and waved at me, and I smiled and waved in return.

Turning around, I saw Bill Moor standing with a sardonic expression on his face. He said, I see you like ugly girls. I said you want to eat those words. He threatened to beat me up (he has a couple of inches on me). I backed down, ashamed and humiliated and confused.

I realized that in graduate studies in Chicago, in the humanities at least, there would be no escape from the street and its macho ethos and this contributed to my move into computer science. I didn't want to have to get into macho confrontations to progress in graduate school, but at this point, philosophy departments were all male, and dominated by intellectualism and emotional numbness: entire segments of European-continental philosophy were being dismissed out of hand, and a member of Roosevelt's philosophy department was apparently cheated out of his retirement because he was a Continental expert.

Klemke in fact helped to enforce a culture war on Critical Theory and Marcuse that deprived a friend of his Master's degree in philosophy (which in a working class school like Roosevelt meant he was jobless).

But then, Klemke resisted President Rolf Weil when Weil took the Postivistic spirit of the American university one step further...and commenced the downsizing of Roosevelt to the joke business school it now is.

Klemke was abandoned in his struggle with Weil not only by "new left" students who'd fought for the retention of Staughton Lynd, a popular left-wing history professor, but also I believe by Mr. Moor.

President Weil told me later that Klemke had "personal problems". Yeah, right. Many people in America have "personal problems"...constituted in the abandonment of them by society, such as the homeless man so cruelly mocked at Moor's web site.

Klemke's originality and brilliance as a philosopher (as opposed to a mere teacher of philosophy, a different thing) were noted by several generations of undergraduates like the above, but Klemke never troubled with the opinion of people who unlike undergraduates actually count.

Academic careerists like Mr. Moor also recognized this originality and this brilliance. However, in the period from 1968 to 1975, the individual per se was not celebrated except insofar as he was a spokesman for a clearly recognizable cause...whether the antiwar cause or the "Silent Majority" and the nascent "neo-conservative" movement.

The attitude towards brilliance and originality as in the case of Klemke, emerging more or less ex nihilo out of darkest Bible-belt Wisconsin, was the same attitude expressed by Sean Penn in THE THIN RED LINE: a man by himself is nothing.

It was in fact quite unfashionable at Roosevelt to be a Klemke "follower". The hip attitude, which Moor most nearly personified, was to patronize Klemke's shyness and scholarly demeanor, because Klemke was the very type of "skinny nerd" into middle and old age.

It was in fact to patronize Klemke's apparently repressed, and rather old-fashioned personality (dressed always in suit and tie) as something retrograde, something off, in precisely the same way New Left students disrupted Theodore Adorno's lectures because Adorno insisted on sticking to a topic and was, like Klemke, old-fashioned in manner and demeanor.

Of course, neither the Klemke mockers nor the Adorno hounders realized that the personal dignity of the scholar is painfully acquired and asserts the dictatorship of truth. That sounds pretty bad until you realize that ANY OTHER type of dictatorship really sucks by comparision. Neither the Klemke nor the Adorno hounders realized that the working class father of a South African friend went in an apartheid state every day as a "colored race" truck driver dressed in suit and tie because on his own time he was a respected Dravidian classical musician, and a man.

Moor, in mocking women who were my friends and systematically using belittling and flaming in addition to his considerable genius to make sure he dominated any and all conversations, prefigured in fact the Internet flamer and, I'm afraid, bully.

I welcomed him to this newsgroup only to receive a private email telling me that I wasn't *au fait* with the academic scuttle butt about Klemke's not being a "real" philosopher, which Klemke was. I believe that Klemke, like Edsger Dijkstra, basically made the bad career moves of (1) actually teaching Philosophy 101 and 210 (Logic) to actual undergraduates without irony, and with passion and something like love and (2) speaking truth to power.

Klemke told President Rolf Weil in 1974 that it was a bad idea to downsize the humanities in favor of computer science and business. In 2006, the pathetic and absurd remnant of the philosophy department of which Klemke was the chair was chaired by an art history "PhD" who was identified on her Web site as "ABD", and ABD means "all but dissertation", in other words, not a PhD.

Much, much, worse, this person, charged with overseeing what was left of training in philosophy, retained only so Roosevelt would not lose its accreditation, told a philosophy instructor that he was not to allow discussion of Zionism because Palestinians are "animals". This is what Elmer was trying to prevent: the return to barbarism.

But it appears that my enthusiasm for Klemke is still after all these years something in bad taste, like the affections of a green girl, and after all these years, Moor is not interested in what happened at Roosevelt: it's just another smirk. And after all these years, I realize that I exited philosophy for computer science (to Klemke's considerable disappointment) because I was sick to death of a Chicago university world that thrived on gossip, machismo, and the systematic destruction of genius and love, AND true educational opportunity for the working class.

I remember the last few phone calls between myself and Elmer. He'd recommended me for Princeton. Each call he was increasingly feeble. He'd collapsed while teaching 101. I regret not seeing him before his death.

Mr. Bill Moor, did you go to his funeral? Did you help him out in his last years? If you did and ONLY if then you are, after all these years, a better man than I am.

Klemke was a role model, Klemke was a mentor. This was re-represented as homosexuality, and we all had a good laugh about that, didn't we? It was sooooo unfashionable of me to see him as a mentor: to some, he was the One Dimensional Man of Marcuse, to others, he was a joke with a funny name.

What we DIDN'T see was that WE were in the process of constructing a "manhood" without the ability to connect and without the ability to father, a world of uncaring Elder Brothers who'd put you down for talking to a funny looking woman.

Elmer

Lee — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:58:09 -0700

Elmer was my instructor for one intro to philosophy class. I thought I was a logical guy until I met Elmer. He inspired me to open my mind to the world of reality.

Happy Trails, Elmer.

You can't be "competent" at an undefined task

Edward G Nilges — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 08:37:31 -0800

See my blog if you like, Chris.

Selecting for reflection

chrishmorris — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 12:25:38 -0800

My project is a complex one. We are currently in transition. Having finished most of the work on the back end, we can put more resources into responding to user input. It has also become clear that some of the user communications we have had are more "suggestions" than "needs". For these reasons, it is time to raise our game from developing features to designing solutions, to use Dan North's expression.

Team members vary in how well they are responding to this challenge. Some of us, like me, are career programmers, and others have a first training in the application domain. The response is not what I first expected. The programmers understand very well that they need to find out about the domain, whereas the domain experts are focussed on the programming, which for them is the hard part.

The people who are performing least well here are the least reflective. Being very competent at a defined task is not enough in a situation of flux.

This should be a selection criterion. So my question is, how do I identify the more reflective candidates, who will grow as the project mutates?

"Personal, anecdotal" experience is usually a token of a type

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 21:45:30 -0800

Wow, an article in Wikipedia, whose authors are religious maniacs and convenience store clerks who demand a "citate" [sic] for the existence of Descartes.

I realized when I posted "conservatives can't code" I would trigger explosions of rage, because in fact (as playwright and essayist David Mamet has noticed) American data processing has been a sort of catchbasin for ineffective people, who can't code among other things.

I include myself in this categorization, because my family issues destroyed my self-confidence and self-esteem, and I entered data processing because if you COULD code (which I could) you could easily compete with workmates with your own lack of self-esteem, who couldn't code.

The fact is, in my direct experience, American programmers can spend years making six figures...while never understanding (for example) the two different ways Boolean operators can be evaluated. And because management organizes them using negative, bureaucratic capability (the mobilization of anger and fear to accomplish organizational ends by default), this is not a problem, because management ensures that something emerges from the machine that's useful, especially in helping the rich and fooling the poor.

For this reason, American computer workers have an extraordinarily well-developed sense of personal offense because you take offense when you are personally insecure, unlike the people who post regularly at this site, such as Daniel and Donna. Dijsktra had to entitle an essay "How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?" for this reason.

OK, I don't know "logic" and I can't "code", especially if I've lived so long into the new global Dark age that "logic" and "good code" have changed their meaning to "the consistent adherence to the predictable thought" and "mindless entering of computer instructions".

I taught logic at university, but I will save you time and I will save Dan server space. I am certain that in your frame of reference, the university was dazzled by my good looks, and imposed me on Plain Folk Just Trying To Get An Education So As To Make Money.

Nor can I Code, if that means what you think it means. I have a lot of strange Coding habits such as the writing of a *feuilleton* at the beginning of each module declaring, in amusing terms, what the module is a gonna do.

But let me address a key point. I've noticed over the course of my 56 years that ANY tale of American woe is always, necessarily, "personal and anecdotal", and, it is *verboten* in any way to fancy that it might be a token of a type (since you're an expert on logic I bet you know that a token of a type is an instance of a type).

The problem is that I am simply not the only programmer to CHOOSE (freely enough, taking responsibility for the CHOICE) to work 16 hours a day far from home in place of telling his boss to stuff it.

I could have told SEI Information Technology to stuff it. But guess what. I was paying the bills for two kids' health care and my wife didn't work, so I reasoned that the job and its bullshit (having to test code in Oklahoma that worked in Illinois) had to take precedence over my wife's depression.

Don't you dare, don't you dare, for one minute to suppose that I haven't revisited this choice because odds are you are a young punk who doesn't know jack about the real world, and who doesn't know that adult life is a series of decisions like this.

But notice that there was no question here about "being able to code". I wrote several OS modules in assembler so that Standard Oil could continue to hide seismic data from the EPA and from its competitors, and they worked.

But you'll learn soon enough that the White Collar game, as C. Wright Mills, is to constantly change the rules so as to ensure the maintenance of a white collar servant class.

This is why "being able to code" becomes unimportant...as soon as you learn how to code, because the needs of the organization supersede those of the individual, and as soon as he becomes, like me, an ace coder, the language game has to devise other ways in which he is defective and shoddy goods...for otherwise, he might demand too much, which would be a bad thing if he (and especially she) hasn't previously registered membership in what C. Wright Mills, again, identified as the (white, Protestant, male, Ivy League) Power Elite.

And, it's not unique: it's a token of a type. From the start of my own career, in which I was encouraged to continue by my first boss because he thought (silly bastard) that I could code, I noticed men in their thirties emerging in tears from closed offices and "structured walkthroughs".

Typically rather good-looking in a conventional way, and, in Chicago, typically lapsed Roman Catholic or nonobservant Jewish, typically trapped in marriages and children, they were typically very good at "coding" using the primitive tools of the time.

Nonetheless, I saw them leave firms enraged or in tears because they were being told, I realized, that there was oh, so much more to life than those nasty little bits and bytes, that they were "arrogant" (with that arrogance that makes men do heroic stunts but which is disvalued today) and they needed to "listen".

I realized that no matter how good they were at their trade, this doesn't matter in an age where organizations and not people call the shots, and I could see the writing on the wall, because I was a handsome devil who could code, who was a lapsed Roman Catholic, and who was trapped in an early marriage.

Boom, the shit hit the fan on schedule.

This experience is a token of a type. And I would be the first to admit that my own defective character played a role. The problem is that the organization NEEDS your defects of character: if you are a greedy sumbitch, they need to use your greed as a trader: if you are a dull fellow who likes to work breaking other people's code for hours, they need you to work as the typical American programmer to create the illusion that something's being Done.

But beyond my defects of character, my international experience has shown me that the American way of doing things hasn't changed since Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which I hope you read in high school.

People are used up, and thrown away, and post facto a narrative of their own unique defects of character is used to justify the unjustifiable savagery of American life, which starts with the Black man and woman at the bottom but also includes the non-elite former computer programmer who's homeless now whether or not he could code.

Commenters on my original note are trying an old language game: to reassert that nonelite white people in America (an American-sodden societies, like Eastern Europe) can control their destiny "if only" they could code, or work well with other people, or something.

I've escaped that situation and I thank my stars for having done so.

Comments on "generalizing"

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 21:41:27 -0800

When we do things we need to do them on purpose. We need to play golf on purpose, and P. J. Plauger exhorted us to "program on purpose".

When I generalize, I generalize on purpose.

I felt for thirty years that conservatives, control freaks and pseudo-alpha male bullies made lousy coders but I kept my big mouth shut because I had a family to support.

Now I "generalize", and possibly the word is a mild critique of my "generalizing" in a thoughtful note from Chris Morris: that exhorts me not to set my face against classes and sets of people and to be a good, nice person, who indeed takes the world one person at a time.

Programmers, many being unlike me from scientific backgrounds, feel that you cannot "generalize" about people without using statistical techniques and polling and they are generally unaware of the methodological problems with such data gathering.

An essay like mine is pigeonholed into the category of a Rant, and unfortunately an unprincipled clown (Dennis Miller of Saturday Night Live) killed that category.

Well, it's not a rant. Using computers in all but the hard sciences is ultimately a matter of justice and fairness, and because it (per Lessig) changes society, conservatives are in bad faith when they mix retrograde political views with high technology.

In my experience, quiet, nice, analytical men are being USED by corporate, government and intelligence apparati in ways over which they have no control.

Sure, we can use computers on our day off to help Katrina victims as Dan has pointed out.

But, when I worked at Princeton and had a relationship with a lady in NYC, at our church in New York City and in the upper West side what I noted among my girlfriend's friends was a signal futility.

Convinced liberals, they had had since the assasination of John Lennon to make continual compromises, getting business degrees on top of PhDs in English in an exhausting and expensive struggle. They worked in soup kitchens or, as I worked, as Scout leaders on Saturday morning while slaving at media and law firms during the week to pay brutally high rents and mortgages.

And, they counseled each other, as do the followers of Gerald Weinberg, not to look for simple justice and fairness, commodities they sought for others and not from themselves for the big media companies, white-shoe law firms, or (in my case) Ivy League universities.

No, it was always a matter of Yet Another self-help book or charismatic Unitarian minister to remind them as Godly folk, who'd returned to the old ways after the Purple decades of the 1960s and 1970s, they should always look within.

As a result, during the 1980s, media companies and corporate law firms made huge profits that were quietly distributed among the alpha males.

I attended a dinner with some of the women staff of the New York Times, and I heard the most astonishing stories of brutal macho, if compensating, conduct on the part of managers...real pathology, coming in different styles from men and women senior managers, but in both cases some things that were cruel and childish in the extreme.

Men did things to women, and alpha women did things to women and men, with a savagery that was metaphorically and allegorically captured by Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho.

Women would do the leg work for an entire story and write it up perfectly, and then, because some (male or female) senior manager owed a marker to another reporter, "he'd" get the byline and the credit.

Sylvia Nasar, when she did her award-winning New York Times series on John Nash and the book, wasn't promoted: she became a journalism professor. Although I of course spoke with her as a source, I do not know her well at all, but I'll speculate that this achievement threatened some higher up who was grooming Judith Miller to lie about the situation in Iraq.

[When I started out, doing something like debugging a Fortran compiler in object code was celebrated. Today we seem to take it for granted that any genuine accomplishment, whether in programming or in journalism, will threaten some higher up and he or she will retaliate.]

The terribly nice people I knew in Manhattan when I worked at Princeton never fought back as their grandmothers had in the 1940s, a decade when employees, including white collar types, would form wildcat unions at the drop of a hat. Oh, sure, there were feminist cabals and a complete ban on sexist talk...which the nice guys obeyed only to see it selectively used by the higher ups to control people, by injecting barbarism into "nice" offices.

Instead they read self-help books.

I was about fed up in July 1988 when I got on the Princeton to New York train to see my girlfriend...and read that the United States had shot down an Iranian passenger jet.

[It was an "accident" that involved bad software. We don't remember it. The Iranians do. We said at the time "shit happens".]

I was angry by the time I got to my girlfriend's apartment, and she treated my anger as an occasion for anger management...suggesting a talk with our minister.

I could see this was going nowhere, and because I DO have a problem with anger management, I broke up with her, not seeing any way of showing her (as I tried with more success with my manager at Princeton) that I can concede a problem with anger management, and take steps to work on it, but there can be also a genuine inequity "out there" that it's a PART of anger management to fight.

Indeed, I found no "uptake" on this except a limited "uptake" from by boss, and more from my therapist, and years later when I joined the anti-Iraq peace movement. Going to a political demonstration on your lunch hour is almost as refreshing as the old noon hour quickies I had during the 1970s in Chicago (alcoholic or in the sack) and much more constructive.

I would like very much to be a "nice" guy, who doesn't occasionally shock and offend Donna, who doesn't pound Nicorette, and who is in a "relationship" (working on that, got sorta lucky this week, met a new girl, we'll see how it works out).

But when I left America I was able to "factor" out the objective circumstance of what it means to work in America, and I find that I need definitely to work in a human services role, not feeding corporate computers.

We need to take life and people one day and one person at a time, and always remember we can't change the world without changing ourselves: Malcolm X knew that.

But political conservatives STILL can't code.

P.S.: Amazon replied courteously to my request that the Gonzalez review be removed as Inappropriate. His review of my book, which wasn't based on the book but on comments at the site, is gone but remains here at this site.

P.P.S. Dan: good job of editing my comments on the code. Thank you.

I'm confused

Brian Yamabe — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 08:03:34 -0800

Edward, who are these landlords and capitalists you speak of? My understanding and experience is that anyone can become either of these. If they use your labor without full payment, it is you who have not extracted full value. In fact, you are the landlord of your skills. If you are not receiving appropriate "rent" you can remove the tenent.

The socialist/communist alternative is what? A planning commity deciding what everyone's value is?

Being wrapped to a job, relationship, and car of your own choice is better than the dependency for your food, housing, and transportation of a governments whims.

In software, the liberal is stuck in the requirements process. Waiting on the desires of others, not moving forward, and whining and complaining about the lack of progress.

Deserving Dan and Edward, the Enigma

Donna L Davis — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 08:38:24 -0800

I am afraid I do not deserve the same level of credit as Dan. I am often shocked and sometimes dismayed by your posts, Edward. However, I recognize that you are also clearly brilliant and perhaps take some pleasure in the shock value of your posts. I also realize that even if we disagree, sometimes we need to be shocked out of complacency. If you never fully win us over to your line of thinking, you will have likely caused us to ponder issues and perspectives that otherwise we would have ignored.

Unbelievable

Donald Hughes — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 20:18:34 -0800

I'm more likely to believe that it is you who cannot code. Your attempt to link political ideology to technical ability based purely on your own personal and anecdotal experience demonstrates a fundamental inability to use basic logical reasoning skills. And since writing code requires logic, I don't see how you could be any good at it.

Please review this article to understand why you are wrong in so many ways:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy

"Conservatism"

Edward G Nilges — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:44:39 -0800

Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Brian: but the claim of conservatives, including conservatives I respect notably William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, that they don't wish to run my life, or anyone else's, is just nonsense.

They prescribe a "back to basics" in government which frees basically only the landlord and capitalist to use my labor without paying for it in full.

Furthermore, I am getting real tired of people who are clearly chained to a job, a relationship, and a car, who can't walk a mile without getting winded, that they are free men.

This may not be you. However, in my extensive experience, the typical conservative is so dependent upon a delicate network of social structures that he could not survive a single day in the hell the politicians he created in Iraq.

In software, the conservative is shrink wrapped. His only forays into internals happen to be destructive and they express infantile rage against a very real, and total dependency on an even more delicate network.