Return of the repressed as fantasy
Just when we have the ability to retail all stories truthfully there seems a complementary demand to return to re-telling them as lies.
The collapse of the World Trade Center was filmed from dozens of perspectives yet not until recently has the possibility been taken seriously that it was a controlled demolition, which probably means that Moslems didn't do it and that it was an inside job.
The firefighters that were filmed by Gilles and Jules Naudet on *der Tag* are shown after action discussing the event in the station house, and in the Naudet documentary, one of the fire fighters says that the building collapsed "pop pop pop" AS IF it were a series of explosions, SUCH AS are used in controlled demolitions.
Comes now before us a Fox story (http://tinyurl.com/ct5gn and http://tinyurl.com/8zufe) which takes the controlled demolition story seriously, which is in the process, apparently, of being pulled and then restored and then pulled from the Fox web site as pro-Bush and anti-Bush Web masters at Fox fight it out on the deck.
One and only one story is true.
Dammit, my Mom and the holy sisters didn't raise me to comfort myself with religious fiction and other Stories and to treat multiple narratives as irreconcilable. The holy sisters forbid us from seeing Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, because, they said, the truth of Scripture was not in miracles but in faith and in crossing the waters in your own life.
My fat and prolix pal Adorno put it best. In his essays On the Occult and on Los Angeles astrology, he pointed out that he who asks for Proof (the name of that movie) knows not what he asks for, for a "miracle", in bringing the star down to earth, makes it no longer a "star" (une etoile).
This whole critique was based on Adorno's understanding that our representation of any one Concept (*begriff*) can as a matter of knowledge, as a matter of understanding, (*verstehen*) never coincide with our representation of it, the Idea, of a sentence, a text (Holy Writ) or a computer program (always one more bug).
If we achieved a Grand Unified Theory that was more than physics but also explanatory of chemistry, down to biology, down to the wharves and go-downs of sociology and psychology, then Thought (*gedanken*) would say time, which surveys all the world, must have an end.
Note that this reconciles religious faith with science until time must have a stop. We don't need no steenking Intelligent Design!
What, you need Intelligent Design to feed the hungry and clothe the naked? News fa lash. Many ordinary white Americans have opened their homes to black folks fleeing the city which has fallen, and not all of them are believers although many are.
It is LOGICALLY possible to (1) believe in literal Scripture and be a bum, (2) believe literally and be a good person on this basis, or (3) be a good person for the hell of it.
Just as a dancer can dance what dance she pleases, just as Jackson Pollock could paint as he list, we could be a good person like we get fired under employment law, and in the strange poetry of the law, "for a good reason, for a bad reason, or no reason at all".
One is familiar enough with the nihilism of a de Sade who brutalized Juliette all a summer's day not even for pleasure. Conversely one reads about German women who repaired Berlin for free after the war, conversely one reads about the students of Munich who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in 1944, a bad time in Munchen to do so to say the least.
So we need no miracle, and today, if "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" then there are no more miracles...if evil men at the top of a country can stage the collapse of a building, and although it looks like something that Vince Gambino and his boys pull every day when there is an aging building to be torn down, we all believe it was Moslem terrorists.
[Parenthetically, if Cheney is at the bottom of this, the True Story logically includes the fact that anybody who believed in the original Story is a damned fool, which means that most of the world's population, including many grave professors and Talking Heads, are complete bone heads.]
[Such a level of world-historical (*welt historische*) malarkey would ascend to a founding myth of a new era in which the toiling masses of the world arise and say unto the leaders who pulled this shit enough is enough (*ca suffi*).]
[We won't be fooled again!]
[Pilate asked "what is truth?" You-know-who was silent and proceeded to rip what passed for epistemology in 4 AD a new asshole, because when He ascended the bitter wood, he demonstrated that truth is suffering even to nonbelievers.]
Adorno would say that the man who says he is in possession of a miracle, such as a true astrological prediction that he would get some cheesy promotion, is, apart from being a damned fool (*dumm Kopf*) in possession of something that is NO LONGER the Concept that it wuz.
When the Rapture comes, whether it consists of all Moslem men ascending into a heaven that looks like the Dubai edition of Maxim, OR all Hindus ascending, OR all Christians, OR all surviving Branch Davidians, wake me up. Until then, know that we still live in time (Zeit) and in Time, the fool of life, I gotta go to work.
Glad you asked, "why?"
Because software correctness (and efficiency interpreted sensibly) is based on knowledge of the way things are, and knowledge-of-the-way-things-are is under assault by Power in my considered opinion, to the extent that many knowledge workers lack the knowledge to accurately brief their superiors without fear at the CIA, to file factually accurate legal briefs, or to encode business rules in a noncontradictory fashion.
Evidence for this exists in software development as in the case where one stakeholder asserts she is the only end User who matters and who dismisses pushback for this reason and imposes constant change, and self-contradictory requirements, on the development team.
If you do not know the requirements, then by definition the code is no good. If you have been directed on pain of termination to deny an ATM transaction in your code where the withdrawal amount is 100, because the end User believes that 100 is not divisible by 20, and because as a wealthy person she has a subconscious contempt for small customers that emerges as a mathematical error, upon which she insists for the sake of corporate *amour propre* you face an unavoidable political issue in the small.
I am sorry if these types of my posts do not meet your needs. If you like, I also have posted hard code on MS-DOS commands (cf. http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/node/280) and using C safely (http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/node/291) recently.
My Apress book, Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler, includes 26000 lines of compiler code that works.
Take a look at these, and many other posts at Developer Dot Star on substring searching in an Oracle CLOB and printing in Java, for useful and purely technical material if you like. For my part I will endeavor to select the topic area of each post carefully so as not to mislead.
Glad you asked "why" redux
The truth of 9-11 affects countless documents manual and automated. Conversely, to believe a lie (if the official story was one, something I do not know) affects in my view our mathematical abilities.
Math, and what Dijkstra called the "cruelly difficult" mathematics of programming, is about truth. But if we learn to freight our truth with fear then the fear infects the math, and it becomes math-anxious people pleasing behavior.
The Usefulness of Compartmentalization
A guest wrote:
Why was this posted to a developer.* software development blog?
This is a fair question, and I'm working on a new article for the site called "About Blogging at developer.*" that hopefully will clarify this sort of thing. In the interim, though, I wanted to comment on this issue since it's been raised directly.
In brief, as editor of the site, I try to exert as little influence as possible over the blogging area of the site. I don't want to people to feel censored, or that I'm meddling in their posts. Moreover, the people who blog here do so of their own accord. In most cases, I have not recruited them, they are not in my employ, and they represent themselves alone.
That said, the main subject area of this site is software development, and the primary purpose of the blogging and discussion area of the site in particular is to bring software professionals, students, and academics from around the world together around this common subject. I do ask that if a person is interested in starting a blog on the developer.* site that it's purpose primarily be devoted to the topic of software development--the key word there being primarily.
In a recent comment on another thread, Donna Davis brings up the idea of "compartmentalization." She writes:
Some how, at this site, I become uncomfortable when we stray too far afield from our common interest: software development. I like to think that however vastly different our backgrounds, cultures, and even IQs, we share that.
I thank Donna for introducing this idea, because I think it is very useful in the current context. One of the main reasons in my own writing on this site that I stick to development-, industry-, and profession-related topics is because I imagine that these are things that I have in common with the people out there in the world that I am trying to communicate with. If I bring up politics, I'll be alienating a huge swath of people, similarly if I bring up religion. I don't wish to alienate, but rather to bring together. It's the same reason I don't paste political cartoons on the break room refrigerator at work: I am introducing a wedge that has nothing to do with work that will by its very nature divide me from some people that I work with, which subverts our common purpose.
Similarly, it is useful, in my opinion, for us here to pretend that we don't have differences in these other areas so that we can come together in the common area that brings us to this site: software development. But that's just me.
Edward takes a different view, perhaps, and I respect that. Part of me would rather that Edward posted something like this 9/11 post in a separate blog that he maintains for the purpose of discussing non-software topics (I plan to start a blog like this for myself one day, and it will be hosted on a different site). But that's my preference, and one I am hesitant to impose on Edward, because I suspect that Edward finds this kind of compartmentalization less useful. Edward takes a holistic view of the world from a philosophical standpoint, and as he has explained in his comments above in defense of his 9/11 post, he *does* see a connection between this issue of what happened on 9/11 and the software requirements you or I might be coding from today.
On a related note, you may have noticed that this 9/11 post has not been promoted to the front page (which also means that it does not show up in the main developer.* blogs RSS feed). This is a decision on my part as editor of the site, and reflects my desire to project to the world at large that the primary subject matter here is software development.
Sometimes, though, it can be tricky to balance that with my desire for people to have their own space, that is, their own blog, to post freely within. And it can be tricky to project a consistent public face to the world under the label "developer.*" while at the same time honoring and encouraging people to post freely.
In the future, I hope that the visual design of this site will better reflect when you are viewing a post in a particular person's blog. The front page, though, and the corresponding RSS feed, will continue to reflect my own editorial bias as I sift through the posts each day. As the volume of blog posting increases on this site, this may become more significant.
Furthermore, if the volume of new daily blog posts reaches a high enough level, and if a corresponding "community" of regular readers and commentors comes together, then I plan to turn on the features of this blogging platform that I am using to allow readers to vote on the posts and the most popular posts will reach the front page automatically. For now, though, it's just me doing the sifting.
Thanks for reading. Comments welcome.
Best,
Dan
Compartmentalization vs. Decorum
Dan: Sorry to have made my comment as an anonymous "guest" ... is there ready link to the developer.* logon page? I always seem to need to poke around a little before I find it.
My comment on Mr. Nilges post was made because I saw no attempt in his post to connect the conspiracy speculations with software development. His response to my short question did connect them somewhat.
I absolutely do not agree that our lives should be compartmentalized. We should, however, always act with decorum. Without unity of life -- a strong correlation between our actions and beliefs -- we become sort of schizophrenic.
On another note, Dan: the new site design looks great! Keep up the good work.
Regards,
Joe (jos.trem)
Thanks, Joe
Hi Joe,
Thanks for your comments. This compartmentalization thing is indeed tricky, and I suspect that what I mean by compartmentalization and what you mean by decorum are closely related and overlapping. My suggestion is not that *life* should be compartmentalized, per se, but that in social situations it's a useful tool for finding common ground and creating a feeling in other people that their views are respected, and for enabling collaboration and cooperation, as in an on-the-job situation.
Best,
Dan
P.S. If you're not logged in, any page on the blogging side of the site should have a login form in the right hand column, down near the bottom. If you're logged in already, you won't see the form, and you'll see a "log out" link in the menu. If you stay away for awhile the cookie will expire and the site will log you out. If you come back frequently, though, the cookie will seldom expire. :-)
Decorum?
I think here "decorum" is confused with predictability. The original post made the claim that IF Sep 11 was a false story, this undermines the moral basis Americans have for going to work in the first place insofar as their work contributes to a false story.
I also wished to start a courteous discussion as to whether the consistent lack of fit between requirements and code has in part a political analysis.
In addition, I see many data processing people self-blaming for lack of progress in their careers when in fact they are held back because their work gives them a committment to truth.
Fair enough
Dan, you're the boss in the sense that you do a lot of work to maintain this great site. I will introduce politics in future only if I see an important relationship to the process of software development. Note that this committment leaves me a lot of room in which to wiggle my toes.
I do this because I see much office politics as REAL politics, real oppression, which dares not speak its name.
At the same time, we can make sense.
In my first computer class, everything outside the classroom was Kent State and "the war". My teacher was unable to keep the politics out completely but at the same time you need to as a favor to people with differing views.
Toe Wiggling Encouraged
Thank you for your comments, Edward. Please do wiggle those toes. I hate the thought of restraining anyone, and I personally find interesting your topic of the role of truth, fiction, and denial in our society at large and its effect on the work environment of software professionals (if that's a fair description). I appreciate your understanding, Edward.
And just for the record, my point is not to dispute the merits of the questions being raised about 9/11. I don't have an opinion on this fairly new controversy, but I certainly don't subscribe to the idea that it should be a taboo subject. The issue for me is not the subject matter of this particular post. At this risk of being glib about a serious topic or belittling Edward's points, the post could have been about sewing a quilt or favorite cheese sauce recipes, which could have prompted the same question from the anonymous guest, and my same comment about compartmentalization.
Best,
Dan
Why?
Why was this posted to a developer.* software development blog?