Dadblog

Alan Moore, in an interview in Salon, on the neo-cons and religious right, and why they’re eventually doomed.

Because they are standing in the way of history, trying to turn everything, politically and spiritually, back to a medieval vision of the world. Whereas they’re perfectly entitled to have whatever worldview they like, I would suggest that humanity is moving in a forward direction. And that any attempt to turn the clock back to a mythical, simpler, or better age would probably be about as effective as Britain’s ancient King Canute, who famously sat on his throne along the tide line and ordered the waves to go back. To be fair, he was only doing this to demonstrate the futility of expecting leaders and rulers to be able to command the forces of history and the world. But yeah, I tend to think that this conservative backlash that has been going on since the ’70s is the final spasms of a dying creature; history is not moving that way, and no matter how much people dig their heels in and assume this is the 1950s or the Middle Ages, that’s not the truth of the situation. No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don’t make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.

No-one’s ever to blame for anything, are they? Blair, Bush, the electrician, me, everyone you and I know - we’re all engaged in a life-or-death struggle to avoid responsibility for something at all costs. Because if we take the blame for something, there might be consequences.

Need a shockingly anecdotal example of this? The story behind the film Open Water, in which a couple of divers were left, in the middle of the open ocean, by a dive boat which hadn’t counted divers coming back on board properly. Said dive boat got confused because two people jumped in the water when they shouldn’t have, and didn’t notice that two complete kits of dive equipment were missing, and didn’t even realise anything was wrong until the next day. A divemaster from another boat, when told that a diver in his group had found dive belts on the sea bed, said the diver had been “lucky” to find them. Because dive weights - they just grow down there, don’t they?

What a colossal cock-up all round. And you know what? It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

The industry’s damage-control mechanism was desperate and unpleasant. Rumours started spreading - many of them put about by the Outer Edge’s [the dive boat] owner, Tom Colrain - that there was more to the Lonergans’ case than met the eye. Melancholy passages in the diaries of Tom and Eileen were raised as evidence that they had committed suicide, that he had killed her in a murder-suicide, even that they had faked their own deaths and sped off to a new life in another boat supposedly spotted nearby.

Nice. Really lovely. And then there’s the reaction of the skipper of the Outer Edge, the man responsible for the safety of the divers who’d paid for his services:

Jack Nairn still lives in the area despite losing his business as a result of the publicity and debts surrounding his trial. He initially refused to talk about the case, and would only discuss how the fallout from the case had affected him. “The reality of it is that the thing creates emotional turmoil for all of the people involved,” he says. “It’s incredibly unsettling and stressful for myself and my children, and for us it’s a terrible thing that [Open Water] has been made. This is really very bad for the industry as a whole.”

Oh, right. So you left two people to die in the open water (and yes, there were sharks, there always are in these situations). You didn’t even realise you’d done a bad thing for 24 hours. And then, when people say “hang on, you really screwed this up,” you bring up how this is bad for your children and your industry.

You know, we can’t really criticise politicians for ducking blame, when they’re just doing the same as the rest of us.

Finally saw Fahrenheit 9/11 last night in a packed auditorium in the Ritzy in Brixton. It is an amazing piece of work. I’m sure there are exaggerations, deceptions, misleading statements of fact and even, who knows, downright lies and fiction in there. But the power with which it builds its central message - that a family chin-deep in hock to the fascist Saudi state stole the American election and then proceeded to wreck every international agreement and to send its finest sons and daughters into an unnecessary and unprovoked war - is all-consuming.

Some things are just wrong. It’s wrong to attack a sovereign nation without clear, uncontrovertible evidence of imminent danger. It’s wrong for a country’s leaders to be financially linked to, no, enmeshed in the leaders of another country, particularly when that other country is a fascist dictatorship masquerading as a theocracy. It’s wrong for a president to be so laidback that he’s incapable of making a decision at a time of enormous national crisis. And it’s wrong to kill people. Period. As they say in the States.

Simon’s put up an interesting intellectual point for all married rockers - where do you listen to music? I’ve been married 14 years, and we’ve never resolved this issue. My wife hates almost all the music I like, and she likes musicals, so there’s not a lot of common ground. She even dislikes me having headphones on the living room, both because of the tinny wail they create and the fact that I’m zoning out of interacting with anyone else.

Which is fair enough.

So what do we do? My only option, I think, is to get a little basement flat somewhere, and instead of taking a mistress, taking an alternative record collection. Then I can creep over there surreptitiously and listen to the Secret Machines in blissful solitude. But then there’ll be the guilt, and the lying, and the covering up. Maybe I’ll just need to start liking musicals.

Apple Computer said Wednesday that it had signed deals with three of the United Kingdom’s largest independent labels, partly ending a licensing spat that had kept many popular bands out of the company’s European iTunes service.

“We’re thrilled to add three of Europe’s largest indie labels to our iTunes Music Store in the U.K., France and Germany,” Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said in a statement. “We welcome Beggars, Sanctuary and V2 to the iTunes family and plan to add many more independent labels soon.”

From news.com.

OK, here’s a question: why are there so few (any?) British political weblogs of the quality of Brad Delong, or Crooked Timber, or Mark Kleiman, or Atrios, or Joshua Marshall, or about a dozen others I could mention? And why does nobody discuss the British press with the same informed, passionate fervour that these American guys adopt when talking about their own newspapers?

Of course, maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough. But I’ve yet to find a Brit who reads all the papers, is informed about the economy and the body politic and is just so farking plugged in as Brad Delong. Maybe he’s just an international, unrepeatable treasure. Maybe the Americans are just way ahead on this blog thing.

Or maybe, just maybe, British media and British politics are so debauched and disconnected and distorted that nobody can be bothered,

Surely it can’t be that. Can it?

Fascinating article in Slate (and I’ve never been able to say that before) about hive minds and mobs working on the Web, taking as an example Typophile’s project to allow a mob to create a new typeface:

In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist’s zillion competing ideas—an internal, self-contradicting mob—and focus them into a coherent work.

Mind you, online collaborators are finding that freedoms are important too. The journalist JD Lasica recently put his unpublished book, Darknet, on a wiki—a type of collaboration Web site where anyone can edit a page or write a new one—and encouraged his readership to edit it. But readers mostly offered only tiny edits, such as grammatical fixes or fact-checks. Nobody plunged in and rewrote an entire section. Lasica suspects his book was too fully formed: People didn’t want to mess with something that seemed finished. He thinks a better idea would be to post a much rougher draft of the book to make it seem more like clay that can be molded.

Just done the Philosophy Selector, which asks you questions about morality and then tells you which philosopher you’re most in tune with. I’m a Benthamite. I did not know that. Here’s my score (at least Ayn Rand didn’t come too far up, and since when did she qualify as a philosopher?).

1. Jeremy Bentham (100%)
2. Aristotle (92%)
3. Aquinas (85%)
4. John Stuart Mill (81%)
5. Jean-Paul Sartre (77%)
6. Kant (77%)
7. Spinoza (72%)
8. Ayn Rand (70%)
9. Plato (70%)
10. Epicureans (66%)
11. St. Augustine (66%)
12. David Hume (57%)
13. Stoics (53%)
14. Nietzsche (48%)
15. Prescriptivism (45%)
16. Ockham (42%)
17. Nel Noddings (35%)
18. Cynics (33%)
19. Thomas Hobbes (27%)

Bentham, Aristotle, Aquinas. I can just see what my kids would say: God, Dad, that’s so bloody traditional.

A robot must risk his neck for his brother man, and may not cop out when there’s danger all about.

A robot must at all times strive to be one bad motha-shutchyomouth.

From a comment on Engadget. Of such fragments are mighty things born.

More RSS goodness, this time a feed for eBay searches. They’re seeking feedback.