December 2009 Archives

Engineers and terrorism

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So what makes engineers more likely to become terrorists? The most obvious theory is their technical expertise; al-Qaida and other terror groups need to recruit people who can make bombs. But Gambetta and Hertog say that doesn't explain the overlap. Their study found that engineers serve the terrorist organizations they join in many more capacities than making or deploying explosives. A significant number held higher-level posts that didn't directly involve their engineering training at all.

The authors instead conclude that the phenomenon is explained by a combination of mindset and professional circumstance. Citing studies finding that engineers as a group are more politically conservative than other professions, Gambetta and Hertog write that engineers by nature are more likely to be drawn to the kind of rigid, hierarchical worldviews that radical Islam provides: Their governing mentality "inclines them to take more extreme conservative and religious positions everywhere." What's more, although engineering is considered an elite profession in Middle Eastern countries, the region's job market for engineers dried up during the economic crises of the 1970s and '80s, frustrating that era's recent graduates and driving them to radicalize. -Source
It must be shocking to certain types of "intellectuals" to find that a set of disciplines which deal heavily with math, science and applied logic, and that depend witch's brew of intelligence, education, experience and innate talent tend to create people who see the world in terms of precision, logic, absolutes and hierarchy rather than relatives, unknowns and all people as "Free and Equal Supermen (ht: What's Wrong with the World for that term)." What is the world coming to when empirical studies start to show that ideas have consequences?..

What connects terrorists like the isolated incidents which have been the majority of reports before and after 9/11 is not ideology or profession, but a combination of intelligence, social awkwardness, sexual frustration and feeling isolated. The "Pants-Bomber" fits that description. So did Timothy McVeigh and Nidal Hasan. Engineers simply tend to have all three to one degree or another.

Next project

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WPtouch is a great plugin for WordPress and Melody/Movable Type need something like it. The way that I chose to start on it may seem hackerish, but I chose to start by taking fully rendered WPtouch pages and converting them into Movable Type templates since Movable Type templates are closer to the HTML produced by a WordPress template than the PHP code in the WordPress template in my opinion.

As the project (hopefully) progresses, people can play with the work here. My goal is to build an initial template set from it, and then build up a more powerful plugin from there.
I have no Internet access at my house because the subcontractors that Verizon is using to replace union labor (note: I have no love for unions) never actually did the work that they were hired to do for Verizon. They were supposed to bring the fiber optic lines across the street from the eight port hub that is in my neighbor's yard, install whatever hardware is needed on my side in a neat little hole and finish up getting my lot ready to receive FiOS; during the summer when they were being paid to build out this infrastructure.

All I have in my yard is a hole that is neatly lined with gravel and plastic with a nice, green lid over it. I found that out when the Verizon tech went slack-jawed and mutter the unabbreviated version of "WTF" when he popped the lid to begin his work on Wednesday of last week.

So now Verizon will have to schedule more work to be done, lose more money in the process, to repeat work God only knows when to get our house hooked up.

This is what happens when you hire fly-by-night subcontractors whose workers look like they just finished drying their clothes off from a dip in the Rio Grande...
The libertarian position on liberty as the highest good makes sense if one views humanity according to the libertarian belief that man is a rational, economic animal who acts in his own interest. From that position, people who make bad choices merely need to be corrected when they harm others, and more extreme cases need to be imprisoned for their crimes. But what if man is not rational, but rationalizing? What if man frequently acts against his own interest in truly absurd ways? Can anyone honestly say that from a cost-benefit analysis that regular consumption of most hard drugs makes sense? Given the rampancy of sexual diseases, especially severely damaging and deadly ones, are promiscuity and prostitution rational rather than rutting russian routlette? These are just the tip of the iceberg of the myriad ways in which man proves that he is hardly a being who subordinates himself to raw reason rather than employing reason like any other tool to get what he wants.

Even as an "economic animal," ordinary man is hardly rational. Would any rational being get themselves into several thousand dollars of high interest credit card debt in ordinary situations? It is certainly rational for someone to bankrupt themselves with credit card debt to finance medical operations, but consumer electronics, dining out and other luxuries? Hardly! The entire consumerist culture which encourages people to spend beyond their means, to save little and that despises frugality is irrational, to say nothing of the economic intellectual support behind it.

Reason is nothing more than a tool, and as such, man can no more live by it than he can live by fire, by hammers, by computers or any other tool with which he chooses to enhance his life and surroundings. Being an intellectual tool, he can employ it to the point of perceiving that he is using it to such an extent that it guides his every actions, but that's nothing more than intellectual conceit for it does not guide him so much as exist as a habit. The greatest danger that comes with this fetishization of reason is that it ignores the way that pre-rational desires and inputs affect the rules of logic and thus serve to create subtle blinders. Fetishizing reason has the peculiar habit of ultimately creating the same sort of haughty arrogance and disdain for disagreement that one finds in religious fanatics.

Once it is accepted that man is not truly rational (which is not the same as calling man irrational), and that he often acts against his own interest, there is an instinctive impulse to save him from himself. This is where many Christians go wrong, for man is perfectly capable of choosing right from wrong, but chooses not to in many cases. It is that facet, the choosing to do evil, which is what vexes Christians and which the Christian framework says cannot be changed by force. Preventing someone from getting high will not make them not want to get high (which is, according to Christianity, where the sin is rooted) unless the state is so successful at eradicating intoxication that man simply doesn't know that it is biochemically possible. Such a state would have its own extreme externalities, the very least of which would be wanton abuses of authority.

The trouble that Christians often find themselves in with reason is that they often play up the power of emotion and desire in overpowering reason to the point of making excuses for why someone harmed another. Libertarians (of the secular, cultural sort), likewise, often lack a proper appreciation for the ways that emotion and desire can so thoroughly rob people of reason, principle, etc. that they are closer at times to animals than the sort of hyper-rational being that mainstream libertarianism assumes man may be. A strong example of this is the way that many ambitious people will gladly arm hostile, tyrannical governments with the means to oppress and murder so long as they reap profit and personal luxury. Libertarians will often defend this saying that it is in "their rational, self-interest," but it is ultimately in no one's rational, self-interest to provide ideological governments, the greatest killing machines in human history (as decisively proved in the 20th century), with the means to efficiently carry out their will. That makes no more rational sense than selling weapons to known criminals who live within walking distance of your neighborhood.

Where the two may come together is by accepting the limits of human nature, especially as they relate to emotion and reason, and accept the fact that these limits have little bearing on the question of personal responsibility. A biological tendency or character flaw does not excuse bad, even evil, behavior. Likewise, a culture without limits on human autonomy and which provides no guidance to desire and emotion will feed into the worst traits of humanity by giving them a continuous outlet; if man is to live with reason as a guiding tool, it needs the assistance of a culture which helps his reason control his lower instincts, his emotions and desires. Therefore, as an example, a free society may legally permit him to be promiscuous, but would not socially permit it. The state may not care a whit about how many women he beds, but his male peers would be free to exclude him from business, from church, from every social institution. If nothing in a society controls this behavior, then the behavior will be accepted, and thus there will be more of it, eventually to the point of obsession as it currently is in America where there is neither cultural nor legal restraint and it is everywhere.
In attempting to reconcile libertarianism with Christianity, one of the main obstacles is the divergence of the moral visions. For libertarianism, the highest good is liberty and human autonomy. For Christianity, the highest good is summarized in the first commandment which is to love Lord with all of one's strength, above all things, and render obedience to the same. No matter how much libertarians may swear up and down that theirs is a "morally neutral vision," any philosophy which claims to differentiate between what is good and what is not good, bad or even evil, contains an implicit moral vision rendering it morally non-neutral. If that were not the case, then libertarian philosophy would merely state, in raw utilitarian terms that violations of individual liberties are merely "undesirable," rather than some act of injustice.

For Christians attempting to be libertarians or engage libertarianism from a minarchist perspective, the conflict in the moral visions is a profound one because Christianity carries with it many assumptions and demands which limit human liberty. Christianity does not recogize a right of autonomy in marriage, in parenting or even refusing a genuinely needy person from taking a loaf of bread to keep from starving. In fact, in these, and some other areas, Christianity actively negates human autonomy and denigrates it to the point of labeling it evil. That is not to say that Christianity forces most of these things on anyone, but rather that it firmly, immutably denies the right to shirk off these arrangements once made, as well as basic duties to one's neighbor.

Libertarians must likewise limit their ideology in some cases to bring it back down into the realm of reason. For example, most libertarians recognize that it would be utterly insane to not punish parents who abandon their children like unwanted pets. There is a great tendency among libertarians to defend positions like opposition to adultery (adultery laws being a restriction on individual sexual autonomy) on the grouns that they are a violation of a contractual agreement, but these defenses tend to be stretched absurdly thin to bandage over where libertarian ideals and views on humanity begin to tear when in put up against human nature.

The libertarian moral vision also often finds itself at odds with the way that the majority of people relate to one another. Most people do not believe that it is an act of injustice to be taxed or pushed to support their fellow man in a time of need. Indeed, the reason that opposition to the welfare state faces such inertia is because it does not feel particularly burdensome to the majority, and they believe it is simply a decent and necessary thing for a civilized society. Unfortunately for libertarians, the majority of the language that would actually appeal to the public in this matter to greatly limit or abolish the welfare state outright is based on a different moral vision: corrosion of work ethic, family life, personal morality, etc. This moral vision is shared by a much higher percentage of the public than the libertarian one, but it is unlikely that libertarians could truly make this argument convincingly since it would require using the language of a vision that is not theirs.

The reconciliation between the two paths would begin by jettisoning the libertarian view of liberty as the highest good, while adopting liberty as the essential foundation of moral conduct; any good behavior which cannot exist outside of coercion is worthless as a matter of personal character. Christians already implicitly recognize that there are many moral matters which the state cannot handle, and libertarianism can help them better understand where the dividing line is between morality which has an impact on life, limb and property that the state can effectively judge and moral matters which are too nebulous or dangerous for the state to prosecute.

Liberty may not be the highest good, but it is a high good, an important good that cannnot be underestimated in its value. In particular, it is an invaluable tool for the Christian Church in helping it identify the character of individuals for most wolves do not feel the need to conceal their identities in a free society. An openly libertine individual is knowable and avoidable, while a secret libertine is a threat to the reputation of everyone who associates with them.
When I was working on refactoring part of the FacebookCommenters plugin to use a config.yaml file, I had to account for the save_config method that the plugin's pl file implemented. Movable Type plugins that are based on PL (Perl) files subclass MT::Plugin and accordingly can override methods in MT::Plugin like save_config. Getting around that is actually really this simple:

The perl module which implements the subclass:

package FacebookCommenters::Plugin;
use strict;
use base qw(MT::Plugin);

sub save_config
{
    my $plugin = shift;
   
    #Do stuff
   
    return $plugin->SUPER::save_config(@_);
}

1;
add this code (use 4 spaces, not tabs for indentation) to the config.yaml file:

init: >
    sub {
        my $plugin = shift;
        require FacebookCommenters::Plugin;
        bless $plugin, 'FacebookCommenters::Plugin';
    }
That's based on a trick that was explained on the Movable Type mailing list, but needed to be shared.

Institutional liberalism

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Comments like this are one of the reasons why I think What's Wrong with the World is one of the best right wing blogs out there:

The reason people don't understand why PC becomes so entrenched is because "political correctness" is itself a phrase that obscures the institutional rationale for things. PC is nothing more or less than advanced, institutionalized liberalism. I have come to dislike the phrase "political correctness run amok" very strongly. It suggests that just a little bit of PC would be sensible, or that PC is just an extreme version of something basically rational, which it's not. You can't identify and combat "political correctness run amok," because it's a meaningless way to describe the phenomenon.

The phenomenon is liberalism, and the reason Western society is in the death grip of political correctness is because PC is an expression of the death grip that liberalism has on all our institutions--the media, the military, the universities, the mainline churches, etc. All of them are PC because all of them have, in ways unique to the character or charism of each, adopted the essentials of liberalism. In particular, the belief that erasing distinctions--and particularly categories as they apply to human beings--is the highest possible calling in life, somehow residing at the core of the institution's mission, is the liberal ideal to which all We3stern institutions now subscribe.

What Larry Auster sometimes calls the non-discrimination principle, that is, the notion that discrimination is the single greatest possible evil and that all goods are tertiary to the good of advancing the liberal ideal of non-discrimination, really is the ruling principle of our society. Recognizing this fact makes every single instance of PC madness fully comprehensible. It also explains why everyone knows by instinct the seemingly byzantine demands of PC, even when they aren't written down anywhere. Being based on such a simple principle, people are able to instantly and without reflection apply it to any given situation at all. Finally, recognizing this fact also explains why people are so hopelessly confused by it all--they accept the basic premises of liberalism, and they largely know precisely when and how to cringe before its demands ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!"), but they nonetheless are baffled when they see institutions behaving in accordance with the raw, anti-rational radicalism of the non-discrimination principle. They fail to identify liberalism as such as the source of the problem, being basically liberals themselves, so they blame it on some hazy thing called "political correctness." Moreover, they realize that this is an expression of something that they basically accept, and cannot repudiate utterly, so they say that it is somehow "run amok."

If people would simply call it what it is, that is institutionalized liberalism, we could at least have a debate on the real causes of such insanity and decide whether we really do think the sacrifice worth it.

The degree to which liberal principles have been accepted in the United States is generally understated. The primary disagreement between what we call conservatives and liberals is only a matter of how far they should go, with conservatives playing the role of liberal skeptics who tend to assume that the realm of politics should be the general limit. The idea, for example, that sexual activity between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home should be between them is mainstream among conservatives, a fact that liberals rarely acknowledge. Prior to the "liberal era" in the West, the very notion of "private sexual activity," or sexual activity that exists outside the realm of accountability to society, and even the concept of a "private life" outside of that realm, would have been alien; such private-public life is itself a liberal social construct, and one of many that are tacitly and quietly accepted by the majority. Other concepts from "individual autonomy," to a general belief that authority rests on the consent of those which it affects are equally liberal and mainstream. Again, in that case, the disagreement between conservatives is not, for example, whether "government derives its authority from the consent of the government" is true or not, but whether or not that applies just to the state or can be applied socially to all institutions from employers, to families.

In more modern times, probably around the turn of the twentieth century, liberalism split into what we call progressivism (modern liberalism) and libertarianism today. At their core, they both hold the same values of equality and personal autonomy combined with a positivist view of all authority. Where they differ is that libertarianism rejected the statism that was in vogue during that time while progressivism is a statist liberalism that aggressively uses the state to pare inequalities in all spheres of life and to try to create an environment in which each individual is an autonomous being within a greater community. That rejection of radical statist social intervention was why the political right and libertarians were able to make common cause during the Cold War, despite the many disagreements between a number of conservative factions and libertarians.

Of course, these are generalizations as there are at least two competing forms of libertarianism, one approaching it from the right as a conservative rejection of statism to achieve conservative goals and the other from the left to achieve liberal goals without radical statism. It is perfectly fair to say that both modern liberals, libertarians and even mainstream conservatism are all heirs of liberalism, though that applies far more to the first two. Unfortunately, we are like students of romance languages who don't acknowledge the common origin in Latin of our respective fields of study. That blindness that verges on willful ignorance is no small part of why our political debates today are so often meaningless.
A sobering thought...

The Founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offenses, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law.

Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalization the first line of attack -- a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it's corporate scandals or e-mail spam.

At one point on Tuesday, Breyer protested: "I thought there was a principle that a citizen is supposed to be able to understand the criminal law." Good luck with that.

There are now more than 4,000 federal crimes, spread out through some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code.

That's 4,000 ways to be imprisoned and/or fined. For a rough order of magnitude, imagine a typical 500 sheet pack of printer paper. Let's estimate that at 2.5 inches in height. The United States Code, if stacked from floor to ceiling, would require 11.25 feet of space. The Old Testament law books, by comparison, cover 613 total laws which range from marriage regulations, to torts, to ceremonial laws, to criminal statutes, to rules of evidence and are contained in a section of text that would roughly a half of an inch thick.

Those 4,000 provisions are just the federal criminal statutes. That doesn't even begin to count the myriad provisions which are given to federal agencies to pass regulatory laws. I doubt that there are more than a handful of individuals in the United States who actually even know what half of those criminal statutes are, let alone the ways that they could apply.

For the record, the purpose of this comparison is simply to remind my fellow Americans that we are, quite frankly, nowhere near as free and advanced as we think we are if we have this many ways to deny our brethren of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

jQuery comment code in Movable Type

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Byrne Reese created a jQuery comment plugin for Movable Type, which I forked and extended. As you can see from this example, the jQuery components work quite well. This is how I implemented it on the test blog. I use the Professional Website Template Set, but the JavaScript includes, CSS links, etc. are applicable to other template sets and should be placed in the header module.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/jquery.mtcomment.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/jquery.form.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$mt:Link template="javascript"$>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$mt:Link template="legacy javascript"$>"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/jquery.mtauth.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/jquery.mtgreeting.js"></script>
<mt:If name="body_class" eq="mt-entry-archive">
<script type="text/javascript" src="/jquery.mtcomment.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
   if ($('#comments-form')) {
      /* First, let's boot strap the comment form on the page.
       * In this one step, we take the default MT comment form and turn
       * into a fully AJAXified comment form.
       */
      var form = $('#comments-form').commentForm({
        target: '.comments-open-content'
      });
      /* Once the form is bootstrapped and we have a handle to it
       * we then pass that as a handle to the reply function which
       * provides the inline commenting ability.
       */
      $('a[title=Reply]').reply({
        sourceForm: form
      });

      $("#comments-form").onauthchange(function(evt, user) {
         var openDataDiv = $("#comments-open-data");

         if (openDataDiv && user.is_authenticated)
         {
            $("<p>Thanks for logging in, " + user.name + "</p>").insertBefore(this);
            $("#comment-author", openDataDiv).val(user.name);
            $("#comment-email", openDataDiv).val(user.email);
            $("#comment-url", openDataDiv).val(user.url);
            $(openDataDiv).fadeOut(1000);
         }
      });
   };
});
</script>
</mt:If>
In addition to that change to the header module, clone the JavaScript index template and rename the new copy to "legacy javascript" so that most plugins that rely on the official site-facing JavaScript won't be broken. Add the contents of byrne's new JavaScript template to the old JavaScript template.

Also, wrap <mt:Ignore></mt:Ignore> tags around this section of the Comments template module if you are using the Classic Blog Template Set:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
mtAttachEvent("load", mtEntryOnLoad);
mtAttachEvent("unload", mtEntryOnUnload);
//-->
</script>
Finally, remove the JavaScript event handlers from the commenter form module (segments like onsubmit="dothis();"). Save the changes, rebuild.

March 2010

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