What's your education worth?

This would really have put a dent in the Weasley's bank balance. I've only seen the movies, but didn't they have four children there at one time?

For my friend Ms Books

If anyone will appreciate it this, you will.

For my friend in Ecuador

Apropos of a discussion we had about Shane Claiborne's book The Irresistable Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, I think this would be a worthwhile read.

Via First Thoughts.

Test your vocabulary

Apparently I'm a bit above average? I credit the reading I do. Test yourself here.

Preaching to the choir

I read a short book titled A Reader's Manifesto that has seen an odd publishing life. It started as a small book called Gorgons in the Pool that was published as a vanity publication from Amazon; only 100 were printed. 20 were sent by the author around to various news outlets as review copies and no more were ever sold from Amazon except to the author himself. It was eventually noticed by The Atlantic Monthly and they ran a slimmed down and modified version of the book in their magazine, after which people began to sit up and take notice a bit more. This edition is the filled out original version with some edits and to include a section that responds to some of the criticism he received in response to the essay version in The Atlantic.

Oh, no... Looks like we're going to have to jump!

I wish it wasn't titled.

Because then I'd ask how many people recognized the song before the lyrics start.

Win.

In lieu of an essay, a simple question

I've been wrestling with a vast response to K's last comment on the "Against IP rights" post, and I realized that it just comes down to a few questions. We'll start with just one.

Do you believe in freedom of association? (That is, that a person ought to be free to associate with whom one will?)

S is for Space

No, it's not a Sesame Street vignette. It's an old collection of Ray Bradbury stories that I found on the shelf at my in-laws'. I'd read them all before in other collections, but they were worth re-reading, if you're into that sort of thing. I enjoy the way that Bradbury can evoke emotions with mundane settings, sci-fi or fantasy settings or any other, really. His work isn't written to be a part of a particular genre so much as it is to tell stories that are interesting, funny, sad, terrifying, or whatever. The art of the short story seems to be dying out if not already dead, at least in English. Do yourself a favour and pick up a book of his and appreciate a master at work.

Heretic!

I've been meaning to read some of Hilaire Belloc's work for years now and I finally got around to getting one of his books from the library. (No, I'm not talking about the magnificent book of children's poems, Cautionary Tales for Children. Though I read that too and I'll have a brief notice later.) The book I read was The Great Heresies, which was written in 1938. That's germane because I think his opinions on heresies may have undergone some revision had he lived to see the changes of Vatican II.

In his book Belloc names 5 great heresies. In his writing, Catholicism is synonymous with Christianity and anything other than Catholicism is not rightfully called Christianity. He deals with ideas he considers to be heretical to Christian belief. Those are, in chronological order, Arianism, Islam (which he calls "Mohammedanism"; and since I think it is a better term I will use it from here on as well), Albigensianism, the Reformation (Protestantism) and Modernism. This last he notes is not a specific or general heresy in the form of the other four, but a competing idea which seeks nothing less than the destruction of Christianity. (He differentiates this from Mohammedanism since he thinks Mohammedanism is fundamentally derivative of Christianity and is thus a corruption rather than something entirely other.)

Meet me on the flip side for more details and quotations!

My timing is awful

Since I've decided to quit one of my vices (World of Warcraft), I clearly need another vice with which to replace it. In a brilliant move I decided to join Netflix at the end of July a couple days before they announced their giant price-hike to get both DVDs and streaming.

So I've decided to start with the DVD only option and perhaps I can turn around the DVDs fast enough to make it worth my while. If I'm feeling particularly ambitious I might even post movie reviews. No promises though.

I just flew in from the East Coast

And, boy, are my arms tired.

I'll resume posting in earnest tomorrow after I've recovered a bit.

Free will or determinism?

People argue over (or debate, if you prefer) whether we choose our actions (free will), or those actions are chosen for us by some combination of our genes, our environment, our limbic and other brain functions - what have you in the physical world - or even by God Himself (determinism). There are a lot of very sophisticated arguments on both sides, and I even thought of a game theory argument, not so much as to disproving determinism, but rather to prove that one should not hold it as a view - a sort of paraphrase of Pascal's wager. (Not well read, I am completely ignorant of whether Pascal himself dealt with free will.)

But really, I am a barbarian of a philosopher, and the way I see it is this: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, shoot it and fry it, Peking-style. If it looks like people are choosing what they do, and you feel like you made a choice between two or more options, they are and you did. Free will. If you try to tell me free will is an illusion, I may choose to hit you in the head. I warned you, I'm a bit of a barbarian.

Why bang my head against a wall?

...when a pretty girl is available to do it for me? This video is remarkably efficient in covering almost everything I tried to say in my first controversial post, with better explanations, and easier on the eyes.

How can something so depressing be so good?

Yes, that's right, I'm reading Russian literature again. I finally got to the end of Anna Karenina.  Boy, howdy! That is a depressing story. I shouldn't have to put spoiler warnings out for a book that's about 150 years old or something, but here goes.

There be spoilers ahead!

Speaking of Property Rights

I thought the edit at the bottom of this post had it about right. You wouldn't catch me giving back a ball like that.

Book Reviews

I've decided that I'm going to post at least a few short lines reviewing the books I read. This time around there isn't anything terribly fascinating, but I should have something more interesting soon.

I read The Outfit, which is the second graphic novel based on the Parker novels of Richard Stark. It was the first that tipped me off to the fact that there were any novels at all and not just a movie. The second is much like the first though it spans the happenings of a couple novels. It does a good job of capturing the feel of the novels, it skips right along at a nice pace and it doesn't make the error of adding material. In this book Parker is getting his revenge on the organized crime syndicate "The Outfit" when they won't leave him alone. The first book involves him getting his money back from them after he's double-crossed by a fellow crook.

If you like graphic novels, heist stories or both it's worth checking out.

Against "intellectual property" rights

(The following is copied from a response I made to a pro-IP libertarian on Facebook. I thought it may be interesting to raise the issue here.)

You are right that when you conceive of an idea, it is yours and yours alone. But when you share it with me, it is not something you can reclaim from me like a piece of tangible property lent or rented out. And if it is a good idea, beneficial to man’s welfare, it is no less profitable to you if a million other souls are making use of it while you are trying to use it, the way you would not be able to use your car or your house if a million others were trying to use that. And the economic and aesthetic benefits of everyone being able to build on one another’s ideas and inventions without fear of legal reprisal are hard to quantify or even imagine. Or they would be hard to imagine, if we did not have the advantage of seeing something like it firsthand on the Internet.

But the most important consideration in this debate is not economic, but moral. If a presumed right requires unjust acts to enforce, it is not a right at all, or at best unenforceable in a just society. IP rights are a violation of others’ real property rights, and even intellectual freedom. The most fundamental IP protections violate the 1st Amendment, stripping us of freedom of speech, if we dare to repeat what we have heard from the copyright holder. If I use a literal, actual printing press to disseminate a good idea other than my own, my freedom of press is violated, and you, the copyright holder, get to violate my tangible property rights for your IP rights. But if I can trace some hint of your idea back to something I once said in front of some witnesses somewhere, we can go at it round-robin in the courts until we die. Worse still, if I come up with a brilliant idea that is in some way based on your idea, you have the right to my idea, the fruit of my intellect, if I should dare try to share it with anyone. Without IP rights, there is no conflict, no paradox, only freedom. You come up with good ideas that benefit humanity, and I disseminate them, and humanity benefits from them.

There is some sense in which you can keep the recipe for your “secret sauce” secret from competitors for a competitive advantage, but when you fail to maintain the secrecy and use the force of government to make up for it, you’ve crossed the line into violating others’ property rights. The government cannot legitimately enforce IP rights, because it is a force of coercion and intimidation without any legitimate claim to its own property or mandate.

Words, Words, Words

I was thinking about words a while back and it seemed to me that there weren't a whole lot of words with the ending "-sp". (Turns out there are 16.) So I sat down and made a list of what I could think of:

Hello?

C'mon, bro. You haven't posted anything in over a month. Will you post something if I show you how to make your own "About" page?

Parker, Porter, Whatever

I've been reading the works of Richard Stark (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake) and I'm finding them mildly enjoyable. I'm not going to purchase the series, I don't think. The first couple novels were used as a basis for the Mel Gibson flick Payback that came out a decade or so ago.

They're kind of noir novels with a bit of a twist. As the tagline for the movie says, you're supposed to root for the bad guy. Parker (Porter in the film) is a professional armed robber who steals infrequently and very deliberately as his way of life. The novels do a fine job of bringing to life a very amoral man who lives his life in an extremely selfish way. He's very Nietzschean, I suppose.

In the movie they change things up so that you don't feel too badly about cheering for him. He did steal money at the beginning, but it was from the Chinese Triads. And then he's double-crossed and he's just trying to get back the money he's owed. In the books he's much more of a bad guy and is motivated by revenge and is not at all scrupulous about from whom he steals. I find that I enjoy the inherent morality of the detective story more, but I'll read through this series once.

Crazy

An image linked from Jonah Goldberg's G-File that shows something about the pace of change in China over the past 20 years.

I suppose we could use this to start an argument over whether it's truly representative or if the rate of change is sustainable or if it has anything to say about prospects for political and religious freedom. Or we could just think it's neat.

Mash-up Madness

I'm not often a fan of what are colloquially known as "mash-ups". Too often the result is less than the sum of its parts.

However! Somewhere in my daily trawl through the interwebz I ran across JamesHance.com. Fun times. I think this one and this one are my favourites.