My best, most vivid memories of school comes from the second and third year of secondary school (that’s 7th & 8th grade to all you mercans). That’s the period when I got into the most trouble, had my biggest triumphs, copped my first feel, made my first teacher cry (and the second a couple of days later), got caned for the first time [could that be related to the previous memory? - ed], was most active in sports, got beaten around the head hardest by a teacher, wrote my first song, wrote the most lines (le silence aides le travail) and a thousand other similar memories.

It was shocking to think, when I dropped my son off for his first day of middle school this morning, to think that those kids were only a year younger than I was in Mr Gooden’s class.

I feel a whole lot of memory-related blogs coming on…

I have wanted to say something like this for a long while, but this letter to the NYTimes editor says it perfectly.

As a longtime peace activist who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, I deeply resent Thomas L. Friedman’s reference to us as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in.”

We were bitterly opposed to the notion of pre-emptive war and to a devastating attack on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. But one of our major arguments against this ill-planned, ill-executed tragic war was that it would distract energy and resources from a truly effective attack against terrorism and Muslim extremism.

This is exactly what has happened.

The Iraq war (and sadly, now the war in Lebanon) has only strengthened the terrorists, worsened hatred toward us and rendered us less rather than more capable of fighting terrorism.

Ann Edelman
Los Angeles, Aug. 16, 2006

I stopped my subscription to TimesSelect a while ago so I don’t know what Ann is replying to (maybe its time to renew?). It’s good news that the likes of George Will, Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan etc etc etc et al are finally starting to ask the question “What was it all for?” but why do they feel such a strong need to malign the motives of those of us who asked the same question four years ago?

I hasten to add that I have no idea what comes next. I broadly agreed with Kerry’s prescription back in 2004 but it’s not 2004 any more, sadly. Staying will be a disaster, leaving will be a disaster. I hope there will finally be an honest debate and less of the debate-only-encourages-the-terrorists nonsense that Cheney and Bush (and, now, Lieberman) are STILL coming out with.

Dylan starts middle school tomorrow.

I remember it like it was just yesterday. Mrs Stevenson in her wizarding robes marching us down to the Junior Assembly Hall sounding exactly like Professor McGonagall - she might even have been scottish.

Such a long time ago and, at the same time, just yesterday.

Raph Koster is one of my favourite bloggers. He was a lead designer on the best game of all time. His blog is nominally about games but he covers a lot of the surrounding territory too. Today’s post is about the recent history of pop culture as seen through the covers of Entertainment Weekly whenever a new actor took on the James Bond role.

In 1995, with Pierce Brosnan on the cover, we see an article on “What’s Hot (And Not) on Laserdisc.” To which today’s response is “what’s laserdisc?” We see a pre-Shakespeare in Love Gwyneth Paltrow insisting that “I’m more than a head in a box.” And the cover article asks, “Do we still need 007 in a post-Cold-War world?”

and

In 1987, the cover was Timothy Dalton. The cover boldly argues “Those Silly Simpsons: Why Tracey Ullman’s Cartoon Clan Deserves Its Own Show.”

He bemoans the ever-changing nature of pop (maybe that’s a definition of popular art? it certainly has very little to do with what’s popular)…

At any given time, pretty much everything in the pop cultural landscape is doomed to irrelevancy; the landscape is actually a landfill that hasn’t figured itself out yet.

…but concludes that the ever-changing landscape gives us hooks on which we can hang our own personal memories. I like that.

Ronaldo was back home safely, Rooney was in devastating form, Scholes was back to his old self. What more could you ask for on the first day of the new season?

Enjoy it while it lasts!

I just got back from camping. During both nights I had to get up to pee. I NEVER have to get up to pee. Why do I have to get up to pee when it is least convenient, it’s dark, very cold and I am guaranteed to step on my wife while trying to climb back into the tent without a torch?

My theory is that it’s cold at camping so I sweat less and my normal intake of beer has to be eliminated through other channels.

Either that or I drink more beer when I am camping but that seems unlikely.

Could be a good science project. (hope I am not getting too cerebral for Richard)

Still waiting for Jeff’s philosopher to give me some context for my musings on morality, but while we wait…

I just subscribed to The Mouse Trap, a blog about evolutionary psychology. Today’s entry was about moral dilemmas and moral development with a link to a discussion of Kohlberg’s Moral Stages. Kohlberg proposed that there are 5 (or maybe 6 stages) in a child’s moral development and crafted a test to determine the particular stage that a child is at by posing moral dilemmas such as this one…

In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man’s store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that? (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 19)

…and seeing how the child reasons about the dilemma. The subject is then graded into one of the stages summarized below:

At stage 1 children think of what is right as that which authority says is right. Doing the right thing is obeying authority and avoiding punishment. At stage 2, children are no longer so impressed by any single authority; they see that there are different sides to any issue. Since everything is relative, one is free to pursue one’s own interests, although it is often useful to make deals and exchange favors with others.

At stages 3 and 4, young people think as members of the conventional society with its values, norms, and expectations. At stage 3, they emphasize being a good person, which basically means having helpful motives toward people close to one At stage 4, the concern shifts toward obeying laws to maintain society as a whole.

At stages 5 and 6 people are less concerned with maintaining society for it own sake, and more concerned with the principles and values that make for a good society. At stage 5 they emphasize basic rights and the democratic processes that give everyone a say, and at stage 6 they define the principles by which agreement will be most just.

Read the article (it’s an easy read) to get the full scoop especially if you want to argue with me in the comments

It occurred to me that the stages seem to oscillate between simplistic versions of liberal and conservative thinking (approximately, conservative, liberal, liberal, conservative) until stage 5/6 when a more abstract reasoning kicks in. Kohlberg claims that there is a natural progression along the stages and, although children do not skip stages, they can be helped through the stages by education and might get stuck at a stage if their education is incomplete.

Revisiting Rob’s Barefoot Dilemma in the context of Kohlberg’s stages, we might decide that rules are appropriate for very young (stage 1) children but that our goal should be to educate the child by providing different reasoning at each stage of moral development.

The goal for a healthy society would be to get everyone to stage 5 by the end of their education. This would allow us to prune back the overgrown Statute Book to remove all those laws rendered unnecessary in a moral society. The only laws left would be the ones that either

1. prevent harmful behaviour by the morally immature
2. prevent society from being hijacked by the plutocrats
3. provide the education and resources that enable everyone to participate in the moral society

Perhaps there could be different sets of laws for people at different stages of moral development (as there are now) but people would have to demonstrate the appropriate level of moral maturity before they could step up a level? The whole system would be administered by philosophers of course.

Morals are the rules that we follow when there are no rules and no one is watching.

Corollary

When we create laws to prevent immoral behavior, we make society less moral.

Citations

In the old days, you used to have to do tons of research - read books and do studies and stuff - before making claims like this. Now you can just stick it on your blog and someone will come along and say “that sounds just like what that famous philosopher said in his second book”. If only I knew someone who lived next to a philosopher, he could ask him.

Everyone has a theory about spam. Most are variations of the Barney in Florida Hypothesis. If you send out 18 million ads for v1-agara you only need to sell one little bottle to make a profit - and Barney in Florida will probably buy one. The Barney in Florida Hypothesis is not only wrong, it’s actually a sales pitch.

Here’s my hypothesis.

No-one has made any money from spam since about 1998 except the people who sell spamming software. Their pitch is that if you send out 18 million ads for v1-agara you only need to sell one bottle (to Barney in Florida) to make a profit because our spamming software only costs $28.95.

Barney doesn’t buy v1-agara, he buys spamming software. He has evidence that Barney will buy spamming software because Barney just bought some…and if Barney is stupid enough to buy spamming software, maybe he’ll buy some v1-agara too. Hey! He only needs to sell one bottle to break even.

It’s a pyramid scheme.

In a couple of years, everyone who might wager $28.95 on an 18 million-to-one bet will have all the spamming software they need and the whole spam period will be consigned to the dustbin of internet history.

Read the rest of this entry »

With everyone using RSS these days, web log statistics are now useless. I have no idea whether anyone is even reading this nonsense. The only sign of readership is the occasional comment - for which I am truly grateful. I tell myself that I am writing this stuff for me - and I don’t care if nobody else reads it - but the truth is I am a liar.

One potential solution to this conundrum is to make RSS deliver just a small teaser and force readers to come to my site to get the full bloggy goodness. I understand why that’s a good solution to for professional bloggers like Andrew Sullivan as they need the $$$ from advertising but, since Andrew changed his RSS feed a couple of weeks ago to send just an extract, I have only read about a third of his posts. Now Bob has started doing it (grrrr). I think that’s a fine way to lose readers.
My dilemma is this. Is it more important that people read my blog or that I know they are reading my blog?

I think I’ll just let my readers stay anonymous and hope that someone - probably Julio - will tell me that there is this great site that can track all your subscribers by nationality, OS and hair colour.

Meanwhile, is there anybody out there?