Saturday, April 06, 2002 More Upgrades By Diana Hsieh @ 10:17 PM Although working within the constraints of Blogger was a challenge, I have managed to create a cool new program that prints an integrated list of the latest comments, formatted either by blog entry or by date. Miraculously enough, both blog entry titles and links are displayed! So now it's much easier to check for new comments. And recent comments on older blog entries aren't buried in the bowels of NoodleFood. Hooray! This cool little bit of programming only works with my custom comments scripts, particularly my datafile format. It also requires some (non-visible) changes to the Blogger template and a bit of server setup. I'll probably have a version of this comment software available for public consumption in the next few weeks. I'll make Paul my first test subject. (Come to think of it, the methodology I used to grab the blog entry titles and URLs could be easily used to generate XML too...) And now back to our regularly scheduled philosophy programming... Link / Noodles / Trackback Thursday, April 04, 2002 Sysadmin Stuff By Diana Hsieh @ 5:21 PM Today, I immersed myself in various long-overdue sysadmin chores. I set up analog to analyze the logs -- for the first time since July of 2001! I also got the old GeekPress archive up and running. That archive does well in strange Google searches because of the odd collection of keywords on each day's page. I also reposted my semi-famous Scamming Google story. It wasn't such a bad day, but I'm grateful not to be programming for a living anymore. Link / Noodles / Trackback Killer Kitty By Diana Hsieh @ 10:09 AM My movie-star kitty is now a killer kitty! She caught her first bird yesterday. Of course, she immediately brought it into the house in order to jealously protect this delectable treat. But her bizarre and extra-loud mewing gave her away. She was not at all pleased to be unceremoniously shoved out the kitty door. Well, at least we'll have one animal that can hunt for the family if civilization collapses. Link / Noodles / Trackback Wednesday, April 03, 2002 An Unexpected Twist By Diana Hsieh @ 10:41 PM Best of the Web today notes: "Egypt announced Wednesday it was limiting diplomatic contacts with Israel," the Associated Press reports. Though Cairo did not sever diplomatic ties, it did say its relations with the Jewish state would be limited to those that "serve the Palestinian cause." Egypt gets some $2 billion in foreign aid each year from the U.S., premised upon its peace with the Jewish state. This seems an opportune moment for Washington to turn off the spigot. I have wondered whether another all-out war by the Arab states against Israel was forthcoming. In such circumstances, I would have guessed that Egypt would remain neutral, prior to reading this news tidbit. Now I suspect that the more moderate nations like Egypt and Jordan might join in such a war. Well, they'll get their asses kicked, just as they deserve. Tonight, Paul and I went to see Yaron Brook's talk The Moral Case for Supporting Israel. It was a great talk, very much worth catching if Brook comes to your part of the world. Link / Noodles / Trackback Tuesday, April 02, 2002 Intrusive Photography By Diana Hsieh @ 5:35 PM Brink Lindsey discusses the Japanese obsession with snapping pictures in his blog entry on the cherry blossoms in Washington. Brink writes: This past weekend, as is generally the case, a big chunk of the crowd was Japanese. The cherry blossom has iconic status in Japan: Its fleeting beauty symbolizes the ephemerality of life, a notion very deeply seated in Japanese spirituality. Haiku poetry also expresses this awareness of the preciousness of the passing moment, and I've often wondered if the Japanese obsession with taking snapshots -- and thereby capturing the instant -- is yet another manifestation of the same sensibility. Anybody able to help me out on that question? However much the Japanese may attend to the "preciousness of the passing moment" in their poetry, taking pictures wastes far more precious moments than it captures. Most photographs require people to break from their chosen activity to be herded into place with big grins on their faces for too many seconds to be comfortable. And those are the pictures that don't involve painfully squinting into the sun. Surely a trip to a museum or a dinner with out-of-town family is not worth the trouble of visual preservation. Photographs too often interrupt the meaning of life in the present, so as to give the past more clarity. That seems like a bad tradeoff to me. Of course, I'm not entirely a stick-in-the-mud. There are certain occasions that are worth preserving, like a wedding, although such work is obviously best done by an professional skilled at unobtrusiveness. And I sometimes enjoy setting out with the express purpose of taking pictures, usually of non-people like my gorgeous plants, my regal dog, and my movie-star kitty. But contrary to the claims of my friends, I am not entirely anti-social; I have been known to snap a decent picture of Paul and even a good character study of my aunt Penny. Sometimes, photos need to be taken simply for the record, like of just-adopted emaciated Abby, 15 year old arthritic Gus in his favorite spot, and Millie attacking the hail during a storm. In any case, trying to integrate pictures into any another important activity too often results in a series of interrupted moments of little importance. While we may not remember all of the fullness and delight of each passing moment as well as we would like using just our feeble brains, it is better to have experienced those moments in all their uninterrupted glory than to diminish them in an attempt to preserve them through photographs. Link / Noodles / Trackback Oh, Those Silly Feminists By Diana Hsieh @ 4:25 PM Best of the Web points out some goofy feminist logic about how peaceful and wonderful women are, particularly when compared to those mean and nasty creatures called men. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat from Ohio told Arab News that "the women of all these countries should all go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace.... Where is the urge to stop fighting and start building going to come from?" Damn those men. They just love killing and getting killed. On second thought, that seems to be a pretty accurate description of the Palestinian suicide bombers -- including the female variety. Link / Noodles / Trackback Monday, April 01, 2002 Philosophical Quotes By Diana Hsieh @ 10:10 PM As part of my preparation for my Objectivism 101 course for TOC's 2002 Summer Seminar I'm on the prowl for quotes in the popular media that embody abstract philosophical ideas. So if you come across quotes that grab you as exemplifying particularly great or terrible philosophy, from metaphysics to aesthetics, e-mail them to diana(at)dianahsieh.com or post them in the comments. Just be sure to include the URL. Perhaps I should start a file of "The Good, The Bad, and The Downright Confused." Link / Noodles / Trackback Sunday, March 31, 2002 The Objectivist Center, Posner, and Lindsey By Diana Hsieh @ 10:54 AM Back in October, The Objectivist Center published their position statement on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The last paragraph of that statement caused me a fair amount of consternation. It reads: 8. Just as our government may take action against other countries and groups that pose a genuine threat, even if they have not actually attacked us, so it may use its police powers domestically to identify and deal with threats from individuals and groups even if they have not yet acted violently. The first responsibility of government is to ensure the security of its citizens--i.e., protect their right to life. In doing so, however, it must also respect their rights to liberty, property, and privacy. Measures that limit the latter rights are justified only if they are objectively required for security and are tailored to minimize restrictions on other rights. This formulation of a tradeoff between security and liberty seems to embody the sort of pragmatic approach to rights that Objectivism has always rejected. We are most emphatically not more secure by limiting our liberties, but rather less secure. Increased security measures which restrict liberties may better protect us from criminals, but at the great cost of allowing the leviathan to trample over us as it sees fit. Unchecked governments, not criminals, have been and continue to be the greatest threat to human life. Nevertheless, the government also does need to protect our security in the sense of our right to life. If a government does not prevent us from bring blown up by terrorists, then it is not doing its job, just as it would not be doing its job if it stood idly by while murderous thugs roamed the streets looking for fresh prey. And, of course, the paragraph does specifically say that the government must respect "rights to liberty, property, and privacy" in protecting the right to life. I suspect that much of my discomfort with this section of the position statement is the result of a serious lack of context. There is little explication of the origin and justification of the ideas. There are no concrete examples to clarify meaning. (Such explication need not have been included in the position statement; a separate article would have been just fine.) In light of these intellectual reservations, I was very interested to read some rather interesting comments by Brink Lindsey concerning the legitimacy of the notion of a tradeoff between security and liberty. Responding to Richard Posner's comments at Cato, Lindsey writes: Posner's formulation -- that liberty is just one competing value among many -- is not one that libertarians like myself are likely to cotton to. But the fact is that, in the case of civil liberties, even libertarians with a principled commitment to the protection of individual rights should acknowledge that tradeoffs and balancing are unavoidable. The reason is that, with respect to civil liberties, considerations of protecting individual rights are found on both sides of the equation. On the one hand, government has a responsibility to protect our persons and property from violence and harm -- in other words, to safeguard our liberty. But while it is providing security for our rights, it must not trample the rights of suspects or potential perpetrators of violence. The challenge, then, is to protect liberty adequately without violating liberty excessively in the process. It's a balancing act, and liberty's on both sides of the balance. Those knee-jerk civil libertarians who think that any expansion of law enforcement or prosecutorial powers is necessarily a setback for liberty are therefore dead wrong. It may very well be that a small curtailment of the freedoms of suspects can yield enormous gains in protecting the freedoms of the rest of us -- in the current context, that includes the freedom from being vaporized by a suitcase nuke or dying horribly from smallpox. Lindsey seems to be arguing the same essential point as the troublesome last paragraph in the TOC statement. But because Lindsey's comments include argument and explication, rather than mere statement, the issue is far more clear to me. However, there is still much to be explored about this idea of balancing security and liberty. For example, how do we determine what constitutes an appropriate tradeoff? What measures are legitimately negotiable depending upon the particular circumstances faced by a government? What measures would be intolerable no matter what? In order to prevent ourselves from sliding down a slippery slope, we need specific principles to guide our decisions as to what would constitute a legitimate tradeoff and what would not. Additionally, this problem of protecting security seems related to other (potentially) legitimate government powers to initiate coercion, such as the power of a subpoena to force an unwilling person to testify. Rand endorsed such subpoenas on the grounds that a refusal to testify would subvert justice. But perhaps a better argument could be made on the grounds that the security-liberty interest of all people is much greater than the liberty-liberty interest of the witness in most of these cases. Such an argument might even point to reasons for rejecting subpoenas where the person faces significant risk of death (from the Mafia, perhaps) as a result of his testimony, as then the security-liberty of the witness is at stake. (That's a confused explanation. I'll have to try to do better later.) As I said, much to explore. Link / Noodles / Trackback

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