Saturday, October 16, 2004

When I read about politics driven by faith, as in an intense story by Ron Suskind in tomorrow's NYT Magazine (not yet online): The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious stody of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That's not the way the world works anymore,” he continued. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” I'm immediately reminded of James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner. Hogg wrote the novel in the early 19th century, when the unbending righteousness of Scottish Calvinism and its temporary sway over Scottish public affairs was still in living memory: The novel, set in the 19th century, is, as Miller says, a bold exposure of ultra-Calvinism's antinomian excesses. The story is first told from the point of view of the onlooker. The antihero is a multi-murderer who kills, among others, his nominal father and his mother. Then it is retold as autobiography. The murderer is possessed by Satan who directs him down the road of evil, but because he is one of the elect none of his sins can prevent him being one of the few who will be saved. (From a review of The Electric Shepherd: A Likeness of James Hogg by Karl Miller.) For me, the sharpest lesson of the novel is how the illusions of certainty and of conscious will drive the main character into a destructive spiral as he reacts with increasing violence and increasingly fantastic self-justification to external events. I don't know about Hogg's creative evolution, but it strikes me as very interesting that as he writes at the apex of the Romantic period with its political turmoil and rejection of reason, his lesson connects the Romantic fantasies of self-determination with the predestination of Scottish Calvinism and against the rational empiricism that Scots so notably advanced in the Scottish Enlightenment, an extraordinary interlude of civility and progress between periods of religious wars and political turmoil. To me, the first quote above reveals a deep Romantic yearning for self-determined certainty, scarily reminiscent of the Romantic underpinnings of totalitarian ideals so well portrayed by Musil in The Man Without Qualities. 5:02:17 PM

Broadband Duopoly Calms Cable, Telecom Battles (Reuters): Reuters - The long-promised battle between U.S. cable and telephone companies has so far been more of an uneasy peace. Thanks to their duopoly over broadband Internet access, it may stay that way.(Via Yahoo! News - Technology.) The fake telecom deregulation of 1996 nicely ignored the fact that the low capital costs that the phone and cable incumbents enjoyed when building out their networks because they were de jure or de facto monopolies cannot be matched by new entrants, who have to go to equity or high-risk bond markets for their funding. The unbundling provisions of the 1996 bill were never effective to level the playing field, and now they have been totally gutted by the FCC and the courts. Physics and geography determine the cost of local access. Wired competition is pretty much impossible now because of capital costs and the loss of unbundling. Wireless competition could conceivably work technically and financially, except that the needed spectrum is locked down. One easily imagines a smoke-filled room where the wired and broadcast providers made a mutual assistance deal: the wired lobby nods to the tear-down of broadcast concentration limits, while the broadcast lobby fights to maintain the bandwidth lock-down that helps wired telecoms. 12:16:18 PM

hhgttg - the movie: "I struggle to understand how a movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will work. (Via tingilinde.) There was a TV series that was mot terrible but way less interesting than the radio original. The main problem is that it's very hard and expensive to do visually what can be suggested cheaply and effectively using a few sound effect generators and the listener's imagination. 5:34:17 AM