After watching The Power of Nightmares, which refers to Leo Strauss's "compelling myths" (of nation and religion), I have been moved to take on Straussian thinking as I find it.

But I have to admit that I am fascinated by the concept of the Straussian text (para. six). Quoting the article:

"The key Straussian concept is the Straussian text, which is a piece of philosophical writing that is deliberately written so that the average reader will understand it as saying one ("exoteric") thing but the special few for whom it is intended will grasp its real ("esoteric") meaning. The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends; it also reveals ugly truths that weaken men's attachment to their societies..."

To bring to mind two personal influences, I see the I Ching as a canonical example of this, and Nietzsche as the exact opposite. Or rather the same, but with a different end in mind.

First the I Ching: to many westerners, the I Ching is hocus-pocus. A book to consult as one would an astrological chart, or the tarot, and the source of many trendy concepts of harmony and resonance. But the I Ching is a Chinese text, and is a conservative work that appears to strongly endorce social norms and values. This is the exoteric meaning: harmony from conformity. But there is a deeper, more liberal strain within it: reading the text carefully, you see that this conformity is in fact how one gets ahead, and in positions of power, one is expected to be magnaminous and lenient. This is still a conservative order of society, though. As one traces things back to their sources, one finds that there is embedded a Nietzschian subtext: The Creative comes first, represented by the Dragon, a symbol of the power of genius. Throughout the texts are references to the forming of moral laws, and changing the laws and the standards... The sage is a creator of values; knowing how values regulate society, he actively designs them so as to regulate the masses, and that includes the Ruler's conduct...

Nietzsche superficially attacks the basis of morality within western society. He attacks Christianity using arguments that closely parallel libertarian attacks upon Socialism. He wishes to restore the individual, characterising a healthy society as one that can tolerate those superficially harmful to it, in fact developing a hardiness from such tolerance. He encourages self-expression, and the overturning of moral norms, that able minds should be creators of values, form and extend their own standards of good and evil. He does this because he believes that our values are in fact ones that are created by our rulers for their convenience. Christianity gets it in the neck for its encouragement of sheepish conformity. To Nietzsche, the genius should be regulated only by competition; monopoly power being the only excuse for tearing one down. The exoteric meaning of his text, then, is that of what, in popular parlence would be called "anarchy".

Esoterically, his philosophy goes far deeper, and converges with the I Ching. Nietzsche's "Overman" is a kind of sage; like the Taoist sage, he rises above arbitary value-systems, and even the desire to create particular systems. He reaches a point "beyond good and evil"; a kind of "objectivity". The Overman as an ideal induces creators of values as the second tier. Nietzsche writes for the teachers' teachers. He wants to restore the noble values that he feels that Christianity's collectivism has undermined, and indeed his work is well-read, and poorly understood. Perhaps this was the intention: Nietzsche is rejected by most as a rabble-rouser; a sign of teenage rebellion to be outgrown. Thus camouflaged, he coaches the next generation of intellectuals.

My own personal judgement is that Nietzsche failed: although he wrote forcefully and continuously against collectivism, his philosophy is written to induce a high, and appeals to (emotional) collectivists because of this. Dishonestly formed bastard children are the result of this: individualism is then suppressed as those not filled with revolutionary fervour are taken to be neo-capitalist spokesmen for received ideas. "If you disagree with me, you're not thinking for yourself". Nietzsche attempts to be beyond left and right. Sadly, to most, he only serves to deepen prejudice, since people convince themselves that their received views are their own, and it is their right as 'Nietzschians' to enforce them.

Maybe Leo Strauss has a point. You need to be careful of both the exoteric, and the esoteric content of what you write, and (presumably) say. I can certainly tell you that I wish I had, a few years ago!

In response to a .sig that I felt was simply wrong:

Real evolutionists get their morals from their biology textbooks.

I felt the need to respond:

Quick question: how do you deduce anything about morality from a physical mechanism?

Knowledge of underlying mechansims can help us to solve problems, but it doesn't affect the moral standards by which we judge our solutions, surely?

Besides, bringing up a moral dimension of evolutionary teaching is like saying that free markets cannot work because they rely upon people pursuing their perceived interests, which is morally wrong, so that they must not be believed to work.

Now I know that is isn't quite that simple, but penguinoid raised a different point: that evolution undermines religion. I should probably have pointed out that the Europeans don't view it that way, and in particular the Catholic Church, but instead I pointed out how atheists get to grow up to have meaningful values, as well as responding this:

First, your parallel is a bit off. The purpose of the free market is to use people's greed for the benefit of everyone, and I'm sure you will find that noone believes that people are all saints. What the free market does do is encourage such greedy behavior, by making it socially acceptable and outcompeting those that are not looking out for #1. This is indeed a moral issue with the free market, which should be taken into account when deciding if it is superior to the other alternatives. However, I am sure the alternatives have issues as well.

Well, briefly, the free market has no purpose. What could be a better illustration of the ID supporter's slides of thought?

All of this, I'm afraid, is another reminder of the increasingly prevalent view that language is reality.

Footnote: I was a bit hard on penguinoid (re: markets), as my language wasn't as precise as it could have been.

Nonetheless, more generally, the search for a first cause does have a tendency to infer meaning and intent from emergent "purpose".

In response to the front page story Search Engine Results Relatively Fair, I wrote this post, and, although it's far from my best post made on Slashdot, I think that the point that it makes illuminates the nature of the continuum between democratic "equality", through capitalism, to outright hierachy.

From my post:

...It's more like capital flow.

Here's how: the wealthy get to decide who receives their spending, and those people in turn decide how strongly to weight their suppliers' votes in the allocation of resources. This perpetuates through in a cycle that reaches a very rough, shifting equilibrium that very much resembles Google's "pagerank", IMO.

Compared with outright hierarchy, this kind of inequality is still going to appear relatively fair, but it doesn't measure up to equally weighted votes. That is, it isn't democratically fair. However, this, or at least some inequality appears to be essential to making useful discrimination, if you're going to use the "intelligence" of the web itself to do it. Ideally, the results would be based upon the quality of the content itself, no matter how obscure, but the artificial intelligence required to do that would be mind-boggling...

This need for extreme artificial intelligence is of course the reason why socialism has failed. But this is no reason to make this "intelligence" still more perfect. Every advance in such artificial intelligence would bring with it a corresponding reduction of freedom. And we would accept it: authority and convenience are seductive to mankind, as they avoid the need for us to do any real work, apply any judgement, in the course of our lives. Also, in attempting to bring artificial intelligence to the problem, we would be creating hierachy in any case, so the more "perfect" allocation of resources would be at the cost of what those resources are for: doing what we want in our lives.

Back to Google. Borrowed from BlackHat's old bio, a Google search that was wholly semantic should cause serious pause for thought.

Dear Sir or Madam,

With regard to the article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4376470.stm

I know that this will appear to be a frivolous complaint by a "film
pirate", but it is not: I am concerned about consistent distortion of
the facts in favour of encouraging correct behaviour. This is simple
social engineering, and to lie by consistently interviewing people with
a particular interpretation of the facts which panders to their fears
and desire for control, however supported by reasonable moral feeling,
is not the business of a news site such as the BBC.

The research on the effect of file-sharing upon sales is in fact very
mixed: Look, for example at some of the results of this google search:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=file+sharing+sales

The article that you wrote a few months ago reporting research that
"Music piracy 'does hit CD sales'", reporting on a report on the effect
of music piracy by (relatively younger and poorer) students:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3995885.stm

Is countered by the observation at the conclusion of the below paper
that "the impact of file sharing on CD sales is negative for young
people, but positive for old people", continuing "My results strongly
suggest that file sharing does not have a negative aggregate effect on
CD sales, and certainly not a large enough effect to explain the current
decline in record sales". See part VI of this paper:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:xRCZWBwil5EJ:www.princeton.edu/~eboorsti/thesis/Music%2520Sales%2520in%2520the%2520Age%2520of%2520File%2520Sharing.pdf+file+sharing+sales
Original PDF:
http://www.princeton.edu/~eboorsti/thesis/Music%20Sales%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20File%20Sharing.pdf

Further, whilst the article quoted a previous report, that original
report by F. Oberholzer and K.S. Strumpf was never reported by you
in the first place. Incidentally, there is no contradiction as you
originally reported, since the difference in conclusion is easily
accounted for in the selection bias of only analysing the effect of
file-sharing upon the purchasing habits of the young (students).

I know that the BBC is concerned about its own copyrights, but this is
surely not an excuse for consistent selection bias of this nature. If
anything, awareness of one's own interests calls for extra vigilance
upon your own part.

I have forwarded the text of this complaint to a friend of mine who
monitors the BBC for political bias, and also to my MP, David Howarth
(Lib Dem, Cambridge).

Yours Faithfully,

__________________________________________________

Footnote: My above-mentioned friend sent me a copy of this report
on systematic bias in the BBC's reporting on Europe.

We should expect the policeman's knock for what we do, not think

Matthew Parris

LIKE A DODGY auctioneer offloading family furniture in a distress sale, Charles Clarke fingers his hammer and moves from pile to pile of once-cherished items.

"Lot number 47: Ancient Liberties. Now what am I bid? Suspension of Habeas Corpus -- three months? Will anyone give me three months' detention without trial? The police tell me it's worth three months, but I'll take a lower bid to start us off -- yes, you there, sir, in the Liberal Democrat hat: still sticking at 14 days? Come on, let's get this sale moving. Have I no Tory bid? Downing Street's getting twitchy . . . six weeks, somebody -- a snip at six. Just 42 days -- they'll fly by in no time -- I'll swallow my pride and let it go at six. Going, going . . ."

But one item may prove impossible to shift: a new crime of "glorifying" terrorism. It won't have been Mr Clarke's idea to put people in prison for praising an idea. Home Office lawyers will have told him that it cannot be done and (one hopes) his instincts will anyway have been against the attempt.

No, there is only one possible source of this folly. The notion that you can make the world a better place by making it illegal to say nasty and dangerous things has the intellectual sloppiness, the headline-seeking shallowness, the philosophical carelessness and the creepy mix of the sinister with the sanctimonious, that marks it out as absolutely characteristic of our Prime Minister's mind.

When I was about 7, urged to say my prayers before bed, I came up with what seemed a succinct and catch-all formula. "Please God," I would whisper, "make everybody be as they ought to be and do as they ought to do." By the age of 10 it had occurred to me that my prayer did not do justice to the complexities of life, and I moved on. I rather think that Tony Blair is still stuck at this stage.

But enough of Mr Blair's mind. What of his idea? This is worth discussing, even though the likelihood is that the relevant section of any terrorism Bill will be shredded by the Lords and abandoned. Then Mr Clarke can tell No 10 that he did his best but the old fuddy-duddies threw it out.

The old fuddy-duddies will be right, but the fact that rationalists shelter behind a wall of ermine to defend Enlightenment values is a commentary on our times. The rules of what Mr Blair calls "the game" have not, as he suggests, changed, but muscles are being flexed in that purpose.

The easy way to fight the idea of speech-crime is to show why it will not work. No watertight legal definition will be found for the kind of terrorism whose glorification a Home Secretary might seek to criminalise.

I would not myself praise Archbishop Makarios, the Stern Gang, Jomo Kenyatta or even the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party, but who seriously suggests that it should be a crime to glorify their struggles? Researchers more ingenious than I will find youthful speeches by the likes of Charles Clarke, Jack Straw, Peter Hain and probably Tony Blair too, glorifying terrorists. So the proposed law will include powers for government to "certify" past terrorist movements who may, or may not, be "glorified".

What madness is this? Are ministers and civil servants to work through history books, ticking boxes? Are we to have (retrospectively) approved terrorists? Truly, as Paul Flynn MP has said, under new Labour "only the future is certain; the past is always changing".

Nelson Mandela, the Free French Resistance, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Abdul Nasser, the Easter Rising . . . oh, what's the point? No wonder Mr Clarke is talking about a 20-year "cut-off" point before which we should be able to praise terrorists. That takes us conveniently back to a time after he and Mr Blair left university. But what is he saying? That we should be able to praise Mandela now, but it should have been illegal to praise him them? There are a hundred struggles, a hundred leaders, some good, some bad, in which terrorism has arguably played a part. Arguably. We have to be able to have the argument. People have to be able to make the case for terrorism as an agent for change, and (arguably) change for the better in history.

A year or so ago I argued, on this page, that in a world where a giant superpower was ready to use either crushing conventional military force or the threat of nuclear annihilation against small countries, the rest of the world might as well give up tanks and fighter-planes and take refuge in combination of the greatest and the least: independent nuclear capability at the top, and a capability for bloodthirsty insurrection on the streets. Around the same time Jenny Tonge, then the Liberal Democrat spokesman, declared that if she were an impoverished Palestinian she might have reacted as Palestinian terrorists have. Either or both of these statements could plausibly be represented as "glorifying" terrorism; they were intended to invite sympathy for this method of resistance.

Because I am a Times columnist and Dr Tonge was a parliamentarian, we should have been unlikely to be prosecuted. But if less mainstream voices are to be threatened with imprisonment for saying similar things, their counsel will not be short of evidence for their defence. Were Mr Blair's idea to become law, only minutes would elapse before George Galloway tested that law by glorifying terrorism in Commons debate. If parliamentary privilege were to cover such speeches, Mr Galloway would repeat his on the streets of Bow. The effect would be wholly counter-productive. Such thoughts must haunt the Director of Public Prosecutions.

So it will not do to say, as poor Vera Baird, Mr Clarke's parliamentary private secretary (her boss being unaccountably unavailable) tried to on Newsnight on Thursday, that "surely we all know what we mean" by the type of speech being targeted. Some legal nets have to be bigger than their intended catch, and goodwill and common sense may remedy the imprecision. But here goodwill will be absent. People will be actively seeking prosecutions. This law will never work.

So it will not pass. But I said above that the easy way to resist it was on practical grounds like these. Where, however, one's real objection is in principle rather than in practice, the easy way is not the most honest.

So now for the hard way. I object to creating speech-crimes even if the legislation could be tightly drafted and made to work. I object to the banning of ideas, theories or arguments. I object to the prohibition of sentiments. Difficult as the boundary is to mark or police, I see the line between thought and action as absolutely central to the rule of law in a liberal society. Good law ties hands; it does not stop mouths or minds. It is for what we do, not what we think or say, that we should expect the policeman's knock.

Of course words may lead to actions. Of course thoughts can be incendiary. Of course shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre is behaviour with direct consequences. But somewhere a line must be drawn between willing things and doing things, and how we draw that line is what defines us as believers -- or not -- in freedom of conscience. The Prime Minister's disregard for this most important of distinctions is deeply troubling.

In my Britain a man or woman is free to say they admire a terrorist and support his aims, but not to offer any practical support to him in his work. The difference is fuzzy and we are doomed to agonies of indecision about the marshy ground which lies between taking stands and taking part, but how we negotiate that marsh, and whether we think it matters, is what marks us out as caring about individual liberty.

I don't think Tony Blair cares. I doubt he even recognises the problem. For this he should not be forgiven, and never be trusted. Charles Clarke, who knows better, should feel ashamed to have anything to do with this measure.

I just found an article by Milton Friedman on the web.

Here's where Friedman makes his mistake (typos are in the linked text; emphasis is my own):

Of course, the corporate executive is also a person in his own right. As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he recognizes or assumes voluntarily-to his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country. He ma}. feel impelled by these responsibilities to devote part of his income to causes he regards as worthy, to refuse to work for particular corporations, even to leave his job, for example, to join his country's armed forces. Ifwe wish, we may refer to some of these responsibilities as "social responsibilities." But in these respects he is acting as a principal, not an agent; he is spending his own money or time or energy, not the money of his employers or the time or energy he has contracted to devote to their purposes. If these are "social responsibilities," they are the social responsibilities of individuals, not of business.

Note: I use 'he', rather than 's/he' below for simplicity, and because Friedman does.

Although the executive owes the owners of the business a duty of honesty, he does not lose his identity and values as an individual. Just as you cannot contract to be a slave, so it should not be possible to contract out of the exercise of one's moral judgement. He should therefore refrain from actions that he feels to be wrong, and make a serious effort to engage in what he feels is right. He should act responsibility with the company's resources, but use them in a manner that he finds to be humane. His moral judgement extends further than whether to work for a company or not: there isn't enough choice to be able to choose work that is entirely aligned with one's values.

If the business's owners do not like the executive, then they should choose another, or else run the enterprise themselves. If however they believe that they are hiring someone to use their judgement, rather than just their time and energy, they will have to accept that their own judgement will sometimes differ. The integrity of a corporation as a viable entity is not a separate concern from the ethics by which it is run. Apart from anything else, goodwill can win co-operation is surprising places. For one to have to enumerate them in advance is actually an error made by statists more than free-marketeers.

But I am wandering a little off-topic. Even if on occasion the business is run in a way that diverges from the owners' real interests, the owners' legitimate interest is to pick that executive, or another. It is not legitimately their right to pick the best, and coerce them to be better still by their own measure. If they demand that, they are not hiring a man to act as the company executive; they are hiring a part-time slave, which is not their right.

[ . . . ]

In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

The stockholders or the customers or the employees could separately spend their own money on the particular action if they wished to do so. The executive is exercising a distinct "social responsibility," rather than serving as an agent of the stockholders or the customers or the employees, only if he spends the money in a different way than they would have spent it.

But if he does this, he is in effect imposing taxes, on the one hand, and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent, on the other.

The analogy fails: it does so because the force of competition is still intact, both between companies, and in-between potential executives. The 'tax' is simply the cost of choosing an executive with one set of values over another. The owners are free to choose another executive, so to present it as a tax (which is involuntary) is a false analogy.

And so I move onto why Hayek was right. Hayek did not argue like this. Hayek instead argued that the forces of competition limited the powers of those who would abuse it, in contrast with politicians who remove the regulatory power of competition to give themselves monopoly power, and then pretend that they've simply moved the locus of power from the hands to capitalists to those of democrats, when in fact they've created monopoly power where there was none before.

Here we see that Friedman would like to enforce behaviour upon the executives through law so as to defeat the forces of competition, rather than rely upon those forces to regulate the market, and it is this that makes Friedman a right-winger, rather than a libertarian.

Proof

The government don't seem to realise that exclusive "sponsorship" is likely to reduce the aggregate benefit of the London Olympics to Britain. As government, they should really be looking to aggregate effects rather than specific revenue streams.

This kind of policy making is very clearly the result of those who understand the concept of spending (and the need to raise revenue), but not investment (and the need to allow the recipient{s} freedom to realise the value of that investment). I suspect that love of the concept of property, and in particular "intellectual property" is behind this.

Articles like this one will, in time, have their effect, but the politician's love of the concrete blinds them again and again to the systemic, and this appears to be the latest instance of this.

Just a bit of silliness.

I have created a level set for LBreakout2, an Arkanoid style game (bounce balls against bricks to destroy/diminish them; clear the bricks on one level to get to the next), and here it is! (GPL-style licence, etc, etc).

Just place in your ~/.lgames/lbreakout2-levels/ or <INSTPATH>\lgames\lbreakout2-levels directory to try them out.

Enjoy!

There is a big problem with the concept of governmental confiscation of property. It appears to be a necessary evil, but it troubles me nonetheless.

I have written before about the nature of property, where I conclude that property isn't an absolute right, and yet such confiscation bothers me very much. I can see that there are alternative uses for property that are of benefit to all, but how do we justify one development over another: profit comes as a result of meeting peoples' needs, so it's irrational to exclude that. So maybe that the development has to be in one place rather than another, or that it meets needs that are seen to be higher, rather than simply more extensive, by popular consensus.

In any case, the degree of compensation is too low. l2718's excellent post 'What does "own" mean now?' raises this point: the "market rate" is neither the value to the seller, or the buyer; by believing the market rate to be somehow "correct", rather than emergent, we are guilty of collectivism. I have raised the fallacy of the market rate on an earlier occasion. The monetary value to the typical tenant is in fact likely to be higher than the market rate, as the surplus value is what caused them to move in in the first place, and indeed causes them to stay. Indeed, the value of their property is likely to go up in time as they build a circle of friends on the basis of where they live. The buyer is themselves likely to value the property more highly, as they wish to use it profitably!

What I'm really saying is that the true market rate is not the "market rate" to be deduced from existing, voluntary trades, but is in fact higher than that, and perhaps ideally, the value to the tenant should be paid, as a minimum. The trouble being that there is an immediate moral hazard if we attempt to determine the rate that tenants are willing to accept by asking them. On the basis of this, the government could perhaps initiate a policy of voluntary purchase wherever possible (eg. when there is more than one place for an amenity to go), with the goal of attempting to judge what people are willing to accept, and which factors (including existing market rates) play most strongly in the decision. By having backup choices, there is less risk of moral hazard. If a simple heuristic appears to do the job for (say) 95% of the population (eg. "market rate plus 40%"), then that should be the money value paid for future compulsory purchase orders.

Any thoughts?

PS. 1 2

Dear David,

        This is not an issue that affects me as much as software patents do (by
a long way), but I feel that the same fundamentalist propertarian stance
underlies it; it might affect me a good deal more were I a musician.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1641428,00.html

        There are two things here of note. First, the government, like all
extremists, has failed to perform a cost-benefit analysis on the
proposal to extend copyright on existing work, so as to raise further
revenue for the existing music industry "so that the record companies
can plough money back into unearthing new talent". The cost of such
copyright was clearly shown by the mass campaign of civil disobedience
that constituted Grey Tuesday.

http://www.greytuesday.org/
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/howard/

        Once more, the language of "incentives" ,"investment", etcetera is
blinding us all to what wealth really is: creativity on the ground
rendered into real goods. Wealth is not synonymous with profit, but I
am sure that I am teaching you how to suck eggs here. Besides, there's
a good chance that greater wealth will create the opportunities for
greater profit in as yet unforeseen ways.

        Quite simply, government policy appears to be to create artificial
scarcity, so that a few future acts can be picked for us on our behalf
by the music companies, where they could instead be allowing songs to
fall out of copyright, and thereby encouraging reuse and
reinterpretation of the underlying ideas, and surely thereby creating
new wealth, especially since it is now a good deal easier for a band to
market itself with the advent of the internet.

        My motive for writing this is really that of frustration with the
Establishment's economic incompetence, confusing, as ever, the interests
of incumbents with future creativity, whether in software, or (as is the
case here) in the case of music. I would have hoped that by now,
government would have matured to the point where making such an error
would be evidence of serious corruption, but I fear that it is economic
incompetence, instead.

        Yours sincerely,
--
I forgot to write the second "thing of note", or rather, I decided not to put it in. Sadly, it remains referred to in the text of my letter. I decided not to put it in, for I wished to come across as a moderate, rather than as the radical that I am.

It was simply to ask whether the government should be putting taxpayer's money into an industry problem that isn't an economic problem.
--
Follow-on email...

Hello again, David,

        Further to my previous email, I though that I would send you a further
link. Vivendi's behavior in the takeover and selling on of mp3.com
reveal that far from wishing to promote new acts, the large music
companies will do what they can to inhibit the development of
independent music. Further cash being funneled to these companies is
as likely to be spent inhibiting creativity as funding it. It is not a way
to develop new talent.

http://www.dubroom.org/articles/0009.htm

        Yours etc.,
--
Footnote: it appears that MP3.com's president was a bit of a plonker.

The Swedish Chef's been at my rpm database bork bork bork.

My question is: does anyone here know how to fix it?

I decided to attempt building TOR from source (yes, I build from source RPMs on a semi-regular basis with the advantage that I can target an athlon architecture with -O3. Gentoo? Wassat?).

My problem is that tor requires libevent, so, being lazy, I just installed it by following the README. TOR built fine, but I couldn't install it (it was depended upon libevent-1.1.so.1), so I moved libevent* from /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib to see if it would pick it up. Ouch! I think that I did some invisible damage at this point (or rather when I typed rpm -U tor*).

Okay, 'rpm -U tor*' still didn't work, so I decided to stop being lazy, move the files back and ran 'make uninstall' for libevent, and decided to build libevent using rpmbuild, as I should have done in the first place. So I grabbed the spec file, trivially editted for version numbers, copied libevent-1.1.tar.gz into ~/system/SOURCES/libevent/, and boldly typed rpmbuild -ba libevent.spec.

A few pre-compile-lines later, I got this:

error: Installed (but unpackaged) file(s) found:
/usr/lib/libevent-1.1.so.1.0.2
/usr/lib/libevent.la

[These files don't exist]. I appear to have borked my rpm database. I can't seem to get it to forget that libevent* lived in /usr/lib for a short while, and so cannot build a replacement.

Anyone else been in a similar predicament? How did you solve it?

Yes, I've done the Google search. Maybe I just need to get the search terms right...

Update: Problem solved. Database not borked, after all, although ces came up with something that could well prove useful on a future occasion...

Thank-you nizo & ces (in posting order) both for your help!

It appears that government corruption is becoming the norm. With secret laws in the US, and the failure to grasp cause and effect with respect to torture at Guantanamo, pretending that just because it is the fault of particular privates, it isn't also the fault of those who failed to manage them properly, as if fault were a zero-sum quality. I wrote about other corruption here, where the Government appeared to wish to prosecute Dr. Thomas M. Lehman for just about anything, rather than what they alleged he did.

Well, now we have the army in New Zealand, who previously lied in court, ordering back a secret report from a lawyer. This time, something unexpected happened: the lawyer published the document! If people are willing to go to gaol, maybe this criminal tendency within government can be defeated.

Of late there has been an explosion of Journal articles and other postings where some posters have been referring to "different realities" or "different truths", especially when dealing with such things as evolution. This is bullshit. Being wrong is one thing, but "different truths" is the ultimate cop-out.

"Reality is Singular" is the title that I gave to this post, but really physical (as opposed to moral) relativism is pretty self-evidently rubbish. What's probably worse, though is the so-called Consensus theory of truth, whereby Newton and Copernicus where insane upon discovery of their respecitive theories, and presumably became sane through convincing others of the results of their own investigations.

When arguing on issues such as Creationism, the consensus theory is worse than being wrong, for the criteria for acceptance shift. If truth is a matter of consensus, then arguments about how dreadful it would be if something were false gain weight. Creationism perhaps should be believed, then, because Christianity induces social cohesion. Punishment works, because it justifies a simple moral outlook, when someone looking at the evidence would see that punishment is only moderately effective, and indeed its effectiveness is highly variable, depending upon context. "Left-wing" criticisms of Richard Dawkins' theories, without appealing to religion tend to have a nod to this, together with ad hominem attacks upon the motives of genetic theorists who's work he's built upon. Such a world soon becomes intellectually claustrophobic as one's thoughts have to be self-policed for political correctness.

To embrace theories of "consensus reality" is to give up upon civilisation, and indeed that there is anything beyond politics. Far from overcoming social division, it entrenches warring tribes, for there is no way that evidence can shift an argument one way or the other. All is politics, and truth is replaced with a simple Marxian political dialectic, where palatability overwhelms reality. Society suffers too, as those who speak their minds are hounded out of their jobs. Consider the repercussions of Lawrence Summers's speech.

Update: More on this starting with Marxist Hacker 42's comment, mercedo's JE, and his second JE.

Occasionally, I might add further links. (1, 2, 3)

If you code under the GNU GPL, you're doing the economy more good than if you use a BSD-style license.

How can this be? After all, surely it's a question of circumstance, after all, sometimes you need to use others' code which might mandate the GPL or other license, whereas other times it depends upon business strategy [eg.] or other factors, and this is true, but I am arguing about the economy at large rather than one's own interests (which would vary according to one's values), and at some point, I'm taking averages, for there's bounds to be unforseen "butterfly effects" that could prove me wrong when dealing with specifics ;-)

A clue for how this can be is given in my use of the DNA symbol for this article: the efficiency comes from reuse and mixing of code, in particular in the induced speciation between proprietry and free software, as each class of software is viral, promoting the persistence of that class.

So what happens when "non-viral" free software is produced? Here, both free and proprietry derivatives result, but free software has not gained over proprietry software in aggregate. Why does this matter? Resources have gone into the production of free software, and yet the species of free software has gained no advantage from this. This means that the free-software development model is not promoting itself with the production of free software (in this case), and thus will not be selected for over proprietry software, even if it is a more efficient mode of production. This diseconomy is clear, for effort has gone unrewarded when considering free software in aggregate, although this is not the case when proprietry software is produced.

Perhaps the solution is to consider BSD-style licenses semi-free for the purposes of economically rational behaviour. It could perhaps be deduced that the government should produce software under BSD-style licenses without GPL-incompatable clauses (favouring neither mode of production) unless is has reasons to believe that there are flaws in the market to correct, such as the value (in general) of the availability of source code as a teaching aid.

Update [30th March 2007]:
Examples often aid clarity, so I'm linking this post, which I believe makes the symmetry between copyleft and proprietry licenses somewhat clearer.

What do I mean when I say "property is a positive right"?

I do not mean that "property is a positively a right", although property is an important part of the concept of freedom, rather I mean property is a right in the same way that health care is a right, as opposed to say the right to bear arms.

A negative freedom is where others refrain from harming you, in particular the state. An example is freedom from false imprisonment.

A positive freedom is one where one is guaranteed something by an outside entity, usually the state. An example of this is freedom from poverty.

Property certainly appears at first to be a negative right because it appears to be very natural, especially to those that are used to it. It is indeed likely that civilisation would be impossible without it. However, property is not nearly as simple as being a simple, universal right. Coase's Theorem lies at the root of why land is property, and air is not, for example. The key here is the concept of transaction cost.

There is a defence of property as natural in the theory of natural law, but proponents of natural law are far more subtle than simply proposing property rights as absolute; rather such a defence is about the natural equilibrium of common law over time. Those who would hold property to be a negative right would have to lean on natural law theory, implicitly defining property to be a natural extension of the owner. The trouble with such a theory is that it isn't nearly as strong as the proponents would wish it to be.

Given the problem with defining what property is, and the implicit definition required of property being an extension of oneself, I posit that this kind of reasoning is post-rationalisation used by those who want a minimal government, and divide the concept of rights conveniently into positive and negative rights for the purpose of achieving the kind of government that they wish. This is an entirely reasonable thing to do: seeking consistency by searching for underlying principles is what makes a course of action moral rather than merely arbitrary.

However, property is awkward, and ever-shifting. The evolution of patent law and copyright show this to be precisely the case, and it appears that a better thesis than that of natural law, or concerns of efficiency concerning what is and isn't considered to be property is simply that the powerful get their way. Luckily, however, the multitude of firms in existence means that power is to some extent decentralised, but property certainly appears to exist with the blessing of the state, and this would still be the case even if property law enforcement were in some way more 'just' (this term will mean different things to different readers). In short, property is a positive right.