Soapbox

Hypothetically, what would you say if you learned Bavaria proudly flew the nazi swastika over its capitol? And if they asserted the nazis were misunderstood, that World War II was fought for European unification, not racial supremacy and genocide?

Your reaction would be outrage, obviously.

Nazi flags do not fly over Munich because, after the war, Germans had to confront the sheer horror of what they had done and atone for it (unlike many Austrians who eluded this soul-searching with the convenient fiction that nazism was imposed militarily by Germany onto Austria). And the Germans do not fly nazi flags in their World War II military cemetaries either.

To this day the state flags of Mississippi and Georgia contain the “southern cross”, the battle flag of the Confederacy. And that flag still flies in a place of honor in the South Carolina capitol. Southern revisionists try and claim the Confederacy was about states’ rights, and that the Union was less than pure in its motives.

While it is certain the Union was less than ideal (the abolition of slavery was belated, and driven more by foreign policy than moral considerations), it is also equally clear the Confederacy’s motives were unambiguously evil. Unfortunately, the short-lived Reconstruction never forced the southerners to confront the true nature of slavery, which is why neo-confederates can deny slavery had anything to do with their cherished Confederacy, the same way too many Austrians unapologetically vote for Jörg Haider.

Recently, campaign billboards have been flowering here about the issue of homelessness. A look at the website www.wewantchange.com shows it is run by a Hotel industry group, and leans heavily towards harsh Giuliani-style enforcement. One statistic is arresting, however: 100 homeless people died in San Francisco last year, compared to 6 in Chicago. San Francisco’s weather is mild all year round, quite unlike Chicago’s freezing winters and stifling summers, and you would expect the opposite.

San Francisco has famously dysfunctional local politics. Thirteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, politicians were still squabbling about how to ensure the seismic safety of the Bay Bridge.

In this case, the posturing and special-interest pandering of the Mayor and Supervisors is leading to avoidable loss of life.

National Geographic aired a special today on Fox, mixing interesting prerecorded footage on how the logistics of building the pyramids were handled (by skilled workers augmented by seasonal labor, well fed and treated, not slaves). What mars this show are the two “live” publicity stunts, opening a 4500-year sarcophagus and drilling a hole through an obstruction in a narrow shaft leading from the Queen’s Chamber.

I had a feeling of déjà vu: I remember seeing a documentary on TV about a German engineer who designed a robot, “Upuaut” to explore that same shaft. I only caught the National Geographic special halfway through, but there did not seem to be any credit given to the truly original work done by the Upuaut project. There are other unpleasant aspects to this show, such as the frequent name-dropping with the two featured archeologists, and the on-screen histrionics of one of them, an Egyptian who is also his government’s chief official archeologist (not to mention the conflicts of interest between his official position and the one he holds with National Geographic).

Even the presenter’s pompous final words rankle: “We still stand on sacred ground, home to the world’s first great civilization”, as if that distinction did not in fact belong to Uruk and Susa, in ancient Sumer and Elam in Mesopotamia (modern-day Irak and Iran).

A quick search on Google found an interesting page on this subject. All in all, this is a rather unpleasant spectacle of self-aggrandizement and boosterism, and I am rather disappointed by National Geographic’s unseemly behavior.

I do not agree with most of the latter website’s flights of fancy. Napoléon Bonaparte started Egyptomania with his 1798 expedition to Egypt, and ever since, all sorts of pseudo-mystical fantasies have grown around the supposed cosmic significance of the pyramids. Indeed, one can read Martin Gardner’s excellent book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science to see how Jehovah’s Witnesses were originally an apocalyptic sect who thought the shape of the great pyramid’s main shaft predicted history and the coming end of the world. When the apocalypse failed to occur, twice, they moved on to slightly more mainstream beliefs…

On a lighter tone:

• A hilarious cartoon on User-Friendly.
• Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids, set in the Discworld but with thinly veiled references to Egypt.
• P.J. O’Rourke’s great article on Egypt in The Atlantic

I recently upgraded my laptop, and donated my old (but still functional) one to StreetTech, a group that trains disadvantaged youths so they can obtain certifications that will get them jobs in IT. I found them using the Cristina foundation, an organization that matches donors to groups like StreetTech.

If you are a compulsive computer shopper like myself, who has functional but not-quite bleeding edge equipment lying around gathering dust, or an IT manager in a company looking to upgrade its computer fleet, please consider donating them this way rather than putting them on eBay. It’s certainly a much better way of disposing of old computers than this one in China.

One of the unquestioned assumptions behind object-oriented programming is that objects are instances of a class, and thus implicitly stay that way. This is akin to the philosophical concept of nature, as in an invariant quality of something, that cannot be changed:

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature?

There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

…

Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.

…

It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right.

Aristotle, Politics I, 5 (emphasis mine)

Needless to say, this concept is reactionary. One may well object that given slavery’s omnipresence in antiquity, even a great philosopher such as Aristotle could not be entirely free of the prejudices of his time. This conveniently ignores the fact Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, himself a disgruntled aristocrat who collaborated with Spartans when they overthrew Athenian democracy after the Peloponnesian war, and is arguably one of the theoretical founders of the totalitarian state. I would say it is rather the presumed greatness of Aristotle that should be reexamined, but I digress. For more on this subject, read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies – Volume 1, The Spell of Plato.

Thus, OOP carries within it the conservatism of Plato and Aristotle, people who resented how the young Athenian democracy had usurped the aristocracy’s natural (in their eyes) right to rule over others. This is not just an academic consideration. Computer programmers influence society, specially those who work for governmental information systems, and if you consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the language they use affects the way they think.

This is why I like Python’s ability to morph an object from one class to another:

Python 2.2.1 (#1, Apr 18 2002, 13:06:27)
[GCC 2.95.3 20010315 (release)] on sunos5
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> class Slave:
...     def whip(self):
...             return 'Yes, master'
...
>>> class Freeman:
...     def whip(self):
...             return 'Die, fascist scum!'
...
>>> man = Slave()
>>> man.whip()
'Yes, master'
>>> man.__class__ = Freeman
>>> man.whip()
'Die, fascist scum!'