I probably shouldn't be impressed by the Cape Town water department, but I am.

I probably shouldn't be impressed by the Cape Town water department, but I am. No doubt they were only doing their job, but I think we can still be impressed by a job well done.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, a Saturday, a water main burst in Observatory. It was at the top of Station Road, just below the traffic lights on Lower Main Road. Somebody who saw the damage said that it looked like the aftermath of a small earthquake. We don't get earthquakes in Cape Town much, the last minor tremor was in Tulbagh, 121km away, in December, and, the last big earthquake, the biggest in South African history, was a 6.3 in the same place, in 1969. So he must have known what they looked like from photographs.

It must have been in the early hours, because we still had a trickle at six in the morning.

I'm not sure the first time they were told about it, but they had the area cordoned off, with men working on it, by nine. When we went past at midday, the men had dug a deep trench. When we came past again, at three in the afternoon, they had a huge back-hoe digging an even bigger trench.

The water was back on again at about five.

We are very short of water, at the moment, not, fortunately, anything like as bad as further North, where there is a terrible drought, but the dam water levels this year are the lowest they've been over the past five years, though the levels did build up considerably in February, despite it being the dry season. There's a picture of the levels at our largest reservoir, 'Theewaterskloof' below.

So it's important that bursts are repaired quickly, and good to know just how quickly they can be repaired, and how good our water department is at their jobs. Congratulations!

The Hateful Eight - Quentin Jerome Tarantino's film

Naming a film, 'The Hateful Eight', in order to remind anybody watching that this is your eight film, isn't the act of a modest man, but, if anybody were concerned that Mr Tarantino had been replaced by a  doppelganger, this, along with the extreme, and, somewhat, gratuitous violence in the film, ought to put his mind at rest.

Though Mr Tarantino doesn't credit Laurence Sterne for the smashing of the fourth wall as an art form, he does do it as well as Mr Sterne does in 'Tristam Shandy'. I think he'd call it 'post modern', as, too, no doubt, he'd also label the other devices found in 'Tristam Shandy', like telling the story in a peculiar order, and adding lots of clever self-reference. Odd, really, that such, albeit unconscious, homage should be given to a book published in 1759, by a chap so keen to be hip and 21st Century as Mr. Tarantino, but there it is.

It is a sound point that the animosities of wars, particularly of civil wars, continue for a considerable time after the mass killing has been stopped. He might be right, but I'm not sure if the possible implication this film intends is really accurate. Do so many current American problems really have their ætiology in the Civil War? He certainly does make a good stab, if you excuse the term in this context, at making that point.

The ghastly characters in the film are nicely drawn, and the dialogue between them is often funny. Their perspectives are sharply drawn, and it's interesting to see what things they appear to hold in common. As far as I can see they hold these views in common:

- Guns are a really good thing
- The Civil War was a really bad thing, but certainly the other side's fault
- Lying is a bad thing, particularly when practiced by somebody else
- Lying is, however, not only inevitable, but ubiquitous, so only actions can be believed
- The pecking order is: White male -> White female -> Black Male -> Black Female -> dog -> Mexican
- Capital punishment, in particular, public execution by hanging, is a good thing. Not for everybody, but essential for some.
- Might is right

The film is evidently, at least at some level, intended to be satirical, so, clearly Mr Tarantino believes some, probably most, of these are not only wrong, but currently ubiquitous enough to require satirical treatment.

The well worn device of having the unlikely collection of characters isolated, in this case by a blizzard, works well. I'm not sure that the indulgence of such a long running time is justified. Certain aspects of the plot, signalled with crystal clarity in the first quarter of the film, are only revealed, as if an amazing surprise, a couple of hours later. I think the film could be much improved by reducing it to normal length.

Roy Orbison's song seems apt as a description of the Civil War, Tarantino films generally, and the problems that he highlights, quite well, all in all:

Now the old folks will remember
On that dark and dismal day
How their hearts were choked with pride
As their children marched away
Now the glory is all gone

They are left alone
And there won't be many coming home
No, there won't be many coming home
oh, there won't be many
Maybe five out of twenty
but there won't be many coming home

x

Moral Copyleft - can open source be closed to immoral use?

The Open Source movement is one of the great modern humanitarian triumphs. There are a number of different licenses that are used to enable the free use and distribution (not necessarily cost-free) of software source code. In particular, it enables the availability of code that can be proven to be free of malicious code (malware), something impossible with software that's distributed 'closed source' in binary.

One important side-effect has been the production of various licensing systems to enable a common pool of intellectual property that's free for everybody to use, not necessarily cost-free, and, usually, modify and redistribute, as long as the licensing follows the changes.

Though it is a humanitarian triumph, and has been championed by humanitarians who objected to the locking away of intellectual property by conventional copyright, there are some problems with it. In particular, it places no restriction on who can use the IP. So it can be put to evil, non-humanitarian uses - something almost certainly not the intent of the humanitarians who put their property under a creative commons or copyleft license.

I propose an alternative license, derivative from copyleft or creative commons licenses. The final license would need to be drawn up legally to avoid as many unintended consequences as possible. However, the idea is simple.

A 'Moral Copyleft' license would, allow free use, modification and distribution, but only for moral uses. For example, a 'Moral Copyleft' license could refuse permission for any arms manufacturer or dealer or organisation that promotes the non-consesual killing of human beings - states that practice capital punishment, or that export terrorism, or practice slavery, or supply drugs or other equipment for use by executioners or armies.

This would prevent a future linux-like platform from being used in military drones, or to manufacture poison gas for use against humans.

There is no reason, today, why somebody should not license work for that cannot be used to promote the eating of meat or working on Sunday or any of the many things individual people might be against.

The difference with this proposal is that, as with creative commons licenses, a free, easy to use, license would be available to any humanitarian who wished to make IP available to everybody, but not at the expense of humanity.

The license would need to reference some body, or bodies, that register immoral usage. Amnesty International, perhaps, or the Campaign against the Arms Trade could keep a register.

Whether other organisations that deliberately kill human beings, such as tobacco companies, would fall under the prohibition of such licenses would be part of the debate needed during the design of the license(s). There might be various levels of moral license, with the basic one being against weapons manufacturers and arms dealers, with more stringent ones available for activities less generally recognised as immoral.

The first step would be to canvas support for this proposal. If there was support, an Aunt Sally license or licenses could then be drawn up for comment and discussion. After that, with sponsorship, a watertight license could be drafted and made available, under its own license (not much of a limitation as it'd be a strange weapons manufacturer that would wish to have a moral license!).

The license could also prohibit use by organisations that act against responsible environmental behaviour - companies that contribute to irresponsible logging in the Amazon, say.

This would enable a moral philanthropist in the future, to donate money to a trust for the development of software or hardware for humanitarian use to have the application of a moral license a condition for funding.

Commercial companies wishing to enhance their environmental and moral image could also use this license for their commercial open source products.

Why do people spend money when they can get something much better free?

This is something that I find very puzzling. I do understand why somebody might wish to buy a diamond, rather than a cubic zirconium - even though it takes an expert to tell the difference, and the subjective experience is identical (well, not quite, because you can have a much bigger cubic zirconium for much less), and there's the benefit of being certain that you haven't bought a blood diamond, the reason people buy them is precisely because they are expensive. De Beers has spent a fortune in marketing, and the world's diamond miners ensure that diamonds only trickle into the market so the price can be kept high.

Do people buy software because it's expensive, though? Is there really some social benefit in announcing that you've been ripped-off? I don't see it.

Many, many, years ago Hewlett-Packard had an e-mail server. Quite a good one. It needed upgrading to deal, but it was basically sound, it was also popular, and sold quite well. However, HP decided to throw the product (HPmail) away. This was simply because, by so doing, they could get a deal with Microsoft to pay much, much less for their software licenses. This was before the days of Linux, and before the days of Apple's OS/X, so, as they saw it, they didn't have much choice, other than to use Microsoft's desktop. It does explain why there aren't many companies offering competitors to Microsoft exchange, though.

However, as everybody knows, well, everybody technical, you don't need exchange at all. You can give your users Outlook as their client, if they really want that, rather than the better solution of Mail on a Mac (much, much cheaper to support, much more reliable, much faster and much easier to use, of course - so, actually, hugely cheaper in terms of ROI an TCO), but use Linux, free, instead of exchange and have a much faster system.

Also, we know from Edward Snowden, even with a firewall, your exchange server is an open book, a complete security disaster, if you worry about security at all, you'd certainly not have one.

Are there any kickbacks? Do IT people who manage to get their employers to buy Exchange get any money or other inducements from the distributors or from Microsoft?

I'd truly like to know, because it's important to know from a governance perspective. A company is obliged, under governance, to make the best use of company assets - paying for an inferior product is poor governance. If this happens, or has happened, a company is also in danger of prosecution under the UK bribery act - if it has any offices in the UK.

The pharmaceutical industry has paid thousands of millions of dollars in fines, over the past few years, for bribing doctors, hospitals, psychiatrists, chemists and others to promote their drugs and force expensive, and often inferior, drugs on us.

Is it likely that the IT industry is completely free of this sort of thing?

Should investment companies or funds be allowed to vote as shareholders?

This is a philosophical question, with implications for jurisprudence. A company is given the status of a corporation (from 'corpus' a body) in the legal fiction that it is an independent agent that can, like human beings, own things and enter into contracts. One question, raised in the 'Unity of the Mind' (ISBN: 9780312120177) is whether there is such a thing as a 'group mind', that would mean that, like Hobbes Leviathan, companies would be genuine agents. This question is connected, but different.

If you own shares in a company, you, as an owner, can influence the direction the company takes by voting at general meetings. That's what that sense of 'ownership' means. If, though, you buy shares in a fund, an investment trust, say, then you're buying a company that buys companies. You're effectively authorising the fund to act as your proxy when voting as a shareholder for the companies that it has bought.

So far so ordinary. The effect this has, though, is to take the control of companies away from direct human control. If most of the shares of a company are owned by other companies, then the directors of the company no longer need to appeal to all their shareholders in order to achieve what they want, they only have to convince the few people, who have the effective proxies from thousands, that it is in their interest.

That's where the temptation to corruption arises. Instead of the stock market helping companies become more open and effective because they are controlled by the will of many shareholders, instead, a few individual humans, who don't own any of the shares themselves, but make a living out of charging those they hold shares for in proxy, make the decisions, because only a few of them are the shareholders.

So the power of these institutional investors tempts companies to court them, rather than the actual shareholders. Instead of needing to, for example, make the company more environmentally friendly, in the interests of many shareholders, they can simply take one person out to expensive lunches or, if they're less scrupulous, bribe directly with money, an not bother.

If voting shares could only be held by natural people, not corporations, investment companies could still make money from owning shares, but the distortion of the control of companies by companies would be avoided. Not completely, because institutional investors could still manipulate companies by taking rewards for buying or selling shares, but this would be less dangerous as there'd still be individual stock holders to prevent the corporation from acting wrongly.

If you see corporations not as legal fictions, but as actual entities, with the same rights and power as individuals, then none of this is a problem.

There is, though, the problem that, since they are not individuals, companies cannot be put in prison. The sanctions open to controlling people are missing.

If you hold that companies should only be owned (in the sense of controlling ownership) by natural persons the danger that rogue companies pose to humanity, by, for example, turning a country into a corporate plutocracy by bribing the governments to act in the interests of the companies, rather than natural human owners, is much reduced.

Art, performance, composition and work - thoughts after watching 'Tim's Vermeer'

A fascinating film. If X -> Z and Y -> Z is X <-> Y?

That's the question. If it is, then Vermeer used almost exactly the same optical equipment. I wasn't convinced before, but, now, it'd take some amazing evidence to convince me that Vermeer didn't.

I warmed to Tim over the film and, somehow, it is necessary (and fun) to watch the film to get the full picture, so to speak.

With Beethoven, you don't get the conductor and orchestra modestly saying that they'd just 'copied his composition' - rather you admire the performance.

Before today, I thought that performance art was a load of tosh. I've now seen Tim perform a work of visual art that really was a magnificent performance - almost like watching Beethoven's 5th being performed.

It reinforces, too, the point that the value of money is not that it brings leisure. For years there was the question about what people would do if there was no 'need to work' for money... but the question was mistaken. We have a need to work, that's far more fundamental than doing it for the money. Yes, of course, one needs money to live - but it was a persistent illusion that that was the reason for work.

The real motivation for work is delight in the work itself. It's been known a long time - karma yoga is the 'yoga of work'. It's proven by the massive amount of hard work that's produced wikipaedia - all of it done for no monetary reward. It's shown too by open source software being so much better than software that's written commercially.

Eliot could have been talking about the rediscovery of work:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

What will we do with all the 'leisure time' that computers, machines, robots and the like bring us? We'll work.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/

Review: publishing an ebook - iBook vs Kindle [Amazon vs Apple]

I'm working on a new book that I'm meaning to publish myself. Rather than go all the way down the wrong route and find out only at the end that I've made the wrong choices, I decided to publish a small pamphlet, or monograph, to try out the process itself.

I shouldn't do this, I suppose, many authors of articles force their readers to hang on until the very end before revealing their results. To be kind, if you don't want to read the rest of this, the answer was simple: avoid Apple's 'iBooks Author' and its iBookstore and, instead, publish through Amazon's Kindle.

Here are the reasons why. The pamphlet describes and afternoon spent at a perfume course at the perfumer Galimard in Grasse whilst on a holiday in Provence. It's a simple and short story that should have worked well in iBooks Author.

It started out well. It was easy to drag and drop the photographs and the text flowed nicely around them. It looked as if the whole process would be, if anything, easier than that using word.

Then I started hitting problems. The first was pagination. If you paste in, or write, a block of text that is too big for the page, it simply truncates it, which is not very good. You can add another text box and another page, but the process is clumsy and not intuitive.

There's a nicely easy table of contents at the top. Or so it seems. Once you've added your chapters and they simply appear in the contents - lovely. Apart, though, from its strange idea to translate a normal one-page table of contents into a multi-page interactive version - not a bad idea, I suppose, for a book of hundreds of pages, but completely useless for my little pamphlet. It is not at all obvious or easy to switch back to a normal table of contents..

You're invited to choose a template at the start from a range. The first lot allow your ebook to have both landscape and portrait pages - which looks tempting and useful. Beware, though, you can't change from this back to a simple portrait document - as I discovered to my cost. If you do, you have to copy and paste all the text and pictures to a new document, the template fixes itself as landscape. So, even if you turn it around, when you come to export it to a .pdf, it all comes out as landscape and your formatting is spoiled.

Not only that, the template locks you in to quite a few settings, including the background. If you choose a template that doesn't have a white background, you can't change the background in any way!

Once you get past all this, you hit the real problem! When you try to publish your e-book, you discover that you need a US tax code. No matter where you live, no matter where you want to publish the book. It turns out that getting one involves sending paper forms in  the post to Texas!! Just to publish a pamphlet that may well sell only a dozen copies.

So, I moved to publish on Kindle. It's a bit messy to edit the .pdf that you get out of iBooks, but not impossible. I then used Calibre to convert the document from .pdf to .ebook (or .mobi if you prefer) and submitted it. A few minutes later and it was working! The next morning it had been accepted.

There simply was no contest. Despite looking so easy, the Apple iBook Author route really doesn't work and Amazon's Kindle bookshop makes publishing really easy.

Top 10 differences between the Taliban & the Saudis

1. Both make their money from selling black, sticky stuff to the West BUT for the Taliban it's Opium and Hashish; for Suadis, it's oil

2. Both favour public floggings, amputations and executions BUT the Saudi like decapitating with swords; while the Taliban like to hang people from cranes

3. The Taliban face Mecca to pray, BUT the Saudis pray in Mecca, since they own it.

4. Both like their women to wrap up warmly BUT the Taliban do it against -21C winters & the winter minima are 8C in Saudi

5. All the attackers, bar one, on the World Trade Centre in New York were Saudis BUT none were Taliban

6. The Saudis had a 75 year old widow flogged in public this year BUT the Taliban had a 17 year old girl flogged in public this year.

7. The Taliban drink lots of Tea BUT The Saudis prefer to drink Coffee

8. The Saudis are anti-democratic, so are the Taliban BUT the Saudis like Monarchy, the Taliban Theocracy

9. The Taliban speak Pashto BUT the Saudis speak Arabic

10. NATO has been killing somewhere between 6 and 10 Taliban a day for the past 8 years BUT NATO is killing nobody in Saudi Arabia

Smoking and living

Smoking kills. Yes, it does, but it doesn't kill everybody, and even those it does, it doesn't kill at once. It takes its time. So, if you're (you, gentle reader, for it's probably only 'reader' in the singular, means 'one', but, I avoid 'one' as some, those with uncomfortable chips on their shoulders mainly, think you're being snobbish if you use 'one' - Kiwis might string you up for that alone if stringing people up wasn't also not in the pc bible) young, and, as we all do, you believe that you'll live for ever, then smoking seems a good idea.

In the old-fashioned sixties words, smoking is cool, it's groovy, it's svelte - at least you are, because it keeps you slim.

It does, though, for those it chooses to kill, kill very horribly; not just lung cancer, not just emphysema, but other horrors too many to mention.

It's not just death either, it gives you wrinkles, makes you short of breath and, unless you meet another smoker, or somebody who likes kissing ashtrays (and there aren't many of those around these days), it restricts your love-life.

So, what can you do? You can't give it up because you're addicted - and you might get fat, and there's the risk that you may not develop those lovely wrinkles, and your heart might keep you going until you're 96.

A solution? Yes, many. One is to smoke cigars - the risk from them is about a tenth of that from cigarettes. But, sadly, they are very expensive. More, even, that cigarettes. Even cigarillos cost more than cigarettes (petite cigars, or course). Also, with cigars there's the problem, for women anyway, that the sort of women who like cigars tend also to be thought as having a penchant for snappy suits, ties, body hair (a moustache if they can manage it) and vegetarianism. This is not prime man catching territory. Often a wrong perception, but, there you are, it happens. The tobacco in cigarettes contains a number of nasty chemicals, particularly saltpetre, which is what makes cigarettes continue to burn, even when not smokes, unlike cigars - roll-up tobacco has none of these unhealthy additives.

So, what to do. Simple - roll-ups. Firstly they have health advantages. Not as healthy as cigars, because of the paper, but much better than cigarettes. Also, secondly, maybe, they cut down your intake because they take time to roll. Rolling them is good, too, for the psyche, being a meditative act. Old Holbourn is a fair exemplar of the tobacco to choose. They have, too, a certain style, not, as you might think, only the aging hippy, but also the free thinker, modern woman. Yes, you get some nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of comments from people who think you're a secret (or not so much) ganja smoker, but a superior air sorts them out quite quickly. Also, you smell a lot less rank with roll-ups - not, I agree, if your taste in man runs to the Anosmic, a handy preference if you're also a lousy cook. You also get used to the soggy ends - if you don't you can buy filters in packets or, like the ganja smokers, tear up handy pieces of cardboard to make a filter.

The only cheaper option is to get fag ends out of dustbins, which, not to put a PC gloss on it, about as nice as the other sort of fag end. But it's cheap.

You'll be asking now, if there are other disadvantages to roll-ups (if you're still with me, that is). Yes. If you've not been brought up properly to know that other people's property is theirs, and not to be taken, then, on a trip to Saudi Arabia, you might find that even mild kleptomania isn’t taken lightly and you’ll have to learn to roll them single-handed. Similar problems arise if you’re a trifle clumsy but a D.I.Y enthusiast. There is a solution, though; you can buy machines that roll for you. Not very chic, but then, Captain Hook wasn’t a fashion victim.

As a responsible adult (from time to time, anyway), I must repeat that giving the nasty things up is really the best solution.

This blog is dedicated to my muse, my inspiration, my friend, and my niece Zara - to be found blogging at: http://ow.ly/nhzp - be sure to follow her (if you like the blog - as you will)

In praise of Common Law

It's true that there's no absolute, platonic, abstraction of
jurisprudence to appeal to. This doesn't, though, mean that it is 'all
relative' or that justice (as opposed to law) can be arrived at only
by some sort of loose agreement.

We're an animal (and there are others) that has evolved a strong moral
sense. We can distinguish fair from unfair and right from wrong. This
sense does not, of course, mean that everybody behaves morally, all
the time; even ants in an ant colony sometimes rebel.

It does, though, mean that we can identify the clear, constant bases
of justice. There's a long historical record from which the essential
matters can be deduced. This is the basis of the soundest form of law,
Common Law, the gradually accreted body of a multitude of small
judgements, taken as precedents, that embodies our internal moral
system, particularly with its exceptions, contradictions and evolved
attitudes to, for example, the relative power of monarchs to ordinary
people, and the legitimacy of torture, execution and arbitrary
detention.

Unfortunately, where common law has been strongest, there's been
something of a conspiracy of politicians [the correct term for a
collection of the creatures, I believe] to replace this with the badly
drafted, idiot inspired, bloated corpus of legislation.

This erosion of an essentially sound system by an essentially foolish
one, has led to the decline in the respect for law that properly
attends such a decline in the essential requirements for respect -
justice, fairness and impartiality. This, in turn, has led to a
decline in justice, which, in turn, as a simple consequence, has led
to an increase in crime.

Utilitarianism, Bentham and happiness

To clarify the point regarding happiness. Bentham argues for the minimising of pain and the maximising of pleasure as the source of the calculus of utility. J.S. Mill changed the formulation to refer directly to happiness. Bentham has achieved a fair measure of his aims as his lobbying of parliament laid many of the foundations for the more measured system of criminal punishment that we have today. The excessive punishments that were commonplace in his time now only exist in Islamic countries and are correctly seen as barbaric in their offence against utility - why should the punishment cause more suffering than the crime?

Suicide

This was an interesting result I saw in the BMJ this week: "People who commit suicide have heavier brains at necropsy than controls who died suddenly but of natural causes, a study has found (British Journal of Psychiatry 2000;177:257-61). The authors, all psychiatrists, can't say why victims of suicide have heavy brains, but they think the matter should be investigated further. "

I seem to recall that the volume of the brain, as measured by a PET scan, it proportional to 'g'. Could it be that stupid as suicide appears to be, suicides are cleverer?

I suppose that it could be an artefact of the violent death of an
otherwise healthy person.

--
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - GBS

Happiness

'Count no man happy until he is dead'

Considering this, I have read many biographies and find it almost universally true that very few people are happy - though they do have interludes of happiness on occasion.

I have wondered if it really is the case that you can only know if you are happy in retrospect. It may be true, but a sensible person could remember a past period of happiness, see the same, or similar, circumstances and, along with the feeling of good will, decide that he is happy now.

It is seen, probably correctly, as smug and insufferable to protest your happiness whilst we travel through this vale of tears. However it is right, I think, to be honest and, if it is true that you are lucky in some particular way, honest to mention it. Just as it is honest to confess your misery if that is how you feel.

I have looked for happy people in many places. I thought I met a happy man in David Raven, the professor of classics in Pietermaritzburg. Later,when he killed himself, I realised that he was not the happy man I thought he was. I mourned, and still mourn, his passing as he was a man of exquisite aesthetic taste, a keen (sometimes too keen) sense of humour and father to a lovely daughter. His homosexuality was, I fear, the seat of his ultimate misery.

I have, of course, been unhappy as a result of the usual things, grief, anxiety, failure in love, physical discomfort and so forth. Without that it would be impossible to claim to be happy - it is, after all, the antithesis of unhappiness, knowing one enables one to know the other. A life lived on an even keel with no misfortune could not be a happy one
for that reason.

I wonder how genuine my belief that I am the happiest person I have ever known really is. My brother (a jovial, delightful and interesting man and a man I loved more than anybody I have known) was not happy. He was irritated, understandably, by what he saw as my complaisant happiness. He felt that I was only under the delusion of being happy because of my capacity to forget unpleasantness and live only for the day.

He may well have been right. After all, if I am truly happy then why should I wish ( or risk ) discussion about it? I know that I do actively forget unpleasantness.

However, if I am so deluded and it doesn't impinge on my effectiveness in life, then why should I seek to open my eyes and remove my delusion to join the ranks of the unhappy? Is there a better delusion, if that is
what it is, than the delusion that you are happy?

I have been interested to join discussions on the Epicurean mail list, I hoped to learn of how to reach increased hights of delight through attachment to an even simpler life. I have been a little saddened to
find that it is a group more of people seeking than of people who have found - but I should have expected that, shouldn't I!

Can anybody point me to happy people, dead or alive, whose lives I can read and learn from?

Is happiness, as I believe, not a goal or a destination, but a way of seeing the journey?

How, by the way, does hubris come into it? Was it just an old Greek way of of cutting down tall poppies or is it a recognition of a real aspect of human nature (environment/culture/upbringing/imprinting/wtf)?

Is this, I wonder, a difficult or threatening subject? Is there a feeling that a person has somehow failed if he is not happy?

Is it, as I believe, not possible to seek happiness, but only to find it, en passant?

--
We are all of us failures - at least, the best of us are. - J.M. Barrie

Jeremy Bentham, Epicurus, Rawls and torture

Investigating the question of Epicurus and his view of torture has led me to look at Jeremy Bentham again.

Sadly his works are not all indexed and on line - apparently work is in
progress to collate, index and publish them, but it will be a 70 volume
monster!

It seems to me that, where Epicurus identified the maximising of happiness as a useful goal in life, Bentham took the matter a stage further with his utilitarian calculus. His work on jurisprudence and punishment is
interesting. He saw that punishment was necessary to encourage better behaviour in people, but that the total punishment meted out could never be allowed to exceed the total misery that the crimes had caused. Furthermore corporal, and of course capital, punishment were too extreme in their negative effect on the total happiness of humanity to be countenanced.

I haven't been able to find any direct references to torture in Bentham's writing, though I am sure that there must be - has anybody else come across any?

Epicurus appears not to be pro-torture, he hardly could see it as a means to happiness for anybody, but he does suggest that the wise man would suffer torture calmly. In this he has the imaginative edge over those currently
urging torture as he doesn't see it only as something to be applied to 'the other' [since Epicurus is a humanist and not a xenophobe], but as something that even a happy, wise and honourable person might suffer in the course of
life.

Though Epicurus suggested avoiding politics was wise for a happy life, a sound view, Bentham, of course, considers the wider implications, for happiness for all, which does require a political accommodation. Actually Epicurus' urging that to be happy you must understand and make peace with your neighbour does really cover the same point if 'neighbour' is taken in
the widest sense - your enemy is, after all, only a neighbour with whom you have failed to make accommodation.

It seems to me that, if they had the chance, both Bentham and Epicurus would be consider Rawl's test of a just society as being a sound one from a utilitarian and Epicurean point of view. Since nobody but a masochist would
invite torture on themselves, I can't see that anybody applying Rawl's test could justify torture.

I wonder too that, since torture has been known to be ineffective in producing reliable information for several centuries those that argue for it must either be ignorant of this fact, or wilfully ignoring it - or must
rather have a different reason for urging torture than the 'ticking bomb' excuse. I think that they are really motivated by feelings of revenge, hatred and the smug assumption that they, themselves, will never face it,
being ubermenschen in their opinion.

--
Yesterday's chip wrapper is enjoys eternal youth - something denied the nectar of the gods; tomorrow's free beer.

Tone, self-satisfaction and being smug

I was consequently interested to see a film that I enjoyed very much this weekend, a Yank film, for the record, called 'Thirteen conversations about one thing'. This film makes the hatred for the congenital (or maybe learned) smug optimist quite palpable. I myself, didn't see the optimist as smug, but smug is mainly a word that is applied to those with whom one disagrees (like 'I am steadfast, you are stubborn, but he is pig headed'). I must admit (I don't think it a confession as I am sure it is common and doesn't do anybody any harm) to have felt what I can only describe as smug on certain occasions - mainly as a result of being proved right after much opposition - but I think that this feeling has none of the unpleasantness of the possibly associated schadenfreuder.

Interestingly also, in last week's New Scientist, being optimistic about oneself and the future is shown to have a huge statistically significant value in health and longevity. I was interested that it was suggested that it was a more significant positive effect than a smoker giving up smoking!

So, maybe the objection to those with a panglossean view (at least of themselves and their own life and situation, if not of humanity as a whole) is envy for both their current 'luck', their past 'luck' and their complaisant expectation of future 'luck'. Calling somebody else 'smug' is more a reflection, under this view, of ones own insecurity.

Interestingly as well, Voltaire's Dr Pangloss didn't suffer himself from any reversals or reasons to doubt his view - it was only his disciples, after his death, who ran into philosophical problems with it. This may also be a problem, ideal as a smug, panglossean, optimistic, content, and maybe even happy, view might be, it is not something that is easy to cultivate artificially.

I'd recommend the film to make up for any bile, angst, irritation or other unfortunate feeling that this post, smug by name and smug by nature might have occasioned.

--
"May you get what you want, and want what you get" - Double Gipsy curse from "Thirteen conversations about one thing"

Is it worth re-living one's life?

If one was aware that one was re-living it then the continual sense of deja vu might be irritating. If, the question were simply if one would like exactly the same experience again then I'd have no objection, but, what would be the point? After all, I'd simply end up in exactly the same state I am in now. If the question is just the old one of 'would I wish to change anything' if I re-lived it, then, yes, as a Groundhog Day style experiment it might be fun to try out a few alternative universes, but, just for fun, I wouldn't wish to change the path that got me to here at all.
--
The happiest people on earth are those few fortunates who seem to be in a state of mild, stable hypomania. - David Horrobin 'The Madness of Adam and Eve' (How schizophrenia shaped humanity)

On the eve of Nelson Mandela's birthday.

Whose birthday is on the mind of the world? The answer is obvious Nelson Mandela's birthday is tomorrow.

Some of the greatest of people have had a Nobel Prize as the acme of their career. Few have had it as a mere marker of their progress to immortality. Though there is far to go in uniting the new South Africa, most South Africans are united in their pride at having Mandela a fellow South African.

What is it about Mandela that has made him such a great man? It is not his intellect, though that is undeniably great. It is not his suffering, though that also has been long, apparently without end and, to a lesser man, soul
destroying. It is not even his humility which, great as it is, has not prevented him from expressing his objection to the mighty. It is not his royal birth, enough for some to claim some position in the world. It is not his fame, though few have been more universally famous and few are likely to be famous well after their death. So, what is it?

Clearly it is all of the above. It is also, much more importantly, his humanity. He stands before all of us as a man who, as with all of us, has had, and, no doubt, has, his flaws. He has never denied them. They are almost his strength. We admire and trust him because he has been one of us, still is one of us, and respects all of us. His example urges us to examine
ourselves for our integrity. Usually this is a cause for resentment. We can't, however, resent somebody who has earned all our respect in such fundamental ways.

We find it difficult to forgive our enemies, even in their pettiness, their insubstantial nature. Mandela sees beyond the enemy to the person and understands, and shows us how to understand the person, who, like us, is human and flawed.

I cannot, when thinking of Mandela, avoid thinking of other great men who have changed the world. Buddha, Ecclesiastes, Socrates, Diogenes and Epicurus seem to be men who have understood the vanity of the world and the
striving of people as empty and have, like Mandela, urged us to move beyond that to our common humanity. Petty men who have only temporal power creep under the huge legs of such men and peep about to find themselves
dishonourable graves - as Shakespeare had it so perfectly.

Mandela is a man with no statutory, economic or hereditary power, at least not in the world. However, when he speaks nobody remains untouched by his remarks. He seems to epitomise the powerless power that Ghandi showed was
real power. He has shown himself, like all of us, to be unwise in youth, but unlike most of us, wise beyond even his years as he learned from his bitter experience, not the bitterness, but the essence of life.

It seems trivial to wish him a happy birthday, but I, and millions who respect him can offer the wish that a man who has given so much should, at least, enjoy happiness for as long as he lives.

Happy Birthday, Madiba!