Money Grubbing Idealists

I am amazed at some of the ego-boosting measures that go on in even supposedly hard-headed organizations. I signed up for an organization and a few weeks later, and admin specialist handed me an "award" for signing up.

Apparently, some people still haven't heard of motivation crowding. That is the phenomenon that people can only operate on so many motives before one has to disregard some. Even if all motives draw one in favor of one action, some motives will be forgotten.

If you try to recruit people based on honor, that is one motivation. If you try to recruit them bases on self-improvement, that is another. If you try to recruit them based on financial benefits, that is yet another motive. At some point, constant iterations of all of these will crowd another out.

If you try to motivate with a nice salary, college tuition, bonuses, service, adventure, and self-improvement, the theme most iterated will be viewed as the focus for participating. Even if one motive is very strong, its relative weight will decline with every instance that another motive is focused upon. The result is that if you try to motivate people based on money, you will will have people primarily focused on money even if they joined for other reasons.

In some professions that may not be such a bad thing but in others, the psychological side is much more important as one faces extreme situations. The problem is reduced if the benefits are given but not frequently mentioned.

Sadly, this escapes even the more professional organizations and the variety of effects this creates is interesting to watch but not to work in.

Occasions for Dress

It is interesting to observe the various movements within culture. One of these is clothing. The old manners are giving way to new ones and one of these is the degree of formality an occasion can tolerate.


The concept of a child going to school in suspenders, white shirt, black pants, and leather shoes is unthinkable in certain parts of modern society. Such a child would be subjected to horrendous pressure to get him to change into what they view as more appropriate for the occasion. For many, an adult version would be glaring at anyone who would dare to wear a suit into a bar. The expectation of the appropriate degree of casualness is enforced with an opprobrium not deployed in other aspects of life.

No longer is there even just one scale of casualness but many. It used to be little more than two decades ago that one need only wear jeans to be considered casual, now the process has become far more complex. The theoretical simplicity of casualness used to be that work clothes were dirty, dress clothes for Church and social occasions, and home clothes whatever was decent and clean. No longer is that the case. People must now find jeans with the proper rips, fading, dyes, and other paraphernalia to demonstrate their superior gaudiness.

Formality, then a practice refined by expense, is now easily achievable thanks to cheaper fabric and rising living conditions. Ironically, as formality becomes ever more affordable, fewer and fewer people dare to dress that way. Perhaps it is the fear of becoming an "organization man" and of losing one's individuality in the society.

The result is that there is/are one or at least very few ways of being formal but many different and complex ways of being casual. The failure to be sufficiently casual can haunt some people for years as their peers judge them based on that standard.

For me, I rebel against the casual by becoming formal. Life is worthy of respect.

Spam, the African Specialty

I am sometimes surprised at the effort that goes into some of the spam or information theft schemes I run into. The ones that get past the spam filter are frequently entertaining in their quality and delightful in their language.

This is likely due to many of the people writing them using a more formal English education imparted during the British colonial period. This superior understanding of the English knowledge interestingly sets them apart from legitimate offers by their very correctness of language. The expectation used to be that information thieves would be distinguishable by their bad spelling and poor grammar. That is no longer the case among at least a small sample.

My "offers" had ranged from an offer of financial aid from a king in Yorubaland, a need to quickly transfer money out of a bank in Sierra Leone, a desperate need for companionship by a very rich woman, winning a UN lottery, and a bank account of a dead miner in South Africa.

These are all quite entertaining if approached in the right way. Clearly, someone has at least been trying to craft initially plausible cover stories and doing so with a better grasp of written English than I can muster. It has gotten to the point where I expect to see errors in my departmental e-mails but open spam messages just to read the delightful English.

Are these people intended thieves? Yes. Are they enjoyable writers? Yes. It is almost sad that these people are spending more time trying to steal from me and others instead of trying to write a book.

Mind Games

It is amazing how sometimes philosophical papers can be so vapid and yet unexpected media can be more acute.

Here is a selection of video clips from an excellent computer game.







These are but a selection from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Normally, one does not expect philosophy in their game but the plot written into the game is far above the standard to which such things are subjected to. The whole field of Science Fiction is more about understanding oneself in a more dramatic variant of the literary method coupled with more "hands on" approaches.

Unlike many who publish in Philosophy journals (or more accurately those trying to be interdisciplinary between Philosophy and Political Science), game producers see a benefit in being understood and erudition for them is more likely to mean reference to interesting ideas instead of field specific jargon.

One can only look at much of what is considered the "geek" part of American society and sigh at the missed opportunities such people are.

Diversity, We Hardly Knew Ye

One hears much in America and Europe about Diversity. The concept seems to be the assumption that all cultures are inoffensive to each other.

It seems absurd to talk of Diversity as simply the mixing of nice Indian exchange students or Chinese businessmen's sons seeking a career. When talking of a diverse society, people speak of them as ideal and tolerant places. Having lived in a few, my reaction is more skeptical.

This immediately becomes difficult to believe when one observes even just the effect of migrating to the US by Mexicans reared in a different culture. Where back in small villages in Mexico there were social controls on young men and a clear set of expectations and punishments, there are an entirely different set in the US. Young men needing to show that they are men pick up on the old show of force coupled with the urban underclass resentment and disdain for education of both rural Mexico and the underclass culture they are assimilating into.

A lack of education is far less problematic in a rural village and men have always needed to show they are independent. The difference is that a lack of education is a major hindrance to the urbanized and technological society that is the US. The different social evolution of Mexican society had its own means of restraining the violence of young men but the aversion of Americans to use force or to condemn a person disarms them in the face of such aggressiveness. The expectation in Mexican villages is that the larger community will know the troublemakers and being willing to deal with them in various ways. The more anonymous American society is averse to violating a person's privacy in such ways.

Every solution breeds new problems.

This gets to the heart of social evolution as the changes made to accommodate one problem alter the overall situation accentuate features at another part of the society.

Mexican society is the evolution of the myriad ways to deal with certain problems. Just as Russian engineering culture evolved radically differently from American engineering when approaching the same problems, the divergences are due to selecting a different technique to deal with the same problem. No technique or situation is identical and so they bring different effects that create yet more situations to deal with and thus does the circle continue.

When the social evolution of Mexican villages resulted in different attitudes than American social evolution demands. The result is a mutual disdain in some parts, a mutual meeting in others and a whole lot of stress everywhere else. The meeting in some parts is seen in the Mexican men who join the Marines and put their youthful aggressiveness to socially useful purpose. The hostility between Mexican gangs and Black gangs is famous and both attack the societies of each others trying to drive them out. The reason is partly out of hatred and partly out of trying to expand the social environment they can operate in. In other areas more educated Mexicans can use their numbers to invoke White Guilt and to pose as the defenders of the downtrodden poor Mexicans.

The downside of this diversity is that there is an ethnic conflict between poor Mexicans (most Mexicans are poor) and Blacks, there is a large Mexican underclass beholden to Nationalist feelings egged on by richer members of their community hostile to the larger American society. The effect is to create a large and dangerous division between faction of American society.

From Shrinkwrapped:

One of Murphy's laws that is germane to this discussion is that "Nature always sides with the hidden flaw." Simply put, when a system is deeply stressed, any flaws become fault lines. To the extent that we favor a status quo that minimizes individual differences in the interest of a social compact based on designed to provide the illusion of absolute equality, we are setting ourselves up for significant social problems.

Ultimately, when there are different ways of doing something, there needs to be a decision mechanism. If the question is if raped women should be comforted and helped in prosecuting their aggressors or if they should be stoned, a population divided between the two philosophies will not resolve the problem. They will not meet in the middle and say "fine, stone them but stone the rapist too". The two positions are irremediably opposed. If the positions of both philosophies are about equal, there will be a painful stalemate until demographics, conversion, or force resolve the dispute in the favor of one or the other. Diversity is no help if it can lead to an impasse. Diversity helps if it broadens perspective but not towards forcing rival factions.

All would describe Bosnia as Diverse. The mutual hatreds and suspicions entailed orientation towards different communities for protection. While people lived side by side, they also were suspicious of each other and anarchy gave opportunity for people's sadism against the despised other groups. Diverse? Yes. Tolerant? No.

South Africa is known as the Rainbow Nation for its many peoples. What is less publicized is the brutal murders of members of different groups. Boers (White South Africans of Dutch heritage who dominated the old government) are subject to numerous murders such as an attack on a supermarket where several children were shot. All White South Africans worry about farm murders and attacks on urban homes. Zulus feel the anarchy in their poor outskirts where it is estimated that 1 in 2 women have been raped. Zulus hate the Shona who dominate the key families on charge of the ANC and who have been the only ones feeding at the political trough of the South African government. Coloreds are derided as white underlings and must show their racial allegiance by condemning Whites. Indians get the worst of it as they are not part of the White social network but are hated for their wealth and productivity. Somali immigrants are murdered by crowds.

South Africa is far from anybody's ideal of tolerance but is a very diverse place.

Washington DC is roughly 1/3 White and 2/3 Black. Neighborhoods are spread in between each other but Whites and Blacks mix very little.

Yugoslavia broke apart for obvious reasons. The once diverse USSR is now the somewhat less diverse Russian Federation and other states. Iraq is contending with its ethnic diversity in other ways.

Another thing to note is that Austria has long been considered a diverse society in contemplating its pre-WWI period. Autria then was a state encompassing Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, parts of Poland, and Transylvania. Sadly, Czechs were insisting on greater political power in Bohemia and the struggles over political power used National identity as a source of support. The effect was to heighten chauvinism. It should be remembered that Hitler was referred by critics as "the Bohemian" (he lived just across the internal border with Bohemia in Austria) as he had imbibed much of the worst of the political culture of Austrian Germans. The result of the struggle to keep Austria together led to a recourse to demonizing a third party (the Jews). Hitler made many claims about Jews dominating the Professions in Germany that were inaccurate as applicable to Germany but were accurate in Austria.

Hitler was as much a product of Diversity as is Tex-Mex fast food.

A few of Murphy's laws might be germain to the conversation.

Nothing is as easy as it looks.

This is applicable in that no culture is the same as its appearance. That Bosnia was a region that had existed for hundreds of years as one region under the rule of other countries did not mean it could remain integrated on its own.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Over time, there will be some idiot who might form any manner of group or movement. The relative proportions may differ but eventually some connection will be made. One does not normally think of Pakistanis and Punks in one sentence but there are Pakistani Punks in Northern England.

If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

This is quite common as various crises divert attention and resources away from one front to another. This permits activity that had once been suppressed. Serbs wanted to be free from Roman (Byzantine) rule and when Roman forces were diverted in fighting Muslim attacks in the East, the Serbs had the opportunity to defeat the residual Roman forces in the area and become independent. People take crises as opportunities thereby putting much more stress on the system.

Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.

No individual has a full understanding of a situation and bears into the old aphorism that "none of us are as dumb as all of us" when individual parts of an organization try to to work in different directions. Time will bring up the fact that anything that can go wrong will and there will always be a weakness that is not considered. Few thought that privatizing a large part of the US Army's logistical functions to private contractors would prove so expensive. The idea may have worked in the confined conditions of US bases at home but not when deployed in the middle of fighting in Iraq.

Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics
Things get worse under pressure.

This refers back to people having to make hard decisions. When Bosnia was fracturing along ethnic and religious lines, neighbors would face the problem that people they had known for decades would now spit at them and curse at them. The opportunity to achieve their differing goals tore people apart and pressure the various sides applied only made the hatred and violence grow. The habit of Muslim politicians to intimidate suspected recalcitrants made for a painful situations for Serbs in Muslim territory who were now victimized by Muslims seeking to prove their bona fides. The political pressure of having Muslims in Serb territory made Serb leaders decide that mass expulsions were their best option and hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from where they had lived for hundreds of years with attendant recruits for the Muslim armies. Pressure from internal and external actors made people more desperate at optimistic in achieving their goals. They hoped to ride out the pressure by even more forceful acts that stimulated more hatred.

The first myth of management is that it exists.

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

My response to these two is merged by their commonality in both expression and applicability. It is an error to suppose that politicians know enough to engineer a society. They are frequently average human beings (thus fallible) fulfilling a necessary role that is more to maintain the system than to cope with great stress. Usually, we do not need insightful leaders, just someone to be the ultimate arbiter. That means that while we cannot ignore the occasional burst of insight from a politician, we cannot count on it. They are working within they system they were brought into and frequently operated on the imagined society of their youth or propaganda, not life on the ground. They get ideas but these are frequently selected for their reinforcement of their current conception of life by similarly isolated people.

The Aquinas Axiom:
What the gods get away with, the cows don't.

This refers to the tendency of the rich to share a common culture of wealth. Among expatriates living in Eastern Europe, there is little distinction between American, Australian, Brazilian, Sudanese, Israeli, Pakistani, or Lebanese. They are bonded by their common luxury to a common popular culture oriented away from the concerns of survival that the rest of the population faced.

The wealthy also can afford to live in the fantasy that everybody is the same by virtue of living in segregated neighborhoods. Few places are as stark in this as Washington DC. The division between the White and Black parts of the city are very clear. Black parts rarely had lawns and if they did, any blade of grass would feel lonely. Garbage littered the streets and the signs of people unconcerned with order were evident. The White parts were distinctive by the cleanliness and order but also by their luxury and frequent orientation towards recreation.

As hostile as most of these Whites likely are to segregation, they accepted that Blacks and Whites (usually referred to as Poor by Whites for fear of offending) did not mix well and Public Transit did not reach far into White areas where higher-class commercial services were. A phrase the more polite Blacks used to describe Whites was that they were "not from around here" even if they had lived in the area their entire lives. The racial distinction was politely concealed but that detracted none from the animosity.

Diversity here made a major difference. Blacks had conspiracy theories blaming Whites and sometimes Jews for their troubles. Whites could feel a condescending "compassion" from their large suburban houses out of the way of the many poor Blacks and isolated from them in their everyday lives. Even Apartheid South Africa likely had more interaction in daily life between Whites and Blacks. Whites living in comfort isolated from Blacks could then suppose a number of reasons for Black ills but the distance made accurate assessments near impossible. The anti-intellectual nature of Black leadership and the focus on emotionally absolving oneself from blame are key aspects of the Black culture there. General unwillingness to focus on anything other than entertainment was a major feature among Black children. The effect of this on a society is to produce poor workers who lack the mental focus to rise. The will to rise was also destroyed by the insistence on the impossibility of it.

Were the claims of Racism true? Yes, no one who has seen the unconscious reactions of a White in DC when a Black man approaches him would deny that it existed. The problem is that its effect is assumed to be much larger than it is in impeding individual growth. The mutual suspicion is just another price of Diversity.

With such a upbeat example to end on, lets end on these observations.

O'Toole's Commentary
Murphy was an optimist.

NBC's Addendum to Murphy's Law
You never run out of things that can go wrong.

Our Island History's Home

As one looks at the current state of England, one becomes both amazed and saddened by how such a once proud and stoic country turned into a poor and pale comparison to what it once had been.

The refusal of the British Home Office to permit the entry of Geert Wilders is hardly in the spirit of free and intense debate that once marked the British Parliament from the 1500s onwards. The worry of the official who barred him was that his film contained hate speech against Muslims. I hardly believe quotes of Islamic leaders and from the Koran and Hadith would be hate speech. The problem is instead a moral complacency mixed with cowardice.

The complacency is that there will always be an England recognizable as the one they have known or idealized, the cowardice is that they will not confront Muslim intimidation and even terrorists for fear of the public disruption it would cause.

Such sentiments are hardly new, Churchill confronted them in his day.

The Prime Minister desires to see cordial relations between this country and Germany. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. But never will you have friendship with the present German Government. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the British democracy.

What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure. It is to prevent that that I have tried my best to urge the maintenance of every bulwark of defence - first, the timely creation of an Air Force superior to anything within striking distance of our shores; secondly, the gathering together of the collective strength of many nations; and thirdly, the making of alliances and military conventions, all within the Covenant, in order to gather together forces at any rate to restrain the onward movement of this power. It has all been in vain. Every position has been successively undermined and abandoned on specious and plausible excuses.

We do not want to be led upon the high road to becoming a satellite of the German Nazi system of European domination. In a very few years, perhaps in a very few months, we shall be confronted with demands with which we shall no doubt be invited to comply. Those demands may affect the surrender of territory or the surrender of liberty. I foresee and foretell that the policy of submission will carry with it restrictions upon the freedom of speech and debate in Parliament, on public platforms, and discussions in the Press, for it will be said - indeed, I hear it said sometimes now - that we cannot allow the Nazi system of dictatorship to be criticised by ordinary, common English politicians. Then, with a Press under control, in part direct but more potently indirect, with every organ of public opinion doped and chloroformed into acquiescence, we shall be conducted along further stages of our journey.

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1189

The difference here is that unlike the 1930s, very few people today are willing to even think about the threat to the freedoms of people that stems from a totalitarian ideology such as Islam. One factor influencing this is that Westerners are almost exclusively from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Judaism and Christianity are religions of internal moral searching and condemn forced conversion and view such acts as despairing of any moral effect. Islam is vastly different in its focus not on inner spiritual obedience to God but to the submission of all public acts to Allah.

The societies based on the Judeo-Christian concepts of Morality (not as exclusive as the terms implies as almost all other religions agree) are inherently contradictory with those based on Islam. Islamicists recognize this as do some Westerners but States are not run by those people. Western governments are led by a usually incestuous class of leaders, bureaucrats, and journalists with a few public intellectuals to give it a veneer of respectability. Rarely do they look beyond good intentions as a basis for their policy and perceptions.

In this, the state of modern England is far different that in the 40s. Then the cowardice was from explicit self-interest that could be reasoned into fighting for its survival. Now it is a wilful blindness of those who fear excommunication from the society of the Bien Pensants. The social responsibility of the "great" and "good" will now be our suffering and potential ruin.

Churchill was not blind to the dangers of facing Nazi Germany, it is for that reason that his most memorable speech lives down today as the basis for many poorer imitators. He spoke of the situation with honesty and without any expression of false hope. He wrapped the truth of the bleak situation in the honor and glory of those who fight for right in the face of massive odds. And yet he communicated the threat of invasion, urban warfare and all the suffering that entails, as well as a perpetual war fought by the remainder of the British forces for the liberation of their once proud home.



He was a great statesman not only for his perceptions (which are revealed as all the more insightful than previously thought save when dealing with Stalin in personal meetings and with Yugoslavia) but in his ability to rouse people. To paraphrase Jim Hacker, "Sadly, we have no such people now for want of a comprehensive education to make up the wont from the Comprehensive Education."

Efficiently Off Work

As I wait for the inevitable rush to classes and the scramble to get work done afterward, it seems most annoying that people restrict themselves to working on a 0900-1630 schedule. Such a restriction on the end of the working day makes it very difficult to contact someone at work after the immobile parts of your own schedule are accomplished.

Despite that inefficiency, one must learn to bear in mind the inevitable problems that arise. People are not automatons and cannot work for too long before they loose the essential trait of creativity or spoil their personal lives (the motive for working in the first place). Exhaustion takes a great toll on efficiency even in non-physical tasks. Thus in that mindset, I must wait a few more days to get a person on the phone where working hours extended by a simple hour would solve my problem.

In this problem, keeping in mind the larger social limits of work brings cold comfort to my position but at least curiosity is satiated.