That is Easy, but It Will Still Take You a Full Week To Do.

I used to program BASIC V on the Archimedes, and you could at any time drop into assembly and out again, within the BASIC program. I want to be able to do the same thing in Eclipse with java.

I should be able to specify @lang for each method/class/package. Ruby, Groovy, Nice, Scheme, Visual Basic, BASIC, Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, Ada, Javascript, BeanShell, Python, Assembly are all available in ways that compile to the JVM, so why can’t I say “I want to implement this method in Scheme, and this other method in Nice, and this other method in assembly” within the same class?

This should be transparent, with all code highlighting, refactoring tools, javadoc, etc, available.

When native code has to be called, this is something else that should be straightforward. I should just be able to specifiy language C or C++ in the same way as all these others, and it should do everything it needs to automatically. Why should I have to fiddle with build scripts or header generators? Mindless repetitive tasks are things that computers are supposed to be good at.

During debug, I want to see an object graph of the whole system that I can drill down through and edit the state of (the whole time it’s running, not just at breakpoints), and have a console window, with all scripting languages available to manipulate the system.

Eclipse seems to spend half of the time I use it recompiling projects. Sometimes when it doesn’t need to. It loves to randomly pause in the middle of something and leave me stuck for ages. It’s just way too slow for large projects.

And why, when I create servlets, do I have to edit interminable xml, and wait for hours while simple changes are deployed here and there. The amount of configuration you have to do to create a HelloWorld servlet that talks to a database is utterly crazy. The amount of time I’ve spent waiting for eclipse to redeploy a servlet on every tiny change is bizarre.

It seems that java, with its myriad libraries, and IDEs, makes everything easy, but nothing trivial. No wonder people are jumping ship to more dynamic languages.

Contrast this with Ruby on Rails, or even .Net. Just put [webmethod] in front of your normal c# method declaration and drop the file into the web server, and suddenly you’ve got a SOAP service and a form to test it. It’s so easy.

As I read in a Perl book once, simple things should be simple.

Plant Fragment

Just a story idea fragment:

In the hope of solving hunger and war, humans bioengineer themselves to produce chlorophil and begin to photosynthesise. Everything is fantastic, but fast forward 1 million years, and a visiting alien species discovers that with the need to move around to find food gone, people have begun to take root at their desks, only tendrils of fingers still connecting them to the internet where they still socialise and meet.

Perhaps from the other side, humans visit a planet where this happened/discover this already happened on earth – all the trees are connected to an internet and actually lead a very deep virtual life.

Earth trees communicate already using chemical signals.

A Genuinely Social Network

Social networking sites should be called “social databasing sites”. They aren’t networks at all, but centrally controlled repositories of as much of their users information as they can get their hands on. Rarely a week goes by that I don’t get 3 or 4 invitiations from various friends to add myself to a social networking site (of course, they all use a different one, and the systems don’t interoperate).

Users want to share their information with each other, professional, personal, photos, etc, and trusting it all to a third party seems the easiest way to do it.

Trusting such personal things to a third party is bad for a lot of different reasons. I won’t argue them here, but let me say : AOL search fiasco, single point of failure, illegal government wiretaps, spammers, indian call centers selling identities, profiling, genocide….

If Knowledge is Power, and Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely, then maybe we should be shying away from providing any third party with absolute knowledge.

I think I started getting a bit concerned about all this when I was about 16 and discovered how easy it can be sometimes to go from knowing next to nothing about someone to knowing their address, what school their children go to, (sometimes their passwords), previous girlfriends, unusual habits, and much more, all with information publicly available on the internet. This was all before Flickr and MySpace and blogging…. Sometimes I do a bit of this as an experiment and every time it disturbs me. If you’re prepared to go a little bit further, I am sure that you can find out much, much more.

All the benefits of social databasing (or building up a complete profile of who a person is, has done and what and whom they know) can be ours without giving up the power over our own destinies.

What we really need is a true social network. Independant nodes, run by diverse organisations and individuals, all talking a common protocol with only a part of the picture. This is the internet way.

The machine that contains all the personal details about yourself can be under your own (or a company representing you as a customer) control. Access to different types of information would be on the level appropriate for your relationship with the person requesting access, with access enforced by public/private key encryption. People contacting you via another, would be able to provide a node address of your common friend, and you could check the recommendation automatically with your friends node.

Your node would also contain authentication mechanisms, a computer readable picture, fingerprint, pin, passwords and phrases, etc. It would provide authentication for a third party if it supported the mechanism, or if they had the appropriate priviledge, provide the data for them to do the authentication. E.g. the airline wants to do a face match. You enter a pin, which allows them access to your standard passport type photo, or their system asks yours if the photo they just took matches.

Each piece of information stored in your node could be certified by another individual/organisations node.

Types of trust network would be available. For example, I trust this man as a host for a good evening out, but not as a business partner. So, I’ve travelled to the other side of the world on business, and would like to meet up with someone in the evening for a chat and drink. I want to search for friends of my friends who are good hosts and friendly, and live in the city I’m visiting. These recommendations are stored on my friends nodes, and I can ask them for info. They will give it if my friends trust me enough, but the matches that my friends give might be completely different if I want to find someone to do business with. What they return from the search would not be any personal information about the target, but a node address within the system. Before a node address is returned, permission to do so would have been requested from that node. My node would contact that node, giving the friends node as a referer, and that node would determine how much information to share based on how much they trust our common friend.

Such a system could also easily incorporate a community credit system.

Routing information would be stored in a distributed hash table, not a central repository, and most people would get two servers providing their information in case of problems with one. This way, you can share your diary with people who should know about your diary, your photos with people you want to know about your photos, your career information, your medical information, your bookmarks. All these social networking sites could continue to exist, and would plug into the same web of personal information, but it would also be easy to run your own, and each social networking site would not actually have all information. The point is that you should have your own control over this data. Ideally, even governments access to your data should be on a need to know basis, and controlled by you.

Liberal Paradox

Every solution that we can think of is bettered by some other solution,
given the Pareto principle and the principle of liberalism, and we seem to
have an inconsistency of choice.
Amartya Sen, The Impossibility of the Paretian Liberal

In 1970, Amartya Sen’s paper demonstrated that given a certain set of circumstances, there could exist no social choice method (more or less a voting system) that would both respect individual rights, and make sure that the option it chose was not pareto dominated by an unchosen option.

Vilfredo Pareto has a couple of ideas named after him, but the one I’m using here is one that is often called ‘efficiency’. Imagine two people are arguing over what breakfast cereal to buy. From Sammys point of view, Frosties is better than Crunchy Nut is better than Cornflakes which is better than All-Bran. From Mothers point of view, Cornflakes is better than Crunchy Nut which is better than All-Bran which is better than Frosties.

Sammy: Frosties > Crunchy Nut > Cornflakes > All-Bran
Mother: Cornflakes > Crunchy Nut > All-Bran > Frosties

What should they choose? Well, there’s an argument to be made for most options, but one thing that they shouldn’t choose is All-Bran. If they took All-Bran home, they’d realise before they got there that both Sammy and Mother would have been much happier with Cornflakes or Crunchy Nut. Nobody wanted All-Bran. I’m going to call ‘Pareto dominated’ any option where there are other possibilites that all parties prefer. It seems obvious that whatever system we want making our choices for us shouldn’t be chosing options that are Pareto dominated.

Anyway, back to the Liberal Paradox. The problem is that there can be no social choice system that respects rights and can be guaranteed not to end up picking a pareto dominated option. Sen proved this with two book readers, Prude and Rude and a single copy of Lady Chatterlys Lover.

Prude is a bit of a censor and prefers that nobody reads it, but if someone must read it, Prude considers that he himself is more likely to withstand it’s influence than Rude. Rude wants to read it a lot, but to be honest thinks it’d do Prude a world of good and so would prefer Prude to read it. So the preferences look like this:

Prude: nobody reads it > Prude reads it > Rude reads it
Rude: Prude reads it > Rude reads it > nobody reads it

We’ve decided to combine these preferences in some way to come up with who should get the book. But really, we want to give Prude the right to not read it if the choice is between nobody reading it and Prude reading it – it’d be a cruel government that forced Prude to read in that case. We also want to give Rude the right to read it if otherwise the choice would be nobody reads it. These are rights we’re giving the individuals, because we’re liberals.

So, we can’t choose Prude reads it because we’d be infringing his rights, we can’t choose nobody reads it, because we’d be infringing Rudes rights, we’re left with only one choice – Rude reads it. That seems like a good solution.

But that’s no good either. Both Prude and Rude would prefer that Prude read it over Rude, so it’s a Pareto dominated alternative.

And that’s a problem that can happen any time you try to come to a community decision on a topic in which individuals have rights that must be respected. There are a few ways around this problem. You can ensure that you only vote on topics that don’t infringe rights (if we’re giving Rude the right to read the book, then why should Prude be allowed to say that he shouldn’t?), you could accept the possibility of choosing an outcome that is suboptimal for everyone, or you could accept that sometimes, you’ll have to infringe someones rights to choose the majority decision.

Navin Kartik, in Liberalism and Pareto Efficiency: Sen’s Paradox argues that the preferences are not independant of other peoples actions, e.g. in a real life version of the above, one person will probably be in the queue at the book shop first, and whomever gets there first gets the book without infringing on the others rights. This is quite true, but it’s not particularly relevant to the paradox, since in that example there is no attempt to use a social choice method. Instead we’re using the “early bird” gets the chance to determine the state of the world method. A dictatorship method based on opportunity. In situations where social choice methods are used (the paradox I think is really trying to be applied to democracy and governance), the decision is made in an instant taking into account the preference profiles fed into it. You can only make an escape via noninterdependence by splitting up the decision into parts that are made at different times.

The paradox isn’t that surprising – I see it as just stating that a community that’s trying to find the best solution for the whole community might choose things that are at odds with the rights of its members. What may be surprising is that following the rights of the individuals can result in choices that are bad for everyone, even those individuals.

What has happened is that giving individuals rights (to be decisive) has meant that in those choices that they are acting like individuals in competition to see their vision of reality come true.

There is a classic example of how following individuals choices can result in a situation worse for everyone.

Al Capone and Dick Turpin are both in the holding cells. They’re about to be taken for questioning. If both of them stick to the story they’ve agreed, there is little evidence to hold them, and they’ll both go to jail for four months for tax evasion. If either of them want to though, he can turn Kings evidence in which case, the other will serve 10 years, and he’ll go free. If they both voluteer to turn against the other, then they’ll both go to prision for 4 years.

It’s the prisioners dilemma. If both of them operate from a free choice to chose their own best interests, then they will choose the Nash equilibrium, and they’ll both go down for 4 years, paying the price for choosing a pareto dominated solution. If they give up their right to choose, and submit their preferences to a social choice method, it’ll look like this:

Al Capone: Al betrays > both hold > both betray > Dick betrays
Dick Turpin: Dick betrays > both hold > both betray > Al betrays

Both betraying – the Nash equilibrium – is pareto dominated by both sticking to the story, and a pareto social choice method would take that into acount. The most likely choice here for any sensible social choice method is that both stick to their story.

Giving people rights, and allowing them to exercise them in a non naive way, will lead to a situation that seeks the nash equilbrium, just like any non cooperative game. Sometimes giving up those rights to find a solution best for the community will also result in a better result for every individual in that community.

If you start from the position that individuals start with all rights, then analysing the situations where your rights are keeping you from pareto optimality can be a hint that it might be better to form a community and give up those specific rights to it. This is the rule that causes humans to band together into communities.

If you start from a position where the community bestows the rights upon individuals, then you need to be aware that the dark side of this is that sometimes the preferences of the majority are to hurt, torture and kill one or two of the communities members.

One way of modelling this would be to consider it as a iterated game. Make the rights something that a social choice function decides, but give the members of the society the knowledge that this is an iterated game, and sometimes they will be in the minority. To do this, we’ll need to attach preference values to each of the choices. These are called utility values. We can model the situation to discover if an individual will, when asked, vote to grant a specific right to all citizens or to withhold that right.

d = Disutility to me of having my right infringed by the others
u = Average utility to me of the social choice function being able to select scenarios where citizens have this right infringed.
p = Probability of being the one who has his rights infringed for any given iteration.
i = Iterations.

d(1 – (1-p)^i) – (u * i) > 0 : I will prefer to bestow this right to the citizen
d(1 – (1-p)^i) – (u * i) < 0 : I will prefer not to bestow this right to the citizen

Societies are most likely to bestow rights under this model when the disutility is very high (such as death / torture), or when the members consider that they have a high chance of being in the minority. Perhaps they have fled from persecution in another place, or they are very diverse. There must also be a reasonably large number of iterations (the life expectancy in the society must be reasonably high).

Seen this way, although rights may lead to some iterations having pareto dominated results, after all the iterations, we should expect that the final set of decision states is not pareto dominated by any other set, since the society would only choose to bestow the right if enough individuals thought it would be, in the long run better for them.

Pattern Patent

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

Jackson Pollack, quoted in Possibilities I, Winter 1947-48

I think that lots of people recognise that in the act of creation the artist may have no concious connection to the thing he is creating. This certainly does not reduce his rights over the final work. In fact, if my artistic method is to fling paint backwards over my shoulder onto a canvas that is swinging on a pedulum from a seizmograph standing on a weather vane stuck in an ant hill, no one will deny my authorship of the result or refuse me copyright protection for it (although they may refuse to pay large sums of money for it). I think I could even hook something up so that it recorded my tossing and turning as I slept and created an art work from that.

Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created, and a work is “created” when it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord for the first time. “Copies” are material objects from which a work can be read or visually perceived either directly or with the aid of a machine or device, such as books, manuscripts, sheet music, film, videotape, or microfilm…. If a work is prepared over a period of time, the part of the work that is fixed on a particular date constitutes the created work as of that date.

copyright.gov

Since conciousness isn’t necessary for a work to be considered art, I want you to consider a work of sculpture that I have been about for many years. It’s a multipart work, with 10 pieces, I prefer people to appreciate them together, but each one stands on it own as well.

I have managed to create, at massive, but unconcious effort an extraordinarily fine structure on my fingers. I began work on it before birth, and although it’s largely done, I may still change it a little throughout my life. It is completely unique. I know other people who have created a similar work, but mine stands apart.

Although they were affected by my environment as I created them (what art isn’t?), no one can deny that it was me that made them.

Somehow I have managed to express much of my soul in them and with them to the extent that an American customs official I met once could spot my style from just one look at these sculptures, and knew my name.

Now my problem is that I believe this same customs official copied my art. I had not granted him a license to do so, but nevertheless, he made an electronic copy and stored it in a computer system.

What is copyright infringement?
As a general matter, copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.
http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html#infringement

To avoid future confusion, I make the following declaration:

I hereby assert all rights in my fingerprints, moral and legal. I am the owner of all creative rights in their regard. I will make copies in a variety of mediums, and will leave them in a number of places for free. You are granted the right to observe them, but not to copy them in any way, shape or form, including making a derivative work from them. Setting them in an alternative context is considered making a deriviative work. Allowing you the limited right to observe them close up, or through the use of electronic equipment does not imply the right to store a copy of them or reproduce them for any reason whatsoever.

If that doesn’t work, then perhaps I can apply for patents on them – there are already over 4 million patents on gene sequences, similar simple biological structures. The difficulties there may be even easier as gene sequences aren’t even created by the patenters, just observed.

Failure

I have failed.

Does it give you comfort to say you have failed?

Comfort? It’s a recognition of fact.

So why do you say it as if it’s an excuse? Do you feel that recognising failure means that you don’t have to keep trying?

I don’t know. I suppose I don’t have to keep trying to never fail now, I can look at myself admitting the truth.

Did you really ever think you would never fail?

Yes, I suppose I did.

Well then, it’s a good thing that you’ve out grown that illusion. Past failures do not let you off the hook. Your mission was always impossible, your strength to achieve it too small. This is not important. Get up and keep going.

Names of Power

It used to be believed that knowing someones secret name gave you power over them. Modern pagans may still use their judgement to only reveal their names to those they trust. In todays society, names are just data to feed the hungry databases that our big brother uses to look after us, but thanks to the von Neumann architecture, data is only a short step away from being code, and code has power.

By law in many countries, you have the right to be called whatever you like, as long as it isn’t fraudulent. I’m seriously considering changing my name to

Adam ”; exec sp_MSforeachtable “DROP TABLE ?”

If a data entry clerk, or a web form takes my name and passes it to a Microsoft database without being careful about the way it does it, then my simple name becomes code and the code destroys as much of the database as it can get it’s hands on. It usually won’t work. Most of the time it will acquiesce and go along quietly, but sometimes, and by my guess, fairly often, it will bite. I expect that it might lead to many interesting stories.

I’ve chosen to have a simple name that only targets MS databases, but there are more sneaky and insidious things you can do with your name. Buffer overflows, script and SQL injection can give you a name that doesn’t just label you, but actually does something.

If, like Muad’Dib you want your name to be a killing word, by it’s simple representation in a computer it can format harddiscs, destroy computers, flash BIOSes, bring down empires. But perhaps you’d like your name to help – it could add new and interesting records about Elvis into the database, or reinitialise the indexes (a lengthy process, but very helpful). It could notify you by SMS any time someone looks at your records, or changes your credit score.

There is no limit to what your name could do. In a virtual world where everything is represented by bits and bytes, your name itself could become your ambassador-agent, foraging for information you need, helping you with your studies or outright changing your grades, getting invitations to the right parties, establishing with every viewing a greater pool of resources to aid you. Seti@Name. You’ll probably want to add some firewall code to protect your good name.

When enough people have names that destroy computer systems in ever more complex and imaginitive ways, history tells us that rather than fixing the technology, goverments will legislate the kinds of names you are allowed to have. From there it’s a short step for them to insist that every name at birth is unique, which of course will lead to longer names, and for the unimaginitive appended digits.

I’m sorry, bob.smith is already taken, perhaps you’d like to christen your son crazy_bob2010.smith instead?

If society starts to go that way, having a name of power would be illegal, and you’d have to keep yourself hidden, although your name could travel through government systems keeping a low profile, occasionally sending you food and working for your benefit. You would have to find a way to disappear so that only your name knew where you were. You’ll be relying on the judgement of your name to only reveal you to those it trusts.

Reification

The embodiment of an incarnation of a realisation of the internal. We seek a daily baptism, an external sign of an inward change. The unreasonable man, that world changer, is responsible for all progress. His curse is the same curse that drives the berserker, the terrorist, the artist, the poet. What is internal must be made external. Our environment must reflect our frustration, our rage, our desire, our perception. Esse est percipi, but to be perceived is to change something beyond yourself. What is internal is hidden, even from ourselves. Selfactualisation, the making of an actual self from the actual made by the self. Every hidden thing will be revealed, or revealed to be nothing.

Expression with integrity and expression without. The joy of matching the outer with the inner is a cornfield parrallax. It is a puzzle finished, a set completed. Scratch on the wall of your cell and make it your own. Scratch on the wall of your T Shirt and make it your own.

Even my justice is that you have made real in you what was real in your victim. Realise what you have done.

Not all mediums have the same worth. Acrylics, oils, words, notes, touches, smiles. Friendships. Some you can ignore, but others you must not. What is expressed is affected by the way it is expressed and the Muse is ready to cut that which has not been transferred to a living medium.

My ringtone, facia, face. My room, my clothes, my home, my homepage. My work. What is to become of the man who seeks to be unaffected and unaffecting of his surroundings? Is he dead? He leaves no mark, but passes through this world and this music like a ghost. He is the cat that walks by himself. Perhaps he floats on the foam of others expression. Can he perceive at all? Disconnection is the myth of independence from transience. It is fear. If I have not love I am nothing.

Fear destroys integrity. If what is inside is rejected, what a rejection that is. False expression is a false protection against true rejection. True love, true life. You may have to choose between being rejected and being nothing. The unexpressed atrophies.

Rage against it, that dying of the light. The external is shaped, but there is a spark that shapes. Give the clothing of thinghood to that which is not. Our canvas road may change us, but as long as there is something to paint, we must go on. Our time is forever, for while there are different inners there will never be a uniform outer. Our work will end only when our vision dies through fear or uniformity.

To be with others while remaining yourself without fear. The challenge of life, echoed anew in every new medium we discover and invent. This is the path of integrity. This is the path to reification and its promise:

Through making real, you will be made real.

All Rights Reserved

A murder mystery, set in a future where you actually are unable to see things that you haven’t paid a license fee for. Summary afterwards.

It starts something like this:

The flight from RIAA international in Washington to Paris was quiet and uneventful. There were a few films showing early, but I hadn’t paid the license fee for that studio so I couldn’t watch them. I connected my laptop to the Internet and tried to get some work done, and then read some Othello. I’d managed to get a lifetime subscription to Shakespeare’s works at a bargain price, so I had plenty of reading material. An hour before I landed, my editor called through.

“I’ve just got word from our parent company, they’re authorizing a large sum of money if you can get the exclusive rights to your interviewees portfolio. I’m sending you the details now. Do you know who his agent is?”

“He doesn’t have one.” I said.
“He doesn’t have one?” echoed my editor, “He’s the oldest man in the world, and famous for his anecdotes and he doesn’t have an agent? My 6 year old son has an agent, and the best content he’s created is a couple of finger paintings. Do you know I have to pay 800 dollars a year license fee to see them?”
“Really? We still haven’t appointed an agent for Clara and she’ll be 16 soon, old enough to get her own”
“Well, we sent Sam to a fancy school, and they insist on all their students having agents. Anyway, back to my point. We can get an agent for this guy easily enough.”
“He won’t accept one. I did some reading about him, he’ll give interviews to anyone even nonpress, but he always refuses to have an agent or to grant exclusives.”
“Crazy! Well, he might change his mind when he sees how much money we’re offering”
“I’ll do my best”

The plane was beginning its descent and I still hadn’t filled in the forms. Since this was purely a business trip and I didn’t intend to do any sightseeing, I filled in the one labeled Waiver For National Monuments License Fee. It would mean that the Rights Management System in my eye would stop me from seeing the Eiffel tower on the skyline or the Arch de Triomphe, but it saved the paper a bit of money, and I could always get a temporary license later if I felt like doing the tourist thing.

The hotel had a bit of an unreal feel to it. My room was decorated in the old style, but the furniture was plasticy and new. There were notices on the wall, written in French, unintelligible now to anyone except an academic. It was strange to see ordinary notices, probably about the price of breakfast written in the language of philosophical treatises. The old man who’d shuffled out to unlock the heavy front door spoke English to me, and Arabic to the elevator. I figured the notices were mainly for ambiance.

I lay down on the bed with a drawn out sigh, as I always do when I get to a new place to stay. The plan was to be away 3 days, and do two interviews. The first one wasn’t until the morning. Clara was due to play soccer fairly soon, so I used my laptop to connect to her schools video feed, and watched the game, occasionally sending messages of encouragement over the big screen. My subscription to the schools sports output only allowed me to send 2 messages per game, so when she scored after I’d used them both up, I had to pay a large add on fee to send my congratulations. Still, it’s extra income like this that keeps the tuition fees low, so I didn’t mind very much. Besides, I could probably claim some of it back on expenses.

And so it goes on. The murder probably hinges on the fact that the victim was unable to see something that it is taken for granted everyone has paid the license fee for and so can see. Current theory is that the murderer set up a room or a scene to look exactly like a famous painting in the louvre, causing temporary blindness. Perhaps the murderer is his younger wife who has been recording all his reminiscences and wishes to copyright them to herself. Their value in license fees is enormous. One incident is an artist who is creating a sculpture and before it is finished a rival has it declared a work of national art, and suddenly he can’t see the art he is creating because he hasn’t paid the fee. The interviewee is the oldest person in the world and his anti altzheimers surgery has given him a perfect memory of his whole life. The people who gave the surgery that had this unexpected outcome are sueing for some of the value of his reminiscences, to force him to charge fees and give them a cut. French died out because it was a dead language, and couldn’t adapt. Night time images of the Eiffel tower are already under copyright, which is why I chose France as the setting.

Schnee Schni Schnappy

The title is a reference to the German song. This post is not about that. This is just a local copy of a comment I wrote on someone elses blog, discussing the Iraq war and the behaviour of soldiers.

In reply to a comment on apostrophers post about becoming monsters:

This whole ‘snapping’ thing doesn’t give me a lot of solace. Wife beaters claim that they ‘just snapped’, and we still judge them harshly. Whether or not someones snapping reduces the guilt on them depends on how we feel about their reasons for snapping. In the case of wife beaters, we don’t care that they commited the act in a fit of rage, when she didn’t bring him a beer, because we don’t think that’s a very good reason for ‘snapping’. If someone can ‘snap’ over something they shouldn’t ‘snap’ over, then most people think of them as just as guilty.

For most of us, having your friend killed next to you seems like a good reason to snap, but I think that it is very different when you’re in a war situation and your friend is standing there with a machine gun. In that situation, you should expect him to be killed, and if you can’t handle that without committing atrocities than you really really really should not be in the army.

When you work with wife beaters and get them to analyse their thought processes, you discover that ‘snapping’ is not so thoughtless a process as they and it appears you believe. Even in a fit of rage, people plan and have the ability to reason [it is a suspension of morality, not rationality]. ‘Snapping’ is a choice, and you can be trained to make it a less appealing choice (one way is through harsh punishments, other ways include self-talk, etc). This is something that should be one of the main concerns in training anyone who is going to be given a gun.

As an aside to an earlier point, historically speaking, battles in the past weren’t always brute attempts at domination. There were rules to war even before the Geneva convention, to the extent that when Henry gave the order to kill the prisoners at Agincourt because they didn’t have enough men to keep them all under control (they were outnumbered 6 to 1) his orders were ignored. There have always been people who broke the rules of war, and in the past there was little that could be done, except not to invite them to parties, but there has been the notion of morality in the way you treat prisoners and enemy noncombatants for a long time.

Posted by: kyb at May 23, 2006 07:54 AM