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The role reversal in the ‘Roman Charity‘ story reminds me to some extent of that in Robert Munch’s delightful little tear jerker Love You Forever.

The daughter’s adoption of a maternal role is especially apparent in representations like these two:

Others show the fear of being discovered in violation of the verdict (of death by starvation)

– but I see no particular suggestion there of lasciviousness or embarrassment at the social situation.

What they all most definitely do NOT bring to mind is a woman’s filial debt to the patriarchy (especially since in the earliest version of the story it was apparently the mother who was being saved from starvation by her daughter).

There has been a lot of noise lately about alleged Chinese “interference” in recent Canadian elections, but the suggestion that anything has somehow compromised the actual vote counts is just a load of crap.

Of course any kind of covert support for an electoral candidate is to be decried. That’s why we have campaign contribution limits and disclosure laws. But they get violated and/or circumvented all the time and the prime offenders are not foreign governments. And even when it does happen it is not interference in the electoral process itself.

Neither bribery nor coercion of potential or actual elected officials is “electoral interference”. Nor are attempts to influence public opinion in favour of policies that favour some particular group, entity, or nation.

The former is rightly illegal but does not affect the outcome of an election; and the latter may affect the outcome but is entirely within the scope of how we expect to make our collective decisions.

I have no more objection to having the PRC try to persuade me to support its interests than I do to the similar efforts of Shell Oil and Exxon. But if a nation blackmails its diaspora, or a corporation its employees, into support of a political position, then I will object to both with equal fervour without pretending that either is somehow more deserving than the other of being labelled as “electoral interference”

Source: China’s Big Canadian Mistake | The Tyee

So… For any who have been wondering about the lack of posts recently, here’s a partial(*) explanation for the most recent gap.

Back in the waning years of the last century, I became interested in the potential for web-based “applets” to support the learning of mathematics by providing an opportunity for the student to interact with diagrams in a way that might help build an intuition for how relationships are either maintained or changed when the situation is varied. Several people were developing such “Mathlets” in the widely promoted Java programming language, and I joined in and used some both in class demonstrations and in some early attempts at on-line instruction.

Unfortunately, concerns about security eventually led to the abandonment of support for Java in web browsers and so a large body of really useful material became unavailable in the years following my retirement in 2010. Similar materials were provided by other means of course, but a lot of ‘classics’ disappeared (along with my own lesser efforts as well).

With the onset of COVID, the need for both alternatives to the classroom and ways for students to fill in the gaps left by missed classes led to a renewed interest in on-line instruction and I wondered if there was any way to revive those old materials without re-programming them all from scratch.

It turns out that a lot of businesses who had been running software in web browsers had the same problem, and that there was in fact a way of taking existing Java programs and running them on the server rather than the client – with an interface in the browser that made it look just like the old applets.

So I decided to see if it would work for me.

And to make a long story short, in the end it seems to have done so; and, while I don’t know if it really took less effort that rewriting everything from scratch, I have been able to restore the function of my old page of  Mathlets.

(Whether they will be of any use to anyone else now is another matter, but at least I enjoyed getting them to work again!)

(*)- other factors being holiday travel, focus on a new family member, and possible failure of the old automatic email system.

Not exactly in accord with Loyola, but consistent with the theories behind many educational movements – from “public” schools through Boy Scouts to Hitler Youth, Red Guards, and street gangs (and perhaps why the current fights over school curricula are so important).

Source: Adolescence is a ‘use it or lose it’ time for moral development | Psyche Ideas

Source: How to think about truth | Psyche Guides

I am surprised to see it claimed that truth is a more basic concept than falsehood. In fact, it seems to me that the naive mind initially accepts any proposition at face value without having any concept of “truth”, and it is only after having had to deal with cases of error or deception that some propositions are identified as “false” – with “truth” then being defined as just the negation of falsehood.

And as for the definition, I would just say that a statement is judged as “false” if including it in my worldview leads to a subsequent feeling of disappointment with regard to the efficacy of my predictions.

I also have trouble with the following excerpt:

• True beliefs pick out facts that exist independently of our beliefs about them.

This idea is admittedly questionable when applied to certain true beliefs, such as the belief that gold is more expensive than grapefruits. Sure enough, this belief picks out a fact: the fact that gold is more expensive than grapefruits. But if no one had ever believed that this is a fact, then it wouldn’t be a fact. The prices of objects are determined solely by humans’ social conventions, which are usually dictated by the levels of supply and demand. So, while the belief that gold is more expensive than grapefruits is true, it isn’t an objective truth.

Source: On the advantages of believing that nothing is true | Aeon Essays

The claim that “nothing is true” only makes sense if one has a well defined concept of what it means for something to be “true”. What makes more sense to me is the claim that no-one has ever given a satisfactory objective definition of that concept; and that when someone says “p is true”, what they mean is just that they agree with the propositon “p”, and strongly expect other reasonable people to do likewise if presented with the same evidence or argument. The usage “p is true” is unfortunate because it hides the subjective nature of the claim, but that doesn’t make it what I would call “false” (if I were going to commit the same misbehaviour).

I didn’t attend this seminar, but if I had I would have asked why the proposed system uses kiosks rather than service to arbitrary addresses within the safely drivable region. Restricting the routes to specific streets on which low speeds are acceptable seems like a sensible starting point for such a service, but I don’t see any reason for restricting to a limited number of specific stopping points.

A separate issue raised in the opening remarks is that of identifying different levels of AIDriving. My own preference would be to have just two acceptable levels: namely driver monitoring systems that take over in cases of apparent operator incompetence such as when an imminent collision or loss of traction is detected, and full driverless operation (at maybe a restricted speed on a limited selection of routes). The intermediate levels, I think, all encourage inattention of the “responsible” operator which is just asking for accidents to happen. (This does not preclude the traditional “cruise control” so long as it is just to relieve the operator of the physical requirement of having to exert constant pressure on the accelerator to maintain speed, but should perhaps be subject to switching itself off and reducing speed whenever a loss of operator attention is detected.)

Source: A Deployment Framework for MOVES-style Driverless Transit Networks — CARTS Inc.

see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0PTV4PUPlI

The most egregious failure of WHO is not that they took two years to say COVID is airborne, but that they made and then failed to quickly withdraw an announcement that it is NOT airborne! Misinformation is always, to me, a more serious offense than failure to inform, and I do think that some at WHO, including its top leadership, need to be identified and held accountable for this.

They say “We need your feedback to understand how we can improve your experience on our website”

Well here’s my response:

The site sometimes allows BCid verification as an option and sometimes not. And when I try to use by bank as a partner it accepts the id info and then immediately says the session has expired. Perhaps one time in ten things work as they should but the site almost always works badly and is atrociously designed. This stupid survey is just one more example – it tells me I must complete my task before filling it out but gives me no route back to that task and the question about what I came to do gives a ridiculously long list which does not appear to include one of the most common reasons for coming here – namely to autofill a tax return. Then, if I give up, next thing you know CRA is dinging me for interest and penalties! Total crap!!! But why do I bother telling you all this? It probably won’t lead to any improvement.

Source: Website survey: Why not – Canada.ca – Canada.ca

It should be no surprise to either of my readers that I would be inclined to supplement these nine steps to net zero with a tenth – namely to explore the increased use of plastics as building materials.

See also this related article

Something that really troubled me at the great BC climate marches of the last decade was the presence of a large and loud anti-site-C brigade.

Source: The BC Government Tapes: Climate, Energy and Site C | The Tyee

The examples in this article are just the tip of the iceberg. And appeals to “the science” in support of whatever action plan one has in mind are unfortunately, I think, a big contributor to public skepticism about things that should in fact be understood as well-established.

Source: Why doesn’t “do-re-mi” start on A?

A recent Quora question, asks “Is Noam Chomsky’s comment that ‘NATO should not have moved an inch east of Germany’ ignoring the desires of the eastern European states?”

The use of direct quotes there is dishonest unless Chomsky actually said those exact words. But regardless of whether or not he actually said it, why should NATO members not have ignored the desires of the eastern European states?

NATO is not a general purpose service organization, but a military alliance between states who see one another as sufficiently similar, stable, and responsible, to justify risking their own safety in defence of one another essentially without question. And the desires of others to be covered by that umbrella creates no obligation whatsoever to actually include them.

This is very different from whatever obligation may exist to protect all states from attack by neighbours – which is the responsibility of the UN and subject to a more deliberative and less hair-trigger response.

Source: (375) Alan Cooper’s answer to Is Noam Chomsky’s comment that ‘NATO should not have moved an inch east of Germany’ ignoring the desires of the eastern European states? – Quora

Source: It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war | Seumas Milne | The Guardian

Probably never. The idea of any person or ethnic group as being “inherently evil” seems to run counter to the basic ideas of Critical Race Theory. And the idea of teaching anything as sophisticated as actual CRT directly to elementary school students is as laughable as it would be for calculus or quantum mechanics.

It is not unlikely though that some teachers who have been influenced by CRT may have presented material which could be interpreted as saying that Caucasians are inherently evil.

A case in point is the book “Not my idea” (see also here for a polemically critical reading) that was criticized in a (subsequently deleted) post by C.S.Friedman and defended in a response from Tom Robinson.

It’s hard to imagine that Friedman had ever actually read the book. (She describes the story of a little girl’s frustration with her parents’ protection of her from evidence of society’s structural racism as being a tale of how “A white child encounters a red devil-figure who offers him a deal”.) But the page she refers to does occur, albeit in the supplementary material; and, although not in the story itself, the term “whiteness” is definitely introduced as a label for things that are evil.

Personally, I find this kind of linguistic overloading silly and dishonest at any level, but to ask an elementary school child not to identify “whiteness” with just the property of being white is worse than silly.

So, although I doubt that any teacher of CRT has ever actually affirmed that Caucasians are inherently evil, I am pretty sure from the evidence of this book that some teachers who think they are reflecting CRT have used language which a child might well interpret as saying Caucasians are inherently evil.

Source: (303) Alan Cooper’s answer to Opponents of CRT claim that CRT teaches a hatred for whites, but where does this claim come from? How many times exactly have teachers of CRT actually affirmed that Caucasians are inherently evil? – Quora

My response to the philosophers’ zombie argument is usually to do a kind of “reverse Turing test” – ie to challenge the philosopher to prove to himself (and to me) that I am not a zombie. If there was anything that had all the characteristics and (in principle completely predictable – or at least explainable) behaviours and responses of a human, then anyone (other than the solipsistic philosopher himself) might be not “really” conscious. The alternative is that we all are conscious but that what we perceive as conscious experience is just the physical property of recording memories into a system with some kind of recall and reprocessing mechanism. And if I think about it too much, that’s pretty much what if “feels like” to me ….. Oops!!!(maybe I just failed the real TTest)

My comment on ‘Moral molecules’ – a new theory of what goodness is made of | Psyche Ideas was as follows:

The idea of trying to identify various moral positions as combinations of just a few basic elements is interesting. And it may be useful for understanding where people’s moral positions come from and how to encourage them in other directions (if that is what we want to do). But to conclude that “the theory provides us at last with a scientific guide for how to be good” demonstrates both an unfortunate hubris and (as I see it) a complete misunderstanding of the problem of what it means to “be good” in the face of competing demands whose relative weights may vary from person to person and time to time (and may in the end just be functions of some chemical concentrations in our brains).

To which the author responded with a question – which was presumably rhetorical since Aeon+Psyche only allow one comment per responder, but which I will nonetheless respond to here.

The question was “Alan, what do you think it means to be good?”

And so, not being one to give in so easily, I had to find his email address and answer – as follows:

Hello Oliver.

    I was intrigued by your article and find the idea of trying to identify various moral positions as combinations of just a few basic elements both interesting and potentially useful (eg for understanding and maybe influencing those positions – both in others and in ourselves). But I found it a stretch to conclude that “the theory provides us at last with a scientific guide for how to be good”.

    I am sorry if my comment seemed to imply that I had anything better to offer. But unfortunately your response “Alan, what do you think it means to be good?” strikes me as a cheap shot, since (as I presume you know) the Aeon+Psyche commenting system gives me no opportunity to reply. But since you ask, I will answer.

    The answer though is just that I have no idea (and do not think my comment implied any claim otherwise). What I do think is that the very theory you discuss makes it quite plausible that there is no possible “scientific guide for how to be good” because the various moral elements might be mutually non-comparable. And I would be very interested in hearing of any path you can suggest for overcoming that challenge.

sincerely,

    Alan Cooper

One can, of course, change the meaning of words, but it may be counterproductive to expect that others will understand and agree.

In Some medical devices don’t mean to be racist, but they are | Psyche Ideas, the authors say “If it seems hyperbolic to call an inanimate object racist, it might be due to our tendency to think of racism and other forms of oppression as residing in people’s minds.” But others (and I am among them) may say that’s just because that’s how the word has always been defined in their experience – namely as an attitude or opinion. Those who define racism as an attitude may well be able to see oppressiveness as defined more in terms of the effect, and so agree that it makes sense to call inanimate objects and systems racially oppressive while denying that they are actually racist.

My own preferred usage would include the use of “racist” to describe a device or system developed and maintained with racist intent, but that would not necessarily include everything that may have racially biased and even oppressive effects (such as the fingertip pulse oximeter).

Given what we have by way of explicit historical documents, it seems clear that, whatever the intent of our current populace and leadership, there are still some features of some of our institutions that were imposed with racist intent and so do qualify as “systemic racism”. There are also many individuals with racist attitudes who have power in the system. And even if the intent of the system as a whole is no longer racist, the presence of such people also fits in with what I would call “systemic racism”.

But others (such as Monsieur Legault), who do not see the continued persistence of those elements as intentional, may need some clarification before being prepared to describe the elements of racism that persist in their system as “systemic racism”.

And if they agree to aggressively pursue and root out from their system all of its racially oppressive aspects, racistly motivated structures, and racist individuals, then perhaps it does not matter whether or not they agree to use that label.