Computers, Manuals, and the Command Line

Among Linux forums, Linux users are constantly being accused of elitism. They’re up on their high horses, secure in their comfort with Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, looking down their pointy noses on the hapless noobs who just want their computers to “just work.” Poor Joe Sixpack, trying to free himself from proprietary tyranny, is constantly being chased away from Linux by such superior elitists, who make him feel like an idiot just for asking an innocent question.

What yields such charges of elitism? More often than not, it’s the simple suggestion that the asker of a given question should resort to the documents which were written precisely for the purpose of answering such questions: the manuals. In other words, people who really cared about Joe Sixpack would spoon-feed him like a newborn baby; hateful people who point him to the answers to not only his specific question, but also to most other questions in the computerized universe, are elitists. To this, I can only respond with one short, trite phrase:

Read the f@#$ing manual.[1]

Seriously. Read it. That’ll probably answer your question. If it doesn’t, Google it. Google is your friend.[2] If you don’t know how to get to the manual, go to a command line and type “man command“. That’s it; your manual will come up. Read it. If it doesn’t work, as it very occasionally doesn’t, then once again, Google it. You’ll get a manual shortly. Once you’ve read it, and you actually understand the program you’re trying to use, you probably won’t have a question anymore. You’ll have educated yourself to know something, rather than simply doing something without knowing what or why. And isn’t that better? Isn’t it better to learn than simply to ape what some ubergeek tells you on a help forum?

If you’ve done all this, and you still can’t figure it out, please feel free to ask the question. Geeks and hackers throughout the world will be happy to help you find the solution. Remember that we hang around in help forums answering questions on our own time. Nobody’s paying us for it (most of the time); we’re doing it because we like the program and we like helping people. What we don’t like is people who demand we solve their every problem without them ever making any effort to solve it themselves, or even to understand what it is. That tends to make us a bit ornery. And with good reason.

You see, those of us who are called “geeks” or “hackers” didn’t become such by opening our heads up and letting people pour stuff into them. We got that way by study and effort. Some of us learned in college; some of us never went to college; some of us went to college, but learned little about computers there, gaining this knowledge on our own. But all of us value self-teaching and self-study, with deference to the masters when one cannot find the answers on one’s own. The deeper one gets into computers, the more one will require such consultation. As a corollary, however, the shallower one is in computers, the more rarely one will require it. If you’re just a hapless noob looking for help, then I can more or less guarantee that the answer to your question is easy, and that you’ll find it in the manual. But even if it winds up not being there, at least do us the courtesy of looking first, please.

We’re the ones who wrote those manuals, see. We don’t just write software; we write documentation for it. We work hard at it, and try to include all the normal situations as well as any unusual ones that have been reported to us. As such, your problem is probably in there; in the unlikely event that you’ve found an edge case that nobody else has noticed yet, then we want to know about it. But we don’t want to answer the same question thousands of times when we’ve already answered it in a thorough and complete way by putting it in the manual.

Nobody expects to drive a car without taking a driving class. Nobody expects to wire a house without studying up on electronics. Nobody expects to fix their dishwasher without learning a little plumbing. Yet for some reason everybody expects their computer to sit up and beg whenever they point at it and tell it what they want it to do. The computer is an immensely powerful machine that will do many wonderful things, but one must first learn how to tell it what to do. Sometimes that’s pretty easy; sometimes it takes significant study; sometimes it’s deep magic that only the very greatest masters can manage. In no case, however, can it be done without learning something, and the place to learn that something is, more often than not, the manual.

People who call us elitists for saying things like this are completely missing the point. We’re not elitists. Elitists would want to maintain their superior knowledge and keep everyone else dependent upon them. We’re doing precisely the opposite; we’re helping other people obtain the same knowledge we have, from the same sources that we have it. A truer egalitarianism is difficult to imagine.

It’s the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish. Is it elitist to teach a man how to provide for himself, or to perpetually infantilize him by giving him everything he needs and pretending that it takes no effort for somebody else to get it?

The computer is a tool, and like all tools it takes knowledge, study, and experience to use it effectively. When we refer you to a manual or to a search engine for an answer, we’re not doing it because we think you’re stupid, or because we think we’re better than you. We’re doing it to teach you how to find the answers yourself. That’s not elitism; it’s humanitarianism, pure and simple.

Praise be to Christ the King!

1. This saying is frequently abbreviated to “RTFM,” which is variably rendered as “read the f@#$ing manual,” “read the fun manual,” “read the fine manual,” or something similar, depending on the speaker.
2. This saying is frequently abbreviated “GIYF.” Truer words in the computer world could hardly be imagined.
3. Please, also, learn how to ask a question correctly should the manual or the Internet fail to yield a helpful solution. This will go a long way to showing that you’ve filled your end of the computer help bargain; people will respect you, and thus be more interested in helping you.

The Reality of Localism

As distributists, we’re all strongly committed to localism; that is, to making our society, particularly our production, less remote and more local. Indeed, distributism is a name for that economic system in which more, rather than less, of the population is the owner of productive property; such a system necessarily entails more local production. Many distributists, however, forget that this economic localism corresponds to a very real cultural localism, one which is part of the universal experience of mankind.

Culturally, we are all localists, even our so-called cosmopolitans. (Indeed, the problem with our modern cosmopolitans is not that they are too local, not that they are not local enough.) The “it takes a village” mantra that the modern nation-state constantly uses as an excuse to preempt the just powers of parents is often grotesquely overextended, but nevertheless there is real and substantial truth in it. We are raised by our parents, but we inevitably have substantial contact with others around us, and others around us are inevitably those who come from the same locality as we do. They, in turn, were raised by parents, but also had substantial contact primarily with other locals. As a result, whole cultural systems rise up which are confined primarily to a given, localized area, distinguished from all others throughout the world.

Localities are distinguished from others in countless ways. Those in a given area sing songs that are unlike those sung in other places; they eat food that is not eaten elsewhere; they adopt curious hairstyles and clothing; they play games that others find odd. Men tend to share things with other men with whom they have more in common, rather than with those with whom they have less, and they have more in common with those who live near them than with those who live far away.

It’s sometimes hard to recognize this in our age of distributed computing, but look at the question from a natural point of view. If a hurricane knocks my neighbor’s tree down into my yard, who will help me clean up the flotsam? When my lawnmower breaks down, to whom do I turn to borrow one? When the city garbage collectors are careless with their task, with whom will I join my voice to obtain redress? When my house is on fire, who will call the firemen for me? When I lock my keys in my home, whose phone do I use to call for help? When the grocery store runs out of bread and milk before a snowstorm, who can I rely on to share?

Yet even in light of all this, many claim that localism is outdated, that we now live in a “global society.” Now, after all, we have Twitter; many of us have more in common with individuals we’ve never even met than with our neighbors. But this overlooks the vast majority of our daily and necessary lives. While I’m sure many people find it wonderful that another person halfway around the world can know exactly what I’m having for lunch today, it hardly compares with the localism we’re discussing here. These globalists, these cosmopolitans too good for the universal localism may have global news sites and global networking, and these things are all fine and good. But the things of the earth, the things that are closest to who we are and what we need to maintain our safety and even our existence, are and must be local. And these things, by necessity, we have in common with our neighbors, with those who live in real, physical proximity to us. We have more in common with these fine people than we do with anyone else in the world, no matter how closely we follow someone’s Facebook feed.

My neighbors are really my best friends; I have more in common with them than I do with anyone. And there is absolutely nothing in the world that can change that. No matter how cosmopolitan our society becomes; even if we begin a national policy of moving to another state at least twice a year; for as long as we live in a place, we are dependent upon that place and the people who share it with us. For anyone who doubts it, let him wait for his Myspace fans to call the fire department when they see smoke coming out of his windows while he sleeps. For the rest of us, we will rely on what men throughout the world have always relied on—the people who live next door. We can try to ignore it, but we cannot change it. Man is an inherently local creature.

Yet modernity has long been on a mission not only to ignore it, but to positively oppose it, like Harold the Usurper commanding the waves to cease. Our modern economy, in particular, has been a great force attempting to undermine this unavoidable localism. There are great incentives for leaving localities, particularly smaller ones, to gravitate toward great centers where, we are told, people aren’t so “provincial” and “small-minded.” Economic production is increasingly centralized; even that most quintessentially local activity, agriculture, has been warped into an industry, producing corn and hogs as though they were parts in a great machine. Television, radio, and other modern media have rendered the culture of our locality less and less important, as people increasingly follow whatever culture they see emanating from New York and San Francisco. Consequently, we are told, localities are irrelevant; only the “global society” is important.

One might as well say that men are irrelevant, and only the commune matters; yet without the parts, the whole will inevitably collapse. And that’s precisely what’s happening. As our localities weaken, as everything from our culture to our economy centralizes and our people increasingly ignore their roots, our larger societies become increasingly untenable. With nothing to anchor it, the ship continually blows further adrift, and our deracinated citizens continually invent newer and more disgusting debaucheries for the public approval, which is never long in coming. A people which forgets its roots will die as surely as will the branches of a rootless tree; and our people’s roots, like all peoples’, are in localities.

For how can we contribute to or benefit from our new global society if we’re not even really part of our local one? The leaf can gather all the sunlight it can, but if the roots aren’t in the ground the tree will die. The West is like a man so busy pressing his suits and gelling his hair that he forgets he still needs to eat. We are physical beings, necessarily tied to a particular place at a particular time; when our culture and our economy no longer reflects this reality, we know that the corruption of our society has reached a critical stage.

For the distributist, dedicated to men living as men and not as disembodied brains (for what else is the man without a place?), the solution is obvious: become more local. There is no need for me to rehash the many economic means of doing so, but think of the cultural means. These are simple; the most basic is, the next time you see your neighbor out mowing his lawn or washing his car, do the most revolutionary and countercultural thing you can imagine: walk up to him and say hello. Really; it’s that simple. Once upon a time, people used to have block parties; when the weather gets nice in the spring again, throw one. Invite not your friends from work, but your neighbors. Help organize a neighborhood watch to protect your community from becoming crime-ridden and keep your children safe.

You may even go the extra mile. Learn about your place’s history and culture. Learn local songs, tell local stories. Go to local festivals and cultural events. Join local organizations, like museums or community centers. Get involved in local politics. Simply be local; really live in your place, rather than just store your earthly flesh there for a while. Plant your roots, or your branches will inevitably die.

Praise be to Christ the King!

The Glories of the Command Line

Let’s say you have a middling to lousy Internet connection, but you still want to take advantage of an online video language course. What’s the solution? Download the videos, obviously; my processor is much faster than streaming them over my middling to lousy connection.

The videos, however, are streamed under the “mms” protocol. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be downloaded (they are free to view, by the way); it just means that you can’t download them directly, you have to stream them and save them as they’re streamed. (Essentially, this is downloading them in real time; so saving the thirty-two minute video takes thirty-two minutes.) While I’m at it, I want to convert them from the execrable Windows Media format they’re provided in to a different, free, and good format; namely, Ogg Theora. What to do?

Well, Video LAN Client, or VLC, provides the answer. This cross-platform media player can handle playlists and deals with just about every media format known to man. ffmpeg, on the other hand, will be used for converting the video to Ogg Theora. There are plenty of tutorials online explaining how to use VLC to save a streaming mms video to disk, and plenty explaining how to use ffmpeg to convert a video to Theora. (I’ll show you all in a minute, only I’ll do it in a better way.) It involves navigating lots of menus; it takes several seconds per video, which is fine when you’re only doing a video or two.

Thing is, this is a multi-part language course. With fifty-two parts. Downloading them all individually, one by one, when it takes half an hour to do each, and then converting them all manually with ffmpeg, would be a hideous nightmare. However, VLC is a Unix application by birth and by choice, and consequently it has a fully developed command-line interface. This means that it can be scripted. Which means that I can get all this done without a fuss or a bother; in the time it takes to download one video manually, or even less, I can write a script which will handle each and every one for me, and convert them all to Theora while it’s at it. But how, you ask?

RTFM! I went into the documentation and learned how to tell VLC to save a streaming video while it streams when invoking it on the command line, and how to tell vlc to exit when it’s done. (Check the script below!) This took about ten minutes. I then hammered out the script; I had to look up the syntax for while loops in a bash script, which took another ten minutes or so. I then ran it, corrected a couple of errors, and ran it again. About a half hour of work, and I was able to download and convert all fifty-two videos without a lick of trouble, while not even looking at the computer the entire time unless I wanted to. Without the scriptability of the command line, I would have had to nurse the whole process for well over twenty-four hours to get it done.

Yes, the command line is superior, if you read the documentation and take a few minutes to do it right instead of doing it easy. That’s the way with all fields; why should computers be any different? An automatic transmission is easy as pie; but a standard gets better gas mileage and provides better control.

It’s the same way with computers. A graphical interface is shiny and lets you pointy-clicky and probably after a few minutes accidentally stumble on whatever you need to do, then immediately forget how you did it until you pointy-clicky your way back to it again the next time. But the command line gets you more control, more facility, once you’ve learned how to use it. Learning how to use it requires work; there’s no two ways about it. But that work will pay off once you do it.

So here’s the script. Enjoy it in all its ugly wonder.

#!/bin/bash
# +AMDG

i="0"

while [ $i -lt 53 ]
do
     i=$[$i+1];
     if [ $i -lt 10 ]; then
	vlc --sout videos_{$i}of52.wmv mms://video_path_0$i.wmv vlc://quit;
	ffmpeg -i videos_{$i}of52.wmv -sameq -acodec libvorbis videos_{$i}of52.ogg;
     fi
     if [ $i -ge 10 ]; then
	vlc --sout videos_{$i}of52.wmv mms://video_path_$i.wmv vlc://quit;
	ffmpeg -i videos_{$i}of52.wmv -sameq -acodec libvorbis videos_{$i}of52.ogg;
     fi
done
exit;

Of course, this puts actual curly braces in the final file name, something I didn’t intend. But a quick line of bash, using the rename Perl script (standard on every Linux distribution I’ve used), took care of all that; another half-minute. Big whoop.

The condition is necessary because the videos are named in the form “video_$number.wmv”, where $number is always two-digit, even when it’s less than ten. They do this simply by adding a leading zero (as in “03″). That makes it show up in numerical order in file listings (instead of that annoying “video29, video3, video 30″ listing you’d get otherwise), but it did necessitate two different statements, one if there was a leading zero and one if not. I could have made this just one, but it was more work than it was worth, as this worked splendidly.

Learn the command line! It’s better!

Praise be to Christ the King!

Who Invented the Internet?

Capitalists, we’ll often hear. Just about any discussion of distributism on the Internet will, at least once, involve the phrase, “I can’t believe you’re attacking capitalism on the Internet, one of the greatest of capitalism’s inventions!” Take, as a typical case, the example of John Clark, from the distributism debates of 2002:

Seeing an attack on capitalism appear on the Internet is like hearing a sermon on the evils of flying from the cockpit at 40,000 feet. Using capitalist tools to spread anti-capitalist thought is a strange irony.

This argument lacks merit in any case; it’s like saying that fighting a war against the Chinese using gunpowder is a strange irony. But leaving that aside, is it true? Is the Internet one of the vaunted “capitalist tools,” an invention of private enterprise operating unstinted by the interference of evil government?

Before we begin to examine this historically myopic claim, let’s define what the Internet actually is. It is not the World Wide Web, which is only a part, albeit a large one, of the Internet. The Internet is, in fact, simply a global network of computers connected via a computer communications protocol called TCP/IP. It operates by a very simple server-client system; the client (like the computer you’re reading this on right now) asks the server (where the document resides) for a given file (like this one), and the server responds by sending that file to the client. There are some complications to this description, some of them significant—we haven’t even mentioned server-side and client-side scripting, for example—but for our purposes, this description is accurate enough.

Where are the servers for “the Internet”? Everywhere and nowhere. Servers all over the world are responsible for answering clients’ requests for various files; requests are sent to the appropriate servers—that is, the ones that actually have the requested files—via a complex system of routing that we don’t really need to worry about here.

The Internet has no government. There is no entity that controls the Internet or makes sure that it’s working properly. However, there are some organizations that make sure things don’t go completely crazy. Various standards organizations ensure that the protocols and languages used on the Internet are standard; that is, conform to a given specification in order to ensure that everyone will know what to expect when they use them. Most importantly, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is in charge of making sure that names and numbers are kept unique and orderly; its board is made up of members from across the spectrum of private enterprise, voluntary organizations, and academia. The United States federal government is still more or less in charge of ICANN.

Notice that I said “still.” I said this because the United States federal government has always been “in charge” of the Internet, insofar as anybody has been (and strictly speaking, nobody is). In other words, insofar as anybody keeps the Internet running, it’s the government, not private enterprise. Hardly a capitalist tool. But moving beyond that: who invented the Internet? Is it a creation of capitalist ingenuity, as so many assert?

In its earliest incarnation, the Internet was invented by the United States government’s Advanced Research Project Agency, ARPA. In an attempt to ensure that we stayed ahead of the Russians in every field of technical endeavor, the government funded ARPA, which in turn funded a variety of programs, including the one that led to what we now call the Internet. The first connection in this network, originally called the ARPANET, was made on 29 October 1969, between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. (You may also hear the ARPANET referred to as the DARPANET, formed from adding the “Defense” to the beginning, which gives you an idea of what it was originally designed for.)

Still no profit motive involved here; this is merely the government funding programs which it deemed useful for itself. ARPANET continued to grow, going international for the first time in 1978. It utilized “IP,” or “Internet Protocol,” for its communications. This still isn’t technically “the Internet,” however, because by definition the Internet uses TCP/IP, as we mentioned earlier. However, it’s definitely the precursor to the Internet, and as yet private enterprise has had no significant role in its development.

The TCP/IP protocols were developed in the mid-1970s at Stanford University; their specification, RFC-675, was the first time the word “Internet” was used in reference to a global TCP/IP network. In 1983, the entire ARPANET was placed on this protocol. In 1985, the National Science Foundation started its own network, NSFNET, which elected to use the TCP/IP protocols of ARPANET. Already at this time the bedrock of the Internet was in place. People had email and could work on and contact other computers around the world. Once the NSFNET was connected to the ARPANET, the Internet could, for the first time, really be said to exist. And still private enterprise had had no significant role.

Indeed, commercial use of the Internet was strictly forbidden; it wasn’t considered appropriate to allow private corporations to profit from a publicly funded international network. Private enterprise wasn’t involved in the Internet until 1989, when the commercial MCI Mail was added to the NSFNET. Usenet arose about that time, along with the first of the Internet service providers (ISPs), including the recently defunct Compuserve. But the fact of the matter is that the Internet was conceived and developed entirely by non-profit entities, not by capitalists engaged in private enterprise attempting to make a profit.

Well, what about the World Wide Web, then? Surely that must be credited to capitalism?

No. The World Wide Web is that subset of the Internet which is governed by a weblike system of interlinked pages, largely written in HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. The “hypertext” part refers to what we now mostly call “links,” which keep documents linked in to one another. HTML and the World Wide Web were developed primarily by one person, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (the French name of which becomes CERN). CERN is itself a governmental laboratory with many member states contributing to it; this development, too, cannot be credited to capitalism.

Nor was the popularization of the World Wide Web a capitalist phenomenon. The Internet, already widely used by academia, governments, and to a lesser extent hobbyists, was accessed through a number of different means prior to the development of the World Wide Web. Computer old-timers (and even not-so-old-timers like myself) will remember the old gopher system (also developed by a public organization, the University of Minnesota), along with many others. The Web, however, with its hypertext system, made all of this much easier and more manageable. But it needed a browser, capable of displaying and following hypertext links, in order to function properly. The Internet therefore really took off among hobbyists and other private systems with the development of the Mosaic web browser—another creation of a government entity, this time the University of Illinois. Its development was funded by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, sponsored by Al Gore. (Incidentally, sponsoring this act was the source of his infamous comment about taking “the initiative in creating the Internet,” which is hyperbole at the very best.) None of this is even remotely capitalism at work; as late as 1993, when Mosaic was released, private enterprise had still had little role in the development of the Internet at all, much less a significant enough role to justify calling it a “tool of capitalism.”

Only at this point did private industry begin to get involved, and even then governments and voluntary, non-profit agencies continue to play an enormous role. Indeed, such non-profit organizations govern the Internet. Standards organizations like W3C and ISO make sure that the protocols, languages, and other structures at use on the Internet are well-defined and universally accepted. The United States government plays a large role to this day in ensuring the orderly operation of the Internet as a whole. All in all, this can hardly be counted a great triumph of capitalism.

Indeed, capitalism didn’t create the Internet, nor did capitailsm perfect it. Capitalism swept down on a fully formed and fully functional Internet, developed and supported by the efforts and money of the community as a whole, and turned it to their own personal profit. While utilizing the work of others to benefit oneself is perfectly acceptable at times, it’s the height of vanity to them appropriate that work as one’s own and call it one’s own tool.

Now, of course, large portions of the Internet are commercial, large portions are government, and large portions are neither, which is really as it should be. But the Internet certainly wasn’t created by these commercial interests; it wasn’t popularized by these commercial interests; it wasn’t perfected by these commercial interests; and it’s not maintained by these commercial interests. All of these things were done by governments and government-funded organizations, supposedly the antithesis of all free enterprise.

Does it still seem incongruous to use the Internet to argue against capitalism?

Praise be to Christ the King!

Drying Clothes

It’s long been a matter of public knowledge that almost every “homeowners’ association” in the United States forbids its members from hanging their clothes out to dry. Hanging clothes outside? Allowing the sun to dry them? Surely only the riff-raff engage in such foolishness. Use an electric dryer, or move to a trailer park!

Well, maybe not; some trailer parks don’t allow it, either. I suppose those trailer parks have a different class of riff-raff; the upper crust of the lower crust, if you will.

The theory is that hanging clothes will decrease property values. After all, we can’t have those dryerless hoi polloi in our neighborhood; if we’ve got those people here, then clearly this isn’t the type of neighborhood we thought it was. A neighborhood, by this theory, is better, and thus the property values higher, the richer the people who live therein. Rich people have dryers. So we simply must keep out the people who don’t have dryers, or our house won’t appreciate, and we won’t be able to flip it for twice its price in three years when we move to a still better neighborhood with still richer people living in it.

The distributist has to ask himself: what sort of people have we become? It’s bad enough that we’re so inorganic we refuse to rely on nature for anything ourselves; have we really become so antiseptic, so privileged that we refuse even to live next to people who might have a little less than, or choose a little differently from, ourselves?

We’re not talking about someone amassing large quantities of dead cars to rust in his front yard; this doesn’t involve a dog barking all night and bothering the entire neighborhood. It’s not even a particularly unsightly paint job. This is people drying their clothes. This is people performing one of the daily and necessary tasks of existence, and using God’s own dryer to do it. Granted, it doesn’t match well with the chemical lawns and shiny SUVs that mark American’s suburban wastelands, but surely hanging clothes out to dry is natural and good, a necessary function of life for those who choose not to buy an electric dryer.

Are there not many good reasons to choose to forgo this luxury? Dryers are expensive; perhaps a family’s broke down, and they determined it was better to hang their clothes out than to go into or further their debt repairing or replacing it. Perhaps they decided they didn’t want to waste the energy required to run such a power-hungry machine. Perhaps, most admirably, they wanted to increase their independence from power companies and appliance manufacturers and repairmen, trying to stay closer to God’s nature than a complex machine performing such a basic task would allow. Why should anyone want to insert ordinances or regulations into such decisions? Aren’t independence and frugality things we should be trying to encourage?

Still, while forbidding the hanging of clothes may be obnoxious, it’s hardly pernicious. But these regulations don’t stop there; they go well behind mandating a minimum wealth and consumption standard in order to actively discourage independence and production. Take, for example, the small-scale raising of livestock. Many single-family lots are sufficient to support a goat or two, or a few chickens, in a sanitary and beneficial way. This would provide families with valuable milk, eggs, meat, or even wool, all commodities which are constantly increasing in price. Producing food is a basic and everyday economic activity; indeed, it is the most basic and everyday economic activity of all. Nothing could be more conducive to economic independence. Yet in most urban and suburban areas, local ordinances prevent nearly all useful animals from being kept by citizens.

Generally our leaders cite sanitation as grounds for preventing citizens from exercising this kind of economic independence, just as aesthetics are cited as grounds for preventing citizens from hanging their clothes to dry. But why not then forbid unsanitary keeping of animals? Wouldn’t this fit the purpose, without preventing the vast majority, whose animals would be kept in a sanitary and cleanly manner, from performing such a basic economic task? Don’t we want to encourage our citizens to be productive and independent?

The answer, sadly, is no. Our society does not want productive and independent citizens; it wants consumptive and dependent ones. It wants us to depend on our bosses, to keep us laboring for others to make the money that we’ll spend on ever-more-expensive necessities and ever-more-numerous luxuries. Luxuries like, for example, the electric dryer. A clothesline? That couldn’t have cost very much! How does that help the economy?

As citizens subject to such intrusive and unjustified laws and regulations, we should voice our objections to our local and state leaders. Let’s change our laws to encourage production, action, and economic independence, rather than mere consumption, passivity, and dependence. But more importantly, let’s buck the trend and begin to actually produce some wealth, rather than merely consume it. Distributism, like all real reform, begins in the home.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Postscript: It appears the link about trailer parks forbidding hanging clothes out to dry, once publicly available, as been restricted by the Gray Lady. Apologies. Essentially, it recited a story about a trailer park resident who wanted to hang her clothing out to dry in order to use less energy, but was forbidden by the local regulations.

Racism and Genetic Similarity

Racists will often argue (see the comments on this post for a typical example) that people naturally prefer to be around—and to marry—those who are genetically like themselves. This, they claim, is not really racism; it’s just a natural and undeniable tendency of mankind.

To claim that this affinity of like for like is nonexistent would be to greatly overstate the case. It clearly does exist. However, it’s absolutely false that a desire for like is the primary motivation in choosing a marital partner. Indeed, scientific research proves precisely the opposite.

This was first noticed in the plant world; many plants simply don’t pollinate with other plants that are too like themselves. Apples are an excellent example. As a gardener myself, I know that keeping different types of apples near one another is vital, because apples will not pollinate their own varieties. Nina Fedoroff and Nancy Brown observe, in Mendel in the Kitchen, that plants “prefer—they are ‘anxious,’ say the botanists—to mate with plants that are genetically unlike themselves.” (The book is a defense of genetically modified foods, but the quoted statement is one of simple botany.)

This same principle has found to be operative in mice and rats, as observed by Claus Wedekind and Dustin Penn at the University of Utah. That same paper noted studies of significant sample size confirming that human marriage patterns statistically correlate with genetic dissimilarity along a certain axis; namely, that human beings tend to prefer to reproduce with those who have dissimilar MHC genes, which helps ensure stronger immune systems in the offspring. Interestingly, taking oral contraceptives reversed this trend, leading women to choose men who, all other things being equal, would combine with them to produce offspring with weaker systems. Given that oral contraceptives work by wreaking complete and utter havoc on the hormonal system of a healthy female, this reversal of the natural order is totally unsurprising.

Now, men choose wives and women choose husbands for lots of different reasons; unconsciously noticing specific genetic dissimilarity in the smells of their spouses is not an overriding determinant. However, the studies explored in Wedekind and Penn are significant, and hard to explain without concluding that this genetic dissimilarity is at least relevant. The effect is subtle, but it’s pretty clear that, statistically, the effect is there. It is healthy and good that the effect is there; it helps to ensure healthier children. Only a fool would choose to reproduce with someone without considering, at least briefly, the children who would result.

The bottom line for racists is that people don’t prefer genetically similar people, at least for marriage. They prefer exactly the opposite. Preferring genetic dissimilarity prevents the problems of inbreeding and helps ensure healthier offspring. People do, of course, quite sensibly prefer culturally similar people, for marriage and otherwise. This cultural similarity may or may not extend across genetic dissimilarities. But absent trained biases concerning the allegedly intrinsic value, or lack thereof, of given races, people don’t deliberately seek out those who are genetically like themselves.

This is still more evidence that it is culture, not race, which is really important. This is the natural order of things. If we have been trained to think otherwise, we ought to conform our thoughts to nature, and not claim that nature conforms to our thoughts.

Praise be to Christ the King!

On Genealogy and its Software

Yes, another grandiose title with a not-so-grandiose post. In any case, I went to visit my dear old grandfather in Fort Worth, Texas this past weekend, and it renewed my ever-flagging interest in genealogy. I’ve mentioned a bit about my family’s recent (very recent) history on this blog, but it goes back much farther than all that, praise God.

It may surprise you all to know it, but there’s some noble blood in my veins—noble both literally and figuratively. (Welshmen may recognize it as similar to the arms of the Williamses, sheriffs of Caernarvon; these are kin to the Goodmans of my line.) My grandfather has spent years, both in America (where the first of our line, Benjamin Goodman, debarked in 1673) and in England and Wales, researching our long family history. By God’s grace, many of the records are intact; he’s even found the gravestones of many of our people. And I’ve decided that it’s high time that I familiarize myself with the history of the family that produced me.

Sadly, my dear grandfather, who keeps incredibly copious documentation, decided to do so in the Family Tree Maker brand of software. This software is proprietary and closed, and it saves in its own strange file format, suffixed with FTW, rather than the standard GEDCOM format. (Yes, I know it was developed by Mormons. But nothing’s perfect, and it is the standard.) So I needed to get this ginormous (16M, all but its onesome) FTW file converted into a standard format that some free software genealogy program could recognize (namely, GEDCOM).

There are, as usual, many excellent choices for genealogy software in the free software world. The one I ended up choosing was the GNU GPLed Gramps program, which is GTK+ based and seems quite good. It understands GEDCOM (using its own, better XML format internally) and can produce reports in a number of different word processing formats, not to mention plain text, HTML, pdf, and even the mighty LaTeX. All in all, a superb program that I’m excited about getting to know better.

But it can’t understand FTW files. And who can blame it? FTW files are proprietary; Family Tree Maker won’t tell anyone how to read them. Of course, Family Tree Maker would be more than happy to save the file in GEDCOM—but I need to install a trial of an old version in order to do this. (It appears they no longer offer a trial version, though clearly they once did; fortunately, Grandpa had sent an old one along with the enormous file.) They only make the software for Windows. I don’t run Windows. What to do?

Enter wine, an incredible program which enables many Windows programs to run on free systems. Because the Windows API is closed, wine sometimes has trouble mimicking it well enough to make things run well (though often things run perfectly). That’s fine, for my purposes; it doesn’t have to run well, or even for any significant period of time. I’m going to remove it as soon as I’ve installed it, opened the FTW, and exported it as a GEDCOM file that a better program can use. Surely wine will be able to do that.

So I save it to my ~/.wine/drive_c directory, install the trial version, and run “wine SETUP.EXE”. Sure enough, it runs. It doesn’t run well, and it doesn’t look pretty. But it runs. It opens the heinous FTW file. And it allows me to export it to a GEDCOM file. All without any tweaking.

That 16M FTW file took a good six hours to convert to GEDCOM, but all was well in the end. I was able to import it to Gramps’s better XML format, and I can produce great reports about my ancestry in a variety of formats. We’ve got pretty iron-clad evidence of my ancestry back well over three hundred years (pretty good for a non-noble family, as we certainly were by then). Here’s a listing of them down to 1730, when the last listed was born; the various wars they fought in; and whether they were firstborn sons:

• Donald P. Goodman III (me)—firstborn
• Donald P. Goodman II—firstborn
• Donald P. Goodman—firstborn; veteran of Korea and Vietnam
• Charles Goodman—youngest son; veteran of WWI, wounded
• Samuel Goodman—firstborn; veteran of the Civil War; officer, 3rd Texas cavalry
• Claiborne Goodman—firstborn
• William Goodman
• Benjamin Goodman—firstborn; veteran of War for Independence; murdered by British soldiers after having surrendered after a long and grueling battle at Hayes Station, South Carolina

Yes, this is more than enough to get me into the Sons of the American Revolution, of which I am a member.

It’s also deeply moving to realize just how very close we are to the great events and conflicts of the past. My grandfather’s grandfather was a veteran of the Civil War. He listened to his grandfather tell stories about his heroic father, Benjamin, murdered by British soldiers. (Yes, murdered; killing in battle is not murder, but killing after a battle is.)

Furthermore, I’m struck by how closely connected I am to my ancestors in place, now that I’m officially a Virginian. (I’ve got an accent, a vegetable garden, am descended from a Confederate veteran, and enjoy little more than biscuits and gravy for breakfast followed by a lunch of chicken-fried steak with pinto beans and cornbread. What would you call me?) My most distant of American ancestors was Benjamin Goodman, most probably deported to Barbados, though he stayed there for less than a year, for some crime the identity of which is uncertain. He debarked in Maryland in 1673, then proceeded south to Virginia, specifically New Kent County along the James, where he dwelt the remainder of his life. My ancestors were Virginians for a hundred and fifty years, living in New Kent County; Hanover County; and elsewhere, and fought with Virginia in the war, until Claiborne Goodman traveled to Tennessee, and his children to Texas. And here I am, living barely two hundred miles from where my ancestors lived and worked and died so long ago. It’s quite moving.

Now, that’s just my father’s line, understand. My father’s mother was of French extraction; her line is only traced back to her grandparents, Justin Paul and Marie Berlureau, and even then only to their debarkation at Ellis Island off the St. Louis in 1908. This lack is largely due to lack of funds, time, and energy from anyone in the family to go to France and dig this information up. Perhaps one day. Until then, I’ll keep learning about my family. They are, after all, my blood.

Praise be to Christ the King!

What’s in a Name?

A name is an arbitrary set of sounds designed to designate a person, place, or thing. That’s it; nothing more, nothing less. Granted, some names carry added significance; for example, if a person is named after his father. However, the bottom line of a name is that it means “this thing, as opposed to other things.” Even if it’s descriptive, such as Grand Rapids, it’s still arbitrary, because the set of syllables that mean “section of river with fast current and lots of near-surface rocks” is itself arbitrary—as are, for that matter, all the meanings applied to sounds in the above description of “Grand Rapids.”

So what makes them matter? Only the fact that we all agree that they mean a given thing. All of us that speak that language, that is; to a monolingual Mexican, those syllables are just babbling. To everyone, in fact, those syllables are just babbling, unless the listener happens to belong to the group which we all “English speakers.” If he doesn’t, they mean nothing.

Language is fundamentally arbitrary; the sounds which we apply to meanings don’t inherently apply to those meanings, they only apply to them because all of those who speak a given language agree that they so apply. There’s nothing particularly horsey about the word “horse,” and there’s nothing particularly horsey about the words “cheval,” “caballo,” or “equus,” either. They’re just the sounds that speakers of various languages have decided, through common convention, should apply to what we, in English, call a horse.

Interesting enough; but why bring it up? One word will suffice as an explanation: Mumbai.

What about Mumbai? The fact that it’s not Mumbai; it’s Bombay. The Indians, I am told, have decided that they will call the city Mumbai, since it’s not an Anglicization of a Portuguese name as “Bombay” is, and more power to them. I encourage them to call their city whatever they want (though evidently not all of them do what to call it that). But I do not acknowledge that I have to call their city whatever they want. I want to call it Bombay.

Similarly, it’s become vogue for people to spell the perfectly respectable Calcutta as “Kolkata.” Since the two words are pronounced very similarly, I’m not really sure what purpose this serves other than making the speller appear culturally sensitive. But why should we bother with such nonsense at all, even when the difference is more significant?

These names are totally arbitrary conventions. There’s nothing about the sounds that we, in English, spell “Mumbai” (or “Bombay,” for that matter) that naturally applies to that particular city in India. They’re just the conventions that people have adopted. So what’s wrong with English-speakers having a different convention about naming a city than Indians? Why can’t they call it one thing and we another?

We do this all the time, of course. The French don’t call their capital “pair-iss,” and the Germans don’t call their country “Germany,” or even anything like it. The Russians don’t even spell their names in the same alphabet (nor, for that matter, do the Indians). And I steadfastly refuse to pronounce our greatest port city “New Yawk,” even though a large number of its residents insist on doing so. This is not a problem. Different languages have different conventions for almost all of their names; it’s just as foolish to insist that we adhere to another language’s conventions on place names as it is to insist that a horse be called “un cheval” just because it happens to be a French horse.

So stick with Bombay, Calcutta, and pronouncing “Paris” with an “s.” That’s our convention, and we’re sticking to it.

Praise be to Christ the King!

vi vs. emacs? vi, of course!

Well, I might as well go ahead and join the Great Unix Editor Wars, which are even more never-ending than the so-called Global War on Terror (though there are many fewer casualties, on both sides). vi vs. emacs? vi, of course!

Unix has a very fundamental philosophy: a tool should do one thing and do it well. So we have great utilities like grep. What does grep do? It searches using regular expressions. That’s it. Fat lot of good that does you, right? Wrong. grep is a massively useful tool, precisely because it does that one thing and does it well. Because it doesn’t overextend itself and instead focuses on one excellence, it’s a superb tool for its purpose. Furthermore, because it follows one of the other fundamental Unix rules—it deals in plain text input and output streams, not fancy proprietary binary formats—it can be easily combined with other tools to create incredible flexibility and power.

So, for example, let’s say I’ve got an enormous text file I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World will be an excellent example. I’m writing an English paper on Chesterton’s allegorical treatment of capitalism and socialism, and I consequently want to learn how many times Chesterton uses the words “Hudge” and “Gudge.” (If you’ve read it, you’ll understand.) So I take the text file and I print it to my screen:

cat whatswrong.txt

I then get an enormous blob of text splattered on my screen as the whole file prints itself, then I’m returned to my command prompt. Not particularly helpful. So what do I do? I can open it in My Favorite Word Processor, hit CTRL-F, and then count the instances as I go through the text. But what if I lose count? (Quite likely, particularly if you’re interrupted.) This could also be very time-consuming, if the number of occurrences is large. So I pipe the text of the file into “grep”:

cat whatswrong.txt | grep Hudge

I now get not the whole file, but every line that includes the word “Hudge” in it. This is great, of course, but that could still be a lot of lines. So I just pipe the results into another program, one which does just one thing and does it well: counts things:

cat whatswrong.txt | grep Hudge | wc -l

Now I know, in one fell swoop, how many lines in the book contain the word “Hudge.” (It’s 25, by the way. 24 for “Gudge.”) This will be a very close approximation of how many times “Hudge” appears in the text. (Yes, I know I get the “Useless Use of cat Award” here (“grep Hudge whatswrong.txt | wc -l” would have been more direct), but this works and it helps for illustrative purposes.)

That’s the Unix way: small tools which are well-focused for particular jobs. And it works; indeed, it works better than anything else that anybody’s ever tried. This is How Computers Are Supposed to Work; even if you disagree, however, it’s how Unix works, and since Unix is our chosen system (95%+, anyway, if you’re in this debate at all), we ought to keep it in mind.

vi works exactly in this way. vi does just one thing: edit text. And it does it well. Editing text is a complex process, and consequently it’s a complex program; it offers myriads of ways of moving around in the file, changing blocks of text of various sizes, and so on. But that’s really all it does: edit text. It doesn’t check your spelling, it doesn’t check your email, it doesn’t read Usenet, and it doesn’t serve as a file manager. It just edits text. Period. And it does a phenomenal job of providing an incredibly powerful tool with very little processing or memory overhead.

emacs, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. It was written by Richard Stallman, which ought to tell us something. Richard Stallman, though I disagree with him fundamentally in many ways, is an admirable man in his strong commitment to software freedom and common goods; however, he’s not fundamentally a Unix man. Unix arose on limited-resource machines, thus producing this marvelously austere paradigm briefly explored above. Stallman, on the other hand, flourished in one of the richest computing environments on the planet in the 1970s, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Labs. They had powerful computers with (for that time) lots of resources. And emacs was originally coded for this environment, for a non-Unix operating system—and it shows.

emacs does everything. Seriously, everything. Critics have often remarked that emacs is a great operating system, it’s just a shame that it doesn’t have a decent text editor—and they’re not joking. emacs will do all the things that I mentioned above that vi does not do, and much more. It’s even got its own built-in programming language, a species of Lisp, which is to emacs almost as C is to Unix (emacs itself is coded in C, not Lisp, which makes the difference). As such, it doesn’t do just one thing and do it well; it does lots of things—and arguably doesn’t do any of them particularly efficiently.

Compared to vi, emacs is incomprehensibly bloated. It’s enormous; one of the many jokes about emacs is that it stands for “Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping.” (Understand that eight megabytes was an obscene amount of memory in those days.) It provides its huge amounts of functionality at the expense of comparatively large overhead. This is another reason many vi users dislike it.

So where vi keeps itself busy editing text, allowing other programs to do the rest of the work, emacs does it all itself. So, for example, I tell my mail user client, mutt, that I want to write an email. It calls on vi for me, which is a text editor. I then edit my text, save it, and vi turns the text back over to mutt. mutt then asks me what to do with it; I tell mutt to send the email. mutt then tells msmtp that it has an email to send; msmtp takes the email from mutt and sends it. A long chain of small tools, each of which does just one single job and does it well, each limited in scope, small and focused. If I were an emacs user, though, emacs could do all of that for me, without ever calling on another program. While it was at it, it could spell check my email, and probably program a simple S-orbit for a moonbound spacecraft on its own.

As another example, if I wanted a spell check on my emails (I learned to spell while I was in school, so I don’t), I wouldn’t expect vi to do that for me. vi is a text editor; what I would need then is a spell checker. So I would tell vi that I wanted the shell; it would give me the shell, and I’d call the program ispell (or whatever spell checker I wanted to use) to spell check my file for me. In emacs, on the other hand, one would just tell emacs to spell check it; not only could emacs do so, but it could do so in three languages. For that matter, it can probably just write the email for you without your intervention, so just let it. Step away from your computer and have a drink; you’ll feel better that way anyway.

Sure, I find emacs’s control paradigm incredibly irritating; the digital gymnastics required to do something so simple as “go to the start of the line” are absurd. (My favorite emacs pseudo-acronym is “Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.”) vi’s single-letter, command-mode model is far superior, in my opinion. But I could deal with an editor that requires all ten fingers plus my nose and a couple of toes just to write the working buffer. What I can’t deal with is a program that tries to be all things to all men. It can’t, and won’t, work. It is not the Unix way.

So while emacs is a better operating system than vi, that’s because vi doesn’t propose itself as an operating system. It’s just a text editor—and that’s its strength, not its weakness.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Why Marriage is Privileged

I know; I tend to put up these grandly expansive titles and then provide incredibly narrow posts to go with them. But those are the only titles that occur to me. In college I was well known as a devotee of the unnecessary superlative; perhaps that explains this common trope.

In any case, a recent immigration case involving a Japanese woman and her Marine…well, whatever he was, has aroused some ire at the Western Confucian. The bottom line of the case is that a Marine stationed in Okinawa met a woman at a party there. This woman is, as one would reasonably expect, a Japanese citizen. They commenced shacking up, which they did for over a year, during which time the Marine proposed and they attempted to conceive before he was deployed to a war zone—all before they were married. The article makes some issue of how easy it is to get married in Japan—you don’t even need a ceremony or even vows, from the sound of it, just an affidavit that you’re free to marry and a registration with the government—so one wonders why they dilly-dallied so long when it’s apparent that they intended their relationship to be of some duration.

Whatever their reasoning, however, he was deployed to Iraq, and shortly thereafter this woman found that she was, in fact, pregnant. They were then married by proxy. Now, proxy marriages are perfectly respectable, in cases of unavoidable long distance, and are at least tolerable in cases of premarital pregnancy. I have nothing against them whatsoever. But there is something we should keep in mind here:

This marriage was not consummated. No matter how much the couple may have fornicated prior to their marriage, consummation involves the marital act subsequent to actual marriage.

While this may seem obvious, it’s important to observe because people intent on getting angry at the government no matter what it does don’t seem to understand it.

Before they could get together again after their proxy marriage, the Marine was, tragically, killed in the line of duty in Iraq. Requiescat in pace.

We all know where this is going, of course. The article features, at the top, a picture of this Japanese woman cradling her son with her erstwhile paramour’s mother, an American flag prominently and dramatically waving in the background. This poor woman, we’re all supposed to think. All she wants is to move to America, where her husband grew up, with her husband’s family, and mean old Federal Government won’t let her. How dare they?

The thing is, if they had let her immigrate, they’d be doing something that most of the people getting angry about this situation would, in any other circumstance, condemn them for: they’d be breaking the law. I know that both sides of the political spectrum—from which foolishness the Western Confucian is usually happily distanced—consider obedience to the law to be essential only when it accords with their preconceived notions of a good result, but this is getting ridiculous. Here’s what that totally negligible and unimportant law says about the matter:

The term “spouse”, “wife”, or “husband” do not include a spouse, wife, or husband by reason of any marriage ceremony where the contracting parties thereto are not physically present in the presence of each other, unless the marriage shall have been consummated.

8 U.S.C. s 1101(a)(35). That’s it; that’s the answer. INS or ICE or whatever it’s called now can’t grant this woman spousal immigration; doing so is against the law. If they did so, they’d be breaking the law. It really is that simple.

Yet everybody, lawyers included, seem to think that the existence of this law just doesn’t matter. The immigration lawyer working with the family, for example, had this to say:

There’s no mention of consummation prior to the wedding in the statute, which Renison considers outdated and in need of reform. . . . “Well, 1952 was a different time,” Renison said. “And back then, I’m sure they considered having sexual intercourse out of wedlock to be just fornication.”

Listen to the profundity of this man! “1952 was a different time!” Really? 1952 and 2009 aren’t the same time? Brilliant! Does that change the law? “And back then, I’m sure they considered having sexual intercourse out of wedlock to be just fornication.” Shocking! The backward attitudes of those poor, benighted people!

fornication: Sexual intercourse between partners who are not married to each other.

Ah! They considered premarital sexual intercourse to be fornication because that’s what it is! Quite shocking! Indeed, this law needs to be changed, immediately!

These people don’t want a sensible proxy marriage policy (and I agree that the current law of excluding all unconsummated proxy marriage entirely is not sensible; but the fact remains that it’s the law); they want fornication recognized as equivalent to marital intercourse. The fact is, though, that it’s not the same, and it’s good that the law doesn’t treat it as such.

If I were designing the law, would I allow this Japanese woman citizenship? Based on what I’m reading here (which is not, of course, the complete record), yes, I would. Fornication is not the same as marital intercourse, even if the couple marries afterward. However, it’s clear that this couple intended their marriage to be real and lasting, even if the sequence of events toward contracting it was completely backwards. So it’s plainly not a sham marriage contracted for the purposes of defrauding our immigration agency; for that reason, I’d allow the immigration.

However, I’m not designing the law, and neither are the immigration agents who are reviewing her application. They are tasked with applying the law, as written, to individual cases, and they did so correctly in this case. Dura lex sit, sed lex; the law may be hard, but it is the law. We ought rather to applaud our immigration agents, so intent on doing their duty that they did not allow their personal feelings to persuade them to ignore the law, than to condemn them for doing what they are expected and required to do.

Praise be to Christ the King!