Microsoft is Evil, and Internet Explorer is Terrible

While we’re on the subject of how evil Microsoft is, I thought I’d share this recent frustrating experience regarding one of its more wretched creations, Internet Explorer.

I run a small publishing website, Goretti Publications. It’s written entirely in perfectly standards-compliant XHTML Transitional. If you don’t know what that means, that’s fine; just think of it as meaning “the code adheres very carefully to the rules.” The idea behind doing that is to ensure that all browsers will display the web pages the same way. If you follow the rules, the theory goes, the browser will also follow them, and display the pages the way you tell it to. So it should be.

But so it isn’t, unfortunately, thanks to Microsoft Internet Explorer. The site worked perfectly in every browser except Internet Explorer. It didn’t work at all in IE6; most pages, except two, worked in IE7 and IE8. But those two were not discernibly different from the rest of them, yet IE continued to gag on them. For hours I tried to discover the problem. I knew it wasn’t my code; my code validated.

“Validated” means that the W3 Consortium’s validator program goes through your code and ensures that it’s correct. All of my pages had been validated as correct. So I knew it wasn’t me. Furthermore, every other browser read every page quite happily. So I know the problem has to be Internet Explorer.

The problem was that I put a comment, dedicating the page to God, His Mother, and the saints, in each of my pages. “Comments” are chunks of text that the browser completely ignores; as far as the browser is concerned, in theory, the comment isn’t even there. I didn’t make it the first line in the file, because that would violate standards; I put it down a bit. Every one of my pages followed this standard.

If I moved the comment down, though, to within the html element, Internet Explorer suddenly was able to display the page.

In other words, Internet Explorer was gagging because I put a comment in a certain place. I didn’t replace a required line with a comment; I just put the comment in a place that got its nose in a tickle. Moving the comment to within the html element made all the pages work in all IEs, from 6 to 8, which I suppose is an upside to all this. But despite the fact that every other browser didn’t look twice at them; despite the fact that they were perfectly standards compliant; Internet Explorer just couldn’t handle them. It’s crippled software, a toy version of a browser.

So yes, the site now works in IE. But don’t test that out. Use Firefox. Please. Even if you’re personally happy using a lousy browser, take heed of the sanity of web developers the world over and adopt a real one soon.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Distributism and Modern Economics, Part III

Note: This series can be obtained in its entirety as a single document, in pdf form, at Goretti Publications.

To sum up: we live in a society in which those who produce no wealth, but merely accumulate lots of money with little or no real wealth behind their gains, are glorified, but those who produce real wealth, like farmers, are laughed at as uneducated and useless bumpkins. Our economic system depends, at its core, upon a rampant consumerism that often borders on outright hedonism, and the real production of wealth is relegated to those in foreign lands, who are thus prevented from producing wealth for their own people.

Distributism seeks to answer all these questions. Distributism is a name produced in the early twentieth century by the great Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton; however, in a certain sense it is an unfortunate name. While it is accurate, it brings to mind images of commissars tossing the kulaks off their land and forcing peasants to starve on communal farms. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

Distributism could just as easily be called productionism, as both distributive justice and production are its central tenets.Essentially, distributism attempts to solve the modern consumptive, money-based economy by bringing the focus back to production. It does this by encouraging the widest possible distribution of productive property throughout the populace.

The problem with our modern system is that production has been removed from the ordinary citizen. We no longer respect and honor the man who can produce great wealth, but rather the man who can accumulate the most money. To defeat this tendency, we must once again make production of wealth the center of the normal citizen’s life. When each citizen is again directly involved in production, the production of wealth will again become paramount, and the evils of a money-based system will be substantially mitigated.

However, distributism also takes account of a vital tenet of Catholic political thought: the principle of subsidiarity. This time-tested principle states that any given task in a society ought to be done by the smallest possible level of society. For example, the education of children is entrusted primarily to the parents of that child, as that is the smallest level of society truly capable of performing that task. Similarly,the management of a given trade ought to be entrusted to that trade itself, since that is the smallest level of society really able to accomplish it. Distributism thus has a strongly localist streak, and it is from that streak that it receives its name.

For distributism seeks not only to ensure that most citizens are engaged in the true lifeblood of an economy, the production of wealth; distributism seeks to ensure that the production of wealth is done by the smallest units of society capable of doing it. Often, this unit will be the individual family. Thus, distributism is that system in which most ordinary citizens are the owners of the means of production.

If the average citizen is the owner of some means of production—whether that be land, tools of a trade, or some other productive property—the problems of our current system identified above will be greatly mitigated. Citizens will be involved personally in the production of wealth. More wealth production will be done more locally, ensuring that the money economy—that which is based on the exchange of money—will be much more solidly based in the existence of real wealth. Because most citizens will be involved in producing, outsourcing will no longer be necessary, because our own citizens will be happy to work their own property to produce wealth for their fellow citizens for fair trade.This will further enable those in other countries, currently exploited for our own benefit, to direct their efforts to the benefit of their own peoples. Being once again engaged in the production of real wealth, citizens will become better able to see through advertisements for“necessities” that are really superfluous, or even harmful, luxuries. Significantly, too, the most valuable members of our society, those who produce those things which are most necessary for our survival, will once again be held in their proper dignity.

Furthermore, families and communities will be bolstered and unified by their newfound comparative independence. Families will depend more on their own hard work and ingenuity than on that of others whom they have never met; communities will unite and support one another by spending their money on the producers within themselves. No longer will communities be dependent upon the good will and largesse of large corporations who care nothing for them;they will become strong and one again, independent and proud.

Most importantly, however, we will again be faithful to our God-given task of stewarding the earth which He gave us. God gave us His creation so that we could dress it and keep it;that is, improve it by making it more useful to ourselves,and keep it by maintaining our improvements, so that the earth would serve us just as we serve Him. He didnot give it to us so that we could accumulate ever-larger piles of green paper. Our Lord cultivates our souls so that we can serve Him; this is His primary task relative to man. Let us also cultivate the earth so that it can serve us, as God intended it to serve us; in this way we not only bring about our own sustainable prosperity, but also engage in Tolkien’s subcreation, in order to come closer to our Creator.

Praise be to Christ the King!

1. Genesis 1:26-29.

2. Genesis 2:15.

3. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State 46 (The Liberty Fund 1977).

4. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, no. 51.