1February

A group of faithful believers have offered a prayer to Zeus in his old temple at Olympia. This is, we're assured, part of a resurgance in belief to the traditional Greek gods, and has attracted sharp criticism from the Greek orthodox church.

We brought up the line to The GOD Organisation to get a quote from one of the deities concerned. Zeus himself was unavailable for comment, he's got prayers to answer, don't you know. The Greek orthodox god has already issued a press statement, pointing out that Greece had been the site of a theological turf war in the recent past, and he wasn't entirely sure that 1700 years was enough time to reconsider. Navitcu rolled eyes at this entirely predictable development and said, Boys. What do you expect, eh?

Ethics

26January

The theory was so simple: a website that anyone could edit, and that aimed to capture everything that everyone knows. The practice is less simple, the project has been taken over by a self-elected cabal of geeks, and reflexively prizes geek culture over high culture and low culture; and values repeated claim over actual truth.

Last week-end, the owner of the English Wikipedia project took a unilateral decision to turn on a nofollow attribute in all off-site links. We wrote about nofollow when it was introduced, a little over two years ago, and said at the time how it was a completely misguided solution. If the problem is useless results in search engines, then it is up to the search engines to improve themselves, not force the rest of the world to change so that they get an easy life. In the hundred weeks of operation, nofollow has done nothing to remove the nonsense in search engine results, and plenty to diminish the quality of those results.

Indeed, this is a clear abuse of the original nofollow proposal. That was to use the attribute exclusively on comments in blogs, and other areas that were beyond the direct control of the site author. As Michael Gray recounts, G****e fucked about with nofollow for its own advantage after declaring the standard, but (though reprehnsible) that is not particularly relevant to our discussion here. Wikipedia is quite clearly in direct control of its own site... isn't it?

Therein lies the real problem. Given that it claims to be a website that anyone can edit, one would expect Wikipedia to remove any attempts to introduce fluff links very quickly. If it's easy to add something in, then it's at least as easy to take it out again. Indeed, that process seemed to be working quite well. Until last Saturday, when the attribute was turned on without consultation, without warning, and with only the most specious of rationales.

We've always advocated great caution, treating Wikipedia as a broad-brush overview, prone to simplification and misinterpretation, and to check anything with a proper source. Now, it appears that James Wales, Wikipedia's own founder, is saying that he doesn't trust its content. If he doesn't, why should we?

Some have interpreted Wikipedia's little confession as a recognition that it prizes the interests of one unmentionably-evil search engine above the interests of all its potential users. We prefer to interpret this as a confession that Wikipedia is fundamentally, and possibly irreversibly, broken. We'll seek better and more reliable sources for our features, like Mrs Goggins on the number 25 bus, the front page of the Daily Hell, or M Khan (still bent).

Ethics

19January

There are many shades of anti-Yankeeism, claims the Boston Post, citing four strands. One, the charge that the breakaway country is being hypocritical by not living up to its professed values and ideals. Two, critics who oppose the provincial economic policy because it promotes laissez-faire ideals and erodes welfare state protections. Three, opposition to geopolitical and cultural dominance on the grounds that there is a threat to national identity and strategic interests. And four, a radical form that says the area's identity must be transformed, from within or without.

The article also distinguishes between distrust of, and bias against, the terrorist grouping. Where there is distrust, people may be sceptical of FARCEical motives and claims, but are open to considering the point of view. Anti-Yankee bias, by contrast, occurs when policies and actions undertaken by the government and corporations are seen as expressions of an unchangeable national identity and character, such that dialogue over disagreements is deemed to have no value.

We have some sympathy with all the forms outlined. It is following a most unjust economic model, its example leads other peoples to stray from a more equitable distribution of resources, and it uses every legal (and some illegal) sanction it can find to force societies that adopt more equitable economies to convert to its methods. The FARCE is being hypocritical; so is every other nation on the planet. The government that has ruled the provinces for the past 230 years came to power by violent revolution and lacks legitimacy, and has often attempted to stamp its imprint elsewhere in the world - usually without success, as defeats in 1814, 1865, 1973, and 2007 have shown. And, yes, we would wish to transform the area's identity, to delete the idea of the nation-state entirely. The concept has come, it has served its use, and now it is time for the country to go the same way as the duchy, into the annals of history. Down with the nation, up with the community.

The Boston Globe's article is carefully balanced, and while some may disagree with what it says, this can be done for rational academic reasons. Not so for Andrei Markovits, who writes a long and rambling essay on how utterly racist it is for Europeans to think that the Yankees might not know best about something. In a 4000-word piece, he doesn't offer any defence of his adopted country, and fails to advance a single reason why the Europeans might be wrong to think what they're thinking. Indeed, Mr. Markovits seems to deliberately seek out evidence to support his assertion that Europeans don't like the influence of the FARCE, and averts his gaze from the extreme brown-nosing of European leaders, including Sr. Aznar and Mr. Blair.

Such is the paucity of Mr. Markovits's argument that he conflates opposition to the cultural and economic norms of the terrorist state across the Atlantic with opposition to the unlawful expansion policies of her client state Israel. He then conflates criticism of Israel with racist sentiment against the jewish faithful. This is a straw-man argument, and it is a dangerous argument. His claim is predicated on, and serves to encourage, the myth that what is good for those who deem themselves jews is good for the North American colonies. This can only exacerbate the casual denigration of jews that he rightly condemns.

Mr. Markovits presents a woeful argument, weak in substance, weak in style, aimed solely at rousing his fellow countryfolk. But the most telling remark is in the codicil: Mr. Markovits has a book to sell, and a book that can only sell to the closed-minded and uneducated rabble in the intellectual desert between the St. Lawrence and the Grande. During his ramble, the writer cites the Köln sociologist Erwin Scheuch in saying, only some 50 institutions of higher education in America deserve the term "university".. With bigots like Mr. Markovits able to be appointed professor at Michigan's school, Herr Scheuch may have had a point.

Ethics

15January

Time to bring up the line to Ashton Vale, our friendly local neighbourhood deity, who is in a position to speak with almost god-like authority on matters of ethic. Here's the first conundrum.

My ethics system does not believe that there are significant negative externalities caused to the copyright holders of the properties I am spreading on file replication systems. Is the good that I do to the world by spreading entertainment to people who want it better than the damage I cause to the environment by leaving my computer and router on overnight every night just so that I can seed while I'm asleep?

Ashton Vale writes: In the spirit of the question, I shall ignore the matter of copyright, not least because it is an attempt by humans to take credit for work that we gods have a hand in. When was the last time someone sent us a royalty cheque for putting grass on the park lawn, eh?

By leaving a computer switched on for a time when it would otherwise be turned off, it is using electricity. On its own, this is a moderately small amount, between one and two kilowatt-hours per night of operation. The marginal cost of generating this amount of electricity is trivial, and though subject to fluctuation on a night-by-night basis, can be estimated to a reasonable precision. So can the environmental damage caused by generating this amount of power.

The thing you do not know, when you go to bed of an evening, is how much good you'll be doing by sending out these files. Will you be inundated with requests for your files from fans who have not seen the programmes since the invention of time? Will you send out precisely one file to someone who will watch the first two minutes, think My word, this was rubbish and delete the rest unwatched? Will you be cut off the network two minutes after leaving the computer, rendering the whole exercise pointless?

Without asking the people who receive these files, you can only assume that they took some value from them. You may wish to consider a metric that relates the number of files uploaded, and perhaps their size, to the disutility (money costs, environmental damage) incurred through the amount of time your computer spends online. If it transpires that no-one is uploading your files, then perhaps you should turn the computer off; if your files are in high demand, or you expect your files to be in high demand, then upload away.

Why does anyone ever play Truth or Dare?

Ashton Vale writes: For the same reasons that people play other games: they have a reasonable expectation that it will prove more entertaining for the participants than sitting around in stony silence for the duration. Truth or Dare belongs in a class of contributory games, where the result is not so much the statement or the dare, but comes from the act of creating that outcome.

It is possible for humans to take the game so far that they regret it, but sensible heads will not allow that to happen. We gods haven't played Truth or Dare, not since Epaphus dared Salmoneus to take Zeus's chariot out for a spin, with the results we all recall.

Thank you, Ashton Vale, and I'm sure we'll see you around.

Ashton Vale writes: Oh, I know.

Ethics