My largest complaint is that the book is not intellectually rigorous; it contains a series of assertions, but they don’t necessarily follow from each other. To be fair, politics wouldn’t exist if it were possible to prove or disprove every assertion through logic. Still, it galls me to see Levin put together a chapter which masquerades as a logical argument but in fact is nothing of the sort.

Take his chapter on faith, for example. As an aside, in just three pages, Levin proves the existence of God! His argument works like this:
1. Premise: The Founding Fathers declared in the Declaration of Independence that all men were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
2. Premise: The Founding Fathers were paragons of humanity and their legacy is comprised of perfect documents whose every implication, no matter how far from the purpose of the text, was understood and intended by them.
3. Premise: Unalienable rights only exist in the context of an absolute moral code.
4. Premise: An absolute moral code can only exist supernaturally; a human moral code cannot be absolute.
5. Premise: It would be terrible if an absolute moral code did not exist; people would then have to think about the ramifications of their behavior. In fact, people are incapable of behaving morally or ethically without strict guidance from a supernatural power.
6. Deduction: Given 1 and 2, you should believe in God because they did.
7. Deduction: Given 3, 4, and 5, you should believe in God because failing to do so means that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not actually technically unalienable. This contradicts 1 and 2. Therefore, God must exist!

There are any number of problems with this train of logic, but the biggest ones come from premise 2. Here’s a funny thing: he never explicitly states premise 2; he just assumes it’s a fundamental part of his readers’ worldview. Even so, I disagree with it. These people were smart, innovative, and dedicated to the nation they were helping define, but they were still human. It makes no sense to take their works as holy writ, perfect and infallible, then prove that God himself only exists because they said so.

If you don’t implicitly accept 2, both deductions fail to stand. As it happens, I also have major problems with 5. I don’t want to get into those here, though; it would only distract from my point, which is this: Levin rolls on and on like a juggernaut through this book, laying out argument after argument without stopping for breath. The vast majority of them are flawed. Refuting them all would require me to write a book of my own, and I don’t feel like doing that. Instead, I want to write a more general counter, explaining where I stand.

Fundamentally, I start politically with libertarianism: people should be free as much as possible to do whatever they want, and government should be constrained to the minimum necessary. However, I only need one example to point out why we do want some government instead of none at all: Somalia. That place is an anarchist’s dream; it hasn’t had a real government for over 15 years now. It is a terrible place to live.

So if we do need some government, what should its functions be? Let’s start with the most important one: establish the rule of law. That right there fixes Somalia’s biggest problem. However, it introduces another one.

Nobody’s conquered Somalia because it’s a violent shithole with few natural resources. A bunch of nations have the military capacity to just kill every Somali and take the land, but they don’t because that’s evil. Taking over without just killing everyone there means establishing the rule of law, and to say that’s hard is an understatement. Establishing the rule of law where it doesn’t exist is very difficult; particularly when the particular laws you want to impose aren’t the same ones the majority of the people want. This is the problem the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, and in Somalia in 1993. If, however, the people have a central government that they respect, conquering the nation becomes a lot easier. You just have to get the government to surrender, instead of forcing every person to on their own. The second priority of a government then needs to be this: defend itself and its people from external threats.

It might be interesting to live in a nation whose government restricted itself to those two principles. If nothing else, it’d be a test of how the free market actually holds up in comparison to a government for ensuring the quality of life for the people. Still, to the best of my knowledge, that hasn’t been tried since the middle ages. (Those sucked for the simple reason that 99% of people were serfs who had no rights and whose lives were nasty, brutish, and short.) Since then, every government on earth has had a third priority: the construction and maintenance of necessary infrastructure. Roads, bridges, ports, power lines and facilities; all these are traditionally government projects which fall under the infrastructure category.

Here’s where it gets political: infrastructure segues somewhere, in a messy and ill-defined way, into social services. The Founding Fathers were convinced, for example, that an efficient Postal Service was critical to the success of any democracy. Is that infrastructure, or social service? Is it more important to have the capability to cheaply transport pieces of paper, or bits of information? Finland recently established that broadband access to the internet is a legal right of every citizen. Is that the way to go?

I’m of the opinion that there are certain social services that the government should make available to every citizen. A stable national currency. Fire departments. Education, through at least a high school level. Health care, to at least a minimal standard, in the fields of emergency medicine, pharmacology, ob/gyn clinics, pediatricians, preventive medicine, and geriatric care. I’m not saying that the government should claim a monopoly on these services or that individuals should be required to avail themselves of the government’s offerings; I see no reason to deny the market the ability to compete to provide premium services. However, baseline offerings should be free to every citizen.

Calling these services rights seems a little silly to me. I wouldn’t mind, for example, if the government refused to treat the lung cancer of someone who’d smoked for 40 years, or obesity at all. You can’t deny someone their rights, but you can allow them to forfeit access to social services through personal choice. I’d argue that each of these services is productive for the government to provide because each of them improves the nation as a whole. The benefits of fire departments and a national currency should be self-evident. Public education, since its institution a century ago, has been a sore spot for most of that time, but I haven’t heard anyone arguing that children should not have the option to be educated regardless of their parents’ circumstances. Mostly, people agree that it is a good thing to have. 100 years forward, I expect people to treat health care the way we do public education now: a national service that, while often outperformed by the private sector, is so manifestly useful that essentially nobody is seriously arguing that it should be done away with.

Here’s the thing: there are services that government provides which aren’t rights, but which are nice. Streetlights are a good example. It costs a fair bit to erect a streetlight, and even more to keep it supplied with electricity and replacement lightbulbs. You could argue that streetlights reduce crime, or that they enhance driving safety, but I’ve seen no statistics about that and would actually tend to be skeptical even if they were produced because studies like the ones which would produce those results often have some sketchy methodology. Even Levin doesn’t complain about streetlights, though you’d expect him to: a government boondoggle with unproven results siphoning money out of the taxpayer? Call Rupert Murdoch! Have a Tea Party!

Here’s the thing: in the grand scheme of things, streetlights are cheap, and they’re nice to have. Through general affluence, technology, or rarity of necessity, other services sometimes become cheap and nice also. How much would it cost to maintain soup kitchens sufficient to entirely eliminate starvation in America? How much does it cost to maintain a single wing of F-22s (to say nothing of the purchase price!)? Which better serves the needs of the nation: preventing our citizens from dying directly, or maintaining an air superiority fighter without an opponent?

As it happens, starvation isn’t as weighty a problem as obesity; don’t misunderstand me as crusading here for the anti-starvation cause. The point is that if the cost is small enough, it can be worth providing a service which is unnecessary but nice.

Levin’s boojum, the demon he fears above all others, is the Statist: a terrible creature devoted purely to the consolidation of power in the government and the elimination of individual freedoms. There’s a wonderful description on page 15 of how utterly terrible this monster is. It’s a fierce and entertaining straw man, and a rhetorical trick that he may be physically addicted to. They’re everywhere! The media is full of them; the courts are comprised of them; the entire Democratic party is a thin front for them. Been to college? Beware, all those academics are Statists! Believe in separation of church and state? You’re a Statist! Think human activity is causing global warming? You’ve been taken in by a Statist conspiracy! Want the government to provide communal services? You’re on your way to being voted Statist of the Year! Also, actors are pretty much all Statists: “It is the rare actor who challenges the fraternity.”

Alas, though Levin goes on at length about the media’s tendency to invent a Terror of the Month, there’s no satisfying pull quote about inventing straw men to serve a political purpose. It seems he’s a bit too introspective for that.

Levin closes his book with a Conservative Manifesto: a list of goals and assertions which summarize his political position in a traditional, elephant-shaped package. At best, he comes off as someone who’s honestly trying to work for the best future of the nation, even if his methods and goals diverge from mine. At worst, it’s hard to believe he inhabits the same universe that I do. We have this in common at least: we both believe that people should seek to understand the world around them and work to improve it for the future. We both are glad to live in a society in which we can disagree vehemently and in writing about the way the nation should be run. We both think that individual liberty is the premise, and the Constitution is the basis, of the US system of government.

We just disagree about everything else.

In other news, I am safely arrived after an uneventful flight. If you must fly coach on a long flight, get a bulkhead seat: it is much, much better than the alternative. Inprocessing day zero begins tomorrow. Jetlag status: I think I really did develop an immunity.

Just over two decades later, we have all the technology to implement that exact dystopia, if only social conditions warranted it. Cory Doctorow looked at this fact, and at America’s response to 9/11, and was horrified enough to write this book about why it would be a very bad idea to head in that direction.

It’s written as a young adult novel, which has a few consequences: the protagonist is a teenager, and the writing never gets particularly complex. It’s tempting to write off the bad guys as straw men; they don’t have much depth, being completely and unambiguously evil, and usually stupid. This is an unabashedly partisan book.

However, it’s a fun book. The cause that it trumpets, that liberty is more important than paranoia (and  that surveillance states are unpleasant and ineffective) is easy to agree with. There are a number of what are essentially well-written essays on that topic–as well as introductory ones to subjects like onion routing, cryptography, and webs of trust–snuck fairly well into the narrative.

Overall, it’s a decent way to spend a few hours of reading. Also, as a Creative Commons-licensed work, it’s freely available. Final status: recommended for light reading.

Cory Doctorow, Little Brother (Amazon)

But Hamdan’s central question remained: “By what law will you try me?”

The judge responded with the only answer he could: The military commissions law passed by Congress in 2006.

“But the government changed the law to its advantage,” Hamdan replied. “I am not being tried by the American law.”

To me, this is an open and shut case: the constitution defines the legal system, and its fifth amendment reads in part: “nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy.” The MCA attempts to sidestep that restriction, but that shouldn’t work. America can only improve its relations with the world by returning to its former standard of conduct: well-defined, humanistic, and just. Justice would best be served if this case makes its way up the chain and ends up striking down the MCA.

I’m not sure that can actually happen; the court in which Hamdan is being tried is not technically part of the American legal system, being a military commission and all. Regardless, and no matter the crimes of which he is accused, in this case I am rooting for Hamdan.

Assuming that you’ve got all four of those things, you can find yourself in Japan within weeks of deciding to go. You’re probably expecting certain differences from life elsewhere in the world–if you’re like me, odd surprises are one of the reasons you’re moving there–and if you’ve done your research you’re not going to run into any really difficult surprises. However, some aspects of life caught me by surprise; they aren’t well-documented in the guidebooks because they’re the sort of thing that few tourists will encounter.

There exist small concrete cul-de-sacs scattered through the local neighborhoods; these are trash collection points. In the interest of civic beauty, it is discouraged to put trash into these before sundown. Tax-supported garbagemen remove trash from these most mornings around sunrise; each day is for a particular type of trash. There is a day for burnable trash, and a day for non-burnable. There is a day for plastic recyclables, a day for metal recyclables, and a day for paper recyclables. Twice a month there is a day for trash containing toxic components, like most consumer electronics; once a month there is a day for large trash, meaning anything larger than a trash bag of maybe 15 gallons of capacity. Any trash of the wrong type on a given day is left there by the garbagemen, in the expectation that you will reclaim it and put it back on the correct day.

I suspect that the complexity of the garbage system is the reason that there are almost no public trash bins anywhere in Japan. Depending on where you are, there may or may not be a three-in-one sorted trash can on the platform of a train station, but elsewhere they just don’t exist. There may or may not be a can-recycle-bin at a vending-machine cluster, but if you buy a snack of any sort, expect to carry all the packaging home with you.

No matter what you buy in Japan, there will be packaging. Typical canned drinks come in steel cans which easily supported my weight; an American trying to crush one against his forehead would likely knock himself out. A boxed curry dinner from a convenience store will have the plastic container to eat it out of, an internal plastic strip to separate the curry from the rice before eating, and another plastic strip to separate the garnish. This entire thing is lidded and shrinkwrapped, and before you take it home the clerk will double-bag it. Even fruit in the grocery store have individual anti-bruising styrofoam pads wrapped around them.

When you purchase your items, the only plastic involved is in the packaging, as you will almost certainly be paying with paper money. Japan’s economy is heavily cash-based; outside the big cities, it’s rare to find a merchant who accepts credit cards. Those who do typically push the credit-card processing fee directly to the consumer. I am told that checks do exist in the Japanese banking system, but I never saw one. When I needed to pay a bill, I would take the bar-coded bill and the appropriate amount of money to a convenience store, where they would process the bill. When I was paid each month, it was with an envelope full of cash, which I then took to the post office to deposit in my account.

The post office runs the largest bank in Japan. My entire life in America, access to my bank account was mediated through a mag-striped plastic card. Not so in Japan! There, you’re given a paper book. To process a transaction at an ATM, you insert the entire book, opened to the current page. As you insert or withdraw cash, the machine prints out the transactions as they are processed; the means by which you access your money is also the statement of transactions. It’s a pretty clever system; I just wish there had been some sort of PIN required so that I might have had some protection had I ever lost that book.

It actually took me a few months before I ever established a bank account in Japan, though. This was partly because at first I didn’t really have enough cash on hand for it to matter, but also because it took a while for me to procure a means by which to authenticate myself. This went beyond having my passport handy; I also had to finalize my working visa. Once that was finished, only days before the 90-day tourist visa would have expired, I had to set about acquiring an inkan.

Handwritten signatures as a measure of personal authentication never took off in Japan. Instead, they use personal seals, or inkan. Foreigners can sometimes get away without them–I was permitted to sign for receipt of packages from the shipping company before I had mine–but for official and governmental documents, they are the only allowable means to document personal authentication. In other words, they’re necessary before you can get a bank account, before you can enter any sort of contract; I know they’re necessary for people to get married, and I suspect they’re required to acquire a lease. Fortunately, they’re not that difficult to acquire; all it took was a trip to the local photography shop, an order form, and a bit less than a hundred dollars, and two weeks later mine had come in.

Why do you go to the photography shop to get an inkan? I have no idea. Finding odd instances of misaligned expectations is the rule there instead of the exception. For some things, like this one, there’s no recourse to sort things out except to ask someone where on earth you get your seal made. Other things kind of fall into place in bits and pieces. Some things feel extremely natural: there was a small dry cleaner’s down the road from me, which cleaned and pressed all my work clothes for about $20 a week. The shopkeeper was one of the few people I met in Japan who seemed to have no comprehension English whatsoever, but the ritual was so familiar to both of us that it proceeded smoothly anyway: I would come in each Friday with that week’s used clothes, she would hand me the previous week’s clothing and ring it up, and I would pay and leave.

There’s no way I could run down all the little miscellaneous oddities that I encountered while I stayed there; I doubt I even remember the majority at this point. What I can say is that they made living there a wonderful experience. I liked Japan not only for the individual differences, but for the sheer fact that there were so many of them. Daily life was a matter of exploration, discovery, and adaptation. I suppose that with sufficient time in the country, that may have eventually ceased to be the case, but as things stand, that constant pressure to learn and evolve was exactly what I wanted and one of the reasons I look back at Japan with such fondness.

Despite that, it was very rare for me to speak in Japanese to anyone except my teacher or my students. Speaking Japanese with my teacher was natural. I didn’t speak much in Japanese with my students, but whenever I could illustrate a new concept or grammatical structure to one in their own language, I did. My students were paying for lessons in English, but I couldn’t really expect them to pick it up entirely by inference; it seemed only natural to communicate as effectively as possible when introducing a new idea.

With everyone else, though, it was rare for me to use the language. Probably the single biggest reason for that was embarrassment. The ability to express myself clearly and concisely is important to me; when my only option is to speak poorly, I would rather not speak at all. The only surprising thing was the extent to which that was possible.

Every Japanese person spends a minimum of six years learning English in school. The degree to which this study actually helps varies widely–it is far too common for them to simply memorize huge lists of vocabulary and phrases without any instruction of how to actually use the language to communicate–but it does mean that almost everyone in Japan has a certain baseline ability to understand simple sentences. Combining those with exaggerated hand motions and facial expressions gave me a means to communicate which covered pretty much everything that really needed to be said.

Sometimes I needed to express complex ideas; for that, I had to be inventive. I established my bank account by printing out pictures of the necessary forms that I found online. I shipped a package to America, from a convenience store, using stick figures and hasty sketches of what I wanted. People were very willing to accommodate me in this; nobody in Japan really expects anyone who doesn’t look Japanese to be able to speak the language.

Despite the fact that I shied away from speaking Japanese to most people, I made real efforts to understand what they were saying. It became second nature to attempt to think in Japanese as much as possible, and use English only when I didn’t have the vocabulary or grammar to express myself otherwise. The results of that attempt were rarely correct in a formal sense, but it felt like there was some good in constantly trying. If nothing else, it kept me thinking about the language, and it was more entertaining than studying properly.

Having a background in programming turned out to be a mixed blessing. Programmers by necessity have to have a certain facility with languages; a well-rounded programmer has at least two or three programming languages they’re comfortable with, plus maybe half a dozen technologies which aren’t properly programming languages but act kind of like them. The fact that Japanese is an immensely regular, well-structured language felt very good to me, as that is a trait shared by programming languages. It let me focus on really grokking the grammar and memorizing the vocabulary instead of having to worry all the time about exceptions and irregularities which plague European languages.

However, the single universal characteristic of computer languages is that they are all designed to be understandable to computers. Spelling and grammar aren’t refinements, they’re essential elements which must be used perfectly. The best possible result of a spelling or grammar error in a program is that the code won’t compile, and you have to go back and fix things to get your code to run at all. The worst result is that everything seems to work fine, but you’ve actually introduced a weird and difficult to debug error into your code which will come back to bite you months down the line. Programmers consequently get kind of fanatical about grammar, as it always requires less effort to express an idea properly the first time instead of having to go back and fix things later.

The most natural way for me to construct a valid grammatical construct, whether a sentence or a block of code, starts with semi-verbal intent. I then arrange the components I’ve assembled according to the appropriate grammar; if there is any doubt in my mind that I have done this in a valid manner, I look to online references to ensure that I have. This is efficient when programming, and I’ve completely internalized the rules of English, but it makes for a cumbersome process when attempting to express myself in Japanese.

Could I have worked to break that habit and simply speak uninhibitedly? I probably could have, but when programming, it’s actually a habit I want to maintain. It was far too easy to just accept that for me, grammatical perfection is mandatory, and therefore construct elaborate workarounds so that I could communicate in realtime without having to dive into a reference book every few seconds. Besides, there’s a certain amount of entertainment to be derived from using stick figures and handwaving to communicate; it was a contrarian impulse that required that whenever I couldn’t just blend in and act the way a Japanese person would, I’d at least be amusing at it. I think I generally succeeded; even though I couldn’t always know what the people who interacted with me were thinking, I was having fun.

Right now their zeitgeist is leaning towards Obama as a presidential candidate of choice. Unless something changes dramatically, he is probably who I will end up voting for. Is he ideal? No. Is he better than Bush? Infinitely.

I don’t know how the rest of you choose the candidates you support. I know that some people really do care enough to do all the research, but I suspect that the majority choose their candidates the same way that I do. That’s good enough for me; I just ask one thing of you: find someone you support, by whatever method, and vote for them. I hate the thought that the people I support lose out because of apathy on the part of apathy among my peers.

Incidentally, so far as I can tell, most people are acting like Bush is a lame duck already. Wouldn’t it be better to remove him from office now and end the annoyance? I suspect that our government doesn’t allow votes of no confidence; though I would gladly vote against Bush, I seem to recall some sort of civics lesson indicating that those votes are only ever held Somewhere Else. It’s too bad. I suspect that impeachment is the only way to get rid of him, and impeachment requires High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Unfortunately for America, incompetence, no matter how massive, is not a high crime.

Then again, there is always room for precedent. Do you suppose that it might be possible to hold some sort of referendum against Bush anyway? Or is this just my latent political enthusiasm overwhelming my common sense?

What really impressed me, though, was the incredible speed of the transaction. I’ve had a year to grow accustomed to waiting four to six weeks for even the most basic of purchases to arrive. Not so with this! I ordered the monitor early yesterday afternoon, and less than 24 hours later it is sitting on my desk showing what I type.

As much as I dislike some aspects of America, I have to admit that it can be almost unbelievably convenient living here.

First impression from the plane: there are a ton of parking lots in America. First impression from the ground: I’m going to really miss living in a country where obesity is more or less unheard of.

I only got around to assembling my computer today, not because of any shortage of parts, but because my whole family is almost unbelievably wired, and it’s easy enough to find a spare computer when I need one.

You may recall me assembling my computer some months ago: a high-end gaming rig which I hoped would last some years. I assembled it myself, not just to reduce costs, but because that way I could have complete control over which parts got integrated into the machine. I thus ended up with a tower case which sported, among other features, screwless drive bays. Instead of screwing in your hard drives, there’s a fairly clever mechanism which fastens them with small metal tabs which are inserted or removed by sliding a locking control.

Unfortunately for me, these metal tabs are not as secure as the more traditional screws. Somehow during transit the computer apparantly received some sort of very severe shock, as both drives somehow managed to come entirely loose and spend the remainder of the trip rampaging around the bottom of the case. The affected components are the drives themselves, the video card, and about half the motherboard. All told, about a thousand dollars of equipment may or may not have been destroyed–I haven’t yet had the guts to replace the cables (which were quite definitely broken) and see what works.

On the plus side, I still have my backup computer–I’m likely to try to set that one up tomorrow. On the minus side, I’m not happy about the lifespan of my machines–one way or the other, all the expensive custom computers I build for myself die within months.

I’m in the market for a cell phone. If you particularly like your carrier, and it has some sort of nationwide plan, I am all ears.

My movements for the next week are as follows:
Sunday: drive to Cape Cod to pick up my parents who will have bicycled its entire length as part of the Pan Mass Challenge.
Wednesday: go to Worcester in the hopes of finding someone interested in seeing me. Even better, find someone to take me in for the next few days while I meet people.
Saturday: fly to Seattle.

Over the course of the next month, I expect to skydive, test for the Army, fly several thousand miles, drive several hundred miles, and eat out more often than in. I am going to attempt to spend less than $1500 on everything during the month, but I can afford to blow that budget out of the water if necessary (read: if something really interesting and or cool shows up). This is my best chance at vacation for some time, and I intend to spend it memorably. If you want to join me, just let me know.