February 2022 – Into the Woods

Country comfort food

Biscuits are a misdemeanor. Fried biscuits are a felony.

The fact that it’s February is justification enough for comfort food. But the parlous condition of the world at the moment, with Putin (hopefully) knocked back onto his heels in Ukraine, is even more justification. Pinto beans, biscuits, and slaw are a Southern staple. Onions are always served with pinto beans. Danish Havarti is not exactly a Southern staple, but it’s a comfort food that goes ever so nicely with beans, slaw, and biscuits.

I was surprised to learn that not all Havarti comes from Denmark. I buy it at Trader Joe’s. I need to check on the source, but it’s possible that it comes from Wisconsin or Canada. According to the Wikipedia article, Havarti is a staple in Denmark, where 17,000 metric tons are produced each year. I can certainly testify that, in Danish hotels (which don’t necessarily reflect the kitchen tables of the Danish population), the breakfast buffets always include huge loaves of Havarti, mounted on a rotating-wire device for slicing.

Fry your biscuits in (what else) an iron skillet. I shortened the biscuits above with butter and fried them in olive oil.

The Urkainian national anthem

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily post on Facebook, writes this morning:

“The Ukrainian people have done far more than hold off Putin’s horrific attack on their country. Their refusal to permit a corrupt oligarch to take over their homeland and replace their democracy with authoritarianism has inspired the people of democracies around the world.

“The colors of the Ukrainian flag are lighting up buildings across North America and Europe and musical performances are beginning with the Ukrainian anthem. Protesters are marching and holding vigils for Ukraine. The answer of the soldier on Ukraine’s Snake Island to the Russian warship when it demanded that he and his 12 compatriots lay down their weapons became instantly iconic. He answered: ‘Russian warship: Go f**k yourself.’

“That defiance against what seemed initially to be an overwhelming military assault has given Ukraine a psychological edge over the Russians, some of whom seem bewildered at what they are doing in Ukraine. It has also offered hope that the rising authoritarianism in the world is not destined to destroy democracy, that authoritarians are not as strong as they have projected.”

Though the Ukrainian national anthem sounds as though it was written for this very moment in history, its origins are in the 19th Century, and it was banned during the Soviet years: Shche ne vmerla Ukrainy i slava, i volia.

Nay, thou art not dead, Ukraine, see, thy glory’s born again,
And the skies, O brethren, upon us smile once more!
As in Springtime melts the snow, so shall melt away the foe,
And we shall be masters in our own home.

The new LGBT numbers

Augustine of Hippo with his hair on fire. Philippe de Champaigne, circa 1645. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A new Gallup poll includes a surprising new statistic. That is that 20.8 percent of Generation Z, defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. What’s surprising is that this change is happening so fast, not that the change is occurring. And no matter what religionists may think, this is a return to the pre-Christian normal, not some sort of breakdown in society.

It is a breakdown, though, in the iron grip of Augustinian religion. I am very happy for Generation Z, but this should multiply our sadness for so many millions of lives made miserable, for 2,000 years, by the church. It’s clearer now just how many millions of lives that was.

Alfred Kinsey shocked the world back in the 1940s with his study of male sexuality. Many said that Kinsey’s numbers, which were based on behavior rather than identity, must have been wrong. Now Kinsey’s numbers and contemporary polls are starting to align. Depending on which of Kinsey’s numbers one compares with contemporary polls, we may be even more surprised by the generation after Generation Z.

There is another sad element here. That is that the young people of Generation Z have little awareness of the history that brought them these gains. The short version is that they can thank the Boomers for it. It was the Boomers and their friends who rose up in great enough numbers not to put up with it anymore and to start society on its return to the norm.

You’re welcome, Generation Z.

Beneath the tips of the iceberg

Jill Stein (1) and Michael Flynn (2) with Vladimir Putin (3), December 10, 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily post this morning on Facebook, is clear about the right-wing plan:

“Today’s invasion of democratic Ukraine by authoritarian Putin is important. It not only has broken a long period of peace in Europe, it has brought into the open that authoritarians are indeed trying to destroy democracy.”

Richardson always chooses her words very carefully, aware that she is writing the first draft of history, and so “brought into the open” are the right words. It has been easy enough to identify, by connecting the dots, the most deadly struggle in the world today. That is the coordinated attempt by the kleptocratic global oligarchy to defeat democracy, to install corrupt right-wing governments everywhere possible, to reverse the post-World War II order, to keep oil billionaires rich for as long as possible, to subvert the rule of law to serve kleptocracy while using the law and the prisons against the opposition, and to force as many people as possible to live in right-wing police states, slaving for as little pay as possible, without social safety nets, to make the rich richer. Not only is it clear now what they are trying to do, it’s also clear who is on which side.

The installation of Donald Trump in the White House and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are features of the same plan. Yes, Putin meddled in the 2016 election. Yes, Trump has some sort of connection to Russia or Russian money that we still don’t know about. Many of the agents of the oligarchy have been exposed, for example Michael Flynn, who actually became Trump’s National Security Advisor. As Wikipedia mentions, “Flynn suggested the president should suspend the Constitution, silence the press, and hold a new election under military authority.” Just what Putin wanted.

It’s all of a piece, all part of the same plan. Though Trump failed to retain power long enough to back Putin’s military moves toward the west, Trump succeeded spectactularly at making the Republican Party part of the fascist project and educating susceptible Americans as fascists. The American systems of right-wing propaganda and Putin’s propaganda were aligned, leveraged by the malevolent use of technology. Just imagine how much more hopeless the global situation would be today if Trump were still in power, if the United States supported Russia’s military moves against democracy, if Trump was still in a position to strangle NATO, and if Americans were still being propagandized by a Trump White House.

There is still much that we don’t know, of course. The full extent of Trump’s criminality and treason is not yet known. The full details of the global plan to destroy democracy are not yet known by the public, though no doubt the Jan. 6 committee in the U.S. House of Representatives will reveal a great deal in its hearings this year. One of the elements of the plan that continues to puzzle me, though, is how some left-wing extremists came to be a part of it. I am thinking of the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and of so-called journalists — but actually propagandists and conspirators — such as Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange.

Who knows what Putin still has up his sleeve. But the invasion of Ukraine, I suspect (and hope) was a Hail Mary move. If Trump were still installed in the White House, then crushing Ukraine would have been a cakewalk. Putin is said to be a gambler and a risk-taker. The odds for Putin may look poor at the moment, with the United States and NATO up against him. Nevertheless, many people will die, and the economic destruction will be felt around the world. I am not the first to say it by any means, but it’s worth repeating: We are all Ukrainians now.

‘Typewriters are haunted’

Tom Hanks in California Typewriter ⬆︎

Twenty years ago, typewriters were headed toward extinction. No new typewriters of any quality were being made. The surviving typewriters were deteriorating, unused and unloved, and many were being junked. Around 2010, typewriters started making a comeback, particularly among young people who were born after the Golden Age of typewriters who were intrigued by the typewriters’ elegance, magic, and retro quality. In 2017, Tom Hanks, who is a typewriter collector, made a beautiful documentary, California Typewriter. That documentary gave new energy to the movement to save, and use, old typewriters.

I acquired my first typewriter when I was eleven or twelve years old. My career was in newspaper newsrooms, so I have been around typewriters all my life. I confess that, around 1985, fascinated by computers, I stopped using typewriters. But around 1997 I salvaged an IBM Selectric III from the basement of the San Francisco Examiner and had it restored. A couple of weeks ago, while wasting time on eBay, I came across an Adler 21d electric — a huge office machine that weighs almost 45 pounds — and I bought it. It looked almost new, but it needed help. I’d collect typewriters if I could. But, unlike Tom Hanks, I don’t have anywhere to put 250 typewriters. Two or three well chosen, and well loved, typewriters will have to do for me.

California Typewriter interviews a good many people, but it focuses on a typewriter shop in Berkeley, California, across the bay from San Francisco. It’s horrifying, but the typewriter shop closed in 2017 not long after Tom Hanks made his documentary.

There is a line in the documentary, spoken by a poet or writer, “Typewriters are haunted.” That is it exactly. There is something about old typewriters that is alive, that has a clear personality, a kind of mechanical spirit that is made happy when someone uses them to write. One pushes words into a computer. But a typewriter’s magic is that it pulls the words out. I thought I must have been the only person in the world who sometimes writes on a typewriter, then scans the typewritten page to get the text into a computer. Thanks to California Typewriter, now I see that I’m not the only one.

The biggest problem with owning, using, or collecting typewriters these days is that the number of typewriter shops and typewriter mechanics continues to dwindle. With my IBM Selectric III, I was fortunate to get a full restoration done by a technician trained by IBM who was in his eighties at the time. That was ten years ago, and the Selectric continues to work perfectly. With my Adler 21d electric, I was able to get some help (and a diagnosis of the typewriter’s problems) from Ed at A.B.C. Office Systems near Asheville, North Carolina — the nearest remaining typewriter shop near me. Because I’m mechanically minded and have some pretty good tools, I was able to do much of the work myself to get the Adler typewriter back into working condition.

Manual typewriters are much easier to find and easier to restore. I have a fetish for electric typewriters, though. They’re faster, easier to use for hours at a time, and somehow they seem more alive to me. The electric typewriters made in the 1970s by Adler, in West Germany, particularly fascinate me. I regard those Adler electrics as the apex of typewriter engineering and manufacturing before the IBM Selectrics came out with the “golf ball” typewriters as opposed to the typewriters with little hammers.

As someone in the documentary points out, typewriters — good ones, anyway — will never be made again. The typewriters we have now, and the neglected typewriters that we can save, are the only typewriters we will ever have.

Often even typewriter lovers know very little about the long history of typewriters, or how the office machine industry, through the turn of the century and the world wars, led straight to the development of computers. Below I mention a book that discusses some of this history.

A writer writes, in California Typewriter ⬆︎

California Typewriter trailer, on YouTube ⬆︎

My recently acquired Adler 21d electric typewriter ⬆︎

My video on restoring my Adler 21d typewriter ⬆︎

Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs & Remington Rand & the Industry They Created, 1865-1956. James W. Cortada. Princeton University Press, 1993. 350 pages.

Typewriters were an important part of the technologies that led to today’s computers. This book concludes, in fact, that because of the extraordinary demand for efficiently moving data to support the allied armies during World War II, “one could conclude that democracy could not be saved without the typewriter.”

The machines that saved democracy — including typewriters, calculators, and the earliest computers — are in museums now, if they were lucky. Less lucky examples of some very beautiful mechanical technology are waiting for us to find them, preserve them, and even use them. The luckiest old machines of all those that are still being used.

The academic left

Those of us who identify with the left are, to a remarkable degree, intellectually on our own. We read a lot, certainly, including the output of liberal and even leftist pundits. We may be members of the Democratic Party’s coalition, but the Democratic coalition includes a broad range of political interests, and thus the party makes no effort to tell us what to think. A few months ago I was wondering: Is there any publication that is smart enough and wise enough to make being a leftist a little less lonely? I had subscribed to The Nation for a while, but I quickly grew tired of its low-information, often strident, and heat-of-the-moment articles. I don’t even check their web site anymore. The biggest portion of political commentary (or propaganda, if you wish), both on the left and the right, is aimed at feeding our anger for the purpose of keeping us engaged.

We leftists are certainly capable of forming our own opinions about the train of daily political dramas. We can reason from our moral and political values (fairness, justice, caring, equality). And we may subscribe to well developed philosophical theories (for me that would be John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice). But each of us has limited knowledge, and taking a strong position on a particular issue had best be done with a reasonably good knowledge of that issue. That is the great weakness of the professional punditry. Day after day, though they are experts on nothing, they have to keep cranking it out. Members of think tanks (such as the Brookings Institution) can do a somewhat better job, because they are expected to spend some time on research, and they have areas of expertise. If you follow a serious magazine such as The Atlantic (which is not a leftist magazine by any means), you may find that the weakest articles are written by the staff (who are cranking it out), and the strongest articles are written by people who write only about subjects where they have some expertise and have done the research.

So then, what if there was a magazine with a staff of only four (and thus with no one cranking out articles), a magazine in which all the articles are written by the leading academics in a given area — people whose profession is not punditry but research and expertise. Dissent magazine is that type of magazine.

That I was not familiar with Dissent magazine and had to go looking for it is not terribly embarrassing. Its circulation is only about 5,000, maybe less. I think it would be safe to say that it is an elite publication. It is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It’s a quarterly, with a subscription price of $30 a year. The magazine was founded in 1954. It has a history of punching above its weight, if you measure the weight by the number of subscribers. When Dissent observed its 60th birthday in 2013, there were flattering articles: “A Lion of the Left Wing Celebrates Six Decades“, in the New York Times; and “A Modest Utopia: Sixty Years of Dissent,” by George Packer in the New Yorker. If you are a leftist, you will not be embarrassed by having a copy of it seen on your desk.

The caricature of leftist academic writing and thinking is that it’s opaque and loaded down with postmodern jargon, with a lingering Marxist fetish. With Dissent magazine that is not the case. The focus of the winter 2022 issue is “Beyond Bidenomics.” Except for an article on the Chilean economy, “The End of Neoliberalism in Chile?”, I read it cover to cover. There are advantages, I think, for a quarterly publication: altitude, enough altitude to provide some perspective and to stand clear of the daily media circus. Even monthly publications have to do some cranking. And I suspect that one reason for the narcissistic vacuousness of the way-overrated New Yorker is that the New Yorker has to crank that stuff out once a week.

You can check on Dissent magazine on its web site.

New York Times v. Palin (updated at end)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It’s easy to see what right-wingers are up to here. They want a lower court decision that they can take to the U.S. Supreme Court so that the Supreme Court can change the legal standard used in libel cases, thereby clamping down on the First Amendment. Then, as the right-wing mind sees it, right-wing politicians would be able to sue the pants off the liberal media every other day and win. As they see it, right-wing propagandists with their right-wing alternate reality would then have complete control of the media landscape, and the liberal media would be intimidated into kissing the behinds of lying right-wing politicians even more than they already do. But they are delusional.

This subject may seem a little dull for those who — unlike me — didn’t spend their career inside newspaper newsrooms. But this is very important, and we all need to pay attention as it plays out. There’s a good chance that the Supreme Court may give them what they want.

First, I’d suggest reading a piece in today’s Washington Post. A law professor from the University of Chicago writes about a movement that supports undoing the 1964 libel case that set the legal standard used in deciding libel cases. The piece is “Is the legal standard for libel outdated? Sarah Palin could help answer.”

It’s important to keep in mind that the legal standard of “actual malice” in New York Times v. Sullivan applies only to public figures. Because of New York Times v. Sullivan, it is much more difficult to win a libel case against a public figure than against a person who stays at home and minds his own business. (All politicians are public figures.) The idea behind this standard, especially in light of the First Amendment, is that in the United States we want — and that the Founding Fathers intended — an open and robust public discussion of public affairs, with no one able to restrict what others say or intimidate others into silence on matters of public importance. The reason Fox News wasn’t sued into the dirt twenty years ago for its constant lies and defamations is — you guessed it — New York Times v. Sullivan. We tolerated the lies, slanders, and alternate reality of Fox News on account of a matter of principle as well as settled law — the open and robust discussion of public affairs.

But, as in all things, right-wingers are delusional. If the Supreme Court makes it easier for politicians to win libel suits against the news media, then right-wing politicians may occasionally win one, because the responsible media do sometimes make mistakes. But it is the right-wing media that lie and slander constantly, intentionally, and with impunity under New York Times v. Sullivan. With the “actual malice” standard gone, the only standards remaining would be truth and proof of harm. Right-wingers seem to believe their own lies. They also seem to believe the lies they tell about Democrats and liberals. So they are blind to what would happen, simply because courts — unlike right-wing minds — are able to sort out truth from lies. That’s why right-wingers got laughed out of court after court with their lawsuits claiming that Biden stole the 2020 election. If New York Times v. Sullivan goes down, try accusing Hillary Clinton of eating children and see what happens.

For all I know, there may be some reasonable arguments in favor of a new American standard of libel against public figures. But if that standard changes, we’d better look out for the consequences — a tsunami of lawsuits that would throw the American media landscape into chaos and put many financially marginal news operations (and bloggers!) out of business. Only rich news organizations such as the New York Times and the Washington Post would be able to afford to defend themselves against malicious lawsuits, and even they would be confused and cowed. The use of the word “malice” in New York Times v. Sullivan is ironic, because overturning the “actual malice” standard would clog the courts with malicious lawsuits against the media.

But the first victims of the chaos, and the first media operations to go down in flames, simply because their entire operations are based on lies and defamation, would be Fox News and the lesser network of right-wing propaganda operations.

Part of what is so dangerous and disgusting about the right-wing mind (Trump is a prime example) is that they see themselves as above the law. For them, as in the places they admire such as Russia and Hungary, the law is a tool to be used against their political enemies. That is their intent here, and they’ve been working at it for years. But abusing the courts is not yet possible in the United States. Our courts still function in spite of (as in responsible newsrooms) occasional errors.

If the Supreme Court changes the legal standard in libel cases, then right-wing know-nothings had better brace themselves for the mother of all blowbacks and a nuclear-scale backfire straight into their miserable faces. Those of us who care about truth and fairness would finally have a way of making them pay for their lies by sueing them into the dirt.

Update: Andrew Rice, in New York magazine, makes the same case as I make here: If Sarah Palin Wins, Fox News Could Lose. I would add to that, though, that losing and appealing the case to the Supreme Court may be the plan.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde: A Life. Matthew Sturgis. Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. 838 pages.

It’s an important question, and there probably are many answers: A hundred and twenty years after his death, why does the life of Oscar Wilde still matter, and why does Wilde interest us so much today? This is the second vast biography in 30 years. Richard Ellman’s biography (1988) still sells and was a fine piece of scholarship. Sturgis’s biography is even better.

Sturgis offers no opinions on why Wilde matters until the four-page epilogue. Wilde matters today, Sturgis says, because he was right about a lot of things.

The tragedy was that Wilde was born into the wrong place and time. Even at the time, France and Italy would not have destroyed Wilde the way England did. France and Italy were often refuges for Wilde, though they were not places where Wilde could have become famous.

At times while reading this book, I wanted to scold Wilde. Clearly he was vain, and much of his posings, posturings, and sayings were a show driven by the desire for fame. Again and again he made ridiculously bad decisions. He was clueless about how to handle money. If you add up what Wilde earned versus what he squandered (not just money), then the squanderings at the time of Wilde’s pathetic death (Nov. 30, 1900) surely exceeded the earnings — except for the fact that Wilde left a legacy that we continue to value today. I don’t recall that Ellman was clear about the fact that Wilde was born to enormous privilege. Sturgis tells us much more about Wilde’s aristocratic origins in Ireland and the open doors for Wilde at Oxford. Much should be expected out of so much privilege.

And yet foibles aside, Wilde comes across, always, as a kind, generous, and very decent human being. When he damaged others — as he certainly did with his family — it was always out of blindness for which he subsequently repented (and often relapsed), never wilful malice. There were many people of high achievement who saw Wilde as a fraud but who, after talking with him, had to concede that Wilde was a superb scholar and a more genuine person than they had supposed.

The villains in this story are the Victorians. The ogres are a few horrible people such as Lord Alfred Douglas and his father, John Douglas, the 9th marquess of Queensbury. The saints are people such as Constance, Wilde’s wife, who died a few months before Wilde died, probably from grief and shame. Another saint is Robbie Ross, who stuck with Wilde until the end and who, as Wilde’s literary executor, did much of the work than preserved the record of Wilde’s life and works.

In 2017, the Queen of England pardoned Wilde, along with 75,000 other Britons who had been convicted under the abolished laws that sent Wilde to prison and led to his death. That took almost 120 years. What a sorry race of human beings we white people are, even if we’re slowly getting better.

I’ll venture one other thought on why Oscar Wilde still matters. It’s that the Victorians are still among us, and that the work that Oscar Wilde bravely started remains incomplete. If Wilde’s life was a warning to other misfits about how to live in the wrong place at the wrong time, other lives in this story are models — Robbie Ross, for example, with his loyalty, integrity, and his talent for salvaging as much as possible from catastrophe.

Math education

A rare desktop scientific calculator (Victor Model 230), circa 1978. It works perfectly, though it resolves to only seven decimal places.

If I had children or grandchildren (I don’t), I would take a very keen interest in math education. Things have changed since I was young, and for the better, I think. I was never good at math. Math courses felt like abuse to me. Partly this was because no math teacher, as far as I can remember, ever had a word to say about what math (as opposed to ordinary arithmetic) was good for.

I struggle now to remember anything at all that I learned in required college courses in math. The only memory I can recover is doing interpolation on tables of logarithms. We don’t even use logarithm tables anymore, of course. We just press a key on a scientific calculator. Somewhere I learned, and retained, a low-level competence with algebra and the basic concepts of the properties of right triangles. That’s about it.

Yet as I got older, I increasingly found physics fascinating. Over the years I have read many books on physics. But when I come to the math, in the form of differential equations, I skip over it. The equations might as well be Greek.

Was this my failing, as a student? Or did the educational system fail me? If we have no concept of how to read differential equations, then we will try to read them as algebra. Differential equations are not algebra, though algebra is used to solve some of them. Sure, computers can substitute numbers for the variables in differential equations and make calculations. But in most cases the computer is applying an algorithm (a sort of numerical recipe) rather than doing algebra. Differential equations are neither algebra nor calculus (though an understanding of algebra and calculus must precede an understanding of differential equations). Virtually everything we know about the natural world is expressed in differential equations.

If I were age 19 again, I wouldn’t avoid math the way I did then. That much was my fault. But it’s also true that the educational system failed people of my generation.

I came across an article in Education Week that makes a strong case for teaching calculus in high school. The piece includes this factoid: “Until about 1980, calculus was seen as a higher education course, primarily for those interested in mathematics, physics, or other hard sciences, and only about 30,000 high school students took the course.”

My guess is that liberal arts colleges before the 1980s (and maybe even now, for all I know) don’t put much emphasis on calculus. My guess is that only students on engineering and science tracks, whether in high school or college, get the right kind of instruction in calculus. According to the piece in Education Week, today 15 percent of high school students take calculus — those students who are on an engineering and science track.

There are some disappointing trends here. According to Education Week, quoting Uri Treisman, a math professor at the University of Texas at Austin:

“More than half of students who take calculus in high school come from families with a household income above $100,000 a year, according to a study this month in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education. By contrast, only 15 percent of middle-income students and 7 percent of those in the poorest 25 percent of families take the course.

“‘Math is even more important to upward mobility now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, because … it’s seen as related to your general ability to solve problems quickly,’ Treisman said, adding that as a result, ‘there’s general anxiety and panic about equity issues for anything new, even though the current [calculus] pathway is a burial ground for students of color.'”

Most high school students who take calculus are white or Asian. Education Week:

“For example, in 2015-16, black students were 9 percentage points less likely than their white peers to attend a high school that offered calculus and half as likely to take the class if they attended a school that offered it. And if black students did get into a class, their teachers were also less likely to be certified to teach calculus than those of white students, according to an Education Week Research Center analysis of federal civil rights data.”

As an adult with strong interests in physics and science, I’m hoping to get better at math and reduce the humiliation of having to skip over the equations in books I read. So far, so good, with the help of the book below. One nice thing that has changed since I was age 19 is that today we can let computers and calculators do the calculations while we humans concentrate on concepts and, hopefully, real insight into how things work in the natural world. Just learning to operate a scientific calculator is educational. Behind each key is an important concept.

As for our young people, surely we should do everything we can to help all them — even our young artists and writers — get a math education that goes beyond algebra to calculus and beyond calculus to a reasonable ability to read and understand differential equations.

For adults and others who evaded calculus or to whom calculus was never even offered

Bitcoin, schmitcoin

A very small, modest, home-size “mining” rig for bitcoin. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

We are surrounded by crazy people and fanatics. Fanaticism, of course, is found in many varieties. Some varieties are much more dangerous than others. Here’s my list of the top three categories of crazy people and fanatics, ordered by the danger they pose to the rest of us:

1. Right-wing fanatics. Subsets include Republicans, Trumpists, white supremicists, neo-Nazis, militias, radical libertarians, and right-wing and libertarian billionaire activists.

2. Religionists. Subsets include so-called evangelicals, all proselytizing religions including jihadists, those caught up in moral panics such as book-banning and policing bathrooms against transsexuals, and all those who are trying to use the law to impose their religion and wrongthink on others.

3. Techno-utopians. Subsets include bitcoiners and all those who believe that technology can solve all problems. Billionaires with rockets are in this category.

There is a great deal of crossover, of course, because fanatic personalities are drawn to multiple types of fanatacism. There are many religionists who also are right-wing fanatics, and many techno-utopians who also are libertarian fanatics. The nature of fanaticism is such that all fanatics proselytize, and all fanatics are eager consumers of proselytization. I also can’t help but notice that the conflict caused by the three types of fanatics listed above drives about 75 percent of each day’s news. Fanatics are always in our faces. All of them are threatened by reason; all of them are empty of compassion.

I have paid very little attention to the bitcoin hype. But yesterday Vox carried a piece that I deemed worth trying to plough through. It’s “Web3 is the future, or a scam, or both: So what exactly is Web3, and why is everyone in Silicon Valley obsessed with it?”

Do I understand bitcoin or “Web3” after reading the Vox piece? No, I don’t, not really. Web3 appears to be nothing but hype closely connected with bitcoin, and if anything ever comes of it, no doubt we’ll find out about it. But there is a very concrete element to bitcoin, though, in the form of entire warehouses full of computers sucking electricity and “mining” for bitcoin. The word “mining” is deliberately misleading and is part of the hype. The nature of bitcoin is such that every single transaction with bitcoin must be encrypted and stored by every bitcoin server in the world. That’s supposed to be a feature, not a bug, because the control of the currency is shared by many people rather than by any government or central bank. Government, to libertarians and most techno-utopians, is a dirty word. Instead of governments, bitcoin invites us to invest our trust in the corporatized fanatical nerds who can raise the money to build huge data centers full of bitcoin computers. To me, a currency that requires computers that suck up unbelievable amounts of energy is ridiculous. An article at CNet attempts to quantify the energy cost: “Here’s how much electricity it takes to mine Bitcoin.”

The CNet piece says:

“The Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimated that one Bitcoin transaction takes 1,544 kWh to complete, or the equivalent of approximately 53 days of power for the average US household.

“To put that into money terms, the average cost per kWh in the US is 13 cents. That means a Bitcoin transaction would generate more than $200 in energy bills.

“Bitcoin mining used more energy than Argentina, according to an analysis from Cambridge University in February [2021]. At 121.36 terawatt-hours, crypto mining would be in the top 30 of countries based on energy consumption.”

We’re talking about 53 days of power for a single transaction. And that’s only one reason why you will never use bitcoin to pay for a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Even the fastest “mining” computers need about ten minutes for the computations that “validate” a transaction. This is explained in the Wikipedia article. Would Starbucks customers wait ten minutes for their receipt after whipping their bitcoin Gold Card out of their “wallet”? Does it make sense to burn $200 worth of electricity in Texas and Kazakhstan to log a $5 transaction for coffee in Palo Alto?

And you knew there was a pyramid element to bitcoin, didn’t you? I won’t try to explain it, but the nature of the algorithms is such that “mining” bitcoins requires an increasing amount of computing power as the number of transactions grows. That is, those who mined bitcoin early did so cheaply, but it’s much more expensive now, and it will be even more expensive next year. How the ten-minute waits and $200 transaction costs are supposed to work with Web3 are not explained. One thing is clear to me, though. There are plenty of people out there who are eager to start selling us virtual stuff that doesn’t exist. That’s why we are hearing so much hype about the metaverse, or Facebook’s “Meta.” People like Mark Zuckerberg plan to make a killing selling us non-existent stuff in a non-existent place. Non-existent stuff may not clutter our landfills like stuff from China, but it does burn electricity and transfer money from prey to predators.

The moral question of tolerance is complicated and subtle, and I won’t digress into that here except to say that tolerant people are not required to tolerate any old thing that some human beings might want to do. I’m not very tolerant of people who abuse cats or beat their children or who lie to the public or rip people off. It’s not just that fanatics are different. It’s that, cognitively and/or morally, there is something wrong with every single one of them. For the most part, bitcoin fanaticism is something that we can ignore by not giving them any money, unlike white supremicism or moral panics, which we cannot ignore. How do we oppose them? Ridicule, and our contempt, are a start.