I’ve started reading Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State. I haven’t made it too far in yet and I’m still reading through the section on pre-state political communities. Today, I came across a particularly fascinating fact about confidence in “public” treasuries.
Simply put, the confidence in the government’s ability and willingness to honor its obligations was non-existent; it is not for nothing that, in Hebrew, “sending one’s money down the drain” is derived from a term whose original meaning was “public treasury” (Greek timaion).
(The quote is from page 55 of the paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-521-65629-0.)
Recently, there was a new release of Ubuntu. I’ve had relatively good experiences with past releases, and I was looking forward to trying out the new notification system, so I decided to run the upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04. This turned out to be a very bad idea.
I think it might have been something to do with a video card but I’ve never had a lot of luck messing around with anything related to graphics. The system was continually locking up: i.e. display frozen with an unresponsive mouse and keyboard leaving me with one option: hard reset the system. It was really frustrating, and a fresh install from CD (originally I had used the Update Manager) didn’t seem to resolve the issues. I couldn’t find anything in the release notes but I could have missed it.
Anyway, I really need my PC to be working right now, so I was going to revert to 8.10. I didn’t have an 8.10 install CD available so I downloaded the current 8.04 ISO and made a new CD from that. I moved my PC to another location where I could use a faster Internet connection and other computers to burn the CDs and got 8.04 up and running. At the other location, I had statically configured the network IP address via Network Manager. For reasons I don’t understand very well that appears to have cause a broken Network Manager once I had completed the upgrade to 8.10. The network connection worked but Network Manager had no defined connections (“No valid active connections found!”) and would not take over management when I defined one through the applet.
I found some threads on the Ubuntu Forums but still wasn’t getting anywhere. I also found this bug in Launchpad. I’m comfortable with Linux but not an expert by any means so it took me a while to resolve the issue. In the end I commented out any reference to eth0 in /etc/network/interfaces, purged Network Manager (apt-get purge network-manager), and rebooted my computer. Then I reinstalled network-manager and rebooted again. Might not be exactly the right procedure but it seemed to work. Just making changes to the configuration files and logging off and back on didn’t work. Doing that caused other problems like not being able to launch the Terminal app.
The whole process was made more frustrating because now I have to reinstall and reconfigure many of the bits and pieces of my working environment (apache, vmware, etc). I also accidentally deleted my archive of podcasts and downloads somewhere along the line. Obviously, that’s not all the result of trying to install Jaunty but it does more or less guarantee I won’t be trying the upgrade again.
I have the official Delicious extension installed in Firefox. It’s a great extension and I use it somewhat regularly, but I recently noticed a problem with it.
I was trying to use the Web Feed icon that appears in the address bar to add a feed to Google Reader. Normally, this should not be difficult given there is an option to set Google as the default handler for Web Feeds in Applications tab of the Preferences. (I have Web Feeds set that way.)
The problem appears to be caused by the Delicious feature that hides the regular Firefox bookmarks menu. This feature also replaces the “Live Bookmarks” feed subscription option with a command to add a Delicious bookmark. That’s fine with me, except that no amount of changing Web Feed preferences will replace the “Live Bookmarks” command attached to the Web Feed icon with what I want.
(If I disable the Delicious Bookmarks add-on the preference does effect as expected and clicking the Web Feed icon redirects to the default reader.)
Update: Turns out this is a known issue and that a fix is being worked on.
Garth Turner Joins the Liberals
The news item of the day for Canadian political junkies is that former Conservative, more recently Independent, MP Garth Turner has joined the Liberals. I’ve read only a little bit of the online commentary and it mostly seems to be what I would expect.
The current incarnation of Garth Turner, MP was a lightning rod for criticism and political chatter of all sorts from the beginning. (I wrote “current incarnation” because I know almost nothing of his previous turn in Parliament before the Liberal landslide of 1993.) Anyway, from my perspective this is often a good thing for the individual member (especially a backbencher with a wee bit of wit and some stage ability), but it rarely does much for the party. A party on the Opposition side may be the exception but that’s certainly not always the case.
However, Mr. Turner has also recently represented himself as politician with certain strong principles and his actions today muddy that water quite a bit. He presented fairly sensible arguments for why joining the Liberal caucus does not violate his stated principle against MPs joining other parties without going back to the electorate. And, given the opportunity this move provided to challenge the government over its own late arrivals, today’s announcement was an effective political tactic. But, Mr. Turner’s actions, no matter what he says, do not represent a triumph of principle (at least not the one about MPs and party membership).
It is my contention that in politics principles are guidelines at best, rhetorical frosting at worst, and usually something in between. I don’t have much interest in arguing whether this is bad or good, but rather to establish a base of reference. This is a reality that I find is often obscured by proselytizing for one partisan side or another, and indeed for our civic religion itself, i.e. the idea of democratic government as the saviour from all ills. With that said, before today I would have placed Mr. Turner well over on the guidelines side of the political principles continuum and nothing I’ve read today has changed that.
My interest here is not to besmirch Mr. Turner (even if it were my opinion of him is quite irrelevant) but to elevate the bar of principled action and to make a point about politics in general. Being truly principled is very nearly impossible (I personally fail to be so every day), but I would appreciate if more politicians acknowledged that directly. Often an unequivocal statement is made, possibly with good intentions or maybe just to make a point in a verbal joust, and then later some circumstance requires that this be mediated or abandoned. There are times when I would accept an argument that such turns of events are evidence of hypocrisy, but despite my cynicism about politics I’m unwilling to say that’s always the case.
I’m not sure how I would have approached this situation if I were to be in Mr. Turner’s place. It seems to me that he made his decision by giving more weight to other considerations, in particular his desire for more influence in Parliament, which is entirely valid. And, I can’t say with certainty that any of the alternatives would have improved my view of today’s events. (I’m most certain Mr. Turner will be criticized no matter what he chose to do or say; as I said earlier he is a political lightning rod.) Would it have been better if he had simply announced his intention to seek the Liberal nomination in Halton? How many people would appreciate the nuance of an Independent MP joining with a Parliamentary caucus without joining the party itself?
In the final analysis, I think Mr. Turner’s statement on this comes very close to acknowledging the distance between his earlier statements and today’s announcement. It may just be that in the dirty world of modern politics everything gets dragged down into the muck. And so, I remain a little bit disappointed and just as cynical and pessimistic about this whole politics thing.
Just for the record, I dislike most of the politicians I’ve actually met in person, I’m firmly in the non-partisan camp, and I generally don’t vote. However, following the sometimes amusing and occasionally horrify spectacle that is politics in Canada (and it’s fellow democracies) is a guilty pleasure. You should need no further evidence than that to convict me of hypocrisy.