Having just finished reading Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies: Plato, I must say that he makes a pretty damning case against Plato. However, I think it is plain that his defense of Socrates is very much in error.

His claim that since the most totalitarian and antidemocratic dialogs (Republic, Laws) seem to be among the later dialogs, this implies that they were written after Socrates' death, when Plato's philosophy was drifting from Socrates' more egalitarian ideas. Popper dismisses the "Socrates" character in the dialogs as Plato attempting to lend his destructive theories some weight of authority in a cunning plan to undercut and destroy the democratic leanings of Athens.

In the last chapter (Chap 10, "The Open Society and Its Enemies)" he gives some background to the greek culture wars going on during Socrates' and Plato's times: the rise of democratic (and imperialist) Athens, the cultural conflict between the other conservative greek polis such as Sparta and Thebes and the more progressive Athens, the progression of that conflict into the Peloponnesian war, the oligarchic coup that led to the bloody "Rule of the Thirty Tyrants" (many of whom were Socrates' students, including Plato's uncle Critias), the democratic revolt of Athenian democracy that overthrew the oligarchy, and the new democracy's sentencing of Socrates to his choice of exile or death on the charge of corrupting Athenian youth, which Popper interprets as meaning teaching many of the thirty that had overthrown democracy and murdered more Athenians than did the Spartans in the entire Peloponnesian war.

Popper then goes on to claim that Socrates' association with these was purely benevolent, that the apparent contrast between his "obvious" democratic leanings and their obviously (and murderously) antidemocratic leanings was due to his earnest desire to convert them to the democratic party.

This seems to me to be a case of pure wishful thinking. The critical elements here: the drift from democracy to tyranny that Plato's dialogs attributes to Socrates, the association of Socrates late in life with a large number of antidemocratic forces, and the resurgent's democracy's exile-or-death sentence on Socrates can most easily be explained by Socrates' own philosophical shift from egalitarianism to totalitarianism during the turmoil of the time (Thucydides mentions him several times in his account of the Peloponnesian war).

The case Popper attempts to make to rehabilitate Socrates, in comparison, is ludicrousness itself. The near-simultaneous rebellion of nearly all of his students against his earlier philosophy. The evil plot of Plato to co-opt Socrates good name to lend credence to his destructive social ideas by lying about his teacher's true teachings after his death. The participation of many of his students in the bloody oligarchic coup, and the even bloodier purges during their reign that, somehow Socrates opposed (without, however, the citizens discovering his opposition). Plato's own rejection of Socrates' philosophy evidenced by his antidemocratic activities of Plato in Syracuse and elsewhere.

Certainly there were many still alive that would remember and object had Plato given a false impression of Socrates in the dialogs. But since that that very democracy had felt it necessary to get rid of Socrates by death or exile for his role in instigating the now-overthrown oligarchy, it seems likely that (a) their picture of Socrates was not terribly different from the picture that Plato paints of Socrates in Republic and Laws, and (b) having just executed Socrates for crimes against the state, Plato could hardly use Socrates's good name to gain favor for his antidemocratic theories, any more than a modern "philosopher" could use Hitler to lend popular credence to some new fascist social theory.

The conclusion is simple and obvious, and neatly meets Ockham's test. The name behind the evil of Plato's Dialogs was the very man to whom Plato attributes them: Socrates.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | The Bush doctrine makes nonsense of the UN charter

More whining from europe over american self-defense. I only hope that this isn't mere hyperbole and it really does mean the end of the UN.

Israel News : Jerusalem Post Internet Edition

Victor Hanson tells the Israelis why the US supports them. It's a pretty good summary of my feelings on the subject as well.

USS Clueless - The Case

Wow, Den Beste dislikes Arafat even more than I do.

Israel is making a mistake dealing with him, and the US is making a mistake insisting on his relevance.

Whether or not he is taken out seems less of an issue. But the US and the Israelis need to find someone else to talk to.

NYPOST.COM Post Opinion: Oped Columnists: MIDWAY & TODAY By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Hanson rehashes the Midway chapter of Carnage and Culture, with an interpretation re the current war on terror. Good stuff.

Matt Labash delivers a paen to Kentucky bourbon. "Drinking Kentucky's best is hard, rewarding work. And so is making it."

Personally, I own more bottles of single-malt scotch than Bourbon, but I seem to go through the bourbon much more quickly.

I'm a big fan of Booker's and Woodford Reserve as sipping bourbons, though Maker's Mark is pretty special as well, and is my favorite for use in mint juleps. For sipping, I prefer my bourbon straight. For bourbon and soda, I use plain old Jim Beam with diet coke (else it gets too sweet).

Also highly recommended are Kentucky Spirit, Blanton's, Elijah Craig, and Rip Van Winkle.

Larry Kudlow on Investing & American Leadership on NRO Financial

Kudlow blames the stagnant markets on an incredible lack of leadership in the Administration and Congress. He makes a damning case.

HoustonChronicle.com - UT creates antibody to anthrax UT creates antibody to anthrax

This is major news -- this antibody binds to the toxins and prevents the m from entering the cells and causing damage, and unlike the vaccine does not have to be administered long in advance, rather it works after the anthrax infection is already underway. It is the toxins that cause death, not the anthrax itself.

Antibodies are a pretty well-researched area, with many antibody treatments in production, so this should lead to an effective weapon against anthrax terrorism very quickly.

ABCNEWS.com : Sexually Frustrated Dolphin Sparks Alert

This has happened several times in the last decade (remember Rush's "Finger of Friendship" series back in the mid-90's) when a dolphin would swim by a beach, roll over on his back, and flash his penis at the bathers?

This article is even more specific, claiming that the dolphin is fairly good about singling out female swimmers. Whether this is due to human female hormones seeping into the water, or whether he's an ass or a tit dolphin remains to be seen.

Pretty wierd, though.

I finished reading Popper's Conjectures and Refutations last night. I'm still very impressed, his refutation of Hegelian dialectic seemed on the money to me. But some of the essays towards the end, where he moved away from the scientific to the social arena were noticeably weaker. I need to do some re-reading here and some more study before I'll feel willing to comment further.

First, however, it to finish Stephen Wolframs's A New Kind of Science. Based on the bits and blurbs I read when it first came out, I have major doubts about this book.

But first I need to untwist my brain with some light fluffy comedy, a task for which Wodehouse is admirably suited.

I discovered today in Barnes and Noble some new editions of Wodehouse by an outfit called Overlook Press. Hardbound, looks like good paper and quality printing, roughly $15. Just the thing for a book lover, especially a Wodehouse fan -- my paperbacks are falling apart, and besides there's just something about the solid feel of a hardback in your hands, and the stitching of a well-constructed spine.

FOXNews.com - Excerpts From Bishop's Charter

If these are representative of the charter as a whole, and if the church is serious about it's implementation, then this is a wonderful development.

Eric Raymond has an excellent though flawed essay on allowing the passengers on an airline to carry weapons.

He correctly dismisses the fallacy that a bullet hole will pop the fuselage. He offers several obviously plausible scenarios that would render the a pilot's gun useless. He correctly asserts that the goal of airline security in the post-9/11 world should primarily be to prevent the airplane's being used as a weapon of mass destruction, and only secondarily of preserving individual passenger's lives.

His general argument in favor is of passenger carry on aircraft is basically the same one historically offered in favor of concealed carry on the ground: that the more guns the good guys have the better, and better still if the bad guys don't know where they are, since it means that the gun-wielding citizens still have an element of surprise on the bad guys who are unable to focus their attention on a small subset of their victims.

But there are substantial differences between the airline cabin and other public places that make Raymond's projection somewhat shaky.

Concealed carry rates are fairly low as a percentage of the population, frequently less than 1%. Assuming the aircraft passengers are representative of the population this carry rate among passengers would be similar. The aircraft passengers are of course not a representative sample of the population, but the only factor I can think of that would tend to increase their carry rate above the population average is that frequent flyers might be roused by the danger of hijacking to carry in greater numbers. This seems reasonable, although how much of an affect this might have is problematical. Even if the average airline passenger was twice as likely to carry as the general population, this still means that perhaps only three or four passengers would be armed, facing five hijackers.

In the big blue room, this is not so much of a problem, since the attackers are usually in much smaller groups, and even in the case of an attack by a relatively large group of bad guys, the porosity of the environment means that other armed citizens can enter the threat zone and render assistance -- the set of potentially armed people available for assistance is greater than the set of threatened people. In a closed system such as an aircraft cabin, what you've got is all you've got.

Although the hijackers will have the element of surprise on the passengers as a whole, the carrying passengers will in turn have some small element of surprise on the hijackers, since the attention of the hijackers must be dispersed among all of passengers.

However, the techniques that Eric Raymond mentions for taking out the sky marshals also work for taking out the carrying passengers, although with some slightly greater risk. Here's his scenario:

Sky marshals can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The sky marshals (if there are any present; they're now flying on less than 1% of planes, and can't be trained fast enough for that figure to go up significantly in the foreseeable future) break cover. Now your A team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of the sky marshals. Game over.

So here's the same scenario, in the presence of multiple carrying passengers, assuming only 2-3 armed passengers (where "armed passenger" means armed non-hijacker, whether sky marshall or citizen)

Armed passengers can be taken out in a similar way. Your B team, armed with knives, breaks cover and announces the hijacking. The armed passengers break cover. Now your A team, armed with guns, breaks cover and disposes of them. Game over.

And to quote Eric Raymond again (slightly out of context)

Anyone who thinks either scenario can be prevented by keeping firearms off-board should put down that crack pipe now. Tiger team exercises after 9/11 have repeatedly demonstrated that the new, improved airport security has had effectively zero impact on a determined bad-guy's ability to sneak weapons past checkpoints -- it's still easy. Despite government spin, there is no prospect this will change; the underlying problem is just too hard.

But his argument as stated I believe to have shown to be fallacious. In the more general scenarios on the ground it is frequently unnecessary for the armed citizens to defeat the enemy, it is frequently enough simply to delay him long enough for additional help to arrive, or to force him to retreat. These second two options are unlikely in the sort of hijacking situations we have seen recently.

A delaying action will be unsuccessful because of the unavailability of additional resources.

The hijacker will not retreat because he does not fear for his own life. A tactical retreat might be possible if he values the success of the mission over his own life (which seems likely, although such considerations can sometimes be forgotten in the passion of the moment). But this simply leads back to the futility of a simple delaying operation.

The only options, therefore, are complete victory, defined by the disabling or death of all of the hijackers. And this requires force superiority on the part of the passengers.

Given that the hijackers have had time to plan the operation, it is reasonable to expect that they will attempt to place enough members on board to prevail in spite of the danger, so we can expect that even knowing that some passengers will be armed they will make some estimate of the danger and attempt to position enough hijackers to obtain superiority. 9/11 demonstrated that it was possible to place 5 hijackers on board, although we don't yet know what the upper limit might be. Improved screening techniques can help, both by reducing the effectiveness of a hijacker by forcing him to smuggle in weaker weapons, or preferably by catching the hijacker and removing him from the action completely. As Raymond mentions, tests of the airline security have shown it to be distressingly porous, and efforts to tighten it up have not been effective. To some extent this may be due to our focus on screening the weapons, and given the Israeli success in screening persons it is likely that there is a fair amount of benefit that we are ignoring in our misguided efforts to avoid the suspicion of profiling.

But it is the relative strength of the two forces within the cabin that is important, and this can also be improved by allowing the passengers to be armed. While this helps improve the balance in favor of the passengers, in itself it is not a panacea since only a few surviving hijackers are sufficient to accomplish their suicidal mission. It is necessary to ensure, or at least make highly probable, that the amount of force available to the passengers is greater than the amount of force the hijackers can bring to bear.

In those circumstances I think he's right; that passenger carry would have a positive impact on the hijacking problem, and ultimately I think Raymond's thesis would be much more tenable if the carry rate were much higher, say 10% or so, which would make it much more difficult for the hijackers to achieve numerical parity much less superiority on board an aircraft, and if the armed passengers recieved much more training and tactics in dealing with that specialized environment.

I've never been a big fan of philosophy. I've tried off and on to develop a taste for it, my failure to do so has been a lingering sore spot for me -- I always felt that philosophy was something that I should be interested in, and that is was somehow a personal failure for me.

(Oddly enough, I feel the same way about the programming language SML. As much as I admire its theoretical elegance and clean design, actually using it is roughly akin to screeching chalk on a blackboard.)

Read Plato, and thought the older stuff was ok, but the Republic gave me the heebie-jeebies with it's praise of treating humans as cattle (complete with breeding programs) and institutionalized slavery. Tried reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, got bogged down (may have been the translation -- it was dry enough to start a bonfire). Enjoyed Cicero and his roman sense of duty (and his pragmatism), though he was not an original philosopher himself he was nonetheless an excellent writer and a devoted student of philosophy, and I must confess I've always felt an affinity for his version of stoicism. From there I went on to read Marcus Aurelius, but found it too mystical, though well thought-out; a handy rule-book, but ultimately sterile and a dead-end philosophically.

More modern philosophers seemed even less useful, caught up in what seemed to me to be mere word games for their own amusement, and as best I could tell (without wading through their reputedly dense and convoluted language) about as disconnected from reality as it was possible to be -- a philosophy that states that reality is a figment of our imagination isn't too useful unless your name happens to be Keanu.

It was nonetheless becoming apparent that mysticism and I just don't get along. Confucius, I Ching, etc were clearly not going to be productive. Sun Tzu was interesting (though not strictly philosophical), though even in this arena I thought that Machiavelli made a more compelling case.

Read some of Ayn Rand's stuff in high school, and thought The Fountainhead was ok except for the weak ending, and Atlas Shrugged was a colossal waste of time. Digging into her more focused philosophical works convinced me that her philosophy, such as it was, was completely unsupportable (and unsupported even by her except by vigorous handwaving).

And at that point (high school, middle of my senior year), I pretty much gave philosophy up as a waste of my time.

Until now.

But in recent readings in a variety of topics a philosopher kept popping up enough for me to take notice. Karl Popper was a 20th century philosopher who had developed a principle of falsifiability as a meta-principle behind the scientific method, indeed that attempted to explain how do we know what we know, and more importantly, how do we go about knowing more.

After reading an essay by Stephen Jay Gould in which falsifiability played a major role, I was sufficiently intrigued to trot over to Barnes and Noble and acquire a copy of what seemed the most likely candidate Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. On a whim I also bought the two volumes of Open Society and its Enemies, which promised to have some interesting analyses of Plato's philosophy (hopefully in particular his sociopolitical theories), as well as Hegel and Marx.

So after I finished Anabasis this weekend, I waded into Conjectures and Refutations. I managed to make it through the first part "Conjectures" and am just now getting to the "Refutations" section.

It is an exhausting read, although it is quite readable compared to just about any other philosopher I've tried. It helps that this isn't fluff, and it isn't word games. Popper is driven by real problems in science (natural, physical, social, political, and informational). His philosophical ideas are relevant to scientific process specifically, and to human knowledge in general, as a sort of meta-process for the scientific method, except more than that it also provides criteria for direction and heuristics for "fitness" that help guide and optimize the process of learning and discovery.

Unlike so many other philosophers, Popper isn't working in an ivory tower, (or if he is it's an ivory tower with lots of windows). He's very much concerned with relativity, quantum theory, statistics, logical systems, mathematics, social science, and political science.

One of the events that started him on the road to discovering this principle of falsifiability was the experimental confirmation of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. The question that seems to have bothered him was essentially "What distinguishes Newton's and Einstein's theories from those of Marx or Freud?", for he felt that there was a difference, palpable in the attitude of the scientists conducting the experiments and the jubilant attitude upon their successful confirmation that was in distinct contrast to the attitudes of Marxists and Freudians on the experiments that confirmed their theories.

This difference, as he first percieved it, was evident in the real apprehension in the attitude of the scientists embarking on the experimental testing of Einstein's theory, that there was a real risk of failure involved that was never present in the tests of Marx and Freud, indeed the adherents to these other theories felt that the theories were in fact universal, that everything within their domain was explainable through them.

Popper's insight was that this universality was in fact their weakness. More specifically, that their unfalsifiability meant that these "scientific" theories were not in fact scientific at all, and were in fact no more useful than any other superstition or mystical belief.

Conjectures and Refutations is a collection of essays and lectures further expounding the idea of falsifiability, and of some surprising corollaries. He spends a fair bit of time explaining how other philosophers attempted to tackle similar problems, and where their ideas fell short or otherwise missed the mark.

It's going to need at least one more read before I feel comfortable with it.

More when I finish it, but at this point it's safe to say that it's a monumental book. I only wish I'd discovered it much earlier.

Scotsman.com

BRITISH marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat - being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers.

Maybe they should've tried dressing up like sheep :-)

Finished Xenophon's Anabasis this weekend. It's not a particularly deep or wide-ranging book, but it is a thoroughly entertaining one. It's sort of a cross between a war novel, a travelogue, and a history. Written in a fairly light style, it is a refreshingly quick read after slogging through Herodotus's recursively interminable gossipings.

Some interesting notes: He describes use of the infantry square that was so popular during the Napoleonic wars. He describes the problems and the reasoning that led to a new type of army that seems closely analogous to the modern combined-arms doctrine. His mention in an offhand way of books among the other valuable flotsam and jetsam salvaged by the coastal tribes is a revealing clue that even towards the frontier that books were a commodity that was both valuable and fairly common. It is interesting that the Kurdish tribes were a greater danger to the band than the Persian armies were, and Xenophon's experiences in the Kurdistan area is as revealing as the claims from the neighboring villages that the Kurds do not seem to answer to the Persian king.

He mentions that their slingers (created after their first encounters with Persian archers as an unsupported band of heavy infantry) had double the range of the Persian archers. Even allowing for hyperbole, it seems likely that the slingers, which he describes as using lead slugs, did indeed have significant range on the Persian archers, since the archery threat immediately abated. Although he doesn't say, I would assume from this that the slingers were using pole-slings, since it was known in antiquity and would have had a much larger range than a simple hand-sling. I'm amazed that it would have that sort of range, though if so it would explain why slings remained popular as a military weapon into the middle ages.

And finally, I'm amazed that this book hasn't been made into a movie (at least not to my knowledge). It's an amazing story with lots of the sort of which Hollywood is know to be fond: Heroic figures, danger, scenery, history, violence, and homosexuality.

Yes, homosexuality. There are several instances of quarrels over some particularly attractive boy, but I remember no mention of soldiers capturing or keeping particularly attractive girls (or even unattractive girls). He does list prostitutes among the camp followers, but doesn't give their gender. It's possible that females weren't mentioned because they were so common as to not require comment, but other factors (like the consistent tone of the book even through these sections) makes it seem unlikely.

It's a wonderful book, though, and the first one (apart from some of the old Greek plays) that I can honestly say is a great read for the story itself, and not primarily for the educational value.

Highly recommended. I read the Loeb edition, but other translations are available both in print and online. I did find the map in the Loeb edition quite handy in keeping track of the band on their journey.