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Ethics/Metaethics Geopolitics Philosophy Politics Uncategorized War in Ukraine

I’m Alright Jack Pacifism

I’m going to deal here with some arguments I’ve seen recently in a number of forums with regard to the war in Ukraine. While the war continues past a thousand days, and the heroic resistance during the battle of Kyiv and spectacular breakthroughs in Kherson and Kharkiv are displaced in public memory by other geopolitical events, some commentators in safe countries are giving voice to arguments about “the futility of war”, “risk of nuclear annihilation” and calling reasoned, careful analysts like Lawrence Freedman “warmongers”.

Most directly: these arguments take the view of “we must abandon the Ukrainians: I don’t care how many civilians the Russians torture if Putin adds chunks of their country to his empire, because on a wider scale the way war affects me/humanity/me as part of humanity is worse”.

We are crucial juncture in the war. Russia is performing as badly as it ever has: thousands of soldiers consumed for kilometers of worthless ground, sending [ineffectual] North Korean troops into the meat-grinder, inability to retake sovereign Russian territory in Kursk, a collapsing ruble and soaring inflation/interest rates, strategic disaster in Syria, losses of military infrastructure and senior generals even in Moscow, etc. But the risks for Ukraine are severe: further offenses in 2023 could not be sustained, 2024 has been playing defence, unreliable support from Western leaders/Trump is now a major risk1, and retaking deeply embedded positions in e.g. the Donbas is serious stretch. Putin does not want to make peace: in fact, he has locked himself into trying to wring more than the burnt-out parts of the Donbas he holds as some kind of payoff for his catastrophically ill-conceived war that has wrecked the Russian economy, decimated the working-age population and turned Russia into an international pariah.

So it’s interesting to see these sorts of arguments – which I’m going to call I’m All Right Jack Pacifism – are re-emerging. They were very visible in the first days of the war on places like Twitter – but the basic evolution of the war (the resilience of Ukraine, the embarrassing performance of Russia as a “Great Power”, the basic irrelevance of nuclear weapons even as “red lines” were crossed again and again) has made even those with an actual ideological preference for Putin switch to something more sophisticated.

So based on the facts on the ground and the history of the war, these views are rather crude. But rhetoric and sophism aside, I think there are actually deep philosophical contradictions in these IarJ pacifisms that are at least somewhat interesting to examine.

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Ada Arcana Books Fiction Lit Crit Nabokov

Some Eccentric Readings of Ada

“I loath Van Veen”

Nabokov, Interview Time (1969), cited in Strong Opinions

“I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel — and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride”

Nabokov, Interview (1971) cited in Strong Opinions

“Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.”

Nabokov, On a Book Entitled Lolita

Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist’s son and translator, joined the Internet discussion with his recollection that his father thought the idea that either Shade or Kinbote could have invented the other barely less absurd than the idea that each could have invented the other…

https://thenabokovian.org/sites/default/files/2018-01/NABOKV-L-0013164___body.html

As I continue to my project of re-reading Ada, a couple of aspects are a struggle. One is the richness and allusiveness (or less charitably incomprehensibility) of the writing – Brian Boyd’s annotations are a great help there. The other difficult aspect is the motley appeal of the novel. While a clearer understanding of the structures make me appreciate it more, I am certainly not the only reader not to take to Ada. Even Boyd includes a kind of plea for patience and persistence in his Ada: the place of consciousness.

That aspects of the novel, and certainly its protagonists, are seemingly intentionally repellent has puzzled a number of readers. In response some have gone so far as to suggest unorthodox or revisionist readings of Ada. I’m going to consider here

  1. David Auerbach‘s proposal that Van is a radically unreliable narrator and that large portions of the novel are part of his fantasy (Kinbote Triumphant in Hell: The Riddle of Nabokov’s Ada)
  2. Alexey Sklyarenko‘s idea that the editor and typist of the novel dictated by Van and Ada, Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox, are themselves Ada’s grandchildren.
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Ada Books Lit Crit Nabokov Reviews

Ada: Chapter impressions so far

So I’m 30 chapters through reading Nabokov’s Ada alongside Brian Boyd’s extensive annotations. It is quite heavy going, and I’m continuously grateful to BB for explaining all the numerous allusions, great and small, that otherwise would pass me by.

I’ll have a fuller appraisal up soon – in particular comparing Ada to Glory, which has lots of parallels I think to this section (Ardis the First) of the later work. In summary it’s still not really working for me. I’m surprised how much more I like the sections that appeal, but I’m also finding there are themes and whole chapters that plain aren’t working for me, even after they’ve been convincingly explained by Prof. Boyd.

Why can’t the whole book be as good as Ada’s real things, towers and bridges? It’s a well know mystery.

The structure of this first section is certainly impressive: I could even be persuaded that everything in part 1 is there for a purpose (whether that purpose is implemented in an artistically satisfying way is, of course, another question). A big problem is the length. I’m sort of saturated by Ada already, and it’s a little alarming I’m less than a third of the way through.

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Ada Books Fiction Lit Crit Nabokov Reviews

Speak: Memory! What I remember before re-reading Ada

Ada is Vladimir Nabokov’s longest book, and the first of his late European period after he found fame with Lolita then devoted ten years to his controversial, literalist translation of Eugene Onegin. It shares many features and themes with his earlier work, but is also strikingly different: massive, heavy-going and sometimes impenetrable, it stands in contrast with the lightness and economy of his American work.

I tend to think of Ada as a maximalist, interesting failure. Nabokov described Finnegan’s Wake as “that cold pudding” of a book, and in an irony of memory I had transposed that description onto Ada. I tend to agree with Michael Wood that it’s a late rather than mature work where the ambition outstripped the result. It’s a hard book to love.

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Ada Books Lit Crit Nabokov

Brian Boyd, Lit Crit and Ada

This is a collation of my thoughts on the pre-eminent Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd’s approach to literary criticism, particularly with regard to Ada – likely Nabokov’s least appreciated work.

I wrote this up as part of the discussion of Ada and Boyd in relation to Michael Wood on the ilxor forums, here. These discussions are lively and wide-ranging, and I enjoyed the diverse takes and frustrations expressed about Ada – some of which I share.

I have found Boyd’s work immensely useful in deepening my appreciation for Nabokov, and so I did want to write something of a defence of Boyd’s approach. I argue here that his project is rather unusual in the world of lit crit: an almost scientific empiricism, which well suits his subjects (Nabokov, Popper, and … Dr. Seuss?).

I’d still contend that Boyd remains the most useful critic for understanding Nabokov, for getting the most out of the incredible richness of his designs (too rich, likely, in Ada) and for real aesthetic joy in his work.

Critical mass

With regard to the idea that Boyd is a Nabokov fan, and this limits his usefulness as a critic:

The argument is that Boyd lacks “critical distance” or is somehow in thrall to Nabokov.

But I think Boyd is doing something a little different from Wood and other critics. I have enormous time for Wood and The Magicians Doubts, but I think it’s a partial view of Nabokov underwritten by some of Wood’s theoretical commitments: namely the primacy of a moral view of suffering and pity, and the division between signature and style. The former is definitely an important strand in Nabokov: this is essentially the theme of Pnin – but it’s not the only one and I think it leads Wood to over-emphasize what he can take to fit this theory in novels like Bend Sinister.

Boyd shares some of my frustration with apriorism and theory in literary criticism. He is almost an empiricist.

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Philosophy Philosophy of Language Software Technology

Read My Lips: Chatbot Prompt Engineering

The following is a collection of thoughts on recent febrile discussion of “prompt engineering” as a way to communicate intention to models.

My initial intuition here was that the rather excitable proponents of prompt engineering were making a category mistake (in thinking that all intentions could be reduced to language). On deeper consideration I don’t believe that intuition was correct – but nevertheless that “prompt” engineering, or replacement of formal with natural languages in technical contexts, is even less plausible.

By clawing the whole of human cognition into language it cheapens language’s transcendent aesthetic qualities

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Books Lit Crit Nabokov Podcasts Politics Rand The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand – a good writer after all?

Long after the politics have passed, literary quality – or lack of it – remains.

The following is a comment I put together on an episode of the Origin Story podcast produced by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. The episode covered Ayn Rand and her legacy – while the guys are very unsympathetic to her political position, I was pretty astonished to find that they thought she was a pretty effective fiction writer! This is my response, which became a bit ridiculously long for an inline comment – somewhat edited for clarity and to incorporate my correction. You can see the original here.

(The podcast series is really excellent, highly recommended to check it out)

There is a slight danger of slipping into conspiracism here in thinking that all critics must have had a political axe to grind. There is a simpler explanation: that there really are serious literary defects which become obvious when you are familiar with the history of the form.

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Android Digital Minimalism Mobile Devices Qin F21 Technology

Qin F21: T9 Text as good as 90s Nokias

One of the main reasons I ditched the CAT B35, and KaiOS more generally, was the fairly woeful implementation of predictive text. On a phone with a keypad the main mode of text entry – for SMS, but also in the browser and more widely in the phone operating system – will be some form of T9 text input.

It’s fairly mind-boggling to me that with 20 years of advancement and thousands of times more computing power, modern phones struggle to get as efficient key-based input as 90’s Nokias.

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Android De-Google Digital Minimalism Geekery Privacy Qin F21

Android: Firewall, DNS and Advert Elimination

The purpose of a modern phone is of course communication: not only via the cell radio, but over the internet.

Naturally, this is a vital tool for the user. But the predominance of always-on network connectivity has lead to increasing abuse by providers of phone software: both Google and other creators of the operating system, and third-party app creators. As far as they are concerned, the phone’s true purpose is to (i) gather information about their users and (ii) serve advertising back at them based on this information.

Both these functions – antithetical to the users needs and wishes – rely on the internet. The baleful combination became possible with the rise of widespread mobile internet. In this post we’ll take control back over our network functions, so only the components we says can ever send or receive data on our phone. After all, we pay for it!

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Android De-Google Digital Minimalism Geekery Privacy Qin F21

Android: Eliminating Google Dependencies

with microG, F-Droid and Aurora

Don’t Be Evil is now long forgotten. It’s almost a truism that the purpose of Google is to harvest our data so we can be advertised to. But are we stuck with Google on Android?

We all know that Android is a Google project – but things are a bit more complicated than that. Google does not in fact control Android; rather it is an open source, and freely licensed, project worked on by a consortium (and is merely sponsored by Google). In fact, the majority of Android and the applications it runs is built from open source code and tools.

Unfortunately, Google have in practice made it as difficult as they possibly can to use Android without involving the Google ecosystem.

Google have attempted to insert themselves into almost every process in your phone, hoovering up as much data as they can, and claiming everything will break if they are removed.

This isn’t true. Let’s de-Google Android.

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