Kenneth Dodson, Away All Boats

Introduction

Opening Passage:

The first time MacDougall saw the Belinda was the night before her launching. He was master in the Roamer then, his ship in Moore's dry dock at Alameda after a voyage to the Coral Sea. It was late at night; restlessly waiting for word from Nadine, who was coming by train from Seattle, he was alone in his cabin. Near midnight, he went down into the floating dry dock and walked along the bilge chocks, looking up at sea grass and barnacles on the Roamer's bottom, and checking her propeller for nicks. One of the workmen down there mentioned a new Navy ship to be launched next day.

"A cruiser?" he had asked.

"No, one of these new attack transports."

Summary: Away All Boats is the story of the Belinda, a World War II attack transport. She represents a new kind of warfare, a highly maneuverable invasion-by-sea force packaged into one ship, and she and her sister ships will play an utterly important role in the island-hopping campaign of the Pacific -- a role perhaps second only to, perhaps in some ways even more than, the role of the aircraft carrier in importance. And since she was written by Dodson to represent all such attack transports everywhere, she sees the full gamut of action, from her shake-down cruise, to practice dry-runs, to minor island invasion, to assault on Okinawa.

The book is quite realistic, as one might expect from the fact that the author himself served aboard an attack transport. There are some grisly scenes, although they are told quite well, and we get an excellent sense of the psychology of the U.S. Navy -- all the petty rivalries and competitions, the complications of having to work around the personal quirks of one's captain, the strange obsessions that come from being stuck on a ship all the time, the cracks that start to show under stress and strain, but also the camaraderie, the sense of being bound together in an important cause that transcends one's likes and dislikes, the famous sense of Navy accomplishment (the difficult is done immediately, the impossible just takes some time). There are lots of little details that bring the Belinda to life. One of the ones that caught my eye was the importance of the chaplain, who is not in any of the main action, and who is not a major character in the book, but who ends up playing a role again and again. Some of it is the obvious, of course -- there are men dying in sickbay who need someone to talk to, and the doctors, much as they might wish otherwise, have far too much to do. But much of it is the sort of thing that would only be obvious to someone who actually had served at a ship at sea. The chaplain, for instance, is in practice a back-up supply officer, because he is the one who receives and keeps track of donations that do not come through the logistical supply chain -- all sorts of odds-and-ends trumpets, or bottles of red ink, or boxes of tissue. It is the chaplain whose phonograph and records play what is in effect the background song for much of the book: "Red Sails in the Sunset". But we get these glancing bits about many others in the crew: the self-important and widely detested Ensign Twitchell, the spiffy but unpracticed executive officer Quigley, the original captain, Gedley, and the captain who succeeds him, Hawks, and many others. Although MacDougall will be our guideline character, the book often swings away from him: the protagonist of the book is the Belinda herself, and all these sailors aboard her just express different facets of her personality.

Favorite Passage:

MacDougall had put his ear to her hull, cautiously at first, then, forgetting half dried anti-fouling paint, had held his cheek snug to the bilge. Sound there all right: rustling of autumn leaves, distant surf, sounds she had never heard before, restless whisperings, voices in pain, voices thrilling with eagerness, mixed chattering in some unknown tongue, calling to far off places. MacDougall knew what it was; could explain these sounds in cold, scientific terms; why then was his spine tingling? He took his ear away and looked down at the old man, who was carefullly refolding a yellow telegram. "Those are locked-in stresses working out. They come out slowly in a part-welded hull."

"I know, son. Each part is trying to be free again, but they'll soon settle together; she's going to be a good ship, I tell you."

Recommendation: You probably can skip it otherwise (or watch the 1956 movie instead), but if you have any interest in naval history, this is an interesting and at times gripping fictional account of what it was like actually to be there in the Pacific.

Traditional EC vs. NPV

I keep an eye out every election-cycle in the U.S. for attacks on the Electoral College; this time around things have been rather quiet, but Steve Chapman recently had a column criticizing the Electoral College and advocating the National Popular Vote plan. Now, his criticisms of the EC have no cogency, but his advocacy of the NPV -- which is not to be confused with an actual national popular vote, which the plan does not provide -- is especially egregious.

(1) Chapman brings up the argument, which one gets every single time, that the EC is to blame for the fact that candidates focus on only battleground states. This is manifestly not true -- non-EC election systems do not avoid the battleground problem because it arises not from the election system but from the way campaigning works, so the most one could do is shift the emphasis from states to geographical regions. In a nation the size of the United States it will never be economical or even possible to campaign everywhere; people will campaign strategically. In the United States it is most natural to campaign by state anyway -- state boundaries are quite clear and fixed, it is relatively easy to get information about states as a whole, and political organizations, including parties, most naturally work at the state level -- but even if this were not so, active campaigning is necessarily confined to relatively few areas, leaving the rest to passive campaigning (national television appearance, local party organizations, etc.). This is, again, a necessary structural feature of campaigning, and this is intensified by the demand to campaign nationally in one of the world's largest countries -- fourth largest by area and third largest by population. We are by every metric huge -- there are too many people spread over too much of the globe for any evenhandedness to be genuinely viable at that level.

(2) Chapman also makes the common mistake in this area: he assumes we have actual national popular vote numbers. We do not. When people put together a 'popular vote', they are going on what states have turned in. But there is no standardized way of counting votes from state to state -- for instance, felons can vote in some states but not in others, some states use vote-gathering methods that are not accepted in other states, etc. This becomes relevant to the whole NPV idea: in order to have a genuine national popular vote you have to have a genuinely national way of collecting and counting them, so that what makes you eligible to vote in one place makes you eligible in another and that what counts as a legitimate vote in one place counts as a legitimate vote in another. The national numbers for the popular vote depend on treating the numbers turned in by the states as all commensurable, which they are not. We can know state popular vote totals; but we cannot compare across state lines except in a highly approximate way.

(3) Chapman: "Only for the most important office does that custom get cast aside — in favor of an antiquated system that the framers created without a clue how it would function." Since the Electoral College is less 'antiquated' than straight popular vote, and since the Framers actually had a pretty good idea how it would work (it was an adaptation of election systems that they knew quite well; the main sources of uncertainty were simply whether it could be made sustainable from election to election in the context of a republic), this is all empty rhetoric.

(4) And then we get to the National Popular Vote idea, which, again, is not a national popular vote. It is, in fact, just a form of the Electoral College system in which state election laws have gone insane. On the NPV system, states would be committing themselves in the Electoral College to preferring votes elsewhere to those cast by their own citizens. If State A doesn't allow felons to vote and State B does for civil rights reasons, then on the NPV plan, State A is committed to accepting as legitimate felons voting in in State B despite the fact that people in A exactly like those in B don't get to vote, and State B is committed to accepting as legitimate the election numbers coming out of State A, despite knowing quite well that the numbers are derived in part on what people in State B regard as a civil rights violation, and that there are potential voters in A whose votes are not getting counted despite the fact that they would count in B. This is an absurd situation. Moreover, NPV guarantees that states with well-thought-out election laws and well-run election systems are held hostage to those without. When, for instance, we had the problems with the Bush v. Gore election, the problems were all with the popular vote count of Florida. It only affected the Electoral College because Florida's own method of determining Electors is tied to its own popular vote count. Numbers can't be established for a 'national popular vote' (even one based on a fiction) under a state-by-state system like ours unless all the states have their act together. We know for a fact that this can't be guaranteed, and that a state can make a complete mess of things by poor collection methods, inconsistent vote-counting, and loopholes for voting fraud. And we also know for a fact that nobody can actually fix these problems except citizens of that state.

The point, in short, is that the only rational alternative to an Electoral College system -- which is highly effective as a state-by-state method of election -- is a genuine national popular vote system, which in our case requires taking election law out of the hands of the states and putting it entirely into the hands of a Federal agency. Bastardized systems like NPV are just not a serious option: they are EC reforms that fail to reform anything significant because they simply don't consider the actual logic of the system they claim to reform, elaborate symbolic gestures that talk about the importance of a national popular vote and do nothing to get one.

UPDATE: And in the comments below we see another reason to despise NPV advocates, beyond their complete inability to grasp basic facts about electoral process; as you can see in the comments, advocates just spam long passages of prepared text without serious regard for any actual argument. This is a tactic they've been trying for years now: boilerplate slimed over every post they can find that mentions the Electoral College or the National Popular Vote. Virtually all of the boilerplate, of course, is irrelevant to the argument given here (indeed, most of it is not even particularly relevant to election reform today), and much of the rest makes precisely the mistakes noted above. There is an additional mistake added: precisely the whole point of the Electoral College is that it is an aggregator that converts distinct state policies into commensurable Electoral votes -- Electoral College votes are commensurable because the Electoral College is structurally designed to make them so -- how they are arrived at is no more relevant than whether voters in the voting booth pick their candidates by deliberation or by coin-flipping. State popular votes are only structurally designed to be commensurable within a given state, and therefore any treatment of the additive sum of those vote totals as a 'national popular vote' is artificial and, as noted in (4) above, requires states to give preference to the laws of other states over their own. As I said: NPV doesn't fix anything in the Electoral College; it's just the Electoral College with insane state election laws.

Nonetheless, I'm glad the NPV spammers showed up: they show exactly what NPV is (which is why I'm not erasing it). It is a spammer's con, and has as much to do with serious election reform as Viagra spam has to do with serious health care reform.

The Lustre as of Olives

Helen
by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

Fiddlesticks and Washboards

One nice thing about living in the age of YouTube is exposure to kinds of music that are hard to find otherwise. Here, for instance, is some great fiddlesticks playing:



Dewey Balfa and Tony Balfa, "J'ai eté au bal". Of course, fiddlesticks are from an era in which music was more participatory than it is today. Only have one fiddle between two people? Grab some knitting needles and you've made your fiddle a percussion instrument as well as a string instrument.

And here we have a percussion instrument you don't see often enough, the rubboard or (if you want to be fancy) vest frottoir, which is, of course, an adaptation of washboard music, and is usually played with spoons (using the handle) or bottle openers or thimbles or something similar. Whatever one might expect, the frottoir is a percussion instrument whose quality of sound is quite hard to beat:

Music on My Mind

Francis Cabrel, "Je t'aimais, je t'aime, je t'aimerai". I'm not in general a fan of songs in French, which has always been anemic and is increasingly inbred, and has a smarmy smile on top of that; but when it turns just the right way, as here, and lets itself be simple and heartfelt, it can still be splendid, recalling something of the spirit of ancient troubadors that still haunts its vowels and glides.

Philosophers' Carnival #144

The 144th Philosophers' Carnival is up at "Sprachlogik". The Carnival hadn't adjusted well to the changes in blogging over the many years of its operation, so Tristan Haze, the new coordinator for it, is taking it a new direction. The original point of the Carnival, eight years ago, had been mostly just to contribute to the development of connections and community among online philosophy blogs, in the ancient days of yore when such activities were common among bloggers generally. Early on, people made an active effort to contribute, and, while it still required some hunt-and-seek to bring in a good variety of posts, you could always guarantee that the submissions would turn out several interesting ones, and even that you'd have some room for selectivity, and so could guarantee that there would always be something of quality. But a lot of the real go-getters had been undergraduate and graduate students, and as their situation changed, most of us ended up drifting away a bit, thus leading to the whole thing languishing more and more over time. And there were obviously lots of reasons for this. I, for instance, was one of the early founding participators -- I did Philosophers' Carnival #2 -- and used to do a post precisely for the Carnival, aiming for at least every other edition, and every edition when I could. But I was a graduate student then, in front of a computer at least half the day most days, and it was a welcome relief from dissertation monotony. But slowly other things began to push it out, and it became difficult even to remember the Carnival was there. The blogosphere also changed: community and blog-neighborliness became much less important, and there is less of a sense of experiment and adventure than there once was -- we were looking at the possibility of blogging as a new kind of intellectual interaction, and so were eager to see what could be done with this Carnival idea. Thus there was definitely a need for some revitalization. The new idea is to focus less on the old participatory element, at least in the way it used to be participatory, and focus more on providing a way of making known to people where interesting philosophical work is being done in the blogosphere -- thus letting any community build up around that. It's a good idea, and I hope it works -- a lot of the old mainstay philosophy bloggers are still around doing their own thing, even if not as regularly as before, and new philosophy bloggers are out and about who need to be pointed out to others. And philosophy blogs tend to be scattered around a bit, so it can be easy to overlook good philosophy posts. The change means that one will have more technical posts, but this doesn't, of course, mean fewer good posts pitched at a more popular level. Go over and see if you see anything interesting! They have my recent post on Whewell, but I recommend particularly Helen De Cruz's post on evolutionary debunking arguments, which will be interesting whether you do philosophy or not, and there are several posts of interest for those of us interested in modal logic. And one early sign of the reform's success: I already see a couple of bloggers in the list who I hadn't even realized were still blogging.

The Study of Beauties

...nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties, either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting. They give a certain elegance of sentiment to which the rest of mankind are strangers. The emotions which they excite are soft and tender. They draw off the mind from the hurry of business and interest; cherish reflection; dispose to tranquillity; and produce an agreeable melancholy, which, of all dispositions of the mind, is the best suited to love and friendship.

David Hume, Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion. Hume is arguing for Ovid's maxim, Adde quod [or Scilicet, as it's often quoted] ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes / Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros, which is usually translated, "Therefore [or: Add to this,] to have studied faithfully the liberal arts softens behavior, not letting it be savage." Francis Bacon also discusses this maxim in The Advancement of Learning (1.8), and so does Joseph Addison in The Spectator No. 215 (6 November 1711). Owing in part to its use in Latin grammar exercises, it seems to have been a remarkably popular proverb in nineteenth-century Britain. The second half of it, incidentally, is also the motto of the University of South Carolina.