Month: October 2002

Not a bad article from the AP; if you read it all the way to the end, the “small, stealthy” group of orthodox Catholics even gets to make its points. On the other hand, when the writer accepts VOTF’s claim of 25,000 members, that’s a bit naive. That might be the combined size of their mailing lists.
For those following the Boston Situation, Faithful Voice’s spokeswoman Carol McKinley has her own weblog too. Unfortunately, Faithful Voice’s own website is a mess.

Why Linux development is like the Catholic Church
Linux shouldn’t work. It’s an operating system designed by hackers, the kind of people who can give you detailed plot synopses of every “Star Trek” episode. The “official” releases of the OS are really just releases of the kernel, the basic core of the system. Other companies and groups assemble drivers, programs, interfaces, etc., and package them all together in distributions, which are free to the public.
You can view and modify the Linux source code, if you’re into that kinky stuff. Microsoft would spend a zillion dollars in court before it let anyone look at the code for Windows. Anybody can submit changes to Linux if they want, and their code may be incorporated into the next release, but nobody gets any money if it does. Linux is a hodge-podge of patches, contributions, and hacks. Contrast that to Windows, which is designed by thousands of programmers closely monitored by supervisors and coordinators and managers.
So which one works better? Obviously, the one that’s backed by billions of dollars in capital: the one from the strictly hierarchical, take-no-prisoners, profit-crazy Microsoft, right? Wrong. Ask anybody who develops applications on both platforms, and they’ll tell you Linux is the more stable and flexible of the two. We’ve had Linux servers run for hundreds of days without a restart, which is a dangerous thing if you’re running Windows.
The Catholic Church may at first appear to be governed by the Windows model. It has a pope, bishops, and priests, plus assorted religious orders, lay orders, and apostolates, all with their own hierarchies. Looking at it from a distance, it looks like a top-down, authoritarian society. However, the Church prefers to promote that which grows organically from the life of the faithful, rather than imposing them from above. The pope and the other bishops don’t wake up and say, “let’s develop some doctrine today” — they respond to practices and lines of thought submitted to them by clergy and laity alike. Sometimes they are rejected, but more often, if they are in accordance with Scripture and Tradition, they are nurtured and encouraged. Some examples of the latter are the Rosary, the infallible doctrine of the Assumption, and lots of religious movements (nobody asked St. Francis of Assisi to found an order).
There are some other similarities, too: like the Church, Linux was founded by one man, Linus Torvalds, who continues to guide its development, and there are other men who supervise different aspects of the OS. (Although leadership in the Linux community is not reserved to men alone, there aren’t that many female kernel developers.) Torvalds and his inner circle are completely in charge of accepting and rejecting new code, just as the magisterium accepts or rejects new doctrines.
Many of the failures of Church governance come from people trying to run a Linux religion like it’s a Windows religion. There are Windows religions out there, such as the Mormons and the Unification Church, which are centralized and authoritarian. (I mean those words descriptively, not pejoratively.) Far too many officeholders regard themselves as managers instead of shepherds – that is, they think they are supposed to be directing things, instead of serving those who do all the work. The pope isn’t a despot, he is the servant of the servants of God. It is not we who support him, it is he who supports us from below. We, the laity, are supposed apply the teachings of the Church in everyday life, figure out what works, and check with the teaching authority to see if we’re doing it right.
As for Torvalds, his design philosophy begins with a kernel of wisdom: “I think a lot of things I don’t like tend to be overdesigned,” he said. “To me it’s bad. Somebody spent too much time thinking and too little time doing.” That statement could apply to so many things, in and out of church.

An unfathomable tragedy in Russia

In the rescue attempt one of the hostages died of gunshot wounds. 116 of the hostages died from exposure to the “mysterious” sedative gas used to incapacitate the hostages. The Russians have not indentified the type of gas used.

Rod Dreher posted the text of Putin’s speech to the Russian people on The Corner yesterday.

“This enemy is strong and dangerous, brutal and severe. It is international terrorism. While it is not defeated, anywhere in the world, people can not feel safe. But it should be defeated. And it will be defeated. Today in the hospital I talked to one of victims. He said to me, ‘It was not that terrible – there was a confidence among us, that the future of the terrorists is not enduring.’ And this is the truth. They do not have a future. We do.”

If you thought some people had complicated family arrangements, wait’ll you hear this example from Spike Jones (MPEG audio stream, 799 KB, 3:19).
(If the stream doesn’t work, here’s a link to download the file.)

One, two, three, four, we chant the chants we used before
As war looms closer with Iraq, anxious Americans lifts up their heads unto the Lord and cry, “Where, O Lord, where is thy servant, the Reverend Jesse Jackson?”
In front of the cameras, naturally. There was a march in D.C. today to protest our war in Iraq, though there is no war yet — call it a pre-emptive demonstration — and the Hymietown Rhymer was there to lead the way, along with Susan Sarandon and other perpetual protestors. There was a bunch of people dressed as the ghosts of dead Iraqis, but they looked a lot like Klansmen, which must have displeased Jesse.
There were some counterdemonstrators who looked suspiciously Middle Eastern, possibly even Iraqi, who want to see Saddam ousted. Mostly there were anti-Bush slogans:

The protesters brandished signs reading: “No Proof, No War,” “Bush Sucks” and “Pre-emptive Impeachment.” Some protesters carried Iraqi flags. “No war, no way,” shouted a protester wearing a mask of Bush with horns and a pitchfork.
“George Bush, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide!” chanted the demonstrators, who were escorted by mounted U.S. Park Police and watched by 600 police officers along the route in the heart of the nation’s capital.

It might be impolitic to say this to the protestors, and in any case they wouldn’t listen, but the last war the U.S. started was the Spanish-American War. (Athat time most people thought we were avenging the Maine’s sinking in Havana harbor, which was later proven to be from a boiler explosion, not Spanish malfeasance.) Since then, every time we’ve gotten involved in a war, we’ve joined a war already in progress (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War.) This would be the first time we’ve actually initiated the hostilities, if you want to say that — though since this is just a continuation of the Gulf War, you could make the case that it was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that started it, not to mention his possession of those nasty weapons we keep hearing about.
Reasonable people can differ on the question of war with Iraq. You could make a good prudential argument against it on several grounds: because attacking Iraq makes it likely that Saddam will use his dirty tools of death; because it could provoke a regional war; because it would inflame anti-American sentiment among countries that already harbor hostile terrorists. Personally, I am convinced that ridding Iraq of Saddam will be a boon for humanity. I don’t think he’s trying to get nukes so he can murder Iraqi Kurds and Shiites more efficiently, but so he can dominate the region and live out his fantasy of uniting all Arabs under his uncomfortably firm leadership.
Nevertheless, notice how unserious and unoriginal the protestors are. Unserious, because they don’t want to engage the Iraqi question head-on by providing alternative plans, or making the kind of serious-minded objections I list above. They leave that to the sober sell-out liberals who have day jobs and probably don’t have pictures of Che above their beds. Every U.S. action is an opportunity for them to question American motives and tell the world what a rotten country we are (“One million Iraqi children are dead because of sanctions! I know because Iraq says so!”) It’s a shame that the more responsible war opponents are tainted by these folks. I mean, “Bush Sucks”? Iraqi flags? Who do these people imagine they are convincing?
Unoriginal, because “No Blood For Oil” is vintage 1990-91, and their various other chants and slogans are of older provenance, circa 1966-70. It’s like all you have to do is wave a possible war in front of these protestors, and they have a collective Pavlovian response. “Give peace a chance!” “Stop the war machine!”
Their nemesis in the White House has revised longstanding postwar U.S. doctrine, re-oriented foreign policy, cajoled the U.N. into living up to its charter, and completely re-thought his own political view of the world. The protestors show no sign that they live in a post-September 11 reality, and try to fit every conflict into their neat, pre-defined ideological template, where the U.S. is always the racist agressor, and the enemy is always the helpless victim. And they accuse the military of being conformist reactionaries.