Goat Notes

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 430 words again.  Torchlight in the early mist.  Statecraft use and plainchant abuse.  I want to wrap this scene up tomorrow, but there is much work and much society and maybe I will not quite get there.

I will not post about the riots in my country until I can do so in other than a cherry-red rage, and most particularly I will not be thinking about them now if I can help it, since I must catch a great big load of sleep before the morning.

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 1,850 words in two days.  These will probably come in for some very chilly condensation later.  Kate's party passes the outward adventures and persisting inward horrors of the Swale Road, and returns for the last time to her home country of Alland.  The bitter, conceited, indoctrinated Widow has better points and better reasons for pressing them than I'd expected.  The claw of Kate's own very peculiar and personal harpy is closing about her heart.

Some very interesting stuff is going on with this yarn's gradual expansion from our heroes' grandiose romantic narcissism in the beginning, towards a fantastic sprawl of common powers and agencies and agendas, as this most democratic-spirited of revolts reaches its physical and spiritual apogee.  I'm having to invent some fairly specialized techniques on the hoof in order to convey the simultaneous real significance and narrative marginality of the ever-expanding named cast.

Masters I've found myself most conspicuously borrowing from in this connection: the Icelandic saga-writers; Tolkien; Diane Duane (Tale of the Five rather than Young Wizards flavour).  Malory and William Morris, fainter echoes of.  I've seen some other impressive approaches to similar problems, and had relative success one other way of my own, but here I have the answer that most obviously belongs to my world. I also have a bit of work or three to do, refining it.

There has been a lot of sick and tired lately.  Now there must follow an even bigger lot of rushing about: my blogging may be sporadic or non-existent over the next fortnight or so.  The sickness and tiredness is probably going to deprive me of finishing this chapter before the real rush gets going.  It's got conspicuously better over today, though.  One good night's sleep, and I ought to be set up for my adventures.

Night!

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: Re-read of the Rising arc begun this morning - three chapters, from Fairfields to the Dales.  Kate in Clover Clough, Luke in Langdale beneath the scarps of Hareborough.  Now suitably refreshed on what the original plans were, before they went eight ways to blazes.

The story and a late spate of rage-inducing RL news have jointly given me some food for thought, part of which I hope to chew over here presently.

To recap once again on this month's challenge, it is:

Paying My Moral Debts
I'm going through the list of all the free stuff I, personally, am currently getting only because other people are enthusiastic and generous. Then I'm seeing how much I can commit by way of fair return, and how much of that should or can be financial. The coming month is for sorting out the financial side.

But this is where I ask: is the idea of financial moral debt a trap in itself?

On one level, clearly not. If I promise to give somebody some money, then even if there is no legal evidence of the debt, or the law allows me some way to weasel out of it, I'm obviously bound by my word. Moving out a bit, if somebody helps me out when I need a gift or a loan, and then further down the line they need some help from me, I think I owe them morally whether I've promised anything or not. And if Croesus helps me out and won't take anything back, even this confers on me a kind of soft obligation to pay the favour forward to somebody else at least once. All these kinds of moral debt, I'm quite happy with.

But taking the notion of 'debt' too literally, risks damaging the very gift economy I'm trying to do my part in.

There is nothing mean, and often something quite charming, about the ideal of always paying one's way and not owing nuttin' to nobody. That is a strong strain in the way I was brought up. Its danger, though - and hence the danger of projects like this - is that it may instil a kind of Janus-faced and flinty righteousness. On the one face, a pride in having paid all one owes (unlike, perhaps, some of those other people). On the other, a stubborn unwillingness to take stuff one can't pay for (ditto).

The proud face is almost certainly wrong. Here I've reckoned up a few moral debts that are too obvious to overlook. But were I to look harder, I should certainly find some more. And some of the best free stuff I'm probably benefiting from may be so transparent, and work so well, that I scarcely notice it, and have no hope of quantifying it. If I could quantify monetarily all the labour I benefit from without charge, it's not at all obvious that I could pay it. Nor would everybody even want me to pay it - assuming they were set up to receive payment in the first place. Payment in kind or in labour doesn't necessarily help either - same deal. The gift economy is not, on first blush, very much like the market economy at all.

The stubborn face may now incline to say, "Okay - I won't take any more free benefits than I can help." This is wrong in another sense. If Mr Stubborn refuses to take advantage of a benefit, it doesn't follow that the benefactor gets back any of what they spent to provide it. All that happens is that a little grace is lost from the world, and a little utility dropped into the entropy bin. It's surely wrong to be an ungrateful freeloader. But it's no better to be a surly curmudgeon. I've mentioned before that I believe mutual bounty to be an essential element of a working libertarian society, just as surely as legalistic gaming is a poison to it. But if there is to be bounty in giving, there must logically be no less grace in receiving. The temptation to maintain the moral 'credit' of a Lady Bountiful is ultimately as selfish and status-seeking, as the temptation to live the lush life on somebody else's tab is selfish and greedy.

So how much should I pay, and what should I take advantage of?

In the market economy, we know where we stand. A known value is offered by a particular person, and a known value is given in return by another. Plain dealing and precise reckoning are the market's breath and bones.

In the gift economy, value must still be given and returned. But even with the help of guide prices and suggested donations, the aims, rules, and consequences are very different. The same fundamental economic principles must apply, but in very distinct ways. I have a hazy idea of how to take some of the simplest issues forward, and shall attempt to do so in subsequent posts in this series. Taking the case where payment must be financial - this month's narrow target - I want to show how that quality I call gaiety, a sort of genial flexibility about various specifics of how good things are paid for and provided, can improve on either the legalistic market approach (take all you want, as cheaply or freely as you can get away with) or the moralistic market approach (don't take anything unless you can afford to pay the least you think it's worth) when dealing with goods freely offered. And I want, too, to examine its limits, and the places where market-like punctilio about specific obligations is required to keep the good shows on the road.

It's proving no simpler a project than I expected, and as always, I welcome any insights anybody has to offer.

So last night I took time off from being a free man, in order to become a number.  My number was not Number 6.  I consider this use of my time to be rather a pile of Number 2 - albeit in various happier worlds I would contribute the same information gratis and with a good will.  At least the UK Office of National Statistics is a pretty straight branch of government, as such things go.  Filling in the form gave me a couple of thoughtful moments.

Biggest surprise was on the 'national identity' question, where multiple identifications were very wisely allowed for.  I discovered that I do, in fact, positively identify both as English and as Welsh. 

I don't identify as British, at least not in the same way.  Britain-the-polity is my nation in the tepid sense that other nation-states are very much less so; English, with Welsh running a strong second place behind, are more like personal tribal affiliations (and map increasingly poorly either to race, or even to 'ethnicity' in its day-to-day use - another thing the ONS got right).   I have a separate and much stronger affection for Britain-the-place, which is my island home; and for my fellow-islanders, and our near neighbours, and the customs and institutions that have grown up among us; and also for that large and diffuse cultural community called by some the Anglosphere.   And I have other tribal and kinship affiliations which are not ethnic or national at all: some of these are at least as important to me as my pervading Welsh-rippled Englishness.  It's bogglingly complex when one draws back from it a moment, and sometimes it takes the inherent simplification of a poll or a census to remind me how much so.

And then there was the one voluntary question on the survey: religion.  My usual policy, when somebody compels me to do something for their convenience, is to provide them with as little of what they want as I can get away with.  But in this case, I decided there was a better case for volunteering my  census-simplification of the true answer, viz. "No religion".  Religion is the sort of energetic concentrated interest-group to which governments and other folk are often tempted to defer.  "No religion," though, is a category which says little about one's actual philosophy or even zeal, but provides a broad hint that one will be unsympathetic to future religiose nudgings from the asker. 

Since genuinely religious people will mostly put down their actual religion, and people who know or care very little for religion are notorious for just putting down whatever identity their parents professed, I think it's wiser for people who do care but don't have a conventional religious identity not to let themselves be under-counted.

It is also the fault of this bureaucratic oppression that I only managed 20 words of Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland yesterday, and this is the story to which I am sticking.  But at least, albeit in a small way, I learned about as much from last night's exercise as Mr Trwyn-Ym-Mhopeth did!

Yay!  I have my main computer back again!

When that I was and a little tiny boy, I was inspired by superhero comics and my dad's passion for electronics to build my own computer.  So I made me a diagram of circuit symbol salad, corrected it to allow for the rather limited number of components I actually possessed, and built it in a lunchbox.  My prototype boasted a big old screw-top 9V battery, a bunch of wires, and a large space in which to plug in processing unit upgrades.  One wrote out one's questions on scraps of paper, posted them through the lid, and they were answered with robotic and logical infallibility on the reverse side of the paper.

The output feed turned out not to work, so I was compelled to remove the scraps myself.  I then discovered a general output error, viz. the reverse sides were still blank.  So, until I had figured out the details of the improved processing mill beyond "I suppose the Mark II ought to actually have one!", my only way was to calculate what the computer would have written, and fill the answers in myself.  Applying these to reality, I found them to lack computerish infallibility despite the rigorous calculation and the battery, and abandoned the whole project of computer-building in disgust for the next decade.

Nonetheless, I still sometimes help computers to generate oracles for me.  So taking last night's titular message as a broad hint, the rest of the updates are:

Tired of poncing the help off other people at need, and yet still being unable to read Homer or Sappho in the original, a couple of weeks ago I finally began the study of ancient Greek.  It wants a bit of work.  Still, I progress, and already if I ever need unexpectedly to inform Socrates that the pirate is leading the hippopotamus away from the river, I shall be ready to roll.  Had my class been given material like this to work with at school, we'd have probably ended up speaking all the French and German anybody could ask for, not counting that special species of Parisian who could only ask for us not to.

Another hippopotamus in the room discovered for my Libertarian Challenge: OpenOffice added to my 'free stuff I ought to give something back for' list.  The solution to this is not like the others, and I shall post about it presently.

I am still working, or something, on Kate's great speech, because it is hard and my brain is soft.

I have very nearly refined the art of the meat pie to my personal satisfaction.  A dash of Worcester sauce in the mince-and-onion filling was what it wanted.  The pastry is nice enough, but wants some final tweaking.  Also, I want to find some Brussel tops, and see if they're as much better than regular greens as I remember.

Many travels to arrange over the next fortnight.

I need to research a Do The Housework cantrip.  There are clearly not enough hours in the day for other methods to keep up.

In which I begin to put my beliefs systematically to the test.

An easy and fairly painless one, first.   I'm going through the list of all the free stuff I, personally, am currently getting only because other people are enthusiastic and generous.  Then I'm seeing how much I can commit by way of fair return, and how much of that should or can be financial.  The coming month is for sorting out the financial side.

The question turns out not to be an easy or a simple one at all, which is one of the reasons (or excuses) for my not having answered it very well previously.  The easy and simple question I'm trying to answer in this challenge is: what am I going to do about it, right now?

For each problem I solve, I will allow myself one short post about one of the many issues behind this phase of the challenge, and the various questions, answers, and bewilderments in which it involves me.  All feedback, as ever, will be gratefully received.  Likewise, if any of my researches or mis-steps should later prove useful to anybody else, this challenge log will have served at least one of its principal purposes.

My immediate list of projects I believe I ought to be funding, but am not:

• Dreamwidth, via paid membership.  (I believe the LiveJournal community deserves my support in other ways: I don't feel any urge to support its administrators financially.)  All I need to do here is sort out a technical issue with my card payment - hopefully possible this evening.
• Wikipedia.  Yes, I have problems with it.  No, that hasn't stopped me making extensive use of it.  So...
• Project Gutenberg.
• The Center for a Stateless Society at the Molinari Institute - a political resource, here considered purely as a spring of much freely-given education and mental profit.
• Diane Duane, for the freely webbed version of her The Big Meow.
• Spybot Search and Destroy, that  most excellent labour of love against the evil malware.

Several other things from which I benefit, and for which I am grateful, but which I presently expect not to be funding, will also come up for consideration.

'Ere we go...