Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 6

In a blatant attempt to attract more Institutional supporters…

Anybody who has visited my Patreon page should know that I have two special support tiers.

At Bronze ($20 per month) level, you get included in the credits of the project pages for all my solo stuff. Here’s a recent example.

Today I’m announcing two new perks for Institutional ($100 permonth) supporters. This tier is intended for people with corporate budgets behind them.

When you sign up, you get to chose a name (possibly your corporation’s) and at your option a URL to back the name; this will be included in the credits pages. You will also get an individual shout-out in the “Acknowledgements” section of my forthcoming book “The Programmer’s Way: A Guide to Right Mindset”

By joining my feed at Institutional level, your company can demonstrate good Internet citizenship through supporting the often thankless and obscure work needed to keep the infrastructure humming.

Thanks in advance for your support.

Fear of COMITment

I shipped the first release of another retro-language revival today: COMIT. Dating from 1957 (coincidentally the year I was born) this was the first string-processing language, ancestral to SNOBOL and sed and ed and Unix shell. One of the notational conventions invented in COMIT, the use of $0, $1…etc. as substitution variables, survives in all these languages.

I actually wrote most of the interpreter three years ago, when a copy of the COMIT book fell into my hands (I think A&D regular Daniel Franke was responsible for that). It wasn’t difficult – 400-odd lines of Python, barely enough to make me break a sweat. That is, until I hit the parts when the book’s description of the language is vague and inadequate.

It was 1957 and nobody knew hardly anything about how to describe computer language systematically, so I can’t fault Dr. Victor Yngve too harshly. Where I came a particular cropper was trying to understand the intended relationship between indices into the workspace buffer and “right-half relative constituent numbers”. That defeated me, so I went off and did other things.

Over the last couple days, as part of my effort to promote my Patreon feed to a level where my medical expenses are less seriously threatening, I’ve been rebuilding all my project pages to include a Patreon button and an up-to-date list of Bronze and Institutional patrons. While doing this I tripped over the unshipped COMIT code and pondered what to do with it.

What I decided to do was ship it with an 0.1 version number as is. The alternative would have been to choose from several different possible interpretations of the language book and quite possibly get it wrong.

I think a good rule in this kind of situation is “First, do no harm”. I’d rather ship an incomplete implementation that can be verified by eyeball, and that’s what I’ve done – I was able to extract a pretty good set of regression tests for most of the features from the language book.

If someone else cares enough, some really obsessive forensics on the documentation and its code examples might yield enough certainty about the author’s intentions to support a full reconstruction. Alas, we can’t ask him for help, as he died in 2012.

A lot of the value in this revival is putting the language documentation and a code chrestomathy in a form that’s easy to find and read, anyway. Artifacts like COMIT are interesting to study, but actually using it for anything would be perverse.

While I was making other plans, pars tres

A day or so after the not-so-thrilling last installment of my medical troubles (previous post), I get my hands on a knee scooter. Rented from a local pharmacy.

This is a big improvement over the wheelchair. I’m more mobile on it, and can pee standing up. If you think that last bit doesn’t matter, pray you never find out what an epic getting on and off a toilet seat is when you don’t have the use of your dominant leg.

Unfortunately, life is tradeoffs. You can fall off a knee scooter; I have, twice. No serious harm done, but that kind of thing is another increment of pain and exhaustion in a process with quite a sufficiency of those, thank you.

The ankle started hurting yesterday, seriously enough that I briefly considered actually taking a Percocet, but only when it was horizontal in bed. I think my sensory feed from that extremity must still be a bit disturbed by the aftermath of the nerve block, because it took me almost a day to figure out that the pain was due to external pressure from some of the support scaffolding in the ankle dressing.

I think those rigid parts have shifted around in an unhelpful way due to my crawling around and/or mounting the knee scooter. We’re going to try to get an appointment at the orthopedist’s office today to have someone there inspect and rewrap the thing.

Which means I’m going to have to deal with getting down (and later up) the steps in front of my house. Yeek! Neither scooter nor wheelchair is well adapted to this; I’ll probably have to bust out the kneepads and crawl again.

It hasn’t been all bad. Saturday a couple of my friends from our Friday night game group came over to boardgame with me; Xia: Legends of a Drift System. A good time was had by all.

My far friends on the net have come through as well. My Patreon feed is $356 per month thicker than it was a week ago. And there have been a bunch of one-off donations. John Carmack (yes, the John Carmack) sent $1000, for which I am humbly grateful.

SELF is definitely a scrub, but we’re making plans for me to video in my keynote. Topic change: I’m going to talk about infrastructure sustainability considered as a problem of load-bearing people, and the fact that the hacker culture doesn’t have any customs about how to support our old maintainer/warhorses or arrange an orderly succession when they die in harness.

I’ve actually been worrying about this problem for years, but mostly because of load-bearing people near me who weren’t me. Now my attention is seriously focused. :-)

I am able to work, and a good thing too or I’d be going bonkers. NTPsec is in a bit of a quiet period right now; we’ve delivered NTS, and the next big push I have in mind will have to wait until Go has a TLS 3.0 binding. So I’ve been making progress on the Go port of reposurgeon.

The Patreon is up to $1709 now. At $2000 it would cover monthly mortgage and bills; that’s starting to look attainable, which is a damn good thing given that I still have no clearer idea what the medical stuff will end up costing than “a lot”.

I increasingly think that software users and engineers who care about the infrastructure commons they rely on not collapsing out from under them are going to have to adopt something like the old custom of tithing, in self-defense.

In simpler times, before state-welfare schemes or insurance companies, community citizens in good standing were often religiously required or strongly encouraged to “tithe” – give a small fraction of their income to a church expressly for relief of the poor.

Nowadays we can cut out the middlemen and attendant risk of corruption. We have Patreon and SubscribeStar. Can we grow a social norm that hackers with regular jobs in the profit-making sector should use services like these to split (say) $30 a month among three infrastructure developers of their choice?

Yes, I am asking this for me, now. But I noticed the problem before it was personal. The problem is bigger than me, and the solution should be too.

The point of suggesting a fan-out of three is to avoid a situation where all that goodwill gets captured by a handful of hackers with high visibility (like, er, myself), and people who want to help have a reason to seek out developers who are doing important work in more obscurity.

While I was making other plans, part deux

Thanks to everyone who joined my Patreon feed or upped their contributions. I’m still worried, but a little less so now.

Some good news. The post-op pain has stabilized at a level where the occasional Tylenol will handle it nicely. If Dr. Wilson the anesthesiologist is listening, damn! You are good at your job. The timing of the fadeout on the nerve block spared me agony without overdoing intrusive chemicals. This means I will not have to touch the opiates, an outcome for which I am deeply thankful.

The kneepads I ordered yesterday arrived this morning. Big win – crawling doesn’t hurt now, which improves my options. Also helps with dismounting to the floor off a toilet, which is one of those things you will never realize is a big deal until you have to do it.

But the biggest when is the real wheelchair. My mother is connected to a neighborhood non-profit in West Chester that loans out this kind of equipment. When she first went there the only visible option was a service chair, a wheeled chair designed to be moved by a nurse or assistant rather than to enable the user to self-propel, so that’s what she brought back.

It was awful. A service chair doesn’t cope well with rugs or doorsills. The caster-like wheels on the front are perverse; any kind of turning or backing motion inevitably leaved them in a twisted state that make maneuvering nigh-impossible unless the person moving the chair can brute-muscle it around, which Cathy can’t do.

Mom went back and found out about the basement where they keep the good stuff, and now I have a real wheelchair – that is, the kind designed to be driven by the user’s arms. Massive improvement! The lesser part of it is that the big wheels cope better with sills and rugs; the much greater part is that I can move myself around. Having some autonomy back is, for someone with a psychology like mine, as precious as jewels.

Reduces the burden on Cathy, too. Hoicking my 245lbs around in that service chair was barely within the limits of her strength, hard work. I feel better because I can take that load off her now.

Excuse me while I wheel myself out to the kitchen for a ribeye steak from the Outback. And if, dear reader, you fail to comprehend that this, too, is therapy, you are certainly not qualified to take are of the likes o’ me.

Still trying to get my hands on a knee scooter.

While I was making other plans

Today I had to – literally – crawl from my wife’s car to my house. Because I couldn’t walk. Life is what happens while you were making other plans.

About six months ago I sprained my right ankle in kung fu class. It gave me occasional pain, mostly in cold weather, but I thought it was healing and I could just let it heal. Until about two months ago when I was out with friends on a chilly evening and my ankle folded up under me, just lost the power to support me entirely.

I escaped serious injury from the concrete pavement because I am really good at falling down without hurting myself. This is a skill you learn in early childhood when spastic palsy compromises the motor control in a leg. But it meant I had a prompt need to find out what was going on in there.

A couple of visits to doctors and an MRI scan later we determined that I had developed one of the more unfortunate possible sequelae of a sprain, a thing called an osteochondral lesion. This is what happens when an area of bone in the load-bearing area of the joint erodes away, so the cartilage above it is no longer supported. If the unsupported cartilage is then damaged, the long-term result can be crippling arthritis of the joint.

In my case, it seemed I had gotten lucky. The cartilage seemed undamaged in the MRI images. The indicated procedure is to go in with an arthroscopic probe and squirt synthetic bone into the lesion. Once it hardens it can support the cartilage so it doesn’t take additional damage.

I waited nearly a month for the surgery. Two weeks ago, while still waiting, my ankle folded under me as I was cooking breakfast. This time I wasn’t so lucky. I tucked in the right way to avoid injury from the floor, but the back of my head hit an errant chair leg, producing a laceration that bled copiously on the kitchen linoleum.

I picked myself up, applied pressure with a towel, called my wife, and informed her that when her errand was done she’d need to take me to the ER. A short but extremely expensive visit later I returned with three staples in my head and an MRI scan reassuring everyone that I probably hadn’t taken any permanent damage.

I think the medical staff got that before the MRI, because my main coping mechanism for hospital stress is wry humor aimed to make the people attending me laugh. I do it because this helps me feel in control of my situation, but in this particular case it conveyed something else that was useful. Comic wryness is, after all, pretty much impossible to maintain when you’re concussed or shocky.

Home again home again. It’s nice that even at 61 I’m a physically tough person with a high pain threshold and a thick skull who is actually rather difficult to injure – my school name over at the kung fu kwoon is “The Mighty Oak”. And I like that I can be self-reliant and stoic under stress. But thank you, I’d prefer not to have this confirmed by repeated injuries…

I had that surgery about eighteen hours ago. And ended up crawling from my car because none of the medical people talked about or planned for my post-operative problems until after I was out of anesthesia. Pain management was as far as they got.

It was not made clear to me in advance that I wouldn’t be able to put any weight on the joint for a minimum of two weeks, at risk of compounding my troubles. A nurse handed me a pair of crutches as an afterthought, but everyone’s specialties we so siloed that it didn’t occur to anyone to ask if I knew how to use them, let alone whether the impaired motor control in my uninjured leg might disqualify me.

So now it’s oh-dark-thirty the next morning, I’m writing this because the anesthesia and the four hours or so of shut-eye after I got home have left me all slept out for the moment, and I’ve learned from experience that quietly coding or writing until I’m tired enough to sleep again is better for me than tossing and turning.

I was scheduled to give the main keynote at South East Linux Fest on the 14th (this was well before I even knew I was going to need surgery, let alone how close to the event it would be). I’d have to do it from a wheelchair, now. I don’t have a wheelchair yet; we’re hoping to get one tomorrow. It may not be practical at all depending on my medical state, and I can’t even get my post-op check until after SELF. It’s hard to predict whether I’ll be able, and in a mere ten days I don’t think the odds are very good.

Part of the reason this is a public blog post is as my subjunctive apology to everyone who was expecting to see me at SELF, in the all-too-likely event that I can’t be there. Right after I post this I’m going to put a link to it on SELF’s IRC channel and recommend to the organizers that they find someone else to keynote.

I’m not entirely sure a wheelchair will fit in the corridor and through the doors of my house. Until I can verify that, I move by knee-walking or crawling. Besides forcing one to learn how to fall well, another perverse benefit of a palsied leg (or legs) is that the body compensates by making the arms and shoulders abnormally strong; this is helping me now as I frequently have to hoist myself around by main strength. Just getting from the floor to a toilet seat isn’t entirely trivial even so.

I’ve ordered a pair of carpenter’s kneepads for next-day shipping from Amazon. Improvise, adapt, overcome!

Cooking isn’t practical; the ritual of The Breakfast is denied to me until I’m back on my feet. Fortunately I can sit at my desk and type with my right leg elevated, as I am now doing.

There’s no real pain yet; the nerve block is sill operating. That will probably change within the next 24 hours. When it does, there’s a vial of Percocet (oxycodone and acetaminophen) pills a’waitin. Which I’m going to try hard not to take, because opiates scare me shitless. Still, my stoicism has limits and they might be tested this time.

There was some damage to the cartilage. The orthopedist said that if it fails to heal well I may need an ankle joint replacement. I am guardedly optimistic about this, as I do have a history of healing quickly and well from trauma (that nasty scalp laceration cleared up inside of a week). But the downside could be dire.

Finally…if you’ve ever thought that you might join my Patreon feed, now would be a really good time. This…adventure..has blown a $6000 hole in my budget and the expenses aren’t over yet. There’s that post-op check at minimum, and probably physical therapy afterwards, and that’s if all heals well; otherwise it’ll be much, much more expensive.

The dangerous folly of “Software as a Service”

Comes the word that Saleforce.com has announced a ban on its customers selling “military-style rifles”.

The reason this ban has teeth is that the company provides “software as a service”; that is, the software you run is a client for servers that the provider owns and operates. If the provider decides it doesn’t want your business, you probably have no real recourse. OK, you could sue for tortious interference in business relationships, but that’s chancy and anyway you didn’t want to be in a lawsuit, you wanted to conduct your business.

This is why “software as a service” is dangerous folly, even worse than old-fashioned proprietary software at saddling you with a strategic business risk. You don’t own the software, the software owns you.

It’s 2019 and I feel like I shouldn’t have to restate the obvious, but if you want to keep control of your business the software you rely on needs to be open-source. All of it. All of it. And you can’t afford it to be tethered to a service provider even if the software itself is nominally open source.

Otherwise, how do you know some political fanatic isn’t going to decide your product is unclean and chop you off at the knees? It’s rifles today, it’ll be anything that can be tagged “hateful” tomorrow – and you won’t be at the table when the victim-studies majors are defining “hate”. Even if you think you’re their ally, you can’t count on escaping the next turn of the purity spiral.

And that’s disregarding all the more mundane risks that come from the fact that your vendor’s business objectives aren’t the same as yours. This is ground I covered twenty years ago, do I really have to put on the Mr. Famous Guy cape and do the rubber-chicken circuit again? Sigh…

Business leaders should learn to fear every piece of proprietary software and “service” as the dangerous addictions they are. If Salesforce.com’s arrogant diktat teaches that lesson, it will have been a service indeed.

The low-down on home routers – how to buy, what to avoid

Ever had the experience of not realizing you’re a subject-matter-expert until someone brings up a topic on a mailing list and you find yourself uttering a pretty comprehensive brain dump about it? This happened to me about home and SOHO routers recently. So I’m repeating the brain dump here. I expect I’ll get some corrections, because at least one of my regulars – I’m thinking of Dave Taht – knows more about this topic than I do. But here goes…

If you’re looking to buy or upgrade a home router, I’ll start with some important negative advice: Don’t go near hardware with a Broadcomm chip in it. The current too-weak-to-thrive threshold for router hardware is Don’t trust vendor firmware! Always reflash your router with a current version from one of the major open-source firmware stacks.

If your prompt reaction is “I ain’t got time for that!”, then the Romanian, Bulgarian, and Russian cyber-mafias thank you for your contribution to their bot networks and promise they won’t do anything really bad with your router. But they will sell control of it to the highest bidder, all right.

Yes, it’s that bad out there. You’ll understand something of why by the time you finish reading this.

In fairness to one vendor who seems to be trying to do right, Ubiquiti may be an exception to the vendor-firmware-sucks rule. They have very good buzz among my knowledgeable friends, but I haven’t tested their stuff myself and experience has taught me skepticism in these matters. So I can’t recommend them as an alternative to reflashing yet.

There are two major open-source firmware distributions and several tiddlers. The tiddlers haven’t attracted enough of a community to self-sustain and are best ignored unless you ahem crave adventure.

The majors are OpenWrt and DD-WRT. For a while OpenWRT looked almost moribund and there was a third called LEDE that was an OpenWRT fork, but no more. It looks like LEDE has merged back into OpenWRT and revivified it. They shipped a new stable release at the end of January 2019.

DD-WRT is a different project than either OpenWRT or LEDE. It’s not as well run as OpenWRT, which actually has one builder and stable releases. DD-WRT survives mainly because it has good support for one common SOC that OpenWRT/LEDE doesn’t – IIRC it was some exudation from the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Broadcomm (“Our products are shitty, but boy are they cheap!”).

I’ve found OpenWRT very solid and reliable; the reason my knowledge of the state of these projects got a bit stale is that my router Just Works and has Just Worked for a long time. I have a plan B to buy one of the Ubuquiti routers if OpenWRT shits the bed, but I’ve never come even close to exercising that option.

(Note: What I’m actually running is CeroWRT, a now fairly old fork of OpenWRT by my friend and semi-regular A&D commenter Dave “Bufferbloat’s-Bane” Taht that he wrote to experiment with improved buffer-queue management; since then his patches were merged upstream to OpenWRT/LEDE and Linux and CeroWRT has been discontinued.)

My current recommendation, therefore, is to flash OpenWRT if you can and DD-WRT only if you must. At 846 vendor/model combinations OpenWRT has pretty broad support.

If I needed a new router today (I don’t, I have a couple of cold spares) I’d trawl e-Bay for a one-generation-back commodity router on the OpenWRT support list that does have 4GB+ flash and 32GB+RAM and doesn’t have a &$@*$! Broadcomm chip in it, buy it, and flash OpenWRTs latest stable release. I’ve had good history with Netgear, so I’d probably look at those first.

Flashing OpenWRT is not a complicated or lengthy process, and you will get the happy feeling that comes from high confidence that your router isn’t infected with vendor malware – a serious issue, some of them have pulled very evil shit like rewriting HTTP traffic to push ads of their choice at you, and if you’re wondering if those ad sites are also likely to be malware vectors the answer is “Why, yes, well spotted.”

Even when the vendors aren’t actively evil, remotely exploitable bugs in router firmware stacks have been depressingly common. The problem is not usually kernel-level but higher up, in the admin stack; simple factory misconfigurations (for example) can leave your device totally vulnerable even when the individual software components are sound.

The pragmatic reason to go with OpenWRT is that it greatly decreases your odds of having this kind of problem out of the box and improves your odds of a prompt fix if there is one. It’s a plain fact that OpenWRT ships buggy releases far less often than vendors do.

These are the major reasons I say “Friends don’t let friends run proprietary router firmware.” Ubiquiti *might* be an exception, I’m prepared to be cautiously optimistic on that score, but in general it is not safe out there in vendor-land. Not even close to safe.

OK, now let’s take a look at why it’s so awful in vendor-land…

You have to start by knowing how routers are developed. Almost nobody in this space spends actual NRE on hardware development beyond what it takes for the cases to look different. What happens instead is that there are a handful of reference designs by chip and SOC vendors that get replicated endlessly. This is why, if you look at OpenWRT’s support page, you’ll notice there are a lot fewer images than there are supported routers. I didn’t do a full count, but it looks like there are less than 30 for those 846 products.

Cisco is an exception to this pattern, but only in the commercial-grade hardware they sell to data centers – their SOHO routers are cheap flank guards for the upper end of their range, built on the same reference designs as RandomRouterCo’s. Ubiquiti is not an exception. I can tell both things by noticing that all the Cisco and Ubiquiti stuff on the OpenWRT support list uses a handful of generic images.

Ubiquiti’s value add, if it’s real (which I’m willing to believe – everything I can see from the outside suggests a smart, well-run company) is going to be mostly putting more talent and money into the software end. Which is exactly what I would do if I were running their business strategy; software differentiation is way less expensive than new hardware design. They might do some of the latter, but probably not at the SOHO end of their range – it’s not cost-effective there.

In a market structured like this, optimal strategy is to buy cheap generic hardware and let open-source obsessives add the value on the software end. The main thing you need to be careful about is flash/RAM capacity; everyone’s incentives favor cutting BOM to the bone, and given the fixed coast of the reference designs the best lever on that is to lowball flash/RAM capacity as much as you think you can get away with without having the product go catatatonic in under 90 days.

There’s also a potential problem with cheapjack Chinese component substitutions that contract manufacturers will do unless you’re watching like a hawk, but everybody has that one. If Cisco and Ubiquiti manufactured in the U.S. it would show in their marketing.

And that’s it. I’ll finish by emphasizing a consequence of these things being variations on a handful of reference designs – flash/RAM capacity and port count are about the only differentiators there are. Even if you wanted to try to buy better quality in the rest of the box by paying more money, that’s remarkably hard to do – they’re like toasters that way, except that you can’t actually bail out by buying a better-designed antique. Alas.

Friends of Armed & Dangerous 2019

Once again I will be at Penguicon and hosting a party for all friends of this blog. This coming Friday evening, room number not yet known, it will be posted at the con.

Those of you who participated in he design of the Great Beast may be interested to know that I expect to receive its successor at Penguicon – a Greater Beast built from a 64-core Threadripper chip. The machine might well be at the party.

Spotting the wild Fascist

The term “fascist” gets thrown around a lot by people who have no actual clue what Fascism was about. I know what it was about because when I was about 11 or 12 I read Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of of the Third Reich and became fascinated by the question which has driven my study of politics and history for all of the fifty years since. Which is: how do we prevent the genocidal horrors of the Nazi regime from ever recurring?

In the process of trying to answer this question I have read deeply about Naziism, Italian Fascism, Francoite Fascism, Marxism, Irrationalism, and several political tendencies related to these. I know their theory, I know their history, and I know what Fascists believed about themselves. Most of all I think I have a pretty firm grasp on how a revival of Fascism in the 21st century would look. And it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility, either…but if it happens, it’s not going to come from where most people currently throwing around the term “fascist” expect.

Hence, a field guide to spotting the wild Fascist. And avoiding false alarms.

Let’s start by clearing some terminological underbrush. I’m going to use the term “fascism” for a cluster of ideologies derived from Italian Fascism as it was invented by Gabriele D’Annunzio and then reinvented by Benito Mussolini. The most important derivative of Italian Fascism was German Naziism. I’ll capitalize “Fascism” when I’m speaking historically of how it developed rather than typologically as a cluster of correlated ideas and structural traits.

I’m not going to talk so much about some other movements and regimes historically connected to Fascism and sometimes confused with it, such Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Peronism in South America, or interwar Japanese militarism. In some cases these consciously borrowed fascist tropes, but not the core theory of fascism. They’re also less interesting because they’re not epidemiologically dangerous at this point in history – nobody has any reason to fear a revival of (for example) Saddamism.

On the other hand I will talk about Francisco Franco a bit. He’s useful because he borrowed just enough fascist tropes to confuse inattentive and sloppy thinkers into typing him as a Fascist without actually being one. Thus, contrasting his behavior with fascism is instructive.

So we’ll start with the roots of Italian Fascism. It originated as a kind of live-action role-playing game for disgruntled Italian WWI vets led by a charismatic war hero, aviator, and poet named Gabriele D’Annunzio. Compared to what it evolved into, early Italian fascism had a rather charming opera-bouffe quality about it – theoretical ideas that were incoherent to the point of surrealism, lots of prancing around in invented uniforms, and dosing of opponents with castor oil. The history of D’Annunzio’s Fascist microstate of Fiume makes amusing reading.

Then came Benito Mussolini, a man looking for a vehicle.

Mussolini was a revolutionary Socialist organizer influenced by the theories of Georges Sorel, who was responding to one of the early failures of Marxism. In Marxian “scientific socialism”, universal revolution was a process that would follow mechanically from the capitalist immiseration of the proletariat. But by the second decade of the new century it was becoming clear that most national proletariats were unwilling to play their role in the theory and indeed tended to be among the most patriotic and nationalist elements of their societies. Class warfare as the engine of international socialism had failed, creating a doctrinal crisis in communist/socialist circles.

Sorel responded by writing a new theory of political motivation he called “irrationalism” which proposed that instead of fighting popular sentiments like patriotism and nationalist mythology, socialists and communists should embrace them as tools to build and perfect socialism. Mussolini was persuaded, broke with the Socialist Party, and went looking for a vehicle for a Sorelian revolution. He found it in D’Annunzio’s Fascists and, swiftly shunting D’Annunzio aside, became their leader.

I’ve covered this history in detail because it explodes one of the prevailing myths about Fascism – that it arose out of some fundamental opposition to Communism. In fact this was never true; Fascism was a Marxist heresy from the day Mussolini seized it, differing from Marxism not mainly in its aims but in the means by which they were to be achieved.

The defining doctrine of Fascism once D’Annunzio was out of the way was this quote by Mussolini: “Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” (There are a few variant translations from the original Italian.) Building directly on Leninist political economics, Benito Mussolini wrote a theoretical justification of the totalitarian state which paralleled Joseph Stalin’s less theorized but brutally-executed totalitarianization of the Soviet Union at around the same time.

The Fascist theory was of a unitary, totalizing state ruled by a leader acting as the embodiment of the will of the nation. No power centers in opposition to the embodied will can be tolerated; church, family and civic institutions must all become organs of that will.

One way to tell if you’re dealing with an actual Fascist is whether your subject has that theory of state power. If he doesn’t, you might be dealing with (say) a garden variety conservative-militarist strongman like Admiral Horthy in Hungary. Rulers like that will kill you if you look like a political threat, but they’re not invested in totalitarianizing their entire society.

Occasionally you’ll get one of these like Francisco Franco who borrows fascist tropes as propaganda tools but keeps a tight reign on the actual Fascist elements in his power base (the Falange). Franco remained a conservative monarchist all his life and passed power to the Spanish royal family on his death.

This highlights one of the other big lies about Fascism; that it’s a “conservative” ideology. Not true. Franco, a true reactionary, wanted to preserve and if necessary resurrect the power relations of pre-Civil-War Spain. Actual Fascism aims at a fundamental transformation of society into a perfected state never seen before. All of its type examples were influenced by Nietzschean ideas about the transformation of Man into Superman; Fascist art glorified speed, power, technology, and futurism.

Another political species commonly and stupidly mistaken for a fascist is the conservative populist. My type example for this is Pierre Poujade. Not only do those like Poujade lack the fascist’s centralizing theory of power, their animating complaint is that power is too centralized – ruling elites have become arrogant and disconnected from the populace and it is time to call them to account, restoring the autonomy and pride of the forgotten people who hold up the system from below.

The Fascist theory of power would regard Poujade as a troublemaker to be squashed. It defines the system from above, naturally evolving quite rapidly into Führerprinzip, the cult of the absolute leader whose authority may not be questioned. One important consequence is that fascist strongmen like to create institutions parallel to the civil police and line military that are answerable directly and personally to the Maximum Leader. Of course the best known example is Hitler’s SS, but any well-developed fascism generates equivalents.

You can have a quite an effective totalitarianism without this; Stalin, for example, never bothered with an SS-equivalent. You can get similar developments under Communism; consider Mao’s Red Guards. And on the third hand, Franco copied that part of the formula without actually being a Fascist. Still – if you think you’ve spotted a fascist demagogue ramping up to takeover, one of the things to check is whether he’s trailing a thug army behind him ready to turn into a personal instrument of force. If he isn’t, you’re probably wrong.

Another thing that follows from the Fascist theory of power is hostility towards markets, free enterprise, and trade. Yes, yes, I know, you’ve heard all your life that fascists are or were tools of capitalist oligarchs, but this is another big lie. In reality about the last person you want to be is a “capitalist oligarch” in the way of one of Maximum Leader’s plans. Because even if he needs you to run your factories, you’re likely to find out all the ways utter ruthlessness can compel you. Threats to your family are one time-honored method. You can’t buy him, because has the power to take anything he really wants from you.

In fact, one of the reasons fascist regimes turn anti-Semitic so often is because Jews are identified with mercantile activity. Which in the Fascist view of things, is corrupting and disruptive of loyalty bonds that should be more important than wealth. Furthermore, Fascism inherited from its parent Marxism the whole critique about capitalism alienating workers from their production.

The political economics of fascism is always state-socialist, and explicitly so. This follows directly from the drive for centralization.

So now I’ll flip that around. If your candidate fascist is ideologically pro-free-market, false match. Even if he merely displays an affection for large scale corporate capitalism, that ain’t fascist. For the very direct reason that big corporations are a power center, or collection of power centers, competing with the unitary state. Fascists never tolerate that well.

Something else fascists never tolerate well is unregistered civilian firearms, or registered ones in the hands of anyone not signed up in one of the leader’s thug militias. A fascist looks at these and sees a civilian insurrection waiting to happen, and generally has a pretty keen sense of how quickly said civilian insurrection can end up with him hung up dead in the town square someplace like Giulino di Mezzegra,

Accordingly, one of the recurring themes in the consolidation of fascist power is escalating restrictions on civilian weapons ownership. “Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty,” said Adolf Hitler. The U.S.’s Second Amendment is to such creatures like sunlight to a vampire. If your candidate demagogue pushes in the opposite direction, taking an expansive view of firearms rights? Nope, neither Fascist nor more generically fascist.

And, of course, the thought police. Fascisms are even more hostile to free speech than they are to free markets. This shouldn’t even need explaining

Let’s review:

* A centralizing theory of political power and legitimacy.

* State-socialist political economics.

* Anti-semitism, with the Jews identified as bloodsucking capitalists.

* Propaganda and programs aiming to fundamentally transform society unto an idealized future state.

* Equivalents of the SA and SS, organs of coercion answering to the leader and the Party, not the law.

* Systematic suppression of competing political speech.

* Registration, suppression, and confiscation of civilian firearms.

You should actually expect to see almost all of these being pushed by any actual fascist demagogue, because they’re a mutually reinforcing package – the bones and sinews of totalitarianism – and these creatures know what they’re doing. Only Mussolini was really a pioneer; Hitler copied Mussolini’s playbook, and more recent fascists like Saddam Hussein consciously copied Hitler’s.

However, many people who think they know some history won’t identify most of these as Fascist. You’re likely to get particular pushback on the “state-socialist political economics”, though even a cursory look at the Fascist or Nazi party platforms will instantly confirm this.

This reflects what probably counts as the single most successful Soviet dezinformatisiya effort ever, the legend that fascism is diametrically opposed to socialism. In reality, most of the “totalitarianism” functional package is shared between Fascism and Communism. Partly through parallel invention and partly by diffusion; the Nazis even sent fact-finding missions to the USSR to learn how to run prison and extermination camps efficiently.

I’ll leave it to the reader to go through the list of diagnostic fascist traits and think about which ones apply to which of today’s political tendencies.

I think you’ll find it particularly instructive to plot the likelihood that political groups will fling the term “fascist” at their enemies with the extent to which they themselves have classically fascist traits. Do not expect these measurements to be inversely correlated.

Gun voodoo and intentionality

There’s a recent article about gun violence in Haiti that features the following quotes:

But the anthropological lesson from Haiti is that the truth is more complex. It isn’t just the technological lethality of guns that makes them dangerous: They also exert a power on human agency. They change us. It is both the technology and the symbolism of a gun that can encourage someone to shoot.

[…] There is a lesson to be gleaned from understanding the supernatural potency of guns. We cannot think about guns and people as separate entities, debating gun restrictions on one hand and mental-health policy on the other. The target of intervention must be the gun-person composite. If we are to truly understand and control gun violence, we need to accept that guns have potent technological and psychological effects on people – effects that inspire violent ways of being and acting in the world.

This article has come in for a great deal of mockery from gunfolks since it issued. Representative bits of snark: “Apparently, the ‘magic’ of a professorship can turn you into an imbecile.”, “Gun owners in US- approx 100 million. If this bozo was right, everyone would be dead.”, and a picture of an AR-15 with speech balloons saying “Pick me up…Shoot me at unarmed people…you are powerless.”

I’m probably going to startle a lot of my readers by asserting that the article is not entirely wrong and gunfolks’ dismissal of it is not entirely right. In fact I’m here to argue that almost the entire quoted paragraph is exactly correct, and the last sentence would be correct if it replaced the word “violent ways” with “both violent and virtuous ways”.

So keep reading…

All tools change their users. A man with an axe is a man who can chop down trees, and may well feel an actual desire to do that, because exerting power can be its own reward. A man with a gun may experience a desire to commit aggressive violence with it; what Chelsey Kivland (the article’s author) misses is that it can potentiate desire to be a defender and prevent aggressive violence.

That’s how I experience carrying a gun, and statistics tell me I am not alone. Ever since Gary Kleck’s pioneering study in the 1990s it has been well understood that in the U.S. defensive gun uses far outnumber criminal ones. Occasional attempts to refute this (such as this one) fallaciously or dishonestly ignore the fact that most DGUs not only don’t involve firing the weapon, they’re never reported to police. By the numbers, personal firearms in the U.S. magnify good more than evil.

But Haiti is not the U.S. Context cannot be ignored. Kivland’s account of the sociology of gun use in Haiti rings pretty true to anyone who’s ever lived in a Third-World country, as I have. If you haven’t, it is worth reading. Guns in the hands of people with the average IQ and time preference of Haitians have different consequences from guns in the hands of people with the average IQ and time preference of Americans. Lethality combines badly with limited capacity for forward planning and poor impulse control.

American gunfolks resist thinking or talking about this, for two different reasons. One is that they fear ceding any rhetorical ground to gun-control advocates. And in an American culture context, with the level of impulse control typical in Americans, the proposition “Guns don’t kill; people do.” is a very defensible one. It takes an exceptionally stupid or drug/alcohol-impaired American to succumb to Kivland’s bad juju and perpetrate an impulse killing just because the gun makes it possible. Among middle-class white Americans this sort of crime is so rare that you’d gave to trawl through police blotters for years to find one.

But my last sentence hints at the other reason that gunfolks don’t want to acknowledge that Kivland has a point. Because it is quite difficult to actually engage her point factually without saying things that will get one (unfairly) tagged as a a racist. And gunfolks already have a problem with their opponents’ eagerness to dismiss them as knuckledragging white supremacists.

But here at Armed & Dangerous we make a point of having no fear, so I’m going to baldly state the relevant numbers. Americans in general: average IQ 100. Black Americans, average IQ 85. Estimates for Haitian average IQ should be taken with a grain of salt but cluster around 67 – I’m going to use that figure as none of the estimates I’ve seen are enough higher for the implications to be very different. Half the people in Kivland’s street scenes are dimmer than that, well into the range of what the DSM-V categorizes as mental retardation.

On that basis you’d expect gun crimes revealing poor impulse control and lack of forward planning to be rather more common among American blacks than American whites, and you’d be right (“He dissed me, so I shot him.”). But they’d be vastly and tragically more common in Haitians, who average dimmer than American blacks by far more than the black-white average IQ gap in the U.S. Compared to the Haitians in Kivland’s street stories, your average black American gangbanger is quite intellectually gifted and forethoughtful.

Which brings us back to bad juju. If you have an IQ of 67 or below – and in the U.S. this is quite unusual outside of mental institutions – it might well be the case that having a weapon in your hand is a kind of reality-distorting, violence-producing magic. Kivland’s account deserves a more respectful hearing than gun-owners in the U.S. are wont to give it. Where she goes wrong is in supposing that the Haitian experience has much to teach us about good policy for populations less handicapped than Haitians.

So, why am I poking this hornet’s nest? The usual reason: I believe those who do not acknowledge the facts about the extent of human variability and IQ distribution will eventually be mugged by them. In particular, if we leave the likes of Kivland to tell compelling stories about Haitian gun violence, and deny the truth they carry about the nexus of guns and poor impulse control, we leave ourselves vulnerable to being outflanked in the public conversation.

The truth is, just saying “Guns don’t kill people!” isn’t enough. Because most people understand that a man with an axe in his hand can become attracted to the thought of chopping down trees. That intuition fits their own experience of being tool-users. We’re trying to tell them something that they know is not entirely true.

That’s not a safe mistake to make when certain political tendencies constantly strive to disarm us. For the sake of our own liberty, and for the sake of our unarmed neighbors who rely on us more than they know to prevent a range of ills from crime up through civil disorder to totalitarian takeover, we have a duty not to let ourselves be outflanked this way.

To meet Kivland’s analysis head-on, we have to be willing to say, straight up, that it does not apply to a population averaging 33 IQ points higher than the Haitian mean, and we have to be clear about why: the readily observable correlation between IQ and time preference. Smarter people know better. They plan better. They’re less prone to self-destructive behavior.

Thankfully, we even get to say her analysis doesn’t apply all that well to American blacks at only 18 points above the Haitian mean. Maintaining that won’t keep grievance-peddlers from yelling “racist!” at us, but nothing else (including ignoring the issue) will either. The position we have to take, and have nerves of steel about holding, is that average IQ matters a lot and skin color not even a little. Helpfully, this is true.

The “Guns don’t kill people; people do!” shibboleth had actually been bothering me for years before Kivland’s article brought my misgivings into focus. Literally it’s completely true, but in the Gricean way of engaging the strongest possible version of your opponent’s arguments it is not quite sufficient. That’s the kernel of truth in Kivland’s argument, and we have a duty to deal with it.