Books reviews, current events, and other musings

This Modern World, an excellent site by one of my favorite cartoonists, has posted a couple of very scary items.

The potential corruption arising from computerized voting is terrifying.

Last November, the state became the first in the country to conduct an election entirely with touchscreen voting machines, after lavishing $54m (£33m) on a new system that promised to deliver the securest, most up-to-date, most voter-friendly election in the history of the republic. The machines, however, turned out to be anything but reliable. With academic studies showing the Georgia touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare.
...
But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered what they called "stunning flaws". These included putting the password in the source code, a basic security no-no; manipulating the voter smart-card function so one person could cast more than one vote; and other loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices to be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access.

Taken to a possible extreme, it could lead to the demise of American democracy. As the article describes, that might have happened in Georgia's gubenatorial race last year. Anyway, I was thinking about these factors when I voted for a hospital bond this evening, in my first exposure to computer voting.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is filling up vacancies in draft boards, preparing for the possibility of reinstating the draft.

Local draft board volunteers, meanwhile, report that at training sessions last summer, they were unexpectedly asked to recommend people to fill some of the estimated 16 percent of board seats that are vacant nationwide.
...
Not since the early days of the Reagan administration in 1981 has the Defense Department made a push to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots.

I doubt that Bush will go any further before next year's election, because of the political implications. If Bush wins the election, nobody knows what will happen; he'll need a draft before he can start his next war. Let's just hope that a Democrat wins.

posted by Julian at 9:40PM

Here are the last three books that we discussed in our book group. They were all worth reading, but not outstanding.

In The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why, psychologist Richard Nisbett investigates the conventional wisdom about Eastern and Western thought processes. For example, Westerners are more focused on the individual, which Easterners consider things in terms of relationships. Nisbett describes studies that generally support that conventional wisdom. For example, American news coverage of two prominent murders focused on the killers' personal traits, while Chinese stories about the same incidents emphasized the killers' relationships and societal environment. Most of the cited research seemed plausible, though occasionally it's unclear how that research supports his overall claims. He traces the differing thought patterns back to Aristotle and Confucius, but his attempts to explain what caused those differences are unconvincing.

Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books centers on an all-woman book club that she led in Iran. The book's main appeal is her depiction of life after the Iranian revolution, as seen by a female intellectual. You can see how she and her students contend with an oppressive society that limits their activities and tries to dehumanize them. Interspersed throughout the narrative, she discusses the authors whose books she taught: Nabakov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. Being familiar their work makes the literary analysis more appealing; I've read a couple of Austen novels lately but haven't encountered the others for at least a decade. Nafisi spends too much time describing what people are wearing and what they are eating, but that's just her technique for conjuring images of her world.

In Murder and the Reasonable Man: Passion and Fear in the Criminal Courtroom, Cynthia Lee examines the legal standards that determine the punishment that the killer receives. The defendant's actions are generally compared to those of a reasonable man to determine whether the killing was justified or whether mitigating factors should reduce the sentence from murder to manslaughter. Some men commit murder after discovering their wife's infidelity or after a receiving a homosexual advance; the claim that those murders are a normal response seems totally incomprehensible to me. It's trickier to deal with questionable claims of self-defense, such as Bernhard Goetz shooting four black teenagers in a subway or the Japanese exchange student who was shot when he went to the wrong house for a Halloween party. Lee's analysis and proposals are poorly organized and repetitive, but she brings up some important questions about our criminal justice system.

posted by Julian at 11:55PM