After 18 months, two weeks, and 6 days without any a decision on whether to accept Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping on the part of Theory and Decision (published by Springer-Verlag), and after the failure of the editor to tell me the actual status of the paper in the application process, I have ended the application.

As I have mentioned before, I submitted a version of this paper to them on 5 September 2009, alerting them that one of their editors was creditted in the acknowledgments. I was told that I needed to redact those acknowledgments; I submitted a version with that change on 8 September of 2009.

The paper was submitted by way of a website running software called Editorial Manager, which offers a report of the ostensible current status of each paper. Neither the publisher of this software nor Springer seem anywhere to define the respective stages, nor even to identify them, except in-so-far as, as one waits and watches, various statuses are reported.

It took a little while before the status was reported as Editor assigned, but I had been assured by a JEO Assistant on 9 September that an editor was assigned. The status was subsequently up-dated in early January of 2010, when it became Reviewers assigned. Needless to say that I was concerned that it should have taken four months just to get reviewers assigned. In any case, the status was not up-dated again until 23 March 2010, at which point it was, well, Reviewers assigned, but now with a time-stamp of 23 March, as if reviewers had withdrawn, and new reviewers had to be found.

Nothing in the report had changed as of 28 June, when I finally wrote.

Can you please provide some information on the status of "Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping" (THEO789), submitted to Theory and Decision?

The manuscript was submitted on 8 Sep 2009. Since early January, the status reported at Editorial Manager has been "Reviewers Assigned", although the time-stamp of the status was changed in late Narch [sic, *facepalm*].

I received a reply on 29 June from the JEO Assistant.

We apologize for the delay in the processing of your paper.

There seems to be some difficulties in finding potential reviewers. However, I have forwarded your mail to Editor.

I did not receive anything from the essentially unidentified Editor. In any case, it seemed that Reviewers assigned meant something other than that reviewers had been assigned; rather, it could mean something such as that reviewers were being sought. And, 9 months after my paper had been submitted, it still didn't have any.

At the first anniversary of the submission, the status still read Reviewers Assigned (with, however, no further changes in the time-stamp); so, on 9 September I wrote

Could you please provide some information on the status of "Indifference, Indecision, and Coin-Flipping" (THEO789), submitted to Theory and Decision?

The manuscript was official submitted on 8 September 2009.

The JEO Assistant promptly replied

We apologize for the delay in the processing of your paper. Your manuscript has been sent out for review and I have forwarded your mail to him.

You will be notified once the decision has been taken.

So, apparently, Reviewers assigned could mean that reviewers were sought, or that they'd indeed been appointed; and it seemed that now my paper actually had them, though it wasn't clear when it got them between 29 June and 9 September. I went back to waiting.

On 15 November, the status reported by Editorial Manager was changed to Under review. So it would seem that a paper could be sent out for review, yet it would take another month-and-some-days before it would actually be under review. Or something. Evidently, the status labels are names, not descriptions; without a special dictionary, they tell one nothing.

I discovered that John Turri, commenting at a 'blog of Brian Leiter, reconstructed the labels of the Editorial Manager statuses as

1. New submission
2. Editor assigned
3. Reviewers assigned
4. Under review
5. Reviews complete
6. Editor has a decision

Anyway, as of 21 March of this year, the status was still reported as Under review. So I wrote

This article has been in your hands for over 18 months. While that is not a record, it is none-the-less a rather dire length of time.

For more than four months, Editorial Manager has labelled the article as "Under review". Whatever one may say for or against this paper, it does not take such time to actively read, digest, and critique. I would like to know what "Under review" actually indicates and, more importantly, what the actual status of this paper is.

I fear that I have simply wasted considerable time having submitted this paper to Springer Verlag, and that I should look for a publisher who might actually want to publish it.

and I received a reply on 21 March.a

We apologize for the delay caused.

I have forwarded your inquiry to the editor and will let you know once I hear from him.

Now, that word caused gives me pause. If there'd been some assertion about causation, the caused would be fairly natural. As it is, that's just a bald caused, as if there'd been some concern that the delay might be uncaused — ex nihilo, as it were; but I don't think that they're trying to preëmpt metaphysical concerns on my part. That use of caused may be an attempt to allude to the period of time, never exactly identified for me, when potential reviewers were fleeing into the wilderness, but it could be that I'm looking at wording that has been imperfectly recycled.

The Editor hadn't bothered to contact me as of 23 March (and the reported status was unchanged), so I wrote

Given the history here, I have little expectation of receiving an adequate response from the editor or from anyone else at Springer Verlag before I yank my article from submission.

The reply on 24 March was

We apologize for the delay caused.

I have forwarded your inquiry to the editor and will let you know once I hear from him.

and, yeah, that's verbatim what I was told on 21 March. Recycled.

I could speculate about what the Hell has been and is happening at Theory and Decision, but it would just be speculation. I don't know whether I've been confronted with incompetence, indifference, malevolence, or some combination of two or of three of these; or if everybody's grandparents and uncles keep dying. (I'm pretty sure that one person over at Springer is mostly just helpless in the face of what others are doing, or choosing not to do.) But it's toxically infra dignitatem to continue to endure this situation. If the Editor were to have contacted me, to identify bottle-necks and sticking points, and to offer some reason to expect that the end result wouldn't just be rejection based upon a sloppy, last-minute reading of my paper, then it would be a different story.

So I've written to them

The offer of this paper to Theory and Decision is ended, as more than eighteen and a half months have been allowed to lapse without a decision, and the reluctance to keep me informed has now descended to a refusal to answer queries at all.

Whatever your superiors might direct notwithstanding, please none-the-less spare me any boiler-plate or otherwise vaguely insulting expression of regret.

I'll need to find another journal to which to submit the paper; I fear that this will be difficult. When other journals rejected the paper and gave reason (as did all but one), it was always that the paper was not appropriate to a readership as general as theirs; so I'd need to find a journal that can tolerate what is, for economics, very formal mathematics, concerned with what many readers would mistake for impractical refinement.

I've made or will make a few changes as well. I've modified the formulæ so that braces are only used to bound the definitions of sets, and angle-brackets are only used to hold the elements of lotteries; I'm hoping that these two changes help the reader. I've abandoned the use of partial ordering and, where I quote Savage using it, explained that the term incomplete preordering would now be more typical. I've corrected a spelling error in the acknowledgments. I have gone back and forth on whether to use a which or a that for a particular clause in a foot-note. I may perhaps include a brief commentary, essentially reïterating points about it made in this 'blog, on a paper by Eliaz and Ok.

Up-Date (2011:04/18): I have posted a continuation (and presumed completion) of the tale of these communications with Springer concerning this paper.

Last night and this morning, I used Writer2LAΤΕΧ to export the notes for my principal paper-in-progress from ODT format to a LAΤΕΧ file, imported that into LyX, and then spent some time cleaning things. This was in an attempt, which looks fairly successful, to overcome the problem that I now have of OpenOffice under RHEL failing to render various mathematical characters.

The results for the formulæ are not really WYSIWYG (nor does LyX seek to offer exactly a WYSIWYG display of formulæ), but they are close enough that, as I look at them, I don't have to spend most of my time thinking about the mark-up rather than thinking about the theoretical constructs that they are supposed to represent. (In fact, I'm one of those folk who prefers to word-process with the non-printing characters represented, and I'm quite comfortable with most of the extra stuff here in the representation of formulæ.) The symbols that I want are being rendered nicely, with the notable (but not egregious) exception of which is presently displayed as \defeq. (It's defined in a LAΤΕΧ document preamble as \stackrel{\mathrm{def}}{=}.)

I still have to learn more of my way around LyX but, barring some unexpected remedial action on the part of OpenOffice programmers, I will probably migrate to LyX for the production of technical documents.

In a foot-note to a previous entry, I mentioned that, when people use the word capitalism, I want a definition.

The word capitalism, when first introduced, meant a condition of possessing capital, and the coördinate term capitalist identified one who possesses capital.

At some point, a new definition for the former was introduced. The word capitalism was used derogatorially, for a system that favors capitalists. The reason that this definition doesn't much work except for disparagement is that, under any system that has capital, there are capitalists (possessors of capital). For example, a system that declares a present or former proletariat to be the rightful owners (collectively or otherwise) of the means of production has declared them to be the rightful capitalists, and would favor their interests.

(At some further point, capitalist acquired the additional meaning of one who favors capitalism. But, if we replace the definition of capitalist within capitalism to use this later meaning, then we just have an idiotic loop-de-loop, within which capitalism is defined as a system that favors the interests of those who favor the system, which definition wouldn't do much to exclude all sorts of systems.)

In the OED, one finds basically the original two definitions of capitalism:

The condition of possessing capital; the position of a capitalist; a system which favours the existence of capitalists.

But my copy of the New SOED (1993) instead defines the term thus:

The possession of capital or wealth; a system in which private capital or wealth is used in the production or distribution of goods; the dominance of private owners of capital and of production for profit.

It's a bit troublesome to find the historically second definition seemingly shoved-down a memory hole;[1] but, in any case, one now finds two new definitions, one in terms of how capital is used, the second in terms of some sort of dominance by private capitalists, and of production for profit.[2] (That definition in terms of dominance might actually be an attempt to capture the sense of the historically second definition.)

Meanwhile, though, Merriam-Webster had its own thoughts on the subject. They define capitalism as

an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market

Well, it's probably worth noting that free market is a bit of a redundancy, in that, to the extent that prices or quantities are bounded by law, one isn't really talking about a market. But, in any case, the main thing to note is that this definition differs markèdly from the previous definitions, as corporate as well as private[3] ownership is allowed, and as a reliance upon markets has been introduced into the definition.

My 1975 copy of the AHD gives a remarkable definition:

1. An economic system characterized by freedom of the market with increasing concentration of private and corporate ownership of production and distribution means, proportionate to increasing accumulation and reinvestment of profits. 2. A political or social system regarded as being based on this.

That's kind-of like the Merriam-Webster definition, but with a theory of increasing concentration grafted onto it; and, not only increasing concentration, but proportionate increase. Huh. So, in other words, capitalism, at least under the definition labelled 1., refers to a system that not only has never existed, but couldn't ever exist; 'cause, as I guarantee you, economic processes don't typically follow nice lineär laws (nor simple arithmetic functions more generally). And one wonders what one is supposed to call a system in which there is a market, but not increasing concentration of wealth, or at least one in which wealth is not increased proportionately. Really, of course, what's going on with this definition is some attempt to impose a theory and to advance a social prescription.

But wait! My 1993 copy of the AHD tells us something else! It defines capitalism thus:

An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.

Uhh… it's more of that proportionality stuff; another system that never has and never could exist. But, now, instead of investment increasing concentration of ownership, it's producing growth. Another attempt to grind an ideological axe, just a different axe. (I guess that versions of the AHD are kind-of like versions of Wikipedia, except that the changes are effected more slowly.)

Okay, so that's — what? three? five? — very standard sources, and how many definitions? And what is one to think when someone uses the term state capitalism, and defines it to mean an economy controlled by the state in a capitalist manner?

I once responded to an essay by asking the author what he meant by capitalism. His reply was that he'd used it with the standard definition. Well, there is no standard definition.[4] As far as I'm concerned, the word capitalism is practically useless, unless what one wants to practice is confusion, or unless one defines it before or immediately after first using it.

---

[1] The SOED is supposed to be complete for terms and definitions found after 1700.

[2] An unclarified notion of profit appears here; there's no point in doing anything under any system, unless it actually improves things somehow; one suspects that the author has some narrower notion in mind.

[3] Some people loosely use the term corporation to refer simply to an association of some sort, but that would be just another sort of private ownership; legal corporations, on the other hand, are creatures of the state. They can be formed by license to a single person, rather than to an association. Corporations are treated by law largely as themselves persons. And they insulate those to whom they are licensed from liability, not merely to those with whom they contract (to whom liability could anyway have been limited by overt contractual terms) but to third parties who may be injured by the actions of the corporation.

[4] I cited some of these dictionary entries to make that point to him, and reïterated my question; he lapsed into silence.

The first three volumes of the Fantagraphics Popeye reprints are currently available from

for $9.95 apiece, with a flat s&h charge of $3.50. (Connecticut residences would also need to add sales tax, whatever that might be.)

The ordering numbers are

I include order information for Volume Four but note that it is $19.95, rather than $9.95. (NB: I do not know whether any of these copies have remainder marks. [Up-Date (2011:03/04):: I received copies yester-day; they did not have remainder marks.])

In order to get the flat s&h charge of $3.50, you'll have to mail an order with a check or money order. To order on-line with a credit card (which may be more convenient, and reduces risk that the stock will be exhausted), go instead to HamiltonBook.com (a domain distinct from EdwardRHamilton.com), but you'll pay an additional 40¢ per item.

One or more persons have wandered to this 'blog searching with

openoffice weak preference symbol

which touches on the font-fallback problem that I mentioned in my previous entry.

The symbols that one would typically encounter or want to use when talking about preference are

[Up-Date (2011:04/05): I have since uploaded a more complete table, including symbols, Unicode values, and LAΤΕΧ code, in the form of a PDF file.]

Now, it used to be that, when running OpenOffice under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I had no problem using the symbols of my choice from amongst those on the table above. But when I up-dated to RHEL 6.0, the OpenOffice formula editor stopped properly rendering any of the above except ∼.[3]

For the formulæ that I'd previously entered, I'd specified a font either of Times New Roman or of Liberation Serif. The files for neither of these fonts actually contain the symbols above, but OpenOffice and RHEL are supposed to coöperate to effect font-fallback, and draw the characters from the files for some similar font or fonts. The software had been doing this, but with the up-date to RHEL 6.0 it is not.

This isn't a particulary great problem for new formula; I would just need to change the configuration of the formula editor to use some font that has the desired symbols; one could even play specifically with the formula editor's catalog, so that just those symbols would be rendered with that font, and some preferred font could be used for everything else.

But one of the serious, long-standing deficiencies of the OpenOffice formula editor is that there isn't a way to globally change the settings for all formulæ which have already been entered into a document. I have literally hundreds of preëxisting formulæ, for each of which the editor would have to be individually reconfigured, to fix things within OpenOffice. Right now, my best option seems to be to export the relevant documents to ΤΕΧ or to LAΤΕΧ, and to proceed with a plain-text editor!

Red Hat has responded to my bug-report as if it were a request for enhancement; since they hadn't planned any near-term enhancements in the versions that they distribute of OpenOffice or of fontconfig (with which OpenOffice would handle font-fallback), they refuse to address the bug. OpenOffice.org, meanwhile, is aware that OpenOffice doesn't handle font-fallback properly, and aware that it ought to be possible to reconfigure the formula editor globally within a document, but had invested its hopes in the editor's using a specific font, OpenSymbol, to provide mathematical characters. That font doesn't have any of the characters above, except perhaps ∼.

---

[1] The relation of weak preference is one of being either more desirable or equally desirable, rather than one of necessarily being just a little more desirable. On the assumption that preferences are a complete ordering, weak preference is equivalent to being not less desirable.

[2] This relation is one of being either less desirable or equally desirable, rather than one of necessarily being just a little less desirable. On the assumption that preferences are a complete ordering, this relation is equivalent to being not more desirable.

[3] I'd not been getting that by entering ∼, but by using the editor mark-up sim.

As I was falling asleep yester-day morning, I was thinking with annoyance about the term co-conspirator.

The term conspire comes from the Latin conspirare, which literally means breathe together, and breaks into con- from the Latin preposition com meaning with, and spirare, meaning breathe. So far, so good.

Things run off the rails with that co- in co-conspirator. The prefix co- is really just a reduced form of com-.[1] Part of the reason that the reduced form is used here is that the original morphology of com- was simply forgot, and whoever coined the term reached for analogy with some term formed by a chain of analogies ultimately leading back to a word that used the reduced form as per rules of Latin morphology (such as co-author). Had that person remembered the morphology — had he or she recognized co- as com- — he or she might have seen the deeper problem.

Prefix conspirator with com-, and one gets … uhm, conconspirator; crudely parsed, that's with-with-breather. That result should raise a warning flag. One should ask whether there is any difference between a conspirator and a co-conspirator. It isn't possible to be in a conspiracy of one (though the claim might be made jocularly).

I think that the term co-conspirator first came to general use during the Watergate Era. Certainly, I don't find the terms co-conspire, co-conspiracy, or co-conspirator in the American Heritage Dictionary of 1975. I'd guess that the term co-conspirator was probably coined by a lawyer, and that it lived for some time in the environment of the court-house, before escaping into the wild exactly as a result of President Richard Milhous Nixon's being called an unindicted co-conspirator in court documents.

I'm reluctant to condemn people who, raised in the years since, use co-conspirator without irony. Even if they recognize the absurdity, it is difficult for people to distinguish those absurdities that one must accept from those from which we might more easily be freed. And I suspect that, in many cases, the folk who use this co- are really trying to capture the sense of fellow; though that sense would be better captured with, well, fellow, at least the co- isn't then wholly redundant. But, really, we ought to make an effort to drive this thing from our language.

---

[1] In Latin, normally, the reduced form co- is used when followed immediately by a vowel, by h, or by gn. The basic form com- is used when immediately followed by b, by m, and by p, but it is assimilated into col- before l and into cor- before r, and it becomes con- in front of the remaining consonants. Things get less consistent when the construction was not actually made in Latin. Meanwhile, in Latin itself the earlier preposition com evolved into cum.

At 08:48 on 8 September 2009, I had resubmitted my paper on indecision to a journal after replacing acknowledgements with place-holders. (The paper was originally submitted on 3 September, with the acknowledgements in-place and with a note from me that one of their editors was mentioned thereïn. The journal tossed it back to me to scrub the acknowledgments.)

To-day, then, at 08:48, we passed Day 500 since the (re)submission of the paper. Day 500, and the present status is Under review, which became its official status on 15 November of last year. (I earlier labored its previous status changes.) Doubtless that someone is thinking that they've only had the paper for 67 days, but the journal itself has had it for 500 days.

I am aware — Would that there were a G_d to help us all! — that 500 days is not a record for such delay. Still, economics journals which report their mean time-to-decision typically declare it to be something on the order of a month.

Some time within the last several weeks, I finally got around to reading The Secret Agent (1907), by Joseph Conrad. The novel is interesting for a number of reasons. One of those is that, as with Heller's later Catch-22, events are driven by the characters' unquestioned misunderstandings one of another, and by terrible narrowness of vision. (Unlike Catch-22, Conrad's book is not particularly humorous in its beginnings.) But what most struck me about The Secret Agent is that Conrad identified and unsparingly depicted the mental process that leads most who turn to state socialism to do so, and what essentially propels most of those who proceed on to left-wing anarchism to do that.

One of the characters of The Secret Agent is Stevie. Stevie is a low-functioning young man; operationally a person of very limited intelligence. He is also someone who is concerned — often overwhelmed with concern — about the fate of people and of beasts who seem to be ill-treated. Stevie's concern is illustrated at various points in the story, but it is in Chapter VIII that they begin to take political form.

Stevie's mother, over the objections of her daughter, has had herself moved to an alms-house; Stevie and his sister, Winnie Verloc, see their mother to her new home. The cab-man drives a much-abused horse to pull his carriage, and responds to Stevie's imploring that the horse not be whipped as if it were nearly incomprehensible. But, after the move has been effected, the cabbie tells Stevie that, however hard life may seem to be for the horse, it is harder still for the cabbie, who is a poor man with a family. Stevie is moved by this information. The driver departs.

Stevie is rejoined by his sister; they begin the journey homeward.

Before the doors of the public-house at the corner, where the profusion of gas-light reached the height of positive wickedness, a four-wheeled cab standing by the curbstone with no one on the box, seemed cast out into the gutter on account of irremediable decay. Mrs Verloc recognised the conveyance.[1] Its aspect was so profoundly lamentable, with such a perfection of grotesque misery and weirdness of macabre detail, as if it were the Cab of Death itself, that Mrs Verloc, with that ready compassion of a woman for a horse (when she is not sitting behind him), exclaimed vaguely:

Poor brute!

Hanging back suddenly, Stevie inflicted an arresting jerk upon his sister.

Poor! Poor! he ejaculated appreciatively. Cabman poor too. He told me himself.

The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame him. Jostled, but obstinate, he would remain there, trying to express the view newly opened to his sympathies of the human and equine misery in close association. But it was very difficult. Poor brute, poor people! was all he could repeat. It did not seem forcible enough, and he came to a stop with an angry splutter: Shame! Stevie was no master of phrases, and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and precision. But he felt with greater completeness and some profundity. That little word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other—at the poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor kids at home. And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten. He knew it from experience. It was a bad world. Bad! Bad!

Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not pretend to such depths of insight. Moreover, she had not experienced the magic of the cabman’s eloquence. She was in the dark as to the inwardness of the word Shame. And she said placidly:

Come along, Stevie. You can’t help that.

The docile Stevie went along; but now he went along without pride, shamblingly, and muttering half words, and even words that would have been whole if they had not been made up of halves that did not belong to each other. It was as though he had been trying to fit all the words he could remember to his sentiments in order to get some sort of corresponding idea. And, as a matter of fact, he got it at last. He hung back to utter it at once.

Bad world for poor people.

Directly he had expressed that thought he became aware that it was familiar to him already in all its consequences. This circumstance strengthened his conviction immensely, but also augmented his indignation. Somebody, he felt, ought to be punished for it—punished with great severity. Being no sceptic, but a moral creature, he was in a manner at the mercy of his righteous passions.

Beastly! he added concisely.

It was clear to Mrs Verloc that he was greatly excited.

Nobody can help that, she said. Do come along. Is that the way you’re taking care of me?

Stevie mended his pace obediently. He prided himself on being a good brother. His morality, which was very complete, demanded that from him. Yet he was pained at the information imparted by his sister Winnie who was good. Nobody could help that! He came along gloomily, but presently he brightened up. Like the rest of mankind, perplexed by the mystery of the universe, he had his moments of consoling trust in the organised powers of the earth.

Police, he suggested confidently.

And there one has it. A great many of us would agree that the world is economically harder on many people than it ought to be. A great many of us would agree that society ought to do something about it. But the typical state socialist just unthinkingly grabs for the first social institution that comes to mind, the State; or, as Stevie puts it, police. There's no real thought to what other institutions might be more appropriate. If the point that we are talking about an institution that is first-and-foremost about violence is considered at all, there is little reflection on the question of whether and when violence is appropriate, unless that consideration is to rationalize the conclusion that violence should be used after the conclusion was already implictly embraced. But Stevie isn't drawn to wrestle with the a theory of what ought to be the limits of the State or of the use of violence:

The police aren’t for that, observed Mrs Verloc cursorily, hurrying on her way.

Stevie’s face lengthened considerably. He was thinking. The more intense his thinking, the slacker was the droop of his lower jaw.[2]

And it was with an aspect of hopeless vacancy that he gave up his intellectual enterprise.

Not for that? he mumbled, resigned but surprised. Not for that? He had formed for himself an ideal conception of the metropolitan police as a sort of benevolent institution for the suppression of evil. The notion of benevolence especially was very closely associated with his sense of the power of the men in blue. He had liked all police constables tenderly, with a guileless trustfulness. And he was pained. He was irritated, too, by a suspicion of duplicity in the members of the force. For Stevie was frank and as open as the day himself. What did they mean by pretending then? Unlike his sister, who put her trust in face values, he wished to go to the bottom of the matter. He carried on his inquiry by means of an angry challenge.

What for are they then, Winn? What are they for? Tell me.

Winnie disliked controversy. But fearing most a fit of black depression consequent on Stevie missing his mother very much at first, she did not altogether decline the discussion. Guiltless of all irony, she answered yet in a form which was not perhaps unnatural in the wife of Mr Verloc, Delegate of the Central Red Committee, personal friend of certain anarchists, and a votary of social revolution.

Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.

She avoided using the verb to steal, because it always made her brother uncomfortable. For Stevie was delicately honest. Certain simple principles had been instilled into him so anxiously (on account of his queerness) that the mere names of certain transgressions filled him with horror. He had been always easily impressed by speeches. He was impressed and startled now, and his intelligence was very alert.

What? he asked at once anxiously. Not even if they were hungry? Mustn’t they?

The two had paused in their walk.

Not if they were ever so, said Mrs Verloc, with the equanimity of a person untroubled by the problem of the distribution of wealth, and exploring the perspective of the roadway for an omnibus of the right colour. Certainly not. But what’s the use of talking about all that? You aren’t ever hungry.

Although it is plainly explained that Winnie is not really out to express a Machiavellian theory of the state, she has done so. Actually, many people from many otherwise very different ideologies would embrace this theory of what the State actually does; many anarchists (and not just left-wing anarchists) would insist that the State is at best unnecessary to all but those who would use to effect or to sustain an unjust distribution of economic power. But, in Stevie's case, in a matter of minutes he's invented state socialism, and then had his statism but not his socialism contradicted, and so heads down a path to left-wing anarchism. Someone else will later help him further down that path.

---

[1] The poor driver has taken his meager pay not home to his family, but to a pub. Earlier, it is revealed that a scrub-woman frequently plays upon Stevie's desire to help her and her family, only to spend on alcohol the money that he gives to her. Perhaps Conrad was inclined to believe that Work is the curse of the drinking classes. or perhaps he meant no more than to emphasize Stevie's gullibility. In any case, the interpretation is separable from what I seek principally to note.

[2] Note that Conrad has written Stevie as quite literally a slack-jawed fool.

After one votes in California, one is offered a sticker announcing that one has done so. In my area, the stickers are typically available in English, in Spanish, and in Vietnamese. I ask for one in Vietnamese.

There are people who want English to be constitutionally declared to be the language of America; they are stunningly wrong.

Of most immediate importance, they are wrong because, whenever anything is made a matter of law, it is made a matter of force; behind any law is ultimately a gun. There are times for laws because there are times for force; there are times for guns. But language choice is not such a time. I have only contempt for someone who claims that there is a symmetry between being forced to speak the language of a merchant because he will not transact in another language and that merchant being forced by the state to transact in some other language, or official proceedings being legally restricted to a language utterly alien to important parties. (And my contempt extends to those who would force the use of minority languages, as well or instead of majority languages.)

Perhaps of even greater long-run importance, if a language is made an official language, the state is thereby empowered to determine whether this-or-that communication conforms to that language, which is to say that control of a language is seized by the state when the language is made official. The state develops the power to decide its grammar and its vocabulary.

America was given a foundation, however imperfect, of classical liberalism. It represents a gross violation of that foundation to tell people in what language they must express themselves, and a gross violation of that foundation to offer-up control of one of our languages to the state.

One of our languages. English is one of our languages; there are others. Any language spoken by an American is an American language. (And any name held by an American is an American name.) And there are people who don't know English who are far better Americans than those who would give that language a legally privileged position.

I loathe the way that police officials and journalists will use the word suspect as if it means perpetrator, as in

When the register was opened, the suspect partially jumped over the counter and thrust both hands into the cash drawer, police spokesman Joel DeSpain said.

A suspect is one suspected — that is to say surmised — to have done something. To baldly declare that a person did something is to speak with far more than suspicion.

One can have multiple suspects even knowing that an act was committed by just one perpetrator. And one can have no suspects despite knowing that some person or persons must have acted; the use of suspect for perpetrator becomes utterly absurd when virtually nothing is known about the perpetrator. Here

An unknown suspect (or suspects) allegedly entered the garage during the previous night and removed a Cannondale bicycle valued at $500.

the police don't even know how many perpetrators there were. On whom does suspicion fall? Here

officers have no description of the suspect, except that he was wearing a black, red and white bunnyhug

they have a gender and a hooded, tri-color sweatshirt. On whom does suspicion fall?