Derbyshire is a quietly brilliant man. A fatalist, but if one reads the story of how he met and courted his wife, also far more than that.

I’m as saddened as the next person that the World is a messy place and that we mostly learn our lessons badly and too late, if at all.

My favourite character only appears in Volume 3 (IIRC — read the series in 2002 stuck in a hotel in the Bangalore Cantonment) and also a homosexual: the urbane, humane, seen-it-all fatalist, Count Bronowsky.

Having observed in country the way Indians of different social classes and castes interact with each other, I’m not convinced that any other relation between Rulers and Ruled than contempt (and I think the novels over-egg the pudding a bit here) could have worked. The Mutiny cast a long shadow, too.

I have long argued to anyone who will listen that the admittedly repulsive colonial policeman Ronald Merrick–a sadist, racist, and closeted homosexual–is the real hero of the Quartet, in the sense that he perceived things as they really were. Also that there is more real-world truth in the bad-colonial-conscience prison debriefing of Hari Kumar by Nigel Rowan (Indian Civil Service) and Indian lawyer V. R. Gopal than there is in all of the “political science” treatises ever written. If one wants to understand how the world largely works, read the chapter entitled “The Situation” in The Day of the Scorpion, the second volume of the Quartet. Derbyshire quotes the essential passage from that chapter, which occurs as Kumar is describing his interrogation and torture at the hands of Merrick:

“In India he [Merrick] automatically became a Sahib. He hobnobbed on equal terms with people who would snub him at home … What they all had in common was the contempt they all felt for the native race of the country they ruled. … He said you couldn’t buck this issue, that relationships between people were based on contempt, not love, and that contempt was the prime human emotion because no human being was ever going to believe all human beings were born equal. If there was an emotion almost as strong as contempt it was envy. He said a man’s personality existed at the point of equilibrium between the degree of his envy and the degree of his contempt.”

Ugly stuff, but my sixty-plus years on earth tell me that Merrick was closer to the truth than his bien-pensant fellow countrymen. Merrick’s views are also in accord with your comments on this forum–comments which we, as good foundational Americans, reject as repugnant (but not necessarily, or in all cases, inaccurate). Human differences are indeed obdurate. You favor one approach to them. We favor another. Who is right? Ah, that’s the question.

The only way out is to take the profit out of it. The focus must change from criminalization to harm reduction.

The two major parties react to drug addiction in totally predictable ways.
The GOP says jack up penalties.

The Democrats see the problem as an opportunity to do what they live for, expanding government. More counselors, more prosecutors, more public defenders, more police, more judges, more programs, more huge government funded studies, and who can oppose the tax increases needed to address such a terrible problem.

There is only one approach that will work, end prohibition and take the profit out of it.

Let’s let an addict go to any physician and get a prescription for his drug. The drugs cost next to nothing to produce, and addicts could afford to maintain some semblance of a normal life at no cost to society. This will also create specialized practices which focus on successful withdrawals.

Current policy creates armies of pushers, makes the worst people in our society filthy rich, explodes the cost of government, and destroys those caught up in addiction.

I have personal experience with addicted employees. In the last few years two employees, both high performers, an engineer and a technician, became addicted. In both cases their work didn’t suffer, but their lives went down rapidly.

?The engineer left his wife and started living in his car and cheap motels. His unpaid bills became a problem that he was unable to hide. Nobody knew what was going on until he made local headlines when he died from a bad batch.

The technician began stealing equipment to feed his habit. The theft was hard to detect at first since equipment that had not been secured and was used infrequently went missing. As security measures were taken, a company truck full of equipment went missing with the employee. Withdrawal was so intolerable that he destroyed his job and damaged his friend and employer for a fix.

The major argument against harm reduction instead of criminalization and government programs seems to be that drugs are so terrible that no public policy should tolerate them. This overlooks the fact that they are already everywhere, and criminalization is actually promoting addiction by creating armies of pushers.

?Where is the fairness in taxing people who stay off them to pay for chasing and locking up those who don’t?

How is it better to destroy those caught in addiction rather than letting them handle their situation as cheaply and safely as possible?

Let’s make it easy and cheap to legally maintain an unfortunate habit. Take the profit out of it, and let addicts live as normal a life as possible until they become so sick of it that they do what it takes to get clean. Harm reduction is the only effective solution. Taking the profit out of it is the only way it will end.

https://johnderbyshire.com/Reviews/Fiction/rajquartet.html

“Instead, through the unfathomable mystery of literary creation, Scott gave us one of the best — truest, most unsparing — descriptions ever written of what happens when two ancient populations collide. Good sense, good intentions, civilized administration, liberal inclinations, and generosity of spirit — all those things “so dear to historians” — are present on both sides; yet at last they count for less than we think, or wish. The real decision-maker is too often the unrecorded man: the Ronald Merrick, or the man who kills him, or the sepoy who betrays Sarah’s brother-in-law to the Japanese, or the anonymous (and chillingly polite) Hindu who murders Sarah’s Muslim friend Kasim in the sectarian violence that attended independence, or those “dark young men of random destiny and private passions” that so vex Count Bronowsky, the wily, worldly vizier of a local prince.

Those dark young men are with us still. One of them dispatched Benazir Bhutto while I was writing this. Others are there a-plenty, in the friction zone where tribes, faiths, and races meet, where modernity encounters historical resentment, where humanitarianism collides with identity. They defy the glib nostrums of the world-improvers, they spit on sweet reason and good intentions, they laugh to scorn the bourgeois verities of cool, shy northern peoples.

Statesmen, generals, intellectuals, and merchant princes will pronounce and propose, posture and plead. Still the unrecorded man may have the last word. The events surrounding Indian independence exposed some dark human terrain. In fiction, I have encountered no better guide to that terrain than Paul Scott.”

I had the good fortune to read Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet whilst enduring a bout of giardiasis in the Le Meridien Bangalore. Needed the diversion and could just about navigate the trip downstairs to the hotel bookshop and back without mishap. Cometh the hour, Cometh the man. Highly recommended.

Just started reading so as to get a bit lodged in my head and have something to come back to. I’m surprised John Derbyshire hasn’t reviewed this as he has a mathematical background and is famously a (qualified) Sinophile.

So.. Looks like Netflix are going to do it. Let’s hope they don’t over-egg the Poz Pudding.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/fitness/everything-we-know-about-netflixs-three-body-problem-adaptation/ar-AAQhWun

If they want to have any chance of selling it into the Chinese market they’d be well-advised to go easy on the POCs and gratuitous inter-racial-in-yer-face-whiteboy sex scenes. What the Tiddly Winks had to say about some of the recent Star Wars casting efforts and love-interests is not fit for a family publication.

I may have borked myself by subscribing to Audible through the Australian Apple store (In-app subscription purchase) rather than via my US Amazon Store account. That’s probably it.

Oh well… Just have to read the thing. Or mess around with shifting my subscription over if I get more into Audible later.

How to Design Programs (HTDP) is the alternative to SICP and is Scheme-based. It starts out deceptively simply, but in a perfect world would be a great book to get students of all abilities of average IQ and up well-grounded and able to reason about computation and program design. The learning environment that goes with it is called DrRacket. Book and software free online.

I’m in the US and 3BD is good. What geographic restriction or oligarch applies in your case?