Changes In Our Alleged Language

We received a letter from the high school principal today, letting us know about "alleged threats directed toward the school, by alleged individuals."

I'm pretty sure the accused are not composites or clones, and are thus actual individuals, not alleged ones.  Similarly, the betting man would put his money down on the idea that the statements were not laundry lists nor love letters, and thus real, rather than alleged threats.  Speaking in an older style of sentence analysis, one my audience would be familiar with, the writer would have done better to use alleged to modify the verb in the sentence, rather than the noun. "Threats allegedly made by individuals against the school" perhaps. 

I am no longer sure we can say that this usage is wrong, however.  I have lived through this change and I think I can understand some of it.  People are petrified of falsely accusing someone, believing they can be sued later for asserting guilt.  It used to be confined to newspapers and evening news, wanting to get the news out there fast, but mindful of possible modification or retraction later.  Sometimes there are hoaxes, sometimes events are misunderstood, sometimes the wrong people are identified as culprits.  "Alleged" was put in as a protective, cautionary modifier. 

In only a few decades, it has gotten quite out of hand.  Multiple "allegeds" are not uncommon in news sentences and statements by institutions.  Even the head of the English Department at the school, while wincing at the imprecision of where the word is placed and cognizant of its traditional and preferred usage, might say "Can't you work a few more of those into the text?  We don't want to get in trouble later."

"Alleged" has become something of an incantation, an anti-lawsuit rune, attached to controversial sentences.  This will not be diminishing any time soon, and will likely increase.  People might find it irritating or amusing - some of both for me - but the imprecision will count less than the need for spell-casting.  Folks will just feel better having enough of them there in the sentence, and the language will change.

I would still consider it wrong usage at this point - but I am a dinosaur and my ear is not the same as the majority culture.  I would prefer that schools err on the side of being dinosaurs as well, as it seems one way of upholding standards.  But my preference there is culturally loaded, isn't it?

(Yes, I also note that it is a bit ambiguous whether "school" refers to the building or the institution, but it doesn't much matter.)

Scandals

The recent political scandals seem to be gaining steam.  I still haven't paid enough attention to know whether any or all of them are worthy of the attention.  They would each be a big deal if mostly true, but I don't know that to be the case.

i do have an observation about how scandals play with the public, however.  The early Clinton scandals were mostly confined to the political class.  The general public would pause over things like Travelgate, Filegate, Whitewatergate (perhaps we are finally done with -gates now) and move on, unexcited.  True or not true, none of those were going to take over the popular conversation.  With help from the media, some scandals can be buried, some inflated; but there is a limit to that.

Vince Foster's suicide came into the national consciousness because there were additional suspicions that it wasn't a suicide. That seemed unlikely right from the start, and ended up having only leftover bits of odd items to support it, so it went away.  That obscured the real scandal of Webb Hubbel and Hillary Clinton denying the FBI access to his office until they had cleansed it.  Ridiculously wrong, but even had there been no homicide conspiracy sucking up all the oxygen, it might not have become the scandal on everyone's lips that the Republicans felt was deserved. The political class cares about the jockeying that goes on around that sort of scandal, because there are alliances to observe and impressions to manage.  And sometimes, they even care about the justice of the thing.

But when there was sex in the picture in the late 90's the game changed.  The general public suddenly cared, a lot.  The Republicans were thrilled, and as usual, misread the social signals.  The general public didn't care about the parts that Clinton's opponents thought were most important.  (I'm not sure his allies got it right at first, either.) Lying to the camera was fascinating for a couple of days.  Possible lies to other parts of the government had some juice, but only about a C+.  Sex held the attention.  Blood, actual courtrooms, violence, and money are also pretty reliable if you are trying to get the public's attention.

How does this apply today?  Scandals have one level of interest in the partisan press, whether accusing or denying.  It takes another level of interest to force the legacy media to cover scandals - which seems to have been reached.  To get to the next level of national interest there must be other factors that catch the imagination.  Government spying might qualify.  Dead Americans from the State Department is a more likely hook, though if it were tourists or military it would go even higher.  People aren't all that aware of State from day-to-day and have only vague notions what embassies are for.  The IRS is something people are familiar with and will pay a bit of attention to.  The Republicans (and likely some Democratic presidential aspirants) want these to go to the next level.  They should remember that if they do, the narrative changes.  The general public is not going to be interested in the things they are "supposed" to.

It's rather like taking a child to the zoo and trying to get him to look at one of the few Asian vultures in captivity, and failing to get that point across because one of the rhinos is pooping just now.

Ray Manzarek Dies

I don't have much to add to what everyone else will say, except to note a radio interview I heard with him years ago.  That long organ riff in the middle of "Light My Fire," where he plays 4 against 3 so powerfully, he credited to John Coltrane.  I never heard that until he said it, but once you know it, you listen to the track and say "How did I ever miss it?"



A lot of life is that way, isn't it? Completely opaque, and then embarrassingly obvious.

Our first few minutes in heaven will be like that, I suspect; eyes darting sideways a little sheepishly and saying "Yeah, I shoulda seen that."

Fear of Heights

Maggie's linked to a buzzfeed page of people at great height in dangerous positions. My reaction is mixed.

There are layers of fear here.  The people who are secured in some way, on anything that looks like it would hold them after a slip, do not send me into panic.  Were I in that situation live, my imagination would run to what this would feel like if the securing device failed, and I would be in utter panic, but just looking at the picture doesn't bother me much.  Walking across a gorge, or hanging from a cliff at any height, doesn't grip me.  The people leaning outward in Toronto would be an exception.  The possible failure of the securing lines is forcibly brought home in that one.

The cliff diver doesn't bother me - I've done 2/3 that height myself (though nowhere near as pretty) into water.  The skiers and driver bother me only a bit, though they are perhaps in the most danger.

But all the unsecured people I can barely stand to even look at. Phobia is a funny thing.

Nice Guys

hbd* chick had an interesting link about whether nice guys finish last. The site Barking Up The Wrong Tree asks the right question: what does the research say? (I have quibbles about some of this research, but think that the overall article expresses the ambiguity well.)

Be Thou My Vision

The song should not be in the slow, pounding 4/4 we always sing it in. Or most recently, the faux Gaelic character of dreamy pensiveness.  It's Irish, centuries old, and the rhythm should be freer.  Before you listen, imagine the hymn you know.  Now imagine it quick and light - add an Irish accent - and sung as an air.

This isn't quite it.  He takes his time getting to the song and you might skip to 2.54, for openers. Chelsea Moon's version is also good, though too slow and pensive. But this may help break the spell of how we've pulled the song out from its roots.  It's one of my favorites anyway. If anyone can do this right, they can sing it at my funeral.  (Yes, I hope to tell everyone how they got something not quite right one more time.)

The Nth Degree

I know that political posturing leads to hyperbole.

I know also that words and phrases, especially idioms, do not always accurately reflect their "original" or technical meanings. This is especially true when math terms are involved.

Some Obama opponent quoted on the news - Paul Ryan, I think - talked about the public's mistrust increasing "to the nth degree," over the IRS scandal (or perhaps the AP scandal.  either way). 

I suppose that can never be proven false, because there would always be some n for which the statement is true.  Still, the intent is clear that Ryan, who should know better, is suggesting some exponential increase in mistrust.  I rather doubt that's true.

There is a distinction between "things that are your fault because they happened on your watch," and "things that are your fault because you caused them to be done."  Both are real, but the latter is much worse than the former.  It is fair that some of this sticks to a president, even if the opposite bias were occurring.  If that seems not comprehensible to conservatives, it's because you are too used to the bias of permanent federal officials going the other way.  Imagine if singling out Conservative/Tea Party/Patriot/Constitutionalist groups had happened under Bush.  Even though it was to his disadvantage, and he didn't know about it, he would deserve some blame, because it's a federal agency doing something wrong on his watch.

But not so very much blame.  I think the same holds here.  I feel Obama has dodged some deserved accusations by stonewalling the records, but that's not a reason to accuse unfairly in other instances, such as this one. 

I know, I know, it's never that clean, and you don't have to teach a cat to catch mice - just appoint cats to the right jobs and they will catch mice for you without being told.  But the distinction between Your Watch and Your Actions is an important one, and we should make it as carefully as we can.

And even if not, we should use our math terms more accurately.

AVI's Wife and Vocabulary

One used to be able to take the Miller Analogies Test instead of the GRE to go to grad school, at least if you were in a verbal-only field.  My wife got her graduate degree in Library Science - I guess that's about as verbal as it gets.

I haven't bragged on my wife around here much, have I?  Bad husband.

At the time she took the test in 1974, my wife's scores were so far off the charts that the MAT sent along that we assumed she was the recordholder with her 98 out of 100.  I guess that's not true, as Prometheus Society accepts that as a score for qualification, implying that people occasionally make that grade.  That's a pity, as I have been saying she's the previous recordholder for almost four decades now.  Ah well.  She is merely at the 99.997 percentile of verbal abilities instead.

I discovered early that there are games you just can't play with her.  The Dictionary Game, for example, in which you take a word that no one knows and make up definitions to fool the other players, with the real definition thrown in to the guessing pile.  It's just tedious to keep going through lists to find a word she doesn't know, and even when she thinks she doesn't, has been known to "make up" a definition that is identical to the real one, revealing that she did indeed know it after all, somehow, somewhere.  Wherry is one I recall from that category.

We do have a copy of Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary.  That usually worked. Except the rest of our friends had already decided by that time that it just wasn't any fun. 

Interestingly, neither of us is much good at Scrabble.  We're not bad, but nothing exciting.  One of our sons is good at speed scrabble when he can find a taker, and perhaps Tracy would excel at that given the chance.  Another oddity:  she does not produce vocabulary automatically or for fun, as many word-people do.  It's mostly recognition vocab.

Verbal Violence Porn

A commenter Ymar Sakar, who shows up on conservative sites from time-to-time (he has his own as well) used the phrase "verbal violence porn" to describe the disquieting, threatening statements one finds on conservative sites.  He used the term disparagingly, almost challengingly, declaring that it is not going to be this kind of woofing that wins culture wars.  He certainly didn't seem to be advocating they take it to a new level, but neither is he violence-averse.  He writes some about martial arts and the history of warfare.

Without trying to mindread what he is trying to accomplish, it is worth noting that he has described the phenomenon vividly, and I think accurately.  You can find people in comments sections everywhere who mutter darkly about revolution and what people won't put up with much longer.  I can add that my mental-health crisis data over 35 years is similar: threats of violence with political overtones comes from the right more often.  Much more.

And yet the violence does not seem to follow. In both the national experience and my mental-health observation, the actual violence comes more from those who vote with the Democrats.  The whole broad picture deserves some attention.  It is true that the most violent districts across the nation, especially black and hispanic areas, are enormously Democratic.  Additional violence with a political or social spin - union, anti-globalist, campaign-office bombing, or church-targeting - also tends strongly to come off the left side of the debate.  Note also that in any group the number of people who actually move to violence is small, so even in these violent, bright-blue districts, the great majority of people are not violent criminals.

And yet.  The rhetoric from the dark corners of the right is much more violent.  I don't think it's close.  It comes in different flavors, some racist, some nominally libertarian, some paranoid, but it's not subtle.

What gives?  Do the violent people on the left just not advertise it that much, leaving the comments sections to the extremely nonviolent white urban liberals?  Or is the verbal violence porn from the right a sort of woofing - barking to warn off threats, with actual aggressive violence requiring a much higher threshold?  Bullying might be a fair question to explore, but I don't think cowardice is.  A lot of these guys - they do seem to be almost entirely male - have military and even combat experience, so I don't think they are Caspar Milquetoast types showing off.

Management

As per the previous post, I have been giving the matter some thought over the past few months. At Steve Sailer's, hbd chick's, West Hunter, Jayman's and other sites I spend time at, the information about the relationship between IQ and life outcomes is well-known.  It is a major factor in predicting college success, for example, but still less than half the picture. Self-discipline, perseverance, and conscientiousness also weigh heavily.  This holds true going forward as well, in some human endeavors more than others. Raw intelligence seems to always help some, and sometimes helps a lot.

By the way, I do not encounter much objection to IQ as a factor because of the racial implications, as is more commonly reported in the press.  Most people I know are not even aware of that controversy.  Their objections are more along the lines of defensively dismissing IQ as a major factor at all.  If one even brings up the topic, folks seem so sure you are going to overvalue it and arrogantly think it is the only factor that they go out of their way to disparage it with anecdotes, or generalisations about smart people not having common sense, and the like.  The psychologists and psychiatrists at my hospital, who have some real working knowledge of IQ, seldom fall into this.  But psych nurses, rehab specialists, OT's, and psych techs get quite declarative in their repeating of something-or-other they read once; and social workers of course bubble over with resentment. (Yeah, go figure.)

What of the other factors in success, also studied and often reported in the popular press.  We all intuitively know that attractiveness is an advantage in a lot of situations, at least in terms of getting your foot in the door. (Some extremes or perhaps types of attractiveness can start to work against one, however. Perhaps credibility is lost.)  It's hard to quantify, so it gets tougher to measure.  Using American college students as one's test subjects - the new acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) - can lead one astray, as they tend to be an attractive group overall, and it's hard to know what's being measured.

I don't mean the 50 Most Beautiful magazine articles, either. Those are just excuses to run their pictures, nicely run up by Harvard Lampoon decades ago:

Yet we know that attractiveness is an advantage at school, in offices, in entertainment, in sales, and even (gulp) in churches.  We see it, even if we can't quite nail it down.

Connections - the derisive cliche that it's not what you know but who you know - is also one key to success, and one they don't mention as a habit of highly successful people. Nonetheless, it's one of the reasons parents send their children to expensive schools, when they might learn about as much at Geographic Marker Community College, or the library.  It doesn't explain everything, and works better in some fields than others.  But it's there.

There is charm, or social skill, or the irritatingly-phrased Emotional Intelligence.  These work.  They help one get ahead, however one defines "ahead." Creativity, generosity, cooperativeness, risk-taking, spunk, and the negative virtues of ruthlessness, paranoia, and deceit - all are advantages that have little or no relation to candlepower. 

Finally, there are the striving virtues I mentioned above, that whole cluster of hard-work, dedication, attention to detail, and Frank Merriwell At Yale qualities we used to teach.  They aren't infallible either, but they still get you something.

I don't think managing other people, which is what the word "promotion" often means at work, is that deeply related to intelligence.  There is a minimum IQ necessary at each job, and some advantage in having another 15 points or so above that to be a manager, but beyond that, other factors listed above are much more important.

Peter Principle

I never learned whether that particular organizational fad stood up to enquiry and observation over time, but I always found it plausible (as well as the Dilbert extension where "we just find incompetent people and sent them straight to management").  When people in in over their heads, they act increasingly irrationally.

One of the common things is to identify some less-important competency and begin to insist that it is the most important part of the job. It's a marker, actually.  When someone is insisting on unimportant stuff, it's a sign they are dimly aware they are in over their head.

Yeah, we're living that right now.

Post 4100 - The Old College Try

I am trying to read another of my birthday books, American Nations by Colin Woodard.  Four tries, I have yet to make it out of the introduction.

It should be a natural.  It is clearly based on both Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America and David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, two of my insist-you-read books. (Though admittedly, I don't think any of my sons have read either, whether that is in spite of or because of my encouragement.) Woodard is trying to refine and expand on those ideas.  He comes from Maine, and the reviews suggested he favors the Yankeeland culture in his description of the history of the continent.  Right up my alley, one would think.

I kept stumbling over his biases from the first paragraphs, rehearsing how I might get people past them and on to the better analysis of the book's core. In particular, I was thinking how I might inveigle my southern friends to keep reading, as his credit to the Appalachian culture started off as grudging, and his criticism of the Deep South seemed a bit one-sided.

A few pages later, as he went into greater detail about those regions, the grudging quality turned into condescension, and the one-sidedness into open contempt. He's not even trying to see, as any historian or anthropologist might, what forces and choices were in play in those cultures.  Whether he eventually gets to that is irrelevant.  His view is that of the gosh-darn-it-missed-the-60's liberal, uncritical in accepting that sacred world-view. It's hard to believe that there is a region whose inhabitants have no redeeming features whatsoever.

In describing New Netherlands, that NYC and environs culture originally founded by the Dutch, he declares they nurtured two virtues considered subversive by the other nations: a PROFOUND tolerance of diversity, and an UNFLINCHING commitment to the freedom of inquiry.  All-caps mine, of course.  Woodard is, at least, a professional writer.

See, I'm betting they flinched once or twice about that inquiry thing, and when I think of Newark, New Haven, or Brooklyn, tolerance is not the first word that comes to mind.  Not that they are bad at that, especially compared to the rest of the country, but we can't just be cheerleading when we are supposed to be objectively evaluating.  That sort of language is the glittering generality of the politician trying to butter up the voters, telling them how noble their culture is.  Appalling.

When writing about El Norte, the mixed culture a hundred miles in each direction from the US-Mexico border, he quotes only Hispanics, and their view of what has happened, is happening, and will happen in the future.  Then he projects how things will be even More So in 2050.  Jeez, that's brilliant, eh?  That's the sort of analysis you can only get from the 90% of the population who are sentient. It is wrapped around an interesting idea that I had not known: that the northern parts of Mexico are seen as very American by the other parts of Mexico, and regarded with some suspicion thereby. Was it worth the crap paragraphs I had to wade through to learn that?  Maybe.

Here's the thing.  I'll bet he's right in a lot of this.  The New Netherlands and Tidewater additions seems sensible, as do his redrawings and reconnections of the other borders.  There is probably a lot to learn here.

I'll keep trying, but I think I'm going to just have to remain ignorant.

London 1927

London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.

The music is "Parasol" by Jonquil, who I had not heard of.  I liked his stuff over at YouTube but I'm not sure it works here.