Assistant Village Idiot

Creating Space

2012-01-28T19:15:00.002-05:00

An excuse to create space for Retriever, who has to avoid her own blog because it's being watched by family who don't want to see anything negative about themselves going public. Creating space is a soccer concept - perhaps other flowing team sports as well. I'm not sure that's the exact image I want. Potempkin Post didn't seem quite right, though.

Tim Thomas

2012-01-26T20:45:00.001-05:00

I thought he should have gone to the White House ceremony. I likely share some political views with him, but I don't think it's a particularly effective protest. Just irritating people and bad feeling all around.

Sports radio hasn't been brilliant on the subject, with some thorough misunderstandings and some fairly bigoted generalisations. But at least it's an appropriate topic for them.

Then, I thought Cam Neeley handled it badly after when interviewed live. He clearly only half gets what protest, free speech, and individual versus corporate expression is. Well, he's Canadian - they do free speech just a bit differently up there.

But most inappropriate of all was the Governor of Massachusetts weighing in. Absolutely an intrusion. None of his damn business. His opinion should be irrelevant. Massachusetts is heavily Democratic, the governor is a Democrat, and perhaps he felt he needed to make sure that everyone knew that dissing Obama - which is what everyone's impression is in Mass, because they are rather clueless - isn't cool with the people here. As a political move for him, it probably works. And because a lot of folks in Mass agree with his politics, they'll agree with him, not getting the underlying principle.

But Deval Patrick should in no way be making any pronouncements on this subject.

Elite Empathy For The Ruled

2012-01-26T17:45:00.000-05:00

Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy has some discussion about Charles Murray's quiz for elites, whether they understand and empathise with the middle and lower classes whose lives they rule in a general sense. Somin has several objections to the quiz and the concept.

I think Ilya has it right here. It is pretty clear what Murray is driving at. We do sense that it is better that the elites of a society understand the lives of the non-elites. Yet I agree that Murray has not captured it, nor is it an easily-defined quality. There are rulers who have great understanding of the lives of the great mass of their subjects – Ceausescu was a cobbler, I believe – yet are horrible; there are pure aristocrats with little identification with the proles who are nonetheless excellent rulers. Victoria, perhaps. Or Churchill. The common touch, valued everywhere but nowhere so much as in America, is an advantage but not strictly necessary. I don’t think the questions tell us much. Perhaps in aggregate they begin to point to something real.

Also, we are not quite clear what this quality is that we should hope for, but only a theory as to how it is acquired. If it is empathy we seek, should we not simply say so? Are we perhaps describing the impression that the lower and middle class have that an upper-class person does understand them? We would then want to measure something in their heads, not in the elites. Pollster questions sometimes ask: On a scale of 1-5, how much do you think the following candidates understand people like you? John Kerry was accused of being aloof and remote, raised in upper echelons and private schools and unable to identify with most Americans. Even his hunting – one of the things politicians do to show they are men of the people – was of the gentlemen’s club sort that has nearly vanished. But Kerry may have understood the perspective of the little guy just fine, I don’t know. He played hockey, which is in some areas a blue-collar endeavor and in others a rich kid’s sport. Impressions.

Is everyone who worked a few summers in a mill able to identify with the less well-off forty years later? Many of the New England well-off have experience sailing, climbing around in the White Mountains and living rather primitively for stretches, fishing in hard-to-get-to areas. Tragedies or medical conditions are great levelers.

In making such cultural divisions, we often find we aren't talking about anything very clearly. Folk music is on one side and country music on the other, except for bluegrass. And maybe classic country music, like Les Paul, and okay, Willie Nelson, and gee, what about Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris, and, okay, I have no I idea what I'm talking about...

Two For 3AM

2012-01-25T22:42:00.000-05:00

Purists

2012-01-25T22:37:00.002-05:00

It's hard not to admire purists, if they are on your side, and sometimes even if they aren't. They appeal to first principles, they try to imagine long trajectories of human behavior, to choose wisely the precise word today that will bear fruit many tomorrows from now.

Today I read someone who really hoped we could get back to being a republic, and phrases like "principles of limited government" or "derived directly from the Constitution" have been popping up in conservative circles the last few decades. The liberals have their own purist rhetoric - I'll pick on them some other day.

I can't object to these ideas. I agree that we need to stick to them as closely as we can, teach them to our children when we rise up and when we lie down and all that. But there's an important hip-check of reality we need to keep in mind. It's not ever going to happen, not very much. At most, we can yank the needle backward or forward a few ticks. Great forces, not especially under government control, and under control of one group or another only temporarily, are going to move the barge, not Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich with a paddle, even if they are intent, and pure, and radical. I mention Kucinich as a reminder to conservatives not to despair. The other side has the same problem. I think Obama is a milk-and-water socialist by the standards of Europe's last generation, which is still way too much for me. But even if he were a flat out Trotskyite and could get a bunch of similar guys elected with him, he's not going to change things much. He can't, no matter how badly he wants to. It's 300,000,000 people, with a thousand major industries and a million small ones, interacting in a world economy of 6 billion - a number which is essentially meaningless to all of us.

I'm not just being cynical here. It is the nature of governance and power. How did our Founding Fathers create such a remarkable document designing a government according to first principles, far-seeing, wise? Because for the most part, they weren't governing at the time. They were given a space for wisdom and abstract principle and justice-in-theory, unrelated to immediate boundary disputes, or need to regulate shipyard repair costs, or tariffs on dried fish. That will not occur again. The closest we came to ever again rethinking great principles about how we govern ourselves was the Civil War, then more mildly and gradually in the World Wars and Great Depression.

It's not going to happen. Now that we know that, now that we accept the point that changes from here on in will be gradual, unless some catastrophic events allow a brief radicalism - - - what do we do with this? Once we abandon the fantasies of what they really, really should do down in Washington, what do we do?

The Future Of Us All

2012-01-25T18:52:00.000-05:00

There has been a fair bit of discussion on Adam Davidson‘s Atlantic article on manufacturing employment, and on David Brook’s related comments. There are a few problems with both: Brooks still reads some things wrongly, and the examples don’t quite fit what Adam wants them to say. *

Nonetheless, let’s say for the moment that they are essentially on point. We will continue to have manufacturing jobs, some of them good ones, but they will continue to decrease in number. Of those that remain, there will be downward pressure on wages. Where will jobs for people – American Dream type jobs – come from?

Megan McArdle’s and Charles Murray’s recent essays bear on this topic as well. (In fact, McArdle touches on a lot of interesting apects of this – teen jobs, where folks will live, what services we can afford, and Murray’s got a new book covering the waterfront on this ) It has become commonplace for sociologists and economists to note that two-parent families have become less necessary over the last few decades. They describe different reasons for this: increased safety net, women in the workplace, less stigma. As it becomes increasingly clear that the success-track has a higher concentration of two parent families, should we start reverting to our old claim that two parents are necessary? What do we do with those folks who didn’t get the memo? If delaying gratification becomes the A-1 necessary virtue for a decent life in America, how do we teach that?

If you are a conservative, what the hell do you do about this?
If you are a liberal, what the hell do you do about this?
Repeat for Christian, libertarian, carpenter, humanist, parent, atheist, school superintendent…welcome to a new age of conflicting roles.

Add these pieces together and project them forward: What if there are only decent full-time jobs for 50% of the people who want to work a generation from now, with the rest having part-time or intermittent employment – or none at all – a generation from now? What if only 50% of the population is qualified to fill the jobs? Remember that there is still a lot of talent in that 50%. They can drive cars, make jokes, play an instrument, read a report, build a shed, care for a child, bake bread, play cards, or grow flowers. They just can’t do so at an exceptional enough level to get paid for it. So far, we have been able to switch over to value-added goods and services over the last 100 years. Specialty foods, decoration, entertainment, enhancement, all manner of spas and self-improvers and craftspersons. How far can that be stretched?

Perhaps it can go on forever. Perhaps a hundred years from now when a permanent cheap energy source fuels the food, clothing, and shelter machines without much attention we can all just entertain each other all day, with the very few at any given moment raking in the dough because their specialty is popular this year, but many having a shot at their day in the sun at some point in their lives. How the human spirit deals with such a social order I don’t know. Science fiction writers sometimes take a stab at imagining that. The Moon Moth, and The Marching Morons provide contrasting visions. Douglas Adams has a go at it as well, but with more humorous results.

Yet why should it go on forever? What if it doesn’t work? Let’s look at some complicating problems.
They can all still vote.

All groups will have special needs kids, or will contract unusual diseases, or get hit by drunk drivers – but the bottom 50% are going to have many more, and they will expect equal treatment. This happens with school districts now. We’ve been arguing about that in NH for two decades.

The meritocracy aspect is going to be uneven, perhaps even highly uneven. Of the 50% who have the good jobs, what if a good chunk of those don’t deserve them, but got them via affirmative action, good old-fashioned nepotism and connection, corruption, or dishonest charm? The capable among the other 50% are going to be significantly resentful.

If the economy does adapt in a value-added direction, Non-Asian Minorities may do just fine. If personal energy, charm, creativity, adaptability, and service all do come to count for more and more relative to g-factor, that’s one less ground for social unrest. There might not be much racial difference in those qualities. But if current trends continue, NAM’s are going to be significantly overrepresented.

*The seeming unfairness of Maddie’s plight is highlighted by her claim, seemingly supported by the data and the opinion of those around her, “I am smaaart.” She graduated with honors, but it is later revealed that she not only doesn’t have calculus, she doesn’t have trigonometry. Those aren’t absolutely necessary for “smart,” but they are usual, and their absence calls for some substitute subject of excellence – a facility with languages, a flair for writing, something. Among the actual smart kids who weren’t especially good at math, they found a way to crawl through Algebra II acceptably even if they were relieved that this was the end of their math careers. Next, she made all sorts of good decisions as a high-schooler, but she did get pregnant early in her senior year by someone who turned out not to be an acceptable husband and father. Now, she feels unable to go to school because of mothering responsibilities, and the article seems to support her idea of the hopelessness of this because she can’t go out in the evening. Well, these days there are online courses, and you can take them one at a time. These types of life decisions are a whole ‘nother kind of smart, but she doesn’t seem to have more than average abilities here, either. She doesn’t seem to be stupid. She seems hardworking, and the description of her is that she is small and cute and charming. Those are excellent qualities, and it would be a shame if we became a country where such folks didn’t have an employable place. But let’s not overdraw unfairness here. There were girls who were a little less pretty, a little less hardworking, a little less socially graceful, who didn’t get pregnant and are now passing her in life, at least for the moment. That’s not a federal problem, a societal problem, to fix. If they all can’t find good jobs, maybe.

Around The Clock - Twelve Thirty

2012-01-24T22:05:00.001-05:00

Around The Clock - Walking After Midnight

2012-01-24T22:03:00.001-05:00

I noticed that lots of songs center on times of day or night. Let's see if I can go around the clock. I suspect late morning is going to get tough.And some of the songs I have already found suck, so I won't put them in just to fill a space.

Trace Bundy

2012-01-23T18:49:00.001-05:00

Anosognosia, or The Dunning-Kruger Effect

2012-01-23T16:50:00.000-05:00

I'll make it up to you.

The Future And Its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel

2012-01-22T22:02:00.000-05:00

I thought I had already read this (it came out in ’98), but it must have been merely a thorough review. No idea where, at this point. Her essential point: any system of importance is too dynamic to control – the drive for stasis is futile, and possibly damaging. The words dynamism and stasis occur throughout, as she multiplies examples from a dozen realms to illustrate that organizations and governments that acknowledge dynamic reality survive, while those which seek stasis founder.

She is quite persuasive. I had trouble fighting my way through it, but I think this is because its idea is only partially congenial to me, not because it is poorly-written. (I don’t think it’s brilliantly-written, but it is engaging enough. Fun examples. Perhaps it is a bit repetitive.)

In politics, she faults both liberals and conservatives, each embracing an impossible static vision and attempting to enforce this on others. That is standard libertarian fare, but she chooses examples well: Nixon’s proposed plan to ration gasoline to a rather precise 33 gallons/month for urban dwellers, 37 for urbanites, which we can now see is an insane attempt at two-size fits all that has no relationship to reality; NYC bureaucrats deciding how much security banks should put around ATM’s (as if the banks can’t figure out better what will keep their customers feeling safe and happy). Politicians dislike messiness, and going back to the age of Teddy Roosevelt, believe it is their job to figure out the One Best Way that the nation should live by. I have long said, when politicians want to solve something, they always want to have comprehensive immigration reform, or health care reform, or jobs programs, and that, more than anything else, is what makes them dangerous.

Every new idea seems to spark a campaign to ban or control it: breast implants and mobile phones, aseptic juice boxes and surrogate mothers, Japanese cars, and bovine growth hormone, video games and genetic engineering, quality circles and no-haggle car pricing, telecommuting and MRI’s, data encryption and book superstores – the list goes on forever.

Most political arguments thus take place between competing technocratic schemes. Should there be a mandatory “family viewing” hour on TV, or ratings and a V-chip? Should the tax code favor families with children, or people attending college? Should a national health insurance program enroll everyone in managed care, or should we regulate health maintenance organizations so they act more like fee-for-service doctors? The issue isn’t whether the future should be molded to fit one static ideal. It’s what that static ideal should be. There must be a single blueprint for everyone.

Environmentalists, with visions of village or even primitive economies, draw her especial ire. Well, I’m always on board with people kicking Bill McKibben,* Al Gore, and Jeremy Rifkin. But she notes that technocratic (both GOP and Dem versions) visions are equally worrisome, if applied across the board.But I kept coming up against emotional difficulties, because there are other stasisist visions that appeal to me. I’m a cultural continuity kind of guy, and some cultural values – definitions of marriage, core curriculum, for example, I might want to at least encourage, if not require. Postrel will have none of it. We can have such agreements by contract between individuals but not by fiat. I kept objecting, throughout the book “is no American, or even local community to be protected in the slightest against the vagaries of current fashion? It is no good to say certainly, groups may agree to abide by such principles voluntarily if they wish, but the reality is that a new person can move in if she wants, and the prior agreements cannot be easily enforced. “ See, for example, how much of the debate on same-sex marriage revolves around others being required to recognize it. Special carve-outs for religions are promised, but such things are unstable.OTOH, perhaps Postrel is not pointing out her desired end, but the inevitable one under the American Constitution, or western values of individual freedom generally. My desire for visible enactment of what has gone before – giving the ancestors a vote, as it were – may be illusory. I can force it on my children until age 18, influence others and organizations via persuasion and whatever claim I may have on them, and am otherwise not in control. Nor are any of us, except temporarily or by chance.Having children is the most dynamic intervention one can put upon the world, yet it makes one desire stasis. I suspect my sons are more comfortable with dynamic visions than I am, the youngest three intuitively (such ideas in the abstract have no hold over their minds), the older two because I think we have trained them in both visions, whereas we were only trained in one. The older son, with two young daughters, can expect to have suspicions of dynamism and sympathy for stasis, at least in part. The second son- well, I don’t know what moving to dynamic Houston but being employed by semi-stasisist Methodists in The Woodlands does to one, but I think he has more of a natural comfort with dynamism than the rest of us. (OTOH, Watership Down? Redwall? He defies easy categorization, I think.)More Postrel: I really liked parts of this book.

…if, like Allen and Werbach, you want to stifle agribusiness and shut down Wal-Mart; if, like Schumacher and Sale, you want to make people less footloose and and limit the size of cities; if, like Rifkin you want to ban genetic engineering (or McKibben – enjoy, CF and schizophrenia sufferers! (AVI note)) or, like Buchanan, you want to keep out foreign people and foreign goods; if, like Frank and Bennett, you want to rein in advertising and control popular culture, you can find powerful allies – and a friendly political system. If exhortation and polemics aren’t enough to rally the public to voluntarily adopt your favored form of stasis, government help is available…technocrats know how to stop things.

*recently, and predictably, trying to sell the idea over at Sojourners, that vetoing the Keystone pipeline is a Christian idea, because otherwise we’d be destroying the earth and rewarding corporations, both of which were big items on Jesus’s list of sins, doncha know. I oversimplify, but not by much. That neither the destruction, reward, nor sin is entirely true is apparently completely irrelevant. It’s how it feels to McKibben. And presumably, one or more people at Sojo.

Unbelievable

2012-01-22T18:38:00.001-05:00

WBX just carried a report about a study showing that students who drink three or more sugary sodas a week have a higher incidence of violence by several measures.Who the hell approves the money for studies, and who are the supposed scientists who do not understand that co-occurrence is not cause? How does someone even show their face at conferences with this kind of crap?The people who have trouble delaying gratification in life are going to be more violent, drink more sugary sodas, have more ill-considered sex, tailgate the driver in front of them, study less, and have poorer general life outcomes. I'll tell you that for free, and so will anyone who sits and thinks about this for longer than it takes to drink a Tazo China Green Tips.

Variance

2012-01-21T22:30:00.000-05:00

If someone fills out his All-Star Ballot with 8 Dominican players year after year, it is fair to conclude that said origins explains all the variance in his selection. We also need look no further for explanations. Whatever he says about fielding percentages, clubhouse leadership, or whatever is mere pretense. He votes for Dominicans. In seeking to explain a behavior (or any phenomenon, actually) we look for what explains the variance.

Caution #1: sometimes there are threshold criteria which are not immediately visible. In the example above, the voter is choosing among players who have already made it into the major leagues, a pretty select group. He's not voting for just any Dominican he might meet on the street.

Caution #2: there are a lot of really good Dominican ballplayers. It could happen that some year they did have a legitimate contender for best at every position. That's why I added in the "year after year" part. I suppose if one wants to be technical, we should be alert for such possibilities in all our other explanations of variance as well. Though that seems tiring.

Excluding such hidden factors and statistical rarities, we are wise to simply disregard anything a person says by way of explanation. It might trick us into believing he is actually thinking. Some folks are quite persuasive, and we might come away saying "I don't buy everything that he says, but he made some really good points about the Keystone Pipeline." He made no good points about the pipeline that you couldn't get in much better form from some more thoughtful source. (Note that I have not expressed an opinion on that. I did it on purpose, to illustrate the point. The person made no good points about the pipeline. He may have repeated something worth knowing, but you have no way of telling.)

My wife keeps up with local politics much more than I do, contacting representatives and asking them what they think. One person who has been elected from here for a million years, when confronted with an issue he clearly hadn't thought much about, answered that he supported whatever the Republican Party was saying. No, he didn't say it so baldly, but that was the essence. General Republican sentiment explains much of the variance in his opinions. He may have some opinions where he goes against that grain, but his default is to generic GOP. Not a person you should ask why such-and-such is a good policy. He would give a good answer only by accident.

At the other extreme, what about the voter that checked off no Dominicans? We would have a suspicion of anti-DR prejudice, and go looking for explanations of that. Does he resent them and favor Venezuelans instead? Or whites-only? (Good luck with that team.) For our purposes here, it doesn't matter. This is another unreliable person. Don't ask them why they think something. You already know why.

But if our All-Star voter checked off five Dominicans, we might think that was a little extreme, that he might be a little bit biased, but he is probably worth listening to. Five's about right. We might be tempted to automatically think he is a reasonable person. No, we have to check which Dominicans he voted for and why. He has not yet earned a place at the table, but only at the door.

Self-Indulgent

2012-01-19T19:12:00.000-05:00

Just heard her interviewed on NPR, thinking "what a self-indulgent young woman, thinking that the ambiguities of her shallow life are important." Then I thought "Well, enough people listen to the ambiguities of your shallow life, and I guess it is important in some way."

A different song was featured in the interview. Ultimately the same song, though.

Update: Now this song is available, but no versions of the one I embedded are. I imagine they are being pulled because it is being released. We'll see.

Childhood Obesity

2012-01-19T14:14:00.000-05:00

Commentary on TV while I was in the waiting room: A guy jokingly said he would be in favor of tasing kids as they put a Dorito to their mouths, because he supported anything that reduced childhood obesity.

I get that it's better not to be obese. Why is this now the most important value to teach in the country, excusing all manner of interference? Especially as the strongest correlate is fatherlessness, which the government doesn't want to interfere in at all?

My Uncle, and the Religious Left

2012-01-19T09:57:00.000-05:00

My sons tell me they no longer read what he writes to me, and only skim what I write back, but my ongoing political debate with my uncle via email continues. He had mentioned that he never heard of the Religious Left except from me, implication that he doubted it was much of a factor. I refrained from mentioning Jeremiah Wright, focusing instead on his recognising the categories of Episcopalian and Unitarian. I later expanded that to include UCC, Reform Jews, and the hierarchies of most "mainstream" religious groups - the colleges, seminaries, and mission boards of the Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, for example. (The rank and file, not so much.) I gave some issue examples. Uncle Dave's reply:

All seem to be sub-sets of economics If perceived that way they are easier to classify as Left or Right,

My response - not quite so clean and organised as for a post, but good enough, I suppose. I am leaving out much that could be said, but it's already long, and we have time later.

I think that's generally true, which is why they don't perceive themselves as particularly left-wing and are puzzled, if not offended, when the accusation is made.

They have a set of economic assumptions that come off the left, but they think of them as merely "how things are." They see the goods in a society as belonging to the society in some way - the wealth of America is often described in some aggregate form, as if it is a mostly fixed sum that just exists here somehow, and hasn't been distributed fairly. When pressed, they acknowledge that people make money by providing goods or services, and that growth can be real and not merely reshuffling the deck. Then they revert back to the static assumptions the next day, that America "has" all this wealth, and that the rich "have" it and are hoarding it from the rest of us.

It's easy at that point to perceive justice as involving the removing of wealth from hoarders and getting it to equally deserving people who are just unlucky. I would agree that this is 20% of what happens in our economy and we should strive to reduce the percentage. They would see this outline as 80% of the economy, putting all participants under general condemnation and allowing for rather drastic measures to correct it. Hence the focus on "the wealthiest Americans" and trying to gin up support for their ideas by telling us how much power they have and how evil they are. Also a leftist picture of society, to see the few as possessing most of the power, and themselves as the defenders of the masses.

This is a point at which the religious left becomes more distinguishable from the general left. They are milder in tone because they are milder in belief. They are less embedded in the narrative that says the regular folks only have whatever scraps of power they have managed to wrest from the powerful. They believe that somewhat, but not entirely.

I have called this Marxist with only partial accuracy. This framing of the powerful few versus the many just trying to get their due has been used by many political persuasions. It is central to Marxism and important to milder programs of the left, but it has been used by far- right groups as well, and is a form of populism. And note, in some countries it is a pretty accurate picture of society. I think it's insane in terms of ours or any Western society, where power is very diffuse, but it's true in Africa, partly true in the Middle-East. Your Truman example was as good a description as I've read. If I'm the most powerful man in the world why do I have to spend so much time kissing other people's asses? See also, Bush 41 not wanting to eat broccoli but having to recant the statement.

Back to the religious left: They know rich people who are generous, and maybe even intuit the idea that they are more generous. If they have been in congregational ministry at all, they know there are professional mooches who must be contained or they will destroy the group.

Last point: There is also an automatic assumption that if poor people need things, it doesn't much matter how it gets to them. Making the government "be just," inspiring to personal charity, it's not so very different. That's not entirely untrue, but there is an almost complete failure to consider the tradeoffs. People hungry, get them food - I might have preferences how that happens, because of the cultural, psychological, and spiritual tradeoffs, but I don't much mind however it happens, really. Secondly, if there are identifiable injustices in the system that can be fixed, I think it's a good thing for Christians to work on that, so that there is less need to redistribute at all.

The problem comes as you move off the floor level. The farther up the hierarchy of needs one goes in providing for others, the more the tradeoffs become important. Everyone in America who ever worked believes they are entitled to Social Security. It's the law. I can claim it. I can make the government give it to me with a very simple set of proofs and if that goes wrong, I can get a lawyer to make it happen. Yet it's just a charity program, same as standing in line at a soup kitchen. We don't like to think of it that way. I like to think of myself as having earned everything and beholden to none. But I also take that mortgage interest deduction, got my education at the public library (the schools, not so much), and depend on the courts, jails, and the police department to keep me safe every day. I consider that I am pretty much entitled to all those things, and would feel robbed if they were taken away - especially if some people got them and I didn't.

I use those middle-class examples to illustrate why giving government entitlements to the poor is dramatically different than giving them private charity. In some ways the government way is better - it's less humiliating for people, for example. But giving people stuff via statute is just entirely different than giving via acknowledged charity (whether they know the identity of the donor or not.) By statute, it's mine, dammit, it's not really charity, it's what the world owes me. Thoroughgoing socialists, especially of the European varieties, think this entirely proper. It is yours. You're a person, you were born here, you're entitled to the goods of the society.

It doesn't always start that way - people usually have an awareness when it is something new that they are receiving at the hands of others and make a mental bow in that direction. It seldom lasts. Not because people who have needs, temporary or permanent, are of such poor moral character, but because we all have that moral character. What we come to expect, we believe we deserve. Horrible, but true.

Receiving charity gives one a very different picture of what is happening. One's own place in the social contract is much different. You recognise (or at least, people have a better chance of recognising) that you should try to be moderate in your requests; you should give back what you can in whatever currency you still have; if you prosper down the line, you are under special obligation to give to others; you should say thank you and not be difficult. We internalise these social contract obligations to such a degree that it sometimes interferes with people accepting charity freely given. I well understand the arrogance of not wanting to be humiliated by receiving (I suspect the humiliation would be far more in my own head than in the minds of others). It puts you under emotional obligation to others, and those others may not be nice people. They may rub it in in subtle ways. Receiving charity can be expensive.

There's nothing humiliating about taking Social Security though, is there? Unemployment compensation...not such a clear case, but many people seem to feel they "deserve" that as well. I know someone who was quite proud of himself for using unemployment "the right way," by not jumping at the first job offered, but staying on it until he could secure a proper job in his field. I rather shook my head at that.

Well, you can expand that thought out on your own, I imagine - the keeping the public peace, bread-and-circuses aspect of government entitlement versus the social contract (good and bad) of private charity. I'm sure you have examples of folks you knew and know. I will add that I don't think one of the automatic assumptions of our day - that government at least does it more efficiently and gets it done, where private charity failed - is necessarily true. I think it is only partly true, and the question would be whether it is more than half true or less.

Spoonful

2012-01-15T23:12:00.000-05:00

Part of my solo set, back in the day. I still thought the idea of figuring out the chords yourself was only for exceptional and well-trained musicians, so I kept hounding them down at Ted Hebert's Music Mart to get a Lovin' Spoonful Songbook in. I don't know when it occurred to me, actually, that one could listen to a song and hear what the chords were, then fool around with it until you got it right.

My wife loved the song and would ask for it, long after I had given up performing. I don't know why I found it embarrassing to sing to her alone.

Better Than The Beatles

2012-01-15T22:51:00.000-05:00

This was the band that won the Decca audition over the Beatles, New Year's Day, 1962

Witherspoon Institute

2012-01-13T22:04:00.001-05:00

I thought this was going to turn out to be another of those groups that purported to be thoughtful and moderate but in the end offered up more sharing-via-government solutions with earnest looks that being a liberal - though a nice polite one - is really the only way.

But I was pleasantly surprised by "Great Recession: What Will You Tell Your Grandchild?" an essay from the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ, and the other things I found clicking around on the site. Not sure my agreement is entire, but they have my respect.

Poetic Essence

2012-01-13T21:55:00.003-05:00

Canadian Blogger Kathy "Five Feet Of Fury" Shaidle comments over at Taki's about the suicide of former SNL writer Joe Bodolai. You might click her name to read her other articles as well.

She notes the insanity of his politics, which figured in his suicide note. A 9/11 Truther, anti-Semitic, FEMA camp type.

Few individuals have the power to raise my blood pressure like “truthers.” If you really believe 9/11 was an inside job, then you’re obliged to either assassinate those responsible or kill yourself in abject despair. And if, like Bodolai, you sincerely think that “Fascism will be America. It already is,” then either you leave the country on the next flight and burn your passport upon arrival, or you’re only a pretentious poseur and a barroom bore.

I have thought that myself, and have read similar others. My brother believes that the onboard Flight 93 story was made up by the government to gin us up in hatred to go to war. If you really thought that...

There are similar fevered beliefs on the right, certainly, and they make no more sense. What are usually called the paranoid beliefs of the right, such as birthers or Obama-is-a-socialist types aren't the same thing. Believing a politician might lie about his birth may be unfounded in this case, but it doesn't match trutherism. (Believing Obama is a secret Muslim who wants to install sharia law - okay, that counts.)

An amazing percentage of Americans believe something like one of these. How can that be? When reasonably intelligent people believe insane things, it pays to ask why. I had not gotten any farther than recognising that being in the know is quite delicious, and to be more-cynical-than-thou sometimes requires an extreme attitude. Yet that isn't really enough to get you to ideas that are so wildly improbable that they cannot be seriously credited without large amounts of weed.

I suggest that these beliefs are adopted in a general, almost symbolic way, which is part of why they are impervious to counterevidence. The details of the conspiracy, or the hidden masters, or the imminent fascism do not especially matter. Yes, perhaps that particular idea about the Twin Towers may not hold up, but then something else equally bad will turn out to be true. "They" are capable of doing this, but people don't see.

Considered this way, you may notice that you encounter such beliefs all the time - reasonably sensible people who say "I'm really concerned where this country is headed," who mean something more than that we are spending too much or aren't educating the young. They sense at some level that a great horror is just over the horizon. They know this without knowing why. Feeling precedes facts.

The artists and comedians and writers who articulate this for them, no matter how wrong they are- how insanely wrong, in the case of the Oliver Stones or other political filmmakers - are believed because their audience thinks they have seen through to some essence. The details don't matter - of what import are minor misstatements and slightly misdirected anger when we are talking about visionaries? If their exact stories aren't true, then something very much like it is true, folks think. Don't quibble, man. That dude gets it. We're headed for fascism. He tells it like it is.

Reflections On Tim Tebow

2012-01-13T20:23:00.001-05:00

He's a professional football player.

Ballad of Irving

2012-01-12T21:17:00.000-05:00

I owned this 45. Could I possibly have purchased it? It seems unlikely, but at 13 (1966) I had odd ideas about what was fashionable - or funny. I laughed out loud at the Swop column in Yankee magazine every month, and that wasn't even supposed to be funny.

I decided at one point that this was a great example of an early, clumsy use of a laugh track. Listening again, I'm no longer sure. Maybe it's real. Sobering thought.

Note that Bob McFadden appears on the credits, the Bob McFadden who did the parody album "Songs Our Mummy Taught Us" with Rod McKuen, who used the pseudonym "Dor." Not that it matters much who Rod McKuen was anymore.

Grand Rounds at my hospital

2012-01-11T22:35:00.001-05:00

Public speaker and activist, Mason Dunn, has been educating about gender
diversity and sexual orientation since 2005...

Presentation:
An introduction to various identities within the gay, lesbian, bisexual,
trans, intersexed and questioning (LGBTIQ) community. The presentation will
cover terms, definitions, and ways to better serve this community...

etc, etc.

LGBTIQ. Hard to pronounce.

Good To Know

2012-01-11T21:22:00.001-05:00

Legacy

"In 2009 Rolling Stone Indonesia selected Harry Roesli's song "Malaria", from his first solo album "Philosophy Gang", as the 44th best Indonesian song of all time."

(Wikipedia entry)

Bad Sign

2012-01-10T20:43:00.002-05:00

I mentioned years ago that Republicans promised to work for you, and Democrats to fight for you, and I drew conclusions about what this meant. Not hard to figure out which side of that divide I come down on.

I have heard Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and tonight Mitt Romney promise to fight for you during this primary season. I get it that the opposition party is in the White House. I get it that people feel that their country is being taken away and they want to take it back.

I still don't like it.

Massachusetts

2012-01-10T20:35:00.001-05:00

Ironies abound. The Bee Gees were an Australian band, who had been nowhere near Massachusetts when they wrote the song. Nor had most of the people in my band in college when we sang the song. But the wonderful feel of the harmonies as they hit on the word "out," was enough for us to go forward. Plus, we got all the Bee Gees fans on our side - this was in their pre-disco days - and the people who actually came from Massachusetts, once I dropped into the intro that I lived there.Playing cheap bars and college pubs in Virginia, you used everything you could get your hands on to keep your audience from moving on. (Really cheap bars, you didn't mention being from anywhere north of Richmond. Even Fredericksburg was suspect.) Sha-Na-Na did 50's revival, we did 60's revival before anyone: Walk Away Renee, Can't Find The Time, Ruby Tuesday. That retro thing people started doing about 15 years ago of humming TV theme songs and making the audience guess? We were doing it in 1973. We were truly cutting edge in marginally cool performance tricks.

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Nor &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Nor had they been anywhere near New York when they wrote The New York Mining Disaster of 1941, a much better song. (Embedding disabled, but a great video.) So why did we sing the song that was less good? Audiences didn't respond to it. Poignancy and human drama don't matter that much to young drunks on a Friday night, unless its their own personal dramas and poignancies.

Japanese Ad Campaign

2012-01-10T18:22:00.001-05:00

There is interesting commentary at Language Log

I added a comment well into the thread.

Nobel For Literature

2012-01-09T19:19:00.002-05:00

CS Lewis nominated JRR Tolkien for the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature. The records are unsealed after fifty years.

...the result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality,

according to one judge. Others nominated and passed over that year included Graham Greene, Robert Frost, and EM Forster.

It's easy for us to criticise their short-sightedness at this point, for literature's worth sometimes only reveals itself over time. When I first read Tolkien I knew it was a whacking good story and fired the imagination, but it was only over years that it revealed its deep understanding of human nature in crisis, both individually and collectively, and its examination of the worth of a life and ambivalences of longevity. So I would understand if they were cautious about giving the prize to a merely well-told tale.

Yet the irony is, it is the storytelling they found lacking. I have to suspect, as many readers of Tolkien (and Lewis) have come to over the years, that much criticism of the works comes from A) not liking heroic fantasy or B) not liking the implicit morality.

Here's my best shot: Swedes usually like fantasy literature. It's pretty easy to see why heroic fantasy would carry unendurable heat in 1961, and even flawed, human good guys would be too bright to behold.

Mission

2012-01-09T18:48:00.002-05:00

Retriever is considering going to Guatemala. Ben went to Guatemala years ago, and we used to support missionaries there (who are now elsewhere).

As to the missed tourism that the relatives are complaining about, I saw more interesting things in Romania as a short-term missionary than I did as a tourist. CS Lewis's doctrine of First and Second Things, perhaps. Some things are never achievable by direct action, but only come as byproducts

Urbanisation, and a Japanese Curiosity

2012-01-08T19:05:00.000-05:00

I come from the hippie era that disdained cities and glorified carrots and goats. Not that I've raised carrots or goats myself, but I've kept a residual sense of contempt for high-rises, parking meters, and all the noise.

We did almost go the full rural route early on, and it hovered in the conversation until the mid-80's, but we eventually settled into a largely small-town/suburban lifestyle. We talk about whether moving back into the city would be reasonable for retirement, but there's a lot not to like about it. It depends on where and how, I suppose.

Thus it is with some reluctance that I am convinced by the argument that urbanisation in a country is a good thing, and that absent artificial encouragements by government (such as mortgage deductions, agri subsidies, grants and programs that prop up marginal endeavors), the natural flow of youth and talent is to cities, and that's a good thing. Less ecological disruption, efficiencies of scale, etc.

Note that in these discussions, it is often unclear whether edge cities are considered as part of the discussion or not, and that single factor changes nearly everything. Researchers whose conclusions seem planets apart might actually be in essential agreement, and arguments that have escalated to threat level might be about details.

Also left vague is what sort of countries urbanisation is good for: All of them? Third World? Free Market?

With that in mind, note that Japanese cities continue to prosper despite the birth dearth and the yearly predictions that the whole country is going to collapse. There are places in the provinces that are collapsing - and the pictures are a touch disquieting - but the Japanese don't seem to mind all that much.

It raises very interesting questions about what a "good" economy is. GDP is a measure of growth and fluidity, but may not capture the idea of stable wealth in a community, nor the technological improvements we all share but look like 0% growth.

QOTD

2012-01-07T20:54:00.004-05:00

...there is nothing more inherently corrupting than government attempting to do something that is inherently impossible. Michael Oakeshott.

Political Theater

2012-01-07T20:20:00.002-05:00

We went out for dinner in Manchester tonight - unusual for us, especially just the two of us, but Tracy had a coupon (she always wins coupons) - and caught Radio Row at the Radisson, Occupy NH Primary across the street, then drove home via the debate at St. A's in our town. We've been downtown in the height of primary season in many other years, and I'd forgotten how odd it is to see so many people clearly from around here in the restaurants and talking earnestly on the streets - junior movers-and-shakers who wait on the campaign and media people with Important Haircuts. Nothing objectionable about this crowd, I just can tell at a glance I don't want to talk with them. These are people who sell ideas, rather than having ideas, and they know more about sales than thinking. Not that they see themselves that way, of course. They largely think they have entered a cultural backwater where people don't know What's What and Who's Who.

Which is true, I suppose, in one sense.

But the energy was a bit subdued downtown. Most of radio row was empty - most folks heading over to St. A's, I imagine. Across the street, Occupy was poorly attended - though they did have some drumming! Wouldn't want NH to miss out on the full experience. But the prominent multi-stickered cars had Mass plates...Mass plates...NYYankees decal...Yeah, you folks really didn't do your research, did you?

I think "Occupy" has become a brand name, because it's generic, unofficial. Every small group with a liberal bent had attached "Occupy" to their posters. You couldn't do that with Tea Party two years ago, because major media would swoop on you and try to bait you into saying something stupid which they could play nationally, pretending that you represented everyone else. So the Tea Party got pretty good at enforcing its boundaries. With Occupy, only independent media tries that. Though Fox did try a couple of times, quite successfully, I heard.

An Obama group was out at St. A's with trombones and saxophones, playing some bluesy thing - that deserves a little credit.

Just not as big a deal as previous years. Our own lack of effort may be part of that.

Political writer Walter Shapiro, quoted by James Fallows at The Atlantic.

As a political reporter, I am prepared to offer a spirited defense of New Hampshire's outsized role in presidential politics. Nowhere else in the nation do voters display such fidelity to old-fashioned civic obligations.... New Hampshire may be a living monument to participatory democracy, but what in God's name is the justification for making the Iowa caucuses the campaign equivalent of the book of Genesis?

Complain all you want, but without NH, the Jon Huntsman's of the world have no chance at all to even attempt to run for president. Wealth, and/or coming from a big state, already are dominant factors. You want to make that worse? Maybe the first primary should just be a single county.

Purists

2012-01-07T16:19:00.001-05:00

All you football purists who claim you really like to focus on line play - here's your chance. Houston-Cincinnati. The QB play may be uninspiring, too, giving you another reason to watch the interior.

See If You Can Bear Them

2012-01-07T15:49:00.001-05:00

Grim over at Grim's Hall links to these essays by liberals at Washington Monthly, What If Obama Loses? I found them unbearable because of their closed assumptions - utterly unaware that they even are assumptions - but you may do better. The comments at Grim's take an interesting turn, with Texan99 trying to navigate a line of being gentle but forceful in her persuasion.

Life Expectancy

2012-01-07T12:50:00.001-05:00

Top Ten List

2012-01-05T21:39:00.003-05:00

I finally discovered one. Looking through my stats every month or two, I notice that "Wayfinding And Stonehenge" and "Goethe's Three Questions" are always among my most-viewed posts, even though neither is recent. I imagine both of them are coming off google hits, as Stonehenge must be a biggie, and the 3 Questions part of Goethe is in that no-man's land between common and obscure that a lot of people have heard of it, and are looking for it, but not many people have written about it. A guess.

Tonight on a whim I clicked through to see what my most-read posts of all time are. It's an odd grouping.

1. By far - is Wayfinding And Stonehenge, from six months ago.
2. And way ahead of #3, Things You Shouldn't Tell Young Parents. I think it got stumbled-upon, or digged, or something, because it was 800 hits in one day, not much otherwise.
3. O'Sullivan's Law Hits Habitat For Humanity, from six years ago. Both O'Sullivan's Law and HFH likely have good search numbers.
4. Goethe's Three Questions. Also from 2006. As above.
5. Not Their Tribe. Late 2006. A mix. A big burst when it first came out, but a few readers every month since then as well. This would also go into my "most comments received" top ten as well.
6. Clyde Joy, Willie Mae, and Goodnight Homes. I am stunned this is on the list. Enough NH people must be searching for Clyde every month, and I must be on the first page somewhere. The 1950's nudist camp photo has been deleted, presumably by its originator or owner.
7. Chagall Windows - Zurich. Common search, I suspect. They are stunning.
8. Merritt Ruhlen's List. (Of words that echo the original, unified language of mankind, 50,000 or so years ago.) 2006 again. Perhaps I peaked as a blogger in my first year.
9. Flamingos, Real and Plastic. Rather a disappointment, as the Don Featherstone's have been deleted. akafred, aka Sponge-headed Scienceman, has a recommendation for a museum in Leominster. You heard me. No sniggering there in the last row.
10. California Rocket Fuel. Likely search-engine related.

NPR

2012-01-05T18:28:00.003-05:00

A NYTimes food guy on NPR is talking about "Junk Food Pushers," and lobbyists, and bemoaning that no federal agency has the power to take on Big Food, and that's why we have this childhood obesity.

Obesity correlates most strongly with fatherlessness and food stamps.

But those are no fun to solve. It's much more fun to pretend that it's lack of nutrition education in the schools, or evil corporations.

Censored

2012-01-05T18:22:00.002-05:00

A theater* professor in Wisconsin is being censored for a "Firefly" quote. I missed this when it was new. I don't know Firefly, except that even some heavy intellectual types seem to like the show. Maybe this is the villain, or some other contemptible character.

Yet it doesn't matter. It is clearly not being censored for whatever it means in context of the TV series. It is being considered inappropriate, worthy of being ripped down, because it refers to shooting and violence. This is because to many non-gun people it all ties together: America's Love Affair With Guns, and all that. The belief persists, for entirely cultural rather than intellectual reasons, that if we weren't so darn encouraging of all this gun talk that a New Soviet M... excuse me, I meant to write a better type of person would slowly emerge, and we wouldn't have so much violence, because everyone would learn war is not the answer and all that. Not that all those Bambi-kil... I mean hunters aren't necessarily violent people, no, no, they're the salt-of-the-earth, usually, but they just don't see, not like John Lennon that it just encourages people to think that violence solves their problems...

Lots of 'em really think like that, as the story of an entire university that seems unable to understand simple ideas illustrates. As if drugrunners were heavily influenced by cowboy movies, or some other bizarre American-culture-is-the-problem idiocy.

I get it that there are lots of yahoos who own guns, and they leave them around in manners I would consider unsafe. But the folks they kill through that carelessness are their own, it is very few, and it's not what drives the violent crime rate. It's not caring about safety that makes folks want to restrict them, it's caring about whose culture gets to be Big Penis in the USA.

A long rant, I know. The takeaway: too many people think that discouraging certain Other People from speaking, and trying to drum up social sanction against them, will reduce violence. It won't. Violence is driven by entirely different factors.

(HT: Volokh)

*Or "Theatre," as we used to say at W&M. If you were really good - and we were - you could discern the difference in pronunciation.

Sex Offender Registry

2012-01-04T19:11:00.002-05:00

I had cause to be examining NH's sex-offender registry in detail today, looking at photos and someone who may be using an alias. Not that my actions contribute in the slightest to the patient's treatment or the well-being of the citizens of NH, but because I'm going to look evil if someone slipped through, once someone wondered allowed whether X was an RSO. She is and is quite open about it. She had sex with a 13 y/o when she was 27 and bore his child. She did two years and has been on parole ever since. She didn't show up on the registry, because the registry is inaccurate, as it often is. And apparently much more inaccurate in other states.

I have never mentioned it before, but I am deeply opposed to these registries. I know a few of the people on New Hampshire's, maybe a dozen or so.

I know lots of folks more dangerous, including sexually dangerous, who are not on that list. And I know for certain that there are folks on the list who are at most marginally more dangerous than the average person-on-the-street. We put up these registries to express our anger, and how much we CARE ABOUT OUR CHILDREN rather than to increase our safety in any way.

There is no evidence that these measures have increased our community safety even 1%.

There is plenty of evidence that people on the registries have been harassed, lost jobs, and even been murdered. (A bunch in Maine. The murderer, from Canada, had a list of NH offenders to go ofter next.)

Paragraph 4 and Paragraph 5: That's not a fair trade.

No one has to tell me that there are perpetrators who reoffend hundreds of times, and bear constant scrutiny. Yup, and I know three of 'em. None of 'em is on NH's registry. There is a subset of offenders, usually male, usually targeting 10-12 y/o boys (the age at which they themselves were molested) - though there are exceptions, who have literally hundreds of victims, and all interventions to date have been only partially effective - who are ongoing flat-out dangerous and should never be unsupervised. But even the most experienced clinicians have a poor record of identifying who those will be, except after long and sad perpetration. There is no one in the country who can identify which 20 year-old offenders will continue to reoffend and which won't. On the whole, sex offenders have the second-lowest rate of recidivism, after murderers.

We pass these laws to beat our chests. They are therefore worse than doing nothing at all. Anytime we feed that beast in our own souls, the idea that we have slain seven with one blow when we have only killed flies, we endanger our children more, not less.

There are perpetrators who continue to lie to themselves and excuse their behavior - don't I know it. But our rage at their lack of remorse is not the issue - public safety is the only issue. I know penitents who are still dangerous, and impenitents who are not. I see little correlation, if any. Opportunity, substance abuse, accountability - those are the only issues. Humiliation and punishment are irrelevant.

BTW, note on substance abuse: I would give a convicted sex offender a lifetime subscription to his ten favorite fetish sites before I would give him a beer.

Santorum

2012-01-04T17:41:00.000-05:00

Now that he has become an issue in NH, if only because of his strong finish in Iowa, I will weigh in on Rick Santorum.

He is a Big Government Conservative, rather like Gingrich. If socially conservative issues are your focus, Santorum is your guy, more than Perry, Gingrich, or Paul. But for hands-off government, Santorum's statements and actions over the years suggest he likes "requiring all schoolchildren to have basic personal economics lessons in school," national service, pro-family teaching (whatever that is), and other nanny-state interventions. It's just this time, the nanny is a Baptist instead of a Unitarian.

These types of programs are a drop in the bucket in terms of cost, and children don't tend to learn what we force on them anyway, so you may be comfortable with that. Heck, a really shrewd liberal might be fine with that, reasoning that these showcase legislations are often more symbolic than effective, and it signals a guy they can do business with, trading support for, I don't know, paying schoolkids to learn Arabic* or Chinese* because we're going to need it, or setting up IRA's for five-year-olds, or funding a Motown museum or whatever.

If Santorum finds a way to cut entitlements, reduce our medical-insurance promises, or wastefraudandabuse, then I suppose all this nanny-state clutter won't matter much. And truth be told, a lot of it would still happen under Romney or even Ron Paul. That Washington barge only turns by degrees. Yet better to have less of this than more.

*And then complaining that it was mostly kids who already had these as family languages, who weren't any more likely to be doing this for patriotic interest as we thought when we envisioned Nebraskan Lutherans populating the State Department in 2025.

Moral Foundations of OWS

2012-01-02T09:49:00.001-05:00

Jonathan Haidt has an article over at Reason about the Moral Foundations of OWS. (Bird Dog originally linked it.) He is an academic, doing this empirically by looking at the signs carried at Zucotti Park and totting up what aspect of moral thinking they appeal to in their attempt to persuade. He and other researchers have developed a six-aspect basis for morality - not as a philosophical foundation, but a simple observation of what people actually do make reference to when they discuss the morality of something.

...six clusters of moral concerns—care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—upon which, we argue, all political cultures and movements base their moral appeals.

The foundations are like the taste receptors on the tongue: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory. Each culinary culture creates its own unique cuisine using some combination of these tastes, including elements that lack immediate appeal on their own, such as bitterness. Similarly, each political movement bases its claims on a particular configuration of moral foundations. It would be awfully hard to rally people to your cause without making any reference to care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, or sanctity.

I love his stuff. It is very refreshing to read a liberal who more than partly gets it about what conservatives and libertarians actually think. I think his basic formulation of the components of morality is good, also. His further hypothesis is that liberals and conservatives use these differently - that liberals only use the first three of the six, while conservatives use all of them in discerning morality. I don't entirely disagree. Yet grant for a moment that it is entirely true, there is still a problem. If conservatives have a six-part morality and liberals a three-part, do Haidt and the other researchers immediately conclude "Whoe, there are some complex, nuanced aspects of morality we might have missed here! We'd better look into this!" No, they note that liberals simply find the other three extraneous.

Ah. I see. Rather neatly done, that.

But that is my smaller objection. More important, a little examination shows that liberals do indeed use those other three taste buds of morality. I acknowledge that they use authority/subversion far less generally. But it is very prominent in their climate debates, for example. Similarly, I think loyalty/betrayal shows up in other places in liberal culture, but the researchers don't notice them, and in particular lump them into fair/unfair discussions when they should more properly be broken out. Still, I grant that this measurement is more of a conservative than liberal yardstick.

But the sanctity/degradation, or sacred/disgust measurement he has entirely wrong, perhaps even backward. Liberals use these all the time. Vegetarianism is often driven by disgust at eating cute things. Health concerns, even quite rational ones, usually come later. The implied sacredness of the body - both the human and the animal - is not incidental. Initial environmentalist appeals are likewise much taken with the idea of "sacred" wilderness and preservation for reasons that are aesthetic rather than measurable. The possible negative consequences are often speculative and placed very far out in time or along risk-assessments. It is the idea of degrading the world that goes against the grain for people.

Plus, Haidt's initial data was drawn from tests which specified sanctity/degradation distinctions along lines that conservatives would respond to but not liberals. It was flags used for degraded purposes, not pictures of MLK, that were on the test. You could easily construct the questions to reflect liberal sensibilities.

I will say little at this point about comparisons between liberal and conservative use of the first three aspects of morality, except to note that Haidt makes the claim

My colleagues and I find that liberals score higher than conservatives and libertarians on all measures of compassion and empathy.

That would be all measures other than actual charity, then, as conservatives, on the strength of having more religious people, give more money, time, and blood than liberals. Haidt means paper-and-pencil measures.

Church-finding

2011-12-30T23:53:00.000-05:00

You should pay attention to the sidebar of commenters' blogs on your own, of course, but sometimes I like to highlight one. I don't know, but... tells the story of leaving one church and seeking another. Key quote:

Questions have a way of ballooning into unexpected regions.

Exactly. A good motto for any blog, actually.

The Budget: Clarity

2011-12-30T23:43:00.002-05:00

Aegon01, formerly Tigerhawk Teenager, has a great simplified explanation of the budget. It will take you 15 seconds and clarifies things nicely.

Wikipedia Bias

2011-12-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

Yeah, that could be a whole category on a blog, couldn't it?There was a Ferdinand Marcos link on the Wikipedia main page today. I come from a Marcos-hating era, of course, as his declaration of martial law occurred while I was liberal, and his fall from power occurred when I was apolitical. In the end, I recalled, even the American conservatives dropped him as just too corrupt and too vicious, however reliably anticommunist he was. So I still had extreme negative associations with Marcos.

Yet I recalled a doctor from the Philippines, Melicio Flores, who I had worked with during the 80's and 90's at the hospital. I recall him being very anti-Marcos, pro-Aquino, but also annoyed at some of the posturing his countrymen were doing back home. Something along the lines of They forget how they cheered him then, early on. He did some good things early on, that they benefited from but don't talk about now. Many of the families that are against him now made a lot of their money by being his friends. And they forget how dangerous his enemies were. Still, Dr. Flores was glad to see him go. Fifteen years early would have been fine with him.

Thus, I thought it a good time to read up on Ferdinand and Imelda, to see what good things had been accomplished, however roughly, that might moderate my negative opinion of him.

Apparently there were none. According to Wikipedia there was nothing redeeming about him ever, other than being clever. And American involvement in the Philippines was likewise entirely without virtue until the day that Reagan belatedly cast Marcos aside. I'm going to bet that's not true. Not that I doubt any of the accusations they make against him. I expect that they are sourced and accurate.

I also expect that the account is slanted enough to be deceitful. Perhaps not. Perhaps he really was a Ceausescu, a Saddam, a Stalin, whose virtues were so insignificant as to no longer bear mentioning. Yet is should be noted even with those comparisons that Saddam and Ceausescu started off pretty reasonably those first few years.

What We Love

2011-12-29T22:45:00.000-05:00

The cliche is that if you do what you love, you will never "work" a day in your life. This seems unlikely to me, as jobs have this tendency to include irritating tasks as well as rewarding ones.

Still, there is certainly something to it. I had a math/science friend from high school who majored in geology because he loved it. I believe it was paleogeology he mentioned as his specialty at Rennsalaer. He was also fascinated by computers, and as our school was on the DTSS* system got a lot more time working with them then most highschoolers did. He continued this is college, getting a minor in computer science - I am not sure many schools had it as a major, then; it was part of the math department - and expressed to me over Christmas break 1972, our sophomore year, that he worried whether he would be able to find work in his specialties at graduation, because a lot of the good jobs seemed to be tied up for decades. He was considering pushing on to graduate school, even though his family couldn't afford it, really, so that an academic or research might open up.

Paleogeology is one of the foundation specialties of looking for petroleum, and that computer thing, as you know, really did take off. In the recession of 1975, when I was glad to find a job as a part-time hotel clerk, oil companies were throwing money at him to do something quite close to what he loved. He never went on to get his PhD, and according to my online research, he is quite happy with that decision.

I have written about both natural intelligence and personal energy this fall, raising questions of what factors go into worldly success. Both have something to do with the drive to learn. But I think there is something different about the desire to learn about "things," which I have in abundance, and a desire to learn about some particular subject. I now think the latter is a greater contributor to doing something important in the world. It can come from either personal energy or natural intelligence, but it is what makes the world go forward. One can call folks like me polymaths, or Renaissance men, but the term dilettante might apply just as well. We are deeply related to the more focused students, and we have our place in the overall system as well. But ultimately, we are gap-fillers and they are builders.

I think I will expand on this soon. Here is a fascinating story about Dennis Ritchie (Lucent) and Robert Morris (Dartmouth, NSA, cryptology) that illustrates the drive of love of subject. At the time, they would have seemed like corporate tools, not cool at all, to me. Computer geeks were button-down types who I backpedaled away from. Yet in a few short years, they looked like this. The computer folks learned that the folks who really knew what they were doing weren't the 3-piece suit guys, but strange-looking people who had chosen this field because of fascination.

*DTSS: Dartmouth time-sharing system for computing. NH, MA, and VT highschools (especially prep schools) were permitted on in the late 60's, but it was mostly for Dartmouth and the US Naval Academy. Mathematician and later Dartmouth president John Kemeny had developed the computer language BASIC, which I was pretty good in in 1970. But when I went to William & Mary, no one there had heard of it. They taught Fortran. It is so odd to read about these things now, to see that I was near a major development node in highschool, but moved to a backwater for computers in college. And yet. Had I the drive or the love of subject, that would not have stopped me. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves. I thought being a folksinger, medievalist, and actor was cooler. And that was likely the right decision for me.

Of Pancakes and Candidates - and Feathers

2011-12-29T17:59:00.002-05:00

Ben is up from Houston, and is re-experiencing what it was like to grow up here in NH presidential primary season. We get frequent phone calls, ignoring many because of caller ID. We didn't have that in earlier years.

We were trying to recall who the candidate was who fell off the back of the stage while flipping pancakes. Tracy and Ben had been present for the event. A school snow day, perhaps. Was that '96 or 2000? Or perhaps even '92? No, it was all Bush 41 and Buchanan for that one - we would have remembered that. Was it Gary Bauer? It wasn't Dole... It wasn't Alexander...Forbes?...Dornan?

It was Bauer, 1996, for those tormenting themselves over it.

We discussed how such foolishness is in many ways a good thing. Even our stuffiest, most self-important candidates have to venture such things. They have to risk looking foolish, having to quickly cover, looking a little sheepish. You can't imagine Vlad Putin putting himself in that position, nor Bashar Assad. Dictators try to look like a Man of the People by wearing military garb, as Saddam Hussein or a thousand Latin American leaders did. In the West, and I think particularly in the Anglosphere, we require more. We make you throw baseballs, and eat kielbasa.

I think Obama is pretty imperious, yet I can easily imagine him covering a pancake-flipping fall with charm and grace. Mao, not at all, and Hu Jintao, just barely starting to make his way into that territory. That tells us something about a country, doesn't it?

It has it's bad side, of course, and isn't exactly a qualification for the presidency. Plenty of corrupt, glad-handing, back-slapping politicians also have that common touch we like. But it provides a check on one type of bad presidency, and for that we should be grateful.

It's been that way a long while, too.

McLaren, Bell, MacArthur

2011-12-29T17:28:00.000-05:00

Somewhat accidentally, I have recently encountered an essay by Brian McLaren, portions of Rob Bell’s farewell address, and half a chapter of John MacArthur discussing changes in the church. All three referred in rather general terms to other Christians who had disagreed with them or criticised them. In each case, I thought “Y’know, those people don’t put it like that. They have a better argument for what they do and why they do it.”

In each case there were additional comments available – the Amazon book reviews for MacArthur, the comments sections for McLaren and Bell. As these things go, those in agreement were more prominent in all cases, and they in turn were even more pronounced in misreprenting what “those other” Christians believe. But those in disagreement were no better. In all cases, the references were not to individuals, where one could perhaps discern whether the quoted person was indeed central to a Christian group or movement, or even – mad thought - track down an actual quote. It was vaguer than that: the evil old way or new way or other way of seeing things. And we’ve got their number. We can display why they are wrong in just a sentence or two.

Do we all do this? Render ourselves unable to give an accurate summary of other *POV’s, and embed ever more comfortably in our own nests?

*shouldn’t that be P’s OV? That is accurate but strange-looking. What is that acronym's protocol?

New Conventional Wisdom

2011-12-27T18:18:00.000-05:00

Where does this idea come from that the protests all over the globe are somehow related, springing from the same frustrations and impulses? Egypt, Pakistan, Greece, Tunisia, OWS, London.

That's just insane. A perfect example of people making up a pattern to give themselves the illusion of understanding - and thus not have to think too hard about events too close to their own lives.

Are there any prominent non-liberals falling into this nonsense? I'm betting yes, even though I have run across any yet.

No Politics

2011-12-26T21:06:00.000-05:00

Very little political this month, and most of that is noting what others think rather than what I think. Looking over the last few months, that has been increasingly true. Replaced by music.

Maybe I'm not thinking as much, and so not writing about my thought. Much easier to watch other people think.

My current thought is to read absurdists and existentialists and connect it to church and culture. My fear is that I will have many brief, unrelated thoughts that don't tie in to any helpful ideas.

(Head slap) Lists! Lists are supposed to drive up traffic, and are traditional at the end of the year. I imagine they drive up traffic with real readers, too, not the in-and-out kind that come over to download ABBA or meerkat pictures.

AVI's Top Ten...Top Ten...can't think of anything. Absurdist dramas isn't likely to grip the imagination, nor is ABBA costumes, nor obscure NH villages, and English language trivia you can get on other sites pretty easily.

I've Got Sixpence

2011-12-26T20:42:00.000-05:00

Don't you just know you would like these guys?

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;HT&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>HT: cobb

Note To Self

2011-12-25T22:55:00.001-05:00

Events are not interesting to others, even if they care about you, just because they happened to you. They must be narrated well and/or have some other point of interest.

I deeply fear that all stories are going to end at Westford Center someday. DNR.

If that sounds grim, I'm a pretty strong DNR guy anyway.

Two From Ben

2011-12-24T10:20:00.001-05:00

He'll be home from Houston Christmas Night, and finally able to sleep after filmmaking, but Ben has been able to post a few interesting things during the making of the film for Christmas Eve.

"I was trying to create the sound effect of a mug smashing for "Unexpected", but it turned out to be harder than I thought. The end result seemed funny. But then, I'm pretty tired."

I have been having trouble keeping the embed. Perhaps twitvid takes it down. If so, you can go to their site for the video here.

In (assumedly) unrelated news, A species of miniature dragon has been discovered. Well, little "dracos" have been known about for awhile, but this one does seem different and definitely cool.

Ron Paul

2011-12-24T09:37:00.002-05:00

He continues to poll about 20% here, so I thought I let you know my unscientific reading of that, based on what I hear people say at work (not everyone who works in a psych hospital is a social worker, after all) and a t church. Half of that number are people who are pretty lined up with Ron on a lot of issues, who would vote for him any year. Another half might dislike, even greatly dislike, one or another of his general positions, particularly on foreign policy. But they are so determined that the government should shrink that they'll risk that, and they're voting for him in the primary.

That's not going to be me, but I entirely understand that reasoning.

50 Best Quotes

2011-12-23T22:06:00.000-05:00

Right Wing News has it's 50 Best Political Quotes of the Year. I don't agree with them all, and surprisingly, Michael Moore had one of the ones I liked best (#26. for its irony.) Ann Althouse at #47 has one dear to my heart, as it echoes my A&H Tribe thinking.

Why does the left hate free speech? Because they don’t know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don’t know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting “shut up”… when they aren’t prissily imploring everyone to be “civil.”

Jonah Goldberg at #40.

If you’ve ever known anyone with a serious addiction, the easiest thing for friends and family to do is pretend it’s not a big deal. Who wants to have a confrontation? Far easier to let things slide and have a good time. “Let’s have a nice Thanksgiving without any arguments, OK?”The tea party is like the cousin who’s been through AA and refuses to pretend anymore. As a result, he spoils everyone’s good time. For the enablers, and others in denial, he’s the guy ruining everything, not the drunk.Uncle Sam is the drunk and the tea partiers are the annoyingly sober — and a bit self-righteous — cousin. Measured by spending, and adjusted for inflation, the federal government has increased by more than 50 percent in 10 years. Some have enabled the drunken spending, others continue to deny it’s even a problem.The tea party is sounding the wake-up call. If America didn’t have a problem, then there really would be good cause to be furious with the forces of sobriety. Nobody likes a party-pooper, especially the people hooked on partying.

Carl at No Oil For Pacifists has his own favorites, and you can get the full link there.

Epitaph

2011-12-23T18:26:00.000-05:00

I have mentioned before that I am a fan of Eugene Ionesco, who is (wrongly) grouped in Theatre of the Absurd. Unlike Beckett or Pinter, the playwrights Ionesco, Jarry, and especially Stoppard do not teach that absurdism must necessarily lead to despair, but sense hope out beyond the final wall of death.

I learned today that Ionesco's epitaph is "Pray to I-don't-know-who. Jesus Christ, I hope."

Often At Christmas

2011-12-22T21:38:00.003-05:00

People will will suddenly notice who I look like. Same as 5 years ago.

Christmas Party

2011-12-22T20:00:00.003-05:00

Frosty. Jingle Bells. Yes, Virginia, with its “Theeternal light with which childhood fills the world…” stealing from religiousimagery for its power, as always.

But it is our holiday, right? Or was, originally.

War Is Over. Deck The Halls. White Christmas.

Richie comes up and amidst some more secular pieces slips in“Hark the Herald,” then a Christian contemporary of his own composition. Goodwork.

The Little Drummer Boy. Marginal – at least it’s got Jesus in it.

From my job I can see the day when an Actual Christian willbe brought out as some museum piece to weakly sing a carol no one knowsanymore, with all the sentimentalists beaming at the old bird, thinking thatthey’ve gotten the authentic flavor of the traditional holiday – similar tothose old-fashioned peppermints you have to special order now, which they getfor their grandchildren every year.

It hasn’t reached you yet. This is New Hampshire, which, along with Maine and Vermont have thelowest percentage of Christians, and gee-whiz-who’da-thunk it, the leastcharitable giving as well. European levels. I am sad to see the gospel leavethe place where I live – because Christmas and Easter are the last culturalholdouts, and if we can’t sustain those, we won’t sustain anything else – but Iam glad that it has at least found other places to land, in Africa and Asia.

I am glad of this for other reasons as well. I used to think that an apophatic faith – onedefined by contemplation of what God isnot, was rather a dodge, a contrariness with more than a hint of arrogance,looking down on those who used mere worldly attributes to understand what God is. But I learned in dry years that this is not so. We lean on the physical and sensory to carryus: if those around us don’t Do Christmas (or Do Worship, or Do Charity) inquite the way we think it should be, it gets ruined for us.*

And yet, Christ comes,just as much in ruined Christmas as in an orderly one. We walk in a world among people whobreathlessly say “…very special moments that remind us of what this holidayseason is really about!” – meaning smiling and punch and watching the Grinchwith friends – but the ordered steps of the earth and sun are unaffected, theseason comes, and the appointed time for preparation is now joined to it aslong as the earth spins. Christ was, and is, and is to come. The apophatic faith which says “Not thus…northus…” is more popular in the East, where there are always bad governments,shorter lifespans, more death. A goodapproach for tragic times, or even merely irritated ones. No one sang “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”this year. No matter. Christ comes. Rejoice.

For contrast to this post, I wrote The Sadness of NPR Christmas a few years ago.

*Can this be AVI, who usually calls us to immerse in theworldly and the physical trappings of the faith – the taste of the wine, theharmony of the music, the dark ceiling recesses of the cathedral? Yes, the same. Those are there for our instruction, to teachus great things. They are the mold ofour faith, giving it shape. Yet the daymay come when the mold is stripped away – and the faith has to stand alone. Rejoice in that day also.

But If It's True..

2011-12-21T20:20:00.000-05:00

But what if the story of William James Sidis, minus the obvious exaggerations, is essentially true? Where then does he rank?

Norbert Wiener, in his book Ex-Prodigy, quite clearly testifies to Sidis' brilliance in mathematics at a young age. That is the single most powerful bit of evidence in favor of the premise that Sidis was the real deal. Wiener was not close to him, but knew him at Harvard, had a class with him, and had some conversations with him. He also knew him later in life, when William was haunting the halls of MIT for employment doing computational work, of which there was plenty in the 1940's - but no more, because he did not want to get too deeply into mathematics any longer. Sparse contact, but real, not hearsay.

The short answer is that Wiener hints that Sidis' non-mathematical accomplishments, his languages and varied subjects of curiosity, are padded and his physics was suspect, but his mathematical potential was top-shelf. He also confirms some rumors of Billy's eccentricities and contradicts others. As Wiener was himself top-shelf, I take that seriously enough to accept the evaluation with no further evidence. Had NW said that about a laboratory custodian at MIT with no other credentials I would accept the judgement. That excellence in math, in turn, gives at least some support that the other precocities might be somewhat true. We don't have to believe that he taught himself Latin and Greek at 4, as his mother claimed, to believe that he was very good.

Yet these find no echo in his later life. The mathematics, though he came to avoid it, at least shows up off and on. The languages, not at all. Not even a passing mention by friends, family, interviewers, reporters later - only the languages that he supposedly knew when young. We might conclude that he had ability but no further interest, and let it slide, or that he kept the abilities only for personal use or amusement.He does not seem to have read widely in other languages, at any rate.

Language prodigies tend not to pan out. Languages as read and as spoken are different, and the subtleties of expression somehow do not register with them as well. In Sidis's case, social subtleties eluded him even in English, so it would hardly be surprising that nuance eluded him in other tongues. Math and music prodigies are most common, languages after that, and males far more common than females. They translate the literal sense of things, they know rules and constructions. They do not get called on to translate literature or diplomatic speech - those arts seem to develop slowly.

Still, Sidis might have known enough of many languages to understand much of what is written in them. What number we claim he "knew" - five or forty or a hundred - is likely to depend strongly on what we call "knowing." There was no fluency in Pennacook, as there were no native speakers but there might have been enough to cobble together a meaning from any document that came to light. A useful skill, and one that demonstrates high intelligence. But "genius" would seem to require more than mere accumulation.

The categorising of streetcar transfers makes immediate sense to anyone who understands the OCD or autism spectra. It gives pleasure, and there is no reason not to. But spinning lengthy theories about Atlantis, Red Men, and the Constitution with no real grounding, how do we rank that? Do we simply award no points in our estimate of his intelligence, or do we take them away? Similarly with philosophy stretched over physics - originality is a good thing, but what are we to make of a person who cannot look at his work and say "Wait, this just doesn't add up?"

In a rough chronological order, William James held a theory about reserve energy. Boris Sidis learned of reserve energy from William James. Boris claimed that William’s intelligence was in part due to the use of reserve energy. William Sidis pondered how William James’ theory of reserve energy might be removed from the metaphysical realm and brought into a scientific study. The Animate and the Inanimate is William Sidis’ pondering about how the second law of thermodynamics might apply to William James’ reserve energy theory…

Does that even mean anything?

We can't know what William might have been if he was brought up by a less driven father - or if someone had whacked his father a few times and made him see the obvious. Boris pushed and William broke. Would he have broken anyway? Would he have been brilliant anyway? Not only unknown, but currently unknowable.

Let us assign some modest percentage to the possibility that Norbert Wiener was fooled somehow - that reputation plus William's computational feats plus overidentification because Wiener was himself a prodigy with a driven father caused him to believe that young William was smarter than he was. The greater likelihood remains that Wiener sized him up correctly, and Sidis had it in him to contribute to 20th C mathematics at highest levels. Even at that, even granting everything, I don't see him at the very top. Smarter than anyone you are likely to run into this week, perhaps. But we are entering territory where the competition is stiff as well. There isn't evidence that William James Sidis did anything more than moderately special, he just did it younger. That's not enough. Precocity is not in itself proof.

We imagine that there is an arc to intelligence over the lifespan, and that a steeper trajectory in youth must mean a higher peak. There is some evidence for this. But in music, and athletics, in drawing, and performing, and chess, we know of examples of early promise that simply peaked before their age mates but ultimately rose no higher than the others in the top 1% in the field. Just earlier, not better. If we are going to speculate about some mind that William Sidis would have had if, we have to also take it as it is - ultimately not focused, not able to sort good ideas from bad, original but not precise.

So what is your estimate of his intelligence? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? A million? A billion?

Smart, Wealthy, Athletic – A Digression on IQ

2011-12-21T18:00:00.000-05:00

We can’t measure these with any precision, because theirmeanings are elusive. We have approximate, somewhat similar ideas what we mean,but can’t nail them down. We think ifRasheed Wallace had been just a little smarter, then he could have (fill inthe blank – mine is “kept himself in just a little bit better shape in 2010 andwon us a championship). But his POV is “I made millions of dollars, wonchampionship rings, had a great time, didn’t force a disabling injuring –explain to me how I’m the one who got this wrong.” Uh, good point,that. Literature is full of smart peoplefiguring out how to win at life in quiet ways that don’t look assuccessful – Mycroft Holmes being a good example.

We can measure riches by reading the Fortune 500 list –andwe can play with the list to take liquidity, control, or security intoconsideration. But philosphy, religion,and literature are likewise chockablock full of discussions of True Wealth,True Riches. The most entertaining isthe Talmudic give-and-take recorded by Jonathan Sacks

"Who is wealthy? He who has pleasure in his wealth":this is the view of Rabbi Meir. Rabbi Tarfon said: "He who possesses ahundred vineyards, a hundred fields, and a hundred servants working inthem". Rabbi Akiva said: "He who has a wife who is comely in gooddeeds". Rabbi Jose said: "He who has a toilet near his table"
This was the kind of table-talkin which the rabbis delighted, coming at a subject from all angles, and perhapsnot too seriously. Rabbi Meir gives a philosophical answer: wealth is a stateof mind, rejoicing in what you have, whether it is much or little. Rabbi Tarfonwon't have any of it: wealth is wealth, and let's not evade the issue. RabbiAkiva tells us frankly that someone who has a good wife is wealthy whateverelse he lacks. And Rabbi Jose replies in the spirit of "If I were awealthy man". Oy, If only I didn't have to go so far to the toilet, thatwould be riches indeed.“Wealth and Poverty, a Jewish Analysis” Social Affairs Unit 1985

Every four years we call the winner of the Olympic Decathlon“The World’s Greatest Athlete,” then forget who he is and pay 100,000 otherpeople more money to be athletes. So wedon’t really mean that. If we arepressed, we will define athletic along some measures of strength,endurance, speed, coordination, and flexibility. We know what we mean approximately, and weknow it when we see it.

When I use the word intelligence in discussing Sidis orother prodigies, I am choosing a meaning closer to IQ than to smart,not because I think IQ is more important, but because we already have a wordfor smart, and I am making a distiction. Intelligence is g-factor, candlepower. It has components of analogising, processingspeed, and memory (at least) and is not quite definable. (In New England, weoften make the distiction with our favorite intensifier. Smaht could mean cleverness or wisdom– and can be used ironically, but wicked smaht is something closer tothe IQ meaning of intelligence.)

Tweet Theology

2011-12-21T17:56:00.001-05:00

The recent “tweet of the year” in conservative circles wasquite clever, and I don’t want to take too much away from it by being tooliteral. In referring to the death ofKim Jong Il, Josh Trevino tweeted “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchenspick the third.” Obviously, if you pressthis very far you come up against “Wait, what little-known heavenly loopholesallow Hitchens in this conversation?” Or, “Who says God is a grinning,clubbable old guy who likes revenge?” Ruins the fun – and it is fun, tothink of Hitchens and Havel looking over the population and discussing who isgoing to be swept from the board.

I prefer to ruin this in a different way. Who says that Havel and Hitchens wereespecially important souls to be given this honor, simply because they werefamous here? Far more likely that thegreatest souls who died in the last few weeks, as measured by their honor whenwe see them in glorified form, are people whose names we have never heard, andnever will in our lifetimes. God is nota respecter of persons in that way. Thelast shall be first. I don’t say that toremind the great persons of the world of their true place – I doubt many ofthem drop by here - but for us, the medium and medium small people of theworld, to remember that those smaller than us may be greater as well.

About That Harvard Exam (Sidis Part 3A)

2011-12-20T23:12:00.001-05:00

An anonymous commenter linked to the 1869 Harvard entrance exam that was dug up by a NYTimes writer and made the rounds last year. It looks pretty intimidating at first glance, and the commenter used it as evidence that Billy Sidis's entrance into Harvard in 1909 was a pretty solid accomplishment in itself. Interestingly, the boy's getting in was probably even better than the exam would indicate. Harvard was no great shakes in 1869, but had improved considerably by 1909, and was one of the world's best by then. I will note that it was still not what we think of today. Competitive university admission is mostly a post WWII, or even post 1960 phenomenon. Many of the brightest did indeed go to the Ivies, the Little Ivies, or the Seven Sisters,* but you simply couldn't count on it. The rich and the alums got their kids in, and nationally, people stayed closer to home and many of the brightest went to other schools, far more than, say, in 1990.

The gap exactly covers the period of Charles William Eliot's presidency of Harvard, if you want more background than I will give here.

But the test. That Latin and Greek looks awfully impressive right out of the gate. If you are older, and/or a reader of history, and/or a traditionalist, you may still have Latin Envy, believing that a "proper" education must include it, and Greek! Why, that just seals it. A different alphabet and everything. Weren't they smart, then?

No, not especially. They had had six years of Latin and four of Greek by then, whether by tutor or at academy. If you took any languages at all in late 20th C, and make the mental comparison of what, exactly, they were being asked to do, it looks much less impressive. Note also, there was a standard set of works studied in those languages, which these questions are drawn from, plus frequent drill in grammar. Even if you had Latin yourself, you should note that the primary authors studied now are not quite the same as studied then, nor in quite the same way. These exam questions are essentially "Did you have proper teachers, are you reasonably bright, and did you make a moderate effort these last few years?"

Before I get into the math, let me note the major difference, then and now. Look at what is missing in this exam. There is no biology, no chemistry, no physics, and certainly no other sciences such as geology or economics. There are no questions on English Literature - no Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton - and certainly no American literature (horrors! To even imagine such a thing!). No modern languages, no history other than ancient, no world events, no weather, no basic medicine. Even deeper, no methods of research, and no use of reference materials. Because these were not taught to young men. They were taught English Composition and Grammar, Latin and Greek, Ancient History, and the mathematics you see here. That's it.

Thus, their facility with L&G is dropping even farther down the list of impressiveness. Most of what 7th-12th graders have to learn today they did not have to even pretend to know. They were being trained to be gentlemen. The push for more useful arts was just beginning in this country.

The mathematics would look worrisome at first, but on closer examination, not so. The arithmetic is mostly just big numbers, and irritating, tedious working by hand. We forget mathematics that we don't use very quickly, but these students were still immersed.

Two stories: I was a math wizard, but I had to relearn a lot of it each time a son got beyond the first few weeks of algebra in HS. The terms and symbols were familiar, but I couldn't remember where they went. I could get it back, but I had to sit and stare, consult the index, and trial-and-error a bit. All year, for both algebra and geometry. (And as the first two seldom needed help, I was even less prepared for the others.) Story 2: There was a math magazine when I was in school, which posed problems each month. It printed the names of those who solved them the next month. I did a few months of that in 12th grade. Because of going to St Paul's for summer studies, I recognised the names of many of the other NH students who got problems right. One month, there was a problem where I was the only kid in the country to submit a right answer - something about rotating one parabola along another and describing where the focus went. Very cool. I pretended, in my conceit , that I was the only one able to get it, which was insane. How many students, even the nerdy math ones, read magazines and submitted problems? Fast forward one year. I was in a different type of math at college, but for some reason wanted to review my accomplishment from the year before. Narcissism, likely. I could not follow the solution I had myself written, only one year later.

We lose new abstract thoughts quickly, unless they are used. Look at the logarithms, trig, and plane geometry in the exam. Even if you can't even remember how to begin to solve it now, do you recognise the words and ideas? Do you have some recollection of solving problems sort of like that? Then in all likelihood, you could have done those problems when you were in 11th-12th grade. And especially, if you didn't have to study any Biochem, Shakespeare, or Intro to Psychology as well. If you had the same five subjects pretty much year after year, you'd know 'em quite well.

Also - there was some different emphasis in what maths were taught then. Trig was the top shelf, and you got two years of drill in it. No sets, calculus, or statistics for you.

Also - read the directions. See how few questions were required.

Also - it doesn't say what a passing score was, does it?

185 out of 215 applicants got into Harvard that year.

*Fun trivia test for you: name 'em. I got five on my first try, then a sixth popped into my head a year or so later (this was before internet). I never did get the seventh until I looked it up.

Prodigy (Sidis Part Three)

2011-12-20T22:06:00.000-05:00

Back in 1988, Adragon DeMello was big news in the IQ societies. A math wizard graduating from a university in the California system at age 11, his father was looking for a graduate school which would accept him. It didn't go well from there. He had just scraped by to get the degree, it later was revealed, no graduate school would touch him, his parents fought over custody, and eventually a SWAT team had to pull him from his father's house. He then went to junior high school under another name and "got his childhood back." Watching that story unfold is perhaps why I am so suspicious of Boris Sidis.

Opinions were all over the map in the newsletters. Some were angry that graduate schools could be so blinkered as to not accept a genius just because it didn't fit their norm. Others were worried about the emotional impact on the boy, wondering if this father were pushing him too much (he was). A third group wondered if it were all quite true. In that pool of people, many of whom had been prodigies themselves, the claims seemed just a bit too far. I was well out of my league in that. I had thought I might lay some claim to significant precocity before joining a few of those groups, but quickly had that theory slapped down. There, more than anywhere, I learned that there is always a faster gun. In many cases, much faster.

Only one person I recall asked why there seemed to be an assumption that the highest IQ's must also be early bloomers, precocities of the highest order. He had not seemed more than above-average as a child, even to himself, and challenged the assumption that genius had to show at young, even ridiculously young, ages. I don't know why that didn't impress me more then. I barely considered it. It didn't fit my narrative, I suppose. But I have come to regard it as an excellent point. IQ is fairly stable over time, but the sample set is too small to see if that correlation is as strong at the extremes as it is in the middle ranges. We simply don't know.

We tend to expect that musical and mathematical, and related types like chess geniuses must have been prodigies. Often they were. But I don't know if we should consider that the only possible narrative. We don't have the same expectation for writers, artists, or philosophers.

Manipulation At Trinity Church

2011-12-19T21:07:00.000-05:00

As manipulative a use of Christian language - some of it by Christians - as I have seen. This not merely overlapping one's politics and religion. This is declaring that one's political beliefs are the same as what Christ taught.

Bună sara lui Crăciun

2011-12-19T13:13:00.000-05:00

I think it means "Wonderful Night of Christmas"

William James Sidis - The Doubt

2011-12-19T12:53:00.001-05:00

There are solid bits of evidence that might support the claim that William Sidis was a child prodigy, but each has its own weakness as well. He did enter Harvard at age 11 – but his father, a psychiatrist and professor, had been pressing for this for years. Harvard had taken on a few other prodigies, including Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Weiner, and Boris Sidis pressured them into it. Billy did indeed give a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the mathematics society at age 11, and Weiner, who was present, states it would have done credit to a first year graduate student. But it was not new information, as has often been claimed and was reported then. It was available elsewhere – Weiner simply doubted that William Sidis had access to it, and gave him credit for thinking it out himself. Yet it was not impossible that such material came his way, especially with a father determined to show the world his son was a genius (and his methods thus correct).

Boris Sidis made claims throughout his son’s childhood for his genius – that he read the NY Times at 18 months; taught himself Greek and Latin from 3-5 years old; mastered other tongues before age 8. William did indeed know English, French, Greek, and Latin at age 8 – but we do not know how well. It was claimed he had taught himself Turkish and Armenian. Which of his schoolteachers, pray, could evaluate that? Even if called out on it if someone pulled a passing Turk out to test him, Sidis could claim that he read the language, not spoke it, and the handwriting of natives in a language tends not to look like the printed matter, so he could dodge there as well. Among the Amerind languages he used to pad his total, some were extinct, existing only in a few manuscripts. I suppose he might maintain he knew them as well as anyone did, but my suspicions are running high at this point. Boris stated that William wrote a book on anatomy at age 5. No one seems to have ever seen even a portion of such a manuscript. William did graduate cum laude from Harvard. But entrance and even excelling then were not the accomplishment they would be now.

Here’s a bit about Boris’s career. He ran a sanitarium in Portsmouth NH at what had been the Frank Jones Mansion. The link will give you a flavor. In addition to educational theories, he specialized in hypnosis, dreams, and dissociation, and opposed Freud.

It is hard to be fair to Sidis from this distance. His book The Tribes and The States, about the 100,000-year history of American Indians, is insanely wrong. He gets their genetics, languages, and government badly wrong. But I am not certain what knowledge was available to him in the early 20th C. Though his theories did not turn out to be true, he may have had ideas worth exploring – no worse than the theories of other experts – based on what was known. I suspect not. He also believed in Atlantis, which figures prominently in his discussion, and reads into the known historical record with great certainty things that even then would have been highly speculative. He insists that “farthest Thule,” where Phoenicians and others raided for slaves was Newfoundland. There is simply no evidence this is so.

I have asked James of “I Don’t Know But…” (sidebar) to evaluate his treatise on reversible universes, and parts of our universe where the Second Law of Thermodynamics runs in reverse, The Animate and the Inanimate. It seems like a 70’s physics undergrad on weed, frankly. But then, most physics beyond Einstein’s Special Relativity sounds like that to me anyway, so I’m no judge. Perhaps it’s brilliant.

His later writing on freedoms and rights seems to be mere rambling. His sister claimed that Billy could speak all the languages in the world, others more modestly put his total at fifty, and Boris’s at 27. How do we know this? Who could tell? This sister, Helena, is also the source for his IQ being in the range of 250-300 – that he had tested on a civil service exam at 254 later in life. Actually, he had finished 254th in the country that year, according to another report. A creditable accomplishment, but not genius by any stretch.

The discussion from the first part about whether someone gets the adjective intelligent without some body of accomplishment is interesting, and I will not neglect it. The idea that Sidis was HFA/Asperger-y also deserves some consideration and may explain his thinking at least as well as the genius/fraud continuum. Yet I am hesitant to go there, as dishonest puffery does not tend to be associated with the Autism spectrum. It’s not unknown, but being offended by minor deviations from the truth is more common.

And Another One Bites The Dust - Part One

2011-12-17T22:57:00.002-05:00

I think the story of Billy Sidis, the purported prodigy with the highest IQ (250-300) ever known, is mostly fraudulent.

I first read about William James Sidis in the pages of Gift of Fire in the late 80’s. GoF was the journal of the Prometheus Society, a discussion group for those with measured IQ over 164. Amy Wallace’s book on Sidis, The Prodigy, had just come out, and Grady Towers took the opportunity to bring us up to speed on the early 20th C brilliant but eccentric child. That essay, "The Outsiders," is perhaps the best known of the articles to come out of the High-IQ societies. Its primary topic is the increasing difficulty of adjustment individuals experience the further from norm they are. Terman's studies in the 40's of gifted individuals showed that those above 140 IQ were better adapted than average. Grady looked harder at the data and decided that those from 140-150 were better adjusted than average, but beyond that things steadily worsened. The greater frequency of those from 140-150 masked the data of the few from say, 170-180.

It was perhaps inevitable that Grady would gravitate to the subject of Sidis. Grady qualified for the next society up, the Mega Society, for those with one-in-a-million IQ, cutoff 176. He had been a prodigy himself, almost completing a PhD in Anthropology at age 20, but by the time I knew him (via journal and correspondence), he was usually homeless, working odd jobs across the Southwest, writing on borrowed typewriters and sending mathematical proofs - usually number theory - to whoever would have them. He was murdered horribly in 2000 while working as a security guard. I liked corresponding with him.

I ran across a stray mention of William James Sidis while reading about the Pennacook Indians. (He had believed their tribal decision-making methods had deeply influenced the New England Founding Fathers, and hence the Constitution. Pure bunkum, to be discussed below.) I remembered the story, but not the name, and I thought I recalled that it was Gift of Fire, and Grady, where I had learned of Sidis. As I tried to get to the bottom of the story of the prodigy, I wondered if G Towers had uncovered some little-known source and had inside information on the boy who went to Harvard at 11, but spent much of his adult life collecting and classifying streetcar transfers and being rescued by his parents.

Alas, not so. Grady's info was pretty clearly drawn from Wallace's biography of Sidis. I have read only scraps of that, but she clearly has taken what Sidis and his family have claimed about him at face value. She wants to believe the tragic narrative of prodigy who just couldn't adjust, nor the world adjust to him. There was a time when I preferred that narrative, too. I fancied myself a prodigy, and could cherry-pick data to prove to you that it was true. But it wasn't. I was a very smart, creative child who was also arrogant and self-centered. No more than that. But the desire to be one of those - one of those special children who would show up occasionally in magazines, or on "I've Got A Secret," or in Ripley's "Believe It Or Not" - is very sweet. It provides a ready excuse for anyone not liking you, or you not fitting in. If you are that smart, then of course it is the school that has failed, not you, when you screw up.

Sidis's parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, she a physician, he one of the first psychiatrists, though a bit out of the mainstream. Certainly the type of people who you'd expect might have a prodigy. They seemed to have expected it as well. Boris Sidis had educational theories about how to raise children to be geniuses. How convenient to have one, eh?

The articles about Billy, including in Wikipedia, generally acknowledge that some claims about him were misunderstood, or even bogus. Yet they generally credit his prodigy status as essentially true. I did run across another doubter at a site called The Logics. I don't know anything about the writer (though I am certainly well-disposed to him right off the bat), so there's no implied endorsement of the site, which seems pretty extensive. I will give my reasons for doubting the claims about Sidis sometime this week, but the sneak preview should be obvious. There are numerous stories, many of which are quite plausible, about William James Sidis. The hard evidence behind them seems elusive. He was clearly quite intelligent. But the evidence that he was a genius...?

Baseball history fans may have had the story of Moe Berg occur to him while reading all this. A lot more examination has been done on him, but I may have some fun with that later as well.

O Holy Night

2011-12-16T21:19:00.000-05:00

Self-Referential

2011-12-16T21:12:00.001-05:00

Artists have always been very much taken with other artists, and are self-referential. It is a way of expressing community, I suppose, or paying compliments, as writers and musicians also do.This is a Winslow Homer painting of other artists painting. I wonder if any of them are painting other artists in turn?

Probably not. This is White Mountain School (a subtype of Hudson River School), Conway side, and they usually painted landscapes.

Ron Paul Family Cookbook

2011-12-16T21:05:00.001-05:00

One interesting effect of living in NH is getting an up-close look at political advertising every four years. I don’t think there has been anywhere near the fuss this time – perhaps because Iowa and SC have increased importance, perhaps because 24-7 media and instant polling gives the nation much of the information it used to depend on NH for.

But still, the rest of the country may not have received the Ron Paul Cookbook in the mail. Quite the item, and exactly as it says, it has recipes; it’s not using “cookbook” as a metaphor for legislation and attitudes. There are lots of pictures of Ron’s family, and some short essays, including his wife’s about America, but there’s banana bread and brisket as well. Simple, everyday American recipes, including such ingredients as a bottle of catalina dressing for the brisket (only two more ingredients there).

I am trying to imagine when this could have occurred before in American campaigns. I think one would have to go farther back than my parents’ generation (which is Ron’s generation). It looks like something I would have found in my grandmother’s bookcase, kept either because it had a particular recipe worth keeping or because she liked the pol. I can’t imagine who that would be, even then. It wouldn’t be something from the Bass family, or the Greggs, or the Bridges. One of the Straws might have tried something like that as PR for the mills, but not for office-seeking. It’s just not us. Seems like it would go down better with the voters in the Midwest or the South.

OTOH, the styling has a 90’s Rodale Press look about it, which in turn drew some from Grit or Burpee’s seeds from a generation before, so the appeal might intentionally be to a younger audience, hankering for an America that never quite existed in any region but was pretty solidly in the imaginations (and aspirations) of most Americans years ago. Ron Paul apparently does have quite a following among the young, and perhaps that’s why.

I think I’ll keep it. Heck, no other candidate ever sent me a cookbook before. My grandchildren might have a hard time integrating it into history at first glance, though.

Liege

2011-12-15T23:04:00.001-05:00

Gee, good thing they have strict gun laws in Belgium.

Guns aren't a top issue of mine, but I figure the 2A sites are going to be pointing that out. The laws don't move the dial much on the crime rate, whether they are strict or loose. John Lott claims that concealed carry reduces the crime rate, opponents claim his research is flawed. I'm nothing of an expert on that kind of research, so I couldn't say. But the contrary research is also undramatic. Enough so so that any study that does yield dramatic results either way should be viewed with immediate suspicion.

Violent crime is cultural, and perhaps even has some genetic underpinnings. I suspect, from listening to them, that the gun control folks - we have a lot in mental health - believe that just generally discouraging anyone they talk to from liking guns will turn the tide.

Similarly, sex education. Whether a district has nothing, abstinence only, or daily condom-on-bananas openness doesn't seem to change teenage behavior more than a bit, and that's temporary. Ditto drug education. It's been that way for years.

Why Should They Care? Addition

2011-12-13T22:46:00.002-05:00

When I posted Why Should They Care? last week, I was trying to capture how recent and rare the whole "brotherhood of man" approach is, and how humans outside a narrow grouping actually seemed to our ancestors. It occurs to me that we can only approach their thought if we imagine sentient non-human species. Even those may seem too close, such as has been the influence of Star Wars and other interplanetary fiction, suggesting that we might indeed be pals with non-humans.

But for a moment, imagine there are only a few hundred of us humans left, and all of them of your tribe, known to you, and of similar values. Their life is ever-precarious and the other sentient or semi-sentient species you encounter are not nice, or noble, but mere competitors for resources. Trading partners at most, wary allies only when under pressure from some worse oppressor.

You would, quite frankly, not care much what happened to the dog-men or those thieving fishy creatures who often prevented your tribe's access to water. If they experienced pain or want, that would be their problem and no concern of yours. If you needed to use them or take advantage of them you would do so, much as we saddle a horse or cage a chicken now.

An this would be an entirely rational approach on your part. The gradual expansion of who is considered important enough to have rights is the aberration. When we wonder how people could mistreat servants, or even own slaves, or torture other humans for amusement, we assert what an amazing and blessed time we live in, that such ideas barely have a foothold in our thinking. Not only time, but place, as most countries of the world are more like our ancestors than like us in this. They represent far more the lot of mankind than our present arrangement.

Actors like to trouble directors by complaining about a bit of stage business "What's my motive for this?" I ask that for our entire fondness for other humans: "What's our motive for this?"

Atheists? Maybe Not

2011-12-10T22:25:00.001-05:00

Sponge-headed Scienceman reports on a Rice University study revealing that 17% of atheists attend church at least occasionally, most of them "for the kids." He comments on why this might be. I concur with his reasoning, but would add that this group may indeed be one which is open to different ideas, as they claim about themselves. Rather than being "believers" in some unexamined sense, who declare they believe in God but somehow never get around to doing anything about that, this group might have decided that on balance they cannot believe, but allow the possibility there might be something to it, and are the sort who are quite intentional in tying their behavior to their beliefs. Perhaps I am painting them too rosily, imagining their thought to suit my own beliefs.

I am reminded of Michael Novak's essay of four years ago about different types of atheists - he identifies six. These are not entirely distinct, but overlap, and in some cases overlap with believers. I have known people in each of the first five categories - no one comes to mind for the sixth. I suspect one would have to be a very thoughtful person, aware not only of the beliefs around one but one's own character as well, to make it through to this conclusion.

Hark

2011-12-10T12:55:00.001-05:00

More of them to come

That's It

2011-12-08T21:57:00.001-05:00

It came to me in a flash. Climate catastrophisers and those worried that aliens will destroy earth because of climate change are just like Jack Chick Tracts for liberal fundamentalists.

Mitt

2011-12-08T18:00:00.001-05:00

I would like to publicly thank Mitt Romney for being an uninteresting candidate for president. I have long said I didn't want any more charisma or saviours, but someone who would just show up in the morning and go to work.

Mitt wasn't like that last time he ran, and was even more of an "idea guy" when he was governor of Massachusetts. Those were not his best years, frankly. He does still trot out ideas of bringing America back to greatness and trying to display that he's the guy to lead us into the future (because where would we be going otherwise? Remember the bridge to the 21st C? The idea that they could provide this nice solid structure that would set us down in a predictable place in a few years...). But Mitt seems to be underplaying this. Newt is always full of ideas. Ideas of how government can really do wonderful things if only the right people are pulling the strings - small wonder he admires Teddy Roosevelt, an inspiring guy but a dangerous president.

PJ O'Rourke: "I usually vote with the Republicans because they have fewer ideas. But not few enough." This time around, Romney has fewer ideas, and I'm all for that. The things I feel Bush got wrong were mostly great ideas he had that would fix things. So even if I think Romney's instincts aren't quite what I'd want, he seems to have gotten away from impressing us with new ideas. Good.

As president, Calvin Coolidge didn't do much of anything, but at the time, that's what we needed to have done. Will Rogers.

Amen. Mister we could use a man like Calvin Coolidge again.

I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form.

Romanian Carol

2011-12-07T22:02:00.001-05:00

The title means "The most beautiful piece of the concert of Christmas carols."

No, I don't know what the carol is or what it means. Sorry. No Romanians here to tell me.

I'll ask one to tell me.

Why Should They Care?

2011-12-07T21:23:00.001-05:00

Americans, and Westerners in general, are so used to the idea that all people have worth that we fail to understand that most of the world doesn't think so. I include in that list not only most people across great stretches of time, but fairly near ancestors of ours as well. It is not at all natural to human beings to think that way - not at all accidental that most tribes named themselves "The People" or "The Real People." We find that almost quaint with native tribes, but that is also the meaning of "Das Volk," and names of some European political parties.

We think that to be willing to kill many people in another tribe must require not only rage, but some unaccountable ability to sustain anger over months or years. Not at all. The default position is the contempt of not regarding them as human, punctuated with periods of anger when we need a burst of energy. In our history, we can see it best with slavery - do we really think that generations of white people woke up every morning with a seething anger at blacks? Of course not. The attitude was generally to disregard them entirely except as pieces of the environment. They might even have some affection for many of the individuals. But regarding them as less than human was the key.

So also with the amazing physical cruelties of invading Mongols, North Sudanese, Indonesians in East Timor, Mayan overlords, Romanian voivodes. Those others were not real people. What does it matter if they felt pain? All that matters is protecting my people.

Well, why should they care? Run the exercise in your mind - not of the people we encounter in our day, but of any random tribe you might think of on the face of the earth a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years ago. What would be their basis for having the least concern for other tribes, except perhaps as trading partners or useful allies. Why not burn their crops and steal their women?

How did we ever learn differently?

Post 3300 - Advice

2011-12-07T19:24:00.001-05:00

Retriever has good advice what to do if you're cranky.

F-ing know-it-all.

Proverb

2011-12-07T17:30:00.001-05:00

Psychiatrists used to test several things in your brain by asking you to explain what various proverbs mean. Because more than one things is being measured, the trend is away from this now, but you can cover a lot of ground quickly - getting a sense of not only ability to abstract, but whether high emotion words distract one. For example, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water," might provoke an isolated-feeling person to get hung up on the part that a baby is being thrown out. A person of limited intellect might make no sense of it at all.

"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" was a popular first proverb. Its abstraction was minimal, and there were no emotion-laden words in it. No obvious ones, anyway. Psychotic people can become stimulated by pretty unlikely things. But most people would get this one right. They had heard some variant of it and understood the comment.

Intentionally more problematic, because it is both more abstract and more ambiguous, is "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones." Even if you know it well and get the point upon hearing it, it's a little difficult to put into words the first time. I never quite worked out for myself, however: is the important part of "glass" in the proverb that it is brittle or that it is transparent? Both preserve the sense of the proverb, though with a different feeling. Perhaps they are also meant to reinforce each other, giving one a double reason not to throw stones.

Which aspect dominates for you in contemplating the proverb?

Christmas Poetry

2011-12-06T22:26:00.001-05:00

I am not much of a reader of poetry, but...

Christmas Trees
(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,
“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

Robert Frost (1920)

Paragraphing

2011-12-06T20:12:00.001-05:00

Blogger does not hold paragraphing when switching between "Compose" and "HTML" modes. I don't always remember to check before publishing, making for an less-attractive and more difficult post. My apologies.

Who to thank

2011-12-05T22:40:00.001-05:00

For the second time recently, I have seen a car with a few similar bumper stickers on the back. Something like "Got Medicare? Thank Democrats." "Got Social Security? Thank Democrats" And even "Got Equality? Thank Democrats."

It is easy to see what they mean. They mean legislative votes. They are claiming that it was primarily Democrats who designed and voted for these things - and let us leave that part of the argument aside for the present - and you wouldn't have them otherwise.\

But that leaves out entirely the more important meaning of those words. Do Democrats pay for those programs all by themselves? Certainly not, and they would never claim so. But it is fascinating that the deeper who-to-thank question does not even occur to them. They go through all the trouble and cost of discussing, designing, ordering, and distributing these stickers and no one says "Hey wait. There's a problem here we might not want to be associated with. If you've got Medicare you should really be thanking all Americans, don't you think?"

I find these mental slips enormously revealing. People say what they really mean, often unwittingly, if you let them go on long enough. The implication that the lawmaking part is almost the whole deal, with the money-finding part a rather distant consideration is exactly how they do think about such things. The government action is all, the action of the people nothing. (See especially Al Gore, considering the government permissions to be the key to inventing the internet, and the government mop-up the key to Love Canal.)

I will predict, in fact, that even if confronted with being busted as government centered narcissists they will still not be able to really see what the problem is. They will still see the voting for legislation as not merely one necessary aspect of the thing happening, but almost the entire show. That the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of many others is involved will be regarded as "well yes, technically, but..."

I always thought those "If you can read this, thank a teacher" and similar sentiments were badly overstated and inaccurate. But they are enormously more justified than this new offering from the Strafford County Democrats.

Greg Landry

2011-12-05T18:42:00.001-05:00

This era that is highly suspicious of running quarterbacks, also has some of the best running quarterbacks in NFL history. Cam Newton, Tim Tebow, and Michael Vick are the source of ongoing barroom arguments: Can they win consistently? Will their bodies hold up under the collisions? Does that much running interfere with passing discipline? Are there more wildcat, single wing, or halfback option surprises being developed, waiting for their perfect moment?

As recently as 2008 a sports columnist could write

When the Minnesota Vikings and Tennessee Titans announced that Tarvaris Jackson and Vince Young, respectively, would no longer start under center, it became clear that the running quarterback era was officially coming to a close.Make no mistake; the mobile quarterback is still alive. Many of today's top players in the position have proven that they can hold composure in the pocket, but also run for a first down when protection breaks down. The running quarterback, however, has officially died.

Moral: don't make pronouncements.

Most of the great running QB's have actually been effective scramblers who could run well in a pinch in order to get out of trouble. They were mobile quarterbacks, not generally runners. Yet a few were, and they seem to concentrate in the same 70's era: Steve Grogan of the Patriots, Bobby Douglass of the Bears, and Greg Landry of the Detroit Lions.

I first learned of Landry on the local sports pages. The Union Leader was excited that Landry had been a first-round draft pick out of UMass, because Greg had starred for the Nashua Panthers 1961-64. It was an era of Beach Boys "Be True To Your School," which strikes me as more than ordinarily stupid now, but made perfect sense at the time. I went to Manchester Central, and Nashua was a football rival - I would not be rooting for any other school's players, thank you very much. Plus, he was going to the hated Detroit Lions, who had ruined my Green Bay Packers' perfect season on Thanksgiving Day in 1962. Just a few years later, after reading Paper Lion, I relented in my Detroit hatred, and as highschool progressed and I got a sense for how few pro athletes, especially football players, came out of New Hampshire I developed some pride in Landry.

He was actually picked for a Pro Bowl, and was not a bad throwing quarterback at all. But his reputation throughout his career was as a quarterback who ran intentionally, either on draw plays or roll-out options. In the modern era, coaches would insist that he stay put more, and the word on him would be that he had diminished a fine passing career by bailing and running too quickly. That strategy worked well with quick-to-elope throwers like John Elway and Steve Young. Either could have been excellent running quarterbacks in the pros, as they had been in college. And then maybe not have gone to the Hall of Fame.
Or the game could be changing again...

Bethlehemian Rhapsody

2011-12-04T12:45:00.001-05:00

Uncertainty

2011-12-03T22:03:00.001-05:00

We tend to think of previous eras as less anxious, because they are entirely predictable - now.

Now that you know you are going to have friends and have a place in society, being 14 looks pretty idyllic. Now that you you know that your children will not die in some horrible accident, will finish school and get jobs, and didn't become axe murderers, you can remember the warm and cuddly things you did and wonder why we worried so much.

Almost everything we remember contains great inaccuracies, sometimes of detail, but more often of focus and meaning.

Sex and Strategy

2011-12-03T21:10:00.001-05:00

Texan99's intriguingly titled post doesn't have that much sex in it, actually. Tricky advertising, maybe. Still, it's fun.

Even less sexy, but fun if you are into observations of how those on the left get economic information not merely wrong, but exactly backward, is Carl's post on why Wall Street was the one place #Occupy should not have occupied. Chuckle.

Links

2011-12-01T20:44:00.001-05:00

Run, Fiver, Run!

What Tory scum evil capitalists really think. (Via bsking via Amy Alkon)

A leftist historian's critique of Howard Zinn. About right. Like Noam Chomsky, however many good points he makes, and however much some of his targets do need criticism, there is no getting around how cartoonish are his enemies. They never have any motives but evil ones, and succeed only by bamboozling the masses. Reading this particular article, I am surprised how much of the rhetoric resembles OWS. Even the choice of 99%, rather than 95, or 90, or 75, is telling.

I have little idea which machines are which in this realm. But I have Retriever to protect me, keeping alert for privacy concerns on Carrier IQ.

I know Sponge-Headed Scienceman's politics, but he doesn't put them on his blog much. He has finally weighed in on OWS, though.

Harvard's Greg Mankiw has clips about wealth redistribution from Milton Friedman years ago. (via Bird Dog at Maggie's)

Energy

2011-11-30T22:40:00.001-05:00

I ran into my sister-in-law, then my brother, at indoorlacrosse this week. We don’t see themmuch but it is always a pleasure. Yet at nearly every encounter something issaid which highlights for me how different that side of the family is from mine. No recitation of the words and description of facial expressions wouldreveal to an outsider what I mean by that. Yet many of you will recognise the phenomenon from your own families.

I became a cat in a dog family when my mother remarried. (Ihate cats and would like to stick them with that side of the description, butthey are dog people and very good ones, so it would be unfair.) Suchintroductions are usually a prelude to criticising relatives, however subtly,in the manner of a 19^thC novelist gaining revenge on those who didhim wrong. 20^th C too, cometo think of it. If anything, this is theopposite. Twenty years ago, I would havemade an effort to show that my microculture, my tribe, had superior qualities,illustrated by anecdotes that put them in a bad light, however subtly. My review is more mixed now.

Describing one microculture versus another lends itself tophrasing that sounds critical. If I say“they don’t tend to be a reflective people,” that sounds just a touchdisdainful in my culture. Yet I amincreasingly convinced that much of the reflectiveness in my A& H cultureis a waste of time. Only in the minds ofa few does reflection actually produce much of value. For the rest, it is mostly dreaminess,rationalisation, rumination. That traitis essential to the survival of all tribes, but like most traits, a lot of itlies around in the population without visible positive effect. Thus, not being “reflective,” means one hasenergy left over to do other things. Which my stepfamily does, and very well.

I should note that I consider such qualities to be largelyhardwired, though both the reflectives and the actives believe the others couldbe like them if they “just tried.”

Steve Sailer notes that we have excellent and numerous waysof measuring intelligence, but none for “energy,” which is perhaps equallyimportant;

My father is 94. He never smoked, drank only moderately, and comes from a high energy family that needs to be moving all the time. His nephew, my hippie cousin, for example, was an organic farmer for decades, and now that he has a desk job, he spends about 25 hours a week at the gym. When my cousin came for a visit to his parents in Arcadia, CA, at the age of 51, he hiked to the top of Mt. Wilson, a 5,000 foot ascent, every day for two weeks. It's unfortunate that social scientists don't seem to have a reliable quick test of energy the way they have tests of intelligence, since it's obvious that energy differs widely among individuals and is important in influencing life outcomes.

I have said “adaptability, switching sets” will be the ability thatwill knock intelligence off its perch as most important going forward; mostself-help business strategies have ideas of focus and discipline at theircore. Those who succeed often credithard work, and there is certainly a great deal of truth in that, however muchdata that overlooks and self-congratulating it sounds. I think there is a strong relatedness tothese described qualities, and I agree we do not measure them well. They don’t present similarly. The manic hustle of the entrepreneur looks nothing like the more linear focus of my stepfamily (they never dabblein anything, they either do or don’t do) but I think there is somecommonality. There is a personal energyin them that is not merely cultural and trained, but seems present from birth. Culture and values reinforce this and refineit, but it is simply visble in them from the start.

Nor is it a single, off-on quality among even those who haveit, but a continuum.

My mother used to say that my stepfather was unable to donothing. Mind and body were always working. Not plodding – he was too sharp for that word to apply – but dogged,certainly. He had few activities outside of work, but those few received duefocus and attention in their time. Heacquired more activities the longer he was married to my mother and ourculture. He was Connecticut Yankee,whose many family lines had come to Hartford and New Haven in the 17^thC and generally prospered – none spectacularly, but many significantly. Theyseek prosperity and security, but great wealth doesn’t seem to hold muchtemptation for them.

They are the heart of the Business Tribe, certainly. All traits need to be found in all tribes foranyone to produce anything of value, but there are skill sets more common inone group than another. I am quitepuzzled over the whole issue of focus and direction for this energy. The Arts & Humanities Tribe*, whatever mycriticism of us, displays far more focus over short bursts than the BusinessTribe – a laser intensity for hours in rehearsal, editing, and performance. At the other end of the spectrum, the Science& Technology Tribe is simply legendary for ability to put in 100-hour weeksfor weeks or months to bring a project to fruition.

Perhaps that is its own answer – those who can switch theirfocus, not in distraction but by design, are the ones who use their energy mostefficiently. Again, I’m not sure one canchange oneself by simply deciding to. Wecan bend ourselves somewhat at need, but I doubt not permanently. Dei GratiaSumus Quod Sumus By the grace of God, we are what we are. (motto of the priorborough of Barking, in London.)

*Upon further review. Only Arts, not Humanites, for that manic intensity.

III

Some thoughts about athletics.

People will claim that sports develop disciplined effort –Benjamin Spock states definitely that “Crew made me,” giving him the disciplinehe needed to make it through med school. Others will say that sports simply reveal it. Let us grant that there are different sportsrequiring different skills, and that most or all virtues that sports teach couldbe learned elsewhere – in scouts, in music, in part-time jobs.

Nonetheless, there is correlation between athletics andenergy, fairly obviously, and the further connection to the Business Tribe maynot be simply a case of Old Boys’ Network in play. Athletics does not createthe energy, and may not be uniquely good at developing discipline. But teenage participation in athletics may bean indicator that the person has the requisite energy. This connection between adolescent sports andadult status seems stronger in the white, black, and native communities, lesspronounced in the hispanic, Asian, and Jewish communities. These latter groupsmay in the past have participated largely to obtain status in majority-whitecommunities.

All sorts of people participate in youth athletics, andthere are many ways to succeed. I don’tthink there has ever been much of an automatic ticket that youth sports punchesfor later success. Rather, they may bothresult from the same quality of disciplined energy. I wonder if reflexes and hand-eyecoordination are even more specific correlates. Successful adults get togetherfor all manner of activities – it was clubs, bowling, and bridge in the 50’s, – but in business, golf predominates withracquet sports second. Skiing, far more of a suburban upwardly-mobile pursuitthan skating or snowmachines, is a reflex, controlled aggression sport, andfoot-eye coordination may be identical to hand-eye. (What other sports dobusiness gravitate toward in non-snow areas?)

The mention of athletics comes in because my stepfamilyexcels at them – sorry I didn’t make that explicit. Multisport, All-State, several were DII orDIII All-Americans. They largely dropthose after college and switch to golf, with some tendency for women toski. Their sports of choice werelacrosse, baseball, hockey, basketball, soccer – all team, all hand-eye. But though it was their pattern which spurredthis line of thought, I was specifically excluding them while writing the lastsection, not wanting a dozen individuals to be my sample set. I am casting about in my mind among thepeople I remember from school, those my boys went to school with (and theirparents), folks I work with or go to church with now, folks I have readabout. I would greatly appreciate all ofyou doing the same, reflecting – hey, that’s our culture, right? – on your ownfamilies and coworkers. I’m trying tobuild a theory here. I am operating from the traditional view that this energy- this gumption, this pep, this moxie, vim & vigor, dynamism,get-up-and-go, animal spirits – is more pronounced in America than elsewhere,and one of our defining traits.

These sorts tend to marry each other, correct? A man from the Business Tribe may take aScience & Technology or Arts & Humanities wife, yet is she ever one ofthe driven obsessive or dreamy reflective ones?

Socially, are they all over the map in tendency? Do we see the same percentage of thegarrulous, the standoffish? How does the energy play out socially?

Yardbirds

2011-11-29T19:00:00.001-05:00

I am playing my son's team, The Yardbirds, in fantasy football this week. He's going to beat me badly, so this seems appropriate.

I might be big into keeping track of roots, but it pays to remember...

they really did get better over the years.

Let Simon's Beard Alone

2011-11-28T19:11:00.001-05:00

Eugene Volokh reports on violent Amish who shame others who disagree with them by shaving off their beards. Not a satire from The Onion, but real incidents from a really creepy group. In usual fashion, he calls them "fundamentalists," not noting that the group's teachings deviate significantly from traditional Amish beliefs, but that seems typical in secular understanding.

It reminded me of the song "Let Simon's Beard Alone," a folksong that is apparently much more obscure than I realised. It is hard to find much reference to it anywhere, and no one has recorded it to Youtube. But for those interested, the lyrics and sheet music are here. It seems 17th C, maybe a touch earlier.

Carols

2011-11-28T18:50:00.001-05:00

I complained about the disappearance of traditional Christmas carols a few weeks ago. I should note that Mannheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra do traditional carols, and have brought them forward into modern performance. Not so much my style anymore, but I express my gratitude that they have done it at all. Here is TSO doing O Come All Ye Faithful/O Holy Night.

Accented Syllable

2011-11-26T22:44:00.001-05:00

THANKSgiving, ThanksGIVing, both interchangeably, or other? The national breakdown on that is
26.17%,
65.34%
08.01%
00.49%
Color coded maps of the regional distribution.
The national dialect survey, with about 50 "How do you pronounce...?" and 75 "What word do you use for...?" examples.

Win-Win

2011-11-26T13:52:00.001-05:00

Speaking with two Asian MD's who have been in this country quite a while, I mentioned in reference to Anglophilism, that the British have long disliked what Americans used to call "pep," then "drive," and such cliches as "win-win." I rather apologised for the cliched nature of win-win, and our trying to sell that idea to people, because it doesn't always work, and some people abuse it.

Both agreed that only Americans believe that win-win situations are even possible. One thought that was a positive, the other echoed the opinion of the rest of the world that win-win was just a disguise for the person getting 90% of the good throwing a bone for the one getting 10%. I tentatively (not knowing if it were an offensive stereotype) asked if he meant something similar to saving face. He agreed that this was exactly it. Victors in China either eliminate their opponents entirely or give them some 10% to save face. (Okay, you said it, not I.)

The other was quite adamant. No, in America it is sometimes, even often true. It is not a cliche because it is a delusion, but because it happens. Of course it doesn't always happen, but why should I be surprised at that?

I gave my usual demurrer that "Americans" included, to some extent, the other British colonies, and that Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders were likely similar. They shrugged. Perhaps. But I was speaking from pure guesswork, not knowing enough about the other Anglospheric cultures to know if win-win is indeed a common idea in those places.

I wonder now if the British especially dislike the cliche because they are one of the cultures that at least understands it, but it happens even less there.

Let me be on record as believing that win-win situations are indeed possible, and resenting the cliche much less than I did a few days ago. That the term is abused and isn't always true seems far less of a worry - since it seems to be the normal course of human interactions - than the idea that it is possible at all a rather stunning legacy for America to the world.

NPR Irony

2011-11-26T12:21:00.001-05:00

Only NPR would have game shows about being up on recent popular culture. They make fun of much of it, of course, because being so on the cutting edge gives you permission to judge everyone else. But they really care about being up on popular culture. It's what makes them special, you see.

Disney Irony

2011-11-26T11:58:00.001-05:00

Oh yeah. The villain in this new Muppet movie is a Texas oilman who has a big corporate headquarters and is clearly interested only in money. Disney, one of the largest corporations on earth, has been using these stock businessmen-as-heartless-villains since at least Mary Poppins.* Does it go back further, does anyone know? Any of those villains in earlier Disney? And how much has this influenced the consciousness of an ordinarily nice and very earnest young OWS idealist, that the popular culture he grew up with, and "gets" far better than those around him, has taught him who the bad guys are? It's like the execrable A Dog Called Kitty, so bad it is a family joke, or Avatar, or

Never mind. The list is endless.

* There would be a lot of jobs for regular Englishmen - not to mention the world - in

Railways through Africa
Dams across the Nile
Fleets of ocean greyhounds
Majestic, self-amortizing canals
Plantations of ripening tea

wouldn't you think? Not so many in feeding pigeons, however heartwarming it is.

Jumping To Conclusions

2011-11-26T11:02:00.001-05:00

Reserving judgement, and being open to the counterintuitive or even disagreeable idea has been a recurring theme here, and I have a few examples from the last week. Daniel Klein had an earlier study about liberals knowing less about economics than conservatives and libertarians. I remember reading it - I don't think I posted on it. My recollection is that it was slanted toward certain questions which might favor libertarians, but was otherwise plausible-sounding. I thought if the study were improved it would show a similar result, though likely less strongly. Yet when other researchers challenged Klein to run the same race over a different course, with basic economic questions which conservatives might be more likely to get wrong and liberals right, that is in fact what happened. Both sides did well on their home course, poorly on the other's, as his Atlantic article I Was Wrong And So Are You records. Of greatest concern, perhaps, was that education did not seem to help much in any group. It did not increase objectivity more than a tiny amount. What then, should we do to remedy this?

Orin Kerr over at Volokh comments on a report that the American Bar Association has given more "Not Qualified" ratings to Obama's prospective appointees than it had to either Clinton's or Bush's in their whole eight years each. The immediate thought would be that Obama is nominating more unqualified people. Yet Kerr, in his last paragraph, raises an excellent question wondering whether something has changed in the Democratic Party's method or infighting instead. The comments discuss. Interesting.

NFL culture has been able to tolerate one white premier wide receiver at a time, so Wes Welker was only mildly unnerving. But now comes Jordy Nelson of Green Bay, and it is apparently difficult for everyone - not just black WR's and DB's, but coaches and analysts of all colors - to absorb. Because we all know that blacks are just faster, and whites can only succeed by "knowing the defenses" and "running precise routes." Steve Sailer has fun with the topic - just because blacks are faster on average does not mean there are no fast white WR's (Jordy ran a 4.37) - and ESPN analysts have a refreshingly open discussion (video) about it.

My uncle (of course) sent the recent news story about the study which shows that Fox News viewers know less about current events than people who watch no news at all. I turned it back on him to do the work of looking behind the story himself, but I'll give you a hint: read the longer versions of the news stories to the bottom, and search around for the actual data behind the study, not the media reports. There may indeed be something of concern about Fox viewers here. But there are immediate qualifiers and ambiguous conclusions as well.

Note: No TV. I have never seen Fox News, except embedded videos on websites, where a person was trying to demonstrate Fox Yay! or Fox Nay! Nor have I discussed with my friends what they watch, so I have no idea which of them, if any, get their news from Fox. I know that the station drives liberals crazy for being so conservative, unfair, and inaccurate. That sputtering would be a recommendation* in my book, but only a mild one. The only dog I have in this fight is that it irks me when people so quickly trumpet "studies" that agree with their existing prejudices, and I readily concede that I am harder on liberals than conservatives on that score. I'm not 99th percentile on objectivity (at least, I hope my level of such isn't as good as it gets), but I think I'm 80th percentile, maybe 90th.

*50% clue to the truth, 50% personal entertainment value.

Things You Shouldn't Tell Young Parents

2011-11-26T10:36:00.001-05:00

Parenting magazine has an article 9 Things You Shouldn't Say To Your Child, by Paula Spencer. It should be kept in parenting books as a bad example. The odd thing is, I discover upon research that Spencer is something of the anti-paranoid in most of her parenting writing. Where this piece came from - an irritated afternoon, perhaps - I don't know.

Still, nothing can excuse my behavior that afternoon.I erupted like Mount Momsuvius: "Enough! Get out! Stop bothering me!" The look on my daughters' faces said it all. The 2-year-old's eyes widened. The 4-year-old furrowed her brow and jabbed her thumb between her lips.

Yes, the look on her daughters' faces said it all, eh? Because once the children are upset, what else needs to be said?Also forbidden are Leave me alone, you know better than that, and "labeling" your child, such as she's my shy one. Horrors. If Ms. Spencer has heard actual parents doing such things, it is a wonder she has not reported it to Protective Services. Six of the nine, in fact demonstrate how you can replace irritated, poorly-thought-out statements with controlled, chilly, yuppie ones which let the child know that their feelings are the pivot point of the household. To be fair, her offered replacements are generally better than the ones she criticises. Yet they are not much better - they focus on inessentials of parenting.Children are not that fragile. A large percentage of the people I work with experienced serious abuse as children, yet many retain remarkable humanity, self-confidence, a perspective. Young parents already have a tendency to paranoia and guilt about their interactions with their children. I don't see much need to increase that.

Muppet Spoilers

2011-11-25T21:19:00.001-05:00

There were trailers for really irritating-looking new movies. A Disney offering called "Brave," which absolutely should have been "Brave♥" instead. It's about a beautiful spunky redheaded Scottish gal who does unladylike things like furrow her brow and get dirty, and even (gasp) uses bow and arrow. By drawing on her inner strength even though others doubted her, she saves the day. Then there was one about Alaska spending millions of dollars in the 1980's to save some whales that had stranded themselves in the Arctic. A spunky, pretty strawberry-blonde girl spearheads the efforts to save them by talking to the whales to encourage them, then going on TV to shame everyone into remembering that whales are Just Like People. Based on a true story.

They are frigging whales, dammit. Not people. If you ever wonder why liberals only grumble, rather than scream in outrage at Disney Princesses, it's because Disney is the primary purveyor of liberal environmental and multiculti pieties to the young. They get a pass for that.

But the main attraction...

They save the theater by putting on a show.
The rather goofy hero does propose to the adorable homespun girl.
The villain almost wins several times but is eventually foiled.
There are cameos and inside references to the original TV show.
Things blow up but no one gets hurt.
We learn you can do it if you try and being with your friends is the best thing.
There are flaws in the movie, but they don't matter.

60's Sitcom

2011-11-25T10:32:00.001-05:00

David Kopel over at Volokh has a post about a strange theme he discovers running through 60's sitscoms: the hidden alien and relatedly, the family that doesn't know it is strange. He puts Mr. Ed, My Favorite Martian, I Dream of Jeannie, and My Mother the Car in the former category, while the Addams Family, The Munsters, and Beverly Hillbillies go into the latter. He wonders if there is some suggestion of closeted gays in this repetition.

I can think of many reasons why this is not the case, discussed below, yet would still give it a qualified agreement. The entertainment business was close to the only sector to accept homosexuality, and even there it was not reliable. It was part of a general acceptance of people a little different from the norm. There was a lot of posturing and self-congratulation about it - Hollywood (New York, LA general) was not the only place which accepted Women Who Speak Their Minds or liberal political ideas; nor was it entirely deserved - other American sectors were less racist, for example. But in the main, the arts and entertainment industries were a place where a person could acknowledge or even flaunt homosexuality. So the writers for My Favorite Martian probably never had the idea of gay acceptance cross their minds, but the idea of the hidden, shameful idea actually being quite all right was likely not far from the surface.

The shows remained heteronormative for one obvious reason and one less obvious. A) They had to appeal to an audience, make money, stay on the air. B)Acceptance of gays was less a principle than a tradeoff: don't say my divorces/affairs/fetishes are wrong, and I won't criticise your homosexuality. That is often how such tolerances develop - religious tolerance here and in Western Europe owes much to property rights, for example. I don't care if you hate Quakers, Hiram. He bought the property and it's his and you can't make him move out. Unless you want the deacons to decide whether you own your piece or not. That it was tradeoff, not principle, has come back to bite them when it comes to child molestation. If Whoopi Goldberg objected to it on principle she would never say "It wasn't rape rape." That's the statement of a person being given a pass to say and do what she wants in exchange for extending that to others.

Back to sitcoms: I wrote in 2009 that a stronger theme was Missing Family Members (especially Mom). The possible creepiness of this I discuss there.

The Unusual Family motif may also draw a great deal from ambivalence about families of origin. The Munsters may simply be an exaggerated "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." I mentioned that the weird families tended to be the intact ones: Munsters, Addams, Simpsons. It's comedy by inversion, like Superman's Bizarro. It's been used for centuries because it sets up laffs quite well. It also sets up sentimentality in comedy, of filial bonds despite it all, etc.

Ambivalence is key for comedy. I Dream of Jeannie clearly plays to the subtext "OMG! That guy has a beautiful woman who will do whatever he tells her to!" (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) Yet consider - the show isn't funny if she doesn't have superpowers. A guy finds a pretty girl who does what he says - you could sell some episodes of that on a porno channel. You could use it as a comic bit from a minor character in a larger movie. But what are you going to write for jokes for twenty-five episodes? Tangentially, I knew even as a child (12.5) that Tony was entirely oblivious/resistant to the sexual angle of all this, but that his friend Roger wasn't. I don't see it in the scripts - Bill Dailly must've done it entirely with his facial expressions. Bewitched follows the older, Lucy-and-Ethel type of crafty-shemes-behind-hubby's-back comedy, except now the woman is clearly the more powerful one.

Secrecy, where the audience knows things the character onstage doesn't, is also comedy gold. No need to wonder if My Mother The Car is actually My Mother The Secret Drinker But Is Still A Really Nice Person, or Mr. Ed represents Wilbur's B&D dungeon. It's the fun of comedy, and if darker elements are there, they are of necessity vague and far away.

These themes recur in TV in later decades, but in the 70's were largely replaced by Wacky Ensembles: WKRP, Mary Tyler Moore, MASH, Taxi, Muppets, Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, Laverne & Shirley - I imagine my clever audience can think of others.

Assistant Village Idiot

Creating Space

Tim Thomas

Elite Empathy For The Ruled

Two For 3AM

Purists

The Future Of Us All

Around The Clock - Twelve Thirty

Around The Clock - Walking After Midnight

Trace Bundy

Anosognosia, or The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Future And Its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel

Unbelievable

Variance

Self-Indulgent

Childhood Obesity

My Uncle, and the Religious Left

Archive

Spoonful

Better Than The Beatles

Witherspoon Institute

Poetic Essence

Reflections On Tim Tebow

Ballad of Irving

Grand Rounds at my hospital

Good To Know

Legacy

Bad Sign

Massachusetts

Japanese Ad Campaign

Nobel For Literature

Mission

Urbanisation, and a Japanese Curiosity

QOTD

Political Theater

Purists

See If You Can Bear Them

Life Expectancy

Top Ten List

NPR

Censored

Sex Offender Registry

Santorum

Moral Foundations of OWS

Church-finding

The Budget: Clarity

Wikipedia Bias

What We Love

Of Pancakes and Candidates - and Feathers

McLaren, Bell, MacArthur

New Conventional Wisdom

No Politics

I've Got Sixpence

Note To Self

Two From Ben

Ron Paul

50 Best Quotes

Epitaph

Often At Christmas

Christmas Party

But If It's True..

Smart, Wealthy, Athletic – A Digression on IQ

Tweet Theology

About That Harvard Exam (Sidis Part 3A)

Prodigy (Sidis Part Three)

Manipulation At Trinity Church

Bună sara lui Crăciun

William James Sidis - The Doubt

And Another One Bites The Dust - Part One

O Holy Night

Self-Referential

Ron Paul Family Cookbook

Liege

Why Should They Care? Addition

Atheists? Maybe Not

Hark

That's It

Mitt

Romanian Carol

Why Should They Care?