Laundromat

 Son #5 is moving and looking for a new laundromat, because the one in Southie will be too far away. It's a continuing problem.

By the way, the following geographic areas are distinct:

Southie - Your thought will be "Oh, that's the Irish one," but they are all Irish by history.

South End

South Shore - where my wife is from.  It has the highest concentration of Irish descent in the country.  See also Irish Riviera. 

The Italians went to the North End and the North Shore Communities: Stoneham, Saugus, Lynn, Wilmington.

Racial Preferences

It's the Rules and the Real Rules again, isn't it?

I haven't written much on the topic, because it automatically brings in discussion of standarised tests, which I bring up only when I have to - that is, when some actual unfairness or injustice is being proposed. The intellectual argument is long since over and has been for 50 years, though occasionally some new thought which potentially undermines the known truth has to be examined.  The facts are dreadfully inconvenient, and the standard thoughtless explanations for them are easily shown to be inadequate.  The accusations against testing are social, or cultural, or political, not scientific.  You can nibble at the edges, perhaps. So there is no point in bringing them up.

I am interested in the topic of racial preferences at colleges even though A) I think college as currently constituted is overrated and overpriced, save in a few fields, so I don't care what happens to them and B) It does not much affect me personally. As a good percentage of my readers are connected to colleges or used to be, I can well understand them being more intently concerned about what is going to happen to them. But I am interested without a dog in the fight because of issues of basic fairness, and applying reason and evidence to large decisions.  Y'know, unimportant hobbies like that, much as one would be interested in chess or bridge tournaments, or baseball statistics. Just practice for the important stuff like (NYT front page today) "Who won" on whatever we did with the debt ceiling - I'll bet it wasn't me; why people are going to poetry workshops*; where to go when visiting LA; and what Iceland's PM wants tourists to know. We sharpen our tools on the trivial topics like justice, morality, and practical considerations of whether America will survive the 21st C for stuff like that.

WSJ today has an article about how colleges will find sneaky ways to fill racial quotas anyway.  (There is a video about the NC governor imploring the public about how much school choice will destroy public education and civilisation in general, which I didn't click on, because I already know what he is going to say and why it's wrong.) They're not stupid, after all. Lots of jobs are on the line here over in administration and they know how to protect the money and PR for those. Plus, people do sense that something about the culture war in general and their whole opinion of themselves about the value of what they do is in jeopardy. How do you act when your job is on the line? Hopefully at least a little better.

Universities will engage in similar shenanigans if the Supreme Court rules against Harvard and UNC. They’ve done it before. When a voter referendum forbade Michigan schools to use racial preferences in admissions, they turned to preferences for applicants who live on Indian reservations or inside the Detroit city limits. Bilingual applicants also got a leg up. None of these preferences were for race, but rather for things highly correlated with applications from Native American, black and Latino students, respectively.

It's all move/countermove. The Supreme Court has already ruled clearly on lots of this and allowed specific exceptions. Colleges and HR departments have tried to expand those, even dishonestly and comically as above, which are now being challenged. I have little doubt the writer is correct.  This will just force them further underground.

*"Teacher, teacher, I know! Pick me! Pick me!" (Without having read the article.) "They go to meet other people who like poetry workshops, for good reasons and bad." How'd I do?

Trump and Campaigning

Trump is holding fewer campaign events than even Biden, who was the previous record-holder in modern times for avoiding them, holding even fewer than Obama. It was an original strength of his 2016 campaign, and a lot of 2020 as well. Maybe the campaigning landscape has changed, but I think it is more that Trump has changed.

Also

This might be a wise use of money in terms of campaigning.  But it also indicates how he is increasingly concerned about Donald more than America. His blustering patriotism and reflexively all-in-Americanism had some weaknesses (mainly thoughtlessness), but was also the thing his supporters liked most about him. They knew he might get many things somewhat wrong about foreign trade and foreign policy, for example, but was at least not going to sell them out. That may still be his instinct, but I think having been exposed to power has weakened it.

Spengler

David Goldman writes for the Asia Times, originally under the pseudonym Spengler (after Oswald Spengler, who wrote about the decline of the West).  His economic predictions have been unusually good. Steve Hsu interviewed him at Manifold podcast. As that is one of the podcasts that offers transcripts, that is available for those who prefer that medium.

He was originally focused mainly on classical music, and was all-but-dissertation in music theory at CUNY.  "Then, my first child was born and I noticed immediately that she wanted to eat almost every day." He began taking Wall Street jobs. He has been politically involved since the 80s and is not afraid to be radical, as one can see from both the Wiki and the interview. He refers to Republicans and Democrats as "Dumb and Dumber."

The question which has obsessed me for many years is why the West would develop the most inspiring and elevating high culture in the history of the human race. And then effectively abandon it. 

This interview includes some American economic observations, such as what he considers felonious market manipulation by huge players (Bank of America, where he had previously worked, for example) in the crash of 2008, but mainly focuses on the economics of China in competition with the US. It is not mere doomsaying, but it is alarming. He considers some sectors, such as EV's, to already be effectively lost. Tesla? Largely a Chinese manufacture, actually. BYD Auto has introduced the Seagull EV for about $11K, and Wuling (with GM) will be offering one at $9K later this year. They don't need the American and European markets for these, not at all. He also points out the uses of AI to solve lower-tech problems for poorer countries, giving the example of Bangladesh and the packaging of chili peppers, a key commodity for them.  A single bad pepper can spoil the whole bag, and losses of 15% are now reduced to near-zero because of AI. Of course they are going to buy this technology from China. 

Lots of topics covered in an hour. Another interesting bit.  He makes reference to predictions of his coming true more quickly or more slowly than he thought, and it occurred to me that in popular media, unfavorable reporting is likely to call those inaccurate, not just wrong about the speed.

Just an Irony

Progressives object to mild sexual material on display in workplaces as a form of harassment. But it's not only okay but demanded on the shelves of the YA section of the library.

It Is Time

 

The Rules, and the Real Rules

I doubt that it is actually better in other societies, neither historical nor primitive; not Eastern or African or Native. When I point out that there is a grave discrepancy in American society between the rules that we teach children will be what they need as adults and what the rules turn out to be, I am not going to spring on you some nonsense how that wasn't what happened in the old days, or in China, or in the golden age of Greece, nor among the Arapaho. We teach children what we want to believe are the real rules, or wish were the real rules.

We do this at schools a lot, insisting that the behaviors which bring awards and honors there will also work in the adult world. They do somewhat, but there is another entire set of work rules, concerned with skill at selling things or making things that gets left out of the mix.  I have mentioned before that the Second Wave feminist fury derives in part from succeeding at school, just as told, then finding that this is not a fully reliable predictor of success as an adult. I followed the directions.  You lied. They didn't much mean to lie, especially as schools are and were run by women for girls. Those are the skills that work for school jobs and are not unrelated to other fields. Their horizons were limited.

Churches insist that certain moral behaviors will "work" in solving your problems, not fully understanding that they are not necessarily intended to work in that way. They are meant to work in terms of building a particular type of person, fitted for heaven. That is supposed to be our goal, and the Church's, yet it often isn't, not quite.

It's one of the lessons that sports actually does teach, because what the rules are in the book is not always what the officials will call. The baseball strike zone gradually got completely out of whack for a while. What is a foul in basketball, what the rulebook says or what the refs will call? And yet it also pays to know the book rules cold, because sometimes, sometimes you can steal a march on everyone else for a whole season until they change the rules in the offseason. 

Who gets promoted?  In some systems the formal rules are followed strictly, in others you can spend your career trying to figure out what the real rules are. What are the real rules of marriage?

Why the Stork Brings Babies

I figure I can't be the first person bringing some of these connections, but the last one, about the souls at sea, I am not finding anywhere else, so I am giving myself some kind of credit for it.

The word sea and the word soul are connected, back to the proto-Germanic word *saiwaz or *saiwalo (OE sawol) meaning sheet of water, lake, sea, pool. The belief was that souls went after death to a contained area at the bottom of a lake, and some lakes were considered more likely than others. There is ambiguity around the word sea, because some tribes had no contact with the ocean and thus used *saiwaz for any body of water, while others knew about both salt water and fresh and had different words for the two.  But it seems that the idea of the dead going to a chilly, damp resting place under lakes after death was the main one, and extending this to places under the ocean came later. 

Ship burials occured because the Germanic peoples were among the many who believed that you might need certain objects after death, and a ship to get to the place of the dead was necessary for the important people like kings and queens. The stork comes in because this Hel, this cell under some Baltic lakes also became known as the place where souls waited before they were born into this world. Storks are lake-birds, picking up souls and bringing them to the land of the living.

If you look up where this belief about storks comes from, you get stories about how this comes from the Greek goddess Hera, only it is cranes, not storks. However, the belief in storks bringing the babies seems to be purely Germanic and already in place when first contact occurred. As Greek is also an Indo-European language it is possible that they also had some previous belief about large birds bringing babies. Hera had one of her rivals, a beautiful mortal, into a crane and banished her, but the woman would not leave without her child and so carried it off herself. Fine.  Except the Greeks didn't go from there to believing cranes or any other bird brought babies in general.  The Egyptians believed a heron delivered the world. Okay...but there's no record of them believing herons brought babies. Large birds can carry large things, yes. The mind does revolt against the idea of warblers bringing infants. But that still doesn't get us to belief in storks bringing babies, which was Germanic and Norwegian.

Most likely, the people guessing at the explanations didn't know the history of where souls went or came from in northern Europe.

 

The person receiving said souls under the sea was Hel, goddess of the dead, and when Christianity moved into the Germanic areas she seemed to be the obvious answer for a place name for the dead, and the name was well-enough established by the time the KJV came along that it was used to translate the Greek place-name Hades. Her name comes from *kel in Proto Indo-European, meaning "to cover, enclose, conceal," from which we also get our words for cell, cellar, helm, helmet.

The phrase "How many souls were lost?" and the reference to people on board as "souls" likely stems from a similar ignorance. The reference to souls lost is confined to nautical and later aviation uses. It goes back to at least 1300 and again, is first found in the north of Europe. Those lost to disease, or battle, or famine are not called souls. I propose that all the explanations that "souls" was used because they didn't need to differentiate between the important and the poorer folk, nor between nationalities, nor even clearing up the ambiguity between passengers and crew or whether they were alive or not makes the least bit of sense once you have a better explanation.  It's the sort of thing one cooks up when a fact is in place without explanation and people throw darts.  I propose here - and I swear I can't find it anywhere else, amazingly - that the association with souls and the sea, first in some Baltic lakes where Hel received them into some sort of cellar  - was still present in the minds of those living around the North Sea, where ship burial was still practiced until at least 1000AD.  Admittedly, such burials might only be custom at that point, without belief that the queen would need a ship to get to the bottom of some lake. But souls were lost at sea because that's where souls went.

The Purpose of Public Education

I recall reading years ago some left-wing educational writer complaining because he believed our entire public education system was originally designed by mill owners and those sympathetic to them to create a population that would be good for working in mills and being obedient employees. I now think he was only half wrong. I thought of this again when Grim had an education piece up. 

I am fond of pointing out how little effect school has on academic results, which has been demonstrated repeatedly, despite the researchers often wanting to find something else.  Teachers, didactics, and curriculum may matter more to worse students, but even then it is often just the occasional rescue of one on the brink.  Certainly, there is an advantage to going to a school where you aren't constantly worried if violence is going to break out right next to you. Though I went to a mill-city highschool that had fights a fair bit.  Now that I think of it, though, about half of that were "I'll meet you after school" fights (and they did, with a crowd), which is already putting some boundaries on shock and what will occur. So there needs to be safety and some structure for the students on the brink. Beyond that...

So schools fall back on teaching values, which is what they have always done.  Not so much as they hope, and often not quite the values they intended.There is also conflict when the professional educators teach the values they think are important, regardless of surrounding culture. That's why you got taught so much pointless grammar, because it was supposed to be important for schools to turn out kids who sounded middle-class. Ditto Latin, which is a class signifier more than an education.  The energy would have been far better spent on a living language. Conservatives look back fondly on what was taught for values then, but I'm less impressed. We were taught a lot of patriotism, but that turned out to be a lot of "respect for the flag" and some songs.  Nothing particularly wrong with teaching such ceremonial aspects of living in a place, and it is hard to teach the young abstract ideas, so one sees how it happens.  Focus on the concrete acts, it's probably about all you're going to get anyway. My son went to a Baptist school where he had a workbook page about one boy saying something bad about the flag and the hero punching him in the eye. The usual mouth agape, the bruise already formed just a moment after the punch, and large exclamation marks next to his head. I don't know how often first graders hear another child say something bad about the flag, and I'm not sure that's the patriotism I want taught. But it lingered on even to 1990 in such circles.

Yet in teaching patriotism it often turned to citizenship. I don't mean Civics and the three branches of government or right to a speedy trial, but a fair bit of focus on how a good citizen behaves. I think there was a lot of emphasis, though not expressly stated, on obedience. I know, I know, when you've got thirty hoodlums thrashing about your fourth grade, anything that promotes obedience is going to be looked at fondly, and as above, you have to teach concrete actions they can understand. Doing what the policeman says was not an automatic in a lot of our neighborhood, and I'm talking about the parents, not the teenagers. It was mostly applied as a civilising influence at the time - no trash in the streets, no destruction of property, no stealing - all good things. 

Not all of it. We were also taught not to jaywalk, to register our bikes, not to be too noisy, not to be tardy or (horrors) skip school, to do our homework. To stay within the lines, do what authorities told us. That was citizenship, and thus indirectly, patriotism. Now citizenship is more focused on environmentalism, being extra-careful to being respectful of other groups (rather than of older people and government people), but still staying within the lines.  It's the patriotism that Obama talks about, and I don't think it's an act.  He thinks that is what is supposed to be good about America and he wants to see more of it.  Respect for the flag?  Well, fine, but really, not so important.

I guess all this to say that public education - and private education even more so, perhaps - has always had the goal of teaching children to stay within the lines. (See Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn.)  Just different lines in every generation. It's very much what education does in all cultures. Next up, I think I'll have to say something about the conflict between the stated rules, the real rules, and the unintentional rules does to us.

Snow

Son #3 is discouraged by the weather in Nome today, especially as he just injured himself in indoor soccer.

Lockdown

 

This would be Cambridge, England, not Massachusetts

Mild Massachusetts Accent

When we make fun of an accent, or even just want to signal it, we choose the strongest version, and for the New England Coastal accent the usual example is "Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd." Which is fine, and you will find the occasional person whose speech is that dramatically accented.  But more often, one detects a trace of accents, so that in going to the South Shore, Cape, and Islands I would often hear cah-ur, or cah'r, where the "r" is much more prominent and the extended a with the h more muted. I did not hear any "-er's" instead of a's (Cuber, tuber, Florider) except in the word "idea," which is going to be the last place it disappears from.

Here's the American dialect map again, for those who forgot how much you liked it. 

And Casey Affleck with a beauty of that accent, for those who forgot how much they liked that.

Two Other Museums

We went to visit the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association in Oak Bluffs, a charming collection of tightly-packed, brightly colored houses with abundant gingerbread built over 150 years ago around a Methodist Camp Meeting Tabernacle. It is clearly a more secular place now, but our church camp experiences (plus sending two sons to Asbury, a Wesleyan college) allowed us to discuss for an hour as we walked around what it must have been like for families to go there year after year, from the time when it was camp meeting through the "generally religious" years on into the "community involved" focus now.

One can only live in these houses a few months a year. Because of their age, I estimated that craftsmen of all types could make a good living on Martha's Vineyard keeping up with the repairs. The museum was not yet open and the Tabernacle is being refurbished.  As it is open, one can get some sense of it. Interesting to see and think about once, I think.  I feel no call to go back to get the full experience when everything is open and everyone is there, but I'm not sorry I went the once.

We also went to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. Tracy got two new birds for her life list, because environments where one thing meets another, such as salt and fresh water, are prime locations for diversity. We found that I prefer to walk right along and look off into the landscape to see an environment, while she keeps becoming fascinated by smaller-scale items like wildflowers. Fifty years later, we still haven't quite worked this out. But this mostly-outdoor museum in Brewster has both, so we were able to make it work. Even I can get interested in the birds when they are out on the shore and in open salt marshes, and even she can put up with walks with bad footing in order to get to a beach where she can look down and see new shells.

Marriage of True Minds

James Thomson, a psychologist who has shown up and commented on HBD sites for years, now has a substack Psychological Comments. Rob Henderson linked to an article from last year about different divorce rates among different races. Thomson wonders if intelligence scores, which follow the same pattern, might be a partial expectation.  I make a suggestion of my own at the article The Marriage of True Minds. I wish him well.

Irish, First Responder, Union, Democrat

We went to an Irish restaurant on the Cape, Keltic Kitchen (with Keltic Kottage gift shop adjoining), which was fun. It was one of those places that had patches from fire and ploice departments decorating the walls, mostly local but with some from farther afield. There were a few military and ambulance as well.  These are typically acquired from customers who bring them in for display. It is a statement of who their clientele is, and who they respect in this world.

These are occupations which were and still are highly unionised, especially in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. There would be lots of emotional conflict when other unions would go on strike, especially if they were civilly disobedient, as in blocking traffic. This is waning as the violence has increased. Police and fire don't like to get stuck with what happens when people tip over cars and torch them. Still, it remains strong, and is part of why Massachusetts remains heavily Democratic.  It's not just Cambridge and Amherst. The Irish still have resentment in some places for past ills - not at Belfast levels, certainly, but still a secondary or perhaps tertiary motivator.  They resent rich WASPs, and in tourist areas this split has its own love/hate dynamic.

The Cape and Islands were also places where African-Americans could be treated nearly as well as whites, even a hundred years ago. Martha's Vineyard in particular attracted rich A-A's from away as well, and these both integrated somewhat into both the working and rich tourist societies there, but also formed their own elite culture. We went to a souvenir store that not only had sweatshirts and other clothing (Including the baby T-shirts that said "I'm a Delta baby!") for a sorority I did not recognise at first, but the oval bumper stickers that show a location you have been that not only said MV, but others that said INK. I was only figuring it out as I exited the story that the sorority was Delta Sigma Theta, the prestige black sorority for decades, and Inkwell was for Inkwell Beach. Oh right, now that I think of it a lot of the little fisherman statues and beach-reclining watercolors that one finds in souvenir shops were black.  Duh.  

So these groups are overdetermined to be Democrats, which usually means it is a long time before they abandon altogether.

Bronny

LeBron James's son is going to USC for a year, after which he will be drafted into the NBA. Current estimates are that he will be drafted in the middle of the first round, or even as high as tenth.  The thought that he will go higher because his father wants to play with him and so that team will likely be able to get some discount on Dad's services for a year or even two is becoming less and less likely. First, it's likely to only be the one year, and teams don't want to waste a #10 pick on a #20 player just to get a year of LBJ, however much that would help their merchandising. Secondly, Bronny seems to be a different type of player than his father, who does the little things, keeps teammates involved and on the same page, plays a speed-and-finesse game instead of the bullyball LeBron does. Those are stereotypes and exaggerations, of course.  LBJ does a lot of little things and shows finesse.

But the third piece is what I find most interesting. Because LeBron commands all he sees and can basically make teams, coaches, teammates, and business partners do what he wants, everyone has operated on the assumption that what he wants in terms of what Bronny's basketball life will be, he will get.  He is The King, after all. Yet it is he himself who is starting to say that a lot will depend on what Bronny wants.  This is a new song.

I am not a fan, but this is what a father should do, and without knowing the wheels within wheels, I admire both of them for this.

The Wrath of Becky

There was some discussion of The Wrath of Becky over at Althouse.  Ann covers a wide variety of topics and things that I might miss, especially when it is coming out of popular culture.I don't think she is at all puzzled about what is up here.  She posted it because what is happening in this movie is obvious, and she wonders why everyone doesn't see it. But just in case, let me tell you what the message is in this movie, coming out at this cultural moment.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

The game is to substitute their reality in for the actual one.  They do it well. It works with far too many people.

Just A Closer Walk With Thee

We had this at the church we visited in Brewster.  I sang it years ago with men's chorus and have loved it.  Very fun to sing, including when you are actually walking out in the woods privately. Yet I was hoping to find a harmonised one.

I'm not the only one.  Country musicians play it, jazz musicians play it, and I was looking for a version I thought stood out among the many. I saw at a glance that what I wanted was someone who I could reasonably think believed the words. A lot of the videos in the search dropped right out. Others were...well, maybe... 

I kept coming back to this one.

Allowing People To Hurt You

The was a fashion twenty years ago in psychology - I associate it strongly with the UNH nursing instructors and the Antioch College psych department - that what other people did does not make you feel a certain way, you choose to feel it, or allow yourself to feel that way. I take the point, that you as the receiver retain ultimate control. It is also good to learn that your retain agency, and it is good to teach yong people that they retain agency and to not have to respond in a certain way. 

But to suggest, as these instructors did, that the person acting on you is responsible for zero percent of the "making" is just silly.  It is very similar to what CS Lewis was pushing back against in Abolition of Man. When we see a great waterfall, it is not something entirely arbitrary to think it sublime. To see it as sublime is entirely proper.  To fail to see it, in fact, suggests that there is something missing in you as a human.  When someone pops you in the snoot, or says something nice about you in public, or takes something from a small child, makes you at least initially feel a particular way. (In context, if the the punch is from a toddler, if the compliment is from a weasel, etc.) To not feel something for the child is to be missing some bit of humanity. To be indifferent to someone's compliment is to not quite get the rules of social interaction...

Or to have dismissed the person to such an extent that their opinion means nothing to you, and this is where the subtler rules of humankind start to emerge. 

When someone can hurt us, it is because we have allowed this vulnerability, yes. But that is a great deal of what it means to love and to be human at all. If we are beyond (we will call it above) being hurt, we have in some way left the building. It is an odd imbalance when we are not able to hurt someone who retains a power to hurt us, but it is actually very common. One of us is likely wrong, A for moping around B who no longer cares, or B for denying a bit of their humanity but cutting off A from consideration of affection. Some of us may make ourselves vulnerable to too many people, others to too few. But at the extremes there is a problem.

Crisps

 Hard to find, I may have to order a carton. Sweeter and lighter than the similar Deep River product.