Post Hoc Rationalisation

Perhaps I should say immediately post hoc rationalisation, or as-quick-as-thought rationalisation, those things that we justify in some way as soon as our desire becomes conscious. 

I was listening to Patrick Wyman talk about the culture-historical method of archaeology and of understanding the past. He of course had to mention right out of the gate Nazis! to warn people away from going anywhere near that cliff or anywhere even in sight of that cliff.  (Other cliffs, over which more people have fallen, remain unmentioned as usual.) So yeah, I get it.  Don't be like them.  I think I've heard that like - all my life. I digress. The association being offered was that this method of associating culture and ethnicity leads to evil thinking about what ourselves and others are like, and then to evil actions.

Digression continued: The focus should be on the fact that is an unreliable method of identifying culture from ethnicity or ethnicity from culture, with America being a great current example.  People from widely different genetic backgrounds have similar language, material culture, and customs here. It is good to keep that in mind when looking at archaeological material, whether humans or objects. Don't assume they all used these objects - some may be prestige imports obtained for the rulers in trade - nor that they spoke the same language. People often speak two or more languages and use them in different circumstances. This was true then and now. On the other hand, it's place to start looking. If you uncover graves 200 miles west of a culture which has written records in language A, a distinctive type of pottery, and a ruling elite with R1a y-haplotype, and your newly discovered group also has R1a y-haplotype, something close to language A should be your tentative hypothesis. Now that we know that migration does occur more than was credited fifty years ago, theories related to the disfavored one are coming back. (Just don't be a Nazi, got it!?  I hear they are just everywhere these days.)

So the idea is that this sort of thinking leads people to do bad actions. We tend to do this about all groups. There has been a great deal of discussion recently about why Russians act like they do, and before that it was why all those largely-Muslim people from the Middle-East act as they do, and why Americans expanded westward, and why Christians went to war against pagans, and then other Christians. It seems the only thing to talk about in attempting to understand the world.

But what if most of it, or (gulp) all of it is just later rationalisation? What if people just do things because they can? They have stuff and we want it. There are other people who aren't us through that gap so we had better subdue them for our safety. It's a bit frightening, because we would then have to look out on a world we don't have much control over. It's more comforting to believe we have better reasons, not only for our own consciences, but in hopes of getting other people to act in ways we like. Like either trading with us or going away or something.

It is not only the perceived overall aggressors doing this. The current narrative is that the Native Americans attacked Europeans because they felt attacked and invaded themselves and were just defending their land.  Well, sometimes.  Sometimes they attacked because the Europeans had good stuff and they wanted it.  If that sounds insulting to the indigenous peoples, as if they are primitive, I'm also saying that's pretty much what the Europeans did as well. The New World had stuff. Let's go get it.

I think it is more likely that the bad attitude flows in the other direction.  If we want to defend our territory from you, then you must be terrible in some way.  If we want to enslave you... gee, maybe we really shouldn't do that - hey, I know!  They must not have souls. Problem solved.  

I don't believe the strong version of what I just put forward myself. I think what we believe about others can be modified by cultural factors, not just our primitive amoeba-seeking-food responses. I just think those cultural things look more and more like rationalisations, less and less like reasons, with every passing decade. I made a great deal during the first years of this blog about tribalism - not between Tutsis and Hutus or Flemish and Walloons, but among the various internal cultural tribes in America and the West. I made much reference to the Arts & Humanities Tribe I grew up in but felt was going in bad directions. I focused on ideas. Yet sometimes I read an analysis that cynically notices that particular legislation or cultural changes means more and better jobs (status, food, mates) for one tribe, so they like it.  All the purported reasoning, charts and graphs, and historical examples are just tacked on for show. Down this tunnel there is more mash, and I have an instant justification why it should be ours.  

It may be why they have to see so many Nazis now. It's a great reason to take someone's mash. The others can't be just any old type of competitor, they have to be crammed somehow into the category of  Best Enemy.

Love Crucified, Arose

 

Years of Educational Attainment

This is becoming a more common thing to measure in genetics over the last decade or so. There is a huge advantage in being able to just plain get ahold of the data, as people fill it out on profiles of all sorts.  From various ancestry sites you can get millions of answers.  On Unsupervised Learning, Khan interviews UMinn psychology prof James Lee about his recent paper in Nature. It has a GWAS of 3 million individuals. 

This seems intuitively weak at first, because a lot of things go into educational attainment that aren't genetic, so what good is it? What country you were born in or moved to, what your family's expectations are, what your chosen field requires, your level of determination (even if that is also genetic) all factor in to that final number. Even the final number can be fuzzy.  Someone who enters "13" might have been dragged across the finish line for high school and stuffed into a college for a couple of semesters picking up only a few credits.  Or they might have left college to go into the service or a particular job where they received ongoing training for many years.  The life-outcomes of the individual might be very different with that number. However, in large studies like this the researchers are mostly just worried about the range. For both 10 and 11 years, or 13 and 14 years, the +/- might be the same two years, so it washes out. Only at the graduation points of 12 and 16 is there likely to be a bending of the graph as lots of individuals try to get those last few classes in to get to the finish line.

The genetic correlation for height is 91%, for IQ 83%, and for years of educational attainment about 55%. These seem about right.  You can't make yourself taller, but your height can get screwed up, such as by backbone curvature, as my son from Romania's is, making him about 2" shorter. Similarly, even more things can work to depress your IQ, though you can't stretch it above a certain point. And for educational attainment, there are many reasons that can get bounced around, as noted above. Still, we would expect that there was some genetic association.  Of particular interest is that Lee notes that the genetic differences cluster around neurological development, which also makes intuitive sense. 

The long interview included some very clear descriptions about why heterozygotic and homozygotic - that is, whether you have a plus and a minus gene at any given point or whether you have two pluses or two minuses - have different effects than expected.  We are familiar with the example of the Sickle-Cell Anemia genes, where having no copies of the immunity is bad, a copy from only one parent is good, and having a copy from both parents is very bad. We were taught years ago in biology that lots of genes behave this way.  In fact, very few do. They are interesting because these rarer genes are often the ones with strongest effects, mostly negative but also some positive.

The Tasaday

I was "strongly encouraged" as an anthropology student to watch the National Geographic special about the Tasaday tribe in the early 70s. They were supposedly a "Stone Age" tribe who were unfamiliar with metals and had not been in contact with outsiders in known memory.  It was a very romantic idea. There was discussion afterward among the professors whether it was proper for outsiders to spoil their culture by contact. It was unclear to me whether it was Tasaday culture they were protecting or our ability to study something rare. Students were encouraged to continue the discussion among themselves.  It was clear that these were matters of Great Import from the solemn tone of the documentary and the similar hushed tones of the older students who stepped up to lead those discussions. 

I had what was considered a simplistic view (because someone was impatient with another student who gave it voice), wondering whether we would bring them medicine if they were sick. What about sickness unto death? Wouldn't it be a kindness to introduce the idea of knives or something to them to improve their ability to survive? Look, I may be misremembering badly and this is all post hoc for me.  I don't recall a single conversation about it again after that night. Yet I think I recall that this was considered a grievous imposition on these poor people, who deserved to have their culture preserved. Again, I wondered why not give them the choice and see what they thought?

I later learned the whole thing was a hoax put forth by some friends of Marcos (why?), and then learned that it wasn't a hoax and the hoaxers were a hoax. I now know that I should have at minimum questioned whether this "Stone Age" description was just journalistic exaggeration and nonsense. It is exactly the sort of thing that sets hearts aflutter and sells fishwrap. 

I take it that the current understanding is that they are not a residual Stone Age tribe, but they are very remote and do not seem to have had intention of participating in a hoax. Their primitiveness is real but not fully uncommon on this southern island in the Philippines. Lots of tribes had little contact at that point, and this was simply the one with the least. Even the word "contact" is more than a little fuzzy.  If your tribe is in contact with a tribe that is in contact with another tribe that has a few people who occasionally walk into settled areas where they trade with people from off the island, don't you have some contact in the sense that you hear about other people who do things differently and get your hands on some of their smart technology if you get the chance?

I mostly bring this up only to poke fun at the idea of the holiness of leaving people alone so that we can use them for our study purposes rather than offering them choices, however indirectly.  It makes them not real people. My daughter died of a terrible disease last year and you could have saved her and did nothing?  And you call that respecting me?

Optimistic Voices

If you think the Flying Monkeys were a better part of the movie I would say only in memory.  While you are watching, this is the best combo of sound, music, and visual.

Pileated Woodpecker

Pileated Woodpeckers (PIH-le-ay-ted) were uncommon in NH but becoming more common.  There was one lat year on the rail trail I walk, and another near the power lines near our house. Strange call.  I heard one on the trail about two weeks ago, and one near the house this morning. It's fun to have birds you didn't grow up with.

Pheasants are rare here now, and I miss them. Rare wild turkeys now show up in the yard in groups of 10-20 and I'm not that fascinated.

No, that's not my photo.  Don't be ridiculous.  I am clumsy and unartistic.  It is from the linked site.  My second son or first daughter-in-law might manage such a shot, but not me. Er, not I.

 

Long Covid

I think the reason we are hearing conflicting reports is not only because we have become so divided - Covid was not that bad vs. Covid was much worse than you are acknowledging, but because that fed into a polarising tendency to exaggerate in the direction we like. 

I believe we are now talking about two separate things and as I expect no help from the culture in differentiating those in clear language, I suggest we do it ourselves. 

Anytime you get a virus, there is a danger of long-term, very bad effects.  These are usually rare, but they are well-documented for decades and quite real. It varies from virus to virus. OTOH, bsking sent me a study which defined Long Covid by a standard of any of 32 symptoms still present after 28 days.  That is real, but I think we have to call that a low bar. I don't think we close cities over that. I am wondering about that for myself, back-and-forth. I will not belabor my own medical history, but I am older (1953) and fat (less fat than I was) and qualify for metabolic syndrome. So even before covid, I could be expecting gradual deterioration offset by more exercise in retirement, perhaps punctuated by steps downward after any illness. So anything I observe about myself after covid carries a question mark.

As there seems to be a run on people who are claiming serious post-covid symptoms, more than one might expect, I am conscious of the question mark. Yet I do detect a difference this year from last year, even months after covid (Oct-Nov).  What does it mean?  My blood pressure went up but is medication-controlled - with an increase since covid. My blood sugars remain well-controlled, but I wonder about circulatory issues and oxygen-exchange issues.  I was actually hoping to have my "mild COPD" diagnosis dropped after testing this summer, a decade after quitting smoking.  I am no longer confident of this. Throughout the winter I thought I tired more easily and was more bothered by cold. There is more, but i shan't bore you. Small stuff, yet I think real.

I think this is exactly what a lot of people are going to be wondering after having had covid.  Some will strive to make their symptoms appear worse (even to themselves), others will attempt to deny real symptoms, but most will be in between, wondering. My own prediction is that cardiovascular long-term effects will be more than expected, and neurological effects will be real but subtle and detectable mostly in aggregate.  Pray that there are no chronic effects for children with mild cases.

We hate wondering and leap to conclusions, and unfortunately these will be influenced by our political and cultural beliefs, plus the (likely small) disease worry and disease denial* we had preloaded before 2020. It is unfortunately likely that most of us will never know whether our particular mild symptoms were from covid or from getting older and fatter. Sussing out the reality will involve looking at large numbers of people and seeing whether there is an increase over what would have been expected if covid had been contained in China to the index case, sent to a mountain with food airdropped in for him.

The best I can say WRT to actually understanding what is up versus being able to win arguments is to regard Long Covid as two different things.  Eventually it will likely be considered a continuum, but we hate those.  For now, divide it into two and try to keep your head above water.

It's A Sin To Tell A Lie

This song is associated with Fats Waller, though he did not write it, Billy Mayhew did.  If you prefer his version, or Billie Holiday's, I won't call you wrong.

But I put this out because I had not realised Steve Goodman from Chicago (died young, featured here before) was this good a guitarist. Because Arlo played the "City of New Orleans" and it has been covered more by folk and country artists since I thought if Goodman was good, it would be in one of those styles, not jazz.

Not Fighting Fair?

One of my clues as to figuring out who is fighting fair in an argument is to check who is changing the subject. It is often a motte-and-bailey fallacy, sometimes applied intentionally and deceptively. Or it might be a hobby horse, as noted in my previous post - a topic that someone just keeps wanting to get back to. They see the world though a particular prism and don't really want to listen to what you have to say. Let me tell you about the aspect of this topic that I think everyone should pay more attention to.  

I don't often credit the idea that perhaps more people are just fuzzier in their thinking than I expect. Maybe they are doing the best they can, but that just isn't very good.

As Colin Kaepernick came back into the sports spotlight briefly, he is a good example. Discussions about Kaep were not as bad as the Tim Tebow Effect, but close, and similar. To my mind there were only a limited number of logical discussions that might be had, which we avoided and had the illogical ones instead. Does he have the right to protest?  On his own time, absolutely. On his employer's time, only with permission. (Is the team or the NFL his employer?) Does the current practice of other athletes using their employer's time to make public statements change this?  Probably, though it shouldn't. 

My temptation would always be to point out that what he was protesting, that the police are targeting young black men, is not accurate, and also rather convenient for a young black man who has many young black friends. But that is seldom relevant to the actual discussion of whether young Colin is being blackballed and treated unfairly. Others would want to stress how very, very insulting the protest was, which is irrelevant, or how very, very important the topic is, also irrelevant.

Some would try to declare the question moot because he's not good enough to be an NFL quarterback anyway. That gets tricky, because it is a change of subject from the pure rights issue, but it does have a legitimate practical aspect. The whole debate likely came up because he did occupy that middle ground.  If he were much better, he would just get away with it.  If he were much worse, no one would listen to him. My non-expert evaluation that he was good enough to at least be a credible backup, but only for a limited number of teams, and he hurt himself by being a jerk who teams might hesitate over anyway, puts him squarely in the "maybe" category. There were less-talented QBs who still had jobs. However, many of them brought less-obvious advantages that he did not, such as being similar in style to the guy they were backing up, or being very good analysts in the film room, or being encouragers and teachers of teammates.

Yet the discussion would not just stand still and be examined one point at a time. I have focused on the unfairness of the disputations, but perhaps that comes from expecting more logic out of people than they can manage. They may be reciting cliches because cliches are all they've got. Or maybe it's just no fun to slow down and think about things precisely.

What Can You Just Not Refrain From Saying?

Those who know me in live space will recognise that I look like a person who has a multitude of topics I cannot just leave alone. They are correct, but I would counter-assert that they do not know how many things I just let things go. I actually do try and pick my spots.

I notice sometimes with others that they cannot refrain from commenting whenever one of their hot-button issues goes by. I am not much concerned about this unless they are speaking in some public manner.  In conversation, sometimes people are only half-listening, or just want to get rid of a topic, or just want to have something to say and have only that one idea. They didn't necessarily invite the topic, so it's best to give them a pass. Also, if the main topic of the public writer or speaker is near that issue, one would expect that the same topics always come up.  On The Glenn Show, race is one of the main topics intentionally, as he and McWhorter believe there are aspects of the discussion and facts on the ground that consistently don't get heard.  They bring up often how this affects both university education and the public discourse. Expected. 

If you tune in to a podcast about modern women, you should expect sexism might get mentioned frequently. If you tune in to a Christian podcast you should expect Jesus and churches to come up most episodes. The objection comes when the topic is purportedly something else, but you have to go inserting sexism or Jesus into it.  It's not that this could never occur naturally - it's just that it is unlikely that it always occurs naturally, week after week. So...two female professors discussing a movie for its linguistics content, and they have to, just have to mention the smallish incidents that go by that they find sexist.  One, ironically, had an exact mirror incident about a male character that she did not notice was sexist in the other direction.

Ann Althouse linked to a humorous TikTok about black men groaning over a woman injecting slavery into a discussion. 

We knew people years ago who could not get into any discussion about the Christian faith without bringing up the idea that praise is central and the churches don't teach about praise enough. Similarly, I can't picture any at the moment but I feel confident there were others who did the same with Gifts of the Spirit, as you couldn't get away from that topic.

There was news report about an assault, and one of the staff writers wondered if Will Smith slapping Chris Rock had something to do with people feeling they could assault each other. All I could think was "But isn't everything really about important celebrities? Can't we talk about them, who fascinate us, rather than some unattractive nobody in a hospital bed in a town I never heard of?" It would make a good comic bit for a reporter to ask the victim whether he thought Will Smith's actions had anything to do with it. There was a Credibility Gap* album years ago with a segment "Earwitness News," in which the newscasters were determined to uncover that marijuana had caused the MyLai Massacre. They forced the interpretation in. 

Ironic to listen to this now and reflect that the regular news actually does something close to this, but flowing in the opposite political direction. Projection, way back when? You can be observant comic geniuses and still project. 

For us, project number one is to get a handle on where we do this ourselves, reflexively getting on one of our hobby horses even when the topic does not call for it.

*This is the later version of The Credibility Gap, with names you recognise better.

Gates of Heaven

My wife: We have to wear what we died in for eternity!?

St. Peter:  That's right

Me: (from the back of our horse costume) What'd he say?

Oh Happy Day! We Did Him Slay!

Occasional poster JM Smith from The Orthosphere put this out for Good Friday.  His, I think.  It has a Chesterton/Lewis feel to it in sentiment, doesn't it?

Champagne flowed in Hell this day,
Corks flew, confetti sifted,
Satan triumphant pumped his fist
And was on shoulders lifted.

Oh happy day!  Oh happy day!
The cheering fiends exulted,
Oh happy day! They him did slay!
Scorned, mocked, rebuked, insulted!

With the smoke of Hell this night
Cigar smoke was combined,
For no more wall nor fortress stood
Twixt Satan and mankind.

And on the earth sagacious men
Were likewise pleased and merry,
Rid now they were, and evermore,
Of that bothersome adversary.

The means employed were not,
Alas, full fit for public boasting,
But the great end of that pest dead
Called for applause and toasting.

So as in Hell champagne this day
In temple and palace flowed,
Hands were shaken, backs were slapped,
And once grave faces glowed.

Oh happy day!  Oh happy day!
The cheering great exulted,
Oh happy day! We him did slay!
Scorned, mocked, rebuked, insulted!

Recumbent on a stony slab,
The corpse sagged, stiffened, cooled
Its wet blood blackened into scabs,
Spit caked where it had drooled.

The tomb was black, the tomb was still,
It was by all forsaken,
And from the few who felt no joy,
This tomb had all hope taken.

 

Ain't No Grave

We sang this to close Easter worship this morning.  I like the lyrics better to the Johnny Cash version, but I like this arrangement better. It is originally from a Pentecostal preacher in that far SW corner of Virginia, Claude Ely, in 1934.

Traffic

 Came in over the transom:  There's a Stairway to Heaven but a Highway to Hell. Does this tell us something about the expected traffic?

He Descended Into Hell

I threw the pastor off during Maundy Thursday service by saying that loud enough to hear during the Creed, though our denomination as switched to "Hades."*  In my ignorance I considered this mere wimping out, prettifying the reality. A day later I learned differently, as my second son's podcast at First Methodist Houston tackled the sent-in question "Why Don't We Say 'He Descended Into Hell' in the Apostle's Creed Anymore?" Teaser: Methodists have a different answer than everyone else for this.  They have gone back and forth. 

I was wrong in my understanding of why the Evangelical Covenant Church made the switch (though I still maintain not entirely wrong - there is translation justification, but we are still too deeply immersed in the Gospel of Nice in our originally Swedish denomination). As with many simple-looking questions of the faith, a wealth of fascinating material cascades upon you when you look at the creeds and what we have fought over. When things hit this level of complexity, however, I rejoice rather than despair. 

We depend almost entirely on artistic and poetic statements about heaven and hell. If you have read CS Lewis on why metaphorical language is inevitable in nearly everything of importance that is not strictly sensory, you will see why this could not be any other way. Not only do other religions, and even secular philosophies that purport to be foundationally neutral rely on such things, but sciences do as well. Physics is used to the charge because it is most obviously subject to it and has provided some defenses against it, but even things that are all equations are not really...all equations. Biologists pretends otherwise but keep slipping into intentional and even teleological explanations of evolution, the web of life, ecology, the definitions of life...everything.  I don't fault them for it.  We all try to remove as much of that from our language about Big Ideas as much as we can, but...we can't.  Or rather, we can, sometimes easily, but then don't sustain it for long.

So art, poetry, metaphor will always be there in discussions of heaven and hell. The actual scriptural references are few and point many directions in three-dimensional space. Most of those are from Hebrew, though some of those come from even earlier Semitic precursor languages, and there are uncomfortable hints that some of the Sheol, Abaddon, Gehenna, Hades language come from God-knows-where, long before writing. And for Christians it rapidly becomes worse.  If we have descriptions of Jesus preaching to the spirits in bondage, or of making some sort of descent, where would we have heard those? Hmm, they would have to come from the mouth of Jesus himself, our only witness to those events. (See also our account of the temptations in the wilderness.  Unless you have one of those words-as-magic concepts of God dictating in a particular language to the authors of scripture, so that they were strictly copyists with no understanding of what they were setting on the page, we are left with "that's what Jesus told us.  In a different language.") 

So he would have described these events in Aramaic, a language related to Hebrew. His followers likely discussed them in the same language. But when they came to write them down, well gee, no one wrote things in Aramaic much, that was just a local language.  Important stuff went into Greek. Or one of the Greeks that was around. By the time the creeds were being debated, Latin had come in as more important, at least in Rome. So we're talking about what the land of the dead/condemned/separated is like in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin.  We want it to be simple.  We want it to be "Textus Receptus  is in Greek, so we're calling that the real word of god and digging into that obsessively.  Yes, yes, we are deeply influenced by Dante and Milton, but we're pretending we aren't and this is the declared KJV reality.  Deal with it."

As I said, I rejoice whenever I see these things.  God is telling us that we can only come at this from many angles independently, because he wants us to puzzle over it and wrestle with it, not summarise it in a few sentences and go back to our regularly scheduled programming. It's why we wrestle with angels, why there is no "private interpretation," why Jews require a minyan, it's why we need two or three gathered, it's why we have a tribe at all rather than a one-page document dropped off at the Temple by Jesus who then says "Okay, I'm going off to die now as a sacrifice. Follow the rules.  See you in heaven."

*I go 50/50 on whether I say Catholic or Christian Church a few seconds later.  I don't think about it, I just roll into one or the other. The Covenant Church says "Christian," but a lot of the music I used to memorise it by used "Catholic."

O Sacred Head Now Wounded

 

From a Professor in Moscow

 Russia is Completely Depoliticized. Thanks to Ann Althouse for the heads up

The dominant attitude is to preserve your everyday life. A Russian citizen might say, “What am I supposed to do?” It’s impossible to imagine what would be the response to that. And of course, the government gives them the story line and the talking points to reject it, and they’re willing to believe it, not because they believe the propaganda — Russians don’t believe anything and anyone — but because it reconciles them with the reality that helps you protect your everyday life. I haven’t seen anyone so far saying, “I was kind of supporting this war, but now there’s just too much.”

Looking Down on the Cross

Caution: It is not for me to command what you should contemplate, especially without warning. Those who have children should be especially prepared to bail until another time, or even never. 

I always imagine looking up at the cross.  Up to a savior, to something greater than me brought low, yet still magnificent, offering forgiveness despite his pain, fighting through to think of those he loved. We put crosses up high in church, and on top of churches. Cathedrals were designed to dominate the landscape, to be above other buildings and features, with a cross atop them. When people want to advertise their Jesus they put him up overlooking the landscape, even way, way, up as in Rio de Janeiro. Lift High the Cross.

Tonight at Good Friday service, the Seven Last Words of Christ, I looked down on the cross, not for the first time, but I think for the first time with understanding.  Though I have heard the many Scripture verses about the Father giving his Son, with emphasis on how great the sacrifice; though I know the Genesis tie-in of Abraham offering his only son Isaac and the foreshadowing that "God himself will provide the lamb;" though I saw when still young  the Salvador Dali painting of Christ from above, I had not made it real.

Tonight, prompted by something in one of the songs we sang, I looked down and saw my own first son, bleeding and still alive, crucified. He was in real space sitting right behind me and I even glanced back in horror to make sure he was okay. But before my eyes even rested on him I saw his four brothers as well, all from above, all bleeding in a row, all still alive but crucified and I just started weeping. I never knew, I never knew.

I could not hold focus on any of them, my mind refused to go there.  I quickly cleaned it up by 90% to even stay in that space. I felt pity for the younger three, who understand much less about Christ and would be hanging there without understanding, simply puzzled and tormented.  Then I realised the the older two would not fare any better, nor could any of us. Who could? Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, which the Satan character repeats with great glee in Perelandra. 

Good Friday has always been solemn, and even sad. Now I am afraid of it and don't ever want to see it again.  That may be the proper response and spiritually uplifting, but I don't want it.

While We Were Sleeping

Again, language change happening under our noses. Around 1950, most people would have said that the past tense of dive is dived. Now dove is more common.  This is perhaps under the influence of so much time in autos and drive/drove, ride/rode. Language change often moves in the direction of assembling similar-sounding words under similar rules.* We used to prefer to use sneaked at the past tense of sneak, but now mostly use snuck. Even more recently, the use of sank for the past tense of sink is giving way to sunk, even from official news sources supposedly relying on one or other of the manuals of style.

There are regional variations in how quickly these are happening, but they seem to be happening throughout America.  I don't know about Canada and Australia. Also, these forms existed before 1950, but were not dominant.

I think of dived as something old-fashioned and believe I have always preferred dove. But snuck sounds slangy to me and I would still use the other form. I use sunk only with the "helper" verbs of "was sunk," "had sunk," etc - that is, as a past participle.  At least, I think that's what I do.  Sometimes when things are undergoing change we find that we have begun intermittently switched over without noticing. I sink, I sank, I have sunk is what I believe I invariably say.

Once a form is accepted as preferred, it is long before it is called incorrect.  It will be marked archaic instead. The forms that get called incorrect are the rural, the provincial or regional, and the new. Old forms just slowly slip away without our fully noticing, like a celebrity who dies at 96 and we say "Oh, I thought he had died years ago."

*Could got an l in its spelling for no reason except that it looks and sounds like should and would. No older form or root for it had the l.

Fixing Things, Ruining Things

 I have a friend who grew up here, has lived in a warmer climate the last few years, and came back. She grew up in the city, but later lived in a rural suburb while in NH. Returning to the city after lo these many years she is distressed by the homeless, and more acutely aware of the cold they experience.  She goes into town and talks with them at various locales. She is tender-hearted - a good Biblical virtue, that - and the predictable things she has heard and read over the years occur to her. No one grows up wanting to be a homeless person/addict. We are a rich country, this should not be happening. Everyone's story is different.    

These things are true.

She noticed that the old intercity bus station, owned by the city, was closed over the winter. Why not open it up for people who have no shelter?  It's below zero some nights. I will note that what she seemed upset about to me is something that Other People should be doing.  I don't know what she has done herself, and that may be a great deal.  Yet I have learned that my first question should be "Is there something I can personally do here?"  And my experience is that people tend to ask mostly one question or the other. I think that speaks to deep philosophical differences. (See paragraph 7) She called a politically-connected friend who was once the Democratic candidate for governor in NH, who put her onto what local political figures might make this happen for her. 

Well, it might work, and a few people might get out of the cold next year. I am familiar with touching stories that are also real, of poor people standing by each other and forming small communities and helping each other out. In fact, that is what most people desperately in need of shelter are like, because they are mostly like us. It is unfortunate that we adopt the shortcut that because 20% of the poor are violent and abusive to regard them each as 20% violent and abusive. This is not so, and we have to keep pushing ourselves to relearn it. (And Christians have some interest in the 20% who are deeply pathological as well.)

However, I also know of some worse stories, because the desperate include a disproportionate percentage of people who have alienated others for good reason, or made decisions bad for others repeatedly. One very real possibility is that a few violent people will establish dominance over the new area and decent people will have one more place they can't go.  How can this be prevented?  Someone must supervise and enforce at some level, whether at entry or overnight or round-the-clock.  Where will we find them? Should someone exercise supervision over them? Paid or unpaid? 

To be frighteningly blunt, there are reasons why there are women-only shelters and all of the others make some effort to segregate children away from the general population. I think spontaneous community can be a beautiful thing, but it's only automatic at the Heartwarming Stories Company. 

It is difficult to make things and maintain them, but easy to destroy them. It is absolutely true that collective action working even somewhat smoothly can accomplish much more in terms of prosperity, justice, and safety net.  Jesus did found a new church, a tribe, not an unassociated collection of individuals who wave to each other and blow kisses. Yet if you start by thinking about what We can do, there is an immediate temptation to dip down to what Those Others can do, and very soon you are in a political or journalistic setting where making other people do things is all you know.

Lingthusiasm Quote (and pronoun discussion)

"If you assert that you can fully communicate ideas in emoji, communicate that idea to me using only emoji." Gretchen McCulloh, "Lingthusiam" podcast.

I think I'm going to be quoting this woman a lot.

I had a little more objection to the pronoun discussion about the recent move to allow individuals to elect to have they as a singular pronoun for themselves. Because I have long been irritated that we (supposedly) cannot use they to refer to an individual in such constructions as "All the students can come back and pick up their coats after school," I like the idea of lifting that ridiculous convention. English has used "they, their" in such a sense since the time of Chaucer.  It is the forbidding of that that is recent. So if we adopt "they" in the gender-neutral sense for an individual, then I get my wish about the everyday usage of "they" that I have had to work around for years in certain situations if I know someone is going to be sticky about it. 18th and 19th C grammarians - a category that should always arouse your suspicions whenever you read it - thought things weren't smooth enough, consistent enough, and put down various rules, as usual.  And as usual, most of those faded away but a few stuck. Such systemetisers often have an OCD, Asperger-y quality about them, trying to make sure they can construct rules that have no leaks and take in every choice. You may reflect on the tax code or highschoolers of my era defining virginity for how well that works.

However, keep that in mind.  I'll come back to it.

One James Anderson went completely amok in 1792 , offering up different sets of gendered pronouns for 13 different genders, including male animals alone, female animals alone, inanimate objects alone, animals known to be castrated and meant to be distinguished as such, male and females known to be such but not meant to be separated - what he called the "matrimonial gender"... you can tell he was not worrying about such things as what trans people preferred, but about making obsessive distinctions in grammar.

Because "they" as an individual pronoun will always sound like a plural to me, I do find it mildly irritating. I am also irritated by mandated language change in general.  I would rather have it be that if something catches on on its own, that's fine. I imagine the enforced "Ms" just sounds normal to most younger people now, but it still sounds silly and artificial to me.  Doesn't matter. My problem. I do dislike bad reasoning, however, and one of the arguments from the 2016 podcast grated on me. The thought was that those who were requesting the pronoun had gone through a great deal of thought and conflict about it, while for us as individuals it's a minor change.  The imbalance of those two were an argument. Having listened to a mother of a fifteen-year old who wanted to be seen as one type of nonbinary "sometimes" and another type "sometimes," all this springing up in the last four months and according to mom and sister, tracking her menstrual cycle exactly, I contest that strongly.  Admittedly, that is the worst example I encountered, but there are others. 

I later relented and thought that what the linguist said probably did look pretty true in 2016, and only lately have we had this run on people impulsively wanting everyone else to adjust to them - and then sometimes changing what they want a few months later. Also, we are discovering the same sort of obsessiveness we saw in the 19th C grammarians among the multiplying categories of nonbinaries.I dislike them both for the same reason.  I don't see the value-added.

Quotes by Clark Kerr, Chancellor of UC-Berkeley from the 50s-00s

“The chancellor’s job is to provide parking for the faculty, and athletics for the alumni, and sex for the students.” To be fair, he seems to have been talking about what the job seems to become if one is not careful, not what he thought it should be.

Also 

One of the most distressing tasks of a university president is to pretend that the protest and outrage of each new generation of undergraduates is really fresh and meaningful. In fact, it is one of the most predictable controversies that we know. The participants go through a ritual of hackneyed complaints, almost as ancient as academe, while believing that what is said is radical and new.

Thanks to commenter Ann+K over at the orthosphere for putting me on to him.

Comedians

Glenn Loury has a new episode talking with comedians at a comedy club about what can and cannot be said in this society, and if comedy offers an opportunity that is not available to others.  It is a promising idea, but I gave up on it quickly. It is a matter of audience.  Who goes to comedy clubs?  Disproportionately young, hip, single, or at least without children. As I am still in a mode of watching comedians, that is what I see when the audience is shown. Also drunk and out for a good-time evening. That is going to skew strongly liberal. Dry Bar is a bit older.

I could tell immediately as Glenn started that the topics he was bringing up were jarring to those people. A few of the comedians seemed ready to tackle some of them and whether comedy would be possible, but the discomfort in the air was palpable. They were quick to say that few or no topics were off-limits in comedy, but when they leaped in - one especially - it was clear that they couldn't quite imagine how jokes could be told about these things. She thought that the comedian only learned what was over the line by working the audience. Yet look at who is going to be her audience.  It's not a representative sample of the society. Not that we should protest that or deplore it in anyway, it's just what people prefer to do with their time and it's their choice.  Comedians who could find humor in those topics aren't going to be in front of that audience. Generally.

So it remains an open question whether some other style of humor could be used to broach these topics - satire sites seem to manage it at least somewhat, though social media censors the Babylon Bee pretty regularly. There are public speakers, Christian speakers who trade in humor quite a bit.  Those audiences are older, and they are often coming to get something else as well, beyond mere yuks. They are getting motivation, or a teaching, or are part of a conference.  But I think we can be clear that standard club standup comedy is not going to be that vehicle, because their is no audience for the comic to polish her routine in front of, so she can't make a living at it. It is therefore self-reinforcing, in that people will have in mind what type of experience they are going to be spending their money on, and will stay away from things they don't think they will find enjoyable. 

If someone listened longer and encourages me to go back and give it another try I will consider it.

Just Notes - Not especially organised

From the last 90 minutes of Razib's interview with Samo I decided not to work that hard, just report items they talked about, sometimes interjecting my own summary or thoughts.

Much was made of actions by countries that are overdetermined, because they have more than one reason for them. These are more common in command economies like China and Russia, but not unknown in more free-market states, which also attempt to use policy to set general directions, as in increasing tariffs, directing research, and protecting industries. A lot of attention is given these days to whether China will invade Taiwan, but there are levels to this.  Actually accomplishing the invasion of a well-defended island nation is equivalent to a moon landing in complexity. Developing a military port structure for that cannot be done invisibly, so what must be done is developing commercial ports that can be shared, disguised, repurposed, etc. And there is an obvious side benefit economically to controlling many great ports. Expand this out to airfields, shipbuilding and aircraft development, energy flexibility, access to key resources and a hundred other secular uses. The line from the space program to personal computers is clear in America, for example.  The follow-on effects can be enormous. 

Therefore, if the Chinese credibly develop this capacity - they do not have it now - it has all sorts of uses.  They can use it as a threat without activating it.  It could be readily expanded to the possible invasion of other nearby islands, such as the Philippines  or Indonesia.  Japan and Australia would be much, much harder, but would be on the same line.  We fear powerful nations acting irrationally - it does happen - and initiating military actions that are unlikely to succeed but could do enormous damage. Burja looks also at military actions which are not irrational, because they have been long prepared for. Just having them in your back pocket without using them is influential.  In that light, a failed invasion of Taiwan would only strengthen the alliance against China in the region: India, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam. But a successful invasion would weaken any such alliance, as nations would quietly make accommodation for events that look inevitable.

Speaking of South Korea, the observation was suggested that reunification with the North, desired by the South Korean left which is a significant minority, is not likely to take the form of millions of starving refugees pouring across the border, under gov't control or not, but more along the lines of the poor Eastern European countries in the EU moving to the richer nations for work. There are lots of Bulgarians in Germany, Romanians in Italy, Poles in Ireland. As SK  has a population replacement rate of 0.9 and NK has 1.9, arrangements might be made in which many young people moved south to work cheap, and the SK gov't could arrange some sort of money transfer to the north as a sort of stabilisation fund. The NK regime has to make some concessions, but gets greater security of not having so much trade isolation.  They might also demand that the US troops be sent home, and they would have a good point. SK might dislike the NK political influence on its affairs, but the enormously reduced threat of insane tyrants invading is a nice tradeoff.

With that idea of national actions having multiple reasons underlying them, let me put together the Lego pieces he thinks are important for Russia. England, Germany, and Russia, to name a few, are not particularly good candidates for a solar world. Russia does have some skill with nuclear power, and developing barges that carry nuclear power plants that can be towed to whatever city you like is something that can be made in quantity once you figure it out.  Cooling and safety are easier. You can keep them, sell them, or rent them. Natural gas is not a world-wide commodity yet, though advances in liquefication might make it so. But at the moment, pipelines are the answer. Most of Russia's natural gas is in its arctic region. Therefore global warming has some advantages for Russia as it opens ports up more days of the year. They are in fact already creating pipelines between cities in the arctic. They are also developing nuclear-powered icebreakers. Taken together, more ports, more ability to move NG. Even in that region, more ports is more trade. If warming slows, they still win with icebreakers and pipelines, just not as dramatically. 

Natural gas, which is an on demand source in contrast to coal which has to be run 24/7, and is at least somewhat cleaner, is the natural complement to solar power at present, even more than batteries. Russia does not love solar for itself - how could it? - but applauds German and other European reliance on it. If the US gets there first in liquefying natural gas it won't matter for long, as it will then be figured out by others soon enough.

Russia gets invaded by someone in the West about once a century. That seems like a lot to them, so they try to expand to their natural geographic boundaries in order to get "strategic depth." They have never cared in the least about the countries they run over and control in order to get this strategic depth.  On the other hand, the invaders haven't cared much about Poland, Ukraine, or Czechia either. They just don't try to control them in between. To Russians, everyone not under their control is therefore out of control.

Putin is leading Russia to hedge its bets by selling high-grade weapons systems to India, even knowing that they will reverse engineer them and become competitors, as China did to Russia before. This is because while it is now being forced to be somewhat dependent on China, having a backup plan of a strong India, likely part of an anti-China alliance in the hemisphere, is in its long-term interest. They risk angering the Chinese with the move but consider it worth it.

Whether you are bearish about China because of the demographics of a rapidly-aging population should depend on whether you are bearish about the planet as a whole for this reason, as they are simply the most vulnerable out of many.  Nearly everyone except sub-Saharan Africa, actually. If you think that the West will figure this out after some pain and adjust its economies with technology that overrides this chronic lack of young replacement workers, then it is likely that China will eventually get there too, just with more pain.  However, if you think the graying of the planet is only partly solvable in the near term and we are all headed for a world of hurt, then it is reasonable to think that it could be catastrophic for China.

When China starts pushing for stricter international intellectual property enforcement, it will not be because we have persuaded them to behave and stop stealing stuff, but because they perceive themselves as now winning in the innovation race and have more to gain than to lose. (Libertarians will note that this is similar to what licensing and much regulation is, of people trying to pull up the ladder behind them once they have gotten ahead a little.) That day may not be far off, as many improvements by the Chinese now are not just stealing ideas and cutting costs with cheap labor, but actual steps forward. Note their improvements in battery technology, for example. It is the same as what Japan did in the postwar period, but China has 10x the number of people. Samo thinks that Chinese innovation has historically not been as good as Western, particularly North American, and their ascendance is likely going to be temporary.  But that "temporary" might be 2030-2050 leading the world in innovation, a result of their full-court press to steer all their young talent into fields good for the economy or for international prestige. 

Razib and Samo discussed bureaucratic decay, and Burja declared it so automatic and predictable that it is nearly measurable and should be factored into every evaluation of an institution, and industry, or even a country.  For all its new-worldness, America is the oldest democracy, and many American departments, such as its military, State department, and security agencies, have not changed in structure much since WWII. A people's tendency for innovation and independence can only take you so far, and in this case those have obscured and disguised our institutions flaws.  they possess a great deal of knowledge - often far more than we give them credit for - but their assumptions cause them to misdirect the application.  Khan thinks that it also feeds elite corruption, and notes that American military interventions have been less and less effective, even with technical superiority, as the decades have gone on.  We are no longer nimble. Burja gave the example of Russia needing naval vessels to intervene in Syria and simply buying commercial ones and repurposing them, which was extremely quick and cost-effective.  That the ships were not perfect for the job was irrelevant. He noted that it would be impossible for the Pentagon to do this.  It would take years, even decades to get a new type of Mediterranean transport ship up, and by then it would be obsolete.  We are no longer nimble.

Because of this they agreed that American military interventions are likely to get less and less effective, regardless of whether they are a good idea or not.  We have relied on technical expertise to override our failing systems, much as colleges have gotten less good at transmitting knowledge even as knowledge has increased because perverse financial incentives have siphoned off resources and energy. Those flaws have not only become institutionalised, but are now even applauded and regarded as the point of the university. He sees the military as well on the road to that already. Better technology and better training will not cover that forever.

Commenting

Bird Dog has long noted that for some reason he cannot comment here, though he occasionally wants to. Franknbean has just mentioned the same thing.  HMS Defiant, and sometimes others (randomly, unexplainably) always show up in my spam folder, ever though his comments do come through.

I have had problems commenting at a few sites, sometimes fixable by not entering my website address at all, sometimes no matter what.  Any of you who have insight into these matters, I welcome your discussion.

Race and Police Violence

The Quillette article Studying the Link Between Race and Police Killings is a good summary of why results can appear contradictory or inconclusive in different studies. Advocates, of course, pick the studies that show what they like and trumpet those. The rest of us have to have higher standards than that.

Consider, as a thought experiment, data showing that a white police officer was less likely to shoot a black person once the officer had unholstered his or her gun. On the surface, this would look like evidence against racist intent. But this inference becomes much weaker—and perhaps even unsustainable—if one considers the possibility that officers are significantly more likely to unholster and aim their weapons at blacks to begin with. This field is full of puzzles such as this. 

Thinking Outside the Box

It's overrated. It's really easy to do, I've been doing it since I was 13.

OTOH, there is a level of deep outsideness that actually is valuable, the kind which says "Box? I see no box," not merely as contrarian "What is reality anyway?*" popular among the clever but not brilliant. I do respect that. But its rare, and the imitation of it just grows tiring. It is common in the arts. Oh, you're incorporating Native American rhythms into your jazz/pop?  How quaint.  I've been experimenting with Mongolian throat-singing myself. You do deserve some credit, I suppose, for being the only kid in town who was listening to that radio station in the 60s and playing in 5/4 time, but it's modest. Modern art seems to be forever "starting a conversation" about whatever, challenging your expectations.  Extra points if you work in blood, sex, texture, or animals. Yawn.

In Modernism, it became popular to praise something as being original, as if that were some great accomplishment in itself.  I bought into that when I was younger, fading as I got toward the end of college but persisting for years after in at least some form. I don't think we can blame the Europeans for this one, as it grew up in the American expansion, with ideas of American newness, originality, and independence. The original colonists were intent on preserving what was best from their European parent cultures, not only the British, but the French, Spanish, and Dutch as well. Even the Scots-Irish, who we associate with the frontier and that idea of American self-sufficiency, did not start that way, and subsequent changes were adaptations to new environments, in which they tried to keep the stripped down essentials of the old ways in the new circumstance. Circuit-riding preachers were somewhat of a new thing (not entirely), but what they brought was the foundation for the KJV-only, four-spiritual laws theology still used in those areas today.  Not wrong, necessarily, but missing some pieces. Cattle-rustling as a career, and the defenses and punishments against cattle-rustling weren't new, they had been common in Scotland and Ireland.  They were just new in America. There was a lot of rhetoric about newness and originality in America, but preservation remained the norm for a long time.

Even though the Wessex-dominated lowland South colonies were the traditionalists, it was the Puritans who had the peculiar horror of "novel" teachings, and novelty in general.  It might be a New Jerusalem here, but the emphasis was on supposed return to NT theology and practice. 

We could say that the radical idea that newness was good in itself was the main new idea. Technological innovations fueled the concept, as those were visible improvements. Yet all regions and movements revered tradition and mere oldness for many decades of American history. Still do, really. We still notice that the West Coast is different, having collected many of the fans of newness from the states back East. It has been the big cities of the world that have usually served that function of attracting experimenters, and we have that, too. But America has that extra overlay of admiration as a whole for such folk.

Claudia Stokes, author of Old Style: Unoriginality and its Uses in 19th C US Literature (Expensive academic book, but you can read the introduction at the Amazon page, and I thought that was enough for my purposes) applies it specifically to literature and captured some interesting aspects I had not thought of. What we would call unoriginality now was admired in literature because it showed knowledge, understanding, and mastery of classical learning. It was not only religious, as in How much more understanding of God than St Paul do you think you have, Jasper? but also the revival of Roman and especially Greek thought. A writer had to show that he knew Plato and Aristotle, not just experiment with new rhyme schemes. Even in the 20th C a TS Eliot might be a great innovator, but packed his poetry with classical allusions. "April is the cruellest month, breeding..." is not merely a description of postwar devastation and discouragement.  It echoes the first lines of "The Canterbury Tales."

Those who came after untethered further from the past, and revelled in it.

But in the 19th C there was an additional use for literature, especially by women for girls. Women used poetry and novels to show how adult women should live (and more or less obviously, how they thought men should live as well). Girls were expected to show they understood this by imitating it. While women did introduce a good deal of new perspective and literary innovation, these were generally within the confines of highlighting the themes of adult responsibility, of delivering care to the overlooked and unfortunate, of remaining calm in crisis. Male writers did it as well, though more often in popular literature than in what we now look back on as high literature, in Hawthorne or Melville. Men might record adventures in strange settings with exotic names and inhabitants, but the underlying themes tied them to the values of grandfathers: honor, loyalty, honesty, courage. These things still apply however far you go from us, son.  

It is relatively easy to find someone who can rattle off a hundred alternate uses for a brick, as one old creativity test used to measure. Sometimes it is useful.  But we overvalue that sort of originality. There is a team-building exercise which I have come to dislike, of setting a team some physical task, and then ramping up the expectations greatly, to what would be impossible levels under the original directions.  The trick is supposed to be that someone notices a way to - well, you could say "transcend the rules," but you could also call it "cheat." To those who protest that the solution is cheating, the instructor is supposed to note that our assumptions limited us.  He - these leaders are nearly always "he" - never said you couldn't do this or that! Yes, technically true, but tiring.  It is a useful lesson to check your assumptions from time to time to see if there is some legal way around your obstacle. But it is not enormously useful. You get the occasional breakthrough, but come up empty the next week and the week after for further improvements.

*Classical reference: Firesign Theater

Update on Policing Your Own

It occurred to me while out walking that this ties in to my previous posts about humor, and being able to make fun of your own as well being a sign of health and reliability. There was a time until the mid-80s, that as hateful to conservatives as he could be, Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury could still make fun of liberals.  This allows his usual opponents to sit with him much longer, and sometimes even be influenced, as in Y'now, this time he has a point.  That guy IS ridiculous.  

My best example has always been Garrison Keillor, who I very much enjoyed even though he was on NPR and clearly preferred liberals. I thought some characterisations of conservatives were over-the-top but I could stay with him. But when the change came, it was in both directions and made him intolerable. He made fun of anyone on the left only in that Reduced Shakespeare Company way, of accusing liberals of being over-intellectual, and his criticism of those on the right went from affectionate accountability partner to vindictive prosecutor.  It is not accidental that these changes occurred simultaneously.

It matters, and similarly in serious material where no humor is intended.  When you can't turn around and criticise the nutcases on your own side, it is not merely a matter of reduced effectiveness (though that is worth noting), it constitutes ceasing to be reasonable.  On the left, it is often valuable to criticise America all the way back through its history.  But when you cannot endure hearing even a mild approval of the country that you learned these elevated values in, reflexively pointing out some vaguely-related criticism at every turn, it is not just that you are being insulting and are losing your audience in a tactical sense.  It means you have become unreasonable, even stupid, however smart you were when the whole discussion started.

Lingthusiasm

 Grammar is really just an agreement between all of the people who use that language. Lauren Gawne, Australian linguist, on the podcast "Lingthusiam" with Gretchen McCulloh, Canadian lingusit and author of Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing. (Which looks like great fun and I have put it on inter-library loan request.)

We think of grammar as something a bit holier than that if we were raised in previous generations, but that has always been the truth. Grammar rules got put in place by oh, just anyone who felt like it and some of them caught on, in parallel to the middle class arising in England.  The elites wanted to maintain their superiority by speaking properly, but as with any regulation, one can game the system immediately and the rising classes bought books to learn how to imitate them.

But do not despair. If something is an agreement between us all you can go as slowly as you like adopting the new ways. I do recommend you understand the nuances of changes as they happen, but you don't have to use them yourself.

John McWhorter recommended the podcast in connection with his interview of McCulloch and I have listened to an episode and put the whole series on my list.  I learned that aliens apparently speak in Object-Subject-Verb order, as this is both Yoda-speak and Klingon. It is the least usual order among Earthlings, who usually speak languages with Subject-Object-Verb or Subject-Verb-Object. Gretchen speaks too quickly (like I should talk), but I adjusted to that and recommend it.

Literature Change

 Darn kids don't even know how to shoe a horse these days.

There is a trend - not an absolute but a shift - in what is chosen for children's theater now as opposed to two generations ago. It is a trend away from literature and towards branding. We saw the oldest granddaughter in a Disney-branded play last night, and there are other scripts among those groups following the Glee or High School Musical brands. I don't think there was anything like that fifty years ago. Even when a script is literature-based, it is likely to be an adapted script specifically for young people.  Sometimes it carries the tag "Junior" to let you know that, as in "Matilda JR," based on a Roald Dahl book. "Little Women" looks encouraging, but it is a musical now.

If the participants were all pre-highschool I would say there was only a slight change of emphasis in the unfortunate direction of regarding this moment in time as the center of all existence (Chronocentrism, or "chronological snobbery" for those of you following the mid 20th C Inklings framing). At some deep level I do dislike the increasing denial of all that is past, but scripts for that age group have always been mostly elevated skits, obvious humor, and superficial.  I was in such nuanced literary endeavors as "Hicks in the Sticks" and an actual minstrel show as a boy, and if you were an evangelical in the 1990s, there was always Psalty. 

But this is more worrisome as the lead actors are all highschoolers. There is a gradual movement away from what we used to call legitimate theater. 

Many of these are the local children's theater groups that draw from many schools and have to do this sorts of large-cast dance/chorus production to sell tickets to lots of grandparents and sibling. They won't be doing any legit theater at all. Theater companies have for years done an annual musical to make enough money to fund the rest of their offerings. These were often drawn from the Golden Age of Musicals, and many of them were pretty fluffy. But even large high schools didn't do these much. Too many volunteers needed. The improvement in recorded music, both for performance and rehearsal, may have made such musicals more accessible. 

I did some fluff, as I said, but I also had done "Death of a Salesman," "West Side Story," and "Tom Jones" before I got out of high school. There was a lot of repetition in what schools did, as you could learn from conversation at competitions. Everyone did "Our Town," ("The Skin of Our Teeth " might have been better) and/or "The Miracle Worker" and/or "A Christmas Carol." The large, rich, and ambitious schools in Northern Virginia might even attempt Shakespeare now and again. I don't recommend that, BTW. There were many forgettable scripts that made you wonder what English teacher forced into supervising the theater club this year thought this was funny. Or significant. Still, the intent was to make this instructive for the student body and even the community as a whole, at least some of the time. 

Well, we'll see when the girl gets to high school and I follow more closely exactly what is being offered, rather than just reading off the signs that they are doing "Seussical" this year as I drive by one school or another. I have read these automatically for years, and don't recall any dramatic or strong literary history offerings over the last twenty years.  I imagine there was something.

*****

This particular script was clever but objectionable in a very typical theater/Disney/popular culture way.  The moral lines were drawn between the good people on one island and the evil people on another, and Surprise! the children of the good people turn out to be mostly prissy rule-keepers with a mean streak, while the evil Descendants are cooler and sexier, just a little rough around the edges. It is the latter who quickly learn true goodness. Some actual villains are portrayed as evil, at least, and the most moral character is drawn from the pile of the good side. There's that. There is the positive value that things that are valuable require sacrifice - Disney does that well - and as it is American Musical Theater one can hardly mind that romantic love is the most precious thing and conquers all. It is just morally wearying to have to fight this battle about the union of good and evil everywhere, even in our innocent entertainments.  It's the spirit of the age. And the last age and the one before it, too. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Reverend Mr. Black

I always saw this song listed in Kingston Trio collections, but I didn't grow up with it, as any son of my mother and 60s coffeehouse folksinger might be expected to have been. There is also a good Johnny Cash version, but I like this one best.

It captures Appalachian sentiments on a coupla three levels. First, it looks like it is about one simple, actually oversimple idea, that it takes a strong man to turn the other cheek; but upon further review there is the almost hidden but devastating complexity of including the idea that having "to walk that lonesome valley by yourself" is enough to stop an angry, powerful man in his tracks.  And it is.  The Reverend Mr. Black fells the lumberjack with one sung sentence, and when we run it over in our minds we realise it is true. Whatever pain and anger you are bringing here son, the answer is not in hitting me, but in a personal journey you have not yet taken. We know immediately that most listeners won't pick up that meaning, being stuck on the first one.  But it's there.

Secondly, there is the common theme of lonesomeness from the hills, which hovers in the background of a lot of Appalachian music and writing, ignored for decades until maybe the 30s and 40s and then noted for decades, once people got around to the idea that "Hey we should actually go up into the hills and ask these people what they are all about."

The region is from its inaccessibility a very secluded one. There are but few roads—most of them little better than mountain tracks—and practically no railroads. Indeed, so remote and shut off from outside influence were, until quite recently, these sequestered mountain valleys that the inhabitants have for a hundred years or more been completely isolated and cut off from all traffic with the rest of the world (Cecil Sharp)

The word “lonesome” plays a large role in many songs from this region, including “lonesome dove,” “lonesome day,” “lonesome night,” and “lonesome grave,” among others. In addition to loneliness, these songs often carry a melancholy sensibility and helpless fatalism in which the characters in the narrative are caught in events over which they have no agency or must live with the consequences of actions they have initiated. “Lonesome Valley” seems to be the most prominent usage in the “lonesome” family and somewhat iconic in its own right, even used as the title of a novel by Henry Hornsby, Lonesome Valley (New York, 1949)

They became celebrated and cool in the 60s and especially 70s, in the creation of bluegrass (a fairly modern amalgam of several old-time musics), the fascination with various "roots" musics, the Foxfire books, and the back-to-the-land ethos, so we now don't quite fathom how unknown this region was to most of America. After the wars many in the 50s moved down to find jobs in Cincinnati or Atlanta or Charlotte and even their own children only went back a few times. Its cultural distinctness was not a mere pose by the residents or an affectation by the hippie and folksinging visitors but a reality. David Hackett Fischer and Albion's Seed has a good summary of the founder effects, but the isolation was greater than it had been in Scotland and certainly Ireland for the simple reason that there was more land. Dirt-poor hillbillies in West Virginia had more land than lairds in Scotland. I believe that isolation was as powerful a force as the exodus from the siege of Londonderry because it lasted 200 years.

There are questions in the song.  What in the world does this lumberjack have against this man, or preachers in general?  We are not told. How can the Rev Black preach hellfire but let this man off the hook?  It doesn't fit the theme. This is typical of the stripped-down lessons of the region, told in stories like parables. The horse, the admiration for a father, the idealisation of a man of the cloth - these are are all common decoration on the Appalachian tree. But they are mostly there for atmosphere, not quite part of the lesson.

If you want a slowed down portion of that core song "Jesus Walked That Lonesome Valley," here is a personal favorite, the Fairfield Four.  They sang this in "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?"

It should be noted that there was a mid-19th C African-American spiritual called "Down in the Lonesome Valley," though we have neither lyrics nor music for it. That could also be a source for the song that the Reverend Mr Black sings, if not the song about him.  The categories that we make now for songs and their origins did not exist then.  They were passed back and forth.

Reporting the Opposite of What Your Study Says

"Truly Alarming" was the comment from the statistician who sent me this. 

From Jesse Singal,yet one more liberal increasingly going off the reservation: Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite. 

It is from a study in JAMA out of University of Washington-Seattle. It makes repeated claims, some of them explicit and dramatic, that gender-affirming mental health care reduced depression and suicide. Its own data says there was no such reduction.  Thank you Jesse. 

Among the kids who went on hormones, there isn’t genuine statistical improvement here from baseline to the final wave of data collection. At baseline, 59% of the treatment-naive kids experienced moderate to severe depression. Twelve months later, 56% of the kids on GAM experienced moderate to severe depression. At baseline, 45% of the treatment-naive kids experienced self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Twelve months later, 37% of the kids on GAM did. These are not meaningful differences: The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems. (Though as I’ll explain, because the researchers provide so little detailed data, it’s hard to know exactly how dire the kids’ mental health situations were.) 

As depression and suicidality fluctuate over time and often revert to the mean from the panic point where someone desperately seeks care, I would argue that there is some chance that even these insignificant improvements might be illusory. We are in a culture where people get angry if you don't give them what they think they deserve from treatment, and such folks can get worse and blame it on their clinic or doctor.  I have seen many people come in a "crisis" hoping to get a medical marijuana card, or a referral for an expensive treatment their insurance won't pay for, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation.  When we don't obey them, they get worse. Sometimes this is manipulative but not always.  I wouldn't assume that. Our trans patients were one of the three overlapping categories of people who got outraged if we didn't do what they said. In those cases it is again, not necessarily instrumental or manipulative when they do this.  Given their personality structure, they really do believe they have been disaffirmed to such an extent that they are staring into the abyss, fearing annihilation. Hence the repeated trans complaint of "denying my very existence."  Because they do not see the world as we do, they do not use these words to mean the same thing that you or I would. Feelings in the moment are everything, and it is not merely immaturity or lack of a limit-setting by their parents that causes this. It may not be true, but it does really feel that way to them.

And come to think of it, if you have a gender identity that is a house of cards, assembled from things other teenagers say, plus your feelings and your still-limited actual experience in the world, there is some truth to its being in danger of annihilation.  Those of us coming from another world not founded on social media can insist there is a more solid world it would be better to depend upon, but they have little experience with it.

Policing Your Own

Interesting study about media reporting, (twitter thread by one of the authors, with followup here) and it ties into the lack of media scrutiny in Sweden over covid. I have a discussion link for that too, though it is from an Australian woman who I know nothing about, and thus am uncertain how much she is shading or cherry-picking her information.  I will wait until I have a better. As we are used to twitter threads being used for rants, sometimes quite clever ones, we lose how much actual research scientists are using the form to talk with each other now.  This is especially true as here, when the study is in preprint and not yet reviewed, and they use twitter as something of a group editing function.  Did we miss anything?  Does this mean what we think it does?  Are there downstream implications we haven't been thinking of?  Is there other research that bears on this? I was surprised a few years ago listening to Razib and Spencer Wells talk about genetics research coming out this way. One of them laughingly said it is so common now that they were suspicious of research that showed up in a journal which no one they knew had heard of before. It seems to be the new version of peer review, a system that worked well until a few decades ago but has gradually broken down because of volume and specialisation.

The study paid regular Fox viewers to watch CNN for 7 days, then asked questions. They tried to get funding to do the same with regular CNN viewers (who they openly stated they thought would be as bad or worse) but were unable to.  What they found - oversimplified - was that it didn't change their votes, but it did affect their willingness to call their own side to account. Being exposed to another POV made you more willing to call the worst of your own side out. This strikes me as a very good thing in itself.  

WRT Swedish media reporting on covid triage, reporting basically wasn't there. Even months later it was unreferenced and Swedes had little idea that this had happened. Even the government commission appointed to look at the whole response, while it did include some critical information, did not include the switch from active treatment to palliative care as a matter of common practice. Parents were encouraged not to tell others if the children had covid as it would "spread fear."

The thread I was reading also noted how discouraging it is that our initial estimates of what was going to be required for herd immunity were too low. There was some prediction that 60-70% was going to be enough to at least greatly reduce spread. That turns out to not be close, and estimates of what will be necessary are now more likely to be 90%.  This is territory where I have no expertise, so I can't get a sense of whose answers are better.  Because one of the things I rely on in such matters is noticing who is fighting fair, I am hampered when no one in the discussion seems to be accusing, posturing, or ignoring the others. I also don't always have a clear idea of the value of various credentials on the issue. Is a epidemiologist better than a statistician here?

Yet back to the point of the study. I had not predicted any such thing, but once heard it makes a kind of intuitive sense. When you see what the other side is actually getting exercised about, you find that it is somewhat different from what you have been told they are exercised about.  I have long complained that liberals do not often refute conservative arguments because they don't even know what those arguments are. Working among liberals, and within a media universe that is default liberal, it has been frustrating to keep hearing "well, the conservatives think..." and have it be something that I knew a few people who thought that, but mostly, no, it was a fringe opinion.  Over the last few years, and not just around covid, I have seen the same thing from conservatives, and conservative sources. The usual tactic is to find particularly egregious examples of something an opponent has said and blasting that out as major news. 

When one reads or listens to the actual source, one finds what they are more often saying.  You might still think it is wrong or stupid, but at least you have the data right.  This in turn gives you into an insight into your preferred sources.  You start to notice that a few of them are linking to article after article of outrage about what those terrible Others are teaching our children or trying to pass legislation about in distant states, but you now know that this is not really happening all that much. You immediately notice that many of those articles contain exaggeration or supposition, or do not record possible responses from the players in question.  When it happens often enough, that source drops out of your rotation of places to check. With your newly freed-up mental space, you find that one of your less-used sources is actually a better one. You get some idea what sources - and what public figures - are more reliable.

One younger friend who has a liberal brother asked him what was a reliable indicator of what liberals are actually saying and he chose Vox. That was a couple of years ago and these things change, but it's a possibility. I used to be able to go to The Nation, but I gave up on that almost a decade ago, as I found that they were publishing those on the left who were merely dissenting voices, not ones who had solid work or represented at least some others.

QQQ

Politico Playbook, which unintentionally amounts to a daily letter from Mars that rehashes the bizarre thinking of the Democratic political class in D.C... (Kyle Smith, National Review.)

Samo Burja - Part I: The New Events.

Sorry that this is something of liveblog/stream-of-consiousness, with most of it being Razib and Samo with only slight commentary by me.

The first 30 minutes were taped after the last 90, which was at the time expected to be a standalone.  Razib had interviewed Burja about world trends, including a lot of discussion of Russia/China/EU/US. Before he had put it up the events in Ukraine started, so he went back and interviewed Samo about those, then proceeded to the original podcast. That is what I am commenting on here.

Burja points out that the mechanised invasion, slow-moving and attempting to deny air supremacy, is very much in keeping with longstanding Russian practice.  He does find the "gentleness" of the method, for example attempting to take airfields rather than destroy them, a bit surprising.  He thinks it is Putin's idea to at least leave the door open for a quick surrender, though he does not expect it. because war is always a shitshow, we overread the value of signs of Russian failure.  "If we had had smartphones during any major operation in 2003, in 1991...let alone smartphones during WWII, during the Blitzkrieg, we would have never-ending stream of video of abandoned vehicles, captured vehicles, vehicles out of fuel, soldiers deserting, and so on. War is just always a terrible, terrible mess." He speaks from schoolfriends' recent memory of Sarajevo and the like when he was growing up, and to a lesser extent, his own. He also speaks from diaries and recorded memories of many campaigns that supposedly went smoothly, if bloodily (like Normandy) that those there described as a clown show. People are hard to organise. Graded on a curve, even though the Russian efforts are a clown show, are a B-. 

European views are mildly sympathetic to Ukraine, but this depends on where you are.  In Spain and Portugal, people don't much care. If you are in Poland or Hungary, there is a view expressed in private, that Germany has gotten them into this mess, not spending on defense and buying Russian gas. He describes a meme going around of four flags with arrows. Poland to Ukraine: weapons.  Ukraine to Poland, refugees. Germany to Russia: Euros; Russia to Germany: natural gas. Russia to Ukraine: Invasion.  Germany to Poland: sanctions for violating EU rules. Yes, the EU just imposed sanctions on Poland and Hungary, not Russia. They are angrier about pushback for social issues like LGBTQ rights. Watch their hands, don't listen to their words.

I will insert here that my Romanian sons are reflexively anti-Russian, and thus are rooting for the Ukrainians even though they have no special affection for them. Neither of them analyzes the events much beyond that. The Russians have earned this attitude from their neighbors over many years. There are legitimate things one can point out about reprehensible behavior of Ukraine, or Hungary, or Romania. To focus on that is not straining at gnats, but it is swallowing a Russian camel. The Russians do not view themselves that way.  Historically they view themselves as the beleaguered protectors of order among ungrateful and irresponsible nations that keep embracing dangerous ideologies. **

There is a discussion of how poorly GDP measures an economy's effect.  Russia has an unbalanced economy, with its elite sector and natural gas affiliated doing very well.  Because so many Russians are still impoverished, we think it must mean the whole mess is unstable, ripe for revolution or at least social pressure.  They don't care. It is always this way, for centuries. Natural gas, not batteries, is the key point of support for green energy in Europe, because it can go on and off at will.  The American experience of focus on battery improvement is not so important to them. Therefore, whatever they say, the Western European left will not oppose Russia in practice. They don't care about their other citizens either.  They keep information from them in the media.* They care much more than the Russian elites about the peasants, sure, but nothing like American standards of even the most callous elitists here. Those people are expendable and always have been. That's why they fled to America. 

Other economies, even if they approve of Russian sanctions this time are paying attention to its need to ally itself with some alternative system. India, Indonesia, and African nations all know that they might likewise need a backup plan some day. Alternative systems might be partly interactive, partly mutually exclusive with the "western" economy of North America, Europe, Australia, Japan. The current alternative offered by China still isn't that good, despite its efforts.  But it's the only one out there, and it is likely to improve. Nations will quietly engage it as a backup plan. Iran has endured similar sanctions for years and waited them out while pursuing alternatives.  You can do that more easily if you don't care about your citizens. The last time there was an international transition was from the European-centered to American-centered. We see that as essentially unified and cooperative now, but it was not always so. 

There is some irony in that it was the US that has put in the most effort to integrate Russia into the Western Economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's also why Nixon went to China.  We thought that would work. We think other countries want democracy and free markets, only held down by autocratic elites, which we can pry them loose from. Maybe not.

We might picture that China has Russia by the short hairs at present, but Russia also offers some things to China.  It still has resources and technology. But even more, it offers a back door into the European economy, especially into Germany, that exercises leverage on European nations that would seek to punish China. Europe is more dependent on globalisation than North America. The next five years will be tough on both Europe and North America, but in the end, the US can create the backup internal resources to the global economy (which we should have done before), while Europe cannot. Samo sees their future as impoverishment.  France (nuclear power) and Great Britain (anglospheric connections) will do better than the others but still be badly harmed.  Norway may be hurt least of all. 

So does that mean we hurry to visit European tourist spots now while they are still roughly what we expect, or wait ten years until they are much cheaper and we stand in line with other tourists from China and India?

*Much to say in the future about this. Burja talks about how Western media also does this, left or right doesn't matter. There is the David Brockmeier report of the study about American partisan media followers being paid to watch opposing sources, and the news that Swedish media has not reported covid scandals they know to be true, and even appointed commissions have refrained from mentioning it.  Sweden triaged early covid and would not admit people with comorbidities (read: old people especially) to ICUs at all. They got morphine and died instead.

** Is this Putin sensing and embodying the Soul of Russia in the same way Hitler did for Germany? Is that the hidden explanation why so many talking heads keep wondering if Putin is crazy because of what makes no sense about this invasion? Does he see this as his final legacy as he closes his career, to "restore" Russia to its proper place?

Advance Notice

A two-hour podcast with Samo Burja on Razib Khan's show.  So much that I can't get my head around it all and want to listen to the whole thing again before commenting - and I don't know when that will be.  So if you are going for a long walk or ride, there is this discussion about long-term world events and Bismarck Analysis. Stunning, really.  So many topics came up where I thought "Yeah, I never thought of that.  And it's important." It's not on his site for some reason. Burja is a Slovenian now in America whose company does deep dives on long-term futures for (apparently) well-paying clients. He sounds smarter than me.