Pagans and Neopagans - Part Three, Chronology

Quick Chronological Overview.  I'll bet it won't be quick.

Prior to the coming of the Romans beginning (not really) in 55BC, there were Britons, a Celtic people.  They shared deep ancestry with the Germanic and Italic peoples and even cultural similarities, but were long-sundered cousins, and none of the groups would have recognised it. They had replaced the people who built Stonehenge thousands of years before. We are only now learning much about any of these people, because of archaeology. Records, not so much.

When the Romans really started coming in, they did not bring any Christianity at the beginning, but their elites increasingly included such believers, and by the 300s it had become the official religion of the Empire, and the elites especially embraced it. The conquered, peasant, heathen, string-of-negative-adjective Britons embraced Christianity very irregularly, and as the Romans left beginning in the late 300s, the older, traditional Celtic beliefs slowly became the norm again. We call this the Dark Ages, not because we don't like the Britons and think they are stupid ( though we did and that did influence later historians) but because they were illiterate and we have almost nothing from written sources about them, and even less from them.  A few inscriptions is it for the latter.

Entertaining digression, because that's why you come here, admit it: one can still find lots of people referring to the Ages being called Dark because it was the age of faith, when everyone was under the oppressive control of Christian priests. It's one of those ideas that just won't die, because so many people want it to be true. Facts are troublesome things.  The Dark Ages are in fact bookended by Christianity, which if nothing else, wrote things down. The Ages were Dark because we don't have any written records and have to stumble about in the Dark guessing where the deities, gold jewelry, and sugar cookies were being kept in this Age. Rather than apologise for this lack of solid info at every turn, I have decided to embrace it for this discussion. It is not just a joke, though I will treat it that way. It is highly revelatory what current scholars, previous scholars, 21st C popular culture and 18th-20thC popular cultures do when confronted by limited hard evidence.  If you are into historiography, you might find that contemplation more interesting than any spurious list of Anglo-Saxon goddesses who were really Spunky Gals on the neopagan sites.

Back to the cliffhanger, where we left the Romano-Briton elites being slowly abandoned by the Romans around 400. Archaeology keeps bending our dates so that we find the Romans started jumping ship ever-earlier, and the various Germanic invaders showed up ever-earlier.  Not really a problem.  We make categories in order to break them. The Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Franks started looting and extracting tribute in the 400s, and even the occasional Jute may have shown up for the spoils. They were illiterate, and we don't have records.

Scholars take a long time to say we don't know anything for sure but gee, this sure looks like it could be...

I suppose none of us can quite avoid that. 

The A-S peoples settled in like the owned the place over the next few centuries, until the Danes and other Vikings came in in the 700s and enacted the same scenario of looting, extracting tribute, then protection money, and eventually scooping up the best land and wives. The Saxons formed from villages and farmsteads to first The Heptarchy, petty kingdoms from about 500, eventually coalescing into the more familiar Mercia, Wessex, Northumbria, and East Anglia in the 700s. In the meantime, a few of their monks had picked up writing and history, and just as they were all starting to be overrun, began to record history, including what the pagans were doing out in the provinces.

Monks?  Oh yes, in the meantime after the Roman-Briton elites and their Christianity disappeared, there were external efforts made to convert the Angles, etc, and these had some success. Augustine (not that Augustine) came in and became archbishop of Canterbury. Also, Augustine had the tremendous advantage of landing at Thanet which 1066 and All That assures us is the key to conquering Britain. (Haha. Joke.) A lot of the Christianity wouldn't be recognised by too many denominations today, but they at least had the children baptised, got married in church, and went to Mass. This Christianity had penetrated enough that the Anglo-Saxons thought of themselves as Christians, whatever leftover pagan practices they had, and considered the invading Vikings The Great Heathen Army. But even those became Christian in the next few centuries. We won't get into that, except to note that when we find something pagan still hanging around in Britain today, we should remember that it could have originated in any of these historical layers.

The Danes were distant cousins, though no one treated each other that way, but they notably had at least some writing as well, just not right there in Britain at first. The Dark Ages gave way to the Okay, Darkish Ages.

Social Mobility

All this is known to (most of) this group. Why Does Everyone Lie About Social Mobility? (HT: Rob Henderson, again. I've still got a free one-month subscription if anyone is interested.  You can read a lot of archives in a month if you set your mind to it.) The reason I post it is 1) it is from a country other than America, 2) it highlights that it is not just a few eggheads - remember eggheads? - who are refusing to acknowledge reality, but the most powerful political players, and 3) it uses the phrase cognitive ability, which I think is not only more accurate than intelligence, or IQ, but less toxic in introducing the topic. I think IQ is a pretty good measure of group intelligence and almost as good for individual intelligence, and I think intelligence is a rough approximation of cognitive ability, but they are not all identical.  The brain does many things, after all.

Educationalists began to suspect that the problem was rooted in the very early years of children’s development, before they ever started school.  The Major and Blair governments responded with free child care and nursery school places for the under-fives, with a national network of Sure Start centres aimed mainly at poorer children.  Yet the government’s Social Mobility Commission found none of this had achieved much impact on the performance of the poorest children.

Yes, they found that things were not equal at 30, so the problem must begin at 20. Then they discovered that things were already unequal then and went back to 15, to 10, and to the beginning of school at 5. Upon discovering that they still hadn't found the root, they began to scour the territory for what must be happening in the neighborhoods, and then the kitchens, and then the nursery. Still there is inequality, with the same associations of poverty, and lack of parental involvement, and lower parental education, but somehow, anything that could be clearly identified as a cause remained elusive. BTW, if you want to make yourself famous and well-liked in psychology forever, find a causal effect other than heritability for outcomes. Getting hit on the head or eating lead will work, but you won't get credit for those, because you can't make political programs and educational systems with lots of jobs and prestige out of those. But if you can find a real something that can be implemented by educationalists, you will dine out forever and be invited to conferences.

What to do, what to do? Dare we look at prenatal influences? they thought. We could at least build programs around that, even if most of our people aren't trained in anything like that. And to be fair, you can get some good outcome stuff out of prenatal interventions. I'm all for it.  Load it up for government programs.  It's like if your kid wants to run track instead of play an expensive sport like hockey or lacrosse or golf. Arthur, you can have top-of-the-line track shoes and training shoes. Money is no object, son. Heh heh heh. I am pro- going crazy on prenatal interventions. Buy up everything in sight.  Give it away to rich moms, poor moms, irresponsible moms, pregnant trans men, everyone. That is, if we are now admitting that the other interventions from 0-22 are mostly crap and backing them down.

I will allow that severe nutritional deprivation - and I don't mean "food deserts" where the (usually ethnic) poor shop at Wal-Mart for starches and sugary things instead of at farmer's markets - and sometimes childhood trauma can affect outcomes, but even those don't provide the nurturist bang they were hoping for.  Because humans have endured periods of severe hunger intermittently in childhood up until very recently, even in the west, and even trauma seems to have its primary effects as it is happening, and decades later they are nonetheless getting PhDs and/or cuddling their grandchildren. The pain is real, but life is suffering, as the Buddha supposedly said. The theory that we are just genetic material that happened to survive and in some places prosper, wandering around believing that our conversations and exchange of information has any meaning may in fact be true.  About the rest of you, anyway.

But even that won't happen, because it gets too close to an uncomfortable answer. Dare we push our theory of causes back to...conception? They won't. 

As for the politicians, they are not even remotely thinking about what will work for poor people, whatever they say.  They are thinking about what statements will work for them. It is entirely instrumental, and does not pass through the abstract reasoning parts of the brain at all. They are amoeba searching for food and asexually reproducing entirely by instinct.

Economic Stability

"I remember the 80s as being an economically stable time, so long as I mowed the lawn when I was supposed to."  Benjamin Wyman

Origins

Rather than take up a lot of space in the Anglo-Saxon Paganism post - which remains unwieldy anyway - I thought I would take up the idea of origins here. We spoke of Anglo-Saxon and Norse paganism has having a common origin, based on similar names of deities and some evidence of similar calendar observances and burial practices, which often indicate something about religious beliefs. Also, we know that other parts of their culture (language, economy) show similarities, and now know that they share genetic affinities as well. That's fine as far as it goes, but we base it off something of a false picture of origins. We can argue a lot about previous and subsequent influences, but for many religions, we do have an origin point: Buddhism originated with the Buddha; Christianity originated with Jesus; Islam started with Mohammad. Let me switch to an analogy from geography and culture, which would not be inappropriate in discussing language and religion anyway. 

There is an American idea of freedom, and it is distinguishable from Pakistani or Japanese ideas about freedom. When you push it hard enough, it is even distinguishable from Canadian or English ideas of freedom, though those have greater similarities. There will be Venn diagram overlaps throughout, as not all Americans agree on what freedom is. Economic freedom? Sexual freedom? Religious freedom? But where does the American idea come from? Well, it doesn't come from anywhere, it emerged in colonial times as a development, combining and recombining elements from first, various regions and generations in Britain, but subsequently Native groups that were not themselves the same, and then different neighbors from Europe - French from Canada, Spanish in the south and west, Dutch in New York, and beyond that immigrants who came from diverse places. Central Europeans, Jews, and Chinese did not go equally to all regions of America. If you look for an origin, you can't say it's John Calvin or John Lock. You can't point to a particular tavern in Philadelphia (or London). Whatever ideas it started from, those were somewhat separate to begin with, moved to different environments, bumped into different peoples, and did not even interact with each other equally.  In particular, the coastal residents of colonial America had much more contact with each other than even their own literal cousins twenty miles inland. Boston was not Sudbury. Petersburg was not Yorktown.

(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It's more like the Danube Delta, above. What thread of water are you going to call the real one? Even the source of a river is seldom as clear-cut as we pretend. By convention, it is based on tracing back main channels and measuring greatest distance from the mouth.

There is no single  origin of the Indo-European language. If we could trace back in time even with exactness there is no spot we could say "There! This little village right here is really the starting point." Because we would have to say that it was only 20% of the starting point, and a village a ways away that had a lot of captured wives from a raid east three generations ago another 20%, and a third one quite a distance out, that had a lot more contact with Uralic languages, was another 18% etc. There was never a time when all of those spoke quite the same language. It was an I-E-ish area of pretty good mutual understanding and exchange of goods and marriage partners.

We can usually do pretty well identifying things in the negative. We can at least say what things aren't. We can see deities that are more identified with Celts than Norse, even if there is some mix. We can say that another was not originally Yahweh, even if the Christians of that area adopted in some aspects later. Unfortunately, we are often up against data that eludes our definitions. Is this type of metal disc worn on a helmet an animistic, shamanistic, or polytheistic practice? Not only can we not tell from here, we might not even have been able to tell if we were there. Yet we can often say "This was new in that time period, and looks deeply related to discs on helmets from this other culture they had recently come in contact with." 

In terms of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse, they have at least a couple of deities they do not share.

Algorithm

So now I know how the game is played. I have said in many other contexts in my life "Once you are keeping score, I'm going to figure out where to get points."

I listen to many podcasts, as you know, and they all stress how helpful it would be to them if listeners left a review. This has struck me as a bit silly.  I don't differentiate between 4.2 and 4.3 stars, and I don't expect others to. I also don't read reviews of most products. Maybe a hotel. Maybe a book. Footwear, I do read reviews of, actually. But mostly, I know whether I want it or I don't and have little interest in what others think.  Leave me alone asking for reviews.

Today, one of them mentioned that their placement on the app was dependent on an algorithm, and I suddenly got it. Someone might read your review comments, but mostly, machines are totting up your checkboxes of when you reviewed, what country and region you are from, how many stars you gave, etc. Lifeless data to me, but they might get something from it.  They will likely wildly overinterpret what they get and misinterpret the remainder, but the algorithm is how they keep score. It's like the SAT's, where your discussion of what discomfited means is not even noted.  No one is reading.  Move on.

So I'm going back and reviewing all my favorites. Once I know how they are really keeping score, I will get what points I can for my guys, even if it is minimal. There are no style points here.

Administrate

The term has long bothered me.  It seemed from that type of overcomplication that says "utilise" instead of "use," that popular language police from the second half of the 1900s were always railing about. Why not just say administer?  

I now learn that this is not a new creation, but dates back 400 years, back to a previous time when people showed off with big words in English. It keeps happening.

Funny, You Don't Look Jutish

Following Bede, we rely on the formula Angles, Saxons, and Jutes for those tribes which settled* eastern England from Denmark and the north coast of Germany. But there likely weren't so many Jutes after all, and other invaders deserve some credit/blame. It is more accurate to call them Angles, Saxons, Franks, and Frisians. Please make a note of it and enter it into your manuals of style.

*"Unsettled" would be closer to the mark, but invaded is no longer regarded as quite accurate either.

Reverse Basketball

 The caption was "Put reverse basketball in the Olympics, you cowards."

The Last Thing On My Mind

 Everyone covered this.  Which is true of many Tom Paxton songs.

Pagans and Neopagans - Part Two

One podcast and the Wikipedia article in, and I have got way too much stuff already. I'd like to see what Brittanica has to say, and of course I have some background supporting material from my hobbyist following  of the history, language, literature, and later the archaeology of the place and time.  However, previous knowledge mostly just gives you more cuphooks on which to hang the new information coming in, which may be wonderful for completeness, but is hell on summarisation and detecting patterns.  Ah well, we likely impose too many patterns that aren't there on our knowledge anyway. But as I wrote recently, we create categories in order to break them in our learning, but they are necessary for the initial learning of a subject.  

My usual second level of research is to follow the footnotes and references of both the written and audible overviews, and my third level is to go looking for writers who think those mainstream theories are mistaken. We'll see. I suppose I could just post "Here's a podcast or two, plus read the wiki and the Britannica, I liked them," but that isn't going to help me get it organised in my own mind. And it wouldn't give all of you much incentive to comment, either.

Updates on Part Two will occur, because I haven't really said much about the topic yet.  It's looking like a Part Three is also likely, and at the end I will have to have names to go with the numbers.

Pagan is something of an approximate description, toggling between a formal definition centered on polytheism and a mere epithet meaning unbeliever. I will hew closer to the first definition here. Classical Greeks and Romans were pagans. But many tribes of the world are animists and/or ancestor worshipers. Many have nothing that would qualify as a god or goddess, but have spirits, mostly dangerous and harmful, who animate springs or mountains, or that various important animals participate in the generic spirit of. The spirits cause disease of bad harvests, and sometimes diagnosis is required to figure out which spirit, or which ancestor, has been offended and needs appeasing. The Chinese have ancestor worship, and are not thought of as so much polytheistic, but Buddhist temples include offerings to local gods strewn about.

The Norse can be considered mostly polytheistic, but animism is never far beneath the surface, with dwarves, esse, elves, trolls, and the like populating the borderland between the visible and invisible. Think of The Wild Hunt, for example. Odin leads them, but is not always present when they are mentioned.  Christianity since the Reformation and Enlightenment* downplays these or even ignores them, but when the creeds talk about God creating all things visible and invisible, such spiritual creatures that moved about the world was much in their minds. Christians encountering the Norse categories would have places to slot tomten, nisse, and the like right in. Gods may be more of an abstraction and strike us as a step up from animism, but apparently this is not universally acknowledged. 

The Brittonic peoples who the Anglo-Saxon peoples started pushing out in the 400s (or earlier!) were more animist than the Germanic peoples. More holy springs, more burial mounds with unquiet dead in them, more wandering spirits looking to trouble the living.

At least, that is what we speculate, because the Anglo-Saxons seem to be pagans with similarity to the continental Germanic tribes. But we don't know, because the written sources are few, and we mostly say that because the few written sources we have record gods with similar names to the Norse ones. Yet we mostly know about those gods from centuries later and far away. If groups in adjoining valleys on the continent can have different legends about Odin, how much more can there be variation across, say 500 miles and 500 years? We have very little we can nail down.

*Yes, I know, I am on record as disliking both categories.

Pagans and Neopagans - Part One

I am not kind to neopagans in my conversation and I believe I have mentioned druids with irritation a half-dozen times here. I have regarded them as poseurs, relying on an imagined continuity with ancient pagans and misrepresenting what those ancients believed. Hint: they were not interested in "harmony with nature." Following CS Lewis, who saw a lot of good in them, I have looked more kindly on actual pagans, especially those that are safely in the past.

Neopaganism is often an extension of a milder set of imaginings that is not necessarily unhealthy. Many people feel a connection with others from the past, especially if they can be in the same place or believe they have some connection such as descent from them. Yes, the druids and wiccans are just as likely to be adopting their outlook in order to stick it in the eye of the normies and show how transgressive and freethinking they are, but I have focused on that too often. The gentler attraction shows up in the wistful words of legitimate historians talking about how they got interested in a particular site or subject, or even the field in general. "I wondered what it would be like to be standing on this bank as a soldier with a spear in hand, watching the fires go up in the camps across the river..." Or if something already has mystical associations, even more so. "When  was delivering my own first child unexpectedly out in the remote village where my grandmother's people have long lived, I thought about those other women, perhaps with only a midwife and another friend or relative nearby..." "I imagined what it would be like to be that potter, trying out the new design he had seen on the pots arriving from the south..." Nothing wrong with any of that. 

One way that it pretty obviously goes wrong is in making up what you think happened or they were like, not realising that your little narrative is not based on any historical reality, but only on the beliefs of your own era. Scandinavian artists of 100-200 years ago started increasing the number of trolls, elves, and women in the forest in long white gowns in their work, considering them important to national identity. But it seems they had been less important in previous centuries, and we don't fully know what they thought before widespread literacy. Romantic poets start believing that the industrial revolution has separated humanity from the land, and all these machines have destroyed our contact with nature, and pretty soon you have all manner of folk thinking their revival of pagan figures is teaching important lessons to modern woman and man, and the order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley are due to pop up any day (Crowley's parents were fundamentalist United Brethren, BTW). 

I do get frustrated when this infiltrates the church, as it pretty thoroughly has at this point, with frequent reminders to "get out into God's creation," or to contemplate its wonders in some large general way of appreciating natural beauty. This is virtually absent from scripture.  Those people looked at "nature" quite differently. Well, church camp is one of the few ministries that keep the young connected to the church, so perhaps I shouldn't complain.

Also, it seems to be a major foundation of a lot of literature that I am devoted to, beginning with JRR Tolkien. The contradictions are large in my mind at present. 

I just learned that we actually know little for certain about Anglo-Saxon paganism. We make educated guesses based on associated knowledge and reports from much later.  I shall have to look into this. I guess I just started a series, but I suspect it is only one more entry. Still, I'm going to go back and add "Part One" to the title.

Alone or Together

It was quite cold and windy yesterday, so I cut my walk short, but it was sunny, so I wanted to see things. When I shrugged and decided I would just head west for a while to see things i haven't lately, my wife suggested an errand half an hour WSW, and I poked around a bit after that.  No new places. There are no roads I have not been on an hour in any direction at this point. I fancied that a superpower I have not much thought about but would be an enjoyable one would be the ability to teleport - with the car - an hour out in any of the eight directions and then start searching for serendipity as I drove around. That's getting into territories where there really are roads I haven't been on, or pullovers I haven't stopped at, or country stores I haven't gone into for coffee. If I'd had that superpower starting with my driver's license I might have eventually exhausted it and grown tired of it, like Gollum under the mountain, but at my age I would have enough to keep me busy until they take my license away. 

I enjoy that impulsively deciding I'm going to take one route rather than another, spending a less-efficient fifteen extra minutes on the trip but seeing places I haven't for three years, or five, or ten. I briefly thought how much more fun it would be to have my wife along suggesting the turns and variations that she would like. It immediately occurred to me that she doesn't find this anywhere near as much fun as I do.

Yet I think who is controlling the steering wheel has a lot to do with the enjoyment at such times.  I have been a passenger with friends (I am thinking of one in particular) who loves this sort of rambling about, and I soon tire of traveling with him. We grow less curious and weary of a road at different rates, hankering to get back to the main road and knock off some mileage, but not unhappy enough to object to what the driver chooses. We get hungry at different times, we want to see different things. We have friends who have been wealthy since they married fifty years ago who travel often, and seem to be of similar mind in what they will do. My wife and I would look similar in taste and knowledge to outsiders, but it seems less so to us. We don't want to see the same things, even when we want to go to the same places.

And of course, children complaining in the back seat makes that so much better.

It's a very different experience whether you are holding the wheel or sitting in the passenger seat in terms of searching out serendipity. My wife usually drives only if we are exceeding two hours each way, in which case she will start taking 30-60 minute shifts while I nap. But when you start putting in over four hours of driving in a day total, your desire for serendipity diminishes. There are lunches and stretches to arrange, B&B's to check into, and when the daylight wanes, the scenery ain't worth much. When I drove Ben to Houston ago it really drove home the lesson that after dark on the highway, the whole country looks the same. You get some variations in the restaurants noted on the exit signs (we don't have Waffle House up here), and if it's not raining a city skyline can be interesting even quite late, but mostly, Montana looks like Maryland on the interstate. The numbered secondary roads aren't that different either, just irritating because they do not behave as regularly as the freeways. When you can come over a rise and see some landscape in the daylight, or sense whether you are in thick versus light forest those roads are fine. But at 9PM you are stopping at a lot of red lights where you're the only one there, the little shops your wife wants to explore are closed, and the non-chain restaurants take on a seedy, even menacing air.  Not the serendipity you were hoping for. You need daylight for that when driving. Nighttime serendipity requires town centers.

We think we'll head for Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard this spring when there aren't any crowds. A good drive with some new territory and ferries are always fun. Unless you miss them.

Posting in Series

I post in series less often than I did in early years. I wonder if that is an example of my audience capturing me and changing me, as from the link that Eric sent along a week ago. I seldom get much in the way of commenting on those, though sometimes one of a set of five will attract a dozen. I get more of that reward from you for the little offhand things I post. I am aware of the difference in quality over quantity, though.  A lot of times you are just being pleasantly conversational, as I am when I come over to your places. You do tackle the more difficult matter in gratifying fashion. 

Sometimes I would set out to cover a great deal of territory on a subject I thought was being underplayed in my corner of the internet, but more often I would set out to write up a topic and find that it had rapidly grown unwieldy and divided it up into digestible bits. It is likely that knowledge that had been building up for years influenced the many series I wrote in the first 5-10 years of blogging, while I put new things up as I come across them now. Last fall I had so much new info about dating apps, intrasexual competition, the growth of nonstandard relationships over the last fifty years, and evolutionary psychology that it was swamping my thinking because it was spilling out all over, so I forced it into topics and did a series on Dating Apps and the New Polygamies. I had planned it as only a few links and comments, but it eventually attracted more organisation than usual and was eight separate posts.  And I thought lists were bad. But I feel like I covered a lot of territory and organised my own thoughts in better fashion. I now know what I would have thought was almost everything, but turns out to be only an appetiser sampler plate.

One Church

From a longer article about unity in the church from  our denominational magazine

As I have wrestled with Jesus’s prayer, I have become increasingly convinced that I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.  

This oneness Christ desires for us is not something we create or try to make happen. This oneness is a gift, a reality we receive from God. It’s a fact. We are one. Paul reminds us of this: “Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is part of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27, NIV).

A wise friend taught me years ago to notice that this is not an aspirational statement. It doesn’t say, “You should try really hard to be one body.” It doesn’t say, “If you all get your acts together and do what I’ve told you, you will be a body.” It doesn’t say, “If you love me, this is what you should be working toward.” It says, “You are the body of Christ.” One body. Christ’s body. (Italics mine.)

At adult class this morning I said something related, that sometimes we might be doing the right thing - in my case posting on a blog, perhaps - but doing it wrongly, without charity. I have said many times over the years that it may be that what we accomplish in this world matters little, but how we accomplish it, with love and service, may be everything.

I have said it so often that one might think I could begin to learn it.

Hyperstitious Slur Cascade

The phrase was a new one on me, though I picked pretty quickly what Alexander was talking about when I started reading.  I doubt I'll be using the word hyperstitious much, though I like the feel of that "slur cascade" phrase. Scott Alexander over at Astral Codex Ten discusses how words become slurs, and whether there is any sense in fighting such trends. Apparently Whoopi Goldberg just got suspended for using the word "gypped," because people who know precisely no Roma people and have never inquired whether any are offended (or even recognise that is where the English word comes from), have complained about the egregiousness of the offense.

In discussing words becoming slurs, he notes early on

Nobody ever uses the word “Jap” unless they are either extremely ignorant, or they are deliberately setting out to offend Japanese people.

This is a very stable situation. The original reason for concern - World War II - is long since over. Japanese people are well-represented in all areas of life. Perhaps if there were a Language Czar, he could declare that the reasons for forbidding the word “Jap” are long since over, and we can go back to having convenient short forms of things. But there is no such Czar. What actually happens is that three or four unrepentant racists still deliberately use the word “Jap” in their quest to offend people, and if anyone else uses it, everyone else takes it as a signal that they are an unrepentant racist. Any Japanese person who heard you say it would correctly feel unsafe. So nobody will say it, and they are correct not to do so. Like I said, a stable situation.

But what about when a word is not a slur, but a few people are trying to get everyone to start treating it like one? We see a fair bit of that these days.  Use of pronouns is an area where I am wondering how much energy I am willing to spend on a pointless rearguard action. If history is any indicator here, I will spend too much energy on pointless actions and not be especially repentant about it. Though sometimes I have seen the point and switched immediately. 

Yet we also accept that some phrases that used to be used commonly are in fact offensive, and others have become offensive by sheer weight of popular demand, and would never use them now.  Alexander discusses where along that line do you get off one train, how long do you just stand around on the platform waiting to see where the population is going, and when do you get on the train headed back in the opposite direction?

If you are an early adopter of taking offense, everyone starts to roll their eyes (or clench their buttocks) whenever you come in the room, but if you are one of the last holdouts, you really are intentionally offending people in order to make your point that no one should ever have been offended five (or twenty-five? or a hundred?) years ago and you are going to insist on purity of language. 

He gives an estimate that is not based on measurable data, but is probably still better than most people's estimate and decides that's where you will be happiest.  As always, it is fun to watch his reasoning and wonder if you agree.  I imagine he is right if we want to live at piece with all mankind, but it does seem to be giving in too easily sometimes.

What Worked on Covid

I have not read the comments. I already know what they will say. Tom Frieden writing at the Wall Street Journal is pretty forthright in his estimation of what reduced the number of deaths during the pandemic. Death is indeed the first number to look at. It continues to be reasonable to weigh this against lost jobs and financial hardship. Those were real and continue to have effects. Though as I never tire of pointing out, much of that was not government doing, but individual voluntary responses. I am less impressed by the claims of lost academic progress. Schools don't much matter to begin with, and individual student losses over the years, such as to extended illnesses, usually rebound within two years. I get it that some people have real mask hardship because of speech or hearing problems, and more occasionally impaired breathing, but mostly, it was an inexpensive minor solution that people just didn't like. 

Long covid likely exists, but all of us have tendencies to stuff our explanations for bad things into whatever basket is at hand. Measuring the number of years of life lost to it is going to be uncertain for a long time to come. It is also going to be difficult to separate from the increased traction that the Scientologists and other anti-vaxxers got through this, convincing people not to get vaccines, and thus decreasing health and lifespans that way.  Do we blame that on the illness, the government, the public, or those advocates? But the vaccination numbers are down, and we will pay the price.

Maple Syrup Again

This is bskings brother, making the local news for his sugar house. Video of cute child eating pancakes closes segment. 

We were there last weekend, and know the others in this video as well. Sap is still flowing, and this is a record year for every producer in the area.

Chinese Pie

My wife had chinese pie made with brisket and creamed corn at the restaurant tonight. I will sometimes throw in 50% peas to go with the corn, and sometimes broil the top of it considerably at the end, maybe with a little cheese.

There are a few theories where it comes from, including China, Maine, as it clearly comes from either Northern New England or Quebec, but the one that makes most sense to me is the Canadian railroad one. The owners of the railroad were English, and they wanted their shepherd's pie, made with lamb (yes, Grim's post today inspired this) and the carrots and peas common in England in addition to the potatoes. They hired Chinese cooks to feed the workers on the line because they were cheap. The Chinese cooks didn't much care about tradition, and they figured out pretty quickly that there wasn't much lamb to be had, so they substituted beef. Peas and carrots had some availability, but nothing like the corn that sprung up right away, in quantity, across the plains. 

The workers on the line building ever westward in Canada were Quebecois, and when they came home they brought the idea of "Chinese" pie, thinking that it must be some oriental version of the shepherd's pie that rich English people ate. There was lots of coming and going between Quebec and the northern parts of 802, 603, and 207, and once the mills came in in the southern cities of Manchester, Nashua, and even all the way down below the Mason-Dixon line into Massachusetts in Lowell and Lawrence, they brought the dish with them even more frequently.

Taylor the Nahamsha Hiker

She is just starting out.  The name caught my eye, but I don't know a thing about her.  I doubt I'll watch much, but I wanted to give her a shout out. She is from Gilmanton, locally famous as the eventual home of Grace Metalious, nee deRepentigny, author of Peyton Place. She was uh, known to our family and I wrote about her in 2006. But perhaps there's no scandal anymore. Grace died when I was ten, after all, and no one reads Peyton Place anymore. Maybe Taylor will be the name the small town is known for now.

This is her second through-hike, and she had a third interrupted. 

She is originally from Hopkinton, MA, where the Boston Marathon starts.

Lists of Lies

You can guess the topic that was featured on this one, but I'd like to stay away from that and talk about the journalism cheat of making such lists to begin with. It's a headline driving the story.

I like lists.  In fact, I love lists, and am uncertain whether to classify it as an OCD or Aspie symptom in myself. They organise things into nice piles. They give you the illusion of more control than you actually have over a situation. They create an artificial sense of accomplishment.  My roommate in college used to live by his daily list, and within a few weeks he had settled into a form that read 1. Get up. 2. Brush teeth. 3. Take shower. 4. Get dressed. 5. Have breakfast. 6. Read list.  He was already doing the first five without forgetting already, but found it very satisfying to cross off so many things right away every day.

I carried a yellow legal pad with my to-do list on it the second half of my career. I wrote "Don't Take It Personally" across the top of every page, not because it is the most important advice in the world, but because it is the principle I was most likely to forget in about thirty minutes every day. It was useful, not just an emotional crutch. There were things I could leave off the list if I had thirteen patients or less because I would just remember them, but abbreviations I had to put in if it were more. I've made lists ranking baseball players in history, lists of songs I might sing on stage.  I have nothing against lists.

But it was making my own lists here on the blog that exposed what's wrong with them as a device for publication.  If you are doing a Top Ten, one of two things will happen. You will either have only 7-8 real ones (which is why you mentally estimated there might be ten), and you are stretching to fill the list.  Or, you find that you have too many and have to create a three-way tie for one of the slots in order to fit all twelve in. If you make a list of ten best songs of the 60s, then 70s, then 80s you will very quickly see how artificial all the boundaries are, and that your framing is a mere advertising convenience. 

Top Ten Roman Emperors

Top Ten Sights in New York

Top Ten Bikes in India* 

Ten Best Life Insurance Companies*.

So if it's got the word "list" in the headline, we're already in trouble.  

But I read the list of lies anyway. A few of them were real qualifiers. Yep, those were lies of some sort.  Things that if people didn't know they should have, or have known not to appear so certain when they couldn't be. Maybe three of the ten fit that. Then another four were acceptable if you squinted a bit.  Sure, some people said that but we are making the word "they" do a lot of work here; or some other word besides lie would probably be more accurate, but I take the point. Then lastly, there were three that were almost entirely unfair. In fact, I thought, it's a lie to call that a lie, because you know (or should know) that hardly anyone said it. And that next one is actually based on a true statement, you are just rewording it in exaggerated form. They aren't just padding the total to make a catchier headline, though that is bad enough. They are lying to themselves, and thus to us, about the subject in general. Their list of lies ends up being about 60% true.

Is that worse?

*Those last two are going to be spam-attractors, I'd bet. I got them from auto-complete.

Slush

It ended up being 16" of slush, the most I've ever seen of that. The hardware stores have now sold out of shearing pins for the snowblowers.  I got the 2nd-to-last set. And you mostly just give up because the machine won't clear it more than a few inches to the side anyway, and you spend all your time clearing the chute. (And you'd better.  You don't want that freezing solid in there.)

When you downsize your house after retirement, most people think of less space and less to clean and repair.  But less driveway and less lawn is what I am all about at this point. This would have been a nightmare at the house we left three years ago. I imagine it was a nightmare for the single mom who bought the place. She has a sixth-grade son, but I've had five of those, and they ain't as much help as you'd hope. By the time they are driving themselves they suddenly acquire improved ability to clear snow.

To be fair, that does tend to match their improved musculature at that age.

Wilt The Stilt

In the Bill Russell biography, I recall that Bill's eulogy for Wilt included something like "He wanted to be the greatest basketball player of all time, and I wanted to be the greatest champion.  We both got what we wanted." I can't find the exact quote now, but the sentiment is pretty understandable in any wording. 

Still the GOAT, and I say that as a Celtics fan.  He said angrily to Michael Jordan in the 90s "They changed the rules to make it harder for me.  They changed the rules to make it easier for you.  Who's the greatest?"

I still have him on my Mars team, no matter who has come along since. 

Nicknames like "The Stilt" come across as pretty lame these days, but so do ones such as "Death to Flying Things" and "The Galloping Ghost" from other sports and eras. Someday CP3 and Matty Ice will seem similarly ridiculous.

Exemption

In NH, the bishop has granted an exemption in Lent for Catholics who want to eat corned beef with their cabbage and potatoes this Friday, St Patrick's Day. This seems sensible and I imagine it is widespread throughout the country.

Yet if it isn't in your diocese, is it considered acceptable to bishop-shop and find something nearby where you can have what you think is reasonable, or is that considered worse than mere sinning for venal reasons?  I would tend to the latter myself, considering sins of the will more serious than those of the flesh, but it's not a specialty of mine.

Corned beef background, in case I haven't covered it before: It was not originally an Irish tradition. In Ireland, corned beef was an export because it was so precious.  It brought in the few pennies a packer might have, wistfully watching it go out the door to either Manchester or London. So when they came to America and made a little money, the pain of that corned beef going to "rich" people elsewhere stuck in the mind, and they bought corned beef when they could as a luxury. Eventually, it became so strongly associated with Irish Americans and St Patrick's Day that the custom made its way back to Shannon and Dublin and is now a tradition even there. tourist dollars and all that.

Traditions that made it to America from Europe are often like that.  I can't testify to the ones from Africa or India, but the idea that "this is what they used to do in the Old Country" is usually a lot more complicated.

The Boy Who Wouldn't Hoe Corn

 

The song goes back to at least the 30s, and was sung by the standard folksingers of the 50s, the Pete Seegers, the Burl Ives. It's fun to listen in the earlier version that the young woman "gave him the mitten" in rejection. I remember seeing it occasionally in PG Wodehouse, of one young man telling another that the engagement is apparently off.  That would usually be "handed you the mitten."

The origin is unknown but goes back at least 200 years to Britain, with suggestions that it came from a French custom of a young man giving a woman a pair of gloves as an engagement present, symbolising  two hands holding each other. Were she to break off the engagement, however, she would return one of the gloves to announce it. As there was a similar custom in Scandinavian countries of returning a single glove to break off an engagement, it might support that idea.  Plus I just like it.

Tyminski's version is quite dark, and the young man's exit threatening, even chilling.  I don't know that other versions also have that.

Nor'Easter Coming

12-18 inches coming. I find that the weight of the snow matters more to me than the height of it. I don't know if we should learn to think of snow more in that way, but it matters.  If the snowthrower won't even clear it a foot away from the machine, you might have to shovel wet cement.  But if it's light and it does throw, a foot of snow ain't much.

Update: this was as bad as I have seen.  Shoveling slush here.

Years ago I noticed that every year people talk about what a strange winter it's been.  It became a standing joke with a psych nurse who came over the same mountain I did to get to work, once I mentioned it to her.  She told her husband, and her children grew up with it, and it has even come back to me a few times from other avenues. "Yeah, but we always say it's a strange winter." If it ever catches on and becomes my legacy to NH I will consider that an honor.

Which reminds me.  Someone else passed on another meme making fun of the Live Free or Die motto. There are people in NH who are deeply embarrassed by the saying, but most of us make fun of the people making fun of us at this point. We are just saying the quiet part out loud. Lots of states have the same sentiment - Alabama, Massachusetts, and Virginia off the top of my head - but a bit more implied. Maybe the NH motto, like my heading, should be "Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud."

Who We Were Then

There was an argument years ago at First Things* about a youth sports team that had run up the score on a smaller school (also, perhaps significantly, a special school that was an alternative placement for boys with emotional difficulties) and whether that was acceptable. My son Ben was on a junior-high basketball team that regularly lost by scores of 86-12, and once even 104-4, so I have some experience with the concept. But I did not enter the discussion until there was a shift to the idea that such things might inspire the boys who lost to work harder, and specifically to men reminiscing how losses in sports at considerably older ages and in different circumstances had been deeply formative for them, so there was nothing wrong with running up the score. There's a lot to discuss about the issue in general, and you can have a go at that at any of these five posts from early 2011. There actually are reasons it would be okay - just not the ones put forward.

Running up the score

Respecting the game

Teaching Virtue

 Penultimate

 Limping Home

This may have been the height of my taking too long to get to the point and making sure I nailed down every corner.  If you want to comment on any of those five I recommend you do it here, or no one will see it.

But the point from that discussion that I want to bring forward here is how often men asserted confidently that what they thought at seventeen - or believe they thought then - was applicable to themselves at twelve. I came back the next year prepared after working out all summer...I talk about how unlikely those memories are to be quite as accurate as we think. Nor is it only men.  When the students at my son's very small Christian school were moving on to a larger one, one mother of a fifth grade girl asserted how happy she had been to go to a larger highschool and change classes frequently back in her day.  It made her feel older and more competent.  Well, sixth grade is not tenth grade, nor are all children identical. It can be a big deal, as it figures in to sexual age-of-consent law and abortion-choice legislation. And tattoos, and alcohol...Yes it is good for children to move out from under their parents' supervision. But what is our basis for thinking that twenty-eight is better than eighteen is better than eight?  Numbers, please.

In the nostalgia tour I have several times encountered people remembering what they think they were like, erring always in the direction of applying what they thought or did at nineteen to their sixteen-year old selves. Retrospectives lie somewhat.  I recall in my own past reading a letter or a song or a school paper I had written just two years earlier and being shocked at how young it sounded. 

This is a general human tendency, not some unfortunate lack of clarity that affects us only in our worst moments. We perceive the continuity with our earlier selves because we are living in this head, and can also go back and visit it at will. If we were described as self-confident by outsiders when we were a senior, and can see evidence of that because of having belonged to the Outing Club and taking risks the last two years, we will apply that retroactively, that we entered school self-confident.  After all, we thought about joining the Outing Club before we actually did it...it was just that we couldn't the semester before because of a heavy lab schedule...

We believe we had mastered parts of our job well before we actually had.  "Whenever I had occasion to counsel someone about making a sideways move in a company..." Except that it never occurred until two-thirds of the way through your career.  We err on the side of giving ourselves credit for more wisdom and maturity.  Perhaps we would do better to give ourselves credit for how hard-won these lessons were.

I think it first requires suspicion about our need to fluff ourselves up in order to counteract the halo tendency, then specific grounding facts such as photographs, records (and frankly even unsupported assertions that sound more likely to be true than what we have been claiming), and finally, willingness to interact with others who might modify or even contradict our recollections. I admit, not everyone likes this as much as I do. My friend Sam correcting a couple of impressions, even though I had long since worked them into entertaining stories was one of the reunion highlights. People remember things you said that they have thought wise and clung to as advice over the years - and you now think it's not true. Gee, did I actually say that stupid thing?

Best to assume you have bent your narrative in the direction of something more complimentary to yourself, and made it a bit worse each time to recalled something and reconsolidated it. Reconsolidation is powerful.  When we bring something to mind, it really is fluid and up for grabs, which is how both false memory and recovery from memory work.

Does it matter? Well no.  Not unless you have an interest in understanding who you are and where you came from.  Not everyone does.

*I think there was one at Volokh Conspiracy as well.

Contrarianism

I was listening this morning to Ethan Strauss defend himself against the charge of being merely a contrarian. "I believe a lot of things that other people believe.  I believe the sky is blue.  I think that people love their children.  I just don't see why anyone would spend money to hear me talk about that."  GK Chesterton was accused of being a contrarian, and to a certain extent this was fair, as he was ever alert for things that were commonly believed but the reverse of the truth. Yet even more, he was alert for ideas that were once widely believed but were now abandoned. He wondered whether the reasoning for the abandonment was any good, and often noted that it is usually easier to trace how an idea came to be discarded - usually recent - as opposed to tracking down how it ever came to be believed - often very remote and obscure.

CS Lewis followed this tendency of GKC's and I took to it immediately when I read him so thoroughly in the 70s and 80s. Lewis had also picked up the similar idea of "chronological snobbery" from Owen Barfield. We are still very much in a culture that believes a new idea is clearly more moral and an old one not only obsolete but regressive.

It was not always so. Three of the four founding British cultures in the American colonies include in their literature explicit rejection of "novel" interpretations of Scripture. Only the Quakers accepted such a possibility, and even they certainly did not extend this openness to all new ideas.

Metal Detectors

According to Dr. Leszek Gardela, senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, it is illegal to use a metal detector in Poland unless you are an approved researcher. This would seriously hamper archaeology, as it is amateurs looking for things who make a lot of the finds in West Europe (especially England and Scandinavia) and America. 

To an American especially, it just seems like a silly infringement on individual rights. What do they think is going to go wrong if citizens are wandering the beaches looking for lost jewelry?

Smart People/Stupid Beliefs

That Gurwinder substack site The Prism that Eric put me onto for my previous post has some good articles.  It is another one that might make its way to my sidebar, though I am not hasty about such things. (Treebeard's voice is supposedly CS Lewis;s in Tolkien's mind, BTW.) His article Why Smart People Hold Stupid Beliefs is excellent. He links to research showing that the best-informed people on any side of an intellectual debate are more likely to be ideological and biased, not less. We speak to others as if answering their logical flaws is the key to changing their minds. Apparently it is secondary - or worse.

An absurd ideological belief is a form of tribal signalling.It signifies that one considers ideology more important than truth, reason, sanity. To one's allies, this is an oath of unwavering loyalty.  To enemies, it is a threat display.

This is similar to the idea of foxhole friends that I have written about a half dozen times over the years.  Politicians and cause leaders look for these sorts of people in order to enlist them.  Anyone can support you when you are right, but you want followers who will stick with you even when you are talking nonsense. 

Gurwinder's addition, which I had not considered but makes sense, is that last line about the threat display to enemies. It is that as well. It is equivalent to those useless but decorative peacock tails that signal to the peahens "I've got energy to burn, baby!  Sign up on this while you can." If you signal that you are willing to fight for this side even though you are capable of knowing it's irrational, you are saying that you and your pals are going to be a tough out, like Bigwig burying himself to his neck in the floor of the tunnel in the defense of Watership Down.

We all hope it is not us. One of the great rabbis, I believe it was Rashi, used to pray every morning "Let me not use my powers of persuasion in the defense of a lie."

From the essay 

...while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves.

Exactly

Entertainers

I will not link, but it will be easy enough to check it out if you are interested.  I have mentioned previously that while entertainers shape culture, it may be even more true that audiences shape entertainers. I made especial reference to the comedian Taylor Tomlinson, who I binge-watched about a year ago but grew increasingly disquieted by. Because of the binge she still shows up in my YouTube sidebar a lot.  Or perhaps she is very popular now and is showing up in everyone's sidebar.

Her shtick is "nice girl becoming increasingly whorish," and I wondered if this need to degrade good people is more commonly applied to women, or is neutral. She has become quite skilled, with good timing and some spontaneity, but especially good at facial expressions and postures. As she became increasingly raunchy in her routines, I wondered where it would go next. There's only so far one can go in the direction of jokes about what you do in bed. Yet it was only a year ago that I described her as "nice girl who says outrageous things," which is milder, indicating she has gone downhill fast.

There was a clip on the sidebar that looked like it might be less sexual, so I gave it a click, hoping that she is going for a wider range of humor as her career expands. Where she has gone is simple meanness. In a manner similar to late-night hosts, she is better and better at giving the impression that she is saying something humorous because such is her skill that she can deliver it that way, but is really just saying mean things. No joke involved. 

Hayley Morris makes me wince sometimes with how bluntly scatological she can be, but her routines of imagined conversations among the parts of her body continue to have actual humor in them. I worry it won't last, but for now it's still funny. 

Update:  First commenter Eric has a great link, The Perils of Audience Capture. We (or at least I) immediately think I would never do anything that ridiculous. And yes, I wouldn't do that. But i have been Assistant Village Idiot for over fifteen years now, and I wonder how much all of you have shaped David Wyman into some more composite character between a realspace and online persona. I see Glenn Reynolds as quite different from the person he was fifteen years ago, and last I checked in on his wife, it is even more true for her.

Well, if I have influenced you at your sites, that can only be for the good, of course. You're welcome.

Oy

John McWhorter points out that both of them use "oi" for "er" in the middle of words, illustrating that our stereotypes about accents - that they were blue-collar or well-do-do; that they were New York area or Midwestern; that they were black or white - are often not accurate. Armstrong says "woith" for "worth," and Durante says "toins" for "turns."

But you can ignore that and just enjoy watching them if you prefer.

Following Sports

I got a few minutes into a podcast and the interviewee was talking about how he didn't follow sports, didn't like sports, didn't see the point of sports, and had gone viral in because of complaining about the attention that Americans put on sports.

Well, I'm complaining about the attention that Americans give to people who say such stupid things, that they haven't thought through and are merely socially signalling.  Don't get me wrong here. If you don't like sports, don't follow them. Some people don't like sports. I pay little attention to TV and movies even though they are clearly culturally important. Furthermore, I do recognise that they are legitimate art forms that express some types of ideas particularly well and can provoke thought. I even made a movie reference over at Grim's from the narrow band of years back when I was dating. It's good stuff. Just not my stuff. I have too many other things and have to make the cut somewhere.

When one studies anthropology and they try to define culture there will usually be a list of things that every culture has, a list that is sometimes two dozen elements long: everyone has mating customs, everyone has religion, everyone has artistic expression, everyone has housing customs, everyone has economic exchange...so if you are objecting to people having those things at all, you're just an idiot. They don't have your religion or your sports or your economic preferences.

Cultures have sports. They vary. Animal violence, like cockfighting and bear-baiting used to be big and things like it are still popular in places. (In case you didn't notice, that is Martin doing the juggling.)

Animal racing, or motorized racing, is big in other places. Even in "primitive" cultures that don't have an NBA or a Premier League people lift things, or throw things, or aim at things, or run up mountains and down. If Bilbo's birthday party is any indication, you could have had a "Dancin' with the Tooks" TV show, or "Bree's Got Talent." In America in 1950 it was boxing, and horse racing, and baseball, but even then there were people - indeed whole regions and classes of people who didn't care about those things. We use sports to practice for war, like the biathlon (a sport that is impossible to watch but still impresses the hell out of me); people show off their verbal facility with crossword puzzle tournaments or charades; or abstract reasoning in contract bridge or chess. Now it is video games with the intense need for reflexes and fine-motor coordination.  Even the noncompetitive sports beloved by those who find competition unfair to...someone...have a hidden element of competition in them.

It's fine not to like sports, but if you have to keep telling me that you "don't care about sportsball"or turn up your nose at other people's pleasures you are not saying you don't like competition, you are saying that you prefer the social competition of knowing what's in intellectual fashion and being able to insult others cleverly. Showing how much you hated the mean girls you had to put up with in high school by being able to put them down now, from a safe distance (Janice Ian made her career out of it, and Tina Fey rode that wave quite a ways) is just telling everyone that you finally won that competition, and are drinking the blood of those girls from their skulls now. Or writing novels or TV scripts about how stoopid those football players were. 

It's similar to Post 6000 which I recently quoted.

An extreme of this was discovered from Norwegian news by the marvelous David Thompson, of competitive disability and disadvantage.

It's popular anthropology, popular sociology, popular psychology. You just need to see what's in front of you and not virtue-signal about it.  Plain signalling, to let potential mates in a dating app, or at a bar, or at work or the church social or in class - that's all fine.  that's just saving everyone a lot of time that you like fishing or listening closely to the cellos or trying new South American foods. But the people who are signalling that they are really proud of being from near Philadelphia, and know the recent history of the NFL draft, and think the interplay of violent collisions with graceful fingerwork catching footballs is exhilarating, they can have that, without your snarking about it.

GF IPA

I have mentioned before that most GF foods are not that good.  I have learned that many of the supposed GF beers, like Omission, are gluten-reduced, not GF. That matters to some people but not others.  Glutenberg is actually GF, and the IPA is fine. At this point I am quite happy with something that is what it says on the label, and you can just drink it and go on with your evening without noticing it any further. Not something that you taste and immediately think "Oh, not an actual IPA.  This is a consolation prize IPA. pretending to be the real thing.  I wonder what the hell it's made from?"

YMMV

Fathers

I had three fathers in my childhood, none of them very good. Making an effort to see the best in them that I can from this distant perspective, I did gain something from each, though none of them reached even 50% of the complete package. I don't think I ever wondered much what it would have been like to have a good father, but I did notice, almost with surprise, when anyone referenced having a good father, whether in conversation, or in a song or book. Huh. Looks kinda nice.

"Field of Dreams" is not even really about having a good father, but of finally getting something from a bad one, but I couldn't leave the theater the first time I saw it, sitting there weeping. Of course, I have always been able to go from completely callous to sentimentalist in a flash, so maybe that doesn't count.

My father-in-law ended up being the best of my fathers, even though they didn't like me much at first and it was nearly twenty years after I first dated my wife for them to really warm to me. But he was a very decent man, who tried to be kind to everyone, and that would especially include anyone brought into the family. I was the only one missing from the family bulletin board, which I thought was pointed at first but eventually decided was just an unfortunate oversight. At the end they liked me very much.

In talking with my old highschool and college friends during my nostalgia tour, a few have wanted to talk about fathers, and I noticed only recently that I may have been steering the others to talk about theirs. Only this year have I started to wonder "What would it have been like to have that father?" A couple of them would have been nightmarish, but most would have been fine, and a few I think would have been excellent, enough to wonder how my life might have been better with them. I never thought that at the time I knew them, playing in their yards or dating their daughters. I was off on a mission to found my own family. For a long time I didn't much like most men a generation older than me anyway. I did worse with those professors and bosses.  All their fault, of course. Grandfatherly types I did great with.

When I was middle-aged I would tell young men hurting about their own bad fathers or lack of fathers that you can get some of it back by being a father. Not all of it - all losses are real, even if better things come of them. But being a father can be an opportunity for repair. I stopped saying that years ago, I don't know why. Maybe just being busy with five sons put me in Garrison Keillor's Civilization mode.

The Wrong Crowd

"Bad company corrupts good morals" says St Paul, and his is right in this. Yet I think he is also being pastoral in how he puts this, framing it in a less-threatening way to enable you to be decisive and take action to change your ways.

"He got in with the wrong crowd" is an explanation I heard often as a social worker, and sometimes I would buy it.  It is particularly likely if falling in love is involved, getting involved with a boyfriend or girlfriend who is bad for you, but you are just so attracted. But more often I would think to myself "No, your son is the bad crowd.  He's the one the other mothers don't want their boys to be involved with. He's not a helpless victim here."

Jalen Rose gets it right when talking about Ja Morant, who has been getting himself in increasing trouble with threats, intimidation, and flashing a gun at a strip club with no context suggesting he was in any danger. Rose points out that the whole crowd around Morant is not the problem. Even if they are terrible people and bad influences, they are dependent on Ja and his money for both status and support. If he decided he was going to go work soup kitchens instead, they would either go along or be gone. They do what he wants.  That's who they are. It simplifies matters for him.

Well, if someone had thrown millions of dollars at me as a young man I would likely have been irresponsible as well, just in different ways.

Fresh Hot Soup Is On

I went past a small independent convenience store this morning, the sort that would not think of itself as a restaurant or fine eating establishment, nor a place that puts much budget into advertising. There was a roadside message board with the words "Fresh Hot Soup Is On."

Fresh. Well obviously we knew that or you wouldn't be advertising it.

Hot. Sure, there are cold soups, but for this situation, it could only be a hot soup.  So why tell us?

Is On. Obviously it's on.

Really you could have just written "Soup" and we would have gotten the whole message. There are places in the world that would just say Soup. But Americans who are in business know how to sell things without even thinking about it. That it's fresh, it's hot, and it's on makes you want it a little more. Maybe you didn't know that soup would hit the spot, but the sign gets your mouth watering, just a bit. They didn't think about this that much when they put the letters up on the sign.  It just sounded right to them. Mmm, soup.  

We are reading a Thomas Sowell book, and he writes about the business skills that some societies have which others could learn, but have not been exposed to or resist learning. He gives the example of a middleman for a contract to shingle a house between an owner and a worker of different cultures. The worker was unable to quote a price for the job, so the middleman bid on it, got it, and hired the worker to do the job for a lower set price, making a profit. A simple skill, but one that the worker's culture did not have.

They usually can learn it. When I was in Romania in the 90s I would observe behavior in a store and think "An American fifth-grader could figure out that you need to take some of those shelf-stockers who are standing around useless because there's nothing to put up at the moment, and get some of them to work the check-out registers, because those are overworked at the moment and the lines are long.  The child wouldn't see that right away, but they would eventually make it happen if you just turned them loose." 

By the time we came back in 2005 a lot of Romanian stores - not all - seem to have figured this sort of thing out.  There are a thousand little things that go into know-how, many of which are not even noticeable they are so common in your culture.

Civilization

Garrison Keillor made a humorous but profound observation years ago. "When you are a parent, Western Civilization is just a job. Whether it is going up, or down or is in trouble or not is not something you are worried about."

Pilot of the Airwaves

 

On Pausing Alcohol

Marc Andreessen has an essay On Pausing Alcohol, and a followup. Both are brief, and MA is entertaining.

Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s become clear that most or all — probably all — of the scientific studies on the benefits of alcohol are fake, the scientists unwitting or witting victims of selection effects. As Michael Crichton says, “wet streets cause rain”, or rather wet streets don’t cause rain. It turns out that sick people often don’t drink, or subjects just lie to researchers about their consumption outright. There go the studies.

Andreessen feels better consistently the whole next day if he has no alcohol.  But he is angry about it, because he feels better during when he has alcohol. I find all this irritating, as he does, but the fact that there are fewer and fewer forms of alcohol my digestion will tolerate allows me to see his point.  I am trying to be an honest broker here, posting even the things I don't like if they seem true.

WRT substituting weed, the studies which show that it is not as bad as alcohol in several ways are true enough but often are comparing apples-to-oranges. Of those who start either substance young, those who smoke marijuana are much more likely to rapidly move to smoking a great deal. Comparing light uses to light users and heavy users to heavy users is only half the story.

Pew Research Political Typologies

 I usually post these when they come out every few years, but I missed this one in late 2021.

Corruption

James posts an UnHerd article about corruption in California.  It reminded me of a Romanian story.

I spoke with a Romanian in 2005 who had emigrated to Australia and started two businesses there successfully.  He wanted to use this talent in Romania, which he felt lacked this knowledge generally and needed to see examples. He could not get permission to even try. I suggested the obvious, that he bribe the right people. (That's what my Romanian sons do.) He scoffed. "Oh, I knew THAT! Not only money but I have an uncle in the department who would put in a good word. No, the problem was this: When I left  years ago if you bribed someone you got what you paid for. But now in the big cities, paying someone only buys you a seat at the table where your situation will be discussed."  He attributed this to the difference between Italian corruption (good) and Arab corruption (bad), the latter having increasing influence.

Well, it's one person's opinion and I don't know what the situation is now, but I thought people might be interested.

Kelly Bets

 Scott Alexander at ACX is excellent, as usual. 

But science and technology aren’t perfect bets. Gain-of-function research on coronaviruses was a big loss. Leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbon-based refrigerants, thalidomide for morning sickness - all of these were high-tech ideas that ended up going badly, not to mention all the individual planes that crashed or rockets that exploded.

Society (mostly) recovered from all of these. A world where people invent gasoline and refrigerants and medication (and sometimes fail and cause harm) is vastly better than one where we never try to have any of these things. I’m not saying technology isn’t a great bet. It’s a great bet!

But you never bet everything you’ve got on a bet, even when it’s great. Pursuing a technology that could destroy the world is betting 100%.

I may lean more to Aronson's POV, BTW.  But Alexander gives me pause.

The Right of Self-Determination

It is a very common idea now, that a people can have their own nation and run it the way that they like. Well, that's simple enough, then, the consent of the governed mentioned in the American founding. What's not to like? 

Perhaps it is the next step, which might seem automatic but is not, that is not to like.  There is the idea that other nations, and most especially America, should help them do this, by separating from nations or tribes they feel do not represent their interests well. We have gone over to that pretty fully in the last hundred years, but it was considered a bit radical when it was a favorite idea of Woodrow Wilson's. His own Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, disagreed with its implementation on a broad scale. From Lansing's diary:

These phrases will certainly come home to roost and cause much vexation. The President is a phrase-maker par excellence. He admires trite sayings and revels in formulating them. But when he comes to their practical application he is so vague that their worth may well be doubted. He apparently never thought out in advance where they would lead or how they would be interpreted by others. In fact he do not seem to care, so that his words sound well. The gift of clever phrasing may be a curse unless the phrases are put to the test of sound, practical application before being uttered.

And ten days later

The phrase [self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives...What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery will it cause! Think of the feelings of the author when he counts the dead who died because he coined a phrase! (Quoted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics, via Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures.)

The idea that all the peoples of the world would love to have American values, if only they could be given the chance by being rescued from The Baddies has taken rather a beating in the last century. While it is true that there are some people in each nation - and the ones that we know best and like best - who very much would like to live under American ideals and want for us to help them do that, it does not seem to be true that all peoples want these ideas enough that they are willing to give up some of their own traditional ideas. Loyalty to family often trumps loyalty to principles of indifferent law, for example. 

Silver In The Dishwasher

Apparently the experts disagree. The simple version is that it is not absolute best, but it is fine as long as you choose a detergent without citrus or phosphates and handle the silver a little differently. The topic came up in the discussion over at Maggie's about his yearly reminder to use the good China more often. 

I turn 70 next month and would use both every night for the joy of it and the simplifying of storage and thus life in general, but my wife just doesn't feel right about it and sees it as extra work. She does the dishes, so she makes the call.

Black Bean Soup

Black bean soup is never as good as I expect it to be, at least...not when I make it.  It can't possibly be my habit of adding another ingredient or two to the recipe to improve it.  I has to be the soup's fault.  Or the beans.

At a previous church we had a potluck with the Seventh-Day Adventists whose church we rented for Sunday worship. One resourceful mother put out bowls half-filled with Fritos, threw some cut up tomatoes on them, and then put on some black beans.  Her kids and their friends loved it, so I gave it a try. I liked it a fair bit and have been trying to replicate it since, with no success. It's one way to feel quite stupid, being unable to pull off a three-ingredient recipe. Perhaps it was the context, or the pleasant surprise, or my hunger, but I've never gotten it to work again to the same taste.

But today I think that adding the roasted chicken with smoked paprika was the downfall. Hopefully it improves as a leftover.

Job Destruction

So another son early in his career has a job disappear because the business is closing.  It's tough to be a good worker in a bad place.

Update: It may have been a worse place than we knew, and a worse owner.

Strange Brew

 

Clapton is barely recognisable because of the hairstyle - he changed it often in those days - and his mouth all tightened up because he had just had mouth surgery.  Or so the rumor was at the time.  It does look likely watching him here.

Going To War

I thought I would be able to take the comfortable, protected view of evaluating twenty years later whether going to war in Afghanistan and/or Iraq was a good idea. My view in those early years, not always as clearly stated as I would like because I kept getting distracted into in-the-moment debates, was that it is difficult for the citizen to know whether the moral justification is adequate, and so I allowed that there is actually a fairly low threshold for moral justification. The difficulty is going to be the practical justification: Is this wise? One would think that I would be the reverse of this, but conflicts between nations have an iceberg quality to them, and few can see whether the reasons below the surface have validity. There are perhaps a very few things that are visible to all, such as whether one country is currently actively causing harm to another, and perhaps if they are an imminent danger. Also, it is usually clear if one country is entering another country.  Beyond that, the breaking of treaties, the economic harm, often quite extensive but quite deniable, the history of trustworthiness, the encouragement of behind-the-scene allies - all these are very hard to quantify.

But the wisdom of war can often be fairly simple: what do we have to spend, what do we hope to gain? It is not only politicians who prefer to engage in moral posturing instead, picking out selected aspects to stir up the populace, it is actually all of us.  All the newspapers, TV channels, magazines, podcasters, and bloggers all mark out their space and then defend it, like birds chirping to notify others of their territory and willingness to defend it. I complained bitterly that we seemed unable to even get to that question in the early 2000s. (Humorously, I originally wrote "early 200s" and was quickly corrected. But that too. Becoming emperor usually ended in murder or execution, and one has to wonder if they ever stopped to consider whether it was worth it, simply as a practical matter. It is always the main question of war that the citizen might actually have some insight on.)

I said at the time that we would not know whether it was worth it, even in 20 years. The almost universal view now that neither war was worth it is actually a red flag that we are now overlooking major things because of the current cultural and electoral climate. That it was 80% approved of in 2003 was a bad sign.  That it is 80% disapproved of now is an equally bad sign. It is not a discussion for another day, but for another decade or two more, and even then...what do we think of the Thirty Years War now? Opinions still vary widely on whether the French Revolution was a good thing.

It comes up, of course, because of Ukraine and the possibility of our increasing our assistance there. The moral justification is pretty straightforward: Russia's claim that Ukraine is just Russia is insane, and their perceived need to protect themselves is understandable, but in this case it's uh, not their country that they are trying to make do things. Plus lots of us know Ukrainians and like them. Politicians like to focus on these sorts of issues.

OTOH it means supporting dangerous fascist/mafia bastards, especially in Eastern Ukraine. So we get into the ambiguity of  that iceberg, and what that massive amount of ice is built from. 

Again, I think the citizen has a hard time knowing enough to sort this out. We not only have prejudices and poor news sources, we also don't even know a lot of the backchannel info the leaders and people who do business there know. We can't.

Yet the citizen can still get a pretty good grasp on "What is this going to cost?" (Multiply the estimate by at least 10X, by history) and "What do we hope to gain?" (Discount this by at least 75%, by history.) If this looks like an argument against any deeper involvement, you can read it this way, yes. Yet you will also notice that there are plenty of wars that could still go forward under the simple cost-benefit evaluation. It's just that we won't do that - not only Joe Biden or whoever, but AVI as well -we want to feel righteous when war is at stake, not merely calculating.  But being merely calculating might result in a better morality in the long run.  At least we will lie to ourselves less.

Punishing Actual Merit

Columbia is eliminating the SAT/ACT before it is eliminating legacy admissions.  It tells you everything you need to know.  If you can be described as a traditionally disadvantaged person - even if you are 2nd-generation Nigerian Ibo whose oppression was on another continent fifty years ago - the Ivy League would like to make sure that news stories about you leak out. Columbia does have a rationale, which includes “to best determine an applicant’s suitability for admission and ability to thrive in our curriculum and our community, and to advance access to our educational opportunities.” The key words there are community and access. Those allow Columbia to do whatever they want, to anyone they want, basically. Always ask first "Who benefits from this? Who is punished?" In this case, children who have overcome a difficulty are not rated higher than those who have merely experienced one.

The ability to effortlessly produce buzzwords and gibberish and euphemisms has become a precondition for advancement in our institutions of higher learning. Which is how ambitious mediocrities have gained control.(Rob Henderson's Substack Newsletter)

I am reminded of Steve Sailer's declaration that his preferred pronouns are the same as Stalin's: Who? Whom? The revolution is essentially the new status quo when its opposition has too many hills to effectively die on and increasing percentages of it pursue essentially symbolic, feelgood victories.

Paper Bag Book Covers, Revisited

 

A reader sent this along about book covers. They are apparently a collectible item.

On this one, scroll right (or down) and check these out.  It is interesting that could be patented back in the day.  If you look at the design you can see what they were trying to accomplish with the design oddities, but I don't think you could get a patent on this now. I have a pal who is a patent attorney.  I'll ask him.

Altar Calls In Anthropology and History

I keep listening to anthropology, archaeology, and history podcasts, and there is this repetitive exercise of cautioning the listener not to draw any racist conclusions from whatever it is they are saying (because there are obvious conclusions that are not racist but are currently considered so), and not to draw any gendered conclusions (because there are obvious...you know the drill) or ethnographic (ditto)...

I heard it semi-explained on one better podcast. They have access to the data of who is listening, so they know that a certain percentage are listening to only one, maybe two or three podcasts before moving on. I have done that myself, though I try to choose carefully at the outset and then listen to all the episodes, even into the hundreds. That is a plurality but not majority of people listening to any podcast. So yes, I get annoyed that every few episodes they have to preach this academia sermon about not venturing into bad political beliefs. I don't like it, but I have considered it their way of observing the proper rites and sacrifices, in a rather Confucian or Epicurean way of cynically worshiping the gods of the city in order to participate in the civitas. 

Today it occurred to me that the analogy might be improved.  These little sermons are the altar calls of academia, their way of making sure that you at least get saved before you leave their tent. I am 70-30 against that in the church, disliking that theological emphasis but recognising that it has its uses for the few who are just dropping by, and therefore is also extremely important to the (frankly shallow) faithful who want to make sure that no one got out without hearing the Only Message. I am 90-10 against it in academia for the same reason, but perhaps I should at least relent to 80-20.

Nah. 

Grime's Graves

From "Grim's Graben," a graben being a ditch or depressed area. I ran across it as an English Heritage site in Norfolk, near where many of my ancestors were from.  It's an old - very old - flint mine. So a place to visit if you are ever in East Anglia, Grim.

Turning Back

I recalled in conversation today a psychiatrist friend of mine who was an ice climber who had moved from Nashua to North Conway so that he could get up and do Cathedral Ledge some mornings before heading to work in Concord.  A bit crazy, yes, but wonderfully so. He was part of a group that would teach serious ice climbing for rich guys (occasionally gals) willing to pay a lot for a series of weekend lessons. He mentioned once that the six-week course always included the lesson of turning back when conditions were not safe. They seldom had to design this artificially, he said, as the weather in NH usually provided one Saturday or Sunday where there had been a thaw weakening the ice, or visibility was too low, or whatever. But if they had to, they would fake one, because they would not graduate anyone without the lesson of turning back.

The would-be adventurers would object, not only because they had paid good money, but because they were the driven sort who had expectations of how and when things should be and didn't like being thwarted in this. They would often transfer their irritation about this to the instructors, taking their eyes off the weather and conditions. The instructors would of course be unmoved by the complaints. If you couldn't learn the lesson that you had just ignored a potentially deadly risk, they would send you home right there, refund that day's lesson, and not accept you back for at least a year.

Groups do better at this than individuals.  With teenagers, we worry about them egging each other on to dumber and dumber things, and this does sometimes happen with adults as well. But it is more often the people just out of their teens acting alone or maybe as duals who do the dumbest stuff, and bad mountain judgment among older adults is almost never in groups.

Do Your Own Translation

 

I didn't see this in Gothenburg SE or even points north, but perhaps that isn't surprising. Kvikk Lunsj might be that Norway-specific. It is made by the Norski company Freia, named after the goddess who owned the necklace Brisingamen, a name familiar to early readers of fantasy when there just wasn't much out there. My professor of Anglo-Saxon mentioned it to us. I loved Weirdstone on first reading, but not as well the second time, when it seemed to me to have too many things poured into the plot.  Good things, though, and parts of it still come back to me. It had a strange power.

The Norski kit-kat seems to hold a strange power over them.

Not As Expected

For the record, the American colonies would also be dark green no matter how many centuries were covered. Our impression to the contrary derives from the many forms of anti-Puritanism from people who know little or nothing about them.