Diabolically Evil

Is a New Report About the Humanities ‘Diabolically Evil’? at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

 We invited four of the report’s authors — Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Boghossian, both philosophers at New York University; Katherine E. Fleming, a historian and former NYU provost who now serves as head of the J. Paul Getty Trust; and the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz — to respond to their critics. We discussed their findings, the risks of outside interference, and what they hope happens next.

Anthropology was especially singled out for deteriorating standards of scholarship because of homage to political narratives. I recall there being excitement in the anthropology department when one professor was to give an address at a major conference - this would be in 1975 - about how voices from within cultures were not being heard often enough in the field. Notably, he was a Filipino anthropologist and thus positioned to notice, but also had a direct career stake in the issue. Even at the time, I recall thinking something along the lines that this wasn't about anthropology, but about anthropologists.

Time In Palestine

 I Actually Spent Time in Palestine - Here's what I saw about their society 

An American college student notices the prejudice of extremist Israelis...

...and a complete denial of reality by the Palestinians.

 Looking back, my conversation with the two Palestinians who denied the existence of the Second Temple foreshadowed something that I gradually came to recognize: while I was more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause when I first traveled to the West Bank, I came to realize that facts are largely irrelevant for the vast majority of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists.

Erling Haaland

 My son in Tromso is very excited, calls him Superman

 

Not only the accent, but the gestures remind me of Maria, my Norwegian DIL. I don't think I know any other Norwegians well enough to know their accents.  I used to know a few, but I wasn't paying attention then.

Surprising Allies

The Knowlton Trial in England in 1877 had an immediate effect on family formation.  It was about the criminalising of publishing information on contraception, or artificial limitation of the family, as it was called then. Immediately after, age of marriage began increasing in English-speaking countries. What is surprising is that Charles Darwin, despite being an anti-Churchman did not approve of this development. Darwin and the Knowlton Trial, Peter Foreshaw Brooks over at "Persistent Ruminator."

[Darwin] would prefer not to be a witness in court. In any case CD’s opinion is strongly opposed to that [of Bradlaugh and Besant]. [Darwin] believes artificial checks to the natural rate of human increase are very undesirable and that the use of artificial means to prevent conception would soon destroy chastity and, ultimately, the family.

So also Francis William Newman, the agnostic younger brother of Cardinal John Henry Newman. 

 Newman, also writing entirely from a foundation void of orthodox religion, felt this was misguided. He argued that a large amount of poverty can be attributed to vice and social problems, not the mere size of population. He then laid out how he thought the neo-Malthusian view would exacerbate these problems. He worried that an expansion in birth control would result in an increase in men’s demands of women’s sexual access (an argument Louise Perry and others make today) and would lead to more behaviour focusing on achieving short term pleasures over long run fulfillment.

Charles Darwin, pro-natalist. 

*********** 

Dave Barry is perhaps a less-surprising pro-natalist. Sex

Links From 2015

 Obviously 

36 Righteous Men 

 Girl Books. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole with this, I also did a 2007 post on Female Characters in Heroic Fantasy which linked in turn to my son's post Books for Girls, Books for Boys. Almost half his life ago now... 

A bad play is evocative of marvelous nostalgia The Old Homestead, Swanzey, NH 

Bad Doctrine about being a Christian Nation.  Lots of comments

School Cell-phone Bans

 Research on banning cell-phones in schools.  Interesting way to test a variety of measures. 

 National Evidence From Lockable Pouches National Bureau of Economic Research

The short version is that in the first year there were increased disciplinary incidents and decreased student subjective well-being. This was attributed to the disruption of the change. In further years the disciplinary incidents returned to baseline and the student subjective well-being improved to measurably above the previous baseline.  Test scores were not significantly affected.

Magic solutions are seldom magic, especially in education.  It all looks so easy from the outside.  Remember Daviess County KY and its 13-year (1997-2010) intensive experiment to build better brains? I really though that one was going to work.

Are you part of...a chain?

A visitor to our church this Sunday asked this, hesitating and laughing at herself, as she knew that wasn't quite the word she was looking for.

"A denomination?" I smiled, filling in the word she was looking for. "Actually, that's not a bad word.  Maybe we should switch to that so that people know what we mean." 

Two Out of Six Myths

 Another Six Myths About Gender, Race, and Inequality. These two are free, the other four are for paid subscribers only. These are short summaries, but don't skim, as at first glance we might think they are saying something else. The first is about what Democrats and Republicans think that other people would do, not what they themselves would.  For the second, most of the funding is not specific to either males or females, only to humans. The graph shows the research amount dedicated to one sex.

Celebrating the 250th

I am going now to mow the lawn and water it.  It seems like one of the most American things I can do. I am admittedly on shaky ground historically, as I doubt that George Washington mowed his lawn very often, and Ben Franklin likely advised others to mow, but avoided it himself. Hot dogs may have come in just before the Centennial celebration, but fireworks were set off in 1777, so 1776 was at least possible. Drinking too much predates colonial settlement by centuries. 

So I'll stick with mowing the lawn. That's the plan.

Update:  Well, sort of. I picked up donated food with my granddaughter for the halfway house. I went to a neighborhood party and traded a Sam Adams for a freshly-grilled sausage.  Not really barter, because we both would have happily given them away, yet it's more fun to trade, isn't it? I listened to a great American blowhard with calm patience. A parade of golf carts went by, three of them. My stars, I do hate those things, but in a retirement park... I looked up and then there were seven of them, all decked out in spangly R/W/B stuff and honking. I found a new place to nap out by a fountain that no one visits, with a swing and a canopy and tacky little garden statues. 

I moved a heavy object for Vacation Bible School (July 6-10) toward the car with my 1.5 arms - one good heave over the stone wall with my healthy arm - and decided discretion was the better part of valor, stopping a quarter-way along. When you worry that men are going to get in over their heads, don't ask "Do you need help?" because the answer is always going to be no.  Ask "Is that a a two-person job?"Tracy loaded it into the hatchback with me.

The golf cart parade came back with 11 carts, honking even more, and the lawn is now mowed. Rain is expected. The sausage is coming back on me, or something else is, but my, my it was good. 

Yankee Doodle Dandy

"Boy, she doesn't have a very melodic voice!"

"It's a man.  It's George M. Cohan." 

I also noted that he largely recites the song, rather like Maurice Chevalier used to get away with: For little girls grow bigger every day!

 

Men are allowed to get away with that more often than women. In his case, he was talented musically, just didn't have a good voice.  Vaudeville teaches you how to get around that.

 

Spelling

We discussed spelling reform at pub night last night.  

You really want to come to our pub night.  We also talked about Gettysburg and Fred made his joke about the cunning linguist for the sixth time.  He just can't contain himself.

You may have known that cniht was pronounced k'neecht, the ch as in Scots Gaelic loch. Knight. No longer a good spelling, but here we are.

In terms of English spelling many of you already knew that scribes who wrote in Latin or French applied conventions from their own language to English and printers from the continent did not always have good command of English, leading to the use of gh for that raspy throat sound more common in German (hoch) or Scots Gaelic (as above) or adding an h to c or s to represent an English sound that hadn't a letter. ch, sh.  

The Great Vowel Shift occurred just before the growth of printing and the conventions of that became messy, because the vowels moved around in the mouth and what was considered a long vowel and short vowel changed with it.  This gave us all oo, ai, and all manner of ei and ie. U wasn't even it's own vowel until then, but quickly became four sounds: super, mute, put, putt. That brought in all the ou, au, ui, eu confusions. 

There were attempts at standardisation in the 1500s, but they were largely ignored. Printers did what they wanted and things calmed down a bit without intervention.  But regional variations persisted and people were stubborn about it. Imagine that.

There is an influence on change that is largely overlooked. King Charles tried to keep a lid on things in the 1630s by not calling any Parliament for over a decade, but with the Scots and the French and the damn Puritans, military money was needed. The Star Chamber dramatically censored printing in 1637 because there was a lot of information that they did not want in circulation, especially about the troubles with the above. During the religious quarrels leading up to the English Civil War in the 1640s, the nobility had a longer and longer list of complaints, Charles had an increasing need for money, and secrecy.  Good luck with that.  But to do this he needed Parliament, which increasingly opposed him. Even his allies in the nobility had had it. He called a Parliament but it didn't do what he wanted, so he disbanded it after three weeks - the Short Parliament. The Scots attacked and decided to settle in in the north, hovering around and looking like they might head to London. Now Charles really needed money to pay them off, so he called another Parliament and this one - the Long Parliament - lasted two decades.  One of the first things it did was execute his major counselors.

Yes, I know we haven't gotten to any spelling yet.  We are just about to. The Long Parliament disbanded the Star Chamber, and all its acts became null. Printers poured into London and put out pamphlets, broadsides, and what might roughly be called newspapers. They provided up-to-date reports of battles, sometimes in only a day. This speed was previously unheard of. Prior to this time, such reports were printed with justified margins , which looked elegant and nifty.  But to justify margins printers added in letters, so that three words in a line might have an -e at the end, no longer pronounced but recognised, or a doubled consonant as in magicall or grass. This slowed down spelling standardisation quite a bit. 

But with speed now of the essence readers cared less about elegance and printers just spelled things the way they thought they should.  Even better, they spoke English rather than Dutch or French as their first language.This only fixed about 10% of the problem, but it  was something. 

 

Egypt wins on PK's

 Great hat.

Soccer

It's a good sport, especially live.  It did not televise well until about twenty years ago, which hampered its professional growth, and there still is the problem of low scoring. A three-minute highlights film is about all you need even for a World Cup game.  I understand why people who have taken to the sport like to watch the whole thing, start to finish, but the same can be said of golf and tennis, which most people find unwatchable. If you know something in depth, you see more than others and it is more interesting to you. I have never watched a videogame competition, but young people who have played that particular game and gotten good at it will see things I don't and recognise the excellence of some moves. 

There has long been a quiet political undertone to soccer, and not-so-quiet as well.  Soccer has been a mixed sport, played by immigrants and prep schools, making it a liberal natural. Sssshhh. But the World Cup has gotten problematic for liberals now.  This is a background item that is causing collisions in progressive brains.  

They liked soccer because Americans weren't good at it and had to eat crow. Especially, it was European (!) and Latin American(!) Swoon.  Now it is even African and Middle-Eastern which should further stick it to The Man, but it's too late.  The American women's team has long been dominant, which was hard enough to swallow, but at least was anti-sexist. Now the men's team has been pretty good throughout the 21st C and there is a lot of hand-wringing over whether a good liberal should root for them or not. 

I will mention again that NPR missed a trick by not adopting World Cup coverage as far back as the 70s. It's a fun alt-history to imagine how that would have played out. It would have changed NPR's audience a bit, and that would have influenced it. They would then be involved in sports broadcasting, a different world. (It could conceivably have expanded to rugby, with less coverage but still some every year.) They would then have to deal with the interests of immigrants as they really are, not as they imagined them. 

All for the want of a horseshoe nail. 

Even Cooler Than You Thought, Eh?

 

Baumol Cost Disease

Or Baumol Effect.  I had never heard of it until today.  Because all prices are relative, if the price of something goes down...No, I am not going to dare explain it.  I am reading a paper by Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution and keep thinking I understand it, but the next page reveals that I probably don't. I really thought I had it when I grasped that when productivity improves in one facet of building a house, the wages go up even in areas that have not improved, because they are now the bottleneck that prevents the houses from being finished. But I think I am oversimplifying, as I am told it applies more strongly to services than to manufactured goods. 

It was recommended to me as explaining a great deal about economics, as it is a principle that works across countries, across industries, and across time. It is independent of regulation, though regulation keeps trying to correct it.

So have at it, with my blessing.  I'm going to try something else. 

Progressive Intellectuals

Image v. Reality  at Fake Nous.

My usual audience will wonder Why are we going over this ground again? It's a fair cop. This will look like many other discussions we have seen here and at our small corner of the internet.

First, it's a great name for site.  I was determined to link to something from the main page; the host is a philosophy professor with significant libertarian leanings. He doesn't pull punches.

I have spent many years around progressive intellectuals. They fill the academic world and the elite cultural circles of our society. As a group, they seem to me incredibly deceived and self-deceived people—much more self-deceived than right-wing intellectuals (of whom there are far fewer). Their worldview revolves around self-serving lies, and much of their self-image is practically the opposite of reality. 

Second, many of the themes I have tried to tie into the Dueling Intellectuals debate over the years are in this article. Echoes of the various tribes will show up.

That is the first element of progressive self-deception: they style themselves warriors against prejudice, but they are the biggest force stoking prejudice in our society. They think that their prejudice is different because the group they’re attacking is actually bad. They don’t see their stereotypes as stereotypes but just as the truth. That, of course, is what all bigots think. 

Many leftists seem to live in an alternate reality in which our society—including the most left-wing-dominated of institutions—is filled with neo-Nazis bent on hurting women and minorities at every turn. In the academic world, you can hear people talking about how biased the academic world is against women, in the very same meeting that everyone present agrees to give women preference over men in hiring, and no one notices the dissonance. Constantly talking about how the other side has all the power, while being constantly directly confronted with their own side’s power. 

 Third, some new insights I had not thought of, or not articulated as clearly

 This sort of echo chamber tends to make people overconfident, to make them ignore problems with their worldview and even take increasingly extreme and implausible positions. Conservative intellectuals, by contrast, are probably more self-aware because they keep hearing criticisms from left-wing intellectuals. (But this is not true of the right-wing masses, who ignore the left-wing intellectuals.) 

I have a friend who worked long amongst liberals who had tiring and irritating prejudices.  But she took a new job that involved a lot of work with bluer-collar guys who had different false beliefs, about contrails and power lines.  There was a general cynicism that everything was not what it seemed and was either a sham or a shady plot by the worst of the powerful.  CS Lewis noted much the same nearly a hundred years ago. It was not merely different prejudices, but a different kind of prejudice.

 

Grover Cleveland's Grandson

I keep forgetting this bit of NH trivia.  George Cleveland, a grandson of Grover Cleveland is still alive, up in Tamworth. We used to vacation up there, and bsking's family is quite familiar with the area. Her father Mike, also a commenter here, lived in the next town over when younger and they have a lake cabin up there.  It is in the borderland where the Lakes Region leaves off and the White Mountains pick up.

George is my age, but I've never met him and don't know that we have friends in common.