My Name Is Jack Hall

The American version has it as Sam Hall, with similar lyrics about a man going to be hung. "And my neck shall pay for all." Johnny Cash had the more humorous version, though grimly so.

 

Campaigns

So one candidate for Senate is claiming that the other worked for a lobbying firm and that lobbying firm made lots of money. In reply, the lobbyist is accusing the first candidate of voting in a way that the companies of guys he dated probably liked.

That's it.  That's what passes for corruption in NH.  

Stuart the Just

Reposted from 2025.  Substack has fewer knuckleheaded conversations than other social media sites, but it still has them.  I find I am linking to this at least once a week when someone is trying to claim "I was just asking a clarifying question, which you still haven't answered..." 

It must hit a nerve, because it has received a lot of hits in only 13 months. 

******** 

My father-in-law used to joke that his mother called him Stuart the Just, because he was always saying "But I was just...But I was just..." We have variations in English: "We were only..." "She was merely..." "All I asked was..." When people use these phrases, they are often hiding something. No, Stuart you weren't just looking in your sister's toybox to see what was there. No, Ingrid, she wasn't only dropping by to chat. No, you weren't merely looking on your wife's phone to see if her mother had called yet. 

I have been on a run for motte-and-bailey arguments lately.  I have a few more coming. This is mostly because I am currently alert to them, but I hope to perform some instructive service along the way, saturating the summer of 2025 with examples and commentary. 

I don't want to get too bogged down in the castles themselves, though this is an attractive picture that's fun to spend some time on.  Analogies break down if you stretch them too far, but this illustration allows us to extend the idea just a bit.  The motte is the most defensible place.  It was often built first on an elevated area, which provides in itself some defensive advantage. In some descriptions the motte is the mound itself, and the keep is the fortified area. 

Once the motte is in place it makes sense to live near it in case of emergencies. Outbuildings would spring up for stables, work areas, and housing.  These in turn would be fortified as time and resources allowed.  In the illustration above, there is an expanding series of baileys, and outside the moat there are plenty of fields for pasture and planting. The motte is extending its influence over an entire area. The whole enterprise expanded in stages and can be defended in stages. 

In rhetoric or argument, a set of ideas can extend their influence over wider and wider areas. If you have a constitution and laws, a group can start from something quite basic, quoting "the Constitution says this," and be on safe ground. Not long after, they are saying "the Constitution also means this," expanding the idea out a little farther.  If everyone goes along, it becomes a fortified place of its own. The expansion goes fine until someone says "Hey, this isn't the Duchy of Toulouse anymore.  You are encroaching into the Duchy of Aquitaine.  Stop that." If Aquitaine attacks with enough force, Toulouse falls back to an area it thinks it can defend. Unfenced fields are tough to keep enemies out of.

In the motte-and-bailey fallacy, what is usually the problem is the discovery that Toulouse has been encroaching into Aquitaine for a long time.  It has been claiming lots of territory that isn't theirs, and Aquitaine quickly acquires some allies who say "Dagnabbit! Toulouse has been cheating. None of this has been theirs and they must be punished." Toulouse goes all the way back to the motte if necessary, saying "THIS IS OURS. You can't accuse us of lying and cheating.  We own this."

From here we are going to the situation of "But we we're only quoting what the Bible says," because being deceitful about that "only" is a big deal.

Trepanantion

 I didn't know I was interested in this until I started reading. Why Global Trepanation? by Scott Alexander at ACX.

Was it cultural diffusion? No. Trepanation (the technical term for drilling a hole in the skull) was common across Europe and South America, with scattered cases in Africa and other continents. The Old and New Worlds had limited contact after about 10,000 BC, and most customs don’t survive for five thousand plus years with no reason. 

Late Flurry in 2015

I thought this set of links would wrap up the year, but I seem to like a lot of what I wrote in the last 45 days of 2015. In 2016 we enter the Age of Trump*, or at least the foothills. The NH Primary is early in the election year, so we were already hearing a lot of him even though he would not take office until 2017.

What's HAPPENIN' in Social Justice, about fashionability of causes. 

English Is Not Normal.  John McWhorter, refreshingly uncontroversial

Contrast Between Liberal Bias and Conservative Bias  

Odd Explanations For the Suicides of Men 45-54  By professionals working with them.

Wondering About Immigration into Europe that year  

*I got tired of that phrase pretty quickly. 

New Comedian Charles Haycock

 New to me, anyway.

 

He has a whole channel, unsurprisingly 

English's Closest Relatives

 Test yourself how well you can read a familiar text in Scots, West Frisian, and Low German. Can You Understand English's Closest Relatives? The Lord's Prayer is often used for such examples, as readers are familiar with it. Heh. Used to be, anyway. I would add Old English 

 Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod. to becume þin rice, gewurþe ðin willa, on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg, and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele soþlice.

And Middle English to the quiz for comparison, 

 Oure fadir þat art in heuenes halwid be þi name; þi reume or kyngdom come to be. Be þi wille don in herþe as it is dounin heuene. yeue to us today oure eche dayes bred. And foryeue to us oure dettis þat is oure synnys as we foryeuen to oure dettouris şat is to men þat han synned in us. And lede us not into temptacion but delyuere us from euyl.

For Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Middle English both, it will help if you know that the "þ" is a thorn, "ð" is a eth, and both are pronounced "th," as in thee/thine. For Middle English, "u" is sometimes pronounced v, and "y" is sometimes pronounced hard g.

Three From Lyman Stone

 Are 3-Child Families a Luxury Good? Lyman really doesn't like the Survey of Consumer Finances as a Statistical Source.

Babies Are Not For Cowards  I noticed years ago that people with more optimism about the future had more children.  Apparently this is international

What Census Was Luke Talking About?  If you are a demographer and a Christian you look at different questions than the usual.

Recent links

 Smart People Love New Ideas, Even When They Are Bad.  Rob Henderson. Some people just like novelty too much.  "Sometimes the old solution has been around a long time because it works." 

Smart Therapist  Therapy works best when it is life coaching.

Pink-Washing Patriarchy I do not usually trend much to this topic, but this was interesting.

How Many People Live Paycheck to Paycheck?   One can find all kinds of big numbers for this and its companion that most people cannot afford at $400 or $1000 emergency bill. Guess what? 

Committed Leftists Are Not Just "Very Liberal"

Those Tradwives, eh?

 Fred felt neglected because Wilma spent so much time on TV

 

Education and Prejudice

 Does Education Make Us More Prejudiced? 

It depends. The story is usually that college makes young people more liberal, but it would be more accurate to say that it makes liberals more anti-conservative, and conservatives more anti-liberal.  The effect is stronger depending on the strength of belief. Moderates don't seem to move much at all.

Bible Study Analogies

I have described my dislike of many Bible study guides, especially their questions. "Where have you seen God at work in your life this week? What can you do to notice more of this?"  These are not gripping questions. Analogies and metaphors work better.  You will notice, BTW, that his is how Jesus taught, and he may have known a thing or two.

Psalms 3-7* were part of our sermon series and discussion this week. Our class study guide included the summary of those " Which of the five rooms are you in this season — the flight, the sleepless night, the watched morning, the bottom, the hunt?"

Hebrews comments on that. Our study summarises  "Your kingdom, Dallas Willard said, is the
range of your effective will — the kitchen, the desk, the hospital bed — and it was never meant to compete with God's, only to be joined to it."  It goes on to ask "Which kingdom is yours this month — the cubicle, the kitchen table, the hospital bed?"

Those are better questions. 

 

AI Uses

I am trying to clear space in one cupboard.  "Which will go bad first, fish sauce or oyster sauce?" Fish sauce even after opening will last 3-5 years.  Oyster sauce should be refrigerated after opening (oops) and will last 3-6 months.  

Thank you.

Thank This Engine of Advancement

 Humans Are Flourishing More Than Ever. Washington Post.

 Journalist Matt Ridley wrote that, in the two generations from 1955 to 2005, “the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.”

The United States, in particular, has experienced strong growth. From 1970 to 2024, inflation-adjusted household income has increased from $59,000 to almost $84,000. Lower-income households have seen gains of roughly 35 percent during that same period, and educational opportunities have expanded.

Quite different from what one sees on social media these days.

Humans have a tendency to remember good times rather than bad, and thus idealise the past. I wonder why?  It seems to make us less happy in the present and more pessimistic about the future. Like the Ukrainian woman who remembered that there was always enough food under Stalin, not like when she was interviewed in the 1950s, we are quite certain life was better in the old days. The food was tastier, the girls were prettier, and kids knew how to apply themselves and understood the value of a dollar.

I often think of Garrison Keillor's line that we believe life was simpler then, because we were children, and out lives were looked after by others.  But it wasn't simpler for them.  In fact, it was harder. Why do we find this so impossible to believe? 

Who Knows Where the Time Goes

 

Why Evangelicalism is Winning

 Ross Douthat writing in the Free Press. I think he summarises very well, for me capturing both my admiration and suspicion for a brand of Christianity that I am forever half-in, half out of. One point he captures more accurately than I have before seen, is the defense against the accusation that evangelicalism is theocratic. That has always just plain rung false to me, yet the evidence critics bring forward for that idea has always had much truth in it. I have not countered the charge well. Douthat does.

 Evangelical political engagement is more likely to be defensive than controlling or incipiently theocratic.

Yes, this. Evangelicalism is not theocratic, but it is defensive, the great destroyer of all the other claimants to (theo)cracies that pretend to not be religions. As an overly-flexible, cliche-ridden faith, it knows another religion when it sees one, however many veils those may dance behind. The princess detects the pea under a dozen mattresses. Wokeness, politicised liberal Christianity, Country-Over-God, the Gospel of Nice, the Big Guy Upstairs, the Pale Galilean, All-Faiths-the-Same, the Inherited God, the Good Persons, Somber Churchiness, the God of Funerals - all of these are cut to earth by the Evangelicals more quickly than by other brands. Each of these small gods is bitter against the diagnostic X-Ray that is evangelicalism.

Cross-posted at Substack 

Recent Links

There are so many from The Free Press.  I think you should just check in on them without my prompting at this point. I put in two at the end.

Technology, Decentralization and Recentralization David Foster. Communication decentralised with the internet, but is now recentralising. Probably not good.

Two From Works in Progress  

What caused the end of the Bronze Age? The puzzle has never been the collapse. Collapse of civilizations happen all the time. That level of organisation is a fragile thing.  But why did nothing rise again for centuries? This is a good theory.

Mosquitos are a Choice  I do get suspicious when people say "If we only had the courage." 

I love N3's thinking, even when it is on subjects I care little about. Dinosaurs that evolved ultra-high intelligence. My first thought was "Yeah, compared to other dinosaurs.  Big Whoop." I am not a subscriber and don't have access to the rest of the story.  But even in a few sentences - yeah, that's a good point.

Max Spero of AI-detector Pangram - who awaits the threatened lawsuits eagerly, because he is certain he can hold his ground.

I think the work that we’re doing is really prosocial,” he said. “The future that I’m working toward is a world where people value humanity and we find an inherent value in words or content from humans, even if Claude could have said the same things better.

A follow up to that:  The Last Essay