NPR

A NYTimes food guy on NPR is talking about "Junk Food Pushers," and lobbyists, and bemoaning that no federal agency has the power to take on Big Food, and that's why we have this childhood obesity.

Obesity correlates most strongly with fatherlessness and food stamps.

But those are no fun to solve.  It's much more fun to pretend that it's lack of nutrition education in the schools, or evil corporations.

Conference

I went to a conference/training Wednesday morning.  The introductory speaker and a most others commented on how honored they were to work with us, advocating for the mentally ill - as were they - and doing so with great dedication in these difficult times (clear slam in tone and expression at budget cutters), giving of ourselves as civil servants...

Pouring ourselves out as meat-offerings for the poor, bleeding in the streets for the noble cause...

Well no, not that.  But this self-congratulation is part of every conference in human services.  We consider it part of our wages to tell each other how good we are.  I imagine it happens in most other fields, in one form or another.  People like to encourage, to give credit, to inspire.  It just rubs me the wrong way because the speaker so transparently includes him- (or more usually her-) self, yet seems not to realise that.  I likely am also bothered because I believed that for so longer, and ate that stuff up.

Obit: Victoria Regina Shouldis

 Not much of a picture, but I couldn't find a better.

Two months ago, I mentioned a friend dying of cancer.  The link, in turn, carries a note from years ago.  Remarkable woman, and her obituary, which she wrote herself, was in today's Monitor.

A brilliant Trivial Pursuit player - and I specifically sought her out for a particular competition (another teammate was a Jeopardy! winner who died earlier this year. I thought the competition was going to be severe, but we dominated embarrassingly) - and a witty, kindly person, I loved talking with her. She had briefly been a DJ in New York, and was one of the few people I knew who not only recognised "Alison Gross," but knew a female Wiccan DJ named Alyson who had used it as her theme music. She was full of little tidbits like that, which is a small but clannish subculture in our society.

And yet...

Can you imagine a libertarian, paleocon, or anarcho-monarchist writing their obituary with quite this same tone about political persuasion? She was not an arrogant person in the least, - and there is some tone of self-deprecation here, to be sure - but the sense of assurance of correctness here is found only on the fringes of other political movements.

Ah well, she was in general a nicer person than I. The conceit one inherits from a POV is perhaps only a small part of us, and not one that is measured by God in the fiery proof of our works.

Two From Volokh

There is always much of interest at Volokh Conspiracy, though much of it isn't so gripping if you ain't a lawyer.  The first is PETA's attempt to have whales freed from Sea World under the XIII Amendment (no slavery). The comments include a mention that the amendment was likely drafted by whale-oil light, and a wonderful extension that notes if the orcas are persons, then so are the sea-creatures they killed, so orcas should be incarcerated, and Sea World is rather ideal for it.  Fun stuff.

The second is a bit more disconcerting.  A lefty blogger declares that if OWS doesn't "work" - not sure what he means by that, but it seems to be a pretty considerable restructuring of society - then perhaps mandatory participation in government-assigned social media groups would be beneficial.  The idea seems to be that making people interact with others unlike themselves in race and orientation to solve problems will create a better citizen and be good for us all. His commenters seem to think this is a fine idea, which is rather chilling that such an idea doesn't immediately set off warning bells.

I hardly need to point out to this audience the possible problems that might arise from this, but I thought a few words might be in order.  The word "mandatory" should always wake one up and cause one to examine the proposal with narrowed gaze.  Mandatory means, ultimately, once the refusal to pay increasing fines and contempt of court charges are taken into account, that we will put you in jail for not doing this. It's worth keeping in mind.  Government should make some things mandatory, but we should be clear about exactly what, and why.  Secondly, I think I sense the liberal fantasy of "if you would just be open minded and not be stupid and a bigot, you would come over to our POV" behind this idea.  The idea that being exposed to a diverse group would be good for us and make us better citizens ultimately rests on that.  That people could be exposed to diverse (read liberal) POV's, and know some minority citizens pretty well, yet not essentially agree with them seems not to occur to the writer.  The assumption seems quite strong that we who disagree just haven't really thought about it much.

I understand that type of bias because that is pretty much what I think of liberals.  But I try to guard against it, and make sure that I've got some specific evidence to put forward every time I make such a claim.  I might ultimately just be rationalising and deluding myself, but I at least make some attempt to find evidence.

Tribes Collection

Reposting the old series from 3-5 years ago. I collected all my “tribes” writing into one post for easier reference later. And now it's later. People who have been following the blog might enjoy the refresher. Newer readers might like to see what is probably my main partly-original contribution to the world's discussions. These are in chronological order, not importance or intelligence.
The Influence of Doonesbury

Trudeau inherited the mantle of righteousness from the folksingers, and became the chief exponent of the idea that conservatives were essentially stupid and had evil motives.

Early Tribes Writing

I recall going into Walmart a few years ago and thinking "There's a lot of ethnic folks here. Huh." I thought immediately after, "I wonder if that's what the people who hate Walmart are really objecting to. There are poor people here, immigrants, odd-looking people."

Types of Answers in Education

Modern study in much of the Liberal Arts and Humanities rewards students for a certain type of answer.

Postliberal

But "Postliberal" also gives a sense of my history and my approach to issues.

Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychologists speak of survival strategies of individuals being bound up in the survival strategies of the group.

Not Their Tribe

The Arts & Humanities crowd in America do not support OIF, or indeed nearly any war, because they do not perceive their tribe to be in danger.

Hoist On My Own Petard

John b made the claim that doubt was the defining characteristic for Episcopalians, which I scoffed at.

A Thought On Hollywood Liberals

The explanations why entertainment folks lean left usually identify two factors: they make their livings via emotion, and they aren’t very bright. That’s too facile. I offer two factors which have more explanatory power.

The Sadness of NPR Christmas

Year-round, NPR tends to the bittersweet, the witty rather than uproarious, the world-weary rather than the cynical, the poignant, the melancholy, the wistful.

C.P. Snow's Two Cultures Today

Scientist and novelist CP Snow declared fifty years ago that the educated classes were becoming two cultures, literary and scientific.

Renaming The Tribe

I have already mentioned my desire to rename what I have been calling the Arts & Humanities Tribe. While the name has the right feel to it, it does not enclose the group as neatly as I would like. It does not mention the social science folks who make up a large portion of the tribe, and it suggests a connection between the humanities and political liberalism that is permanent rather than temporary.

The Other Tribes

Science and Technology Tribe – Call it the Geek Tribe if you want, but they are gradually taking over social sciences, and making inroads into arts and entertainment, so I wouldn’t insult them too much.

State of the Discussion

Several commenters have advocated that I delineate my tribes according to cognitive styles: left-brain, right-brain; pragmatic, synthesizer.

A&H Tribe - Plodding Onward

Pew’s identified group of Liberals (19% of the population) are outliers on many issues.

Tribe, Class, and Cold Pizza

In the comments sections of one of my Tribal posts, Cold Pizza linked to a long but excellent article on the Rand Corp site about tribalism and its effect on societal development.

Arts & Humanities Clans

There are A&H subgroups, with varying degrees of adherence to the larger group’s values.

Science & Technology Tribe in Humor

All those MIT and Caltech jokes over the years - the third guy on the guillotine who looks up at it and says "Hey, I see why that thing doesn't work," for example, illustrate the S&T culture. This group often has the enormous social confidence of themselves writing most of the humor making fun of them.

How Shall The Country Be Run?

When disputants not only give different answers, but different types of answers, it is likely they are answering different questions. If they not only give different evidence, but different types of evidence, we can use this to discover what are the questions behind the questions that the various parties are asking.

Rosenstock-Huessy

Peter Leithart over at Leithart.com has been making frequent reference to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a German social philosopher who moved to America in 1932, teaching first at Harvard, then many years at Dartmouth. I had never heard of this man in any context that I remember, but he does seem to have been quite brilliant, and quite fascinating.

That Tribal Name Again

I had thought the term chattering classes was older. A Dorothy Parker term or something of that era. According to the revised OED entry, however, it dates from 1980.

Running Commentary

Robert Fulghum has a mildly interesting piece about American tribal behavior. I recall similar pieces from college sociology and anthropology texts, purporting to view America from an objective standpoint.

Sunday Mornings

The idea of having other gods is a commonplace for Christians. We hear sermons on it, read books about it, teach it to our children. We know from the examination of our own hearts that such things are not only possible, but the natural state of things. There is a spiritual Second Law of Thermodynamics that says we will move inexorably toward lesser, path-of-least-resistance gods unless organizing energy is put into the system.

Imus In The Morning

He had Chris Matthews this morning complaining about George Bush. I keep telling you, they hate him because he's from the wrong tribe.

The Long Post

It starts on family culture, ends on American Tribal Politics. I will summarize the latter soon under "Surprise #2." For those scoring at home, I am in my 50's - the uncle I write to here is 80. The Arts & Humanities Tribe may be changing in the younger generations.

The Soul of America

Conservatives complain that the left is not serious about the War on Terror, but is treating Bush and the neocons as the enemy. Put less confrontively, the left is fighting a different battle - one for the soul of America.

The Ideas, and Why They're Wrong

If we fight, we are becoming just like our enemies. Well, no. The express train to becoming like our enemies is to be conquered by them. A slower, but equally reliable train, is to negotiate with them.

The Internationalist Elite as Secular Religion

Kenneth Anderson of Washington College of Law at American University and the Hoover Institute at Stanford has an article which will be dear to the heart of those who have participated in the discussion of American tribes: Secular Eschatologies and Class Interests of the Internationalized New Class.

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose The Military?

Schooling, maintains Nozick, breeds in intellectuals a sense of superiority, and with it a sense of entitlement to the highest rewards society has to offer - not just top salaries but praise comparable to that lavished on them by their teachers.

Labeling

I have succeeded in labeling the last year's posts. I tend to use too many labels, because I don't want to have to do it again, I suppose. I doubt it will come as much of a surprise that a particular cluster - self observation, self observation (liberal), anosognosia, irony, trusting our thoughts, May We Believe Our Thoughts - is strongly represented, with a bible/church and culture cluster, a music/nostalgia cluster, and political also strong. I do think that self observation is key, and I do think that liberals are especially bad at it. But fundamentalists are, if anything, worse, and I haven't picked on them much. Not fair of me, perhaps, but I'm just not that interested. I also try to put in special effort to subject my own thoughts to observation when I am being critical of another group. That is a fairness I am apparently attached to.

Yosemite

A recent National Geographic cover picture of some guy standing on a very narrow ledge in Yosemite. It is clearly dangerous to the point of flirting with suicide, and there is tacit approval of this. Because it's outdoorsy and cool and nature and all that. I doubt we are going to see many NG covers on less-fashionable suicidal pursuits.

They know their audience, after all.

Boosterism

There is usually a sort of dweeby charm to boosterism, when it is minor. Most people getting into their cars don't realise how much of what surrounds them has its origins in the inventions or improvements by the sons of Poland. Poles figured prominently in... Or similarly, geographic areas are fond of listing the famous citizens from within their boundaries, whether they were born, worked, or retired there. The theatrical designer Robert Edmund Jones, for example, came from Milton, NH - an amazing thing if you know Milton, NH. Even Wikipedia runs lists of such notable sons and daughters of the area discussed.

We do it with personal characteristics, nearly always overstating the case. Missouri is the Show Me state, and it's inhabitants are a skeptical, practical people... In America, we do this regularly with our lands of origin, particularly at ethnic festivals or in the introductions to personal histories of families, churches, towns. The hardy Scots who originally settled the area... "National Lampoon" did a sendup of this in the 70's with its White Studies issue. (Did you know that Benjamin Franklin was a white man?) Martin Mull did it a decade later as well.

Our women were always prettier, our tinkerers more clever, our craftsmen more sought-after among our people.

There is, as I noted, a certain innocence to this. We smile benignly even when it is about other states, other groups. But when it gets too bold we begin to grow annoyed, particularly if the speaker does not seem to have an awareness of the potential for insult to others, or worse, no insight into the social dangers that can result. Texans are notorious for plugging their state and lauding their own virtues, and while it is mostly good-natured humor the rest of us grow just a wee bit nervous where all this is going. Californians were the same a generation ago - many still are - a bit too certain they were better than the rest of us. Various cities verge beyond mere self-celebration to a sort of chauvinism that is off-putting: Boston, New York, San Francisco, Portland, and Washington DC most of all.

Insisting on the superiority of a composite region is a little suspect. Those who declare the superiority in wisdom or virtue of Midwesterners are unusual, but it does happen, particularly on the political stump when candidates are trying to position themselves as exemplars of the noble hard-working farmers of yore. New Englanders are a bit worse, and Southerners offend in this way quite often. The Charlie Daniels Band gets cheers when it proclaims the "The South's Gonna Do It Again." Do what? Secede? Grow Cotton? This is troubling.

We cut you more slack if you actually are on the downtrodden or disregarded side of things. I don't know that's wise of us, but as a culture, we do that, and it seems to work tolerably well, within limits. But it can get away from people.

We also get nervous when one's religious group is brought in. Methodists have always been deeply concerned with... or "Catholics approach the education of their young with more realism..." We don't want to contradict you on this, lady, but it's a little overstated, and even when it's mostly true we don't like to encourage any of us to think that way in America. The lines can be tricky.

It can go bad so quickly, and usually does.

I don't know how representative these links are. My uncle sends me these things, and I tend to use him as a proxy for intelligent but completely noninsightful liberals, rather completely indoctrinated by the news sources and facile stereotypes he became comfortable with years ago. He is likely to write things like

It does seem that the purpose of education, formal or informal should be to question and examine belief systems. And that is the foundation of liberalism. The cornerstone of the Age of Enlightenment.

He is quite convinced that it is the liberals that are the open-minded questioners, because that's what the word means to him. I don't know how typical he is. I read similar sentiments in comments sections, and nonliberals will sometimes link to such things when they are examples of particular unreason. Perhaps they aren't really so common. OTOH, respectable publications, seemingly educated and reasonable people have an audience when they publish this stuff. So it's not entirely a fringe phenomenon. Anyway, from Psychology Today. The other is on multiple sites, I picked one.

You can find this kind of boosterism among nonliberals as well, but it seems to come off the fringes and comments sections more. To repeat: I see plenty from the right that expresses this type of sentiment - more hardworking, more independent, what-have-you. But posters and essay-writers usually stop quite short of that. There are qualifiers, acknowledgements that not all the virtue is on one side. It may be insincere and a mere politeness, but what then do we say about those who will not even be polite? Who do not have the simple thoughts of "Gee, what's this sound like if I reverse it? If I put it in the mouth of a Jew or a Virginian? Is this fair? Is this insulting?"

So do these people want like, T-shirts and hats to show their Liberal Pride, or something? Or is that just not cool, so they just do bumperstickers instead?

Here's the kicker: this is the same group that is so appalled about any expression of American Exceptionalism, which they see as a mindless jingoism, dangerous to the world. Recall, for example, Obama's backpedaling that his belief in American Exceptionalism was equivalent to Greek or Polish exceptionalism. I don't think you could find many liberals who would say that about liberal exceptionalism, being essentially the same thing as conservative.

It's almost as if their real loyalty...

Nah. Couldn't be.

A Liberal Reads Right

National Review Online has an interview with a liberal, a New England professor even, who wrote a biography of William F Buckley Jr, and in the course of that, read conservative writers extensively. His comments seem just, and it is nice in any event to have a different set of eyes on the same material.

Q. After having completed an extensive program of reading great conservative works, how can you still be a liberal?

A. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, what separates us at the most fundamental level may be our different conceptions of liberty. Conservatives value above all else what Berlin called the negative vision of liberty, namely, freedom from coercion. Liberals are more willing to balance that against the positive vision of liberty — that is, having a reasonable opportunity to realize one’s potential. The negative vision focuses conservatives on restricting the government’s ability to interfere in people’s lives. The positive vision leads liberals to believe that government has a role in guaranteeing baseline minimums in education, medical care, and healthy communities. Most of us probably accept both visions to some extent, but how we balance the two may be built into our DNA...

The negative liberty/positive liberty contrast is as neat a brief definition as one can find. He is also correct that few of us are purists in that, but sit along a continuum.

Politics In Conversation

I don't get it, frankly. I read Tracy's FB news. I haven't done a census, but she likely has slightly more conservative than liberal friends, among those that are political at all. But I don't see political comments inserted by conservatives in the general flow of things, apropos of nothing. I don't see many from liberals either, but the few that I do see are always from liberals, and always of the entirely social variety, rather sneering at how hateful/stupid/angry a particular conservative, or perhaps Republicans in general, are.

Are people just unaware that friends who disagree with their politics are "present," and may find such things insulting? I am not sure if it is merely an insensitivity, or a communication of enforcement "My friends have these politics. I will cut you publicly if you say otherwise?" Who wants a friend like that?

I have seen the same in conversation, of course. I imagine everyone has. It is most common in a situation where the speaker believes that everyone present must of course share their views on the subject. I have certainly heard conservatives do it, not so much at the churches I have attended as at the schools my children attended. One could hear such assumptions, a "my how terrible those people out there are" attitude on a variety of subjects, political, social, religious - not only in conversation while slicing tomatoes or waiting for soccer teams to return, but from the speakers at events. I found it offensive then, also. I wondered with that group as well if there were something worse than insensitivity present, a declaration of "if you want to be one of us you have to believe this."

I hear it all the time at work, enough so that it seems like background now. The same half-dozen liberals make hateful comments all the time, and an overlapping half-dozen will make anti-Christian statements. Sometimes a new voice will be heard from, or the context will be different, and it will catch my resentment unaware.

I can hardly be accused of not wanting to discuss politics and religion. But there is a social grace to it, a testing of whether a person wants the topic to come in. It's just rude to stand in the lobby and complain that Obama is being dishonest or foolish. It's rude even in the context of someone making a general comment about a political issue, such as the budget deal. You don't just launch with a pre-emptive strike that you think the people you disagree with are stupid or evil, for the simple reason that the person you are speaking to might be one of them, or one might be overhearing.

Maybe this is a New England thing, where liberals believe they own the culture and have the right to defend it. Maybe the opposite happens in, oh, Oklahoma or something. But from this vantage point, it is a rudeness far more common among liberals.

Dunning-Kruger Again

The Dunning-Kruger Effect makes its appearance again, over at Futurepundit, which asks whether geniuses are equally susceptible to this illogic.

She's More To Be Pitied, etc

It used to be common for some more intense Christian groups to insist that if Christian believers would just "get back to God," in some way - sometimes defined, sometimes not - then God would bless America(2Chron 7:14). Or perhaps, many would come to believe in Christ, because they see Christ in us. The world will be amazed. The scriptural backing for the idea is weak. It is far less than half true, though it does have some truth-elements in it. There are many Muslim groups which take this attitude, that if they are obedient, the world's problems will be solved.

There is a variation of this on the left as well, that if we Americans would just build schools for people and stop thinking we are so superior, other countries would not be so resentful of us. It is a pretty idea, but one that has little evidence to suggest that it goes any deeper than "sometimes, if you are nice to people they are nice back." Which is true, but unremarkable.

It is the idea that an essential balance must be restored - that the barbarians must be denied access to power because they are not the rightful bearers. The sense of entitlement decrees that 60% majorities for Democrats are the normal course of events, and anything less brings forth real fear that the country is being "controlled" by not only the right, but the most extreme elements of it. When one compares the rhetoric with the actual numbers, one is - well, puzzled. What kind of unreality do these folks live in?

What we have in current American political discourse is a step vaguer still. This same primitive belief, also quite religious though the terms may be avoided, holds that if everyone would just become like liberals culturally, international strife would diminish and perhaps even be resolved. You may think that I'm a dreamer, but if you read Cynthia Boaz's essay I highlighted from the last post, and remember that however foolish or wrong Fox and its listeners may be, there are equivalent errors which can be easily -

- and I would like to highlight the word easily here -

found among HuffPo and alternet readers and the left in general, I think you will see that this is a cry of the heart that we choose the particular unreality of the left, and all will be well.

As primitive a sentiment as it is, it is at least a step better than my usual tribal criticism - that on such arbitrary items and ways of perceiving the culture, they stand to benefit as it is their base culture, and they know the steps. They know the language and subtle cues in this culture, so adopting it would give them higher status with virtually no effort.

The temptation in contradicting my point would be to maintain "Well, yeah, but we think the world would be better because those values are better. Our ideas are true and really would work, that's why we believe them. Let me give you some straw men and false choices to illustrate my point." That can only be a discussion among people who both admit that they could be wrong.

There are of course real generosities, real altruisms, real self-denials amongst the motivations on the left. Few among us are so base as to have no good impulses whatsoever. But I declare again, as I have for years and continue to find evidence for: Much of liberalism is founded on social correctness, arbitrary distinctions not based on intellectual or moral virtue, cultural hegemony - even hipness. Until there is at least an acknowledgment of the mere possibility of this, there is no discussion.

She's More To Be Pitied Than Censured

Setting the stage...

I was sent a Cynthia Boaz HuffPo column. You can see that her focus is peace and change, nonviolent studies, that sort of thing. Just to kick her right up front, I direct you to her articles on how encouraging Egypt's February (sorta) revolution was (How'd that work out?), and how evil it was to leap to the conclusion that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan's "motive was jihad and that the murders fell into the category of political terrorism," except of course, that this is exactly how things turned out. Why would I start out by slamming her, when my purported goal is to try and see her actions in a different light? Perhaps I'm just not so nice as I hope to be. But my own thought is that the amazing wrongness of these essays is what drove me forward to think more deeply.

Had I written such essays in a national, public setting and then been so quickly proved wrong, spectacularly wrong, I would be ashamed to appear out in writing public again. These are not Strong Opinion Pieces with which one might disagree, nor are they areas where she got things partly right and partly wrong.

She's not the only one, of course, and I'll warrant that if challenged, she and others could come up with elaborate rationales why what they said was understandable in context and still containing much worth listening to, etc. But in all normal circles - at work, in school, at church, in the neighborhood - making pronouncements like this and then having them served to you to eat just a bit later would cause us to slink away. What gives?

(If you really want to torment yourself, you can try On The Moral Depravity Of Capitalism In 21 Tweets. As thoroughly vacuous an essay as you will find.)

The essay sent to me, however was on the topic of how Fox "News" brainwashes its viewers to be dangerously stupid, and what a dire situation that is for the future of the republic.

Just a word or two on that. "News" in quotes. The first sentence includes the phrase "nothing more sacred..." Yet she is complaining about the attempted manipulation by others. When I read this language, I don't envision brave, unclouded souls speaking Truth to Power. I don't have images of stalwart faces staring off to the horizon, resolute and stern. I see Victorian women with wrists to the forehead, looking for fainting couches. Or is you prefer a deeper historic allusion, a David Garrick production of "The Merchant of Venice," Portia with heaving bosom. Or best of all, the Tragedians of comedy: Henry in "The Fantasticks," or Jack in Chapter 13 of Lewis's The Great Divorce.

So if I were to follow my usual script, I would excoriate her for being such a dangerous, violence-enabling airhead. I would make my usual demurrer that most liberals are of course not this stupid, noting only that they give such folks far too much credibility; that more lefties have some element of this than admit it to themselves, etc, etc. Yeah, fine. But I've said that for years, and is anything any better? Do we know any liberals who have, on the basis of being trounced intellectually, asked themselves "I wonder if there is even a 1% chance that we are wrong, not just in method or strategy, but in core principles?" Of course not.

Another possibility
As I am currently primed to consider anosognosia and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, I wondered why intelligent people - for this sort of liberal is usually intelligent in some sense: educated, facile with words, familiar with popular culture references* - thinks this way.

The second article sent with this one, plus a discussion at Althouse about music therapists, brought it into focus. The other article was about a team of people sponsoring an event in San Luis Obispo displaying quotes from holy books and having people guess which one they were from. The point being, of course, that there are some nice things said in the Quran, and therefore Muslims aren't really evil. A Methodist minister was involved in the design.

Reality check here: Anti-islamic prejudice in SLO is responsible for precisely none of the problems in international relations. What type of insane mind thinks that running such a program has any effect whatsoever? Then I remembered the music therapists, which reminded me of aromatherapists and "bodyworkers" and the artist in NYC who made female superhero sculptures after 9-11 so that women would feel empowered and safer. People pretend that what they do is useful, because it's all they have to keep away the night.

Cynthia Boaz is like that kid in the country song who wants to buy red shoes for his dying mother, but only has thirteen cents. "But it has to be enough, mister! It's all I've got!" Yeah, I know, there are other stories with that same plaintive cry, the wail that one is giving all one has, how can that not be enough? The world is dangerous and evil people want to kill us. We cannot bear to do nothing, so we employ a variety of psychological fantasies to keep the horror at bay. We blame ourselves; we pretend our paper swords are deadly; we declare the evil already defeated. It's just our pathetic, human nature selves.

This attitude can be noble, pathetic, or destructive in the human soul. There have been dramatically beautiful works of literature, as well as a thousand saccharine but uplifting stories, about those who gave their loaves and fishes and changed the world. It can be. But all good things can be made dark, and this one goes to especial darkness. The first key is humility. There is a difference between knowing that one only has thirteen cents, or a few loaves and fishes, or mere hobbit-strength to battle against evil - and claiming that such items are the great power that enables you, the elevated and noble, to hold the dark at bay. And still worse is the attitude which says that all those others are getting in the way of you and your thirteen cents conquering the serpent with your all-purpose goodness, and those others must be brought to heel and made to worship at altars you direct.

Yes, such things can go wrong. All good can be poisoned. But for the moment, have pity on the Cynthia Boaz's and Cindy Sheehan's and earnest rescuers. They at least started out loving the poor before they became addicted to the pleasures of kicking the powerful. They started by hoping everyone could get along, like in the movies, before the resentment of not being Princess overtook them.

75% chance of more to follow.



*Less-popular culture, such as anything between Sumeria and 1950, less so.

The Workers - With Update

I find it offensive that the pro-union protesters in many places throughout the country - including the building I work in - refer to themselves as the workers. It is more than implied that they are people who actually do some work and the others are...what, exactly?

I get it that they have some resentment that their opposition portrays them as having cushy government jobs, with bloated benefits and pensions unknown to those in private employment. That opposition does tend to focus on the worst excesses they can find, of union officials or folks who have landed in bountiful sinecures of a bloated government or favored industry. Thank rankles. That annoys. I get that.

But the return service is quite simply, far worse. We/they (as a person who is represented by a union in salary negotiations but not a member myself, it is a bit ambiguous which side of the divide I fall on) are not the only people in America working, or working hard. Most people in the world do decent work with far too little appreciation - we aren't the only ones.

Confronted directly with this complaint (I have mentioned this a few times to people at work whose rhetoric rose into extreme territory), union members protest that they didn't say or mean any such thing: they know other people work hard, too. That is just complete bullshit. The reference to calling themselves "The Workers," is calculated and repeated. If the rank-and-file aren't consciously aware of it, the people making the posters and leading the charge emphatically are. It is the old class-warfare rhetoric, portraying themselves as the noble sons of toil versus the wealthy exploiters. The best they can manage for those who oppose them is that they have been duped by these moneyed interests, and needed to be enlightened about the political realities.

The people on the streets love the narrative, love to imagine themselves as the wise and noble workers, who have seen through the manipulations of the powerful who would put them in their place.

Again, I get it. There are exploiters out there. There are also ignorant people who equally love the narrative where you are the perfumed princes living off government largess extracted from decent folks. But remember those "ignorant" people are dealing from some real examples, real statistics, and real data. It may be the people supplying you with info who are projecting.

Addition: It's rather like political groups who claim to represent Christians, or Women, or Seniors, without any identifiable credentials that they have been elected or appointed to the position. I think back to the childhood taunt: "Who died and left you boss?"

Irritation Central

In a comment likely to offend just about everyone, I dislike Sarah Palin for just about the same reasons I dislike Barack Obama. She intentionally touches on cultural symbols as substitute for content. I feel more comfortable with Obama's symbols, and certainly, most of the people I know hail from crowds that would be Barack-symbolic rather than Sarah symbolic. But either way, both draw their support from people who really want a full-out culture war - with the other side defeated, humiliated, enslaved. And both are sure that this is exactly what the country needs. Do you think we need more presidents who ride motorcycles and shoot wolves, or more presidents who are embarrassed to be Americans in front of Europeans? Would you rather be a Lilliputian or a Blefuscuan?

Both do well with their respective crowds with prepared speeches, but are fools - even stunning fools - when speaking off-the-cuff. Obama thinks they speak Austrian in Austria? (And no, it wasn't a slip. Watch the tape.) Yet because they continue to ring the right gongs even when their content verges into senselessness, their supporters think them wise. This last supposed gaffe by Palin, getting the history wrong in Boston - and then it turns out she got it right and her critics, so eager as usual to jump all over her, drink her blood, and bay at the moon, got the facts more wrong than she did.

I saw the clip. Even granting she got those parts right, it's still not an impressive performance. You wouldn't think many people could be worse than Obama without a teleprompter, but she manages. Yet even as I wince I laugh at her attackers, outdoing her in stupidity in their impatience.

Both "Obama" and "Palin" still show up as red-line misspellings in my blogger dictionary, and I ain't a-gonna change it by adding them in. My own little petty protest.

Changes in NPR

Tracy listens while washing the dishes, and we catch some of it.

You can feel the discomfort of some of them as they report more market-friendly ideas than they ordinarily would - because they are reporting world events, and all those Europeans and Canadians - who used to be such reliable contrasts to us cowboy, materialistic Americans - are increasingly contrasts in the other direction: kicking out socialists, cutting back on the safety net, trying to contain (gasp) left wing mobs. In world events, NPR is being dragged where it does not want to go. But some of them are honest, if misguided liberals, and follow where the facts lead. Others can barely get a sentence out without having to undercut it in the next breath. We shall see.

To compensate, I think their American reporting is burrowing ever deeper into comfort territory. [UPDATE: Or Not. See Fresh Air.] Tonight there was a longish interview with Bradley Cooper (did I get the name right?). Before I knew who they were talking to, I was bolt upright listening to them falling into form. They spent ten minutes talking about whether he was one of the cool kids in high school and college or whether he was somehow apart - one of those artsy intellectuals who was a bit of a loner, you know?* (For those new here, I have been mentioning for years that this question is a dominant one for liberals. They are unable to let it go, somehow. As a nostalgic person I understand somewhat, but people, we have to move on. I thought it was just Boomers, but I am finding it is more general.)

Who the hell cares? Such things sometimes come up in conversation in an adult's life and some analysis of self is instructive. But this is a national radio program, supposedly discussing artistic development, recent and important work, or other grownup ideas. Sports interviewers don't spend that much time asking friggin' athletes about their high school careers. Even while they're still in their 20's.

I swear that culture is dominated by people who spend their lives trying to prove that they really were cooler when they were young, but the benighted fools just couldn't see that.

*Yes he was distant, even from the theater people, because he was more into film.

Bad Reasoning

I find that bad reasoning can influence my thinking as much as good reasoning. Is that the best you've got? I find myself thinking. Then maybe your idea ain't so great.

In the 1970's, I was exposed to a lot of Christians who believe that America's support of Israel figures prominently in the events of the Last Days. The general idea seemed reasonable enough to me. God seems to have Israel, the specific place, and Jews even when they aren't in Israel, as connected to the meaning of human history. Jesus was Jewish and the themes of his preaching assure us that's not accidental. The Holocaust and foundation of Israel were enormous and recent. America happened to be the world's preeminent power.

But the specifics of that, no matter how much people assured me they were straight from the Bible - you could look it up* - never seemed all that solid. There are a half-dozen general outlines, each with some possible variation, and none of them are convincing to me. Any of them could be true. I'm not saying they are false. But the evidence is scant, nowhere near what its proponents think. The books, videos, preachers, and teachers put forth bad arguments. And so, over the years, I have questioned whether America's foreign policy should be Israel-protective as one of its main objectives. The thought experiment pretend Israel is just one more nation in the world isn't very hard, actually. So the people who take that view also have an initial plausibility on their side. Sure, why not? Let 'em stand or fall on their own.

But when you let them keep talking, you find that they have bad reasoning as well. Specifically, a heckuva lot of 'em turn out to be anti-Israel and antisemites with very little poking. Online, it gets very difficult in comment threads to attend only to those people who at least seem to be Israel neutral - or well-wishing but unwilling to have America involved - because of the hordes of insane people chiming in. The excuses for Palestinian behavior, or Syrian/Lebanese/Iranian/whatever behavior are stunningly stupid. These are excuses you wouldn't accept from your teenagers for why they got a detention (not that any of my perfect children ever got a detention, you understand), but they hold up for nations?

Oh right, liberals are less likely to have ever had any teenagers, especially more than one. Maybe that's part of it. Though it can't be all of it.

So I am driven back in my first direction again. If the arguments against America supporting Israel are that mind-numbingly stupid, maybe we should be for it. We should at the least have the thought occur to us that America gets something back from this alliance, and have a little curiosity what that might be.

*********

Recently, I have had the same experience in discussing same-sex marriage. As an evangelical, I have been exposed for years to the idea that the destruction of society, whether by natural consequences or direct punishment from God, will result from allowing - well hell, not just allowing SSM, but civil unions or homosexual behavior at all. While I agree with the general premises that 1) the family is not an accidental or optional vehicle for the training of the young and integrating them into society, but the only method that has been shown to work, 2) screwing with things that work invites disaster, and 3) permissions for homosexual behavior seem tied in theory to adultery, divorce, and Lord-knows-what-else - the opposing idea, that the right of the individual do do stuff they want to - is a fully American idea that deserves consideration.

Homosexuality has never been the key issue for me that it is for a lot of other Christians. I was a theater major and a dancer, for Pete's sake, and learned early to shrug at other people's sexual behavior. I have sexual sins of my own; working at a state hospital I have had all sorts of people with all sorts of problems who nonetheless deserve decent speech and general compassion. But primarily, I have never bought the idea that God puts it on the top of His list of things to complain about in other tribes. Idol worship seems to have captured that spot. For His own people, sure. The scriptures are more than plain that homosexuality is forbidden. Yet even here, it doesn't seem to be a dominant theme driving world-historical events. It's mentioned. It's forbidden. It is tied in to the general idea of the sanctity of marriage and the use of that image as a description of Christ's union with his church. Not much more.

So one would think that I would now be among those who shrug at the idea of SSM in America. What's the harm? Why is it my business? Yet as the debate intensifies we get the opposite effect. The arguments in favor - the arguments that people actually make - are ludicrous. You might convince me with great effort that a right discovered 30 years ago is indeed a Basic Human Right. We do extend ideas and see conclusions over time that may have been opaque to us before. But to insist that this new idea is just obvious, that only bigoted and intensely stupid people fail to recognise that changing the definition of marriage is something beneath even discussing, brands you as a hyperpartisan who is unable to even participate in a debate among reasonable people. To assume that opposition to SSM is the same as wanting to make homosexuality illegal is just the same as being opposed to civil rights for black people in the 60's is a set of huge logical leaps. I don't think gay rights in general are just exactly like racial civil rights at all, actually. Asserting louder that they are too doesn't help.

And of course, calling people bigots for disagreeing with you is always persuasive. I will say that in general, proponents of same sex marriage have not actually listened to their opponents' arguments. They have selectively listened to the worst arguments. That's fairly natural for all of us, but that's not good enough. I could play that game as well, noting that some proponents, if you let them fly, use language that makes it distressingly clear that they want the government to give the stamp of approval to SSM so that they can force it down the throat of mummy and daddy and their teachers and the straight kids from school that they ARE TOO OKAY!!! I don't take those folks into consideration when I'm discussing the general idea - everyone's got jerks and pathological people buried on their side somewhere, but it's best to seek out the reasonable people to talk to.

Yet here's the thing. In the debate over at Volokh, comment after comment, and even most of the posts, don't rise above the level of it's just obvious and you're a bigot. Not the first time I've encountered this over the last decade. Volokh is going to attract about the best disputants in favor of SSM you can find, and a few are pretty good. Yet even they slip into the Bad Reasoning.

It pushes me the other way. If that's the best argument you can make for SSM, then it's not such a great idea.

*When I hear that now, the insistence of a preacher that you should follow along in your Bible to insure they aren't misleading you, or the insistence of a congregant of following along to "check" on the preacher, I am convinced that I am in the presence of people who will make no sense. Trees. Forest.

Admiration

I only heard about the end-of-the-world 5/21 group late in the week. I think I had seen a billboard as much as a month ago and just rolled my eyes - it was probably the same people. I don't know much about them, so maybe they have done some awful things I haven't heard about. Yet my naturally contrarian nature, listening to so many people gleefully picking on them - clearly needing some group like this in order to a) feel good about themselves, like the the 6th-grade bully, and b)laboring to tie this group to whatever opponents they have in this world - stepped back and looked at this differently.

Compared to environmental catastrophists, it should be noted that these folks

1) Spent their own money on the billboards and publicity
2) Expected nothing in return, so were merely generous
3) Did not attack those who disagreed with them

I will note that the frequent defense of the embarrassing facts that environmentalist predictions have gone laughably, ridiculously wrong - that they're still right, they just got the decade wrong - may well apply to the end-of-the-worlders as well. In fact, they will eventually be right.

Fools they may be, but I admire this. We are called to be fools for Christ, and they have put themselves out there with greater risk than most Christians dare. Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, Bill McKibben - these people have got pretty good gigs going, haven't they? That's certainly their right, and heck, they may even be right. But the altruism piece rings rather hollow. They're wrong, they've made money off it, and they sneer at others.

I know which group I'd rather live next door to.

Public Intellectuals

John Naughton at The Grauniad wonders why public intellectuals do not seem to be so prominent in modern times, and especially in Britain.

I have some theories on that, actually, but I can more easily tell you why Naughton is puzzled. He quotes some guys identified as intellectuals

The French polymath Pierre Bourdieu saw PIs as thinkers who are independent of those in power, critical of received ideas, demolishers of "simplistic either-ors" and respecters of "the complexity of problems". The Palestinian literary critic Edward Said saw the public intellectual as "the scoffer whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations".

I love Bourdieu (I should do a post on him as related to my thinking on tribes, as he was big into analysing social classes), but politically, he was the original anti-globalist liberal. And Said has little to recommend him in the way of intellect - but he is great at sneering at the West, insisting we do not understand his vibrant, ancient, and viciously barbaric and narcissistic culture. And he hates Israel, so we know he's sound.

Throughout the essay, Naughton keeps verging on the answer, as he notes that Sartre and de Beauvoir were later exposed as contemptible, that many of the lists of public intellectuals are weighted toward journalism, writers of fiction no one reads, and "critics" who don't seem to know about anything, but just talk about stuff as if they did. He wonders why the French have such respect for this group - which he approves of - while the Brits and Americans don't, especially, even though we are

a cockpit of vibrant cultural life and home to some of the world's best universities, most creative artists, liveliest publications and greatest theatres and museums.

That's the list for identifying intellectuals, apparently.


(Explanation here.)

He mentions David Brooks as someone who should perhaps be included. For what, exactly? I despise Paul Krugman as a bigot, but he at least has some original claim of being an intellectual.

Here's the thing, John: Bourdieu and Said are right, in theory. That's what public intellectuals should be, and we can all see the value of their being that. But they aren't that, and consistently have not been. The intellectual classes have consistently come out in favor of ideas and regimes that result in lots of dead people and hungry people. They just sell out to different powerful interests, the ones that can get them writing gigs and potential bedmates. The rest of us poor yahoos, who admittedly just don't understand a lot of deep philosophical stuff and can barely keep our lawns mowed, have nonetheless at least not created that kind of damage. These intellectuals are clearly people who should not be left as night watchmen in a day camp.

The article did give me the idea of Paul Johnson's book for my wish list, thought. Except, Johnson is more solid than engaging as a writer.

"The Lesson Plan"

I know nothing about the Newport Beach Film Festival or of Libertas Film Magazine, but I found the experiment this documentary recalls intriguing. It fits both with my Tribes discussions and the recent MWBOT series.

Ron Jones, a puzzling mixture of grandiosity and naïveté, claims he intended this to be only a one- or two-day experiment, but it went on for at least a week. Other students remember a longer or shorter period (the incident was not well documented at the time). He admits he was so energized with the power and passion of his movement that he upped the ante each day, introducing new methods of mind control. On day 5, when he finally exposed the movement as a lesson meant to teach the students that they were no better or worse than the Germans, the young students fell apart in a fog of betrayal and emotional panic. The tearful interviews of his students 40 years later testify to the damage wreaked by the experience.

Trailer at the link.