Time For The Obvious

I am in recent close conversation with a person dear to me who is very worried about the Muslim invasion of his European city.  His experience is quite real, as he now cannot walk in areas he used to because of the danger, and he sees and hears live and up close the recent migrants aggressively challenging passers-by, especially females, and notes that the rape rate has increased.  I checked, BTW, and it has.

The problem is, he overestimates the numbers by more than 10x, and this adds to his wrath.  He doesn't get numbers that well anyway, and maybe it would be just the same if he knew the proper statistics.  Because...angry people arriving at the train depot in the center of town, hanging around until the local government does something about them, often refusing to work, and trying to accost and corner young women has its own effect regardless of whether you get the numbers right.  It is virtually certain that many of the arrivals are not bothering anyone and would dearly love to have a nice European job.  But he doesn't see those. He sees the others, where last year there were none. So, with the crap that spills out of his mouth, he would be regarded by most Americans as a bigot.

On the other side, I have lots of nice people posting on FB heartwarming stories of Syrian medical students who aren't being welcomed, or Palestinian musicians, or cute children looking sad, and all that.  Tonight's claim was about families carrying starving children, and how evil bigoted Americans were keeping them out.

Starving is a big word.  Hungry, I will acknowledge, but you have to go a long time to starve. Last I saw, 12% of the migrants were children.  Many of those were smuggled across Turkey for a high fee.  So if I agree with those who want to highlight what wonderful people we are discriminating against that the situation for many is indeed dire, and that some of them are children, can we not have the implication that this is some sort of huge majority, rather than something less than 10% of the total?  I think helping that 10-% is a good thing.  We should do something, and I'm willing to discuss what that might be.  However we just had a fundraiser at church for a Sudanese group where the people are literally eating grass because they are starving, and there are many other world-wide causes that might be equally deserving."Syrian refugees," even though they are not so much Syrian and not so much refugees, are the fashionable topic, because it provides everyone with an opportunity to kick other Americans who are competing with your tribe for power in government.  Nigeria, Uganda, Yemen, Ukraine, Venezuela?  You bastards can go pound sand. You aren't the hip conflicts.

As regards American Muslims, it is clear that most of them are not violent extremists, and hinting that the next ones we take in are likely to bring down the Republic, it's just not true. Europe has it worse, we just get lots of focus because we are as big as all of Europe put together, so occasional incidents seem disproportionate. It is a very similar situation to the anarchists over a century ago.  They can be dangerous, and we don't have good protections, but they really aren't going to make a big dent in population, nor even in our habits, as we seem to resume life as usual just a week after every incident.

But the other obvious thing is the reverse: Even in America, with a watered-down Islamic extremism, there is much more danger in mass events from the few Muslims than from, say La Raza, even though there are many Hispanics, or the Black Panthers, even though there are many African Americans, and that goes double for White Supremacists, Tax Protesters, Radical environmentalists, or whatever.  Worldwide, Islam is fighting lots of groups on lots of borders: Hindus in India, Communists in China, secularists in Europe, Jews in Israel, Zoroastrians, Bahai, animists, and of course Christians, Christians in many places.  They are more violent. Whether that is tribal violence (heightened or mitigated by Islam, pick your theory) or Islamic violence that has influenced tribes doesn't much matter for the larger discussion, because measurement isn't going to be definitive. But pick up a world map and just look at it.

So we settle into two camps, one saying that Muslims aren't any worse than others, and heck, we made 'em mad so it's our fault (and Israel's), the other saying that they are all dangerous and we should kick them all out.  Both POV's are pretty much insane.

Wyman Christmas Letter 2015 - Part I

I'm going to publish it section-by-section this year, just as an experiment.  Six Parts

The People Walking In Darkness Have Seen a Great Light

Tracy developed a liturgy for family use that we have recited for over thirty years instead of table grace during Advent. Personal liturgy develops its own strength. This year we had new people, Jocie and Aurora, for the first night of it.

Best Meerkat Ever

What Our Enemies Hear

I recall an email discussion a decade ago, in which I noted that elected Democrats and opponents of the war continually hammering their desire to leave Iraq and Afghanistan, win or no, might be interpreted by our enemies as evidence of a lack of resolve on America's part, and an encouragement to continue fighting and wait us out. I asked that if this were true, did they then bear some responsibility for further American servicemen's deaths?

I didn't say they should be prevented, or that they had no right to speak.  But I thought it was something that any public American should consider when making statements.  Is there not some chance that we might win more quickly if our enemy were intimidated and discouraged? Isn't history actually full of such psychological factors affecting outcomes? Should that not at least be a consideration?

That question was rejected as not only wrong, but rather evil to be even mentioned.  There was no chance of any such thing happening, and my suggestion that Americans should be censored (which I had not said) was fascistic.

Fast forward to today, when not only lefty news sources, but Secretary of State John Kerry are suggesting that Trump's statements are a powerful recruiting tool for ISIS. So apparently, the statements of presidential candidates, who have no actual power, have a great deal of influence on our enemies, while people with actual power, like US Senators, do not. 

Global Something

Even if the climate were warming at an alarming and dangerous rate, it would be imperceptible at any single location. If, by some wild chance, you had been taking measurements of sea levels or dates-of-first-blossom or whatever, you might suspect something was up after a few decades of puzzling results.

This counts also for skeptical backlash that warming-is-a-fraud. Even if it were a terrible inaccuracy perpetrated on gullible citizens in order to effect the societal transformation of impoverishing oil executives and elevating earnest young clerks at solar-heated non-corporate bookstores, you wouldn't be able to detect that from your front porch, even if you'd lived there for years.

Bloggers Are The Best Seekers After Moral Truth

I am reading Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, which I think I am going to categorise as a necessary book, one that must be read if the topic is to be understood, whatever shortcomings it might have. I have seen much but not all of this information in other venues, but it is nicely arranged here, in a more engaging style than The Happiness Hypothesis.

In the meantime, I was struck by his description of Phil Tetlock's work on two different types of moral reasoning, exploratory versus confirmatory.  Confirmatory moral reasoning is what we do 90+% of the time, instantly and seamlessly seeking justifications for whatever it is we just did or decided.  It is our built-in PR firm or built-in lawyer, and doesn't bother much about the actual truth. Yes, it's all rather tawdry, but it seems to have served us well in an evolutionary sense. The appearance of morality and justifying our behavior may sound like we're mostly faking, but in small societies, there's a limit in what you can get away with, and smoothing things over with a good excuse that shows you generally acknowledge the underlying rules is an economical way of getting at real moral behavior.

Yet we all know that the exploratory moral reasoning, the "evenhanded examination of alternative points of view" is the real deal, and that requires accountability.  Interestingly, Tetlock found that three factors must go into the accountability, all of which apply to bloggers: 1) Decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience. 2) The audience's views are unknown, and 3) They believe the audience is well-informed and seeks accuracy. Haidt explains:

When all these conditions apply, people do their darndest to figure out the truth, because that's what the audience wants to hear. But the rest of the time - which is almost all of the time - accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than to be right.

He then quotes Tetlock to the effect that we are also, perhaps even mostly, trying to convince ourselves.

Well, that looks like bloggers, doesn't it?  There's some weakness around factor 2), because each site has an audience and the blogger knows something of what they believe.  But that is true of any writer, or indeed, any communicator. Unfortunately, you will notice that this applies less to blog commenters.  Of which I am also one.

It's bad news in the end, though.  Tetlock also found out that the best moral reasoners aren't any more moral in their actions than poor moral reasoners.

Missed Anniversary

I just noticed that my ten-year anniversary of blogging was last month.

Looking back at the early entries, I find that most links are dead.  So much for information on the internet lasting forever.

BTW, even though the link was broken for "Komodo Dragons and Meat Hats," I found it again.
So much for the serenity of Eastern cultures, as I said then.

History Of Gun Control

I think the topic fascinates me because I have no dog in the fight, and if anything, have a cultural antipathy to guns in general.  My children were among those who were not allowed to have any toy guns, and even finger-guns were discouraged in horror at Bedford Montessori School. It was one of the last bricks in the wall to fall for me in abandoning liberalism.  At some gut level, I just believed that if there were fewer guns around and we were stricter about who had them, and if guys didn't get so excited and admiring about gun stuff and gun stories, we would all be safer. I still have no interest in learning about them and being near them makes me nervous. (Of course, with my hand-eye coordination, that's reasonable.  I would be extremely likely to take out the refrigerator and a couple of windows if we had a gun around.)

It was the numbers that convinced me, and that was slow.

I saw a quote from Chief Justice Warren Burger that the Second Amendment interpretation that guaranteed individual gun rights as opposed to militia rights was a huge fraud. I have no idea if the quote is authentic,  but I thought it would be interesting to see what a 1960's conservative justice's influences were.  This led me to reading up on the history of gun control in general.

I had read before that early gun control occurred in the Reconstruction era to keep guns out of the hands of newly-freed slaves. That seemed a mild left-right irony compared to the present, but I didn't think it particularly germane now. The next two major dates on the timeline caught my eye, however. Gun control became a big deal again in the 1920's and 30's, both at the state and federal levels.

Well gosh and gee whillikers, that's exactly the same time period that America felt it had just about enough of immigrants and instituted Prohibition in order to keep those Slavs and Dagos and hot-blooded Latins from getting dangerous, isn't it?  If fact, I think that was a major theme for Ken Burn's film "Prohibition." 1927 was the year that we hugely restricted immigration, until it ramped up again in 1964. Waves of Jews and whatnot from Europe, plus (gulp) colored people from the south were all moving to the Northern cities. And union organisers and all those Bolsheviks, all in the cities, too.  What about them?  These were not regular rural white people who hunted, these were people who weren't...reliable. The law schools of the era were suddenly much more in agreement that this only for the militia idea must be the original intent.  Because, frankly, who signs up for the National Guard?  (Wink, wink.) I'm willing to be corrected on that point, because I already had my theory by then, and I know how easy it is to find exactly what you are looking for in doing research. Especially brief, slapdash research.

Fast forward to the new gun control of the late 60's, when those law students were now judges and legislators. People had moved off the farm into the cities and suburbs, and hunting for food became less common in favor of hunting for Bambi.  Plus there was a war, and y'know, that was all about guns. That layer of cultural protection was vanishing, as socially aspirational people increasing found guns to be, well, owned by either rubes or criminals. Besides, the cities were still known to be very dangerous. There was a magical hope that fewer guns in the cities - somehow, we don't know how - would make them safer.  As an added bonus, all those rich guys who hunted for (ugh) sport, plus the rural people, those rubes we were trying to put in our own rear-view mirrors, could be kicked, made fun of, and accused of multiple pathologies. Hey Bungalow Bill...

I don't know if unacknowledged fear of black and hispanic people underlies modern gun control.  I suspect not, actually.  People get very good at disguising associations from themselves, and in a few generations we have a disgust taboo that runs entirely on modern political competition.

American Arrogance - Part II

dmoelling landed immediately on the Monopoly square adjoining mine in discussing how the American regions relate to each other, noting that New England/northeast doesn’t hesitate to tell Texas that it is doing things all wrong.  I had not wanted to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by announcing my own suspicion, but I had immediately thought of New York telling Texas what to do, unrequested.  Pretty similar.  This covers what Texas should do about public transportation, how they should run their schools, how they should talk, dress, eat, vote.  It’s the strongest cultural line of giving advice unasked-for in the country, the distillation of what happens everywhere.

Texas says that it’s great, but they mostly say that to each other, which is parallel to America bragging on itself.  That torques everyone else off, so the other states go looking for ways to tell Texas what to do. New York/New England, on the other hand, pretty much tries to tell everyone else how they should act. Most regions do this, but we are more intense about it.  That’s the stereotype, anyway, and I think there is some reason for it. That would make Northeast America a lot like Northwest Europe.

 

California also tells everyone else what to do.  They do some of this via the entertainment biz, but they do seem to have some of that attitude in their character in all interactions. New England settled the top of the country, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the Pacific Northwest.  Ecotopia also tells everyone else what to do, but nowhere near as intensely or obviously.  (Maybe just as smugly.)

Looking back at Europe there is a nuance I didn't quite describe in Part I: Scandinavians and NW Europeans dislike individual bragging and wouldn't quite say out loud that they are Best Nation, they do very much take collective credit for having figured out just about anything you name - how to handle the Russians, how to do healthcare, how an economy should be run, what the relations between men and women should be.  They humblebrag very well.

I hadn't thought I was going here when I set out, but we seem to have come around to some very usual stereotypes.  The regions line up pretty closely with political persuasions.  Conservatives tell each other that they are great, which irritates liberals who are then very quick to point out that "they" (Americans/Western Civ/Texans/Christians) aren't, really.  Liberals tell others what to do, unasked. which torques off conservatives, who would never go into your house and do that.

And it's the defensive/offensive pattern between them again, liberals on offense, conservatives on defense. I certainly notice this in my FB feed and my own FB behavior.  Liberals on offense tend to be general, even when they are being vicious. They complain about gun owners, or Republicans, or whatever, then seem shocked and offended when they get called on it. Yet at one level, I get that. They have themselves convinced that if you aren't being mentioned by name you have no right to be offended.  If the shoe fits and all that. But when I am calling someone out for a bigoted remark, that's personal, that's individual, there's nowhere to hide. It is an escalation of a sort.

CS Lewis, Special Agent

For those who missed the story. BTW, I have not forgotten that Part II of American arrogance is due. It's just that there are other things at present. I have started it.

American Arrogance - Part I

A stray comment at Quora digest claimed that Americans actually are modest about some things, despite their reputation for arrogance. Bragging about one's own accomplishments was specifically mentioned as somethings Americans consider rude. As I had been in an argument over at the CS Lewis site with a man from England and one from Holland, both of whom I thought were arrogant without being conscious of it, it set me wondering. Is there some cultural difference in which certain approaches are innocent in Europe but Americans find arrogant, and vice versa?

First, I get why Europeans find Americans arrogant.  American movies, TV, songs, many publications and Americans themselves announce how great we think the country is, and how much we like our way of doing things.  True, there are also many American products which take the opposite tack, dwelling on our evils, and perhaps those should be considered as balancing items when we are being judged as a group.  Yet leave those aside for the moment and note that the first claim is true.  Americans tell each other what a great place this is and what good people we are, and we do it a lot.

Notice my wording.  We tell each other this. Lee Greenwood didn't write "God Bless The USA" in order to stick it to Belgium or Turkey.  (In fact, he also wrote a "God Bless You Canada" version.) All those American hero movies that strike others as so jingoistic and offensive - you weren't the intended audience.  No one made you import those. If you like our movies and you bring that in and suddenly start getting offended by Americans winning and waving flags, that's on your own head. The ubiquity of American arts and culture since WWII seems to give people in other cultures that they should have some sort of vote in this.

I don't think Americans find it all that bothersome when other countries do this. The bravest and most intelligent characters were all French.  Well duh.  The movie was made in France. So long as you don't single Americans out as being especial villains (and even that is okay in some situations, such as when it's historically true), we aren't offended by the idea that you think your guys are the best. In fact, if you made us the bestest in your novel, we would immediately suspect you were trying to suck up to us, or criticising your own government in some way.

The exceptions would be our portrayals of Germans up until about 1970, and the Russians until 1990.  We did make random villains conform to those nationalities even when there was no reason to in the TV show. We had to pick someone, and you actually did deserve it, dudes.

The thing to notice is that we don't tend to go up to others and tell them off just because we think our way is better. (There is a large exception, which I will treat later.)  We don't go to London, strike up a conversation with the man next to us at the bar and say "You English are always whining about the economy. I think it comes from having a monarchy and a House of Lords..."  We would find that quite rude, and we don't tend to it in online conversations either.  We don't go into your house and start insulting you.

Yet Europeans do this to Americans all the time.  They do it personally and individually, and they do it in their newspapers. They do it when they visit us here and when we visit them there.   America should stop saying... the trouble with Americans is... The reason you have problem x is because you don't do things as we Swedes do... Unsolicited. I think they don't notice that it is terribly rude because it is so common and natural when talking with each other that they don't hear it talking with us.  there's this entitled sense that they have the right.

Now, once they've done that, they are going to get it back double-portion, and American arrogance will be on full display.  Don't like out sports, and think we should get with the program and care about soccer like the rest of the world?  Who asked you?  Let me tell you the problems with soccer and why I don't care...  You don't like our gun laws, and think those are what cause our homicide rate?  Okay, mac, let me tell you the reality here... We don't go into your house and insult you.

So there, I thought, is a cultural difference. It's a misunderstanding perhaps, which can be worked around. Then I wondered if Europeans do this to each other? Do Scots go to Paris and pop off about how the French do things?  Or if the French visit, do they take them to task about Le Pen or French movies?  The Swedes are notorious for telling everyone else, including even other Scandinavians, how much better they are managing things. They say they prefer to mind their own business and not interfere, but apparently, it always comes up pretty quickly, like the jokes about being a pilot or people who do Crossfit. Still, I am guessing here, and would appreciate hearing from people who know better.  Staffan? 

And the next question that would just naturally arise is Hey! Do Americans do this to each other?  What are the rules when it's in-house? That led to some very surprising speculations. What does New England say to California?  What does Georgia say to Minnesota - how is it delivered, and what is considered rude?

I arrived at some odd locations after following that. 


To Be Continued.

Quora Question

How will it affect Quora now that Hillary's campaign has learned how to game its system?

Campus Controversies

I have to keep reminding myself that I should be concerned about this, as Son #5 commutes to college and has already been shown "The Hunting Ground" in an English class. I think I have been counting on his experience in the Reserves, plus his expectation of going ROTC as a protective factor, but I may be overestimating that. If Kyle goes to UNH Durham in the fall I might grow more concerned, as the total environment might be more in play.

Still, it's hard for me to worry about it every day, even though campus outrages are common fare at both Maggie's Farm and Instapundit, which I go to often, as well as a dozen other sites I visit less frequently. I agree, it is hard to take some of the students, professors, administrators and hangers-on all that seriously sometimes, yet I keep assuming the barbarians are in the minority and everyone else mostly goes about their business of teaching and learning.  I am perhaps naive.

I think the obvious things have been said many times, yet there is one thing that is danced around that perhaps should be said more bluntly.  In the demands for diversity, and avoiding all cisnormative, patriarchal, western, and white dominance of the curriculum, there seems to be an an assumption by the students (and even the faculty) that there is some other choice. I wonder if this comes from the over-compensation in elementary textbooks, which have long included B and C-list accomplishments of Latinas or Africans as if they were essentially equal to those of some dead white males, so that those in traditionally disenfranchised groups have some role models and feelings of efficacy. These students go to college believing that there must be people from Their Group who were just as accomplished as the ones they are being forced to study.

I don't think that's a terrible thing for children.  Shading an absolute ranking in every field in order to instill hope and spare feelings, creating a rising tide for all boats, is reasonable when applied judiciously. Yet I wonder if it has created the false impression that there has been something entirely arbitrary about who we honor, as if there were some equally impressive lists of female mathematicians, black inventors, or chicana poets that we just refuse to talk about because we're bigots.

But really, who would those people be? 

It has been a great exercise to try and find these, because there are of course people from less-favored or less-expected groups who did things which deserve mention. We might further argue that because of prejudices in many times and many places, there should have been, and would have been talented people who were not allowed to show their full powers.  Yet that is also true even in the favored groups.  We can't always honor mere potential.  At some point we have to honor accomplishment. Female writers, especially of fiction, provide a respectable list on their own, with no need for a handicap. You could indeed make an all-star team out of accomplished thinkers and doers from the nonmale, noneuropean, nonwhatevers of the world.  China in particular could provide a lot of nominees. I suppose if you are gay it is inspiring to know that there were guys like Turing. But building your whole sense of self-esteem on people who can check the same boxes you do seems like a sure-fire way to feel miserable about yourself forever.

Yes Virginia, There Is Some Effective Gun Contol Law

Original Here.  You can zip in "effective gun control law" wherever you want.

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Effective Gun Control Law.
Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there an Effective Gun Control Law?

VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET...

...Not believe in Effective Gun Control Laws! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Effective Gun Control Laws, but even if they did not see Effective Gun Control Laws coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Effective Gun Control Laws, but that is no sign that there are no Effective Gun Control Laws. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world...

...No Effective Gun Control Laws! Thank God! they live, and they live forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, they will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Parental Behavior

Megan McArdle's What Really Scares Helicopter Parents is interesting in itself, and feel free to comment on that. But a trend in parents' use of time jumped out at me.  If helicopter-prone parents are spending more time with their children, and working more hours, then what are they no longer doing?

I suggest it is time with other adults, in groups. Dave Barry writes about the parties his parents threw in his childhood - indoor parties, outdoor parties, dress-up, dress-down, themed and unthemed - and how that has not been so great a part of his life. I recognised immediately what he was talking about.  My parents often went to largish get-togethers at other people's houses, or held them at their own. It might be the bridge club or curling club or golf club members getting together purely socially, with no curling stone in sight.  There were company events. There were enough annual events that they added up.  And as every reader of Bowling Alone knows, there were the groups themselves and their own meetings. Barry remembers that children were not invited to many of them, nor was this thought odd.  Children were expected to take some job such as bringing in chafing dishes from the kitchen or setting up tables, or get lost.

Tracy and I have done some of getting together with adults, but the children were often in tow.  We went to some church parties for the adults when we were a young couple in the 70's.. We initially went to some work parties, but discontinued that. As the children grew up, they stopped coming to what is still called Bible Study, which has met weekly for almost 4 decades, though the Bibles were left behind years ago. But that is a group of four couples.  Its annual Jesse Tree and July 4th celebrations were the center of the social year from 1983-2005, but no more. I think our children do even less entertaining than that. Sons 2 and 3 seem to go to large get-togethers put on by others. Whether that will persist when they are married with children remains to be seen.

I think the 25-55 cohort has even less getting together as adults than we did.

There is also the amount of time men (and now women) put into following sports and news as well. No one watched football all Saturday or Sunday, or equivalently followed it on radio or internet. There was A Game on each weekend day, which expanded to two some time in the 1980's. Baseball was followed on a radio playing at the workbench or in the kitchen, in the background while you did something else. That gradually changed as well, but it was simply a different world then. A fanatic follower of sports read three pages of the daily newspaper intently and got a weekly magazine. He watched as many games as were on TV - less than five total, all sports, and he went to an occasional local event, especially if he had a son or friend involved.  News was much the same. After you'd read the paper and watched the 6 O'Clock News, there wasn't much else.  The 11 O'Clock News was pretty much the same, so that was an alternative, not an addition.

Much of radio was music only, without commentary.  Public radio was classical or light jazz. Background music. You did other things.

McArdle's points about the types of jobs and the implications of that also grabbed me. Businesses that could be passed on, where we now have only routes through bureaucracies which must be navigated. That is not an either-or, certainly.  Men went off on trains, and then in cars, to work in the cities in businesses they did not own quite far back.  But there was certainly more of the family business model then, and it affected how parents treated their children. But even if you have a family business these days, it is probably closing down when you retire.  Children learned skills they liked better, they didn't need your shop, and they have careers up and running that they aren't going to change when you decide to cut back on your hours.

I wonder about the old model, and if it was even possible for me to go that route, even with perfect hindsight.  What business could I have built that even one of my sons might like to continue?  I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Global Lukewarming

Grim's Hall links to Matt Ridley's article at Scientific American Climate Change Will Not Be Dangerous For a Long Time. I admit that Scientific American is a lot more like Discover these days, but still, it's a little something.

Well. I'm feeling vindicated.  I've been saying it's real but no big deal for a decade now.

Namaste, Bitches

This slays me.

Parenting, History, Politics

When you are a parent, you get credit you don't deserve and blame you don't deserve.  Early in our marriage, my wife mentioned with warm nostalgia that her father had often - perhaps even always - made pancakes for his children every Saturday morning. Sometime in those early years of adulthood, she mentioned this to her parents.  Her father looked puzzled.  Her mother looked irritated and said that her husband had made pancakes a few times on Saturdays when the children were small, but it was not anything like a regular occurrence.

Stuart deserved great praise for many things he did, but not, apparently, pancakes.

Those who come after assign blame and credit inaccurately
"You never went to any of my games/dance recitals/award ceremonies!"
I MISSED THREE IN TEN YEARS, AND ONE WAS BECAUSE I WAS IN THE HOSPITAL!

"At least my real mother always listened to me."
 ONCE.  SHE STAYED UP UNTIL MIDNIGHT LISTENING TO YOU ONCE WHEN YOU WERE FOURTEEN!

It's just the way life is.  One of my cliches is "Do not judge your parents until your own children are grown." It has been true in my life.  I now forgive my parents of things I once said were unforgivable.  I now understand that they had huge failings I overlooked when I was young, but absolutely deserve blame for now.
*****
The same thing happens in history.  The recent Thanksgiving example is the "Pilgrims.*" 

Say what you will about the Maritimes, and the Virginians, Marylanders, and Spanish. They had different vices, different virtues. Different decades, different aims, different economies. It doesn't all just meld together as "white people." Nor were the native tribes much alike over hundreds of miles.  They'd be the first to point that out.

The Pilgrims were not refugees. If you encounter a writer who claims that, stop reading.  If you are very tolerant and read farther, the odds are 20-1 you will be wasting your time. People only write such foolishness when they hope to parlay it into some political advantage now.

The Pilgrims/Puritans/Strangers/Colonists/Fishermen/Adventurers deserve a lot of criticism.  They did terrible things, to the natives, to other Europeans, and to each other.  You can debate whether they were worse than anyone else on any Atlantic coast or just Regular Selfish Bastards, but they clearly did bad things.  Just not the things they get blamed for now.  They get credit for a pre-American democratic sentiment they don't deserve, and blamed for oppression they never engaged in.

The Dark Ages weren't (dark).  The Holy Roman Empire wasn't (though that denial is equally flawed).  The Crusades weren't. The Civil War wasn't.

Sort of like parents.

 *Not identical to Puritans.  Not identical to Puritans.  Not identical to Puritans.  And there were other colonists anyway.

******

You wouldn't think that people could be much crazier than Trump supporters, but Trump critics have them beat by a mile. It's rather an echo of the Sarah Palin phenomenon.  She wasn't qualified to be one-heartbeat-away-from-the-presidency, but she was way less crazy than her critics.  The Donald is not a fascist. You don't have to go full-screaming-Hitler to see this, you can just contemplate the much-admired Mussolini or Franco to see this.  Do a sample body count, or even potential body count.

He is a buffoon, which should be an automatic disqualifier for the presidency, and he is also a blowhard, which should be a disqualifier but isn't. He is blamed for saying things he didn't and advocating things he doesn't, yet he also gets credit from disaffected Republicans for being a conservative hope, which is just about as insane.

Cue Hillary and Bernie supporters, who are often decent people who believe entirely backward things about their candidate. The feminist candidate has done a great job harming women over the last 25 years, and the anti-1% candidate supports policies that will favor the rich in the long run (though he does agree with Trump about limiting immigration. in order to protect th3e native-born poor).

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Spend a moment right now.  Whatever you are sure you are right about, ask yourself, as the medieval rabbis did "Is the opposite also true?"

Get A Little Dirt On Your Hands

Truth

Another old rule-of-thumb of mine. If something has to be given a wonderful-sounding title, there is a good chance that it is more sales job than actuality.  Thus, organizations or legislation with peace, justice, or fairness in their names should be held at arm’s length and examined before embrace.  This is especially so for the word “truth.”  If you see a book entitled The True History of the Catholic Church, the best you can hope for is a one-sided history.  Probably, not even that.  Or “The True Cost of Obamacare,” may not – how shall we say this? – follow generally-accepted principles of accounting. When of my patients starts an answer “Can I be honest with you?” it is a tell that they are about to say something self-serving they know others might not like, but expect to be unchallenged.

“Truth” is a large word, and people using it lightly, without embracing the responsibility for it, are likely not being all that honest with themselves.  They are unable to make the more modest claim that they are presenting another side, or information you may not have.  Why are they unable to do that? There are instances where one might legitimately say this is true.  I saw it…I know it…I proved it… But those things invite evidence rather than merely assert.

Items which advertise themselves as true or just may indeed include a great deal of things worth knowing or acting on. Very occasionally, they may be largely true or just.  But red flags should go up when you see the words.