Louisiana Purchase

 It's got to be tough when they say "Write us a song about the Louisiana Purchase."  But Irving Berlin...

Thanks to John McWhorter for the tip.

The Violence of Henry VIII

The contradictions of Henry VIII character have attracted much attention.  He had a reputation for wisdom and patience early in his reign, and though adventurous was not known to be especially violent, and certainly not cruel. He became an unquestionable tyrant later.  Historians during the 18th and 19thC tended to see these changes as a function of the temptations of power, and losing his grip on his better self because of not getting his way.  That fit their beliefs.  In literature since the Greeks and Romans, humans were prone to such temptations, and rulers were especially susceptible to deteriorations of character once they were unchecked. It is a common theme in Shakespeare and all subsequent European literature. Nothing wrong with that, it's often true.  But they didn't really know how baps on the head might affect you once you had regained consciousness, so they never went to that explanation.

One traditional approach, favoured by (David) Starkey and others, is to divide Henry's reign into two halves, the first Henry being dominated by positive qualities (politically inclusive, pious, athletic but also intellectual) who presided over a period of stability and calm, and the latter a "hulking tyrant" who presided over a period of dramatic, sometimes whimsical, change.

More recently, there have been suggestions that he died young due to the obesity caused by brain trauma, or that his personality was influenced by the draining effects of many medical conditions resulting from his several blows to the head and periods of unconsciousness, and finally a direct suggestion that his violence and impulsivity were clearly derived from his TBI's. They didn't think that way then, we think that way now. Taking more factors into account is usually better than fewer. (As we just discussed under Critical Race theory.)

Even in my generation, unless permanent results were very obvious, people did not ascribe behavior to brain trauma. Parents might be aware of it - "After that he was never quite the same agin, always losing his temper and getting into trouble." Yet parents are both the best and worst of observers of such things.  They see that something is wrong even when everyone else looks away or attributes behavior to simple disobedience or other bad character.  But parents also have too much information and their own needs, and so fit behavioral changes into any of a dozen categories: parental divorce, the emotional rather than physical effects of abuse, rejection by a girl, a bad teacher/pastor/school bully, competition with siblings. I have heard all these explanations offered by parents when taking a social history. We all fall into this naturally, as the brain will not endure having an unexplained phenomenon, and we jump to conclusions. Much of what I believe about how my children became who they are is likely only partly true. Many of their own explanations are probably similarly slanted, as are mine about why I am who I am.

Baps on the head are one of those things that fade from memory fast. We expect boys to be reckless, they take falls, they hit their head on rocks. Because ice is a factor in New Hampshire, my worst blows to the head were usually to the back. These injuries usually take place out of sight of parents or other adults.  They were considered just a normal part of growing up. Getting assaulted by older boys, or sneak assaulted from behind by weaker boys, even with sticks or bats was also just considered part of childhood, unless something obvious and severe occurred.* Men and women in prison have an unusually high incidence of head injury, which we often write off as the environmental effect of "being exposed to violence," or "coming from a bad neighborhood."  Yet while those things matter a bit, when we try to factor out all such factors they don't matter much. Measurable neurological changes matter a lot more, and have larger consequences. Like maybe a nation's split from the Roman Church and a division of Europe that has enormous consequences even in our own time. 

It would be great if my bad qualities were the result of one or more of those incidents as a boy, so that I have "diminished responsibility," as they say.  Yet that would immediately extend to everyone else, and it may be that the evils done to us were the result of actions by people who had diminished responsibility themselves. What societies have to consequate for their own survival may not be the most accurate measure of judgement.

There is a gene-environment interaction that goes even deeper. In families that have a lot of children showing risky behavior, so that we figure they can't all have been bapped on the head in exactly the same way and there must be some genetic risk-taking involved, those kids are going to just naturally have more head injuries, including repeated small, undetected ones. When they become teenagers and adults we are going to blame the parenting, and the courts are going to treat crimes as personal decisions. We might be wrong.

*This may also affect whether we perceive something as traumatic in an emotional sense. I don't like to go too far down the road of what is called "blaming the victim," but I experienced events at school for which I might have sued my children's school district had they happened to them, a generation later and in a gentler place. There was a comment-section argument a few years ago among women about sexual assault in which one woman who still lived in a rough part of town quoted a young woman from a suburb who was describing some aggressive behavior by a date and noted "At my high school forty years ago, we just called that dating." The younger woman may have been correct that it should be considered assault - I would have expected a call from the police myself had it been me - but clearly the older woman did not experience it as traumatic.  Expectations matter, because they affect feelings of uncertainty and control. What children experience they immediately compare to the experiences of those around them.  If Jeffrey next door got beaten up much worse than you, you didn't feel so bad about yourself.

Buyer's Remorse

Play with this thought with me. What if our elections were (more) temporary and had to be ratified a year later? There would be no sense in doing that with governors or the House of Representatives, which are already only two years.  But Senators and presidents, we get to do a redo a year in. First terms only.

Looking at presidential approval ratings as a proxy, it looks like  Truman, Carter and Reagan would be marginal but survive, Clinton 50-50, and both Obama and Trump would be out.  That's not necessarily reality, however, as each of them would have to run against someone, and as we saw in 2016, that matters a lot. The serious third-party impact of Ross Perot also makes 1992 even more unpredictable.

I will concede it a net negative to have an even longer campaign season. I have also not thought through the elite media and general PR implications of "how long can you lie and keep up the appearance" for such events as framing Donald Trump about Russia without serious media scrutiny. It would also change the territory for protests.  Maybe those would be worse, maybe better. 

No fair speculating why this is occurring to me just now.

Stray Thoughts On Genetics

One downside of listening to podcasts while walking is that it is hard to take notes.  I have used both a notepad system and a "dictate into notes" system, but the latter is hampered by poor reception in some areas, and the battery going down very quickly, not to mention toggling back and forth between apps. The cumbersome nature of the former should be easily imagined by all of you.  First world problem, I know.

But when I think of things they collect up and I forget them if I don't write them down.

In the discussion of measuring intelligence, people often give an example of being placed in a hunter-gatherer's environment and not being as smart as they are. Yet there is more to that story. Hunter-gatherers don't survive alone in those environments either. If you were plunked down in Amazonia alone you would die, yes. Someone who grew up there would last longer than you, and might by some chance make it on their own, but most likely, they are also dead. But if you flopped into an Amazonian group and tried to survive, there would be a few abilities you would need. You would not only need the intelligence to know that you had darn well better be humble and inoffensive and willing to be subservient, but the ability to actually effect such things. Learning physical skills would be as important as learning cultural skills, and both of those involve cognition. Copying others is a useful human skill and it is usually wisest to do what everyone around you is doing.  However much we might praise the nonconformist, that is a tendency best expressed against a background of 90% conformity, and in the Amazon, you had better aim for 99%.

This is true for the Amazonian native moving to America as well. She could not survive alone, but we are pretty used to integrating people in, if she were willing to adapt. And she would do better at this if she has better cognitive skills. Thus the example chosen to undermine the standard definition of intelligence ends up supporting it instead.

This adjusting to new groups is what we do throughout our lives to survive, though in less dramatic forms. We are parachuted into kindergarten, into a new job, into a new family of in-laws, into a new town...and we have to make that work.  We do need a variety of skills - again, humility might be one, ability to get along with others also.  But cognitive skills are going to help at every turn.

****

JBS Haldane said "I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins," being clever and cute about the math of natural selection at the gene level. Yet it is not the laying down of one's life that is the issue but the enduring risks for the sake of others.  As in the line from General Patton's introductory speech in the movie "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.  He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." This overlooks the fact that the other guy doesn't die unless someone takes the risk of dying himself. (Patton certainly knew this but was sidestepping it for persuasive purpose.) It's better for your brothers and cousins if you also survive. Once we see that it is risk, not sacrifice that is the key the equations change. There are varieties of risk, physical, financial, social, and they are often not simple in how much one is putting others at risk as well. Generosity is risk, because circumstances might change and we need that money or object someday.  Helping others physically is risk for similar reasons. Tolerance and forgiveness are both social risks, as a difficult or offending person might cost us something in the future. 

****

Social disapproval used to signify danger more than it does now. When resources are scarcer, a girl's friends and family communicated that having a baby without being able to claim resources from the father might mean starvation, and for the man, offending against that family or the society might mean punishment or banishment as well. Even in survival, resources would be diminished for all concerned. However cruel it seems to us to shame or even banish offenders, it would serve to discourage others - because young people do not weigh consequences well and take too many risks that also affect others (as above). A harsh calculation, but the survival of the customs suggest the math works out for the group. 

The calculation changes as resources improve. Unmarried women getting pregnant now do not face death, and the men face diminished consequences. Therefore, social disapproval seems unnecessarily unkind we have taken to disapproving of the disapprovers instead. Yet unmarried pregnancy does still result in diminished resources for several people, and young people are still not fully understanding of risks. It is a less dire calculation than the one our ancestors faced, but social disapproval - even the milder shaming or punishment of the one for the sake of the group - did work up until the day we stopped using it.

Simone Biles

I don't follow gymnastics, but she is certainly talented, and seems a decent enough person. I think her decision to remove herself was probably wise.  Her routine includes moves that others can't do and are considered at the edge of what is safe to perform. If she lacks complete confidence so that anxiety is not merely a bad feeling but an active interference in completion of vaults, she may be endangering herself. Some events are like that, such as various skiing events or the pole vault.  You could damage your head badly. I have nothing against her for assessing the situation and believing her danger was too great, even for a gold medal.

The response to her decision interests me. She is being called brave for doing this. It is socially brave, as she will endure criticism and contempt for it. We are social creatures, and that does mean something. Yet unless complete ostracism or banishment were on the line, most of us would find such criticism endurable. There would be a cost, but I have been criticised before. It is likely significant that as an athlete, her job is to be an entertainer, though we don't often characterise it that way. Therefore, she would be more sensitive to social losses and take them harder. She lives in the fishbowl. That has been true for athletes for years.

Though that cost has been increasing over the years, I think it has skyrocketed recently, and the young in particular might rate social courage higher than those who are older, who might rate physical, financial, or even spiritual danger much higher.  I'm not saying she's not brave. It's just that I frame this more as a wisdom decision.  The social cost is there, but I think my generation would not be so alarmed by it.

Disney Princess

This is the genre and singing style that the last umpty-'leven Disney animations have worked from.  Part of Your World, Let It Go, A Whole New World.

O Sacred Head Now Wounded

 Notice the tune

I had a longer post about my ambivalence about Simon and his equating New York with America, all other places being exotic, culture changes, and The Graduate, but even I couldn't sustain interest in it.

Saltines

I have not bought saltines in years - they are just flour and salt, after all - but I bought some today.  I swear they are smaller.

The Fundamental Things Apply

 

Vintage Ray Guns

 

 ...and many more. Thanks to David Thompson.

Amazon

I just talked to a frantic-looking amazon guy.  Their GPS still sends him to the wrong number, off by a hundred, rather than the last half-dozen houses on our street.  But he's okay with that.  He can follow the numbers, as we all used to do when looking for a house for the first time.  What gets him wild-eyed is 200 stops a day.

Critical Race Theory is Not Complicted, But Responses Are

I almost passed up The Glenn Show episode of Loury and McWhorter talking about CRT, because I knew I would agree with 90% of what they would say and it seemed a poor use of my time to be told what I already wanted to hear. But some podcasts have that feature of pushing themselves to the front of the line when another podcast ends and just start playing.  When you are driving, it is often best to just let that happen until you stop and switch over.  So I started hearing it anyway, and happily went through to the end.

I have nominated them as public intellectuals, and they do generally fulfill that.  But in the French model, that would be thinkers who put forward edgier, more difficult ideas, put in a form that the brighter persons in the general public can understand.  I consider  that valuable, and I believe there are American and British thinkers who do that and are worth hearing out, even when they are infuriating. A public intellectual must be a person who can transpose the ideas coming from the deepest thinkers to a discussion that we middlebrows can absorb and reflect on. Think William F Buckley Jr and "Firing Line," for example.  (We were already far downhill of that when Dick Cavett took the stage.  He was a decently-bright but thoroughly indoctrinated individual who was skilled in engineering interviews so that the general public was told what their betters deemed it good for them to hear, with the carrot that they thought they were listening in on True Intellectual Thought. It was a form of deep propaganda, very Gramscian. See also Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver.)

Loury and McWhorter are even better at a separate function, as educators.  As they both do that for a living I shouldn't be surprised. What I heard on the podcast wast not merely things I agree with, but things put concisely and clearly, so that I said "Yes.  Exactly this.  Thank you, sir." It may be a more important function, though it is less glamorous. Notice, by the way, that both of them are almost as solid in construction of the language and ideas when they are speaking of the cuff as the rest of us are when we have a chance to write things down and edit ourselves. McWhorter:

Do you want your children taught that battling power differentials is the center of intellectual, moral, and artistic endeavor? Do you want that taught? I think all of us would say a concern with power differentials might be one of maybe ten things, that an education is concerned about, maybe even six. But do you want that to be the central focus of all endeavor at the school?

Because that is the issue. There is continual dishonest representation that people who don't want CRT don't want slavery or racism to be mentioned at all. Motte-and-bailey argument.  Or straw man.  Or intellectual dishonesty.  Your choice. But CRT is exclusive by design.  It asserts it is the only method by which political understanding should be viewed. It is a derivative of Marxian, Nietzschean power theologies. Children are set into "affinity groups" of their own kind*. So we are pitting one POV that says "Let's teach a variety of approaches to understanding all of history, literature, and culture," while the other says "Those are false.  Only one voice shall be heard." This is why the legislatures trying to ban CRT altogether are wrong, but they aren't crazy.  As one view among many it would be fine. It destroys all discussion.

There was an interesting approach when my children were in Christian schools to teach World Religions, but it was something of a put-up job. They explained what Islam teaches - not entirely accurately, but better than "religion of peace" bromides - and why that was wrong.  They described Buddhism - again, not fully correct but based on a true story - and why that was wrong. Adults looking back on this method of instruction express a lot of irritation about it.

Let me stress that CRT is far worse.  Those other viewpoints don't even make it to the table to be criticised.  They are simply dismissed.  The excuse is that those other, racist ideologies are so firmly embedded in the national culture and already have such a head start that CRT is only pushing back against a massive tide, feeding on scraps, and cannot afford to offer quarter. That was not quite true in 1950, though it was at least a decent argument then. It is now simply ludicrous, seizing upon anecdotes for confirmation bias. Look, we found a racist! That proves everything! It is the argument I have heard hundreds of personality disorders make that what looks like cheating and manipulation are merely their desperate attempts from deep in the hole to get some fairness back in the world.  It does look that way to them.  I have little doubt that personality disorders in the public discussion also feel this just as strongly about racism.

It doesn't make it true. It's just Motte-and-bailey that "this isn't what Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw said" (and you ignorant fools can't reach our lofty peak), when it is they who have watered down Bell and Crenshaw into programs that dim people can effect, because their skills are not abstract thinking and they can be convinced "...two legs better!" Like that's my fault.

And now Loury, summarising McWhorter and commenting further: 

I want to reiterate something that you said earlier, because I think it was profound. People are always demanding "What's your definition of Critical Race Theory" and you offered one. It was a two-part definition - I want you to correct me if I get this wrong - one part had to do with separating children by race, and encouraging whites to think of themselves as privileged, presumptively in virtue of their race and oppressors. And encouraging blacks to  think of themselves presumptively in virtue of their race as victims. That was one part.  The other part of it was making this idea of countering disparities of  power or influence into the central mission in life.  You are here to get an education so that you can be a warrior on the battlefield of equity, on the battlefield of social justice. You think the marriage of those to those two things, basically, defines critical race theory (McWhorter: "As. Practiced. Today. In schools") and as opposed by the people who are up in arms about it. That's what they're against.They are not fighting a phantom.  They're not just, as Ibrahim X. Kendi would have it, having an argument with themselves about something that is in their imaginations but that doesn't exist in reality that no one has ever said. There is a real thing they that they are concerned about, and it has to do with identitarian and with the kind of co-opting of our kids into a crusade on behalf of political objectives which are not universally shared.

(To which McWhorter chuckled and said "Yes! That was better put than I could...")

In short, if CRT actually did what they said they intended to do and no more, I would have no objection. I would say they were wrong but refutable, and may the best man woman** win, as conservatives generally do about Marxism or immigration.

*I think of our local schools.  Here in suburban, rural, or small-town NH, if you did such a thing there would be one lone black, Hispanic, or Asian child set into a corner by herself.  However much you tried to sell the idea "No, you are the good one, darling! It's those others who are oppressors who we are trying to humiliate," that poor child would feel separated from the only friends she had and made to feel distant from them. These educational exercises are almost universally cruel to actual children in order to feed the fantasies of what some narcissistic adult imagines he would have liked as a child, or will save the world. All of our memories are inaccurate, and what we think we would have liked is partly delusion. But narcissists are far worse on this.  They reconstruct their pasts far more thoroughly than the rest of us are even capable of - because we don't work at it 168 hours/week.

**CRT is the fad.  But women, environmentalists, socialists, and a half-dozen other groups are constantly clamoring for primacy, hoping for that one big tragedy that will vault them to the top for a few months.  Being a leftist is highly competitive.

Horses, Zebras, and Unicorns

I got a lab result back today on a test that I had no idea what it was about.  As near as I can tell, my APRN was making sure I didn't have some strange condition, so the blood had to be sent to Salt Lake City and took a while to get back.  Whatever it was, I don't have it. It seems a waste of money. How many people, even wealthy ones, would get that test if they were paying for it themselves?

Doctors used to love to say that thing about horses and zebras. Do they still?  I had too many guys who said "When I was at Harvard Medical School, we were taught that if we heard hoofbeats, we should look for horses, not zebras."  Oh, like they didn't know that trick at Tufts, doctor? I liked the simpler "common things being common" better.  You are more likely to have a strange presentation of something common than have a strange condition. A friend had longstanding puzzling and very frustrating symptoms. One of the causes was migraines, but because her presentation was odd, neither she nor the previous treating physicians had thought of that.

So yes, horses before zebras.  I always thought it would improve the saying to go one step further and say "And never look for unicorns."  There are conditions that people believe in, but do not exist. Some alt-medicine is recommending useless treatments, but a lot of it is treating nonexistent conditions.  This is usually of the "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" type.

Melungeons, and Others

I first heard about them in the early 70s, when I hung out with people who could score status points among other folksingers by sidling up to obscure groups who were really, really authentic. If you had a song that was taught to you by a Melungeon, or a Redbone, everyone would marvel at what a great song it was, with very serious faces. Most things that came to the coffee houses in that way completely sucked, BTW, and I can now see from YouTube and Wikipedia that precisely none were authentic anyway.

The story becomes interesting because of what it reveals about the larger culture. These were people who hotly denied being in any way Negro or African.  They were Portuguese, or Indian, or Absolutely Anything But That, and for good reason, because the legal and cultural consequences of being black in even the smallest percentage were large. 

Baseball historians will recognise this as what happened with light-skinned blacks in the South in the first half of the 20th C. It was an era in which players went to leagues in Mexico or the Caribbean in the winter, and it was okay to be Cuban when you came back to Florida in the summer.  Teams were called Cubans pretty regularly.  As Cuba was baseball-obsessed - even Fidel Castro played, and if he had been better we might not have endured him as a revolutionary - the "New York Cubans" could barnstorm in Birmingham.  It was often partly true.  Luis Tiant's father was actually Cuban, played for teams called the Cubans, and pitched in Negro League All-Star Games in the 1940's. But mostly it was a way of providing cover for African-Americans to play in the wealthier US. While it bears witness to racial prejudice, it also illustrates that the prejudice was waning and unraveling. Reality has a way of slowly grinding down beliefs that are merely convenient.

But now DNA comes into the picture, and we can know more. Melungeons are both African and European in descent, with little mixture of Native, and likely none of Middle Eastern or Romani. The article declares that they were descended from sub-Saharan African males and European females, but that can't be entirely so. The Estes study itself identifies a predominance of R1b1b2 male haplotype, and a few more that are R1a, and those are Western and Central European lineages. (Skip to page 28.) The rest are more commonly African, yes. Also, some of the mtDNA (female line) is more likely African than European. The reporting was sloppy there. There was also a ridiculous statement, typical of science reporting, that all of us are multiracial. 

G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who’s spent more than 30 years examining multiracial people in the U.S. and wasn’t part of this research, said the study is more evidence that race-mixing in the U.S. isn’t a new phenomenon.

“All of us are multiracial,” he said. “It is recapturing a more authentic U.S. history.”

Why is this person even mentioned in the story?  He wasn't part of the study, he is a sociologist with no known expertise in DNA, and he is flat wrong about all people being mixed race. Does he think the 4% of the US that is "Asian" are anything other than 100% from their country of origin for a thousand years, be it India, China, or Thailand? Most individual DNA results are of Americans of European descent, and the vast majority of them are entirely European, though they may be mixed versions from that continent. Ah well.  The myths must be declared.

Melungeon has become something of a generic term in the late 20th and 21st C's - or that is the claim, anyway.  I have not heard the term used myself very often over the decades, and that was always in the Virginia-Tennessee context I was used to.

Later generations came to believe some of the tales their ancestors wove out of necessity.

...

In recent years, it has become a catchall term for people of mixed-race ancestry and has been applied to about 200 communities in the eastern U.S. — from New York to Louisiana.

Among them were the Montauks, the Mantinecocks, Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecocks and others in New York. Pennsylvania had the Pools; North Carolina the Lumbees, Waccamaws and Haliwas and South Carolina the Redbones, Buckheads, Yellowhammers, Creels and others. In Louisiana, which somewhat resembled a Latin American nation with its racial mixing, there were Creoles of the Cane River region and the Redbones of western Louisiana, among others. 

There were ethnicities that were acceptable, even if not welcomed. 

Deconstructing Puff

The rumor was always that PP&M's "Puff the Magic Dragon" was a drug song.  They had a performance piece specifically dedicated to describing how We didn't even know what marijuana was in 1962, which was convincing only if you wanted to be. Yet they had a point.  What else, other than the title, would suggest that?

So, you have this guy you meet, by the name of "Papers." Huh. Yeah. What's that about? What do you mean when you say 'Sealing Wax?' 

Jackie Paper.  He's my friend. My only friend. I don't really like to talk about it.  He was a little boy, about six years old, I think. Sealing wax is this weird substance he brought to me as a present. You heat it up and then you stamp your initials on it.

Heat it up?  Like on a spoon or something?  Then what do you do with it?  Inhale it? Eat it?

Eh.  It's a stretch, even at that.

But skeptically looking at the lyrics, some dark stuff emerged. A dragon lives forever. Okay, but very soon after it is followed by without his life-long friend. So...this immortal dragon has a little boy who is a LIFE-LONG friend. Therefore, a very, very young dragon, who is now going to go forward for centuries with some sort of human-induced trauma. Where are this dragon's parents?  This sounds like a normal developmental process for a young, well-meaning dragon, but he has to navigate this by himself, with no older dragon to reassure him.  Is this normal dragon behavior?  No wonder they are such destructive, narcissistic creatures. Your parents and all older members of your species abandon you when you are a child. You make friends with a young human, who in a very short time decides he doesn't need you and ghosts you. No text, no email, he just stops coming around. No one to say "Son, it was ever thus.  This is the burden that all dragons bear. Go eat a sheep or two and get a few gold bracelets.  You'll get through this."

It reminds me of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where the "monster" originally starts out as a pretty good guy, looking in on a human family with sad envy, cutting wood for them in hopes of starting some normal relationship. When that is cruelly dashed he becomes an enemy of humankind.

Does Dragon culture have any sort of child welfare system? I am thinking that we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble centuries ago if we had only understood what the poor bastards have gone through. When they are already 400 years old it's way too late. 

If anyone runs into this Jackie Paper character, who must be at least 70 by now, let me know.  Someone needs to have an intervention with that jerk.

Kibbutz Memory

Edward Grossman describes a time in Israel I had known only fragments of, over at Quillette. The story doesn't go anywhere, yet still told me a lot.

Not Real Congee - Oh My!

When people put out a variety of dishes and call it a Smorgasbord I don't get my knickers in a twist. Thanks to Grim for the heads up on this.

Obvious

Some things are obvious once they have been pointed out.  I heard an interview with the insightful Devin Brown, Asbury professor and CS Lewis scholar, who pointed out that Jill Pole's scene with Aslan at the beginning of The Silver Chair mirrors Jesus speaking with the Samaritan Woman at the well. The confession, the water-symbolism, the theology both welcoming and exclusionary, all are there.

He also notes that Aslan functions more as Jesus in some of the books and more like the Holy Spirit and occasionally like God the Father in others, yet appropriately, moves back and forth among them seamlessly.

Synthetic Racism

 I looked on my sidebar and misread the title of the Quillette article.

Generational Prejudice

I have noted before that for purely social interactions, age is a more powerful predictor of who I will choose to speak with than sex, race, perceived status, or other determinants.  I give the example of attending my sons' soccer games decades ago.  When I arrive, I am going to gravitate to the other dads, regardless of race or dress (though I may have wheels within wheels, certainly).  I would say hello to the boys and there are occasions on which we would speak, even have animated conversations.  The moms likely came next, and grandads, faculty if it was a school event, and female students would be progressively less likely. If I knew someone already they would cut the line. 

But socialising is not our only activity.  In particular, I am wondering whether there is a generational component to viewing the protests of the last year.  The violent protests of the left were largely by young people. The violence-enabling protestors were older. I recall  reading that a large portion of Antifa lived with their parents and were unemployed, but I don't know how reliable that is.  It could just be some conservative partisan asking some people to fill out forms and making a few phone calls, calling that research. As many are college students and some advertise their unemployment and freedom to be at extended protests, it is at least partly true.  Perhaps it is not fully relevant, except that many people on the right believe this to be true, that the protestors are young, don't work, have their needs attended to by others, and generally know little about life.  They know what they have been told, and some of the young people are very good at picking up what they should believe. The thinking on the right is they blame others because they just don't understand how hard all this is.  Putting up with bosses is difficult and infuriating at times.  Creating wealth is not automatic, it is elusive, unpredictable, and labor-intensive. When one has responsibility for others - for spouses, for children, for other relatives; for employees, for community needs, church needs, neighbor needs - one has less interest in humanity as an abstract. (And less confident you can do much about that anyway.)

The DC protestors were older, and while few seemed to be wealthy, they did seem to be employed, with skin in the game about the country in general that was not purely hypothetical. To the young left, these look like people who have benefited from the system, and have some nice things. What right have they to complain when most things are already going their way?  And now you want more? You are butthurt because your guy who is perpetuating all this unfairness you benefit from didn't get elected, and you want to throw your weight around to make sure the goodies keep coming your way. You just don't understand fairness, you don't understand justice.  (You have stuff and I don't.) The young find authorities who are not young who tell them this - not incidentally, people from the A&H Tribe who also feel that society does not reward the correct people.