Men in Packs

Prehistoric hominids traveling in packs suggested the Yamnaya to me, though those were much later - just last week by this time scale.  Men might travel in packs for lots of reasons, trade and hunting being two. But advance scouts out to attack others and take their women was a major one we don't talk about much.  The tribe didn't do that for you until late in human history.  The Genesis accounts seem horribly barbaric to us, of neighboring groups exchanging children - or more likely, just the brides - as a sign of cooperation. But that's actually pretty advanced in terms of human behavior.  Sending the young men out to get their own mates before they could be considered adults was common for millennia.

Lots of them died in the process, sure.  But they were usually the hot-blooded extra crazed young ones anyway, and it was good to send them out to do the bloody work. A couple of women each calmed the survivors down a bit, and you could send out the next age cohort. The men were trained and bonded together, which worked out great for the other pack activities, trade and hunting.

I think of this when I see the reels by young women complaining about patriarchy these days. A few thousand years ago, half the young women were captured and half the young men were killed. And that's not even including disease, injury, and famine. Kids, the wives and husbands available now are a pretty good deal, comparatively.

Save The Children

 From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine

 

The Obstacle is the Point

Megan McArdle and others have explained why we learn more from failing (oversimplified, yes). It is a good message to teach, that failures are just a setback and resilience is better than talent. Sometimes we learn to try harder, or earlier, or smarter. Sometimes we learn that we have to find a partner with complementary skills. Sometimes we learn that we aren't a pro athlete, but we can make a career as a coach, a YouTuber, a trainer, a writer. I wonder if there could be an educational model that teaches children to pick a goal they are most likely going to fail at - a science project that they can try again next year, a history project that they have to look at differently next year.  It is sort of like the St. John's Great Books curriculum model, but aimed at younger students. The important thing is to not fear throwing things out.  This only partly worked.  Back on the horse.  

This does still carry a covert message of the important thing is to be king in the end, however, if we let it. When my sons were at a small Christian high school, there were a few years where there was great success in sports...followed by a few years of very few wins in any sport. At one of the parent meetings, there was discussion of how difficult this was to go through, but they were glad that their children had learned these lessons young. One parent was having none of it. He worked in a positive-attitude sales field and fired back "Why are we talking about the lessons learned from failure?  Why not teach them the lessons we can learn from victory? Our God is a god of victory!"* There was a Victory Christian School in the area, but we did not consider that for our children. I I think we learn from both Solomon and Job, myself. Many biblical characters had both sets of lessons. 

I don't think the lessons of failure leading to success is the Christian point. The obstacle is the point. God could accomplish these things we strive for almost accidentally with a word. This world is a school, not a factory. The learning does not lead to doing, the learning is the doing. 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is our friend.  It is an implacable teacher. It may be why we live in this universe and not another. 

*My children and bsking's family might guess who this was. 

Stick Library

 Via "Pineapple Street" on Substack

Recent Links

 The Isle of the Dead It has an evocative sound, doesn't it, like The Well at the World's End and The Young King of the Black Isles? Lewis declared it impossible to write a story that lived up to the title.

 Nehalennia has long remained a controversial figure, with all sorts of theories arising over the years regarding her origin and how she is depicted. Yet the latest research indicates that Nehalennia was a Germanic goddess who had a particular connection with Britain.

The illustration is attributed to Andreas Bonn, but it looks far too modern and nothing like Bonn ever did. That this is a watercolor by Peter Spier fairly leaps out at me.

David Foster reviews Red Plenty

How might this actually be accomplished? Stalin mocked the idea that planning an economy required much in the way of intellectual depth or effort. Get the chain of command right, Stalin seemed to be saying, build it on the right ideological principles, and all that was left was a few technical details, a little bit of drudgery to be carried out by the comrades at Gosplan with the adding machines. But it turned out to be a little more complicated than that. 

The DSA Sweet Spot  Nate Silver looks at who are the voters of the Democratic Socialists, and notes that the strongest group are people with high education and low income.  This has been said before, and discussed.  The finding is consistent across groups in America, which makes it more likely that it is measuring something real, but there's a catch.  The effect is not that large. Education itself is stronger. Note: There is a reference to Omnicause voting.  I interpret that as more social aspiration than ideological.

Colin Gorrie of Dead Language Society is writing a book about English before it was English, that is, from Proto-Indo-European through Germanic through all the subsequent splits to the beginning of Anglo-Saxon, first written down in the 600s.

Bernard-Henri Levy does not agree with Niall Ferguson that historians have lost the war against antisemitism. This is just another chapter in the long war against truth. 

Post-truth was not invented in Silicon Valley but in the Agora of Athens.

It did not come after truth; it was born alongside it, as its shadow.

It is that force which, with the death of Socrates, seemed for a time to triumph and plunged the Fergusons of that age into despair.

And yet.

In the end, it is the spirit of Socrates that prevails, while his opponent Gorgias sinks into oblivion. 

 

Up and Coming

Gout Gout is an 18-year old Australian runner whose parents are from South Sudan. He has stunning speed, but is inconsistent, likely because he is so young. He is on track to pass Usain Bolt and has already broken his junior records, but so many flash out after a promising start.  This is a sport where no one can hand it to you.  I feature him because you might be hearing about him everywhere in a year. The name does rather stick in the mind. 

 

I have mentioned over the last few years that there are too many up-and-coming runners to keep track of. We had Quincy Wilson in the 2024 Olympics, and 2028 is likely to be better.

How to Talk to Someone Who Is Still Inside The Spell.

 Mary Jane Murphy, on Substack, writing about talking to trans activists and friends still "inside the spell." It is good advice for any difficult discussion, but she makes it specific.

1. Refuse the vocabulary without attacking the person

Language is where the spell lives. Every loaded term you adopt is a conclusion you have silently conceded. “Assigned at birth” presupposes that sex is assigned rather than observed. “Cis” presupposes that everyone has a gender identity. “Trans women” presupposes the category exists as described.

You do not need to fight about every word. You need one calm, repeatable move. Mine is this: “That’s contested vocabulary, it embeds a conclusion I haven’t agreed to.” 

2. Ask questions you do not answer...

3. Pace before you lead... 

 4. Plant seeds and walk away...

5. Wait for the wobble... 

Recent Links

I have never heard the term "protected species" applied to Black people, in or out of sports. The anger against Brondello sounds like insensitivity to Australian immigrants to me. This has the perverse effect of evidencing that Black women in the WNBA are a protected species.

Stochastic Terrorism is applied rather conveniently. 

“Stochastic terrorism” is the idea that if you spread fear and mistrust against a target, then eventually people will commit violence against that target, and it will be your fault, even if you never specifically said the words “you should commit violence”.  

...The “stochastic terrorism” concept is near-unique in how effectively it can be discredited merely by listing many examples of its use together in the same place. Almost no one supports a blanket prohibition on criticizing of all of these different groups of people. “Stochastic terrorism” mostly gets deployed opportunistically, by people who either are too blinkered to realize that the same argument could be leveraged against their own speech, or who hope you’re too blinkered to realize that.

CS Lewis Center Summer Schedule 

Cremieux on Data Center resource use. 

True Crime is tending in one direction, according to bsking 

 

New World Record in the Mile

I grew up in an era when the mile record was broken by a little bit every few years and expected that to be normal forever. But that didn't happen, and the old record has stood since 1999.

The pacers just barely did their job - or one might even say that they didn't, as they dropped out a touch behind the record pace. If you aren't used to watching the lights at the runners' feet they display the world record pace, so you can tell at a glance if they are on it or not.  For a while on the third lap, they were not.

 

Kibbutzim

When Israel was founded, there was a culturally powerful Kibbutz Movement, which mixed socialism and Zionism and young people lived communally. It was primarily agrarian at first, as utopian communities often are. These days most people getting back to the land are doing it just because they like it, but in the 50s-70s at least, that life was pursued as having a special holiness of its own. 

The socialists now reject the Zionists with an intense hatred.  I wonder if any of that comes from seeing them as defectors from socialism.  Israel has an extensive social safety net, but it is also prosperous and free market. 

It may be only indirectly related or even coincidental.  But betrayers of the cause are treated with implacable anger. 

Golf

 No one ever got better at their job after taking up golf.  My source for this did point out some exceptions.

But You Knew That

 From Ryan Burge, who has a current primary focus on religious statistics.

I am unsurprised by this. I suspect it is the same in my own small denomination, the ECC.

Beggars Have Persistence

When we were in Chester, England over twenty years ago the was a young man on a main street trying to get passersby to purchase one of his socialist tracts. He had a standard patter in a heart-wrenching voice. Every few seconds he would interject "Please!" in a voice that went right through me.  It was hard to turn away. I had not heard anything like it, even in Romania, and I realised how professional beggars in very poor countries must have to sound because of the competition. One has to reach into primal places where we have few defenses to cut through the noise of the market. (BTW, his voice creates empathy in us. We have discussed that before.)

Similarly, when I was alone in Budapest in 2001 there was a man seated on the street in the cold, shabby and miserable. He said nothing but his sign (in English) was imploring, and nothing about himself: Food my little dog, with a dachshund beside him. The dog has died of old age inf nothing else by now, but I am still sad to think of it.

In Till We Have Faces, When Orual describes hearing Psyche weep, I thought first of the sound of the man in Chester, then of the appearance of the dog and man in Budapest.  I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her.   

Psyche's sadness was real, and I presume the Hungarian's was. 

The voice of the man in Chester hawking pamphlets was likely an affectation, either discovered or learned with practice.  Yet still frighteningly powerful.  I can hear it still. I knew that there was no discussing or arguing about socialism with the man, nor even talking about some other subject.  This was his job, he depended on it in some way, and would do it regardless. News that a war was begun or a war was over would not affect that cry.

I think of that when I see the social media photos of Gaza with lettering plastered on them, of "70,000 innocent Palestinians killed. Send our NGO money. "  No correcting of the number would matter. No questioning of the innocence would dent. "Famine in Gaza is at catastrophic levels. Send us money to give them food." That Hamas is breaking into the storage, stealing the food and feeding themselves first while starving their own people would fall on deaf ears. 

It's their job. 

Hit The Road, Jack

 

Capitalism Vs Status Quo

 I am not usually a Matt Yglesias fan, but there are worse thinkers out there, and he's not stupid. He makes an observation that instantly makes sense to me, that young people complaining about capitalism are not only not talking about a formal system of private property rights and reinvestment, not even about a general free market, which is the term I have preferred to use for clarity. They mean, with vague hand-waving, "the status quo."  That instantly rang true about the knuckleheads I read on social media complaining how capitalism clearly doesn't work, and impervious to statistics and reasoning about it.  They are talking about something else and don't know it.

Over at Slow Boring he put up To save capitalism we need radical land-use reform. (From Emma Camp at the WSJ Free Expression, whose own article Capitalism Gets a Bum  Rap is excellent as well. It's about refrigerators!)

 If you’re young, your experience of the economy is dominated by the housing situation. And the housing situation in the United States is not very good. So I think for most young people “capitalism” means something like “the status quo system,” and they perceive the status quo system to be pretty bad because they are super exposed to the single most dysfunctional element of the status quo economic system.

Now, in my capacity as a lawyer for capitalism, I am happy to point out that not only is housing the most dysfunctional element of the status quo economy, but it’s also the element that is run in the least capitalistic way.

Far and away the number one thing that could improve young people’s living standards in America would be to embrace more market-oriented housing policies.

I might even get suckered in to making myself miserable for a few days by responding to them again, by beginning with "What you are describing is not capitalism, but the status quo in America, which is a mix of socialist, free market, bureaucratic, and sometimes corrupt elements. The free market parts are actually the parts that are working the best." It won't help, but it's fun to say. 

Selfie Generation

Engineerlite sent me a Wall Street Journal article by Scott Atlas, of whom I had not heard who I had not heard of.  It describes how the Selfie Generation has become a problem because Boomers coddled them. * While there is something to it, of great-grandchildren and gggrandchildren not showing the same pluck, sufficient grit, the same spunk and moral fibre as their forebears, I always look sideways at such things. Damn kids can't even shoe a horse nowadays. Generalising about whole generations has limited value. Sometimes the times brings forth the women or men.  Yet even beyond that, the variance is so enormous in every generation that choosing examples necessarily involves cherry-picking. I look at my own great-grandparents, and there was child abandonment and complete irresponsibility alongside incredible resilience and effort. I doubt that the percentage of responsible versus irresponsible men and women changes that much because of who is president and what movies are popular.

 The appeal of socialism to young Americans isn’t really about economics. It’s about having someone else to blame. When you haven’t succeeded after being given every advantage, it’s easier to claim the system is unfair than to admit personal failure.

What’s tragic is that the narrative of societal unfairness is being sold as compassionate. It isn’t. It is condescension packaged as solidarity. It tells young people they are victims—incapable of rising, dependent on redistribution, owed a life they haven’t earned. It robs them of the one thing my father’s midnight taxi shifts gave me: the knowledge that I could do it myself.

Well, maybe.  But going through the effects of elder relatives I found Uncle Manfred's Swedish Socialist Songbook from a century ago. My grandfather and my Uncle Dee used to grumble about "those Reds down in Washington" in the 50s, but it looks like their wives voted for them. Damn Swedes. You'd never catch the solid Scots-Irish doing that! Except...

As lot of what we see as impressive about our ancestors is survivor bias. 

*He sent an ungated version to me.  I hope it works for you. If not, I will add to the summary to give you more flavor. 

Concealed Vs Planted

You know bsking from Graph Paper Diaries on my sidebar, but she occasionally writes for her true crime blog as well, Exhibit Asterisk. She has a new one up about how small differences in a poll question can yield different responses. Concealed Vs Planted. To believe that the police concealed evidence sounds rather passive. But to plant evidence to frame someone is a deeper level of corruption.  And in this case, it matters.

Sorry. She's dealing with a serious case, murder actually. But all I could think of was this. Starts at 2:34

(Second try. First version forbidden)

 

Debunked

I keep encountering that word in Wikipedia, especially about controversial political topics. I often sit back with a frown and say "I don't think so.  I think the idea is still standing. It's unacceptability in certain circles is well-established, but I don't think a debunking has taken place."

I happens often enough that when I encounter it now I conclude that the claim has been 30% debunked - usually the strong or extreme form only - but is otherwise intact. Some editor at Wikipedia is wishing it were so.

 I think it was in Miracles that CS Lewis asked "By whom?  And when?"

Encouraging Fertility

Rob Henderson at City Journal on having babies and having friends. It is his take on the Stone and Brooks study and recommendations I linked to a week ago. 

 The researchers asked respondents how many kids their three closest friends had, and how those friends would react if the respondent had another baby. Would they offer to help? Cook meals after the birth? Or would they worry about their career stalling or stop inviting them out?

The answers were associated, to a startling degree, with the desire to have children. For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up.

Whether we copy our friends or choose them because of similarity,* our closest friends have 4, 2, 2, 4, and 3 children.  Our college friends had 0, 2, 3, 0, 8, and 2.  Our (barely) remaining high school friends have 3, 0, 2, 2, 0, 2, and 2. We had two originally and then adopted 3 more. 

*Some of both.  Must be.  Peer pressure is more powerful as an adult because we have chosen those peers rather than just being stuck next to them in homeroom or the neighborhood when we were teenagers.

Violent Crime

There is a reason why we focus on homicide when we discuss violent crime.  There is a body that the police and the statistics have to do something with. With other crimes, people might not report it because they don't think the police will do anything. This is a complicating factor for reports of rape, certainly. There is an interplay of female reluctance to report, police willingness to prosecute, and legal system sympathy for quick and neat solutions for fair ones. Maybe the police won't care if Blacks get into fights, or maybe they'll care more and prosecute, telling the white boys to just go home and cool off. 

Still, those other crimes are there, and there are other statistics that capture some of it. Even though the numbers may vary by county, there are victimisation reports that are consistent across counties. These numbers are softer, but they ain't nothin'. 

John Lott, who draws eye-rolls* from gun-control advocates who claim he has been debunked even though said debunkings only pay off at 30 cents on the dollar, has an interesting and controversial claim that Canada and Australia have much more violent crime than America. America's high homicide rate is important, but it is a small percentage of overall crime and is most related to drug turf. Also, suicide is a large part of the "gun-death" numbers and presumably requires separate discussion and interventions. 

While the United States still leads in some categories, on the whole it has significantly less violent crime per capita than those two nations.   

I might have expected that the numbers were closer to America's than people think.  I didn't think there was any world where those countries exceeded our violent crime rate. In round numbers, victimisation reports yield estimates that 60% of violent crimes in the US makes it to a police report, while less than 40% make it to the official statistics in Australia and Canada.  Look for yourself and see if you think he deals with the data fairly.

*And Lott, the much-despised, he tore the cover off the ball..."