On The Possible Utility Of Recent Wars - Part I

It is my preference to make a more general positive case, so I will only answer terri’s and Dave’s objections briefly.  I hope to suggest lines of refutation, rather than fully argue the points.  As a consequence, you may feel I have not fully heard what you are saying.  Likely so.  But I’m not answering all I heard.

I am not sure how far we can push the equivalence of America and small nations compared to the police and individuals, but there is at least some similarity, so let’s go with it, recognising that it is incomplete. The drawing of a firearm in a confrontation is not the only force response.  When the police surround a place, that they are armed is implied.  When they turn on the blue lights and use techniques to control the situation that people find intimidating, or when they patrol an area to increase their presence, all imply force and possible violence if necessary.  I don’t see that as irresponsible saber-rattling.  Just so with nations.  There are implied force actions or statements that a president might use that his critics might call saber-rattling that I would call wise warning and diplomacy. David’s viewpoint isn’t insane- it is close to the Colin Powell doctrine and Teddy Roosevelt’s, both of whom knew many things I don’t (more on the weaknesses of experts later) – but I still think it is wrong. Abjuring force until it is clearly necessary and then using it fully is a respectable strategy, but I don’t think it is the best, and it certainly isn’t the only. Other strategies might be implemented badly and make things worse, but abuse is not use, and saber-rattling can prevent violence as well.  Show of strength does not always provoke.

There is a growing idea in Western society that because soft answers sometimes turn away wrath, that they are a relatively dependable method of doing so.  I think confirmation bias is very powerful here.  Where I work there are those who believe various soft techniques almost always work better with clients and thus they avoid confrontation.  This is good, generally.  But there are cases where it does not – like our guy in the news this morning - not only as an unfortunate exception, but as a general rule with certain types of clients.

Terri’s second idea I also partly subscribe to – that in response to violence by jet, we make violence by jet more difficult, and continue to improve our techniques in that. Improved surveillance and spy-stuff?  Love it.  Cheap at any price.  Partial solutions, steadily improved, are great – and they are often far less expensive than war to boot.  But England had violence by subway, Spain violence on the trains, boats attacked, lots of places had cars with explosives. What are essentially law-enforcement techniques are indeed our first choice way to go.  But I’m not sure there is agreement that we have gotten that much bang for the buck with Homeland Security.  Response measures are sometimes not distinguishable from shutting the barn door after the horse is gone.  The highlight point, which I will expand in my positive case, it that there were no attacks of any type until recently, because a primary cause was reduced. Going to war with heavy focus on particular networks of enemies has worked to convince them to choose other targets, or none.  We dissuaded people from acting as enemies.

I am not one to make too much of individual incidents as indictments of a particular president’s actions, BTW.  Violent, evil, insane people are by nature not fully predictable.  That Bad Event 227 happened on a president’s watch may or may not be significant.  People make political mileage out of that, but I am more cautious.  Trends matter, not one-offs.

Captcha

Saturday I will be turning on the Captcha function while I am away.  The amount of comment spam I am receiving was already large and has now doubled.  I don't want to have to delete 1000 spam comments when I return from our Thanksgiving trip.  Sorry for the inconvenience - you will all just have to work a little harder.

Ouch

This morning's radio comment was that Rick Reilly is stealing his humor from old "Please Don't Eat The Daisies" episodes.

That should leave a mark, but it won't.  He'll still be sure he's right and everyone else just doesn't get it.

Temporary (I Hope) Incoherency

There are suddenly many questions at once, and I am not seeing my way to clarity.  Once comments multiply on a post I tend to move it up to the main stage and do a new post.  Or perhaps, as the ruler of my domain, I just want to give my own comments visibility.

The original post that got us rolling was about insult, offense, and fairness. Terri had mentioned some public conservatives who are insulting as examples that the triumphalism of liberals, though unseemly, was not worthy of especial disapproval.  I am no longer familiar with much public commentary, I'm afraid.  Still, I think those leopards may not change their spots that easily, so I will venture comment.

When Limbaugh first came out, I found his style shocking but his arguments reasonable.  He would make an outrageous generalisation, often mocking, but back it up with at least something - a string of quotes by prominent feminists who said much the same as he was claiming, though in words that sounded more acceptable, for example.  Or recordings from the previous evening's news and commentary in which multiple supposedly neutral sources used the same unusual phrasing, which could then be traced back to a DNC press release earlier in the day.  I was impressed. Granted, he was reporting selectively, but he had real stuff to report.

I compared him at the time to political cartoonists, who were, and are, far more unfair.  At a minimum, they don't take calls from opposing viewpoints. they don't have to answer any criticism, in fact.  Why, I asked, were liberals so outraged when it was their ox being gored?  I still think that argument has merit.  Limbaugh changed the game, and brought the political cartooning style to talk radio.  Television comedy had long been allowed that level of unfairness, but it wasn't purporting to be news.  One could see intimations of that on SNL, and before that on Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In with pretend news, but on radio that line was unbreached. Limbaugh also did that briefly in a TV format, with the trappings of news broadcasts, yet making fun of his opposition.  It was considered infuriating and unfair.

Now it is standard.  That is what Stewart and Colbert do, though their comic style and politics are different.  Liberal talk radio has not worked well (last I heard, though Rachel Maddow seems to have persisted), but the premise of having a one-sided, take-n-prisoners political humor show is now established.

Let's look at that shock from the other side.  Even many liberals were stunned when Bill Clinton made fun of sectors of the American people while running for president.  They wondered if there would be backlash.  A few earlier figures like Tip O'Neill had done some of it, and there were certainly suspicions that many presidential candidates had contempt for one or another group of Americans, but you just didn't say that. A president is supposed to represent all Americans, and not ever attack his own.  Reagan would say "our liberal friends" with a little bite and it drew howls of rage - and I tended to agree.  It seemed to me to be technically within the rules but using tones of voice to communicate something different. Adlai Stevenson's campaign was insulting about groups of Americans, but I don't believe he ever was directly. Then Clinton blew that out of the water completely, with he and Hillary openly mocking the culture they were running against.

This continues to the present, with Al Gore talking about the double XX chromosome or Taliban wing Republicans, or Obama talking about people bitterly clinging to guns and religion.  Conservatives just can't get over that a president or potential president just isn't supposed to say that.  Worse things are said by others all the time, arousing less anger.  Something about the context makes it shocking. (Historical note:  Roosevelt did it often in his first two terms but stopped thereafter, so far as I can tell.  Perhaps that emotional content was part of the fury that he was a "traitor to his class.")

There's a host of sociology research to do, and experiments that could be run here.  Do conservatives and liberals, or men and women, or Greatest Generation and Millennials, or black people and white people, have very different context expectations of where and how criticism should be said?

I have become increasingly sympathetic to this idea of context and giving offense, as, for example, my discussion about Peyton Place in Some Rambling About The Printed Word about 10 days ago. There really is a difference between talking about sex in one medium versus another, and I think political offense shows the same pattern.  I was objecting after the election to some offensive, angry comments in what I had expected to be a more social, respectful context.  There were a score of offensive bumper stickers in the parking lot I just shrugged at - that's an expected context. Links from conservative sites to outrageous comments at expected liberal sites I didn't even click through.  I expect HuffPo to be like that.  But newsier sites, even in the Op-Eds, are supposed to hold themselves to higher standards.  Insults can be implied, criticism harsh and even somewhat unfair, but the outpouring of venom is supposed to be kept inside certain bounds.

Wow.  I didn't even get to militarism, saber-rattling, and shows of force.  Perhaps tomorrow.

Train Song

Disagreement

Good to have terri's disagreement.  She is polite enough that I don't get irritable and shouting, and her thought is different enough from mine that it causes me to clarify for myself exactly what I mean and what I think.

I have a very good friend who expressed similar sentiments about militarism, the lack of benefit of the recent wars, and the high cost.  I have heard more than one conservative starting to come to that conclusion.  The paleoconservatives and more libertarian types already leaned that way.  There may be some consensus forming about this.

I see the appeal, but I think they are wrong.  No, I think they are possibly right, but probably wrong.  I think saber-rattling can be a good thing.  I think we can point to benefit.  I think we can point to some reasons why the cost was necessary.  As the pendulum swings, I think I should make the arguments I can, anyway. I will start with one point to ponder; a different starting point than we usually work from now, but one that was common then. 

Had we continued as before, the most likely result would be that we were attacked again. Repeatedly.

Stay tuned.

Coalition Politics

I have had a lot of focus over the course of my blogging career, on an American group that is largely cultural, perhaps even ideological: the Arts & Humanities tribe. Let me give a quick summary of that before I try and shoot this film from a different angle. The Arts & Humanities tribe is largely white, liberal, educated word-people. They might be miseducated, but not uneducated. They are something close to the first of Snow's Two Cultures (now Three, with the social sciences). They heart NPR. They weren't all literature or anthropology majors, are not exclusively white, nor are they always liberals. The writers at Maggie's Farm or National Review, for example are certainly A&H, but not liberal. Yet on the whole, they tend that way. Boundaries are fluid depending on how intense an identification, or how much actual scholarship rather than posing one requires for membership, so estimates are suspect. But let us say they constitute 7-17% of the populace. They are disproportionately represented in running things, especially government. Lawyers (some), librarians, writers, psychologists, academics of many stripes. Very Canadian border, as they are concentrated across the top of the country: New England, Upper Midwest, Pacific Northwest.

 My people. That's who I come from. I'm rather suspicious of them and in rebellion against them in these later decades, but culturally, these are who I am most comfortable talking to.

When we look at all those "Romney Won White Voters" graphs and articles, keep in mind that those numbers were in spite of this sizable group of A&H tribe. Subtract them out, and ponder.

hbd* chick linked to a set of graphs by The Audacious Epigone which shows the electoral vote breakdown if we counted variously by income, sex, or race. For example, if only white men vote, Romney wins 490-41 (7 undecided).

Coupling that with similar data that Steve Sailer extracted from the Reuters-IPSOS poll, where we learn that married Jewish women voted for Obama 66-34, we have an entirely different way of looking at the culture, at least in terms of voting.

 Let us assume, arguendo, that this second method is much better than mine; that a far more simple tribalism of race, religion, gender, etc, is true. Who we will tend to vote for, and what appeals by candidates we will respond to, are largely a result of accidents of birth, with all the worrisome implications that we can be manipulated with increasing accuracy by campaign teams with each passing year.

If that is true, then the demographics are going to go so consistently against the Republicans that they will not ever win more than an occasional narrow majority in House, Senate, or Electoral College. They will never be able to bend their message enough to peel off enough stragglers from all the other groups.

The Democrats are not a unified party, but a coalition. Have been for a few decades now. Black voters are not the natural cultural allies of union members or Jews, but they can agree to defeat Republicans and then each get something of what they like in the next year's legislation.
Therefore, what the Republicans need not a broadened message, but a coalition partner. A group that can sign on despite differences in exchange for cabinet positions, or the introduction of particularly dear legislation. There is something of this already. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, and libertarians overlap, but are not the same thing. They are a proto-coalition.

What coalition partner can they hope to attract with consistency, whether ethnic, ideological, or cultural?

Seeking Moral Superiority

There are stories that come around - they have a parable feel to them even though they are seldom biblical - of merciful kings.  It is considered a good thing for a king to be merciful; historians note this with approval.  There was a poor man who owed a great deal of money which he could not pay.  His creditors wanted to take his house (or put him in jail, or sell off his fingers one-by-one or whatever; the usual creditor stuff).  They brought him before the king.  The king noted that he had a wife and small, cute children (or maybe had some disease, or had taken many beatings as a child or whatever; the usual sympathetic victim stuff). He forgave the debt and sent the man home, causing poets to praise him for his mercy.  What a guy, our king, eh?  We try to overlook the fact that he just gave away someone else's money, because - well, because we painted them as evil so that the story would feel right. We feel morally superior for having approved this message.

We respond to these things powerfully.  I feel bad for this poor fictitious man and beaming in approval of the king even as I make fun of it.  The fact that some people just got robbed - well, it serves them right for being evil villains who don't care about the poor, doesn't it?

It turns ugly, however, if it turns out that the poor man is a member of the king's clan and the creditors are from a rival clan. In a quick about-face, we recognise that this is a tawdry story of corruption, nepotism, and power politics.  The despised creditors now become honest businessmen who can't get justice in the courts, left shaking their heads as they walk away.  And what about their wives and children, after all?

*            *           *           *            *

In our politics and social values, we like to feel morally superior to our opponents.  Also, we prefer that superiority to come cheaply. Liberals pointed out that "Support The Troops" bumper stickers and wearing flag pins were cheap substitutes for patriotism, and were enraged they had become popular. No, enraged isn't an exaggeration.  One can't read True Patriot without noticing how much the authors hate their opponents. (If folks are interested in that topic in more depth, I covered it around the time of the last election.  Quick Hitters; If You Give A Liberal A Cookie; Modesty, Humility, Understatement; Political Faux Pas.)

Yet they have a decent point.  There is a hint of claiming the high moral ground at low cost with the whole stickers and pins thing. I don't doubt there are plenty of people who just wanted to make a statement of what good patriotic people they are - implication that you might not be - and so gravitate to the visible displays. But I see at least three weaknesses in making that accusation:
1. The idea that it is the armed forces making the real sacrifices comes up pretty regularly among the stickers-and-pins crowd.  They deflect a lot of the moral credit to others.
2. Just because you take on some inexpensive gestures doesn't mean you aren't willing to pony up for the expensive ones as well. People who gave limbs might also wear flag pins, right?  Any implication to the contrary is a little insulting. And revealing.
3. Interpreting the stickers and pins as a sneaky form of supporting the president is so far beyond reality that it is good evidence of projection.  Always hearing dog whistles and people talking in code is pretty good evidence that you believe that's how the world works.

We do not usually choose our tribe because it is more moral.  Rather, we think our tribe more moral and go looking for ways to prove that.  It is cart and horse. What we think of as the issues has a lot of by-product about it.  Sentence first, then trial. 

I bring all this up because I think the shoe has been on the other foot these last elections.  I am likely over-influenced by my uncle's correspondence and my brother's FB posts again, and the sample of liberals who write for money or comment on sites is going to tend toward the True Believer.  And yet...I expect the time leading up to an election to be laden with posturing, and I try to apply discounts as I can.  We are all at our worst.  There are those in my own tribe who seem mere posers and partisans. I am not above this myself.

Yet the anger continues to spew after the elections. Romney et al did not lose because of some faulty technique or bad timing or bad strategy, but because the American people recognise that he and the Republicans are hatemongers.  They lie, and we won, and that proves it.  They hate women.  They hate immigrants, and the legal vs illegal distinction is just a pose. The don't care about the environment. (For example, he Kevin Drum editorial that Sailer linked.)  I note again the importance of social approval in liberal thinking.

(For the record, I don't know what the tone has been in the other parts of the Democratic coalition, the investment bankers, the government unions, the African-Americans, the soft-hearted.  They may not be spewing.)

All mind reading again.  In light of Jonathan Haidt's research that liberals actually don't understand conservative moral reasoning as well as they are themselves understood, it seems ironic that the belief that they understand us should extend to mind-reading.  Perhaps the irony is inevitable.  If you can't follow someone's reasoning, yet you are sure they are evil because they are from the other tribe, then you kinda have to mind-read.  The most revealing stat: one poll had Obama winning under "cares about people like me" 81-18.  I think that number is likely inflated, but still revealing.  We have an electorate that is concerned whether the president cares about their sort of people.  Or more exactly, gives the impression that he cares, because who pretends to know, really?  That's getting into Father Stalin territory, isn't it?  I doubt we'll ever ever go too many steps down that road, but the point is we shouldn't be going any steps down that road at all.

Milestone

Tomorrow afternoon sometime, Assistant Village Idiot will hit a quarter-million pageviews all time. It sounds like a lot, though I'm not sure it is - rather like figuring out that you've driven a half-million miles lifetime. The number seems padded, somehow. Still, it's nice to see a round number go by.

I keep thinking I must be approaching a stopping point, and then I don't.  The 4000-post total might come up early 2013, if I still have things that attract me to write about.  I had a few topics I wanted to comment on in depth when I started.  Those days are long gone.

Thank you very much.

Barzun on Revolution

Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn To Decadence, 2000, discussing what happens to the intellectual life of a country in revolution (defined as a violent transfer of power, whether quickly or slowly)

A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals, while other people neglect their usual concerns art, philosophy, scholarship - because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea.

I think not only of the American Revolution or the Protestant Reformation when I read that, but smaller examples as well. This happens in any great change, violent or not, though it may be less pronounced.

Asylum Suitcases

Dubbahdee sent along an article about a cache of suitcases from the 1910's-60's found abandoned in an attic at an asylum for the insane in NY.  When patients died, the staff had not destroyed the limited personal belongings, but kept them stored away against a day of relatives claiming them. (The Collector's Weekly general site it wa found on is interesting in itself.)

Some findings are poignant, some puzzling, many quite predictable.  The 1960's predate my direct experience of state hospitals (though I did tour one in 1968), but when I started at NHH in 1978, there were many patients and staff who had been there for years, and many of the objects around dated from that time.  The photos had a familiarity.

It put me in mind of the James Thurber short story The Night The Bed Fell - the era, and all that talk about attics, and Thurber's dementing grandfather is a somewhat loose connection, but I think you can follow it.  The story was a favorite in our family, and I read it aloud to the boys several times.

You might wonder why I bring up putting eccentric grandfathers away, or into attics at all as I myself age, but I am safe for the present.  Our particular attic can only be reached with great difficulty, and through a small opening. I do keep a wary eye out at times, and have sudden reasons to worry more about being set out on an ice floe.

As a final, full-circle irony, the link to the story is school based, and has a quiz following.  But the quiz is for another Thurber short "The Man and The Unicorn" by mistake.  And the second story is entirely appropriate to where this whole discussion started.

Best In His Field

We have a new patient in his late 20's.  He thinks there is an emblem on his brother's head telling him to kill him, and believes words are coming out of his own neck that others can hear.  Thought broadcasting.  Schizophrenia.  Pretty straightforward, actually.  The job of the hospital at this point is assessment of danger and function, connecting him with services and benefits, seeing what antipsychotic might work, etc.

He had psychological testing 2-3 months ago at The Grand Psychiatric Hospital, the famous, Ivy-affiliated one in the 617 area code.  The one that historically looks down on the others, including us many times in my direct experience.  So we sent for said testing, which turned out to be four paragraphs of rather pedestrian Rorschach interpretation. Nothing more - no WAIS, no PAI, not even an MMPI, House-Tree-Person, TAT, nuttin'.  I did have to talk to the testing psychologist in order to get the fax number for the release of information and give her our fax.  The PhD wanted to engage in conversation that the testing clearly showed the patient had schizophrenia.  She had referred him on to Dr. Mufson, who she thought was the best psychiatrist in Boston and the only one she referred to.  And shazaam! Dr. Mufson had also thought that the patient was definitely schizophrenic.  We should call Dr. Mufson, she thought, to discuss this.  She spelled his name, gave me the address, email, phone, and fax.  She listed his affiliations, how she knew him, and why she thought so highly of him. She kept coming back to this, as if trying to extract a promise from me that we would call him.

Dr. Mufson thought he should eventually be on clozapine, she said.  That's the other name for Clozaril, she reminded me.  Well, fine.  That "eventually" tells me that Dr, Mufson noticed that he had improved but been undertreated on risperidone, and had a non-trial of Geodon because no one told him or his mother to take it with food, unfailingly, or it doesn't work.  Thanks ma'am.  I'll make a note of it.

I'm sure he's just fine and all that, but we didn't bother to call him.  It is analogous to bringing your kid to the ER, the nurse and the MD both thinking his leg is broken, taking an X-Ray and seeing that it is broken, and them asking you to wait for treatment.  Because tomorrow, tomorrow Binky, the best orthopedic guy in all the Northeast will be in, and he will look at the films.  Which he will look at and say "This kid has a broken leg.  What the hell do you need me for?"

Bethany over at Bad Data, Bad described a similar scene, in which the patient had traveled past many quite decent hospitals to get some standard medical care at a top-flight hospital's ED.  But it's not just a patient problem.  It's a provider problem as well.

BTW, this is part of why I am not excited by either having Obamacare or not having it.  I have a bias against such large federal interventions because citizens pressure politicians to pass them at great cost, thinking that somehow these sorts of problems will fade into the background forever.  But they don't.  Human beings do dumb stuff, and they don't stop just because someone passes a law that says things will be better now.  OTOH, I don't have a free market faith that says these things will be minimised if we just let the natural ebb and flow of success and failure operate on its own.

Both solutions are insane.  Got that? Mankind is fallen and both solutions are insane.  We do things to try and make treatment better, and generally, we have succeeded, gradually and painfully in improving medical care.  Long may it wave.  But if even PhD's can be counted on to say stupid things, what hope have the rest of us to consistently avoid it?

Moderate Republicans

The next time you get a sneering email or comment from someone about how Republicans were just too far-right, close-minded, anti-abortion and religious and that's why they lost, remember these three words: Bass, Brown, and Tisei.  

Rolling Stone

A coworker, a 41-year old mother of two with 18 years' sobriety, mentioned that she has a subscription to "Rolling Stone." That struck me as slightly but not ridiculously odd, so I looked up its demographics. On a lead-in page, I found the view of themselves they want to put out to potential advertisers.

Rolling Stone goes beyond just taking the pulse of youth culture.
Rolling Stone is the pulse of youth culture.
| |
Whether the subject is music, TV, movies or politics—over 12 million young Americans trust and turn to Rolling Stone every two weeks to keep them up on the subjects they care about most. Bold stories. Big interviews. Insightful commentary. All delivered with energy, passion, irreverence and a point of view that defines its audience.

Then I read the demographics of its readers.
I suppose if life expectancy is going to continue to rise, then having half of your readership over 35 can be considered "youth" culture, but it seems a stretch to this child born in 1953. Perhaps a portion of those older subscribers are buying it to put out in their waiting rooms. The only times I hear about RS is if they've just done some Top 1,000 Lost 45's of All Time, or are footnoted for some political piece heavy on assumptions and short on wondering if there is another possible POV.

They do seem to get actual modern artists on the cover, though. They're not crazy. They know all their readers, even the 11.4% that are 55+, want that.

I'm also wondering about that "other" category for race. There just aren't that many mixed-race people in America, unless they all subscribe to RS somehow. In a conservative publication, that would be "white people who are trying to screw with your data because they hate balkanizing Americans by race." But I don't think that's going to hold for Jann Wenner's crew. I'm guessing it's more like "white people who consider themselves minorities in spirit."

Though one should never rule out, for all ambiguous answers from any group,
that a considerable percentage may be "people who didn't understand the
question," or more succinctly: "Whoa. Dude."

1984

A paranoid patient of ours had taken the book 1984 out of the patient library.  His particular paranoia is very much concerned with thought reading and thought broadcasting. He is not a person one might expect to have good general knowledge of literature and political culture, and he did not have much preconceived notion what it might be about.  He had heard somewhere it was an important book.  We were a little concerned what he might take away from the book, but we don't get much involved in people's selections. 

He found it sad.  This guy had a girlfriend, but he lost her.

He didn't really notice the paranoia-inducing parts of the book.  Those were just normal background to him.

Extra Ramble

The "Printed Word" post was inspired in part by looking at people's FB pages with political content.  I know, it's Facebook, it's not supposed to be lengthy or nuanced.  But these are intelligent people, who have entry after entry of snarky criticism of candidates they don't like and self-righteous posturing about how they really, really care about this issue, all expressed in the most oversimplified, highschoolish words, but very clever visuals. Therefore, the posters at least must think the statements effective.  Therefore, this patent idiocy must be being carried by the clever visuals and condescending tone.  Therefore, those elements are more dangerous in hacking into people's political views and more dangerous to the republic.

Except I'm not sure that's actually true.

Still, it's distressing to watch intelligent people descend to sloganeering and sneers, seemingly unable to think clearly anymore.  Is this who we all, in fact, are - with only a thin rind of intellect covering?

Some Rambling About The Printed Word

I am suspicious of persuasion by visual means, especially those using human beings, as I have mentioned before.  I prefer to be addressed in words, without the facial and vocal cues.  I feel better defended against arguments in that form, less likely to be swayed by emotional cues I am not aware of.  Secretly, I believe that this is true of all of us but hardly anyone wants to admit it, because movies and commercials and TV are more fun, more efficient, and cooler.  I worry that our responses are being hacked by skilled visual persuaders, and that we notice well less than half of it.

Yet I admit it should be the opposite.  There has been an arms race in our evolutionary history between the persuasive and the persuaded, weeding out liars with some effectiveness or the tribe goes over a cliff.  There seems to be more leadership advantage in being thought right than actually being right, at least in terms of passing your own genes on within a surviving tribe. But I can't imagine there isn't some advantage to having leaders that actually are correct more often than not. 

The printed word, on the other hand, is new, and we may not have developed the extra subtleties for lie-detection that we need.  Of course, the liars have only had a few hundred years as well, so the battle may remain even.  Nicholas Wade, who used to be science writer for the NYTimes, suggested that religion may have provided that function, testing people with uncomfortable levels of sacrifice and commitment to prove they belonged.  I suspect that's not more than a little true, but atheists who continue to feel resentment at not being trusted by the religious others might try finding a substitute public cost they can demonstrate. 

Let me also note that I also have a worse history of people fooling me with printed words than live.  Well...that's my first impression, at any rate.  I haven't really thought through a hundred examples of each over the course of my lifetime to measure which is more dangerous to me personally.  But I deal with people who are lying to themselves or to me all day long, and I very seldom get taken in.  Reading...my failure rate may be higher.


There is a cultural value that is now mostly lost but was still strong in my youth, that books, especially hardcover books from respectable publishers, were almost sacred objects.  Destroying a book seemed deeply wrong, whatever its content, while acquiring books was a sort of wealth.  Some people got books just to show off, certainly, but note that this would have not had any power to elevate one's status if there hadn't been a core of people who acceded to that value. 

I note that Protestant ministers retain this value.  They don't seem to weed through their collections well.  Speaking of which, I remember my shock when my librarian wife first spoke of "weeding" through a library's collection.  Throwing books away?  And thee a librarian?  I cannot understand it! It wasn't that long ago.  But even then I was on the regressive end of the culture on that score.  I think old textbooks may be a good indicator.  Not many of those are still all that useful, you know.  Books can be useless enough - or pernicious enough - to be thrown away, and not merely held for a yard sale, to be offered to a good home like a puppy.  Some books should not be encouraged to keep on living.  Strangle 'em.

The roles have switched in our house, BTW.  I have gotten rid of something like 70% of my old books, and I stare meaningfully at my wife's genre fiction, encyclopedia, and obsolete reference books.  She remains well able to shrug this off.

I have little doubt this is left over from days when books were relatively expensive, not everyone had the luxury of formal learning, and publishers saw themselves as bearers of cultural standards, not mere tradespeople. I don't know what dates we would assign to the loss of this value, but an anecdote may be instructive. I recall my Great Aunt Esther, a well-read woman, discussing with my wife and me some new work that had come out and stating rather automatically that Little, Brown, & Co publishing it was some mark in its favor that it was of genuine quality.  She couldn't see how they would have bothered otherwise.  This would have been in the late 70's, and I thought immediately that this approach was no longer true.  Little, Brown, and Co was no guarantee. But I knew exactly what she meant, and believed that it should be true, even if it no longer was.  Had I mentioned it, I imagine she would have acknowledged this was changing.  She was pretty sharp about such things.

A related anecdote: her daughter, my mother's favorite cousin, recently mentioned that Esther had not read Peyton Place even though we had some familiarity with the author, who was local.  It seemed shameful to even consider it.  Yet Esther was rather broad in her reading and a great fan of the theater, so hardly prudish.  Her disapproval seems odd to us now, but when I put my mind back to that time, I can understand it better.

We had public expectations of movies, because there were no rating systems, and anyone could go to any.  Heck, they were even outdoors, for whole neighborhoods to see.  Most children would have been embarrassed to go to something inappropriate, because the adults nearby might stare at you, or openly challenge you or something - but in theory, a bold child could pay up and walk in.  A big deal was made of the fact that the airways were public, and there were only three channels, so TV had to be always mindful of that youngsters might be watching.  All this and more for hardcover books from respectable publishers.  A book itself was valuable, deserving of protection.  Its mere existence was some guarantee of quality and safety for children.  When a book like Peyton Place came out, it was considered a breach of the public trust. We can't imagine that very well anymore.

From this vantage we think we are wise to accuse that era of being unable to deal with such difficult content.  We prefer to think of them as naive, hypocritical.  But racier material was present then, in detective fiction, on the stage, in night clubs, and before that in vaudeville.  We did attempt to pretend we were better than we were, certainly, but let's not overstate that.  The context in which such material appeared mattered greatly.  To be out on display down at Goodman's Bookstore, or appearing on the NY Times Bestseller list, or to be discussed in literary circles, was a statement that this was now mainstream, public, acceptable.  That, not the content that was already available in pulp, was most of the shock.  Such things happen, of course.  But we don't bring them up at the table.


Back to the Protestant ministers.  The phrase book-burning carried more weight then. Moderns who didn't share that old book-preciousness value can only understand the disapproval indirectly.  People didn't destroy books, as I noted.  They were near sacred, in and of themselves.  Protestant ministers shared this value, as I noted.  Therefore, to disapprove of something so strongly as to override that value was a powerful statement.  It was an enormous condemnation.  Hardly anything was so unfit for human consumption as to deserve burning. Like Catholics with divorce, book people tended to feel that book burning was never justified under any circumstances. Therefore, when it happened it always had an air of extremism, of fanaticism about it.

Also, it actually did tend to make the material much less available locally, if some group burned a bunch of volumes of one type or title.  These days, people would just shrug - it would seem a purely symbolic act, having no effect on people's ability to read the content.  Heck, we'll just download it to the Kindle after lunch.


Last Ramble:  On being fooled by text.  Shortly after college I went through a phase of reading James Michener.  I gobbled that up.  I was fascinated by history and geography, but I didn't want to actually work hard at it by taking it in college.  Historical fiction filled the need admirably.  For one such as I who was seeking content but knew little about the history of Israel, or South Africa, of the Chesapeake Bay, or Poland, I read with few defences up.  I believed what Michener told me, essentially.  I could see how he had shaded things this way or that a bit, but I accepted uncritically that the larger events he recorded were pretty much as advertised.  Not until I picked up Texas a few years ago in preparation for visiting my son in Houston did it dawn on me: Michener draws his characters and selects his incidents with great prejudice.  It comes near to agit-prop in places it is so blatant.  Yet I fell for it.

Storm

It didn't hit us badly, but Retriever & Co. took 7 feet of water on the first floor.  The house is currently, but hopefully only temporarily, declared unsafe for occupancy.  She seems to be putting a lot of energy into looking at the upside of all this, which strikes me as...

Well, admirable, but strange.  Tough girl, that Diana.  Or something.  Spare a prayer for her and her husband having to clean through a lot of mess.

Put Not Your Trust In Princes

11/6/12

Train Song

Goldie On Elections

Tea Leaves

You know that I am notoriously bad at the horse race aspect of elections, but my reading is that Obama is going to be re-elected.  I am distressed not so much that people disagree with my assessment of how the country should be run - though that is indeed important - but at my usual metacomplaints about the field on which we play: the important stories buried by those who fancy themselves the guardians of the republic; the lack of ability of liberals to step back and even consider the possibility that they might be at fault; the confirmation bias and self-righteousness on both sides, but more distressing in those on the left who seem unconcerned with the necessity of even addressing those issues.

For that is all that I am capable of understanding, after all.  I read economists and am persuaded one way or another; I encounter arguments for and against healthcare legislation or military interventions or trade agreements; I read about scandals and weigh their relative importance.  Yet I know that these issues all have complexities far beyond me, and crucial information that I am not considering.

However, I can tell who is playing fair and who isn't.  I am qualified to judge that.  No political party ever does very well at this - nor should we suspect that any ever will. But I don't see how that particular balance scale looks at all even these last few decades.  Fallen humanity.  And I fear we will not ever do better.

Campaign Charm

On my way to work I passed a home in the center of Dunbarton with many signs for Democrats, including "Veterans For Obama."  Included was a display with dressed figures which said "Scarecrows For Obama."  I liked that, and was sorry to see that it wasn't there today.  I can't figure why.  My guess is that some thin-skinned Democrat convinced them that it actually sounded critical of Obama for some reason, and they took it away.

A pity.  We need more of that light spirit in these days.  And you know how unwilling I sometimes am to give a liberal a break.

Football Trade

There is controversy whether the Patriots got value in a trade for a player plus a 7th-round pick for a 4th-round pick.

The Patriots like late-round draft picks so much that we live in constant fear that they will trade a 4th for a 7th straight up some day.  At least we got a player.

A Poll About Polls...

NHPR's "The Exchange" has a pollster on, discussing polling difficulties and methods.  Which is fine.  The show host(ess), however, is conducting "an unscientific poll about polls and pollsters (giggle)," to get people to call in.

Of what earthly use is people's opinion about polls?  How does this advance human knowledge?  Polls are clearly an inconvenience with some potential use.  How we each value the inconvenience and the use varies.  What else can be said?  It is rather like people's estimates of whether hurricanes or earthquakes are increasing or decreasing.  The estimates tell us nothing (unless, perhaps, you are doing research about perceptions.  But disasters are not prompted or prevented by public opinion.)

I am reminded of a recent heated controversy about what is discussed on sports media. Some middle-management programming-deciding guy was being interviewed.  An irate caller came on to complain that he was sick and tired of hearing about Tim Tebow, and then went on to explain - quite emphatically, I should note - how Tebow wasn't very good and isn't a legitimate NFL quarterback and we should just stop talking about him.  The programming guy laughed.  "That's what we get, all the time.  People complaining that we're talking too much about Tebow, but then going on to give their opinion.  It's like they can't stop themselves.  If we put on a show Two Guys Arguing About Tebow, everyone complains, but no one changes the channel.  People say they are tired of hearing about Tim Tebow, but they're really just tired of hearing the opposing opinion about him."

It does seem that way.  People want to make a pronouncement, have that be the final word, and then have everyone else shut up.  Well wouldn't we all?  But I couldn't even get that out of my kids after about thirteen years old.  Even though they tend to agree with me.

I have said in the past that conservatives like to make pronouncements, almost daring you to argue, and liberals like to condescend, almost daring you to risk being thought a yahoo.  As the election approaches, both groups do both.  It doesn't seem designed to provoke an actual exchange of thought, does it?

I'm sure you all agree.

Patna, India

Ben is back from India.  Photos; thoughtful essays.  His favorite and mine:  Day Six:  The Gods Are Dead.

Junk Science

I don't mention it often, but the Junkscience site can be informative. Currently in discussion are the EPA doing testing on humans, Michael Mann falsely claiming to have won a Nobel Prize, some alarm about Mitt Romney's rumored choice for the head of the EPA, and the lackluster green jobs program of Obama.

Early D&D Was Rubbish

Retriever sent me his video about drawing swords - they don't really make a "schwing!" sound - but I watched a half-dozen and liked this one.


The Hollywood myth about throwing knives is dealt with pretty cleanly as well. Have fun.

I loved First Edition D&D BTW.  I spent hours designing.  But in retrospect, there were enormous holes in the game.  Why would wizards go to the trouble of creating rooms full of pools of random spells?  Shelved and labeled storage seems more sensible.  And what did the orcs survive on when we wernt around?

Poll Excitement

Just to inject the proper note of caution to all those excited Republicans outs there.  Rasmussen had the best results of the pollsters in 2002, 2004, and 2006.  But they were only average in 2008, and in 2010, below average. In all those years, Rasmussen tended, though this was not true of every poll, to overestimate Republican strength.  The numbers that have conservatives so giddy might be a few points high.

As in all elections, however - and this seldom comes up in all the criticism of which polls are better than others - turnout is hard to predict.  The polling experts like to talk about cell phones and windows and sampling - because they all have to lower their voices when it comes to turnout.

Running The Numbers

Bird Dog at Maggie's, in his Friday morning links, had an article about the racial divide in our presidential voting.  I won't tip my hand just yet, but I smell a slant in the numbers the way this is presented.  Read the article, and without doing any calculations, estimate what percentage of Hispanics vote for the Republican candidate.  Jot it down.

Because of the number 80% nonwhite, in the text and in the graph, I did think 80% for an instant, but then remembered oh, it's got to be less, because the black vote pulls that up to 80.  So in the 70's.  No, the low 70's.  Wait, if there's the same number of Hispanics and blacks, then it would be 65%.  Is it the same number?  And what about Asian-Americans and Native Americans?  I'd better look this up and scratch down numbers.

Until I went into the long correction cycle, the article smuggled in the idea that almost 80% of Hispanics were for Obama.  That feeds the general idea that Republicans, particularly rich Wall Street types like Romney, don't care about Hispanics, who are offended and don't vote for them.  Which is what I suspect the writers and most readers of the Washington Post think.  That's my stereotype, anyway.  Could be wrong.

But let's run the numbers...95% of African Americans, who were 12.1% of the voters in 2008...Asian Americans, hard to find, but 2.4% of the voters and they break 3-1 for Dems (76-23)...Native Americans, even smaller and harder to figure, but seem to be 1.1% and go 9-1 for Democrats...so that works out to - golly, that means Hispanics vote for Obama at the rate of 59-40.  Heck, one of the repeated points of the article was that the white vote, though 60-37 for Romney, wasn't that dramatic in a lot of places and groups, such as among women or in certain states.

My, my, my, here's the Hispanic vote being the closest to evenly divided of all the racial/ethnic groups.  You would never have thought that from reading the article, would you?

The Lineup For Yesterday

A baseball poem, by Ogden Nash in 1949.  If any of the references are obscure to you, the explanation is is here.

A is for Alex
The great Alexander;
More Goose eggs he pitched
Than a popular gander.

B is for Bresnahan
Back of the plate;
The Cubs were his love,
and McGraw his hate.

C is for Cobb,
Who grew spikes and not corn,
And made all the basemen
Wish they weren't born.

D is for Dean,
The grammatical Diz,
When they asked, Who's the tops?
Said correctly, I is.

E is for Evers,
His jaw in advance;
Never afraid
To Tinker with Chance.

F is for Fordham
And Frankie and Frisch;
I wish he were back
With the Giants, I wish.

G is for Gehrig,
The Pride of the Stadium;
His record pure gold,
His courage, pure radium.

H is for Hornsby;
When pitching to Rog,
The pitcher would pitch,
Then the pitcher would dodge.

I is for Me,
Not a hard-hitting man,
But an outstanding all-time
Incurable fan.

J is for Johnson
The Big Train in his prime
Was so fast he could throw
Three strikes at a time.

K is for Keeler,
As fresh as green paint,
The fastest and mostest
To hit where they ain't.

L is for Lajoie
Whom Clevelanders love,
Napoleon himself,
With glue in his glove.

M is for Matty,
Who carried a charm
In the form of an extra
brain in his arm.

N is for Newsom,
Bobo's favorite kin.
You ask how he's here,
He talked himself in.

O is for Ott
Of the restless right foot.
When he leaned on the pellet,
The pellet stayed put.

P is for Plank,
The arm of the A's;
When he tangled with Matty
Games lasted for days.

Q is for Don Quixote
Cornelius Mack;
Neither Yankees nor years
Can halt his attack.

R is for Ruth.
To tell you the truth,
There's just no more to be said,
Just R is for Ruth.

S is for Speaker,
Swift center-field tender,
When the ball saw him coming,
It yelled, "I surrender."

T is for Terry
The Giant from Memphis
Whose .400 average
You can't overemphis.

U would be 'Ubell
if Carl were a cockney;
We say Hubbell and Baseball
Like Football and Rockne.

V is for Vance
The Dodger's very own Dazzy;
None of his rivals
Could throw as fast as he.

W is for Wagner,
The bowlegged beauty;
Short was closed to all traffic
With Honus on duty.

X is the first
of two x's in Foxx
Who was right behind Ruth
with his powerful soxx.

Y is for Young
The magnificent Cy;
People battled against him,
But I never knew why.

Z is for Zenith
The summit of fame.
These men are up there.
These men are the game.

 This is as good - or as bad - a place as any to inform you that a nickname is from an eke-name, an also-name. Anglo-Saxon.  Sometimes the n moved in the other direction. as in a nadder, which became "an adder", a snake; or a napron (cf. napkin, nape, map) , which became "an apron."

Jacques Barzun

Died yesterday at 104. A formidable intellect. I recommend the obituary to give you a sense of the man.

I read From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 to the present when it first came out in 2000. I intended to reread it immediately, this time marking its themes (which he places in SMALLCAPS to help you follow them) and taking notes.  I never got farther than writing them in the inside cover.  That one has a yellow highlight mark next to it suggests I was going to color-code them. His overarching themes are

Self-consciousness
Specialism
Analysis
Individualism
Primitivism
Abstraction
Secularism
Emancipation

Perhaps I should reread now.  If not now, when?

Decadence, BTW, he uses in something between a popular and a technical sense.

All that is meant by Decadence is “falling off.” It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

His characterisation of the late 20th C as decadent was not merely complaint.  He used the term to highlight that something was coming to an end.  He was not optimiist about what would emerge next, but neither was he without hope.  He was 92 at the time, and I could not help but wonder if his own coming to an end severely influenced him to perceive that the same is happening to his culture.  CS Lewis had voiced similar sentiments sixty years earlier in De Descriptione Temporum , his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, in which he describes the Great Divide between the longstanding earlier culture and the emerging one.

I have said that the vast change which separates you from Old Western has been gradual and is not even now complete. Wide as the chasm is, those who are native to different sides of it can still meet; are meeting in this room. This is quite normal at times of great change. The correspondence of Henry More and Descartes is an amusing example; one would think the two men were writing in different centuries. And here comes the rub. I myself belong far more to that Old Western order than to yours.

Of course, Barzun was born only twelve years after Lewis, so they are perhaps more contemporaries than not. If the change was not then complete, perhaps Barzun describes its last shiverings. Still, I wonder if the people who have read simply everything sense in their maturity that the whole enterprise is winding down, whatever era they live in.

To read Barzun is be deeply aware how little one has actually read, however many of the references one recognises. I recall that I fairly rejoiced whenever I encountered something I was actually knowledgeable about. 90% of the time, I was playing catch-up. That is not entirely a function of his far greater knowledge, however.  Though he lived in America and taught for many years at Columbia, his orientation toward continental Europe is much stronger than would be typical for a British or American scholar.  French, Italian, and German writers and artists loom much larger for him than we are used to in our reading.

Whether because I am stupid or merely prejudiced, I still call that a weakness.

Stereotype Accuracy

Lee Jussim, PhD, a blogger over at Psychology Today, has a piece on the accuracy of our stereotypes. In fact, they are often more accurate than hypotheses for research in social psychology.  Not that every stereotype is accurate, or even that the most accurate ones are infallible.  Just that they are often a good first approximation.

Check his sidebar.  There's lots of fun there.

Norski ER - Anecdote

Chris was feeling sick for a few days, so he went to the ER.  His understanding now is that it was something to do with eating too much concentrated sugar (four popsicle-like snacks), so they gave him an antibiotic and told him to drink fluids. He doesn't know what the explanation was. He was pretty vague on the medicine as well.

Chris has a history of only half paying attention to medical information and leaping to wrong conclusions, which is not the fault of Norwegians.  He is, however, not stupid and usually gets things at least half right, and does better at this since being in the Marines.

Yet notice:  no translator, only partly because he speaks some Bokmal, and all Norwegians think they speak great English.  But there's no requirement anyway (or not one that is observed.) What, are you crazy?  Only English-speaking countries worry about whether you have a right to a translator.  You come to our country, it's your problem, says most of the world.  I have some agreement with that, actually, but want to point out that this is usually an area of criticism of uncaring Americans.  It's a very big deal at our hospitals now, and you can get in trouble for screwing that up.

Other countries whose health care we are supposed to be imitating - not so much. But even Chris really likes not having to pay for it, and I think this is important in understanding our healthcare debates.  We would rather they get it mostly right most of the time so long as its free. We really would.  We say the opposite, but we don't know our own minds.  When they get it wrong and we come near death, we don't repent, but double down, because now the treatment is really expensive and we're going to die if we don't get it.

Even people who have to buy their own insurance, even employers who have to pay for insurance, only partly get the connection.  It's just too distant from the illness.  

Snow

Chris called and said they've been having a blizzard and he had trouble getting home.  He thinks Tromso already has one meter, maybe two, on the ground, so I looked it up.  They've had over 50 inches of snow so far this autumn.

Dear Red States

I don't think you should bother to read this.  I'm just ranting and wanted to get it on the page.

This old thing was sent to me by my uncle.  I wanted to articulate why I thought it was not merely lacking in humor, but the sort of discourse that is bigoted and damaging to the country. The rant under discussion is intentionally linked farther down, after I have made much of my point.

There is a continuum of group criticsm and the offense that it gives.  At one end are the friendly rivalries in which people who have actual affection tease one another. The Americans and the British criticising each other’s food, language, and forms of government usually fits into this category, as do many of the regional stereotypes Americans send back and forth among siblings and friends in other areas.  You are crazy to live in that weather, you people talk funny, etc.  Dear Vermonters, you still have too many cows and your skiing is overpriced.  All you can make successfully are ice cream, designer beer labels, and cheddar cheese. There might be some actual aggression buried in those, giving the needle under the guise of humor, but generally, it’s good fun.

At the other end of this spectrum is Dear Niggers:  We produced Benjamin Franklin, you produced Al Sharpton.  You suck. Which is clearly offensive and not exchanged in emails among decent people.  (I admit there are probably comedians who could get away with that somehow, but I sure wouldn’t try.)

There are keys which tell us which is in play, Dear Vermonter or Dear Niggers. Is there actual affection underneath it all?  Garrison Keillor makes fun of both Minnesotans and New Yorkers, but there are things he clearly likes about both.  He seems to genuinely dislike Southerners, however, except perhaps certain ones. Are the barbs delivered the sort of thing people might say about themselves with a wry smile?  This one aspect may cover all.

That in turn may be detected by what is being criticised.  If culturally important qualities such as intelligence, honesty, and attractiveness are coming under the microscope, you can pretty much count on others to take offense.  If one has great skill, one can make even those work, but it’s dicey.  PJ O’Rourke can say “I don’t know why anyone would want to see an Irish girl in a bikini,” because he’s Irish, and everyone knows that there actually are plenty of Irish girls who look fine in them.  He’s just ragging on the general type of attractiveness that is favored – likely the freckles, pasty-whiteness, or something. 

Humor can come from exaggeration, and you don’t expect it to be even-handed, or it’s not funny. But when you get it wrong, then you really are hanging out in the breeze.  Ben Franklin may have been wiser than Al Sharpton, but he’s also wiser than the majority of white people, so he’s an unfair example.  OTOH, the majority of black people are not as irritating as Shaprton -not near, so he’s also a bad example.  Someone is taking unfair credit or assigning unfair blame by implying they are typical. It's the stuff you read in the fever swamps of racialism.

All of this is why, on the continuum of making fun, Dear RedStates is a lot closer to Dear Niggers than it is to Dear Vermonters. There's no affection, no chance those criticised would say this about themselves.  It’s high-school insult stuff.  Calling it humor, and pretending it is more like the gentle regional or difference-between-men-and-women stuff (though that can be pretty bigoted as well) is deceitful.  Nothing of the kind is intended here.  It is all “we are smart, you are stoooopid; we get it, you don’t; blue states rule, red states drool” stuff.  When you play to those stereotypes you enter the world of being refuted by facts – if anyone wants to bother.

I will bother only briefly.

All states are purple.  Perhaps DC qualifies as fully blue. Liberals are far more likely to make a big cultural deal about this Red State/Blue State stuff, because they like to disguise that they aren’t really 50% of the country – they are about 16% of the country, leaders of a coalition of government union, African-American, and single-parent voters.  Also, it is evidence that they are culturally rather than intellectually moved, just as I have long claimed.

There are lots of fine schools in the supposedly Red States: Rice, Duke, (yeah, William & Mary), Vanderbilt, Davidson, UVA, Chapel Hill – and plenty of joke colleges in the “Blue” ones.  In fact, I note that the country’s worst highschools, highest crime areas, etc are in the supposedly favored areas. Strange this wasn’t mentioned.

Just because the world’s finest universities are near you doesn’t mean you aren’t numb as a hake yourself.  Taking credit for other people’s accomplishments by trying to show how much you are like them because they live near you and you identify with their culture is just lame.

The remaining statistics, which you find so telling, are similarly flawed.  I occasionally get forwarded stuff like this with a rightist perspective.  I don't forward it and I usually send back a comment to the sender explaining why.  But somehow, it is considered within the bounds of decent conversation to receive it from the left.

Blaming Others

Retriever sent along an interesting link about blaming people for what goes wrong, including blaming yourself.  It’s a good article that links to real research, so you may find it worth your while.  Barker is clearly not a professional in either psychology or research, but he does seem to be a reasonably clever guy who is very popular these days talking about self-help.  At least, I conclude he is not a professional because I cannot find any credentials discussed anywhere on the web.  He tells you who he writes for and what he does, which is perhaps appropriate for a positive-thinking self-help guy, as if saying  Those things don’t matter.  What matters is if I can produce good material or not.

There are some things you should be cautious about in reading such material however – things that you know but I am reminding you about. 

1. He has no obligation to report research that points in another direction or clouds his preferred narrative in any way.
2. Just because people who do X have preferred outcome Y, it does not mean that you are going to be able to do X yourself, nor that even if you succeed at doing X, Y will happen to you as well.

 Let me expand on that last just a bit.  In this case, Eric Barker claims that people who blame less are more productive, implying that if you reduce blaming, you will become more productive as well.  This is not necessarily so.  You may have a set-point of how much you are going to blame, that can be changed only slightly, or with enormous effort.  Barker may think you can turn it on and of, but you may be wired for the amount of blame you engage in, and your inability to change that be just one more thing to kick yourself about. 

When I started in this biz years ago, there was a psychologist who kept a number of paper bags in his office.  He used them to illustrate his favorite lesson, that guilt was unnecessary.  He would tell people to put their guilt in a bag by blowing it up, then have them pop it.  Observers noted that this never seemed to have the least positive effect on his patients, but he had been doing it for 40 years and wasn’t going to change now. Pop psych strategies often have this weakness.  If they don’t work, it is somehow your fault for not activating the technique properly.

Not that you shouldn’t try them.  Sometimes you can make the adjustment and they do create an upward spiral. At a minimum, they can remind you that the opposite isn’t likely to help – that blaming others or feeling more guilty doesn’t have a track record of improving outcomes either, allowing you to distract yourself for a bit.

Conspiracy Theory

Posted today over at Instapundit, a new book claims the KGB was in on the Kennedy assassination, by steering Oswald.  As conspiracy theories go, this one was always a bit better than most, because as Reynolds points out, the KGB actually did do this sort of thing.  I would add that this particular conspiracy only requires a few people to be in the know, which is where most of the others become entirely implausible.  ("You think that hundreds of people involved in the building of the World Trade Center years ago...")

It still remains implausible, but it did put me in mind of something else on the topic.  Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of the Romanian secret police and highest-ranking defector of the Cold War, has long claimed that the KGB claimed the deed was theirs.  Just because they claimed it doesn't make it so - groups looking for status and intimidation might very well claim credit without it being remotely true.  ("Kennedy assassination? Yeah, that was totally us.  We did that.")  Pacepa found the claim credible, in much the same way as described here: that it was a side operation that sort of fell into their laps when this crazy American showed up and looked willing.  This wasn't a master plan, but opportunism.  In that context, I suppose it could be so.

Here's an important takeaway that keeps getting left out of the popular record though, but is quite clear here.  Lee Harvey Oswald was not some odd, politically unclassifiable aberration.  He was a man of the left.  The obfuscation of this comes from emotive, rather than logical places - but gee, he was a Marine, and...he had guns...and it was in Texas... those are all conservative things and therefore a mixed picture.  Breaking those down one by one, they're pretty weak.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Volunteers were requested at work to give 30 minutes of instruction to student nurses about what our department does.  It came down to two of us, and the other person, a male about my age, challenged me to Paper, Rock Scissors, best two of three, loser has to teach.  It caught me by surprise and I accepted.

He beat me in two moves.  I wondered if I had been snookered, so I looked it up.  I played exactly as novice males often do, and he had the correct answer both times, so I suspect he preys upon hapless, naive RPS players often, and knows the simple strategy.

Neophyte males tend to play "rock" on their first move, neophyte females tend to play "scissors."  Next, inexperienced players tend to play against the strategy that just beat them.  I played "rock," he beat that with "paper."  I played "paper," he beat that with scissors.  I am going to bet he wins with that paper-scissors strategy a fair bit, challenging people who are unsuspecting.

I don't know why I chose what I chose.  The explanations seemed implausible to me.  But there it is.  So now you know:  catch people by surprise and beat them at RPS.

Vague Comparison

I heard there was some controversy about Romney and a 47% comment - his opponents claimed he called 47% of the population useless eaters and his supporters claimed he had said something quite different.  I didn't follow it, don't know the exact quote and context, and so won't weigh in, neither on what he said, nor what I think he actually meant.

I thought of that comment today, however, as the union people who are around a lot where I work were handing out election fliers as I walked in. (Nice people.  I resent that NH SEA affiliated with national, read corrupt, unions, but the people here are regular folk.) The phrase that they use for union members is "Working Families."  When they outline what Obama and Romney will do for (or to) Working Families, it is always limited to what their positions are on union legislation.

This irritates me, for it is a claim that union members are the people who work and the people who have families.  It's a deniable claim if people call them on it, but it's pretty blatant. I imagine the people who thought Romney said that 47% of the people were sucking off the rest of us had a similar feeling.  Rightly or wrongly, once you've taken in that thought, any explanation sounds like an excuse.

I dislike that political strategy, however effective it might be.

Biological Diversity

Not much seems to have come from the blog for last spring's Human Biological Diversity Day, but there is an interesting essay, HBD and Policy: Which Questions To Ask?

I have often wondered when reading the Steve Sailer, Steven Hsu, Taki's Magazine, or in more guarded forms, Nicholas Wade or  Harry Harpending essays But what will we do if/when everyone finally acknowledges the science?  What should we do?  How will the culture respond?  A lot of energy in HBD study goes into fighting off the political attacks and bizarre academic attacks from the social sciences. Races exist, and they have differences.  Repeating "There are no bears on Hemlock Mountain.  No bears, no bears, no bears at all" has not turned out to be a workable scientific strategy.

The essay reminds us what we did last time, and reminds me of my usual fear when I consider humankind.  The progressives of a century ago did believe in human biological diversity, and their solutions were frightening.  There is a certain cast of mind which sees a problem and says "The government should try and fix this."  It's not only liberals.  Plenty of conservatives sign up for knuckleheaded interventions as well.

My own thought is that we start by at least not rewarding bad outcomes.  Actively discouraging them or even forbidding them in some way leads immediately to worrisome interventions, but we can at least stop doing what we do now, which is rewarding pathology.  But I don't think we can as a culture stop there, and I fear what we will do.  I have to wonder if pretending that the lies are true is actually a better solution.

Mutants

Greg Cochrane, co-author of The 10,000 Year Explosion:

History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans - sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants."