Magyars

Okay, who knows enough about Hungarian history to answer for me whether the theory that the European powers actually preferred the Ottomans and seriously assisted them in the 1500s for their own selfish reasons has some merit, is just crazy, or is too oversimplified to be asserted? I can read the standard explanations in Wikipedia and tend to accept them, as that outlet is usually okay when they don't have a dog in the fight. Yet even that far back, events have a way of being important in the present, especially in that area of the world, so I hesitate to accept that framing.

Naming

The US Open is being played at The Country Club. It is very Boston, and especially very Brookline, that it is called that. No further identification needed, sir.

Firebombing - Jane's Revenge

I had decided not to comment on the recent assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh, on the hope that it was a one-off ill person and not representative of any change in overall sentiment. I did remember, and wondered if anyone was pointing it out, that if the politics were reversed Chuck Schumer's comment "you will pay for this" would be a nonstop discussion by horrified liberals expressing how much they felt "real fear," and worry that the country was descending into dangerous places because Sarah Palin/Donald Trump/some obscure Missouri state legislator had been saying such inciting, dangerously violent things.

But I don't think the New York Times and the Washington Post will be rehashing Schumer's comment, because they don't perceive that his comments might send some crazy person that last step over the edge. We have discussed this many times here. It is not just because they are playing the political game of burying news that makes the political side they favor look bad.  It is also because at the most primitive level, they are not in danger personally, so their warning bells do not go off.  They are not the ones who will be hurt. There is a tendency for all of us to do this.  We get activated when it might be our family, our tribe that is under threat. Then IT'S SERIOUS. When it is our political opponents who are in danger, we make excuses about how minimal the danger is.

I had a friend who expressed real concern about the "violence" of pro-life protestors of a speaker at the college he taught at, because they intentionally slow-moved the exit roads of the speakers trying to drive out, never blocking them, just being sort of intimidating, clogging up the road, and saying uncomplimentary things. As was a daily occurrence at OWS, for example, now forgotten. It seemed worse to him because he might theoretically be a target for inviting them.  Nothing like that ever happened, but the threat seemed closer to home. I do not follow it closely anymore, but I don't think I ever heard one word of fear expressed about campus violence in any other direction.  We are all like that.  But we try to be better.

But Schumer did say "Brett Kavanaugh, you will pay for this," which is an odd statement, because Kavanaugh is not in an elected position and the price that he pays will not be political except in the sense of...what? Not getting invited to Georgetown parties? What other "price" was he thinking of?  Schumer isn't stupid.  He reportedly had SATs of 1600, old scoring (though I think there is some shading on that, some information left out). And now someone has tried to assassinate Kavanaugh. 

And this is not a one-off after all, as I naively hoped.  A pro-life clinic has already been firebombed last week by a group called "Jane's Revenge." They threaten more violence. After decades of working with liberals who see themselves as peaceful people, I know what the response will be.  This will not register. It will disappear from memory, not stick to the wall, because the framework, the schema, is that it is the pro-life people who are violent - based on real but long-past incidents - not their people. It is a subset of the offense/defense, liberal/conservative split I have mentioned a hundred times.  It is liberals who are the violent ones, getting in people's faces, setting cars on fire, throwing stones through the storefronts of conservative groups, strapping bombs to themselves and entering buildings.  The difference has been that they have refrained from human targets, and thus it somehow "doesn't count." That is eroding fast - Counterdemonstrations where armed violence against tiny groups of supposed neo-nazis or other baddies is initiated; Bernie staffers shooting Republican congressmen; attacks on police that are specifically political. And of course the assassination attempts back to Oswald have been much more often from the left - when they aren't just from people who are just ill. 

If it's not you in danger, it gets forgotten, as in Cowslip's Warren.

More Finnish Weirdness

 

Granite Dad, your daughters might be interested.

National Anthem

I follow some sports, but it is not a topic of general interest here and I don't bring it here that often.  When I mention them at all, it is usually because there is some larger issue involved. In this case, it is the infuriating comment by the NCAA about why they have cancelled a national anthem singer, a Texas A&M grad, for making the "horns down" sign at the end of the performance, to show rivalry against University of Texas. 

The performance of the national anthem during NCAA championship events is a solemn moment for reflection and mutual respect for all championship participants and fans in attendance,

No, it's the friggin' national anthem of the United States of America, sung at many public events in this country as a moment of reflection and showing respect for the country. When large national organisations make statements on politically charged topics, one assumes that they ran it by a few people before going public.  And no one, apparently, picks up on the obvious anymore. If they had cancelled him for injecting sports rivalry into that solemn moment I'd approve.  But another major institution, controlling lots of money, lots of lives of young people, and lots of attention, has succumbed to this misunderstanding of the whole point. We complain about institutions "going woke," but that happens because it is downstream of this sort of cluelessness.

One's politics might make one uncomfortable at the injection of nationalist sentiment into events such as sports, which may not be deeply related.  Fine.  But if you are going to go and have the national anthem, have a clue why that is.

****

As for sports commentary, I have not commented on Lia Thomas because I don't especially care about those competitions or awards.  I have some interest in the general idea of who is being excluded from what, especially as tax dollars from the feds and in every state go to funding it.  But I'm just not that excited, even by the very public symbolism.

*****

What does excite me is the prediction that the NBA has an interest in making playoff series run longer because $, and therefore they slotted Tony Brothers in to referee against the Celtics last night.  Boston is the best team in basketball, but they are only 3-14 in the playoffs when he is officiating.  He doesn't like it that they complain a lot. He's right, they do complain a lot, and it is obnoxious.  Other fans hate them for it and I completely get that. But when you are the referee, that's not your job, and you are paid to do another one. The NBA allows this to go on, and you can see the pattern in your own jobs. Brothers is likely not going rogue, expressing a refereeing philosophy that is not shared by the other officials and the league.  He is just willing to be the lightning rod and take the damage.  The others are happy to cede him that role. They think something similar but get to look above the fray. In national cultural politics we see the same thing.  The people we hate on the other side are likely just those with the thickest skin and greater courage. They couldn't speak if the sentiment were not widely shared.

When a group is acting both independently and together, it works a treat for someone to be the bad guy, protecting the others. It just sucks when the goal should be overall balance, not one person creating a course correction for everyone else.  The Celtics did lose, their coach, the Nigerian Ime Udoka who is very calm and continually counsels his team not to complain to the refs, nearly got tossed after he was the one complaining to Brothers, just after the Celtics had come back and taken the lead, then slowly had it disappear as fouls got called. If the NBA wants to punish complaining and whining - and I think I would want to do that myself, because we do have a couple of whiners - then they should do that, not engage in this dishonesty. They don't want to admit that they are pissed and insulted, so they try to pretend it's someone else's fault. Typical powerul bureaucrat protecting an image behavior.

Yes You've Got Trouble

There is a lot to see in this article from the Intercept by a long-time progressive activist who is troubled by what he currently sees in progressive organisations. He sees a great deal, and sees it accurately. But what struck me the most were the assumptions he makes that are still unquestioned, even now, that prevent him from understanding. He worries about adopting the framing of criticism from the right, he worries about appearing to give credence to that criticism, he worries about progressives looking like the stereotype of leftist infighting like the Judean People's Front. (Or the Guerrilla Shrews in Redwall.) He is unable to consider that just perhaps, there was something to that to begin with. Do they really think the Audubon Society has a culture of retaliation, fear, and antagonism to women and people of color?

For years, recruiting young people into the movement felt like a win-win, he said: new energy for the movement and the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice. But that’s no longer the case. “I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don’t even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not — they’re not healthy. Like all these people are just not — they’re not doing well,” he said. “The dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it — callout culture, cancel culture, whatever — is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one’s able to talk about it, no one’s able to say how bad it is.”

Or, he is unable to consider that there does not seem to be progress on some of these goals now that Democrats have the trifecta because they are not, in fact, all that popular, the offered solutions not all that likely to work, and the injustices both the internal and external conflicts focus on not quite as real as assumed. 

Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,”

Some of what he is seeing is the coming-of-age of those born after the mid 90s that Haidt and Lukianoff identify, and their highly personalised or even narcissistic approach to their causes - which he sees and wrestles with.  But some of it is the natural decay of bureaucracies into uselessness, which he seems to only partially grasp. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy again. No wonder the radicals want to burn it down. 

The reliance of so many organizations on foundation funding rather than member donations is central to the upheavals the groups have seen in recent years, one group leader said, because the groups aren’t accountable to the public for failing to accomplish anything, as long as the foundation flows continue. “Unlike labor unions, church groups, membership organizations, or even business lobbies, large foundations and grant-funded nonprofits aren’t accountable to the people whose interests they claim to represent and have no concrete incentive to win elections or secure policy gains,” they said. “The fundamental disconnect of organizations to the communities they purport to serve has led to endless ‘strategic refreshes’ and ‘organizational resets’ that have even further disconnected movements from the actual goals.”

It's Trump's fault, of course.  I should have mentioned that at the outset. Everyone was just so upset.

I just put this up for the title.  I don't think there is any further connection to the topic.  If you see one, let me know.  I might edit this and take credit for it. 

There were a dozen roads I could go down in commenting here, but I want you to choose your own.

Attention Versus Power

The City Journal article by Blake Smith, Attention Counteracting Ambition, hit some interesting buttons for me. Our elites desire admiration more than power.  That seems plausible.

Obama’s speeches and Trump’s tweets gave their supporters the pleasure of imagining that their team now occupied the driver’s seat of history, leaving “bitter clingers” or “losers” in the dust. Both political elites and their audiences seem content to let politics become a kind of dramaturgy, in which roles are performed to cheers and boos. Obama flew to Cairo to give what was then hailed in the global press as an epochal speech. Trump flew to North Korea for an equally blustery, equally inconsequential meeting with Kim Jong Un. Both enjoyed fame in its postmodern sense of media attention, not its eighteenth-century meaning of lasting glory.

I see the complaint on conservative sites - more in the comments than the posts - that various liberals crave power and control over us, and they apply that interpretation to everything that they do. I don't reject that entirely, but it has never quite rung true for me. It seems an overinterpretation of motives, and when that happens, one has to wonder if it is projection, and the critic is desiring power himself.

Beto O'Rourke does not seem to be pursuing power.  He wants to be seen as a cool dude with massive righteousness, admired by all. Hillary might be best understood on the power axis, but AOC seems more like Beto.

 Nearly half a century ago, Jean Baudrillard advanced a blistering critique of Michel Foucault’s theory about the ubiquity of power, arguing that political elites today seek only the illusion of power.

I was in the Order of DeMolay, a Masonic-affiliated order for young men when I was in high school. My participation was indifferent, having been dragged in by a friend whose mother was very involved with Eastern Star. But I do recall that there were phrases that kept showing up in the secret ritual, and one was "worthy of the commendation of all good men." That seems like that older version of fame that Smith is referring to.

Difference in Rewards

I mentioned recently that the rising generation may not be that different from those which have gone before, under "Stray Thoughts." I focused there on rebellion and authority, but the idea may generalise. I have long thought that the differences between one generation - of Boomers, or Millennials, or whatever - and the ones before and after are largely journalism and pop-social science games. Even though the generation born in the mid-90s and after looks very different and shows some measurable distinctives, I think even they are much like previous groups.

What is different is that as society changes, different behaviors get rewarded, so who gets famous, who gets rich, who gets noticed, who wields social power - all these change slightly or greatly in response.  If you change the pay scale or the strike zone or the rules on traveling, different athletes will succeed.  Yet the number of athletic people who have the drive to excel will likely be about the same, decade after decade. We likely have the same number of busybodies, but our cultural and especially legal punishments of those they want to interfere with have made them more powerful. HR doesn't want the company to come under increase regulatory scrutiny or worse, get sanctioned, and focuses on that rather than on getting quality hires and keeping quality personnel. This reinforces itself.

Whether we have more criminals is affected by drug use, and the rewards for crime versus the risks for engaging in it. Head injury and other trauma likely has some effect.  But the percentage of people at risk to be dangerous likely doesn't change much.  What their rewards and incentives are is what changes.

There may be secular changes over time related to culture and teaching, but I don't think these change quickly. Stuff makes the news and lots of people try to make a living commenting on how the world is changing, so we are likely given a false picture of what is changing and what is not. I will stick with my view that we underestimate genetic influences, and underestimate rewards and punishments for behavior, and overestimate the effect of fashions in education and both the popular and classical arts. 

Young people marry less often and have fewer children now. (James just had a post that touches on family formation.) There are a hundred theories as to what cultural changes are driving this, and if you talk to the individuals involved they can describe at length what they think their reasons are. And young people in other regions, classes, or countries will give different reasons. But marriage is no longer an economic necessity, and children are more and more expensive, especially when taking the measurement of insuring that they have a life that looks about as prosperous as yours, or better. That is true in an increasing number of countries. Looking for cultural explanations may be a form of evasion, of not admitting that what we have done in terms of zoning and housing and educational costs is most of the explanation.

Ironies

It's hard to keep track of this 1990s concert of a Finnish satirical band and the Russian military band the Alexandrov Ensemble. Is everyone involved making fun of each other?  Themselves?  The audience?  Life in general?  Or just trying to make a buck and have a good time?

 

 

The Finns can be pretty crazy.

Luxury Beliefs

Rob Henderson's Newsletter discusses luxury beliefs, such as the prominence of "Defund the Police" among the well-off, who live in safer places and can afford private security. He is rather stern about the topic.

We have discussed the general topic frequently over the years, including a heavily-linked discussion a year ago about class, or caste in America. 

I had not understood until today that Henderson grew up in foster homes, ran away and joined the military as soon as he could, then went to Yale on the GI Bill - and now UCambridge and UAustin. I appreciate such perspectives.

The Lord Bless You and Keep You

 I posted this once before.  It is one of the few pieces I will sing with the choir because I do enjoy hearing it and singing it and know it well enough that I can pop in with minimal rehearsal.  The choir will be singing it tomorrow for Remembrance Sunday - I'm not quite sure what that it, but I'll bet it has to do with those who lost friends and relatives over the last year - and I will be joining them.

I clumsily banged my head* on an overhanging beam a couple of hours ago after getting back from volunteering at New England Seafarer's Mission and hurrying around carelessly, so I will attract too much attention for my minor contribution, and for the wrong reasons. A ball cap would only attract more attention, I think. 

*This is not unusual.  I am quite clumsy.

Substack

When I got a paid subscription to Razib Khan's Substack, I was immediately offered others.  I accepted the free trial of them, which generated some more offered free trials of other writers, which I declined. I get the business advantage of having the popular point us in the direction of the lesser-known, and i don't object to people trying to make a living that way, so long as it is minimally intrusive.

I have since unsubscribed to Leighton Woodhouse and "Social Studies," though I still have some podcasts on my device and may listen to those. Yet I think I may pull the plug quickly. I will also be deleting Colin Wright's "Reality's Last Stand," right after this post because it deals mostly with gender outrage issues. But you can check it out if you like. 

I haven't read enough of Rob Henderson to make a decision.  There was a fourth one I can't find.  Ah, now I remember, Michael DC Bowen of "Stoic Observations."  I liked him okay but it's an advice column, and I unsubscribed.

Stray Thoughts

Weeding through the buried notes from listening to podcasts while out on a walk. A few of these go back to 2019.

Primogeniture is not a common inheritance strategy in nomadic societies.  Herds can be divided easily.  Orchards and barns not so much.

It seems odd to me that we have a rising generation that shows its "rebellion" by being rule-followers and insisting others do as well.  So quick to appeal to authority, rather than admiring those who are trying to evade authority, as their parents and grandparents did. Of course, this may not be so.  We may have the same percentage of rebels and rule-followers in all generations, but have structured things to reward one group more than usual, so that they have more power than they did in previous eras. Some young people are empowered to be the shock troops for the authoritarian elders. 

I have to check myself not to withhold deserved sympathy just because I think some other group has it worse and is even more overlooked. Irritation rises up in me when I hear about how hard life is for teenage girls, even though their suicide rate and assault victimisation rates are lower, their school success much higher, their problems more closely studied...well, you have seen me go through the list on that before. What about the boys? But I have internally overcorrected on this.  Of course it is hard for teenage girls.  It is hard to come of age at all, without a solid personality to fend off anxieties. Girls have vulnerabilities boys do not and inhabit a world that is often more socially complicated and precarious.  Or at least it seems precarious, until one reaches levels of assurance about identity and "why should I care what she thinks anyway?" 

"You become, of course, paranoid when you have been working on spies for about five years. So there is actually a danger that you see plots everywhere." Nadine Akkerman, author of Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in 17th Century Britain.

You don't say...

Josh Barro on WaPo Fights

There is always the Henry Kissinger line about Iraq and Iran in the 1980s "Can't we hope for them both to lose?" But Barro has an important point about the deterioration of journalism culture and social media culture, which is the public culture of the newest adult generation and likely to have some influence for fifty years. 

Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.

I reflect on my hospital career.  One could say many bad things about the hospital to one's family, or one's Bible study, or the fathers you were talking to at Cub Scouts or soccer games or whatever.  But you didn't put it in print in any way.  I got in trouble for an anonymous parody of hospital decisions in the 1990s, which I put up on a pillar in the lobby, but got picked up by the Concord Monitor.  Front page, gulp. It was really funny, though.  I just had to let you know that part. If you wrote a Letter to the Editor about the hospital, you worded it carefully, and even then worried about blowback.  Or at least, so I'm told.  Never went their myself.  Even now I only refer to management decisions, especially personnel and discipline, very obliquely. I don't know everything behind those decisions.  I don't like to find out that I said something stupid a month later.

Categories

We make categories in order to break them, and I think this should have been introduced to me much earlier in my education.  The Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and Is the Chalcolithic a Thing? The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance - is there any real difference? The dividing line between a language and a dialect is mutual intelligibility, except "do you mean after a couple of friendly drinks?" Or, "what if neither are Russians but have both been in the Russian Navy?" "What if it's considered insulting on this island to call this a creole but the next island calls their almost-identical language Creole?" Separate species cannot interbreed and produce fertile young - except that's a complete mess now. I'll know it when I see it, uh, most dog breeds are genetically very close. The neat delineation of parts of speech that you learned in school turn out to be ideal types that apply to 70-90% of our words and phrases but leave...

I am going inside. (preposition)

I am going home.

I am going back to my childhood. Okay, 

I hated Akron, where I was abused by several relatives. I am going back to the town I grew up in. I am going back to my childhood.  I am going home...I am going inside.

You can have fun diagramming the sentence to pretend that they fit parts of speech neatly, but they don't.  It's a game.  It's an imposing of categories because we like categories. Reality does not fit categories, but that doesn't mean that reality isn't real. That's the opposite game being played.

Schizophrenia or BPAD with mood-congruent psychotic features? Darn, nothing fits.  Maybe Schizoaffective Disorder? I give up. Psychotic Disorder, NOS. Oh, c'mon, no one is completely objective in journalism or even science. Yet each of those categories above - Chalcolithic, Creole, Schizoaffective has a real meaning. Just because the boundaries are in tatters does not imply there is no meaning in the central concept. People trying to screw with you about that, pretending that there is no central reality are imposing their advantage of exploiting chaos on you by declaring all your precisions are false. 

Romania Changed Everything.

I think it was Romania that did it. Even before the boys came in 2001, I came home to a different world in 1998 after two weeks in Beius. Before that I straightened pictures in waiting rooms.  I still might on occasion, just because I like the looks of it, but it used to be a necessity. I can reluctantly single-space after a period now (though I still go back to get the punctuation around the ends of parentheses or quotation marks right, even though the punctuation style I have adopted over fifteen years of blogging would make not only my grandmother, but even my 1980 self shudder.)  Yet in that pivotal period between the very clearly defined Wyman culture of 1997 and the very clearly defined but entirely different family culture (and church and work and marriage and even what I wore and how I worshiped) inverted a great deal. One Romanian spells very well, the other is embarrassing - and it doesn't matter. He's fussy about other things, because he's an accountant. My mother died, my father died, and all my old categories were transcended.  Exactly as should be. All the same yet all different.

Insisting on little things that you know and others don't can be OCD*, or Aspie, or any of six arrogant Elitisms. Sometimes precision matters, even to life-or-death or billions of dollars.  Bible studies are supposed to look this way, and not that way. Mostly, it's just showing off, or a hard-wired nervousness impervious to correction. "It's not green, it's teal. If we abandon such distinctions, we may as well call black and white the same thing!" I still haven't decided which of the explanations fits best for me, mostly because I don't want to embrace any of those categories.

The flip side is you can and should teach categories. Thought without structure is just feelings and fashions. People who try and break categories before instruction are only hoping to impose their feelings and fashions on the defenseless young. But embrace with joy that we teach categories in order to understand something, but the rest of your life will be spent shrugging that the edges are soft/

*or CDO, because that's in alphabetical order.

Berserkers, and The Dogs of War

The berserkir were not what we think they were, according to Viking and Old Norse scholar Roderick Dale.  Snorri Sturluson's translation "bare-shirt/armor," suggesting a nakedness and recklessness is now not favored.  It is more likely to be "bear shirt/armor."  They were unlikely to be the out-of-control warriors of fantasy, and  more likely became the protectors of order, the bodyguard of the king, and then the protector of the helpless.  The champions, in the old sense. There was a ceremonial aspect in preparing for combat that may have functioned rather like Maori Haka.  Even when knowing it's a performance, the disquieting thought "some of those dudes look actually crazy" does creep in.

There is reference to Christian berserkers, something of a precursor to the idea of the Christian Knight, turning his prowess to the service of women, children, and the poor. The references to this being an out-of-control group, as dangerous  tend to be later.

Yet wolves were mentioned far more frequently. The relation of wolf-ness to warriors is actually much stronger, and bears were subsidiary. There is an idea that there must have been wild-boar warriors as well - we like such things in triplet - but the evidence for this is meager.

Wolves, then. That is fascinating in terms of David Anthony's book in progress The Dogs of War  which I keep hearing excitement about but is only a single paper at the moment.  Still the archaeological incident the paper is about is quite something, of dogs - likely old pet dogs - cut into pieces and then eaten by boys in a coming-of-age ceremony, and it is David Anthony, author of The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. I have heard Anthony discussing the overall idea of the centrality of dogs and wolves to warfare in the many Indo-European and even specifically Yamnayan cultures. The association of dogs, wolves, and war is still strong in many of the descended cultures.

Razib's series on wolves and humans on the Eurasian Steppe The Wolf at History's Door and Casting Out the Wolf in our Midst are recommended. I don't know how much non-subscribers have access to, but his usual practice is to give you at least a few paragraphs.

Those behind the Hajnal Line may have gradually become less violent within their own societies* and their descendants less murderous now, but this is on top of a part of one of the most violent groups in history.  We can tell by the genetics that ten women reproduced for every man through those times, meaning that ten was the average number of women impregnated by the successful males, who likely enslaved or simply killed the male opponents they encountered. Whether that was abduction or rape and abandonment is unclear. If you are looking for ancestors to hate, it might be best to skip the colonialists and move straight to the coming-of-age cohorts of the Yamnaya who subdued and overran Europe and half of Asia in the Bronze Age. Their societies tolerated and even encouraged it because the violence was directed ever-outwards, and thus more land and treasure for us all! Later descendants channeling that violence in milder form still carried the ceremonies.

*However, because of their related ability for broader cooperation than other societies, they have been quite good at violence directed at enemies.

Shang China

"I was a student - studying Chinese Literature and I started studying the early poetry.  I was reading all this secondary literature that suggested that early Chinese civilization differed from that of the West... the West has epics and China was a civilization of peace and harmony of the Drum and the Bell and then I was reading these early dynastic hymns about  'The king raised the battle-ax...offer the left ear of your  enemies to the ancestors' and I thought What is going on here? So I'll look into the archaeology. So I picked up K.C. Chang's Shang Civilization. I was blown away. Like...human sacrifice? What? What is going on here? None of this made any sense to me, based on what I had previously understood about early Chinese civilization from a kind of Confucian lens. It immediately fascinated me. The Shang was unexpected yet somehow had to be related to the rest of Chinese history." Interview with Dr. Rod Campbell,  of  NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and author of Violence, Kinship, and the Early Chinese State: The Shang and Their World  

Someone I can trust a bit, then. The western fascination with the ancient East - They invented everything! All our philosophical ideas really come from them! They are just wise and peaceful and better at everything! - long predates my going to college ("The Mikado" was intended as a spoof on the Victorian fad), but it was in full flower by the time I was an undergrad. Already there seemed no place for partial admiration of the east. I eventually wrote about it as a blogger, most prominently in reference to GK Chesterton's line in Orthodoxy "Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatchford, are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism." Seven of the ten deadliest wars have taken place in Asia, after all. I'm fine with giving the Chinese credit for many things, just not all wisdom. So if Dr. Campbell asserts his overall conclusions about the place as net B-minus positive for the progress of the world in general I can sign on. It's just the starry-eyed nonsense I can't abide. It even spills out to the idea that the Maoists must have been basically okay despite some excesses, because "you just don't understand Chinese civilization." Well, I don't understand killing 25,000,000 of your own residents, not by accident of disease or pollution or pointless warfare or frightening working conditions or even the harshness of slavery, but by intentional extermination for political reasons, no. I'd rather credit Chinese civilization as being at least a bit better, thanks.

Over The Transom

Relate to both feelings of safety, and motives for gun control, I had an article from FEE showing that Nobel Economist Ronald Coase predicted in 1974 that intellectuals would eventually begin to favor censorship and regulation of the marketplace of ideas. His reasoning was that they controlled that marketplace at the time and had no need for censorship, as if there was any regulating to do, they would be the ones tasked with it. Yet if that control eroded, he thought, they would favor taking control back via regulation. Changes in communication since that time - cheaper phone service, cable TV services and deregulation of radio, computer improvements that allow self-publishing, and most dramatically world-wide internet publishing of content has democratised the marketplace of ideas. Social media has even more become the town square for many people, and the intellectual class has no control over Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.  They have to compete with the hoi polloi, and they don't like it. Claims that unregulated social media (and more!) will allow bullies to silence shyer or less-privileged voices with their harsh statements are the inverse of what has already happened. They were the bullies who could silence other voices, and now they can't. That's why they suddenly want to regulate things after decades of championing absolute free speech.

It is reminiscent of Burja's prediction that when the Chinese start supporting international patent recognition, which he thinks will happen in a decade or so, it will not be because we have convinced them of the rightness and fairness of this, but because they now feel they have more stake in protecting patents than in infringing the patents of others.

Immediately beneath that FEE article is the reminder that we have already had an assault weapons ban in the US, 1994-2004, and the federal governments own evaluation of it showed no effect. (But this time it will!  For sure! Everyone knows that!) Note that Kamala Harris shows that certainty-without-evidence that I found so dangerous to discourse in my own recent post. “We know what works on this. It includes, let’s have an assault weapons ban,” Also linked is an article about the CDC study - yes, all you hating the CDC out there, calm down - showing that guns prevent crime, to the tune of 3M/year. You can criticise FEE's summary of the study - they do leave out some parts and that is a fair cop - and you can find all the fault with the study itself that you like. I simply note that the mere existence of these studies done in good faith illustrates that the idea of need for gun control is at least Not Obvious. Thus government authorities and purportedly objective news outlets claiming that it Is Obvious is unnecessarily divisive.

Why, it's almost as if they are trying to silence less-privileged voices.

Feelings of Safety

This was an early start on the recent post Where Do We Draw The Line?  I think I will keep it unfinished for that reason.

You can have errors in both directions here.  You can feel safe when you really aren't.  That's the intro to most horror movies, I believe, and also the excuse most drunk drivers give themselves. But even without those extremes there are a few weaknesses to following your feelings of safety. Human beings are pretty good at evaluating an observable, immediate situation - though we are slow to react to unusual occurrences, which is where training and awareness comes in. Remote, new, or long-running risks which occasionally erupt we are less good at.

Be can also feel in danger when we actually aren't, or when the danger is so small compared to the everyday risks we readily accept (driving figures prominently here). This can cause us to act in less-rational ways. I don't think it is good to say irrational, if it is a situation where there is a real danger, just overestimated. Also, different people have to weigh risks differently. If you are going to encounter only six people today, all of them known to you, then surprises are at a minimum. But if you are going to serve 1000 customers today, or if you are a controversial politician who is going to to be appearing in front of a large crowd, then risks of having someone shooting you, or bringing a disease into your range, or a drunk accosting you is something you have to consider, even if each individual you encounter is low-risk.

What is the feeling worth? "Why did you take out hamster insurance?" I guess just for the peace of mind. So we are willing to pay money for the feeling.  We do it all the time, and no one considers it necessarily irrational. On the other hand we have the worries about safetyism, particularly among children, of increasing their anxiety (and thus almost automatically depression) by bringing up boogiemen that make them skittish. Most adults have stories of childhood fears conquered - "I was afraid of thunderstorms until I worked as..." "When I was little I thought that women in long dresses were witches in disguise..." But there is a real downside here. There are some diseases that are more likely to recur once they have been kindled, depression and anxiety are among them. You don't want to get those early, because even if you go on to laugh at whatever you used to be afraid of, you still have at least some susceptibility.  This was picked up first in the 1990s, of Holocaust survivors and people who had seen terrible things in WWII but gone on to have productive, even cheerful lives showing a higher incidence of depression when they were elderly. Sometimes out of nowhere. So even if you "get over it," there is some residual risk, and we don't want to burden our descendants with that. Scaring the pants off children without good reason is bad for them.  Heck, it might be bad for them to scare them even with good reason, just less bad than not exercising proper caution. 

I think there is a distinction between amount of caution and risk and type of caution and risk, that boils down to the idea "Can you learn anything from this?"

Understanding Motives

When people who have displayed rationality before seem unable to get over some basic points, I am fascinated why that might be.  In the case of mass shootings, I am especially curious because the belief that some sort of gun control was just obviously needed was one I once held.  In my slow migration out of liberalism and into the wilderness, it was one of the last beliefs to drop off. I have a sense what my thinking was - or more properly, what my motive for holding a belief without thinking was - but I don't trust retrospective analysis of even my own motives that much.  We are too easily self-serving.  Even when we have some accuracy, we decorate the tree with convenient ornaments we like now. 

I think I believed that the advanced and intelligent cultures had long since demonstrated that restricting gun access was necessary, and the objections to this were from people who held onto old ideas pig-headedly, clinging to their guns and religion, as Obama later said. I didn't have any numbers, except perhaps a vague idea that Western Europeans had less violent crime and also restricted gun access, plus a smug certainty that my sort of people didn't own any guns and didn't commit any violent acts, so therefore being like us was the ticket. I was sure there were numbers behind all that somewhere. 

Or so I tell myself now. And thus I project those beliefs onto people who think some sort of gun control will help now. 

It began to be undermined by odd things. Reading David Hackett Fischer's comprehensive and well-researched Albion's Seed I came across the stray fact that New England had had the lowest homicide rate since colonial times. He was tying that to culture, noting that East Anglia had had the lowest violent crime rates in England in that time as well. (As near as I can tell, it still does, or is close.) I wasn't thinking about guns at all, but the idea "We have lots of guns up here, but somehow we don't shoot people very much" stuck with me. Then in a discussion of Sherlock Holmes and firearms among the Victorians, of all things, I learned that Western Europe's violent crime rate had gone down before there was any change in the laws. Gun control was a follow-on, not a cause. Then came John Lott, and even though people who wanted to lecture me with fingers in my face kept treating his methodology dismissively, it at least established for me that what I had long believed was just obvious and every smart person knew it, was at minimum not a slam dunk after all. Perhaps most humorously (though in a grim situation) was a very liberal psychiatrist commenting about a patient who had just been driving 100mph while in a manic state in order to save his girlfriend who he was sure was being kidnapped in Maine. "Sometimes it's not the guns, is it? I think maybe we should have driver's license control instead." Unexpected. When your mind is halfway changed things start to cascade, as helpful bits keep attaching themselves to the new structure. The Hajnal Line, that interesting discovery showing a different culture related to feudalism, age at marriage, and reduction in clannishness resulted in increasing rights for women, less internal violence (though warfare remained high, perhaps even higher), and greater internal cooperation. And ultimately, I began looking suspiciously at the statistics of the gun controllers, learning that they were often deceptive - Look over here! Shiny! Shiny!

Well, we did that imitation of research of believing what our cultural outlets and the people in our crowd told you, without paying even minimal attention to manipulations of data and important items left out. We likely also nodded to descriptions if this guy had a harder time getting a gun...if he couldn't just go in and buy...if we ran a better screening on everyone purchasing...if we only allowed certain people to sell/buy/trade/make firearms...Yes, we make pictures in your heads, little stories really, like the "human interest" anecdotes used by news sources to sell you their POV. NPR is perhaps the worst ("Kukrit, who runs a bicycle repair shop in Bangkok, wonders what the new trade agreement will mean for him getting parts…"), but they are not the only. News outlets know we prefer stories to facts, and they would rather tell stories. 

Yet I confess I no longer know what the thoughts and motives are of people who believe that some new laws are going to have an effect.  It is too far away and long ago now.  I know that some conservative sites I have gone to are just sure that some want to disarm us so that they can rule us more easily.  They do have the examples of this happening in other countries to back them up.  But I haven't much encountered that myself. 

*********

I do know some ways in which their reasoning is bad.  I suppose that will have to do at present.

There are people who are opposed to firearm restrictions largely from a rights-and-freedoms perspective who ask questions which gun restrictionists usually just ignore, about what the cultural costs for the safety you think we will get are. On what terms do you want to live your life? What is the value of mere survival versus thriving, or independence? I am not especially one of those myself. I will admit those questions farther down the line, once we have determined what level of safety you hope to trade off for. If you want to stereotype gun rights people as those who only care about "muh freedoms," you can go and argue with them about it. You might find, by the way, that their challenges to you are far stronger than you expected. 

But don't bother me about it, or not until far down the road, because I value the number of people who are upright at the end of the day very, very highly. I think it is where the discussion starts. I demonstrated this over the last couple of years in discussing covid.  I like to start from the numbers of two experimental groups and see how many are still standing a year later under method A and method B, and have the discussion proceed from the agreement of which side starts with the advantage. And here's the thing. The people who believe we must change our gun laws somehow are sure, just sure, that under their proposals, there will be more schoolchildren upright afterward.

And there is zero evidence that this is true. People have stories they tell themselves, pictures and scenarios they play out in their heads of if this guy had a harder time getting a gun...if he couldn't just go in and buy...if we ran a better screening on everyone purchasing...if we only allowed certain people to sell/buy/trade/make firearms...IT'S JUST OBVIOUS THESE THINGS WOULDN'T HAPPEN, or would at least happen less. Yet no.  None of those are true. 

It's the belief in the obviousness that is troublesome, i think.

This is usually followed by the idea that well, if we did things like this, we would be less of a gun-loving, gun-worshiping culture, and gradually but importantly become a better people and live in a safer place.  This is also absolutely untrue. New Englanders own lots of guns - Howard Dean used to joke to other Democrats that he came from Vermont, "where even liberals own 2-3 guns." And we have had the lowest rates of violent crime since colonial times. Culture is so much more important as to make the laws irrelevant. We have discussed this here dozens of times and I will only point you to the Hajnal Line or HBDChick's discussions of forbidding cousin marriage and the effects of feudalism in the Middle Ages how we went down this long road.  Enter them in my search bar if it's not quite clear to you.  I had no original thoughts, I just quoted and linked to good people. If this is new to you - I am thinking it might be to clever young Gaznir - you may be in for a treat of new concepts.

Aggie had a great comment under my "Expectations" post. It was in the context of the continuous-improvement work they needed to do in drilling, and in that industry it had gone well, because people wanted safety, not to find others to blame.  Yes. When there is a society-wide problem, the first thing that is required to improve matters is honesty and good faith in communication, usually the last things to become apparent - and even then, in deficit. The biggest task in creating a proactive safety culture is gaining acceptance that this is the priority at the outset. Once people buy in, the culture of continuous improvement takes wing. Ironically, to work safely one has to first feel safe in being able to communicate their observations and ideas without fear of criticism. Shame is a very powerful emotion.