Everyone Does It

Forgive a little wandering in introduction of my point. I was intrigued by Megan McArdle's offhand point under 2), recounting how girls in groups pick an out-girl that everyone picks on. This is true? I have heard mothers complain about how cruel girls can be, but I never put it into a pattern or a theory-of-everything. I forwarded the above link to a psychologist friend of about my own age, asking about this girl behavior. She is much more liberal than I, but a bright and open-minded person who often has interesting insights.

Perhaps I should have picked a different female psychologist of my own age-cohort or something. This one was notably defensive in her reply. She expressed some annoyance that feminist had become an unattractive label to women over the last twenty years. She related it to Susan Faludi's book Backlash - society had resented the growth of women's power and had moved to drain and belittle feminism. In contrast, she saw feminism as having always been inclusive and affirming.

My first thought was "What year was that, that feminism was inclusive and affirming?" I was also around for the beginning of that and was a deeply socialist person who wanted to remake society in the direction of feminism. But even then there was scalding anger directed at all males, sympathetic to the cause or not. I chalked it up to it being a new movement, not quite focused and brimming with personal angers, but figured that was normal and unremarkable. The women of my experience who identified most closely with feminism were bright, thoughtful, usually pleasant women. I figured that the rising batch of younger feminists would sort all this out in the next decade or so and develop a broad, fairly coherent political philosophy that I would quite obviously support.

I keep thinking that has happened, but every few months something comes up that shoots this down. It's not just the public feminists, writing books and heading up organizations. I expect them to be a little extreme, a little outrageous. The original essay goes over the top, but not frighteningly so. But read the comments. Not just some of the comments, but long successions of them. Holy crap. Feministe, firedoglake, Bitch, PhD, and most of the women at HuffPo wish real evil on people who disagree with them.

And in person, where people are more polite, it's that swift, scalding anger from otherwise affable women defending them. Most of these have excellent social skills and politeness, so you have to be alert to the burn. To the manner born, and all that.

Does everyone do the same? Are gay people just fine regular folks until you get on gay topics? Are Christians generally fun until you tread on their holy toes? Black people, environmentalists, anti-taxers - are we all mostly pleasant, warm, sociable people until that soft area is poked and we turn mean?

BTW, I really am asking about that all-female societies thing from Ms. McArdle's essay. Was that how camp was, through highschool? Girl's dorms? Female professions? When and how does it go away - or go underground?

Wedding

Tomorrow is the wedding day of commenter Erin; she is the daughter of commenter akafred. Please offer your congratulations.

MEP's at the Trough

If you have often suspected the corruption of the European Parliament, but never had any actual evidence, this video should be illuminating.
.

The link to the whole story is here.

Irony

I can't vouch for the authenticity of this - it may be just a made-up story. But it's plausible, and an interesting lesson:

In a small Texas town, ( Mt. Vernon ) Drummond's bar began construction on a new building to increase their business. With petitions and prayers, the local Baptist church started a campaign to block the bar from opening . Work progressed right up until the week before opening, when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground.

The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, until the bar owner sued the church on the grounds that the church was ultimately responsible for the demise of his building, either through direct or indirect actions or means. The church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection to the building's demise in its reply to the court.

As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork. At the hearing he commented, 'I don't know how I'm going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.

It reminds me of the Simpson's episode in which people believe the end of the world is coming, so all the patrons of the bar run over to the church, while all the congregants of the church run over to the bar.

NBA Draft

Even in years that I didn't follow college basketball that much I would always gear up for the draft. I was quite knowledgeable in the early 80's, but I faded a bit after Lenny Bias in 1986. I don't remember where I was when Reagan or Ford were shot, but I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard about Bias's death. I thought he must have had Marfan's Syndrome. Not cocaine. Not from a player whose character had been vouchsafed by Red Auerbach.

That hastened the fade of Red from the Celtics decision-making core. Not that he was eased out, but that he lost interest.

Tonight's Celtics pick, JR Giddens, I had never heard of. I would be pounding my head if I hadn't seen Ainge draft brilliantly and surprisingly in the past few years.

I felt good for Minnesota getting OJ Mayo. They've taken so much crap for the KG trade, I want them to have some vindication. I really like Al Jefferson, and still believe that other pieces of that trade (Gomes, Telfair) will work out as rotation players. Then the T-Wolves went and drafted a Serbian center I also hadn't heard of. The was a Croat available, Kev. Make your mother's family happy, huh?

Minnesota was better in the second half of the season last year. Forty wins this year, but no playoffs.

Language Change

I have noted before that Shakespeare is now accessible to the modern reader only with notes and instruction. As even Christian children are little exposed to the KJV these days, the word order, archaic vocabulary, and different meanings of familiar words in Elizabethan English has become too much of an obstacle. Shakespeare is a casualty of that change. Even he only held on as long as he did with some luck. His contemporaries Marlow and Jonson are even less well understood now. William's fame gives us enough familiarity with his vocabulary, plots, and characters to help us along - sometimes. Give Titus Andronicus a spin.

Tangentially, I consider the de-emphasis on the KJV a net gain.

Languages that are written change comparatively slowly, but they do change. The unfamiliarity with the Authorised Version only gave the final push - Early Modern English going out of reach would have happened in the next generation anyway. On shorter timescales, we tend not to perceive differences as changes in the language itself. We see the writing of the 1920's or the 1880's as having a certain style, as if its difference from our own phrasing was some temporary phenomenon now righted by a return to simple English. Oh, they wrote in a very formal (florid, rigid) style then.

Here is part of an introduction from a travel guide of about 150 years ago:

In all parts of Europe the traveler is supplied with Guidebooks, detailing, for his special information and satisfaction, the leading features of all objects of interest on his route. There is not an antiquated castle, a battle-field, a mountain, or a river, but has its peculiar points revealed for the entertainment of the stranger, as he rambles along from place to place. No doubt this materially adds to the interest and subsequent value of travel; and probably constitutes one of the paramount attractions of a tour in Europe, since all its incidents are thus permanently impressed on the mind.

Every word is understandable, so we recognize it as English, but of a different style. Yet it is not style change that we are perceiving, but changes in the language itself. We would now think that is supplied means that the books are somehow automatically provided, rather than available, and we would not capitalize guidebooks. We would use fewer commas. We would choose some word other than special, and leading, and we would not add and satisfaction. Note that I haven't gotten off the first sentence yet. Further on, we see a hyphenated battle-field, and a use of peculiar that we would find, well, peculiar. We would find it somewhat tiring to read such prose at length. Even I find it tiring, and I regularly use older constructions in my own writing. I am 55, and was trained by pedantic female relatives. (One of my great aunts, when she was in a nursing home, and demented enough to only occasionally recognize her only daughter, still corrected the grammar of the young nurse's aides attending her.) My sentence just above, We would find it somewhat tiring to read such prose at length, would not be written in just that way by any person under 20 in the entire country. Few even of my own age would.

I Know Nothing

I am neither a constitutional law scholar nor a gun enthusiast, so Second Amendment questions never interested me much. It did seem to this uninformed eye that finding only a collective right to bear arms was a bit tortuous, but lots of things about the law seem tortuous. (badabump. Is anyone here from Cleveland? I'll be here all week.)


Megan McArdle over at The Atlantic has what I think is the most important statement of the day.

There is a distressing lack of attention to the female market in gun companies. I want something with accuracy and stopping power, but also, an attractive exterior casing that easily integrates with my other accessories. This doesn't seem unreasonable.

Out Of My System (Maybe...)

One Youtube leads to another, and I keep getting sucked deeper into the vortex.

Paul Revere and the Raiders are notable for their inability to settle on a style. The music is trying to be a white-boy version of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels or something, but the boys' faces, costumes, and antics are more Partridge Family.


Another pop music show where the band doesn't actually play their instruments. The Five Americans - there was no irony in such a name then - singing Western Union. Notice the cool background vocals that sound like a telegraph - I mean, is that genius or what? As for the dancing girls Sure I can get you on TV baby. Now let's see what you look like in a bikini, okay?


A psychedelic wannabe band - The Lemon Pipers - has a trip that goes bad. It gets even stranger about halfway the way through, when they seriously attack the bear.



I remember reading that the CIA used this song as a psy-ops against Manuel Noriega, playing it constantly for days in an effort to get him to surrender. If they'd showed him the choreography as well, they could have done it in half the time.

Orpheus

I couldn't find any clips of Ultimate Spinach or Beacon Street Union, two psychedelic bands out of Boston in the 60's, but that's what's great about Youtube - you keep running across amazing things while you are looking for something else.



Two of my bands sang this with a higher harmony on top, showing our CSNY/Pure Prairie League influence. Great stuff. Watching the video, it seems that the bass player has some talent. The drummer, however, looks like he has some sort of congenital illness. Gotta watch the drummer, Ben.

How To Translate Democrat

A Michigan Congressman tells you how to translate Democrat. Heavy-handed? Sure. What's your point?
(Via Moonbattery and Maggie's Farm.)

Infobleg

There is a blog done by a pharmaceutical researcher that small circle of bloggers has linked me to more than one. Anyone remember what it is? Yeah, and I'm coming to your site to ask, too.

Something we could really use in the mental health field occurred to me today. We can do some medication bloodlevels quickly and easily, but some need to be sent to specialized labs and take two weeks to come back. In acute psychiatric emergencies, two weeks is forever. It occurred to me that an easily-detected marker chemical could be put into those medications, so we could at least quickly discover whether they are being taken at all.

Maybe it's not an original idea, but we could sure use it, and I'd like to pass it on to someone well-placed to make it happen.

Watching Autodidacts

My office-mate is a few years older than I and has no computer at home. He is an intelligent and flexible enough guy (though he would deny that), but watching him painfully navigate new tasks on the computer is a stunning illustration of just how much we have learned in the past few years. He cannot scroll properly. Accurately selecting from the dropdown menu in MS Word befuddles him, and the discovery that Excel’s dropdown is different annoys him further. When the cursor turns into a different icon as he scrolls over something he thinks something has gone wrong. Attachments, saving to desktop, using a few key words on a search engine – these do not go smoothly.

I am certainly no computer wizard, though I look like one among social workers. I can guess my way through unfamiliar applications – the directions, vocabulary, and icons seem accessible to my thought – but I am a hybrid between the old ways of thinking and the new. Nor will I ever be anything but a hybrid. My children are newer hybrids, and over time they will likely organize their thoughts according to the networked and electronic world. They may be among the last who are even able to revert to the old ways at need, consulted in their elder years to translate. For even if their children are raised in traditional learning styles now, they will lose those skills from disuse. I can still diagram simpler sentences or work in base 8 with effort, but I can no longer operate a slide rule. Why would I need to, except as a parlor trick?

Not that people do tricks in parlors anymore, or even have parlors. You get my point.

I dimly recall that there are idiosyncratic cursive capitals, such as a Q that looks like a 2; I am quite certain that no one needs to learn cursive anymore. If you doubt that, by the way, try and read old family letters. People had handwriting styles that were difficult even then, but constant exposure to different penmen allowed us to read script. Try it now. Children’s handwriting, still reasonably close to the grammar-school standard, is decipherable. Adult handwriting, only barely so.

Adaptability, flexibility, and willingness give yourself over to the demands of a new technology are not the wave of the future for learning. They are the current wave – it is already upon us. We know that current curriculum design does not reflect the skills children will need, but we are only able to guess at what they will need. We fear to put enormous resources into techniques that turn out to be blind alleys.

Everyone has theories for this, methods folks are just sure will lead us to the promised land. I have seen this pattern in psychology over my career, as various techniques come into fashion as the new messiahs: reality therapy, recovered memories, NLP, EMDR, DBT. As in every field, a few of them will turn out to be right. The others will be neutral at best, damaging at worst. What will be predictable is that aromatherapists will discover that aromatherapy is what people need, dancers will think that children can learn so much from dance, programmers will proclaim vehemently that simple programming should be taught as early as kindergarten.

In that vein, I advocate studying the self-taught, to see what works for them. I was not an extreme autodidact, but a differently-designed educational system would have been an advantage for me. The traditional schoolroom almost destroyed my younger brother, who now has a Master of Fine Arts. Lewis and Tolkien were autodidacts, as were Einstein, Edison, Mendel, and Mandelbrot. The route to genius may even require intermittent, idiosyncratic instruction alternating with periods of leaving the student alone. (I don’t think children learn much leaving them entirely alone. I think it is the back-and-forth style, rigid structure alternating with no structure, which is productive.)

How We Got To Here

Everyone’s got a theory about American freedom, for example, and I won’t be providing any new ones here. One of the most widely-held ideas situates the roots of the American attitude in the Teutonic forests, among the tribes that Tacitus described 2000 years ago. Egalitarian, difficult to subdue, and according more status to women, these Angles, Jutes, Franks, and Saxons are seen as the freedom-loving Germanic peoples, debating at their moots, drinking their mead, pillaging and raping (but nobly), and eventually going off to take over England from whence they founded the colonies that turned into the only nations that are worth a damn.

This freedom-loving Saxon theory comes in both racial and cultural versions. I tend to a soft cultural version of this myself. I find it extreme to push the origin too far into an unrecorded past, but that something different happened in the British Isles and its colonies seems obvious. These Anglospheric theories usually include reference to Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Bloodless Revolution of 1688. The Bloodless Revolution wasn’t bloodless, by the way. Magna Carta wasn’t all that magna, either.

Other theories have included the English admiration for Native American tribal councils, particularly the Pemigewassets; Roman Catholic abstract thinkers reflecting on the rights of man; Protestant settlement finally liberated from all traces of Catholicism; a confluence of French legal thought and East Anglian merchant custom; Frisian influence; the Greek Revival; the preeminence of property rights in English Common Law; the search for cultural universals of governance in diverse colonies – I’m sure I am missing many others.

All these theories were developed retrospectively, imposing a teleological framework that leads to Wonderful Us. We trace back through events and ideas and claim to have found a single path. Such thinking does have advantages. It allows us to see patterns that are there, which gives a certain predictive value to our thoughts about the future. Unfortunately we also see patterns that aren’t there, giving a deceptive predictive value to our thoughts about the future. Paths there may be, but if we are picking out a spot on the horizon in our past and retracing toward it, we come to regard our route through the crisscrossing trails as the real path, the natural path, the inevitable path.

It is almost automatic at that point to look into the future with the idea that this is all going somewhere, and that past trends will continue. Such prediction is risky even with physical or even mechanical events. It is certainly hubristic with political and social events.

I have heard it called assumicide.

Christians sometimes think they’ve got an edge that allows them more right to look ahead. We have been given the last few pages of the book, and easily convince ourselves that we have a pretty shrewd guess what’s going to happen next (wink, wink). The problem is, we don’t know where in the book we are. If we knew that we had started the last chapter, then our extrapolations of current events out to the close of the age would likely be accurate. But we don’t know if we have gotten out of the second chapter of human history yet. Heck, we don’t even know if the number of chapters has even been decided. God might be writing this world interactively with us because it’s more fun for Him and better education for us.

There is a wonderful section in the last book of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series which compares our understanding of the world to the back of a tapestry. There are hints of the figures on the other side, and patterns that are not wholly illusory. But the threads and shapes on this side are not dependable guides to discerning what the picture is. Nor do we even know how large the tapestry is.

If you’ve still got a big fat section of the book in your right hand as you read, it causes you to interpret what you are reading differently. As you gradually come to the last few pages, the physical construction of the volume tells you that the story is coming to an end. (This is what is so frustrating about unexpected set-ups for sequels, by the way. Not only the narrative, but the object you are holding in your hand has powerfully signaled to you that resolution is approaching. Quotus interruptus.)

Ellen G. White had a particularly detailed retrospective of world history in which she saw, or thought she saw, trends that pointed to a particular future. The path leading to her own subculture’s extreme anti-Catholicism she saw as the natural, rescuing path that God had put his church on; she intuited the future accordingly.

It’s a fun exercise in an election year to attend to the various versions of history and progress being put forward by the candidates. Beware “the vision thing.” It is often nostalgia for a false past masquerading as a glimpse of the future.

Paths, tapestries, books. I think that’s enough metaphors for now.

Celtics Envy

Almost the trifecta of championships, eh? Eli Manning doesn’t make that escape, David Tyree doesn’t make the greatest catch in Super Bowl history, and New England wins three straight major sports championships.

The fun part is browsing through the comments sections on the national sports sites, reading all the deeply resentful people from other parts of the country, complaining about how classless the Celtics/Red Sox/Patriots are, how classless the fans are, how happy they are when our teams lose – it’s the refs, it’s all fixed, it’s all luck, blah blah…and you know it’s mostly envy.

Not that the accusations are completely without merit, of course. Bellichek has some jerk qualities, and whatever the full story on cameras turns out to be and however much effect or non-effect it has had on the outcome of games, he clearly broke rules he knew about. Would the Patriots have been a bad team without that boost? Doubtful. Would they have won all those championships? Maybe, maybe not.

The Red Sox have some annoying people, just like every team does. Boston fans – New England fans, can be boorish and arrogant, sure. I’m not sure they are more boorish and arrogant than any other team’s fans that win. I remind the reader of the riots in other cities when teams won championships. There is some reason for the rest of the country to hate us. Some of the criticism is justified. But. Boston fans, you know with a certainty that much of the resentment comes from the mere fact that we won and they didn’t. That other stuff is just scrambling for justifications, because no one wants to admit that they hate you just because you’re successful.

New England and especially Massachusetts, are among the most politically liberal areas of the country. A lot of those Boston fans who know in their gut that they are hated more from envy than from anything they have done to deserve it, nonetheless refuse to understand this about the larger world they live in. These are the folks who believe that America is hated because of our foreign policy, because we exploit everyone, because of George Bush, because of our arrogance.

Not really. Those negative things are partly true, of course, and we shouldn’t go to the other extreme and discount all criticism. But the European elites hate us because we have rescued them, protected them, created the consumer goods and medical techniques they love, and it is too painful to admit that. Middle Eastern countries hate us because we are rich. Because they have contributed nothing to the world for about 7 centuries except the oil they happen to be living over, they must find ways to delegitimise our success. It should be theirs. They deserve it. We must have cheated somehow.

So remember that when you go to the polls Sox fans, Pats fans, Celts fans. You know in your gut the real reason that the rest of the country resents you, and now you know why the world resents America, and rejoices in our losses. Don’t fall for the excuses again.

Pinheaded, Fuzzy-Minded, Arrogant...

When Carol Shea-Porter, my representative to Congress, emailed me a questionnaire about energy policy I was irritated at its deceptiveness. It fell into the category of "Do you think it would be better to conserve energy or just use less? Should we punish the oil companies or the auto manufacturers harder? Carol Shea-Porter is interested in your opinion!"

I doubt that last statement strongly. She sent back a reply - I don't mind that it was a form-letter, I just mind that it was an unthinking party-line form-letter.

And thus a reply to the reply, including a quote from her letter in bold:

"...oil supplies diminishing, exploration and development of oil fields off coastal waters and in our protected lands is not a long-term solution."

Sure it is. Why the hell not? Sez who? (And make the subject agree with the verb, willya?)
Can I make that any clearer? If you only allow one type of solution, you only get one type of answer. The desire for conservation-based solutions is purely aesthetic and romantic - it is, in a very real way, imposing private values on the populace far more than any religious group dreams of.

BTW, the email you sent back to me was truncated on both sides because of poor formatting. I had to guess at the complete quote.

Sonic Booms

Listening for the thunder after the lightning flashes tonight, the sound was confused by a jet aircraft going by. It occurred to me that I have not heard a sonic boom for years. We used to hear them regularly when I was a lad. I imagine they have been declared an annoyance and are not allowed over inhabited areas. Or something.

Number 928 in the Blue Hymnal

See, this is why denominational headquarters sometimes makes me nervous. When I was a Lutheran, stuff like this kept creeping in, which is why I found the Evangelical Covenant (A Lutheran offshoot with pietist strains) such a breath of fresh air. The yearly missions awareness material, with its maundering about the minimum wage* and enviro-nonsense, at least isn't required reading in the ECC.

The responsive prayer #928 includes

"...from a society in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, compassionate God, deliver us.

Except that's not true. And later

"...from a society which makes its weakest and most recent members into scapegoats, compassionate God, deliver us.

Most recent members... Newborns? Oh, I get it. I don't recall anyone blaming legal immigrants for much of anything. And if they're not legal, then they're not members, really, are they? It's an interesting debate what the responsibility of Christians is to people in need who are in a mild sense, invaders. But scapegoats were innocent victims, originally. The word has changed to include anyone who is punished disproportionately, but how does that apply here? Being denied a benefit - citizenship - is not the same as a punishment. I am trying to remember what scripture it is that St. Paul advocates that others should have the same rights of citizenship that he had. Perhaps he thought such a change would be good, or even deserved. But he didn't mention it.
And further on

"From indifference to the needs of other countries, from the delusion that you love any other nation less than you love us, compassionate God, deliver us.

First off, bad usage of delusional. If you're going to show off your ability to use dramatic language in a publication that people are going to be reading for 50 years, you might want to take care to get the terms right. But, to the content: indifference...hmm. 50% of all the international aid, including 40% of the food aid, comes from the US. Next, there may be America lovers who think that God loves us more, but most that I have heard put it differently - that God has blessed us.

The prayer reads more like an accusation by the composers against folks other than themselves than reading like a confession.

I'm all for doing better. I'm all for prayers of confession that acknowledge we aren't doing enough, that there is still injustice, that our giving and humility should be even more radical. But this comes durn close to a violation of the commandment about not taking the Lord's name in vain. This is ministers making personal political observations and rewriting it in the form of a prayer of confession.

* Hey, didn't unemployment just go up? What are the odds, huh?

Advanced Diagnostics

(Ring. Ring)
On-call Doctor: So what's the trouble you're having?
Assistant Village Idiot: I may have broken a small bone in my foot. I was up on a stepstool, working on a ceiling, and I slipped and came down hard on it. Then I was up and down on the stepstool quite a bit after that.
OCD: Is there any pain?
AVI: Only when I put weight on it. It ached a little last evening, but I didn't have a lot of pain until I got up in the middle of the night. I can't put weight on it.
OCD: So, no specific accident, then?
AVI: Not other than the fall, no.
OCD: It could be an episode of gout.
AVI: I'm pretty sure it's not gout. I was up and down on the foot a lot yesterday.
OCD: It could still be gout. You can take Advil for the pain.
AVI: I don't have any pain, except when I put weight on it.
OCD: Well, take Advil for the pain, three times a day with meals.

This is not the beginning of a comedy routine. This is this morning's phone conversation.

I haven't been to med school, but I'm thinking this would be a fairly atypical presentation of gout. I'm hoping reader Giacomo, an orthopedic surgeon, will back me up on this.

So at the walk-in clinic after church, I repeated my delivery of "I may have broken a small bone in my foot, but if I'm lucky it's just a sprain" to five different people there. None of them suggested gout, so I didn't bring it up myself. The X-Rays looked okay, except for some bone chips from a long-previous ankle injury. Probably just a sprain.

I'm Just Sayin'

If sexism was unfairly used against Hillary and racism is unfairly used against Obama, why is it fair to focus on McCain's age?

I want to smack McCain because of his can't-stop-tinkering attitude: yes, he supports the First Amendment but has a couple of ideas he thinks are better; yes, he supports free markets but he thinks if he can just tweak it it will be even better. That's how stuff gets broken, John.

But Democrats who weren't concerned when Bill Clinton refused to release his medical records lost their right to "express concern" over a healthy active guy whose mother is still alive.

Human Enhancement

This is an area where I have fully ambivalent feelings. Many technical assists to human biology - eyeglasses, for example - were viewed with suspicion when they were first introduced, but are regarded as unremarkable now. Life extension is becoming almost alarming. Jonathan's daughter has a life expectancy over 100, and serious scientists believe that lifespans over two centuries are possible quite soon. Genetic tinkering is already well beyond any general philosophical consensus about what is "good for us," and what is a legitimate intervention. If we get good enough at remaking ourselves that human striving becomes nearly irrelevant, or important only at the margins, are we still humans?

Not only do I not know where to draw the line - I don't know by what method we should draw the line. This writer attempts to set up a framework within Natural Law.