Jay Nordlinger Observation

A couple of American officers who had served in Iraq were talking about their time there. And, in particular, their departure. An Iraqi said to one of them, “I can’t believe you came here and didn’t take our oil.” Another Iraqi said, “I can’t believe you’re leaving voluntarily. No invading army ever does that.”

One of the American officers said he had felt like the mayor of a town — responding to the needs of the people, keeping the town together. I saw this with my own eyes on a visit to Iraq: American officers essentially acting as mayors.

Say what you will about nation-building (and there’s a lot to say). But, after hearing this latest testimony, I got angry all over again, remembering a conversation I had with a prominent German in about 2006. He talked about American servicemen in World War II and after. They had helped the people around them, and formed bonds with them. This, however, was not happening in Iraq — or so said the German. We were betraying our best traditions.

BS. (That is not a bachelor of science degree.)

Oh, one more thing: An officer said, “You know how the press referred to the people who were trying to kill us as ‘insurgents’? We always just called them al-Qaeda.”

This seems about right.  If anything, our volunteer, better-trained, more-aware-they-are-being-watched servicemen are probably better-behaved than the Greatest Generation.  Heresy to say such things, I'm sure, as we all know the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, led by the completely irresponsible younger generation. 

Why, exactly, do we think Americans are worse now than then?  Okay, I know why, but it pays for everyone to think it through.

Not Entirely About Recurring Dreams

I seldom remember any dream.  It is usually only a change in sleep pattern that has me waking while a dream is in progress.  Otherwise, I tend to wake at non-dreaming times. 

The Old Recurring Dream involved my attempting to escape some large enclosed space – a maze, a fortress, underground tunnels, a lair, with a helpless person in tow – a child, a person in a wheelchair, an unconscious or sick person.  Unidentified dangers or dark forces hovere about, and time was of the essence.  The simplest method of dream interpretation is to recognise that you are every person on the stage, and probably the scenery as well.  Thus, I was not only the person escaping, but the helpless person as well.  Quite possibly, the maze and the sinister forces were also myself.

That seems to have gone away.  So I fixed all that conflict, whatever it was, eh?  Good to know, though I haven’t a clue what that’s about.

In the New Recurring Dream I have to go back to William and Mary for one more course, or one more semester.  I have no real place there, neither physically in a dorm or with a meal card, nor socially as everyone I know is gone, but somehow it all has to be accomplished anyway. I am dimly aware that my wife is annoyed that I have to go away, and will be doubly disappointed if I don’t get it right this time. The campus looks like the real one only in odd places – just off the SE and NW corners of the

Sunken Gardens, for some reason – and my second son is one of the current students there, whose path intersects mine occasionally but not frequently.  (Sometimes it’s my first son, but then the dream changes, because his wife and daughters come climbing in.)  The rest of the students seem nice enough at first but turn out to be jerks.  I can’t figure out where to re-register and get a class schedule, but I know I must.

It all fits in rather nicely.  My degree is rather fraudulent because I didn’t work very hard; there is much in life I should go back and redo; I’m nice enough at first but eventually reveal strong jerk tendencies. 

I think I preferred my previous pathology.  Solving one problem merely leads to another.

Happy Trails

Maybe Not Marx and Engels

Stray comments from Thomas Sowell reminded me how Marx is misunderstood in modern times, because of what his followers have done with his ideas.  I had gotten even further than usual from that once-known bit of info, as my last h4eavy dose of the two was in Tom Stoppard's "The Coast Of Utopia," which included quite a bit of what an insufferable bastard Karl was.  (And Bakunin, and the rest as well.)

Marx did not think business owners greedy, merely doing what they most naturally might within the system.  Nor did Adam Smith think them virtuous, contrary to current impressions.  Both thought the businessman much like every other category of people - worker, politician, landowner, politician.

Marx also thought that prices reflected resources and what it cost to produce an item, not greed, and didn't think that third parties should be setting prices.  He and Engel believed that capitalism was a necessary next step, and that even the communist state in development, when it faltered, could be expected to revert to capitalism for some time.  They believed that a nation's wealth was not a zero-sum game and that wealth could be created.  He did not think that "society" was a disguised way of saying "government," and I believe criticised Rousseau on those grounds.

There may be more - I am frankly not remembering.  His focus on workers owning the means of production  - and more importantly, how we get there - is what separates him from today's free marketers.  I think John Dewey, Laski, Brandeis, and the other control freaks of the early 20th C are more to blame for current American misunderstandings of economics.  I think Marx would look at modern liberals in bewilderment and maybe contempt, and sidle over rather uneasily with the conservatives, landowners, businessmen, etc.

I am, however, well beyond any real expertise here, so correct me if I am wrong.

Reverse, Again

There continues to be a very moderate improvement in the economy, which the stats-guys predict will be to Obama's advantage come November.

We are slaves to what is happening this minute, and forget the past so quickly. 18-month delay between when a president (or congress) is elected and their influence being greater than the previous guy(s and gals).

Ah well, the Congress is more important anyway. That changed in 2006, a little in 2008, then reversed in 2010.  In all three cases, eighteen months after they took office...

Well, you can look it up yourself.  It's more fun if you go back as far as the 1970's though.

Perhaps The Opposite...

...is also true.  Always a good intellectual game to play, as it reveals much.

For the fifth time, I am teaching a son to drive. - we haven't gotten to driving a standard yet, but that will come.  Tonight I saw the first overconfidence.  Only briefly, because on most things Kyle remains properly uncertain and cautious.  But he is now overrunning his headlights.  He doesn't know that.  He gets embarrassed at leaving his brights on and having to be reminded, so he increasingly leaves them off.  It's an unlit back road with little traffic.  He knows what the allowable speed limit is, and tries to stay up near that.  So soon, finding the dangerous to be normal.  Speed limits really should drop 10 mph after sunset - an enormous percentage of drivers overrun their headlight visibility.  That's why animals mostly get hit at night, and pedestrians have to wear reflective clothing.

We try to impress upon the young how dangerous it is to steer a ton of metal at high speeds, hoping to get them to take it all seriously.  But it's not the dangerousness of driving that kills people - it's the safety of it.  It is such an essentially safe and simple operation that we very quickly learn to take chances:  we go too fast, we drink too much, we adjust the radio and heat, we look at the scenery, and engage in all manner of dangerous additions.  Texting is the big news item now, but eating while driving is more dangerous, and no politician is crusading against that.

Here's the problem:  We still make it safely home a ridiculously high percentage of the time. So we become overconfident, teaching ourselves to believe, in spite of our best judgement that drinking, driving too fast, and not paying attention really aren't that dangerous after all.  If we didn't do all those overconfident things, traffic fatalities would be virtually nonexistent, because it is an essentially easy and safe endeavor.  So easy and safe that we don't take it seriously, and make it dangerous.

Food Pyramid

So who do we sue about the food pyramid encouraging us to eat too many starches all those years?  The federal government?

BTW, has it stopped them from making further recommendations?

Baby Meerkats

                                Which I think trump adult meerkats for cuteness.

Systemantics Origins

There is apparently a fair bit of sophisticated social theory behind Gall's humorous Systemantics.  I don't know if he knew that.  There is Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy,

...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

itself deeply related to heretical Marxist/syndicalist Robert Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Rule by an elite - or "oligarchy" is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.

Reviving Ophelia

Kyle is taking "Women's Perspectives" as an elective this semester, and has been assigned Reviving Ophelia. The teacher is a young woman who is also the winter track coach - I have met her once and she seems nice enough. Presumably, she was assigned this book in college, as it was popular in the 90's.

You think I'm going to trash the book and complain about what they teach kids in school these days, don't you? You would be wrong. I think it's fine. I told him it's partly unscientific crap, but if he's in the class, he'd better be alert to its message.  You don't get so much room to complain when it's an elective.

1. He probably won't read it anyway. It's an elective and he likes to get out as easily as possible.
2. If he did read it, reading is a good thing, almost all the time.
3. Reading outside your comfort zone is a good thing.
4. Reading skeptically is a good thing.
5. Reading skeptically but still finding things worth knowing is a good thing.
6. Knowing what the powerful people in your culture think is true is a good thing.
7. Learning to read the teacher is a good thing.
8. Boys learning what girls think - or what educated adult women think girls think - is a good thing.
9. Deciding whether you want to contest an idea or just go along is a good thing.
10. Putting disagreement tactfully, or focusing on points of agreement, are both good things.
11. It's not completely wrong.
12. It's good to think of people both as categories and as individuals

Systemantics Again

See how John Gall's humor really does turn serious?

The System Itself Tends to Grow at 5 to 6 Percent Per Annum.

And

Systems Tend To Expand To Fill the Known Universe.

Not Really, Really Wrong

There’s a nice article at the Chronicle of Higher Educationon Jonathan Haidt.  (HT: The amazing hbdchick, whose site is currently full - again - of stuff you won't get elsewhere.)  Not much that is new to those who have read about him before, but it does include some things I hadn’t known and is a nice summary.  I will mention again my major objection to this portion of his work, that liberals also have their “sacralised objects” and deference to authority*, it is just expressed differently, in ways that were not captured by his tests because of his own blind spots.  I would agree that liberals rely on those axes of morality less, but it is there, somewhat diffuse and disguised.

I would also like to have a go at a couple of his critics, such as psychology Professor Jost blithely asserting that there is a consensus among philosophers that the two categories of morality that liberals acknowledge are the right ones, the others extraneous.  I’m running lists in my head…Spinoza, Kant?  Wittgenstein, Nietzsche?  Bertrand Russell or TH Green? Kipke? Hobbes? Rousseau? Mill?  Maybe he means Plato, Socrates – nah, they’d be against him.  I’m not seeing this consensus.  Maybe Russell.  I cynically suspect that Jost means “people like us who think about philosophical stuff and are smart, not those yahoos over at Fox News.” I did think some criticisms were valid, BTW, but I find myself rooting for Haidt against others.

All that by way of introduction to two current moral discussions, same-sex marriage and forcing Catholics (and others) to pay for contraception and even abortifacients.  I won’t be arguing, particularly, just observing the arguments.  But my sympathies will no doubt show, and that’s the point.  We pretend to be objective, even try to be, but outsiders can usually tell where our sympathies lie.  It becomes especially messy when issues have become polarised and folks conclude that you don’t really agree with them at all unless you put things just that special way, with proper obeisance to key concepts.

One way this shows up is telegraphing that you because you don’t think something is really wrong, it isn’t really wrong, and all this accommodating the differing moral ideas of others is (ultimately) artificial nonsense.  We say that we respect other people’s moral choices, that we hear them and understand, but we just don’t.  We may want to, and have even convinced ourselves that we do, but our phrasing gives us away. Most people don’t think that contraception is really wrong, so they don’t get that lots of Catholics really do. In their imaginations, it becomes an idea that Catholics don’t prefer it – that they find it distasteful or something, but not Really, Really Wrong – because it’s not wrong, so they couldn’t really.

OTOH, making women have babies, or expecting them to have babies, or looking at them as if they should be having babies – that’s Really Really Wrong. That’s like saying it’s all they are good for, or even like rape, and we have to nip in the pre-budding stage any thought like that.  The actual practical difficulties of a woman getting contraception are not the issue, the symbolism is.  Someone is hinting she shouldn’t have it, and that cannot stand.

The freedom of conscience issue quickly reveals itself as a which-system-shall-rule question.  Certain religious people are saying “I can’t stop this in the world, but you can’t make me participate.  You can’t make me touch it.”  The government is very clearly saying “Oh yes we can make you touch it.  You will touch it and you will like it.  We can make you eat it if we want.”  This is couched in language that says “We wanted you to do this voluntarily.  We didn’t want any fuss, we aren’t mean people, we are nice people who want good for all.  But you wouldn’t do it the easy way, so now you’re getting it the hard way.”

If that sounds unnecessarily accusing of the government, it was an intentional set-up on my part.  When religious groups have held the whip hand, they have done the same thing. And as vicious as I have made personified “government” in this instance, they did exactly that “We can too make you touch it” routine when it came to integration.  And most of us now think it is a good thing that they did. Had to be done.  Folks wouldn’t do it, or not fast enough, voluntarily.  Lot of excuses and whining.  Had to make ‘em.

More mildly, some defenders of the government insistence (even the compromise carries an insistence) take the view that any opposition imperils the whole, so people should swallow their objections and pipe down.  Getting that health care out to those starving babies is a good thing and you don’t want to jeopardise that, do you?  Don’t make waves.  Powerful Forces are against us, and you don’t want to help Them.

Here’s the thing.  I don’t think it’s because government people hate religion, or hate anyone, especially.  Systems naturally expand, and begin to act like human beings.  It’s uncanny, sometimes.  This particular powerful system is encountering resistance to its growth and wants the resistance to go away.  It would prefer it go away peacefully, co-operatively, with minor cost or inconvenience.  But the system itself wants the resistance to go away, and will switch to Plan B – the hard way – if necessary, unless the cost is too high for the system in general. All systems believe that any opposition is bad, and could turn into Powerful Forces if not eliminated or neutralised.

Obama is a person who believes deeply that the government system should rule the others.  He’s hardly the only one, and I don’t think you can claim liberals are even the main offenders.  Systems do this.  It is their nature to expand.  “Churches” as a generic category used to be a powerful system of their own in this country – much less so now, and they resent it. Even in its own category it has been replaced by “religion,” or even “freedom of religion,” much vaguer and less unified ideas.

Over at Volokh, 50% of the discussions seem to be about same-sex marriage at present.  The libertarian writers there are unanimously in favor of it, in case you didn’t know.  It is interesting to note how they treat opposing arguments.  Ilya Somin, who I very much like to read, is trying to answer the objection from tradition.  In his own mind, I suspect he thinks he is bending over backwards to be fair to the argument, giving it its due.  Yet because I am one who assigns a good deal more weight to that argument than he does, I see quite rapidly that he can’t give it its due, not quite.  He wants to and tries to, because he wishes to be an honest broker and a logical person.  Yet ultimately, because he doesn’t think that SSM is wrong, and that trying to prevent it is wrong – is in fact Really, Really Wrong – that leaks out.  He notes, for example, that other moral ideas from tradition have been discarded, and those are good things.  He cites a variety of rights for women – certainly likely to get a lot of assent in modern America.  But it’s a variety, a list, of lessened rights for women in other times and places.  None of them is universal throughout history. It is generally, almost unanimously true across time and space that women have had fewer rights than men in society.  But the specifics vary widely, so its not quite the same thing as the universal prohibition against SSM until recently.  It’s related.  It’s interesting.  But it’s still an apples-to-pears argument, if not quite an apples-to-oranges one.

I don’ think Ilya means in the least to be unfair to the argument.  And in fairness, those arguing with him haven’t stressed this enough to force his attention.  He naturally roots for one side, he sees things a certain way.  At root, he sees all objections to SSM as essentially artificial, and can’t stand outside that belief.  Neither can any of us, or not very well or for any length of time.

In any area where people are claiming a freedom of conscience, we like to think we are evaluating such claims according to fair, objective criteria.  Check yourself.  You may find that at root, you are against the freedom because it’s not Really, Really Wrong and some other effect of the refusal Really, Really Is.  Sad but true.  It’s who we are, sumus quod sumus.  But we can at least try to do better, or we are reduced to the insanity of Whoopi Goldberg saying “But it’s not rape rape” about nonviolent child molestation by talented artists, but anti-abortion policies are “like rape.”

*See 1) environmental or regulatory positions that are more aesthetic than measurable or more about symbolic rather than actual purity/pollution, 2) underdog or minority images/photos/expressions, and 3) social-science “authority” encroachment into scientific areas. Concrete, individual authorities, such as policemen or churches are resisted; social, understood, informal authority is expected to be obeyed.  It is a cultural difference in approach, but still authority.

Etymology

You would think that chame-leon and camou-flage might be related, because of that disguise factor. Nope. Not close. Chameleon is "ground-lion" or "dwarf-lion," camouflage might be from "muffled head." Camisole isn't in there either. It's just related to "chemise," shirt. Shirt and skirt are the same word, BTW. In the north of England (more Scandinavian) the upper part of the tunic-like garment got eliminated, in the south, the lower part went away. Different fashion. Similar occurrence for dike and ditch. Same word. It was originally an earthwork with the ground dug up in a circle and piled inside as a wall as an obstacle. There would be narrow walkways to get through, and it eventually turned into the moat system around fortifications. In the north, the term narrowed to the wall, in the south it narrowed to refer to the trench.

Rockabilly

Across from the bus station in Boston in the early 70's there was a Rockabilly/Country bar - It might have been named "Hillbilly Heaven" or something like. The letters spelling out the name along the roofline were made of thin birch logs - you know the faux-rustic type I mean.

This place was the real deal, though. Seedy, not touristy - Guys in string ties, odd belt buckles. Those who had cowboy hats had small ones, not the big wide-brimmed ones from the movies. It looked more than a little dangerous for a long-haired college boy to go in, but I gave it a try in the dark, on the greasy floors. Both times I went in it was rockabilly, not country music that was being played.

Sign of the times: In my arrogance, I thought that I was more in touch with "authentic" people's music because I listened to Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, while they were just rather old-fashioned losers from the south hanging on to this artificial electrified three-chord country guitar music.

What a poseur I was, eh?

Assortive Mating

Megan McArdle has a serious discussion about post-campus college, which Kenneth Anderson at Volokh turns into a humorous discussion about economists' mating chances. But I think there is a serious discussion behind that as well.  College is used for social signalling, before, during, and after, not only for jobs but for friends and mates.

Excuses

One can read fundamentalists whose joy seems to come from kicking Christians more prominent than themselves in the balls. (Yes, wouldn’t I love to give you a list…not today.) There are often principles they are defending somewhere in there, which they may also believe. Call them Group A. In that tribe there are also those who believe the principles, and genuinely regret that there seems to have to be some battle and rancor about it, as they don’t wish to offend others. Call them Group B.

There’s a Group A and a Group B in every tribe. One can read liberals who make much of principle, yet over time, reveal pretty clearly that dressing down conservatives, or anyone they perceive as the powerful as against their underdog selves,* is what they are really about. Telling themselves that it is about the poor, or women, or the 99% or whatever is only that – what they tell themselves. Yet there is a Group B of liberals as well, who hold the principles with sincerity.

 Conservatives who get off on telling the elites to stuff it. Racialists with an axe to grind because of their own sense of failure. Anyone who considers him or herself part of a beleaguered group can easily – I said easily (can I get a witness?) – fall into the pattern of claiming that the other guys started it…our people tell the truth…look at all these anecdotes of what terrible people they are…someone has to stand up to them…we’re only trying to be reasonable.

We all think we are in Group B, don’t we? Some might admit a teensy-weensy bit of Group A-ness in their personality. Yet you sense immediately where I’m going with this, don’t you? Everyone who is a Group A member of a tribe is absolutely sure they are a Group B member. If anything, they are more certain than the actual Group B members. Dunning-Kruger and all that. Thus, some of us are absolutely deluding ourselves about what our motivations are. And…all of us are deluding ourselves at least a bit.

 Even for good causes. There are people who have (mostly) evil motives for joining good causes.

 As a Protestant, I look with some admiration on the Catholic practice of requiring confession – one has to at least give lip service to fault and sin. Then I think of some Catholics I have known where that hasn’t seemed to have had much effect, even over a lifetime, and I realise that’s not a foolproof solution either.

I don’t know in the abstract how to diagnose or fix this. I do have one place to start, though: If you hope you are in Group B, can you identify any in Group A? Whisper their names out loud, please.  Do you believe them too easily, not calling them to account?

*Like most Americans, I tend to be an underdog rooter. But I have grown tired over the years of the “powerful forces are arrayed against us” trope. It’s not just liberals. They do it more artfully, but not any worse. We all want life to go some different way but are prevented because of Powerful Forces. It’s called reality. We are each part of someone else’s powerful forces that prevent them from being elected Queen of the May.

Systemantics

I will be including axioms from John Gall's 1975 Systemantics, a book one keeps thinking is purely humorous and cynical, except... Except he gets it right an awful lot of the time. The short book itself is lots of fun. those nearby may receive it on lone upon request.

To those within a system, the outside reality tends to pale and disappear.

Supermarket

I often have my grandmother accompany me in my imagination when I am at the supermarket. She was born in 1896, and would have been familiar with supermarkets up until around 1970, but for some reason it is a 1951 version of her that I escort around the store. Perhaps I picked that year because it is just before my birth, and I want to avoid some vague version of the time-travel grandfather's paradox. Except it wouldn't, so it's just an impression of appropriateness, I guess.

She had a reputation as a good cook, so that is perhaps what suggests supermarkets to me.  How do I know of this?  Well, my mother told me.  But my mother was also a single mom with two boys and a lot less budget, so perhaps she was comparing unfairly.  Everyone's grandmother was a good cook in those days, weren't they?  People always say that about their childhood: "My Mom was a great cook!"  Compared to who, Charlie, your pals in sixth grade?  Well yeah, I would think so.

This photo seems to be early to mid 60's. There is less selection than it looks like at first. There are more to be seen at this charming site.

She mostly switched from A&P to Grand Union-Champagne's in the 1960's, though she used both. I know this because she still had books of Plaid Stamps, but they were far less numerous than S&H Green Stamps. She had a corner store directly across the street as well. How long that had been in place on Blodget St. I don't know. It was not there when they bought the house in 1934, and its edge is not visible in an early 50's photo, but it was there by 1960. Her uncle J.A. Lindquist ran the Swedish grocery at the foot of Concord Street, but I don't know much about what they carried and whether Swedes did most of their shopping there or just specialty items. His house was a block from where they put up the A&P - don't know if that irritated or not.

When this little fantasy first occurred to me decades ago I assumed the reactions we all superficially assume: amazement and perhaps even fear and disquiet at the selection, coupled with disdain for current products, such as a hundred types of sugary water.  Yes, I imagine the exotic foods from Thailand, the fruits out-of-season, the abundance of spices, and the superabundance of almost-prepared meals would catch her attention.  Yet I don't think we always see things through past eyes very well.  The casual dress, even slovenliness, of women at the market would appall her, and might distract her attention from other changes we think more important.  That some favorite products were missing and no longer available might loom large. We know that life can go on quite nicely without them, but we might equally think that our own favorites of this era were a great loss if they were not around in future markets.

And of course, if she were brought out of that time to this she would be far more interested in things other than supermarkets.  She would want to know what had happened to her son and her daughters, herself and her husband.  Whatever conventions God would grant I could tell her of such things, she would naturally fasten on the others which I could not - as would any sane person.  Who cares about flavors of Listerine when thinking of mortality and legacy?

We revert easily to the small and familiar, and do not willingly look at the big picture.  That's a feature, not a bug, of humanity.

Family Recipe

Reading the little blurb on a bottle of BBQ sauce, then reading the ingredients. I'm sorry, but there is no family's recipe whose first ingredient is "high-fructose corn syrup."

Guess The Country

No peeking. I keep wanting to give hints, but they would either be a)dead giveaways, b) pure snark, or c) both. If you don't get it at first, there are a few hints at the end.