Sophistry, I
Dad29 sent me this lecture by a Catholic Priest, Fr. Chad Ripperger, on the use of sophistry in political argument. The good father rather quickly identifies his opponents as Communists, rather than Sophists, and to some degree is speaking more about the current issues with rhetoric than he is about the ancients. Still, that's of more obvious use to most of you, and it gives me an opportunity to talk about Sophists and sophistry for a few days, so I'm going to do a short commentary series on it. For today, however, enjoy the video and take on the good man's points.
Endowing Ourselves
In a meditation on what he describes as a "long-ago" post -- he means 2016 -- JM Smith of the Orthosphere discusses the importance of stubbornness and brutality to the preservation of political rights.
Rights are not given by the State. They are recognized. In recognizing rights, the State binds itself to respect those rights, and in some cases to come down like a ton of bricks on any private individuals who fail to do likewise.The quality of this guarantee may be judged by the vigor with which the Federal Government protected Constitutionally guaranteed negro suffrage between 1877 and 1965, or by its current inability to comprehend the meaning of the word “bear” in the right to bear arms; but such defaults only illustrate my point.A man has a right only if he stubbornly insists on that right and is prepared, if need be, to perpetrate or suffer any brutality to enforce it. The State respects rights, and sometimes coerces private citizens to respect rights, because it fears to awaken this stubborn brutality. A State does not love it citizens, and it hates, or at least begrudges, every one of their damned rights.
Much longer-ago, in 2007, we here at the Hall had a lengthy debate on this subject; it makes up much of the "Frith & Freedom" collection of links on the sidebar. I wrote some of them, Joel Leggett others, and I believe Joseph W. others yet -- the latter two both military lawyers at the time, Joel in the Marine Corps and Joseph in the Army.
My basic position at that time was that the world is so dangerous a place for rights that their existence as a practical matter absolutely depends on us developing a mutual defense of them. This mutual defense is not 'cashed out,' as philosopher like to say, by the formation of a government. That is a common step to address external threats to the rights, establishing a government whose purpose is to protect the rights that the Declaration of Independence says we were endowed with by our Creator. Many would go so far as to call it a necessary condition; I hope that is not true, but it is what Jefferson wrote. What it is not is a sufficient condition.
Sufficiency requires that we also mutually defend each other and our rights against the government, providing a internal defense of the right against the very thing meant to provide the external defense. A government strong enough to repel foreign powers, bandits, and tyrants is also strong enough to become a tyrant on its own behalf. If the rights are to be real in the practical sense -- i.e., actually enjoyed from day to day in a living society -- they require us to develop and deploy "frith." Frith is a long-dead Anglo Saxon word that is a cognate to both 'friendship' and 'freedom.' When it was a living word, this is what it denoted: that relationship between us that causes us to defend each other's interests. In those days that the word was alive, this was understood to entail actual violence at least as a potential that might really need to be actualized occasionally -- Mr. Smith's point, which he is labeling 'brutality.'
So, while it may be true that our Creator endowed us with inalienable rights, it is also true that making those rights real and actual requires us to endow ourselves and each other with them.
I do agree that such governments as we have today generally are hostile to such rights, but I don't know that I believe that all governments always are. The administrative state that is characteristic of modern government is basically hostile to its own people because the administrators form a class with its own class interests that are hostile to everyone else's; this is the matter of much of Weber's essay, the commentary on which is also on the sidebar. I don't think it was necessarily true of the Founders that they resented the rights of the citizenry, which were their own rights too, ones they had fought for valiantly. I do think it is true of bureaucracies; that is one reason to eliminate bureaucracies and do without administrative states. Such administrative states are not necessary to the external defense, and they are actively harmful to the internal defense, of human liberty.
The price of eliminating the administrative state is that we would have to provide for some of the goods it provides in other ways. The upsides include a greater liberty, but also that the administrative state is actually pretty bad at providing any of the goods it attempts -- government provided health care tends to be objectively worse than we have here, as we observe in Canada with its MAID and the UK with its endless wait-lists and even here with our VA; public education is objectively worse than private education; etc. Eliminating the administrative state and its hostile class of bureaucrats and would-be rulers might reasonably be expected to result in greater actual goods being realized. It's just a bit harder to have to do it yourself, but as we know, if you want a thing done right you often have to do it yourself.
You Can't Run a Military Without Weirdos
I am a free speech absolutist, as I generally am about basic rights: 1A or 2A or 4A, all of them all the way. However, the government is not covered by those rights; governments don't have rights, they have powers, and the powers of governments are wisely regulated.
There's also the question of practical wisdom where government statements are concerned.
Hegseth: No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals
There was actually a good reason why the beards became a thing during the GWOT.
Of course Pete is speaking to the regulars, not the operators. The regulars benefit from regularity; as Washington said, discipline is the soul of the army.
You still have to make room for the weirdos, though, because they are disproportionately likely to be the one who brings back the rest. The attribution of that quote to Heraclitus is a modern fabrication; the idea is not ridiculous.
[Mad Jack] Churchill was second in command of No. 3 Commando in Operation Archery, a raid on the German garrison at Vågsøy, Norway, on 27 December 1941. As the ramps fell on the first landing craft, Churchill and his Commando leapt forward from their position, while he was playing "March of the Cameron Men" on his bagpipes. They overran the garrison in less than ten minutes, killing or capturing all the enemy soldiers they encountered....
In July 1943, as commanding officer, he led No. 2 Commando from their landing site at Catania, in Sicily, with his trademark Scottish broadsword slung around his waist, a longbow and arrows around his neck and his bagpipes under his arm.
Similarly: Should you insult your core supporters?
Young white men are developing the same sort of mentality that blacks, Hispanics, gays, and others have developed. While it might not be tribal per se, it is defensive. And young white men are very aware of their status in society — namely, being the only people it’s OK to abuse, discriminate against, bully, cancel, and so on. Their level of tolerance and their sense of humor around those things is at a low ebb.
Nobody much likes having a group they belong to painted with broad-brush criticism; women don't like it, men don't like it, Boomers don't like it; I've courted some of that with my recent posts, though I trust everyone here is sophisticated enough to understand that such criticisms aren't intended as universal claims but as statistical ones. What's going on here is something different: it's electing to pretend that 'white boys named Brad' are the problem even though, statistically, they really are not. It's akin to the German posters that pretended that white [female!] Germans were feeling up black immigrants at the pool rather than otherwise.
Just speaking the plain truth is the best use of free speech, for governments and otherwise.
Killing is Easy
For the first time in 200 years(!), Tennessee has tried to execute a woman. They failed.
Pike herself wanted other options. Through her attorneys, she asked for an all-female firing squad or a hanging, perhaps with the Carruthers precedent in mind. The state apparently does not allow for those choices – a few do – although the electric chair may still have been an option. Tennessee does not allow it for recent death-penalty sentences, but it was still an option in 1996 when Pike committed her crime.Governments do not necessarily owe murderers their choice of execution methods. However, they do owe a death to them and the victims of the crime rather than an extended, painful process that ends without any finality.What's next? It might depend on whether Pike sustained brain damage in this attempt. No one is sure yet what her medical status is, and whether she remains competent to contest another warrant for execution. No governor will sign a death warrant for a prisoner who got brain damage from a previously botched execution.
If we are going to get rid of prisons, as we should, capital punishment is the obvious alternative for particularly serous crimes. It's really not difficult to kill a living being; humanity has a tremendous amount of experience, even expertise, in how this is done. There is no reason to make this hard, especially when the condemned have themselves requested a workable method.
Of all the challenges facing our governments this is the one thing I'm sure they could really do. Even Communist governments can succeed at killing people. Especially Communist governments, I suppose, but they do everything else so poorly their efficiency at this one task is remarkable. To be incompetent at killing is a chosen handicap.
Two Generations from Extinction
Ronald Reagan famously declared that 'freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.' Christianity might be luckier: it might have two. (H/t AVI)
British churches increasingly host iftar ceremonies during Ramadan, and senior politicians have accused clergy of facilitating bogus asylum petitions by immigrants who falsely claim to have converted to Christianity.Britain isn’t unique. In the U.S., the leaders of Christian denominations have denounced federal immigration enforcement tactics, and Pope Leo marked the 250th anniversary of American independence with a visit to Lampedusa, an entry point to Europe for migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Leo insisted in a letter published the same day that the U.S. has a duty to welcome immigrants.... The xenophilic position dominant now emerged from a particular historical moment. Pope Leo and Archbishop Mullally are both baby boomers. So are most senior church leaders: in the U.S., the average Catholic bishop is 65½....Boomers grew up in a high-trust, religious and family-centric culture cultivated by their parents and grandparents. Progressive members of this generation also got to enjoy the rejection of all that once the 1960s swung into gear. They benefited from the old culture and from its destruction. This is a trick that can only be pulled once....When the boomers pass away, and a new generation assumes leadership positions, political change in the church could be rapid. Last week, a leaked video surfaced of a young French military chaplain addressing paratroopers in a cathedral in the south of France. To applause from the servicemen, Fr. Romain Ghandour poured scorn on leftists and warned against those who would “take the place of our values.” Left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon—a baby boomer—accused Fr. Ghandour of “preaching the return of the Crusades” and seemed to call for the priest’s imprisonment. The sermon was indeed closer to that of Pope Urban II than Pope Leo XIV.
I assume the readership of the Hall does not need an introduction to Pope Urban II or his significance.
What I would have liked from the Catholic Church, when I converted to Catholicism, was a path to the chivalric knighthood whose values inspired so much of my youth. I would have liked for the Church to forgive some of what we did from necessity, and then sanctify and guide the work according to the wisdom of its ages.
The Church still has some of the old military orders, though for the most part it has pacified them; in an era of violence against churches, having a certain number of young men who serve by standing guard over the assembled flock has practical as well as religious value. This would tie young men into the Church firmly, as the traditions involve prayer and fasting as well as the preparations for guarding and -- potentially -- martyrdom. The Church has no such path only because its leadership wants none; you'll become a Knight faster by becoming an elected Senator with favors to offer than by having a soul devoted to shepherding the weak through the valley of darkness.
Even after 9/11 the pacifism hardened, refusing the sword instead of guiding its application. When it was needed most, the Church set its militant traditions beyond the Pale and refused to consider or lay hands to them.
Perhaps the next generation will do better.
"Similar"
The headline finding: more Republican young men blame women for their problems than Democratic young men. Among Republican young men, it's 26%; for Democratic young men, 6%.
Footnote "similar" finding: young Democratic women blame men for their problems at a rate of 66%. The smallest percentage of Democratic women blaming men for their problems is 47% (age 50-64); the smallest percentage among Republican women is 16% (65 and older).
Young women are unique in their perceptions of gender discrimination in American society. More than two-thirds of young women believe that women face “a lot” of discrimination in American society. Fewer—though still a majority—of young men and older women share this view.There is a sharp political divide as well. Democratic women are far more likely than Republican women to believe women face considerable prejudice in the United States. But it is not only in the existence of discrimination that Democratic and Republican women are at odds. Democratic women are far more likely than Republican women to say that men are responsible for many of the problems women have in American society.
These are perceptions; one argument for the delta in perceptions is that men really are more responsible for women's' problems than vice-versa. The partisan split would remain interesting even if that were true.
UPDATE: Via Instapundit, someone combined the graphs to draw out another point about the partisan split: Republican men/women are pretty even in blaming the opposite sex, but there's a huge Democratic variance.
Leaving aside the question of which perception matches actual reality best, there is a significant advantage to not blaming your problems on anyone else. It is, roughly, the Stoic insight: by focusing your attention on what you actually control, you gain a significant advantage. Blaming other people for your problems, whomever they are, puts the focus on things you can't really affect much; thus, you will tend to end up stewing in your problems rather than addressing them.
There is the competing Zen insight, which is that focusing on yourself is the halfway point because some parts of yourself aren't really in your control either. "A man who blames his problems on other people is far from home; he who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames neither himself nor other people is almost home."
Smoky Mountain Bike Week
Tennessee wasn’t entirely burned down anyway.
UPDATE:
This fellow came to burn a little more of it. I don’t know who he is, although he described himself as a former Marine heading a honky tonk band. His original work is good, but he threw down on a cover of Jessi Coulter’s “Why You Been Gone so Long.”
UPDATE: That turned out to be Gethen Jenkins. I knew at least one of his original songs so well that I thought it was a cover when he was doing it, especially since he was doing many covers of Merle and Waylon and others. What a pleasure to have heard him live.
Moonshiner Heritage
That’s a Studebaker, in case you’ve never seen one.
Hot rods.
One of my favorite aspects of this annual heritage festival is the car show. Jerry Lee Lewis instead of bluegrass is the mountain music here.
Pony cars and a Bandit-mobile.
Corvettes were never moonshine cars either, but the same kind of shade tree mechanics love the old ones.
T-bird
Mountain Heritage
This week is the Mountain Heritage Festival. Tomorrow’s the big day, which I’ve written about before. Tonight there’s a free concert.
Consent Decrees
One of the most useful tools of antidemocratic Democratic politics is the consent decree. The way this works is that some state or local politician gets elected by promising votes the usual things that win elections; however, the newly elected secretly harbors a desire to appeal to the National Party so they can be considered as a Senator or a Presidential candidate. That means doing things local voters would never support, so an excuse is needed. The consent decree is the answer.
The consent decree occurs when a lawsuit is filed by some friendly activist group, the politician 'is forced to admit the government is wrong,' and the two parties 'agree' on a settlement that a friendly judge then endorses. With careful judicial forum shopping you can be reasonably sure of the friendliness of the judge where you file the suit. The party's well-funded activists thus advance their agenda even though the agenda couldn't win at the ballot box -- often not even if Democrats were the only ones voting.
One such case is currently in play in the Senate race here in North Carolina. Now you all know that I despise Roy Cooper for personal reasons dating especially to the Hurricane whose two year anniversary was yesterday. The reason to vote against him is Helene and how he treated the mountains and their people, from where I sit; but this bit is what everyone else seems to want to talk about.
Roy Cooper turned loose many felons, half of whom went on to commit new crimes, several of whom committed new murders, one of which murders has become famous because of the beauty and innocence of the victim and the vicious character of the killer.
Roy would like very much to be excused for having set all these killers free, and given more power and a national platform to boot. So, he explains, he had no choice: he was forced by a binding legal settlement.
Except, this turns out to be just another consent decree:
Cooper agreed to the deal in February 2021, settling a lawsuit brought by the NC NAACP, the ACLU of North Carolina, and Disability Rights NC. The settlement required the state to release 3,500 inmates over six months, framed as a public health response to COVID-19 in the prison system. But what Cooper's administration told state lawmakers at the time, that only non-violent offenders nearing the end of their sentences would walk free, turned out to be false. Violent offenders, including convicted murderers and rapists, made the list.... A 2024 state report found that 48 percent of the released inmates reoffended. More than 600 committed serious felonies....When Cooper's team briefed North Carolina's General Assembly on the settlement, prison officials assured legislators that only convicts with sentences ending in 2021 would be released, nobody who had "committed a crime against a person." That assurance later collapsed....The Washington Free Beacon reported that 51 North Carolina convicts serving life sentences for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or first-degree rape appeared on the early release list. Over 90 percent of those lifers secured release after Cooper signed the settlement. These were not low-level drug offenders or people weeks from finishing their terms. They were among the most dangerous people in the state prison system.
Emphasis added.
No majority even of Democratic voters would ever have endorsed this vision of the activist Left. I have no brief for prisons; I think we should completely abolish prisons because they don't work. However, until we develop a democratic agreement about what we might replace them with, this is the alternative: a bad and nonfunctional thing not as a solution, but as a workaround that prevents at least some violent crime being visited on ordinary people. It is the small-d democratic solution even if it is a bad one (as democratic solutions often are: popularity is no guarantee of wisdom, as we all learned in junior high school).
If elected, we can be reasonably sure that Cooper will continue to genuflect to the antidemocratic activist Left; he will, as he has, continue to ignore what his constituents want in favor of what is wanted by those who can advance his power, position, and wealth. I wish his campaign every ill, even though I don't have any positive reason to favor his opponent.
AI and Working Memory
A plausible theory; certainly at least part of the explanation.
When an AI system solves a difficult mathematical problem, the usual explanation is that it has become more intelligent.... [but also] AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain.Or, more precisely, it has access to an enormous external symbolic workspace that performs many of the functions that working memory performs in humans.This difference may be especially important in mathematics.
Emphasis in the original.
One AI recently informed me that I have "used 50x as many tokens as The Hobbit" on that platform. That's a silly thing to say. Tolkien didn't use tokens to write anything, so it's incommensurable; but his experience of authoring the book also involved his decades of study, wide reading in several languages, and so forth before he even sat down to write. (The process for composing LotR was far more intricate.) If you asked one to 'compose The Hobbit' it would not use anything like the number of tokens it would take to replicate in training cycles what Tolkien did in study; it doesn't have to do so.
The AI experience is that there have been vast cycles of training that have gone into building this 'working memory' (or, as noted, its analog). It can practically draw on much more than even Professor Tolkien, or than Thomas Jefferson dining alone.
That in itself makes AI extremely useful partners to humans in thinking. We should take care to continue to train our own memories, even to recover the benefits of the discipline of wide reading and study. Yet neither ought we to disregard the clear advantages of such a practical increase in working memory.
Iran at the United Nations
The United Nations, generally a useless joke of an organization in practice, has a powerful opening line in its founding document:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...
So today we have the very strange spectacle of the President of Iran addressing the United Nations General Assembly a day after the President of the United States threatened to annihilate his country. The President of Iran on most days is expecting to be killed by a US or Israeli airstrike; today he's in New York City, traveling freely about town under the protection of the US Secret Service. (Yes, really.)
Apparently there is some diplomacy occurring, with direct talks between the administrations of Iran and the US occurring at the conference.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)