The beautiful.
Independence Day, 250th Edition
Dillsboro all out for the veterans' parade.
Some of the local veterans parading.
I was just mentioning the Confederate flag thing and the local pride in heritage; sure enough, a group of them came out to march. Technically, by act of Congress, Confederate soldiers are considered American veterans for certain purposes.
Happy children celebrating in the tremendous heat.
A gingerbread cupcake at the Legion hall.
The Legion gave me a nice challenge coin after the run, too.
It was dangerously hot today, so much so that on the ride back I realized it wasn't safe to continue my ride. Fortunately I was along the beautiful Tuckasegee river, so I climbed down the bank and swam until I was cool enough to resume the ride. I also soaked my shirt so it would help keep me cool for the rest of the ride.
Quite a day. The pork butt came out beautifully thanks to my wife, who took over the smoking so that I could go ride with the Legion. We did a flag replacement ceremony in Robbinsville, the last town before the Dragon. We rode through the Nantahala Gorge to get there, which is a bit out of the way but beautiful. I’d never met these people before, but they put me in the tail gunner position based I guess on the firmness of my handshake. First time I’ve ridden tail for a group ride. I hope I did a good job.
The article on Robbinsville claims that the mean daily maximum temperature in July is 83. That mean was somewhat exceeded today.
Independence Day
Have a happy one, warriors.
UPDATE: I got the pork butt on before dawn. It smells just like old hickory out there.
Freedom Barbecue
I'm going to smoke a pork butt for the Independence Day feast.
I made some Christmas barbecue sauce given the significance of the occasion. This batch was thinned partly with coffee and partly with chicken stock, since I had plenty of chicken stock and not a great deal of coffee. I was also out of molasses, so I added extra dark brown sugar -- which, in commercial sugars, differs from white sugar only by the addition of extra molasses. That's now how it worked historically, but these days they render it all to white sugar and molasses, and then make light or dark brown sugar by putting some molasses back in. Cheaper and easier that way.
I'm also going to smoke some Andouille sausage tomorrow, and a snakeskin hat band I made after Conan's recent run-in. Only a little smoke for the latter, to help preserve and waterproof it.
Yoda: "No, There Is Another."
At the NY Post today, Eric Metaxas declares the American revolution to have been 'the only one in history that worked.'
That's wrong, but his examples aren't the wrong part.
Take the French Revolution, which began just a few years after our own Revolution, and was championed by some of the figures involved in our Revolution — like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. They all seemed to think it would be a happy reprisal of what happened here. It was anything but that, ending in a nightmare bloodbath of terror.What went wrong? Just like us, the French decided they didn’t like the idea of monarchy. So they beheaded their king and queen. But the radicals didn’t stop there....Then there are the even worse nightmares of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions in Russia and China.
OK, fair as far as it goes. But the American revolution stood on the shoulders of at least two earlier revolutions that had worked: the revolt against King John by the barons who fought him at Runnymede, which produced Magna Carta; and the Scottish Revolution led by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, which produced a free nation that taught the Pope to accept that men could choose their kings.
Revolution is a risky business, to be sure. Aristotle spends a good part of the Politics explaining how states grow unstable with an eye towards avoiding revolutionary moments. They often end up being destructive.
Not always, though. The one that just occurred in Syria ended a despotic Baathist regime and at least for now seems to have moved in the direction of a better society -- the al Qaeda-linked leader seems to be moderating pretty fast, making deals with the Kurds and the Israelis alike to try to reach a more stable society. The Vietnamese revolution against the French and then us, which we thought would turn them into another Communist hellhole, actually came off all right: the Vietnamese nation is now one of our better friends in the region. The Irish revolt of 1916 produced a nation that is pretty OK, even if they did send condolences on the occasion of Hitler's death. The recent revolt in Northern Ireland's Belfast is healthy, and might help push the whole UK in a better direction eventually.
Sometimes it's the only way to fly. The Declaration sets the terms out clearly: "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it... Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes... But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."
Emphasis added, though little needed. Not only a right. Sometimes, a duty.
Georgia Gets a Hard Look
The FBI has made a priority investigation out of the 2020 election there. The article treats it as an open question that might go either way; readers of the Hall know that the matter was settled some time ago, and the remaining question is one of responsibility.
It would be encouraging to see actual consequences for this sort of thing, even for an anarchist. That a political system should be corrupt is no surprise, but watching the powerful gleefully get away with it while the press proclaims that "there is no evidence" of the corruption is -- probably intentionally -- disheartening. For those who believe that government can be a positive good, it is even more important to see consequences for this.
1976 versus 2026
There are many things I really like about 70s culture: Outlaw Country, Shovelhead choppers, proto-Metal and Punk rock, Smokey and the Bandit and its predecessors, The Muppet Show (in spite of its periodic pretenses, which were at least fresh and not so exhausted then).
The above film from 1976 highlights some of the aspects I like a bit less. Still, it does demonstrate a way in which the Carter presidency allowed the left to embrace America in that era that is currently forbidden: if Kamala Harris had won the recent presidential election, I imagine we'd have a version of this today that was being pushed out by official channels. As this one was: this was a product of the US Information Agency. USIA would have been called the propaganda arm of the US government except that the US government formally defines propaganda as "enemy action to..." that the US itself, therefore by definition, can never perform.
Had Harris won, USAID probably would have funded the 2026 version of this instead.
The present administration has no such professionals on its side, and any remaining within the bureaucracy certainly wouldn't contribute to celebrating America as long as it is led by the enemy: indeed, I suppose that producing such a film now would satisfy their definition of 'propaganda.' So we'll have to make do with individual efforts from "X" instead.
Any of you seen any good ones? The day is almost upon us.
The State of Virginia
Today was the day that unconstitutional gun ban was supposed to go into effect in Virginia, except it was slapped with a statewide injunction after a court found that it was likely to be proven unconstitutional in the lawsuit already filed.
Separately, the DOJ has filed suit against Virginia today over these laws.
Also, SCOTUS just announced they will hear two relevant cases about banning AR-15s in October.
Oh. Oh, No.
In a year in which socialist candidates are doing so well, competition for Bad Idea of the Year is fierce! However, we might have a winner already by about the halfway point.
Well, one often learns by making mistakes. Or, you know, someone else may learn from observing the experience.
By the way, the flaw in the plan isn't just the guns. It's the 'crash their system' idea. You are talking about people who are very comfortable operating without a system. When Hurricane Helene came through here, it absolutely crashed the system. Every system. The phones were out, the radios were out, the roads were all cut by fallen trees and washed-away bridges. Nobody waited for 'the system' to get fixed and start making things better. By noon I had a chainsaw militia clearing roads made up of every able-bodied man on the mountain and his chainsaw. Even once we began linking up the volunteer fire department and rescue technicians, guys with tractors were clearing roads the county wouldn't get to for days and the state wouldn't ever.
FEMA? Never heard of her.
Soco Gap
On Saturday, I rode across Soco Gap between Haywood and Jackson Counties to head down into the Cherokee Boundary Lands. I wanted to visit the casino because it has a Gordon Ramsay "Street Food" court, and I wanted to see what the famous chef's take on street tacos was like. (Spoiler: Gordon Ramsay doesn't know anything about street tacos.) We got good and soaked, the several of us bikers headed that way, during a wave of cold and driving rain that came across just then.
Since I was doing 'little known facts of local history' on the main post, here's another one:
In Cherokee, the pass is known as Ahalunun'yi (ᎠᎭᎷᏄn'Ᏹ), meaning "Ambush Place" or Uni'halu'na (ᎤᏂ'ᎭᎷ'Ꮎ), meaning "where they ambushed;" named after the occasion, probably in the mid-18th century, when the Cherokees ambushed a party of invading Shawnees, all of which were killed except for one, who was sent back (without his ears) to tell his people of the Cherokee victory.
I admire the directness of the Cherokee naming convention. My guess is that there were many more ambushes at that gap. It's the natural 'head them off at the pass' location between Maggie Valley and the main homeland of the Eastern Band of Cherokee. It's not far from Big Witch mountain, which is just a bit to the west along the Blue Ridge Parkway. There are many witches in Cherokee mythology; I don't know which one that title means to connote.
A Theory of Play
I saw this post on "X" and wondered if it was being tremendously unfair, so I went to see what else I could find about it. It sounds like it might be pretty fair in spite of the tone; the commentator on the other side seems to agree about the basic facts.
I looked into it and was surprised to learn that Lego launched the Friends line after years of market research. In 2008, they found that 90% of Lego sets were being sold for boys, despite the fact that they’ve had pretty gender neutral advertising over the decades. That means if they could find a way to reach out specifically to girls, they could practically double their sales. They studied how girls and boys built and played with castle Legos, and they found that boys built the castle and then enacted battles in front of it — the castle was just the backdrop. The girls built the castle and then were disappointed that there wasn’t anything going on inside of it where they wanted to enact their stories. They also learned that the girls were more interested in smaller projects, and that they were more likely to want to see themselves in the minifigs. And thus “Friends” was born, with hearts and butterflies and pink and purple colors and listed on the Lego website under the category of “girls.”
The second set of comments, which is the one I quoted, is from a site dedicated to science and skepticism from a feminist perspective. She still has some objections to the idea of gendered sales of "girls" toys and "boys" toys, and wants boys to be more comfortable trying out pink and purple and flowers. I kind of think we have probably chased that particular rabbit as far as it'll run, and the question now is what we do instead.
But I'm no longer in the toy-buying market, and won't be again until and unless I get some grandchildren.
Othering English
I was listening to someone talking about "othering" this morning, and I realized that part of the reason to avoid jargon is to avoid the baked-in weights it brings. A more usual reason is that you can't speak to anyone outside of your niche if you are captured by the jargon and can no longer express your thoughts without it. That will limit your ability to persuade anyone who isn't already part of your esoteric area of thought. Speaking plain English lets you speak with everyone who understands English.
Yet when you start trying to express what 'othering' might mean in plain English, you discover quickly that right away you lose the judgment that it is necessarily bad. In fact, even as a philosophical concept it isn't bad: it only became assumed to be bad when Critical Theory built out an argument that was adopted into theories of racism and colonialism. More basically, the idea of recognizing that some things aren't you is a necessary part of figuring out what is you, and thus what is yours. Recognizing that some things aren't yours is a necessary part of admitting to some limits on yourself: mind your own business means discerning what is, and is not, your business. Accepting limits on your own grasping will is an ethical value of the first rank.
To say that this is a process of discernment means also that it is a process of refinement. I am now figuring out what I like, and what I don't like. If we were talking not about racism but about, say, wine or fine coffee, we would in fact praise this sort of mindful experience, reflection, and then refinement of our tastes. Kant's Third Critique turns on how to do this well in what he thought was a universal and humane manner.
That doesn't mean that racism is good, of course. It just means that you now have to explain how this process of recognizing your own limits, of discerning and refining your tastes, can go wrong as well as go right. That's a much more interesting and useful discussion to have; and if you can have it in plain English, you can have it with a much wider audience.
Intellectual Diversity and Political Tolerance
You can't beat a deal like that.
Biker rallies are intellectually diverse. This one place is selling F*CK TRUMP patches right next to F*CK YOU TRUMP HATERS patches. There is widespread tolerance for varying political opinions, which is probably not what is generally assumed about biker rallies.
You can also buy brass knuckles. Other people's political opinions are generally less threatening when you have a good pair of brass knuckles.
We're all going to get soaked together anyway.
It’s a racially diverse crowd too. Lots of black bikers up from Atlanta to enjoy the Smokies. The first one I saw was by himself and looked nervous about the Confederate flags*, but I made sure to welcome him so he'd know he was OK. He clearly felt better and, in short order, would have found that he was in no ways alone. We're all Americans up here.
Usually the Redrum MC comes out, and they’re a Native American/First Nations led motorcycle club (not exclusive; white people can join, but they’re about honoring Native Americans).
Theoretically this is Outlaws MC territory, but everyone is welcome. I see Outlaws and Pagans and a Hells Angels support club here. It’s just a good time for everyone.
We did get soaked, though.
That one bike with her head turned is especially pretty.
I really appreciate motorcycle culture. People have their heads on right.** The political moment passes; every election is 'the most important of our lifetime.' But in the end, you pick your patch or no patch, sew it on or don't, and we all go ride the eternal mountains together. When all the dry land was one continent, these mountains were still here -- these Appalachians linked to the Grampians in what is now Scotland. They're old, and we're passing. We commune with them and are one with them.
That's what matters.
* Locally you see a lot of Confederate flags. This is because the Confederacy won the war here. At the end of the war, Thomas' Legion of Indians and Highlanders compelled the surrender of the last Union forces in the region. The Cherokee Nation declared war on the Union and allied with the Confederacy, for the obvious reason that the Union had been waging war on them since at least President Andrew Jackson, and for the less-obvious reason that they also were a slave-owning power. They joined with Scottish and Scots-Irish Highlanders to form a combined arms force that fought through the entire war. Together, they defeated the Union forces and obtained an agreement to surrender in the local town of Waynesville, North Carolina. As it happened, news of Lee's surrender to Grant arrived at about that same time, so they still held the surrender but reversed the polarity about which side was surrendering. However, the mountain folk were not only never defeated, they won. They remember that they won. The Cherokee often fly the Confederate flag too for the same historical reasons as the Highlanders.
** Funniest thing that happened today: as I was going to the head, a lady biker with a beer in her hand took one look at me and squared up her shoulders. "Wanna fight?" she demanded. I smiled and answered, "Shore." She put her beer aside, raised her fists, and said, "Let's go!" Then she laughed, tapped my shoulder, picked up her beer and went on about her business.
Firewood
Conan enjoys this much more than I do.
I usually start in February, and it takes until summer starts to finish. Cut a fallen tree here and there, split it and stack it, a bit at a time as I have time to spend on it. Now it can season all the long summer and autumn, and be fully dry by the time the cold arrives.
Cash on the Barrelhead
Kind of a catchy song from 1950s honky-tonk. By coincidence I was talking with my wife yesterday on a walk about how she, her first time away from home in the 1980s, had no ability to call long-distance to reach home. My father having been a professional telephone man (and volunteer fire-fighter), I explained that all she had to do was go to any payphone -- remember payphones? -- and press "0," then explain what she wanted to a helpful operator. No one had ever explained that to her, so she was just unable to use the phone service when away from home for her several years at college.
Not much help now, that explanation! In those days, we employed banks of operators full-time whose job it was to help you navigate that problem. Now a long-distance call isn't even expensive on most phone plans. Overseas ones still can be.
“Confessions” of a Priest
In the following article, a basic conflict over the idea of natural law is spelled out by one Catholic priest who is competing with others -- including the infrastructure surrounding several Popes. He has support from another priest here. The more important priest, the one who wanted to essentially dispose of the old ideas about Natural Law, is interviewed here in Italian (but translators are easy to find these days).
In an interview... Bishop Vincenzo Paglia claimed a decisive role in the dissolution of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family and its replacement by a new academic entity, as well as in the radical transformation of the Pontifical Academy for Life. He also made clear that these interventions were intended to bring about a profound paradigm shift, which—for the first time—he explicitly acknowledged as affecting not only the pastoral sphere but the doctrinal one as well.According to Paglia, this “very profound” reform entailed, above all, a rethinking of the very concept of natural law. Paglia accused the John Paul II Institute of advancing a conception of natural law understood as a set of immutable principles from which moral norms are deduced. He proposed, instead, that natural law must be grounded in an ongoing historical discernment of subjective and cultural experience. In this perspective, a “theology within history and within people’s lives” must replace what he characterized as the late Institute’s “armchair theology.”
The short quote should suffice to show that this is not a debate limited to the Catholic Church. It is the cultural debate of the last several generations in the West.
Always a Step Ahead
Wretchard, I mean.
He usually is.
He points out that this means that the Chinese Communist Party is actually opposed to all the diversity initiatives it has spent so much time and money fostering in the West. So too, of course, the environmentalism; the opposition to data centers to power American AI; the opposition to militarism; to nuclear power....
Old Soviet trick, that last one. They just picked it up, but they generalized the lesson. The same part of the West keeps falling for it over and over again.
Only if the scales ever fall away from their eyes. We're going on three generations now without that happening. If anything the mania seems to be growing, fired by social media propaganda so popular and mind-bending.
A Final Note on Exemplary Justice
I wrote on this directly in 2015. My thesis at that time contradicts every other philosopher; it is ancient in form, but it disagrees with all the ancient philosophers and sides instead with the poets, Plato's favorite enemy.
I quote this section in order to point out that this has not been the opinion of the enlightened only recently. Socrates is brought up against it by Protagoras:If you will think, Socrates, of the nature of punishment, you will see at once that in the opinion of mankind virtue may be acquired; no one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong, only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that manner. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention, thereby clearly implying that virtue is capable of being taught. This is the notion of all who retaliate upon others either privately or publicly.Rational punishment does not look to the past but to the future, Protagoras says. Indeed, since we cannot change the past, the only reason -- that is, the only kind of purpose to which rationality even might apply itself -- for punishment must be an eye toward the future. Deterrence is rational. Rehabilitation is rational. Mere retribution is bestial, so he argues.I think that the opposite is true. It is the beast who is most likely to forgo retribution. They will act not to revenge past harms, but to avoid fresh ones. They might kill you if they think you are still dangerous and sense a momentary advantage. They might just as readily avoid you to keep from presenting you with a chance to hurt them again. They will not feel any duty of honor to avenge themselves, or their families, nor to repay you for the wrongs you have done.Retribution is a higher, not a lower quality. This is orthodox, is it not? Vengeance is the divine quality, not a bestial one. Human beings are urged to mercy and kindness toward their enemies not because it is irrational or animal to punish past wrongs, but because they are not high enough to do it well and justly. Be patient, return kindness for cruelty, and you will heap hot coals on their heads.How fitting, then, that it was a Vicar who provided the author cited at the top of this post with his reasons. But this is not a purely Judeo-Christian view. The Ancient Greeks thought this too, those of them who were poets instead of philosophers. They also thought that vengeance and retribution were divine. Hesiod even tells you her name.
Plato and Aristotle on Exemplary Justice
In the Laws, Plato has his three strangers turn their attention to the matter in Book IX. Plato recommends for theft a proportionate equality, by which he means you must restore what you stole, and exactly that much again over it (thus, twice what you stole). This is purely retribution, and as I noted in the commentary it wouldn't have much deterrent effect.
Plato hopes deterrence won't much be needed, as the book had opened with: the Athenian stranger was embarrassed even to admit that so well-ordered and virtuous a people would require criminal punishments at all. The whole structure of the work of the Laws is to try to deter crime by structuring a society so well that virtue will be the inevitable result. In Book X, for example, he lays out the mythological structure that will keep the people aimed in the right direction without the need for punishments. The myth reinforces the law, and makes all sorts of lawbreaking a sort of blasphemy -- which was punishable by death. The example is in the myth, though, not the punishment: blasphemers were to be executed not to set the example but to punish their blasphemy. It was the myth that set the example.
It was curious to me at the time, and remains so, that the Athenian later proves very interested in military punishments in Book XII. Anyone who has been associated with the military understands that regular disciplinary actions are part of the life; and being so regularly necessary, capital punishment can't be the normal course of action. Thus, we can't view military punishments as a sort-of blasphemy requiring execution every time. In fact, military punishments in the model city are notably milder than the punishments recommended for civilians, which is an interesting feature of the Laws' model. That is not normally how military justice has worked, although I guess there are some exceptions -- everyone knows of the guy who was allowed to join the Marines instead of prison. (I did in fact know a guy like that growing up. He turned out great after the Marines.)
For Aristotle, justice divides between distributive and rectificatory. The latter is most like Plato's 'proportionate equality' in revenging theft in that it repays those who have suffered damage, and it does so on lines of arithmetical equality. Aristotle's version doesn't worry over the question of whether a good man or a bad one defrauded the other, or whether the fraud was an accident or by intention: what is owed is to make the defrauded one whole.
Now this was the EN, not the Politics, so we aren't looking at crime as such; more like a divorce settlement, I mentioned in that commentary, where it matters which spouse was the adulterer and which one not; it doesn't really matter which one was the better person, or how justified or not the adultery might have been because of neglect or hard feelings, just which one broke the agreement.
What isn't advocated for here, though, is either revenge or example-setting. It would be wrong to punish the adulterous husband (or wife) a whole lot more just to send a message to other spouses; what is just is to recognize the harm done in the specific case, and address that and only that.
Prime Conan
Having seen what Amazon Prime wanted to do with Tolkien, I don't know if I'm pleased to hear this or not. However, since I subscribe to Amazon Prime anyway for the free delivery (even way out here, well, almost -- the mailbox is half a mile away), I suppose I'll see what it looks like if it makes it the screen.
Exemplary Punishment
There is a standing philosophical debate about exemplary versus retributive punishments. The sentences handed down yesterday against the ANTIFA cell in Texas -- 100 years for shooting a gun aimed at the ground, thirty years for moving a box of literature connected to the attack -- are versions of exemplary punishment, i.e., punishments that are meant to 'make an example' to deter others.
Exemplary punishments are favored by some philosophers as the only moral form of punishment, because they think that retributive punishments do not work. Retribution on the other hand has Biblical warrant, famously 'an eye for an eye,' etc., so especially Christian philosophers have often suggested that it is moral to punish someone only for their own crimes/sins, and not for those of someone else -- especially crimes (or sins) that haven't even been committed yet, and may never be at all!
My favorite philosophical theory on retributive punishment -- not because I advocate for it, but because I love retelling it to see people's faces -- is Kant's theory. Kant especially loved capital punishment, which he advocated for a very great many things. One of those things was rebellion against your sovereign, as he was very much a law-and-order kind of guy. In the Metaphysics of Morals, he talks about two Jacobites who come to trial for their rebellion -- which sufficed, for him; the details didn't matter beyond that they were rebels. (For those of you who want to look it up, this is in Ak. 6:334).
Kant said that the judge ought to offer each of them the choice between death or lifelong slavery. He imagines that one chooses death and the other slavery. The one who chose death should receive his wish and be put to death, because he is "acquainted with something that he values more highly than life, namely honor, while the scoundrel considers it better to live in shame than not at all." The one who prefers slavery should be denied his will, because he has proven he is unworthy of the honor of having his will respected: he should also be put to death.
Hegel was also a retributionist; he thought that treating a man as a man by punishing him only for his own actions was just, whereas punishing a man to deter others was like "raising a stick at a dog," i.e., treating the other men as if they were animals to be intimidated rather than men to be respected. The use of the first man as a mere instrument rather than as an individual worth respect offended both.
Hobbes is mostly a retributionist, but he allows that a valid secondary choice is to correct others liable to the similar offense.
Those are all Modern thinkers, in the philosophical sense of the term -- Hobbes is really Early Modern. Among the Ancients, the exemplary punishment is the usual standard. Plato advocates for it the Protagoras as the only valid reason for imposing punishment.
If you will think, Socrates, of the nature of punishment, you will see at once that in the opinion of mankind virtue may be acquired; no one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong, only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that manner. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention...
Likewise in the Gorgias and the Laws, the latter of which we went through at length together once. The Stoic position is similar, advocated by Seneca in (De Ira 1.19). Aristotle's discussion in the EN, which we also went through together, spells out retributive punishment explicitly, but also allows for deterrence and for restorative punishment as alternative forms.
Not that it has only ancient advocates; deterrence/examples live also in J.S. Mill's utilitarianism, Bentham's as well (Rationale of Punishment).
I'll do a follow-up post later, I think, examining what I said about the issue in my commentaries on the Laws and the EN. For now, I just want to raise the matter for our discussion. What do you think about it?
Follow-up to Prior
The last post was more than long enough, and attacked the basic problem of 'what is wrong with this coherent argument about fairness?'. However, the Clovis example reminds me of an interesting fact about the Beowulf.
Clovis asks his warriors for a gift of honor at the end of a successful fight. He does not simply lay claim to a share of the treasure that is not warranted by the equal law governing their unequal society: "I ask you, O most valiant warriors, not to refuse to me the vase in addition to my rightful part."
The one soldier who refused him obeyed their law about division of spoils, but also then refused the king a requested gift -- he denied him an asked-for honor, which is to say that he imposed a shame. It was this, I think, that Clovis was revenging with his later murder of that soldier in a shameful manner, imposing a shame on him in turn. The entry does not mention, however, if Clovis later paid a blood-price to the soldier's family, as is highly likely. Fairness and unfairness were not the only issues in that society; the honor requested and the shame of being publicly embarrassed had to be addressed as well.
In the Beowulf, which holds up the title character as the very model of honor, we get demonstrations of what contemporary societies thought ideal behavior looked like. Having come to help the Danes with Grendel (in order to repay a debt of honor to Hrothgar incurred by Beowulf's father, who had enlisted Hrothgar's aid to help settle a wergild dispute of his own), Beowulf defeats first Grendel and then, when it proves necessary, Grendel's more powerful and magical mother. In doing the latter, he discovers and wins a great treasure.
What does he do with it? He gives it all to Hrothgar.
Beowulf spake, offspring of Ecgtheow:“Lo! we blithely have brought thee, bairn of Healfdene,Prince of the Scyldings, these presents from oceanWhich thine eye looketh on, for an emblem of glory.
Beowulf had come, after all, to help Hrothgar and settle his father's debt of honor. He keeps nothing for himself. Yet Hrothgar recognizes that this 'gift from the ocean' is too great on top of the fight Beowulf has borne, and creates a new debt of honor on him. He repays this by giving Beowulf presents of his own, rich ones; and later, when Beowulf would leave him to return home, parting gifts as well. Hrothgar declares that all the old feuds are forgotten, and the two peoples united in friendship by this mutual exchange which will bring further visits and exchanges and growth and prosperity.
Unferth, a thegn of Hrothgar's who had not been able to defeat the monsters, gives Beowulf his sword as a gift -- an honor that repays the shame Unferth likely felt at having been unable to do the deed himself. Beowulf's acceptance of this redeems Unferth's incapacity, and restores the honor he might otherwise have lost by not being part of the story of Grendel's defeat.
On the return home to his own king, Hygelac, Beowulf is met by the coast guard to whom he gives a sword as a gift; then, on arrival to the king, he gives the king all that Hrothgar had given him as gifts to his own king, thus eliminating any chance that Hygelac would see Beowulf's newfound wealth as a potential threat to their relative positions. But this is also not the end of the exchange, because Hygelac then gives Beowulf great gifts in return for the substantial honor that Beowulf has shown to him by this free-handedness with what he had won. These gifts include manors and establishments that will produce wealth, placing Beowulf higher in the structure of Geat power because he has proven he can be trusted to keep faith with his king. Indeed, after Hygelac's death and then the death of his son, Beowulf arises to the kingship himself.
This mode of gift-giving looks unbounded and without economic logic to modern eyes: Beowulf was the one who had earned the 'presents of the ocean' through combat; why give it to Hrothgar, who had already received much by having the monsters killed? One present, perhaps, but all of it? Then too with Hygelac, who had perhaps contributed by allowing Beowulf to go on the trip rather than insisting he stay at home; but did he thereby deserve all of the spoils of the venture? In freely giving away everything and keeping nothing for himself multiple times, Beowulf places his fate in the hands of men who are the very sort of men that the author of the 'fairness' piece would suggest ought to be expected to take unfair advantage, being already in positions of social power and authority. It looks illogical and uneconomical.
Perhaps outside of a work of literature, the kings would have behaved more like Clovis than like Hrothgar or Hygelac. Yet in the poem, where the ethic is being spelled out purely and on its own terms, honor provides an answer to these problems of economic grasping. Each recognizes the honor being done him and repays it fairly -- fairly, not disproportionately to his own advantage according to a notion of 'fairness' that is derived from the system's own extant inequalities. At least in the poem, honor proves to have an economics and a logic of its own, one that leads to Beowulf reigning in peace and stability for many decades. His people love him; nations abroad respect him whether they love him or fear him.
And so there is peace, until the dragon comes.
Justice as Unfairness
AVI has posted an interesting challenge, an article that strikes me as making a coherent but wrong argument; yet saying just exactly why it is wrong is the interesting and challenging part. It also plays with examples with which I am well-familiar, such as the diyya, an Islamic form of the wergild/weregeld that I have written about many times because we used to help negotiate them in Iraq as a means of trying to bring peace in tribal disputes that were contributing to the insurgency.
The basic thesis is stated here:
Fairness does not come from external principles that exist in the universe and bind us. Fairness norms are human solutions. They are the rules for playing the game of life properly and agreeing on everyone’s due in society.Fairness norms allow people to avoid having to haggle all the time in real life and to agree quickly on how to split rewards and costs in their interactions. But they can work in practice only if they are not too far from what people could actually claim using their raw bargaining power in a hard-fought bargaining process. Only norms that are broadly in line with actual differences in bargaining power will tend to last.
The immediate problem with that thesis is that it does itself do what it claims it cannot do: it defines fairness, i.e., as "playing the game of life properly and agreeing on everyone's due in society." If this is a universal truth across all of the various societies covered, then there is a philosophical universal at work; the fact that different societies have come up with different ways of agreeing about how to address that universal is actually evidence against the idea that "fairness does not come from external principles," i.e., external to the facts about a given society. If every society develops some idea of fairness in spite of their substantial differences, there probably is -- indeed almost certainly must be -- something external to the facts of any given society driving that project.
The second problem with the thesis arises from the examples. Since I started with the diyya, I'll begin this part with it too. He's arguing that fairness norms essentially ratify existing imbalances in social bargaining power, and points to the fact that in Iranian law (his example, but Islamic law generally) a woman's life is worth half the compensation of a man's. It is true that women have less bargaining power in Islamic societies and under Islamic law; a woman's testimony is also worth half of a man's. Yet the diyya is not the only such system historically, and the value of free women compared to free men has not always disfavored women even though presumably women always had less bargaining power in the era.
This effectively made killing a celibate priest as expensive as killing a nobleman, a useful incentive for communities tempted to settle disputes with the local clergy through violence.
Women of childbearing age occupied an unusual position. The Salic Law valued a free woman who had begun bearing children at 600 solidi, triple the price of a free man, reflecting the community’s loss of future population.
Note that those arguments about why the price was set where it was are assumptions of the modern author, and that they are in direct conflict. If the concern was with future population, a celibate priest would be worth less, not much more. Still: the priest in that society had a very high bargaining power, being able to draw on the authority of the Church as its representative locally in an era of great Church power. One who was powerful enough that he could retain his position even though he was known not to be celibate presumably had greater bargaining power, though, not less: if the author's thesis were correct, he should command more compensation, not less, but the facts say otherwise. And the valuing of a free woman at three times the rate of her husband is not likely a demonstration that she had three times the bargaining power in society! Yet it was the case.
This points to the second problem, but I'll go through another one of his examples before stating it. He opens with an example of king Clovis killing a soldier after that soldier enforced the (actually perfectly equal in spite of differing social/bargaining positions) Frankish rule about distribution of captured war treasure. The conclusion the author draws is that this shows that the equal rule couldn't survive in an unequal society. The example is contingent, however; if the soldier had survived Clovis' attempt and killed the king in revenge, he might well have been rewarded by being elevated to the kingship himself by his fellows (the same ones who had, after all, accepted his rebuke of the king earlier). Then we would be reasoning from the example that the equality demonstrated by the rule was so persuasive, even in an unequal society, that violating it allowed you to rebuke kings or, in extreme cases, kill and replace them (which is, by the way, the story of how the fictional Conan the Cimmerian became king by his own hand -- a story from a much later time).
The author of the original piece is a behavioral economist, not a philosopher nor a historian. He is attempting a philosophical project from historical examples. The problem with doing that is that the two disciplines are diametrically opposed to one another: history is concerned with stating the particular facts that actually happened; philosophy is concerned with the universals (such as this notion of 'fairness,' which appears in at least some form from Aristotle's 'justice as fairness plus lawfulness' to Iranian diyya to Saxon wergild to American payments for wrongful death or dismemberment). The attempt to straddle that line with economics is closer to the historical project, but the historical facts are in a sense accidents that might have gone this way or a different one as far as we know. The universals are found where, regardless of which way the facts happened to go, we still find the same themes emerging.
Fairness and its relationship to justice is one of those things. I think it is probably true that those who occupy powerful bargaining positions are able to use their bargaining power in part to get the people around them to ratify their unfair position. The fact that they always feel the need to do so, with tools like laws or by purchasing social praise from journalists, or from skalds or scops or poets, or by purchasing masses from priests or commissioning praise-plays from playwrights, shows not that fairness is defined by their power. It shows that they are universally keenly aware that the unfairness makes their position perilous, and are always in every society seeking to shore it up.
So what is fair, regardless of the facts of society? That was a question asked by John Rawls in the last century in his famous 'Veil of Ignorance' thought experiment. It's not an experiment that can actually be performed successfully, only imagined as a way of thinking about the problem. If you could pull people from different societies, times, and places, and put them through this 'veil' so that they were temporarily unaware of the facts of their society, and ask them to devise fair rules for any society -- knowing that any society would have inequalities of these kinds, but not knowing where they would fall -- what kinds of rules would they devise?
Rawls wrote a long book about the idea that 'justice JUST IS fairness,' but if you read it he ends up smuggling back in Aristotle's idea that you need laws to enforce people treating each other the way that virtuous people would do by free choice. Thus, after the whole long thing you end up all the way back at the beginning with Aristotle. But there's your universal: two thousand years of law and economics and philosophy, and we always end up in the same place.
A Small Matter
Nobody's thinking about Syria right now, but there is a little complication in US policy there.
Congress is nearing a vote on the Pentagon’s request to send $130 million in military assistance to armed groups in Syria fighting the Islamic State, but changing dynamics on the ground could weaken the program’s effectiveness and dampen the Trump administration’s efforts to improve ties with Damascus.The Counter-ISIS Train and Equip Fund has disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars since 2014 to pay salaries, provide weapons and train vetted partner forces fighting ISIS — primarily in Syria and Iraq.But in Syria, the organizations that the fund was intended to support, such as the Syrian Democratic Forces, are in the process of integrating with the formal Syrian military, which is overseen by a government the State Department still formally designates as an SST — a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
The SDF are mostly Kurdish peshmerga militia, highly effective fighters with longstanding relations with US Special Forces; 5th Group particularly has ties with the Kurds going back to the era when Saddam was firmly in charge of Iraq. The Syrian leadership were linked to al Qaeda quite directly until not that long ago, but seem to have broken free of that and established a surprisingly decent attempt at ending internal divisions and unifying the long-fractured country. However, they are still on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list.
It's not an insurmountable problem; a similar thing came up in Libya during the Obama administration, when they wanted to back the anti-Gaddafi rebels who were also al Qaeda affiliates. The State Department had them as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and had to go through the process of rescinding that designation. That proved manageable; but there is an additional workaround that you can probably imagine for yourselves, the one that was being employed in Benghazi. That was of course why we had a consulate in Benghazi staffed by a high-level official with a nearby "Annex." Still, to get the official money soon to be approved by Congress there they have to go through the motions of doing it.
Solstice
That's quite a hat.
The article is paywalled, but the photo caption says, "Kefan Wang (4th generation Shaman of Liaoning Province, China) dances as visitors enjoy the sunrise at Stonehenge Credit: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images." I would guess that makes Wang a Manchu shaman, a very small and not well-known branch of Chinese folk religion. I have no idea what connection such a one would have to Stonehenge, but we still don't fully understand what the builders were doing there.
More photos from Stonehenge, here.
Mississippi John Hurt
Grim got me started listening to Jimmie Rodgers and I've been exploring the early 20th century for other musicians like him. Although the style's different, Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966) is a very worthwhile listen. Of course, I loved the blues long before I loved country, but Hurt is country blues, so there's something for all of us in his music.
He grew up the son of ex-slaves sharecropping the land they had been slaves on. In the 1920s he got a deal to record some of his music, but it didn't sell very well and then the Great Depression hit. He went back to sharecropping. In the 1950s the folk music revival hit and musicologists discovered his recordings. Eventually, one of these musicologists found him on his farm and he started touring and recording again in the early 1960s. He's known for old-time, folk, blues, spirituals, and country, though it seems he most often gets labeled country blues.
Here's a good spiritual:
Here's some live blues:
Two Arthurian Recommendations
1. The King Arthur Trilogy by Rosemary Sutcliff
The King Arthur Trilogy is a worthy retelling of the Arthurian stories for a younger audience, Amazon listing it as for ages 9-12. At several multiples of that age, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. She based her version on primary sources but, like any good storyteller, has added to and shaped the stories, weaving them into a coherent whole. In particular, she is skilled in her presentation of the characters in the story, while remaining firmly within the tradition. This is the best introduction to the whole of the Arthurian stories I've found. After reading this, someone new to the stories will have a good grasp of the essential elements and story lines and will be well-prepared to tackle more complex versions of the stories.
Sutcliff retold a number of other classical stories for this age group. I believe that her Black Ships before Troy has become the standard introduction to the Illiad for younger readers in much of the classical education and homeschooling community, which she follows with The Wanderings of Odysseus. She also has Beowulf, Dragon Slayer. I'll be adding these three books to my "read for fun" list.
2. The Pendragon Cycle: The Rise of the Merlin
The Daily Wire has made a 7-episode series from the first two of Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle series of novels. It focuses on the bard Taliesin and on Merlin's life up through being advisor to Uther and setting the stage for Arthur.
Overall, I thought it was very well done. The production was as high quality as I've seen in any TV series, the acting was good, the story is well-told, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Two possibly unique aspects of the story is that it weaves in Plato's story of Atlantis as background and it presents Merlin as a Christian wizard, though still with one foot in the pagan world.
My only complaint is that near the very end Merlin experiences a severe internal conflict which is just difficult to show on screen and so comes across a little flat. A possible solution might have been to add a couple of imaginary scenes running through Merlin's mind to show that conflict. That said, overall, it was an excellent show and I'll watch it again.
Alas, it is currently only available by subscribing to the Daily Wire. I got a discounted one-year subscription and have been enjoying it. They have a number of conservative movies and a number of programs on history, mythology, and of course tons of political talk, their bread and butter. They also have a number of conservative-friendly children's shows. For me, it was worth a one-year subscription, but I doubt I'll re-up.
Here's the trailer:
Rainer Maria Rilke Poems
The late 19th & early 20th century Austrian poet Rilke was recommended to me by a literature professor, so I gave him a try. Here are a few I thought were worthwhile. In this collection, translated by Stephen Mitchell, Rilke mostly gives us snapshots or vignettes with a single focus. His work was influential on a number of 20th century poets you might have heard of, such as Robert Bly, M. S. Merwin, and W. H. Auden.
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
Alas, Babylon
Eight airmen dead after a B-52 crash. We’ve been flying the same planes since before any of us were born, on the same mission. They are the wall that keeps the world.
Some Brief Remarks on "Peace"
As I said at AVI's place, I tend to think that this "peace deal" is just an attempt to push the matter off until after the midterms, and that it doesn't really matter what it says because neither side intends to keep the promises being made. It is probably to our national dishonor that we are led by a man whose word doesn't mean anything, but we all know that it doesn't, so why worry about it? The horse is out of the barn; it'll come back or not in God's good time. For now, it's out of our control -- it's not like the other side has honorable men or women to offer as an alternative.
The one thing that should die with this peace, however, is the idea that Israel in some way runs the USG. My Israeli contacts are livid. They feel completely betrayed which, in fairness, is what the United States generally does to its allies. That's how you know you're a US Ally in good standing: you get betrayed by this government or the next one, usually sequentially. That also is probably to our national dishonor, but it is at least a demonstration of some kind of self-governance: we can't have permanent promises because we actually do change at least the top dressing of the government once in a while. The unwashed underwear, by which I mean the bureaucracy, tends to go unchanged decade after decade; but some top-level policies get reversed as the pendulum swings.
White House Fight Night
I went to UFC headquarters last time I was out in Vegas. It's quite a thing, really.
I have heard that the President slept through part of it, but the man is 80. He should sleep.
There Is No Such Thing as Intelligence
So claim "other psychologists."
Not serious ones, I imagine, though serious psychology strikes me as a philosopher as a sort of joke. Psychology's history is mostly philosophy of mind without the possibility of falsification; I am told it's gotten better of late, but the replication crisis doesn't inspire a lot of faith in that assertion. All things equal, though, let's assume 'not the more serious psychologists.'
One of the very replicable findings about at least one measure of intelligence -- reading comprehension -- is that girls get it faster than boys. My elementary school broke the law (such differences already being forbidden) by sorting classes by reading comprehension level, so we had what the kids knew as and referred to as the 'high' 'middle,' and 'low' classes of intelligence. Since I learned to read well fairly early, my classmates were 26 girls and 3 boys, plus myself. The effects of that approximately 9-1 ratio, combined with alphabetical arrangement of students, were that I learned to talk to girls early. This has been an accidental but entirely beneficial outcome, as human beings sort by sex and by age cohort more than is rational. My friendships with women and with people much older than myself have been especially enlightening.
But it's not true, not remotely true, that anyone can learn anything. Try teaching anything. You'd think that one wouldn't get headway among educators, but somehow it has.
The Communist Supercar
No, it's ironic, but it's no joke.
BYD said the Denza Z featured “shattering high performance” with over 1,000 hp and the ability to sprint from 0 to 62 mph (0 to 100 km/h) in less than two seconds, it didn’t reveal specifics....[New details show] the four-seat EV roadster is slightly larger than the Porsche 911 and closer in size to the Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe. The Denza Z is more powerful than both, with the 911 Turbo S delivering up to 701 hp and the Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe offering up to 1,153 hp.BYD’s electric supercar can reach a top speed of 217 mph and weighs 5,842 lbs (2,650 kg) for the hardtop version.The Denza Z will be available with a soft top and a souped-up track package that gains a massive rear wing spoiler.
Nearly six thousand pounds moving at over two hundred miles an hour is a lot of F=ma. That Mercedes is closer to three and a half. Wonder how good the spoiler is? How about the brakes?
It's strange to see luxury goods coming out of a Communist country; being consumed there by connected elites, certainly, but actually produced there? It seems like that should hardly be a priority in the Five Year Plan.
Well, what do I know? I'm not a Communist.
Memories of a young Marine
I think I may have mentioned here some time ago that my uncle, late in his life, gave an interview to preserve his memories of taking Okinawa, including seeing Japanese residents throwing their infant children off a cliff and killing themselves, for fear of what they'd been told the Americans would do to them. This is the transcript, quite brief. When they left Okinawa they expected to be sent to Japan to do more of the same, but worse. Then suddenly the war was over.
My uncle was born in 1922, so he was 20 when he joined up and 23 or so at the time he recounts here. He died in 2013, aged 91. The first his children heard of these experiences was when he gave the interview in 2005.
Proper Hate
I had been told that hate was always wrong; apparently that's not operative any longer.
SpaceX is set to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Here’s how to properly hate himThere are competing schools of thought about the accumulation of wealth, among them the anarchist claim that “property is theft” and the Gordon Gekko theory of greed as a star-spangled virtue.... The more compelling argument against billionaires has to do not with the ethical implications of the extreme inequality that they arguably promote, but with the adverse real-world consequences, which you don’t have to be a fire-breathing Marxist to acknowledge. There is plenty of evidence that extreme inequality produces inferior and even perverse social outcomes.... But if [Elon Musk is] a stain on capitalism, it’s not because of his wealth. It’s because he exemplifies the idea of government as the plaything of plutocrats who shamelessly bend public policy toward private advantage. It may be difficult to excite class warfare in a culture that worships wealth, but people like Mr. Musk make it a whole lot easier.
Those aren't useful instructions; the headline writer has misled us. It's just griping.
The good argument in favor of billionaires -- trillionaires, now -- is that one person can make a decision about how to deploy substantial capital in efficient ways that a government, a corporation, or a committee can never. Musk is building space rockets and tunneling equipment that could build a Mars colony because he wants to, not because of fiduciary duty or because spreadsheets suggest it is wise. We are lucky that the world's richest man loves Buck Rogers rather than Karl Marx.
Concentrations of political power are always pernicious, and wealth is one way that power can be concentrated. To say that we got lucky is to acknowledge that it could have gone the other way; indeed, it has done, as with several rich men who might be named.
If you were wanting the promised instruction on how to hate properly, however, here is Chesterton:
"Up on the old white road, brothers,
Up on the Roman walls!
For this is the night of the drawing of swords,
And the tainted tower of the heathen hordes
Leans to our hammers, fires and cords,
Leans a little and falls.
"Follow the star that lives and leaps,
Follow the sword that sings,
For we go gathering heathen men,
A terrible harvest, ten by ten,
As the wrath of the last red autumn—then
When Christ reaps down the kings.
"Follow a light that leaps and spins,
Follow the fire unfurled!
For riseth up against realm and rod,
A thing forgotten, a thing downtrod,
The last lost giant, even God,
Is risen against the world."
Roaring they went o'er the Roman wall,
And roaring up the lane,
Their torches tossed a ladder of fire,
Higher their hymn was heard and higher,
More sweet for hate and for heart's desire,
And up in the northern scrub and brier,
They fell upon the Dane.
Wandering into a Minefield
The Swedish athlete mentioned yesterday:
Many people helpfully explained that “some items are stolen more than others.” That’s true! And it’s a very reasonable question to ask.
Forbidden Speech
A man in Scotland writes, but has to channel it through an American because he is now forbidden to say it aloud.
Once upon a time, North America was effectively Britain overseas. The colonists were Britons. They had British rights, British liberties, British privileges. Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights 1689. Around seventeen other Constitutional Statutes still technically in force.Then King George decided Americans had lost their right to keep arms for their own defence, and that taxation without representation was perfectly acceptable. The rest, as they say, is history. The United States of America was born, and its citizens kept all of their old British rights and added God-given ones on top of them....In 1920, Britain introduced its first serious Firearms Act. Before that, Britain had fewer gun restrictions than Texas.Understand why it happened. It was not about crime. It was about preserving the Executive from its own people, specifically from any possibility of the kind of popular uprising that had just remade Russia. Protecting the ruling class. Nothing more, nothing less.The constitutional safeguard of the citizen militia has also effectively been erased. It is almost impossible to find in Britain today.
If you keep reading, you find the criticism against the Administrative State that Weber mentions (see commentary on the sidebar). It overwhelms self-governance and replaces it with raw power.
For our German Visitor
Here was the song he was running down the road.
The song sets it up as a reference to an older piece, though, and it is.
Here's a version with Merle Haggard, to link it up with our more usual era.
A German Travels the South
Apparently there's a soccer series going on right now that has brought a bunch of foreign soccer players to America. Soccer is not an American game -- it is the least interesting and exciting of the many variations of games with uninterrupted play ranging from one side of a field to another attempting to score goals. Americans have several better variations that we play, including indoor ones like basketball and hockey. Cherokee Stickball is another game of this sort. All of these are faster-paced and more interesting, so we don't much pay attention to the soccer version; I'm not quite sure why they've having the games here this time.
However, what I have been enjoying is the joyous reactions of one of the traveling Germans to things he's been finding across the South. These things are well-known to me, and it's nice to see how much fun he is having.
For example, here he is attending one of these games at a Southern-style university stadium (Auburn, as it happens). He is astonished by this experience.
Before that, the hotel receptionist gave them a ride to the stadium because it was raining.
Before that Chattanooga; dinner at Chili's; visiting the beautiful mountain lakes.
Before that Georgia; Brasstown Bald (it is in fact an alpine rainforest around here, by the way); American fast food; tubing on the Chattahoochee; Helen; Waffle House; Stone Mountain.
Interspersed among them, scenes driving down the long American highways listening to country radio.
Last night they visited Buc-ee's and ate dinner on stacks of deer feed corn.
It's nice to see someone taking such evident pleasure in visiting the South.
UPDATE: Apparently there's a Swedish player having a similar experience in the Mid-West.
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