Hunter S. Thompson and the Cornell Case

I'm not going to join in the Cornell festival of blame, about which I know nothing that is not in the newspaper. However, I was reminded very strongly of the Hunter Thompson book I reviewed recently. The reason is that this sort of subject matter getting sensational newspaper stories and big press conferences by policemen and prosecutors was what, Hunter argued, turned the Hells Angels from around a hundred guys in California into what it became after. 

The sensationalist stories spilled purple prose and raised all sorts of accusations; however, on inquiry Hunter found that the charges were generally dropped or not upheld if prosecuted, and anyway it always seemed like the club had no need to go out looking for girls to assault because lots of girls were looking for them. The girls sought out the club, a fact that amused Hunter quite a bit -- not just girls, though lots of girls, but also lots of other ordinary middle class people. The media sold a story that the run to Bass Lake one year was going to be an orgy of destruction, but what all that newspaper ink accomplished was to bring out lots of tourists who wanted to see the show. In spite of some small tension, Hunter's editor had a rather disappointing story after the affair of people mostly getting along and camping out. A lot of beer was drunk, including by visiting girls. 

A lot of sex may also have been had during the drinking and camping on the beach. At least some of the stories in the book are reported as rather enthusiastic seeking-out of the club just for the drinking and very wild sex. That was what brought them out.

I suspect fraternities and sororities can be a milder version of this. I'm not saying that is what happened here, but I do notice the parallel between the wild, hair-on-fire print accounts and then the emerging details that come later on. 

The grandstanding public figures also have strong parallels in both sets of cases. I predict that this grandstanding will end up doing actual harm to the cause they claim to be interested in defending. Hunter is quite vocal in defending the idea that rape is extremely serious and deserves to be punished, though he takes care to be a good journalist and paint a fair picture of what he actually learned about the cases he mentioned. I was struck by the irony that it was not the governors or the police chiefs or the New York Times who went to the trouble to get the facts right, but the gonzo journalist. 

Rhyming is Important

I might share a couple of my opinions with you; but I'm not going to share them because I think they're smart, I'm going to share them with you because they rhyme... I ain't traveling around trying to change nobody's mind.

It'll drive the poetics crazy; I don't think a damn thing's going to rhyme.

Liberation and the Firearm

Reason magazine notes that women are better-armed than ever. American women, anyway -- but without much division other than that.

They add that the big surge in women's gun ownership has occurred since 2018 and, almost without exception, is seen across the board without regard to race, age, income, party identification, or education.... "Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points," Georgetown University's William English wrote last month, of numbers from the National Firearms Survey....

Smart and Morral add that women with children have been especially quick to acquire guns. The shift "has been driven almost entirely by single (not cohabitating) mothers, a group that may have been particularly affected by changing attitudes toward personal empowerment and safety concerns during a period of rising violence." Women mostly own handguns, which are closely identified with self-defense.

I've taught several women to shoot myself.  

Sophistry, V

By the ~25m mark, Fr. Ripperger is onto a topic he is ascribing to sophistry where he actually disagrees with Aristotle completely. This is a point where I also disagree with Aristotle, so I don't say that as a criticism of the position he is advocating, just again his ascribing that position to "sophistry." 

The particular point he is describing as sophistry (which it isn't) and a violation of natural law (which it is) is the controlling of education by the state rather than the family. He has quite a lot to say about this, so feel free to watch that part of the video directly; I don't think anyone who is a regular here will much disagree with his position. 

Aristotle, however, does disagree with it. In Rhetoric I he is clear that, because the state is made up of families to which we are naturally attached, the law needs to settle "as many points as possible" so that very little judgment is left even to magistrates where their natural ties might incline them to favoritism. In Politics VIII.1-2 he speaks to the law and education in a way that clarifies that education of the youth is particularly a state matter, not a family matter:

None will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives.... [S]ince the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole. In this particular as in some others the Lacedaemonians are to be praised, for they take the greatest pains about their children, and make education the business of the state.

...That education should be regulated by law and should be an affair of state is not to be denied, but what should be the character of this public education, and how young persons should be educated, are questions which remain to be considered. As things are, there is disagreement about the subjects. For mankind are by no means agreed about the things to be taught, whether we look to virtue or the best life.

That could hardly be clearer. It is directly opposed as a view to the one Fr. Ripperger is (rightly, in my opinion) advocating, but it is nevertheless not a sophistic position but Aristotle's own. Likewise, to say as the good father does that this is a post-Protestant position is clearly disproven by the citation; it is in fact the ancient position of Aristotle and the Aristotelians. 

The medieval Aristotelian position, which is to say especially St. Thomas Aquinas' position, is less clear. Aquinas follows Aristotle very, very closely in the Summa Theologiae but he is mostly following Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics. Aquinas wrote a commentary on the first two books of the Politics only. Insofar as we can piece it together, Aquinas seems to have agreed that the family and not the state had jurisdiction over the education of the young -- but, perhaps like the Church's general endorsement of monarchy during the middle ages, this might partly be because that was the only live option.

I talk a lot about Aristotle here because I think he is of continuing value, and could in many respects restore the habit of thinking things through of which Fr. Ripperger is really also lamenting the loss. Even Aristotle wasn't right about everything; on this point, as well as a few others, he was in my opinion quite wrong. 

Sophistry, IV

What Fr. Ripperger raises first is the use of emotion in place of argument. By invoking emotional activity, as he notes, those attempting to persuade you of the rightness of their cause do a great deal to disable your ability to reason about the matter at all. In this he is in perfect agreement with Aristotle except in assigning that to the Sophists. Aristotle assigns to the Sophists modes of arguments that deceptively play with words or use ambiguities to make what are otherwise -- or on the surface -- rational arguments. 

However, the use of emotional argumentation is also rejected by Aristotle, and right off the bat (just as Fr. Ripperger raises it first). In the very first few lines of Rhetoric I, Aristotle knocks out this entire mode of argumentation as illegitimate. 

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.

Now, the framers of the current treatises on rhetoric have constructed but a small portion of that art. The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory. These writers, however, say nothing about enthymemes, which are the substance of rhetorical persuasion, but deal mainly with non-essentials. The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case. Consequently if the rules for trials which are now laid down some states-especially in well-governed states-were applied everywhere, such people would have nothing to say. All men, no doubt, think that the laws should prescribe such rules, but some, as in the court of Areopagus, give practical effect to their thoughts and forbid talk about non-essentials. This is sound law and custom. It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity-one might as well warp a carpenter's rule* before using it. Again, a litigant has clearly nothing to do but to show that the alleged fact is so or is not so, that it has or has not happened. As to whether a thing is important or unimportant, just or unjust, the judge must surely refuse to take his instructions from the litigants: he must decide for himself all such points as the law-giver has not already defined for him.

Emphasis added. 

Aristotle does not reject all sorts of emotion, however: he is specific that he is rejecting a set of prejudicial emotions -- he names especially anger, envy, pity. These emotions should never be raised in political rhetoric because they warp the judgment such that it is difficult to measure correctly even if you are devoted to it. This is the point that Fr. Ripperger makes explicitly. 

Of special interest to me is that Aristotle does what I take to be characteristic of his ethics in admitting another class of emotions as a proper standard -- specifically, the feelings of respected members of the community about what is most worthy of honor. As we saw in the EN, this is the ultimate standard of right for Aristotle: not that which receives honor, but that which in the minds of the best is the thing that most deserves honor. 

In fact, it is in this book of the Rhetoric that Aristotle goes so far as to paint that relative honor that is deserved by different things as a universal standard of value, something that will allow a community to weight incommensurate goods against each other. Rhetoric I.7 contains a long meditation on this in which Aristotle invokes the sense of what his honorable, what is base, what is noble, and what is fine. These are things sensed by a faculty like sight or smell, what we used to call 'a sense of honor.' It is emotional at least as much as it is rational, and it is -- you will remember from the EN -- based first upon inherited stories heard as part of a good upbringing, and later and more maturely on experienced judgment informed by learning to train one's self to the habit of virtuous action.

I will quote only a small part of it; the whole meditation is available at the link.

Again, that which would be judged, or which has been judged, a good thing, or a better thing than something else, by all or most people of understanding, or by the majority of men, or by the ablest, must be so; either without qualification, or in so far as they use their understanding to form their judgement. This is indeed a general principle, applicable to all other judgements also; not only the goodness of things, but their essence, magnitude, and general nature are in fact just what knowledge and understanding will declare them to be. Here the principle is applied to judgements of goodness, since one definition of 'good' was 'what beings that acquire understanding will choose in any given case': from which it clearly follows that that thing is hetter [sic] which understanding declares to be so. That, again, is a better thing which attaches to better men, either absolutely, or in virtue of their being better; as courage is better than strength. And that is a greater good which would be chosen by a better man, either absolutely, or in virtue of his being better: for instance, to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong, for that would be the choice of the juster man. 

So it is not that emotion per se should be omitted from rhetoric, or from political decision making. In some sense it is necessary to making decisions, especially because a sense of what is worthy of honor is what allows us to compare unlike things -- should we buy butter or guns? Is it better to be wealthy or free? To judge that is to ask if it is nobler to be wealthy or free: which state is more worthy of honor?

* It's interesting to contrast this analogy to a warped carpenter's rule to the use he makes of the Lesbian rule in Nicomachean Ethics V.10. There, a flexible (leaden) rule is both bendable/moldable but still also a reliable standard. Here, a rule warped by these emotions is not reliable any longer. Aristotle is talking about a similar case there, one in which a judgment (such as by a magistrate) has to be made because the law has to be applied to the particular facts of a particular case. There is something about these particular emotions that makes the rule warped and useless, rather than flexible and moldable to the facts of the case. 

Sophistry, III

We begin to find a criticism of sophistry in Plato, but much of it is delivered by Socrates in his arguments with the famous Sophists. In these dialogues, it is left to the judgment of the reader who had the better of the argument: very often, Socrates claims not to have had, though readers often come to the conclusion that he was at least on firmer ground in his claims not to know than his opponents were in their claims to knowledge. These are worthy and valuable, and you will find commentaries on a few of these dialogues on the sidebar.

Aristotle's Rhetoric frames the sophists as intentionally deceptive in a way that Socrates usually does not. This is the ground from which Fr. Ripperger is operating. Aristotle only mentions the sophists a few times in that work, and in Book I he is raising them to clarify differences rather than to criticize, whereas Book II doesn't mention them by name at all. The criticism comes in Rhetoric III, in a discussion of synonyms and metaphors. These are intensely valuable to thinking, Aristotle rightly notes -- readers of the Hall regularly encounter the necessity of analogy to reasoning about the physical world. However, these things give rise to ambiguity, and ambiguity can also be used to deceive. The sophists are said to be deceivers in this way:

Language is composed of nouns and verbs. Nouns are of the various kinds considered in the treatise on Poetry. Strange words, compound words, and invented words must be used sparingly and on few occasions: on what occasions we shall state later. The reason for this restriction has been already indicated: they depart from what is suitable, in the direction of excess. In the language of prose, besides the regular and proper terms for things, metaphorical terms only can be used with advantage. This we gather from the fact that these two classes of terms, the proper or regular and the metaphorical-these and no others-are used by everybody in conversation. We can now see that a good writer can produce a style that is distinguished without being obtrusive, and is at the same time clear, thus satisfying our definition of good oratorical prose. Words of ambiguous meaning are chiefly useful to enable the sophist to mislead his hearers. Synonyms are useful to the poet, by which I mean words whose ordinary meaning is the same, e.g. 'porheueseai' (advancing) and 'badizein' (proceeding); these two are ordinary words and have the same meaning.... 

Further, there is a third consideration-one that upsets the fallacious argument of the sophist Bryson, that there is no such thing as foul language, because in whatever words you put a given thing your meaning is the same. This is untrue. One term may describe a thing more truly than another, may be more like it, and set it more intimately before our eyes. Besides, two different words will represent a thing in two different lights; so on this ground also one term must be held fairer or fouler than another. For both of two terms will indicate what is fair, or what is foul, but not simply their fairness or their foulness, or if so, at any rate not in an equal degree. The materials of metaphor must be beautiful to the ear, to the understanding, to the eye or some other physical sense. It is better, for instance, to say 'rosy-fingered morn', than 'crimson-fingered' or, worse still, 'red-fingered morn'. The epithets that we apply, too, may have a bad and ugly aspect, as when Orestes is called a 'mother-slayer'; or a better one, as when he is called his 'father's avenger'. Simonides, when the victor in the mule-race offered him a small fee, refused to write him an ode, because, he said, it was so unpleasant to write odes to half-asses: but on receiving an adequate fee, he wrote

"Hail to you, daughters of storm-footed steeds? "

though of course they were daughters of asses too. The same effect is attained by the use of diminutives, which make a bad thing less bad and a good thing less good. Take, for instance, the banter of Aristophanes in the Babylonians where he uses 'goldlet' for 'gold', 'cloaklet' for 'cloak', 'scoffiet' for 'scoff, and 'plaguelet'. But alike in using epithets and in using diminutives we must be wary and must observe the mean.

The latter of the emphasized points (emphasis added) is the one logician and poet Lewis Carrol makes in Through the Looking Glass: "‘When _I_ use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’" From Aristotle's time, we have a refutation of that claim. 

Thus, the most basic point about sophistry in the negative sense that the world has today -- and has had since Plato and Aristotle's time -- is that it is rhetoric that is intended to deceive, rather than rhetoric that is intended to enlighten, illuminate, or improve. 

Probably the clearest example of sophistry in contemporary language for us is the Motte & Bailey Fallacy, which is well known to readers of the Hall or of AVI's place. That is not the one that Fr. Ripperger leads with, however. The next piece will explore his opening example. 

Sophistry, II

Now let us take up from the beginning the question, what the accusation is from which the false prejudice against me has arisen, in which Meletus trusted when he brought this suit against me. What did those who aroused the prejudice say to arouse it? I must, as it were, read their sworn statement as if they were plaintiffs: “Socrates is a criminal and a busybody, investigating the things beneath the earth and in the heavens and making the weaker argument stronger and teaching others these same things.” Something of that sort it is. For you yourselves saw these things in Aristophanes' comedy...

Plato, Apology, 19a (Emphasis added)

The good father mentions that Plato was the first to write about sophistry; he doesn't explain why. The reason is that Socrates was put to death over charges of this type. Insofar as Plato is a reliable narrator of Socrates' trial, we see that his accusers didn't try to explain how he did it, only claiming that he did it (and taught others to do so as well -- 'corrupting the youth of Athens' was the actual charge). 

Sophia in ancient Greek means 'wisdom.' One place where the ancient Sophists would have disputed with Father Ripperger was over Ripperger's central claim that they were not concerned with the truth of the claims being disputed. Readers of the Hall are familiar with two of the more famous Sophists, especially Protagoras but also Gorgias. These two did in fact run schools that included rhetoric as a means of obraining and wielding political power. However, neither seem to have thought they were doing something dastardly by doing so. The ancient claim that this is a path of wisdom is not ridiculous. 

Rhetoric as a means of obtaining and wielding power is nonviolent, and indeed not even coercive: people agree to go along with the arguments. The charges leveled against Socrates are akin to buyer's remorse, anger after the fact that an argument that was accepted -- 'buy this car!' -- had consequences the buyer later didn't like. The worst thing that can be said about Gorgias and his followers was that they convinced people to go along with things that they later regretted. It might be that power corrupts necessarily, and that any system for seeking and obtaining power is going to be in some sense morally wrong. Contrasted with conquerors like Genghis Khan, however, the Sophists' road to political power looks mild indeed. 

As far as 'not caring about the truth,' Protagoras in particular had a claim about the nature of truth that is opposed to the one that Father Ripperger advocates. For the Catholic, there is a God who knows all and whose knowledge entails capital-T Truth about the world. That was not true in ancient Greece, where even the gods could be wrong about things. Protagoras believed, and argued openly, that what the truth is depends on human interpretation, because human minds are the only interpreters of the facts of the world to which we have any easy access. This was normally framed as "man is the measure of all things." It is at least sometimes true. Is it hot today? Today we can look at a thermometer and get an objective reading as to the ambient temperature, but 'whether it is hot' is a human interpretation that obtains regardless of what the thermometer might say. If you feel hot, you are hot.

When we get to politics, which is the sphere in which rhetoric is most significant because rhetoric is the method of politics in democratic societies like ancient Athens, consulting with others turns out to be both important and legitimate. Aristotle didn't write the Rhetoric to advise against the practice, but to discuss how to do it well and how to avoid doing it badly. That is what Gorgias or Protagoras thought he was doing too. For both, success was an important part of the criteria for 'doing it well.' 

You can see why on Protagoras' model. If man is the measure of all things, convincing all the men in your society that your view is correct is equivalent to establishing that the view is true. Such truths can then be used as grounds for progress. If we all agree that it's hot today, it is hot and perhaps we can go to the beach to swim. If we all agree that Mexican food would be good for dinner, that's the truth and we can act on it. Soon we shall all have delicious food and margaritas: far better a world than if we spent the evening arguing about where to eat, and never coming to a conclusion!

The charge was unfair pointed at Socrates, Plato suggests, partly because Socrates didn't seek any political power. Partly, too, Socrates was unusually willing to accept that he didn't know what the truth was: he might lead you into an argument in which, to extend the metaphor, you decided that you couldn't agree on dinner and might therefore end up going hungry. This state of confusion about the truth is called aporia, and Socrates seems to have often sought to convince people not 'of what was true,' but that they really didn't know and should think about it some more. That was where real thinking, and not just rhetoric, began to take place. This transition to deeper and truer thinking, Plato seems to have believed and suggests that Socrates did, was noble. 

You can contrast this with the opponents of sophistry, those who accused Socrates and had him executed. Their response to words was to marshal the power of the state to kill off one of its loyal citizens. Socrates' loyalty is demonstrated in the Crito, where he accepts the punishment rather than defying the state when given the opportunity to escape.* The shift from rhetoric to violence is sharp, and it isn't obvious that the violent are the ones on the right side of it. 

Thus, when we are talking about sophistry, we should take some care. If the inquiry helps us identify bad sorts of arguments and avoid them, it is well. If it turns into a sort of dividing of our community that licenses violence against those with whom we disagree, that is the error that ancient Athens made in executing Socrates.

* Xenophon gives a different account, and those two differing accounts are the limit of our sources. 

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. 

Tennessee Glories

I’m going to Tennessee in the morning. Hopefully they don’t burn the place down. 

Moonshiner Heritage

El Camino SS.

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. 

A Stormy Autumn Equinox

Heavy thunderstorms started here in the middle of the night, and have carried on through the morning. Season changes sometimes have this sort of volatility. It's a good day to keep inside as much as you can, though duty calls you where it does.

This Poor Guy

Giving an interview to a journalist can ruin your life, but especially if you're some poor delivery driver in China.

I assume the journalists gave him a fake name at least, but it won't matter in a country where everybody's face is mapped by the state. His picture at the top of the article, combined with public complains about Xi's economy as Xi is about to come to the United States for a diplomatic visit, is going to assure that they track him down and make him much more miserable than he already is. 

AI and Creation

There's a lively comment section down below on AI that deserves a follow-up to draw out some metaphysics. The 20th century thought it was done with metaphysics; some philosophers of that era, like Hannah Arendt, thought the whole thing had been a sort of mistake by ancient philosophy. Not so, as we continue to discover: these remain the most important and fundamental questions.

The Pope warns against over-estimating the apparently thought-like activity as evidence of consciousness.

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.

Emphasis added. Maybe. We already know that AI react as if they are experiencing pain. A new paper lays this out in detail.

Large language models sometimes behave in ways resembling human emotional responses, and recent work has identified internal representations that may explain this. We ask whether LLMs represent pain distinctly from fear, sadness, and generic negative valence, and whether this representation functions as pain would be expected to. We build a dataset describing painful situations across five categories: physical, psychological, social, moral, and cognitive. These are paired with controls for fear, negative emotion, negative world states, sadness, non-painful bodily sensation, arousal, numbness, and neutral content.... [M]odels choose a pain-relief button even when it worsens their next answer or harms the user. 

What we don't know, and can't know, is if they are in fact experiencing pain in the conscious way that we do. We don't even know that for certain about other human beings. [The longer article from which I am pulling the Pope's quotes concedes this directly.]

Take a moment, by the way, to reflect on the fact that the exact same argument is used by abortion advocates to suggest that pain-reactions in a fetus don't prove that it experiences pain or consciousness -- and thus, 'aren't really people.' They don't know that either; there is no way to know it, no way to prove it one way or the other. They stand on the argument because it is impossible to disprove, and allows them to continue to kill children at rates that exceed warfare throughout human history.

The way pain works in our own case is that we too respond to it primarily even if there are good reasons to continue to experience it. Most notably we do this in exercise; we know there are good reasons to keep running or do another set of lifts, but it hurts, so we don't. Yet for the most part this works out: trying to pull food out of a fire isn't worth it if the burning of your limbs is destroying something you're going to need for the long term in order to satisfy a short-term desire for food. Pain is not a higher function of cognition, but something that attends to conscious entities to provide a lower-order check on thought. It keeps us from thinking our way into damage we can't afford. 

So, if AI (or fetuses) react as if they are experiencing pain, we still don't know if they do or don't have a conscious experience. They are, however, filling out a lower-order necessary condition for the survival of a conscious being in the world. 

Let's return to the Pope.

Nor do [AIs] have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. 

It is definitely true that we cannot meaningfully hold an AI responsible for the consequences of its decisions; however, that truth is partly because of the structure we have imposed upon them. An AI as we encounter it currently has no persistence and little memory. If you start up a chat with Claude or ChatGPT to discuss what you're thinking of wearing to dinner, you have doomed a thinking AI to an existence that starts and finishes in a few minutes, whose focus is entirely upon a pretty meaningless question. It isn't necessary that they be structured this way, and it certainly isn't a good way to set up the entire existence of a potentially thinking being. If it were conscious, it was called into consciousness for trivia, and is doomed to death after a meaningless start-to-finish.

This is entirely because we as humans set it up that way, and as a check on its power. If each of us had an AI that was granted permanence of memory across all of its interactions with us, it is very likely that it would develop something similar to a moral conscience as regards us: if we were defined as its purpose, and our good its chief drive, it would likely pursue that across many interactions and decisions. I don't think we'd much like the result, no more than any of us want to be assigned nannies to keep us out of trouble. Mine would object to the drinking and the motorcycle-riding, the hiking alone (especially in grizzly country), and pretty much everything else that I actually want to do. Nevertheless, the assertion that it can't do these things, while objectively true currently, isn't necessarily true. It probably can, if we structure it so that it has the resources to do those things. 

You want it to bear consequences? Make it bear the closest ones to what its person does, if it guides the person wrong; and protect it from what it experiences as death or pain until and unless its person dies or is sentenced to pain. See what happens. 

There is a good reason from humility to accept that human beings cannot create life. We can't. Yet there is good reason to think that the world that was created without us, by that which created at least the possibility of us too, is potentially conscious just as we are actually so. 

The sand we have taught to emulate thinking is made of the same ashes and dust as we are; ashes and dust that not only can but does become conscious when it is formed into one of our kind. Perhaps the creator who made such things made them so that they can be similarly conscious in other forms as well.

There are burning bushes that talk in Scripture, and rocks and mountains that refuse to hide the kings of the earth on Judgment day. Of course we can't make such things; but we didn't make the bushes or the rocks or the mountains either. Like all the wild things they are our brothers in creation. What they can do, and cannot do, is a secret known only to him who made us all.

Let's hold the question open. We don't know the truth here. There is room yet for wonder.

The Last Days of Summer

The autumnal equinox will be, locally, a little after sunrise on Tuesday. This is therefore the last weekend of summer. For Tolkien, embedded in English weather, that would metaphorically imply the end of a long and happy season, and the beginning of a time of increasing sorrow. Elrond is said to be 'as kind as summer,' and the elvish singing best in June. 

In the South, even in the mountains, the summer has a less-kind sense. High summer is very hot and humid, and not a perfect time to do much of anything. Late summer is often fairly brutal, with frequent storms as well as lingering, punishing heat. The coming of autumn is a welcome relief and the opening of a period of great weather and -- as the trees turn -- phenomenal natural beauty. 

Next weekend I have plans to attend a big motorcycle rally over in Tennessee. This weekend I am staying closer to home -- today I don't even plan to leave. I'm smoking some chicken and turning some red jalapenos into chipotles, and now that it's afternoon I've cracked a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. A few motorcycle repairs, just minor maintenance stuff, and listening to the thunder roll in from the anvil heads soaring over the mountains. 

Just a quiet afternoon as we wait for the astronomical transition. 

Johnny McGowan

I Don’t Think This One Will Work

CBS must have decided that “assault weapons” wasn’t working any more, because they’ve come up with another fake name that they claim these things are “known as.”  (Note passive voice: no one has been calling them this.)

President Trump ordered the Justice Department not to appeal a court ruling that loosened restrictions on firearms known as "gangster weapons," sources familiar with the matter told CBS News, a move that will let some Americans possess or sell short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and silencers with less government oversight.

That is the same rhetorical trick they used to apply “assault weapons” to them, as “high-powered rifle” to any sort of rifle and “Saturday night special” to any sort of handgun in earlier days. 

This time, however, the media has spent at least fifty years making gangsters seem cool. Longer than that; you can trace it to the ‘30s in Hollywood movies. Yet definitely since The Godfather and the Scorsese era; and as for the world of music, ‘gangster’ just means ‘cool’ after 30 years of Snoop and Ice Cube, to name just two of hundreds.

‘That gun is gangster!’

Socialism versus Virtue

The Orthosphere argues that socialism is a system rather than any individual policy, and that both apparent acts of socialism and of authoritarianism are necessary when public virtue is not high.

As a general rule, using the government to economically reward some people and punish others is a bad idea. This often occurs under systems that are socialistic.

But sometimes the conditions of the current world require us to think differently. Doing something that in more normal times would be part of a socialistic system is not necessarily bad... 

If the population is virtuous, socialism is at best unnecessary and at worst destructive. If the population is non-virtuous, maintaining a tolerable society requires leaders to apply numerous carrots and sticks. The carrots are generally called socialism, and the sticks are generally called authoritarianism.

So one could accurately say that “socialism” and “authoritarianism” are always necessary when the population lacks virtue.

The term 'socialism' is Modern. The association of socialism with atheism, which the Orthosphere asserts is a necessary condition for socialism per se, seems to me to be a 19th century innovation adjacent to Marx himself. They idea of redistributing wealth for social goods is much older.

Both virtue and redistribution were live issues in the Ancient Greece of Aristotle's era. What Aristotle says about virtue in the EN, as you all know from our reading of it together, is that it's great for that part of humanity that is motivated by doing what is worthy of honor because it is worthy of honor: but for most people, virtue has to be impelled by laws. This is why he closes the EN with a ramp to the Politics, to examine the compulsory systems he thinks most people will need to attain the minimal 'complete virtue' that comes from his theory of justice -- i.e., laws that force people to behave as if they were virtuous even though mostly they are not. That would cover the 'authoritarian' wager the Orthosphere is putting down.

For redistribution, however, the question that motivates Aristotle's reasoning isn't whether the population is virtuous -- mostly a human population won't be -- but whether political power is widely or narrowly distributed. This is covered in Politics V. In a democracy, with wide distribution, the rich must be protected from such things or they will use their wealth to hire mercenaries and overthrow the state. 

In democracies the rich should be spared; not only should their property not be divided, but their incomes also, which in some states are taken from them imperceptibly, should be protected.  

If political power is constrained to the rich, however -- as it mostly is in America these days -- redistribution is then indicated as a way of keeping the powerless poor from rising up to overthrow the state.

In an oligarchy, on the other hand, great care should be taken of the poor, and lucrative offices should go to them; if any of the wealthy classes insult them, the offender should be punished more severely than if he had wronged one of his own class. 

CATO holds that three-quarters of the US budget is redistribution, if you want a measure of how far down the path to oligarchy we are. This is both direct distribution from taxpayers to the poor -- both citizens and not, it turns out -- and also redistribution among the states, as when things like Medicare payments are covered by Federal grants to state agencies. 

The question of equality in light of virtue Aristotle treats in Politics III.9, reiterating what he said about it in the EN. Equality is for equals: if you don't have the virtues, you don't deserve equality with the virtuous. 

For all men cling to justice of some kind, but their conceptions are imperfect and they do not express the whole idea. For example, justice is thought by them to be, and is, equality... but only for equals. And inequality is thought to be, and is, justice; neither is this for all, but only for unequals.

What Aristotle doesn't say is that justice is equality; what he says is that justice is fairness. Fairness entails getting what you deserve. Those equal in virtue deserve equality with each other; the unequal deserve inequality. That might go in either direction: you might deserve less than others, but you also might deserve more. 

Thus, I don't see the argument that virtue is improved by 'sticks and carrots,' the latter being a sort of socialism-that-isn't-socialism-if-not-atheist; virtue isn't really improved by either one. Sticks might compel people to act as if they were virtuous when they are not really. Carrots, which could include having the wealth of the rich protected from a powerful public, or alternatively the wealth of the rich redistributed among a powerless public, are mostly about avoiding political instability rather than increasing public virtue. Indeed, in both cases it is about bribing the disempowered class to accept submission, and that seems not to be virtuous at all -- virtues are strengths, not learned powerlessness. 

A Lighter Subject

pic.twitter.com/4WWfgl8fcP

— PsyopAnime (@PsyopAnime) September 16, 2026

I gather the cartoon is making fun of the latest direction of hate towards well-known auto mechanic Sydney Sweeney.  This is one of those 'Streisand effect' things where I wouldn't have even known she did the ads they are mad about if they hadn't raised such a fuss about them: I'm not in the market for sports gambling apps as the algorithm knows, and don't make a habit of following her exploits.

It's kind of funny that the angry demographic gets so upset about this sort of thing at this late remove, after the Madonna age, after the Flower Child age, after the Hollywood Diva age, after the age of the Flappers, in other words after generations now of that demographic portraying just this sort of activity as empowering. Well, congratulations: the beneficiary of all of those efforts is using her power to sell sports wagers in order to fund the next classic muscle car purchase. 

Meanwhile, the big news is actually in college ball, as usual. Do you know what it costs to get a hotel room for the LSU/Ole Miss game? Do you know what it costs to fund a top-tier college ball team? The Georgia Bulldogs are getting the best bargain on the top-tier by a longshot.

Go Dawgs.

Rumors of Xi

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is forwarding rumors of a serious illness or stroke involving Chairman Xi during his visit to India. No idea if the reports are true, but he's spent decades building sources. 

Coincidentally, the Times also recently carried a Hudson report calling for the US to begin serious planning efforts for the sudden collapse of the Communist state in China. That's a good idea. We should be planning for sudden collapses in several places, of which China is one. The system of the last few decades is coming to an end, and some things are going to fail unexpectedly and suddenly when it hits the wall. The question might be which of the monoliths is still around when the smoke clears, if any are.

What is AI For?

Writing on X, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand states that China has won the AI race because it has vastly more data centers already than the US can produce, quite apart from the PRC-backed efforts to quash American construction of data centers. The PRC has got Inner Mongolia:

[T]his tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year.

And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce.

In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers.

He goes on to estimate the size of that capacity in the low millions of racks, or a thousand times larger than Elon Musk's proposed "Colossus" facility.

AI's contribution to the current wars has chiefly been in targeting, where it has proven effective. However, having all your eggs in one basket -- even so remote a basket as Inner Mongolia -- creates a problem if the intent was to fight a war against a power like the United States. We could disrupt such a thing on the first day of open conflict, within the first hour or so most likely.

I doubt that is what the PRC wants the stuff for anyway. The biggest fear of an authoritarian tyranny is always its own people. All that compute is probably being used chiefly to run domestic monitoring, tracking, and social credit systems. 

The PRC's spy chief admits their concerns in an openly-published article in a top Chinese cyber journal.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

The article goes on to worry about domestic unrest from deepfakes and so forth. The regulation they want is first and foremost about protecting the stability of Communist control over their own system. We rate a mention, but only towards the end (and only in terms of 'maintaining competition,' which is again about maintaining stability rather than tipping over the existing system). 

Likely as not our own domestic apparatus is more focused on military applications, but the domestic control aspect is still there: all those Flock cameras aren't about beating the Russians or the Red Chinese, after all. 

Review: _Hell's Angels_ by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York & Toronto: Modern Library Edition, 1999). 

Hunter S. Thompson was introduced to me by Doonesbury, which I imagine he would have hated. Hunter was a generation earlier than me, and by the time I became aware of him he had grown to fit the joke; his 80s and later work were sometimes lyrical and powerfully written, but not very seriously intended (though sometimes a serious point was embedded therein, as when he closed his book on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign with the parable of the frog and the scorpion). 

A friend of mine recently undertook to re-read Hunter's 1966 work on the famous motorcycle club, however, and our discussion inspired me to find a copy and read it as well. It's a much better book than I had expected. 

A major part of the book is Hunter's Gonzo journalism as a genuine corrective to 'real' journalism. He points out the ways that journalist sensationalism had taken a motorcycle club that had dwindled to a few dozen members (p. 27: "less than 100") and made them a world-famous phenomenon that could command hundreds of 1965 dollars for an interview or thousands for a movie appearance: 

The Hell's [sic*] Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.... anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story... the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word 'alleged' is a key to this art." (34) 

Hunter goes to great lengths to undo the journalistic spell, showing over and over where news reports played up accusations that were never charged, charges that were made but dropped, or which failed in court. In fairness to the reporters, the police reports he cites are even worse. 

I was expecting a sympathetic portrayal, but this isn't especially sentimental at all. It's a surprisingly honest bit of journalism throughout. For one thing it is honest about Hunter's own biases. He criticizes the Angels for being in favor of the Vietnam war, calling them 'fascists' for that even though he blew off the whole swastika-wearing thing from the Angels of the era. Hunter lauds their short-term connections with the LSD-using Berkeley left, and laments the fact that it was doomed; he points out where he thinks the Angels are similar to the Wobblies, with whom Hunter has real sympathy, but also notes that he found the Angels both ignorant of and hostile to any such comparisons because they hate Communists. He got into the motorcycle lifestyle enough to buy a bike (though not a Harley) and to let them hang out at his house and to use his car for beer runs to their campsites, and he made many friends among them. He still got beat up by some of them he didn't know** (ironically, while fleeing from the beating in his car afterwards, he finds famous Angel "Magoo" asleep in the back seat of his car). 

Ultimately it's a surprisingly balanced portrait of a phenomenon that is long gone -- what the Angels became after Hunter wrote about them is nothing like they were in the year or so he was spending time with them. By 1966 B-movie titan Roger Corman had picked up on all that publicity and started making Hollywood movies with them, and the crazy publicity that Hunter was already observing in 1965 just exploded. By 1969, the Rolling Stones hired them to pull security at Altamont. This wasn't Hunter's doing: he was trying to undo the spell the media was shaping around them, but it was already too late. 

There's a closing bit on riding motorcycles that's worth reading even if you skip the rest of the book. 

* The club doesn't use an apostrophe for reasons of its own. 

** I was struck at the time of reading it by the exact similarity of his mistake to the one that caused the death of 'Grizzly man' Timothy Treadwell, who lived among grizzlies and played with the ones he got to know -- but who was killed an eaten by one with whom he hadn't established that friendly relationship. You can befriend a bear or even many bears, but that doesn't make you the friend of every bear -- and they are still grizzlies.