The Crusades as Belated Response

Austin Bay writes:

[For Islamic radicals hearing President Obama] "The Crusades" are a premier victim frame tale. Their cultural and religious victimization begins in 1096 (1st Crusade) as rapine European knights attack the Levant. In 1099 these thugs seize Jerusalem from peaceful Muslims. The 2nd through 9th Crusades are follow-on imperial atrocities. By the way, Israelis are just Jewish Crusaders.

Obama reinforced this crabbed and distorted but politically powerful claptrap. That's Very Stupid Diplomacy...

This victim tale starts with Yarmuk. The Yarmuk River flows east from Syria through Jordan to the Jordan River. In 636 A.D., somewhere near the river, Muslim Arabs defeated a Christian Byzantine army. Thirty years of conflict with the Persians had exhausted the boys from Constantinople. Their tattered formations were no match for horse-mounted zealots. One of Christendom's wealthiest regions, the Levant, fell to these Arab Muslim warriors. Then they turned on the exhausted Persians.

A counter-narrative: The Crusades and the Spanish Reconquista are belated European responses to Islamic imperialism. Yes, that's shaky. But if you know Muslim Saracens seized Sicily in the ninth century, and Rome was repeatedly attacked (and the Vatican sacked), you can start building a real multiculturalist case for embittered Western European grievance. Je suis Charlie? Naw, je suis Charles Martel (Battle of Tours, 732 A.D.).

It's not actually a shaky story at all, although I wouldn't call it a "victim tale." Pope Urban's call for the first Crusade was influenced by two things, both of them immediately contemporary to him:

1) A request from Constantinople for support against Islamic raids, which had not stopped in 636 but rather had continued for hundreds of years,

2) Successes by Western knights in reversing and recovering territory in Spain that had long been overrun by the Islamic Caliphate.

It is surely unsurprising to learn that it wasn't ancient grievances but immediate events that were motivating him. Don't take my word for it, though: take William of Tyre's. He wrote his history within a century of the liberation of Jerusalem, and had access to the primary sources written by the Crusaders themselves.

The Ship of Ely Fen

A beautiful virtual tour of Ely Cathedral.

The fires of the Great Army
That was made of iron men,
Whose lights of sacrilege and scorn
Ran around England red as morn,
Fires over Glastonbury Thorn—
Fires out on Ely Fen.

...

The Earls of the Great Army
That no men born could tire,
Whose flames anear him or aloof
Took hold of towers or walls of proof,
Fire over Glastonbury roof
And out on Ely, fire.

Chesterton would have looked on it, and doubtless thought of it while composing those lines, but Alfred would not have. This particular cathedral was built by Norman kings some years after Alfred broke the great army that no man yet had tired.

"Baby-Making"

The author, it turns out, has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell.

You think it’s exciting to play with blindfolds and cute little commercial handcuffs? Please. Try volunteering for a real adventure: the maternity ward, and everything that comes after. How can such momentous changes unfold from something as deceptively simple as sex? That, my friends, is mystery and intrigue.

The safety part? Well, that’s obvious, too. There’s nothing quite like getting cozy with a man, fully believing that 1) through this encounter, a completely new person might come to be, and 2) if that happens, he’s in all the way.

I'm guessing Cornell must be a pretty good school. She's thought this through, has a solid argument, and is willing to speak some blunt and highly unpopular truths -- follow her links.

Roy Moore & Defiance

Slate is hopping mad about Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's new order directing probate court judges not to issue gay marriage licenses.

In a stunning display of defiance against the judiciary, the U.S. Constitution, and the fundamental rule of law, on Sunday night Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore forbade probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Moore’s interdiction explicitly flouts a federal court order requiring the state to begin recognizing same-sex marriages on Monday, a decision the Supreme Court declined to put on hold.

I don't think it's fair to characterize this as defying a Federal order. What he said was that the Federal order explicitly limits itself to only the Attorney General and his agents, a class that doesn't include probate court judges (who not only don't work for the Atty General, but are of an independent branch of the government). A Federal judge could issue a new order, but for now he's technically correct: Alabama's attorney general and his agents have to stop enforcing the law, but probate court judges are still bound by it.

Of course, if the attorney general can't prosecute you for breaking the law, what would stop a probate court judge who wanted to do so from issuing such licenses? Moore offers the opinion that the governor would have the responsibility, somehow:

...it would be the responsibility of the Chief Executive Officer of the State of Alabama, Governor Robert Bentley, in whom the Constitution vests "the supreme executive power of this state," ... to ensure the execution of the law."The Governor shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." ... 'If the governor's "supreme executive power" means anything, it means that when the governor makes a determination that the laws are not being faithfully executed, he can act using the legal means that are at his disposal.

OK, but what means are those? Can the governor personally prosecute you?

In addition, the very point Moore is standing on here -- the separation of the judicial and executive branches -- means that Roy Moore has no authority to order the governor to do anything. If the governor elects not to do whatever it is he decides he could do, there's nothing Roy Moore can do about it. If the governor is on his side this order provides cover for some sort of action. It's very unclear what action that would be. Alabama's judges are elected, so perhaps the governor could campaign against them next time 'round. But he could do that anyway, if he wanted to do it.

Identity Trumps All

A Western country does not belong in the Middle East and the inclination of the other peoples of the region to oppose such a state is instinctive.

Gay rights, women’s rights and Western-style democracy are also not going to do the trick as all three are irrelevant to the core issue at hand, and true indigenous status easily trumps all three in the minds of even the most progressive young activists.... It is also time to throw away the (somewhat arrogant and very much irrelevant to the point of discussion) “we are the good guys because we are more civilized/produce better technology/have more Nobel prizes than you” rhetoric and go back to the authentic definition of Zionism as an indigenous people’s liberation movement...

I find this argument amazing. Not, I should add, in a good way. It's pushing for a clean break with the argument that X is right in favor of a pure identity claim -- and one that allegedly trumps other identity claims, on a basis that is neither asserted nor obvious to me.

I understood what Yishai Fleischer meant when he said, 'Hey, here on the Mount of Olives are three thousand years of Jewish graves. We belong here.'

Having established that, however, you still have a duty to do right. At no point did he follow up 'we belong here' with 'and therefore we can do whatever we want to everyone else.' The Nobel prize may be a joke, but the ideal of striving for the good and for a kind of justice is not at all a joke.

Disney Princesses Go To War

Um, for ISIS?

Becoming Mulan? Female Western Migrants­ to­ ISIS

Carolyn Hoyle, Alexandra Bradford and Ross Frenett, January 2015

Launching our Women and Extremism (WAE) programme, this report focuses on those women that have travelled from the West to ISIS held territory in support of the terrorist organisation. The first in a series of reports, this research draws on our database of known female migrants to ISIS and analyses their reasons for joining the group, the threat they pose and how to stem the flow of women joining ISIS.

That seems like a questionable decision for even the least spunky Disney Princess.

News Flash

Texas, Georgia are not the most conservative states in the Union -- in fact, they barely make the top twenty.

Wow. I mean, Mississippi, Alabama, sure, but I've got to get out to Wyoming.

The Empire Strikes Back

Japanese troops build monumental snow sculpture.

Terrible Things Have Been Done

...in whose name, exactly?

More than the Spanish Inquisition, nine times as often as Bush. But he gets to be the preacher chiding the Christians to get off their high horse.

Be Still, My Heart

After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most profound legacy could be that it set the world order back to the Middle Ages.

You're probably thinking of the President's Iraq policy allowing a 7th century quasi-government to seize control of much of the Levant, while playing along with Iran's nuclear ambitions in a way likely to secure the theocracy's position among the nations of the world, while making it ever more likely that we'll see a renewed war in the Holy Land.

What he's actually thinking about is the way private contractors remind him of 14th century mercenary armies. There's a strong argument for privatizing our response to groups like ISIS, though, which is that small private firms can offer a short decision chain similar to our enemy's. We don't lose the capacities provided by formal government armies, but those have Schumpeter's disadvantage in dealing with highly adaptable small forces. This is why Marx was wrong about capitalism leading inevitably to monopoly: small competitors lack the economies of scale, but they can often pick off pieces of the larger businesses because their ossified decision-making chains take too long to compete.

That works with 'monopoly on force,' too. As long as contractors are employed by legitimate governments and held accountable according to the ordinary laws of war, there's no reason they should not be used to deal with ISIS-type threats. It's my sense that it's actually much easier to hold private firms and their employees accountable using government mechanisms than for the government to hold itself and its own accountable. There's no sense of protecting one's own that would derail prosecutions, and it's very easy to cancel a contract.

Besides, the 14th century was the during good part of the Middle Ages.

Early blogging

The American experiment with liberty has been under fire since its creation.  The following is an excerpt from a curious little pre-Civil War publication called "Stephen H. Branch's Alligator." Mr. Branch announces that he has reluctantly concluded he must leave his homeland, in view of the alarming political developments. After a lot of fire and brimstone, he suddenly closes in a calmer mood:

Go on, then, ye fanatics and devils of all sections, to your hearts' content, in your apostacy to the living and departed patriots of your distracted and divided country. Stop not until your wives and children run wild through streets and fields of blood, and this whole land is a pile of bleeding and burning ruins. Go on ye incarnate fiends in your bloody enterprise, until the mounds of your fathers are divested of their fragrant verdure, and are trampled by foreign marauders, who wildly gloat over your impending suicide. An irresistible horde of demagogues and vampires, and fanatics and lunatics, are at the throats of the American patriots, and threaten them with strangulation and utter annihilation. Go on, then, ye demons of hell, and tear to fragments the glorious Constitution that was created by Washington, Greene, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Warren, Franklin, Adams, Lafayette and Kosciusko, and nobly defended by Jackson, Perry, Taylor, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Harrison, Grogan, Decatur, (and the living Scott), whose sighs and tears, and expiring energies, were consecrated to its eternal duration. Go on, then, ye slimy vultures, in your ruthless desecration of their graves, until despotic soldiers line our streets and frontiers, and stab the patriots who breathe the enchanting word of liberty. Go on, I say, in your inhuman sacrilege, but I will fly to Switzerland, in whose deep mountain glades I will strive to efface that I was born and reared among the gang of consummate fools and knaves who now level their rifles at the race of noble birds that have graced the American skies for nearly a hundred years. Go on, then, ye dastard traitors, in your bloody demolition, but I will go and live and die in the land of William Tell, whose fair posterity evince a purer fidelity to their remotest ancestors, than those pernicious monsters whose infernal madness will soon surrender the bones of Washington and Jackson to the despots of Europe, whose shafts they foiled, until they went down, with tottering footsteps, into their immortal graves. Farewell, then, ye crazy parricides--farewell, ye Burrs and Arnolds--and when you have consigned your deluded countrymen to all the horrors of anarchy and eternal despotism, think of the humble admonitions of one who, rather than behold the downfall of his beautiful and glorious country, sought peace, and succor, and a mausoleum in the mountains of Switzerland, once traversed by William Tell and his gallant archers, who created a love of liberty that has survived the flight of centuries, and which can never be subdued by foes without, nor fools within, her borders. In my voluntary exile, I will implore God to visit you with His displeasure, through the withering curses of your children, and their posterity to the remotest age, for destroying the liberties of their country, which you should bequeathe to them as they came to you from your illustrious fathers, whose sacred and silent ashes you dare not visit and contemplate at this fearful crisis, amid the pure and tranquil solitudes of the patriotic dead lest the memory of their heroic deeds and sacrifice should remind you of your hellish treason, and paralyze your hearts, and smite your worthless bodies to the dust, and consign your pallid livers to undying torture. Although these admonitions are inscribed in tones of burning scorn, yet they emanate from a bosom that glows with love for my bewildered countrymen. And my last request is, that every patriotic father will gather his little flock around him at evening shades, and read this parting admonition in a clear and feeling voice, and then kneel before the God of nations, and implore Him to preserve their liberties, with a blessing on the humble author of this production, in his unhappy seclusion in a distant land. I would write more, but gushing tears blind my vision, and swell my heart with dying emotions.

Affectionately, 

Stephen H. Branch. 

New York, May 30, 1856

Later, he offers this theory of his fiery nature:

And if, in the morning of life, we do not reflect Vesuvius in our eyes, and belch lava and brimstone from our mouths, we seldom effect much in the great scuffle of life, and go down to our graves with Miss Nancy inscribed at the head and tail of our grassy mounds.

Man, like a horse, must have mettle, and plenty of it, with an immense bottom, or he cannot expect to contend with the fiery steeds of the turf and the forum. And, above all, a man must have a crop or two of worms at 40. All men have more worms in their bellies than they are aware of, (or their physicians, either,) and some have quarts.

Friday Night: The Killer at the Star Club

Scary Christians

Nice one, Bobby:

"The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

What To Tell Sons About Women

So Cassandra and I seem to agree about something, which is that we as a culture need to do a better job teaching our sons about how to understand women. She wrote in a comment:

I wish we could find a way to teach our sons that women aren't lesser or even necessarily weaker. We are stronger in some ways, and undoubtedly weaker in others. But the "lens" here can't be, "compared to a man".

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could see being fully human as a spectrum, along which men tend to position here and women there, but in which - as we mature and grow - the area of overlap grows too?

I always thought that was the entire purpose of marriage: for men and women to teach each other how to be better rounded, more flexible, wiser?

Points on which I agree:

1) We should find a way to teach boys to think of women that doesn't convey that women are "lesser." That's very important, especially if we want boys to consider the woman's interests as something for which they should (at least occasionally) set their own interests aside.

2) There are senses of the words "stronger" and "weaker" in which it can be said that women are stronger than men.

3) The lens shouldn't be "compared to a man," but rather we should teach them to understand that there is an independent and valid perspective they should respect.

4) Part of the purpose of marriage is the unity of husband and wife, which is the only way to experience the fullness of human nature. That's one of St. Thomas Aquinas' three "ends" of marriage.

5) As men age, the natural decline in testosterone reduces one of the major factors that result in very different experiences of the world between men and women. Thus, it makes sense to speak of older men as being better able to understand women's perspective.

Points on which I don't agree:

1) "Being fully human as a spectrum" is only a wonderful thing to teach if it's true, and there are problems with the model. It seems like a lot of people think that way today, which is why you read journalists writing without irony about a man "transitioning to a woman" as if he were transitioning from one job to another. That can't be right, though: at the end of the process, what you will have is not a woman but a surgically altered male who is taking artificial hormones his body won't ever produce on its own. Whether this is in any sense a woman is a topic we've discussed at length, but it seems to me that the only available answers are that there is never a woman or there was always a woman. The idea of transitioning along a spectrum doesn't seem defensible.

2) The lens in a sense has to be "compared to a man" insofar as we are talking about how to raise sons. The very thing we need them to understand is that there's a contrast between the world they live in and the world a woman lives in -- and that requires talking about how their experience compares to hers. That's a problem, given that we agree in the goal in (3) above, but it's a problem we need to grapple with.

3) I think Aquinas is right that the understanding of human nature across the sex divide is not the "entire purpose" of marriage, but rather part of the purpose of marriage. I'm not sure this is a serious difference -- Cass may have been using "entire purpose" for emphasis, rather than being committed to the position literally.

4) As women age, they also endure significant changes in their hormone structures that alter their perspectives in all new ways that men don't experience and need to learn to understand by communication and intimacy. We don't grow closer by nature, in other words; one difference diminishes, a new one appears.

5) Even granting agreement on point (4), we can't rely on marriage to solve this problem because it will generally occur after the period in which misunderstandings are most dangerous. It may be the eventual and complete solution, but we still need an interim approach.

So, all that said --

What should you teach your sons about women?

Stay Classy, Gawker

Morons.

Oaths & Loyalty

A man once took an oath to have, hold, love and cherish a woman until death did they part. They had a son together. Then she told him he had to choose between them.

Soon Forrest walked into his wife's hospital room with Leo in his arms.

Her reaction was unlike one he ever expected.

"I got the ultimatum right then," he said. "She told me if I kept him then we would get a divorce."

Attempts to reach the hospital for comment weren't immediately successful. The baby's mother, Ruzan Badalyan, told ABC News that she did have a child with Down syndrome and she has left her husband, who has the child, but she declined to elaborate.

The philosophical problem here is a dilemma of duty. You have an explicit duty of loyalty to your wife that lasts until death. You have a natural duty of loyalty to your child.

It's easy to condemn the woman, who violated both duties. I wonder if there's unanimity among us that he was right to choose his natural duty over his sacred oath?

Paradoxes in Cosmology

Two things we think we have very solid evidence for are an expanding universe, and the Law of Conservation of Energy and Matter. At least one has to go:

Perhaps the most dramatic, and potentially most important, of these paradoxes comes from the idea that the universe is expanding, one of the great successes of modern cosmology. It is based on a number of different observations.

The first is that other galaxies are all moving away from us. The evidence for this is that light from these galaxies is red-shifted. And the greater the distance, the bigger this red-shift.

Astrophysicists interpret this as evidence that more distant galaxies are travelling away from us more quickly. Indeed, the most recent evidence is that the expansion is accelerating.

What’s curious about this expansion is that space, and the vacuum associated with it, must somehow be created in this process. And yet how this can occur is not at all clear. “The creation of space is a new cosmological phenomenon, which has not been tested yet in physical laboratory,” says Baryshev.

What’s more, there is an energy associated with any given volume of the universe. If that volume increases, the inescapable conclusion is that this energy must increase as well. And yet physicists generally think that energy creation is forbidden.

Baryshev quotes the British cosmologist, Ted Harrison, on this topic: “The conclusion, whether we like it or not, is obvious: energy in the universe is not conserved,” says Harrison.

There's more at the link.

Rape and Violence

Heather Wilhelm mocks this blog post as "an impassioned defense of making your rapist breakfast," but that's even more unfair than it sounds. It's not a defense of having done it at all, let alone an impassioned one. Just the opposite: the author wishes she had been brave and fought, but admits that she didn't. What she did instead was to try to tell herself a different sort of story about what had happened, one in which this was a sort of romance.

I find it clarifying and helpful, because I think I understand why the man she calls "my rapist" thought it was appropriate to stay the night and have breakfast in the morning. Most likely he doesn't think of himself as a rapist at all. He may have no idea that she thought it was rape at the time.

The story as she tells it involves her not fighting him. She says no, but when he asks "why not?" she doesn't tell us if she replied, or how, except that it was not by fighting (or even by cursing, her graphic implies).

One of the ways in which men and women experience the world radically differently is in our experience of violence. Men are the victims of all forms of violence (including criminal violence, except possibly rape) at much higher rates. It's an ordinary part of our childhood and adolescence, as testosterone kicks in and young bucks clash for position and respect.

My guess is that this didn't seem like violence at all to him. She invited him in, she didn't fight, she didn't curse or spit, perhaps she didn't even argue when asked "Why not?" In the morning she made him breakfast and carried on as if there was a romance. He may well have no sense of her experience of the evening at all, and can't be expected to without having it explained to him.

The markers that he would rely upon to know that he was entering the territory of violence are not present. In the world he likely lives in, if it's anything like my world, violence and force are accompanied by clear markers of rage and reaction. She showed no sign of either. What she experienced as a horrible violation, he probably experienced as a moment of hesitation quickly overcome by passionate ardor.

This is something you really need to teach young men, because you can't expect them to have learned it from their very different experience of the world. Her honesty in making this cartoon helped me understand it, perhaps more clearly than ever before. She should be praised for that honesty. Though Wilhelm calls her "weak kneed" and she herself says she "is not brave," this took significant courage to admit to herself, let alone to the world. If we listen to what she is saying, it might provide a useful lesson for young men. The concept of violence for many men is clear and has bright lines, but they are far removed from the much larger space to which she gives the same name.

There's a lesson there, for men and for women.

Right to Try

This is an idea I have advocated for years, though I don't know if I've done so here.

On Monday, the Montana State Senate unanimously passed a “right to try” bill, which would allow terminally ill patients to ignore federal restrictions on experimental treatments and drugs. Too often, patients who cannot be cured by conventional treatment are denied the ability to try new options thanks to onerous regulations by the FDA.

I think of this as somewhat like donating one's body to science, with the alteration that you might possibly not have to die. Even if you do, you were going to die anyway, and you're helping all of us someday solve the problem you are facing. It's the right thing to do.

How dangerous is measles?

The Phenomena website is running an article with good information about measles.  It clears up something that was confusing me, which is exactly how dangerous this disease really is.  An ordinary case of measles comes in through the lungs, attacks immune cells, circulates for a while, and ultimately moves back into the respiratory system, where it can be coughed back out in order to find a new host.  There are a couple of characteristic ways for measles to get out of hand.  One is that, on rare occasions, it spreads into the nervous system, with horrific results.  Another is that it severely depresses the immune system for several weeks, leaving its sufferers vulnerable to dangerous bouts of opportunistic pneumonia.  In a wealthy society with good medical care, this translates into one to three deaths per thousand.  In a grisly refugee camp, the death rate can be 25%.

Measles, an airborne virus, is fantastically contagious.  Something like 90% of non-immune people in a room with an infectious measles patient can expect to contract the disease.

This Hoover article runs through some of the legal history of the police power in the field of epidemiology and public health.  It's an old controversy.

Þæt wæs god cyning!

Apparently the King of Jordan has begun bombing ISIS-held strongholds with Napalm, and may be flying one of the bombers personally. Members of Jordan's air force flying against ISIS targets were already volunteers, but their pride and morale must be through the roof if that report is true.

A Competing View: Political Correctness Defends Against Anti-Intellectualism

'Academic book bannings' has a wicked ring to it.

The anti-ethnic studies law passed by the state prohibits teachings that "promote the overthrow of the United States government," "promote resentment toward a race or class of people," "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group," and/or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."... I invite you to take on as your summer reading the astonishingly lengthy list of books that have been removed from the Tucson public school system as part of this wholesale elimination of the Mexican-American studies curriculum....

There are a number of factors at play in the current rash of controversies. One is a rather stunning sense of privilege, the confident sense of superiority that allows someone to pass sweeping judgment on a body of work without having done any study at all.... This is not mere arrogance; it is the same cocooned "white ghetto" narrow-mindedness that allows someone like Michael Hicks to be in charge of a major American school system yet not know "Rosa Clark's" correct name.

OK, so, not knowing Rosa Parks' name is a pretty embarrassing lapse. Perhaps, we may hope, he misspoke. In perfect fairness, as I get older I find that I often misremember things.

On the other hand, how much scholarship must I undertake to be allowed to criticize these specialty "studies" curricula? I'm willing to join the author in asserting that the answer is not "none at all," but I also don't think it requires obtaining a degree in the study being criticized.

The people being labeled here as anti-intellectual are a school board member, the school board in general, and a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It would be very strange to pursue those opportunities if you really hated intellectual life and wanted no part of it. In fact, the writer mentioned -- Naomi Schaefer Riley -- is the author of several books herself, including a number on education and college! She has a Magna cum laude degree from Harvard in English and Government. This sounds like someone who is probably very well placed to judge the relative value of these studies compared to the humanities or sciences.

She doesn't sound especially intolerant, either, having written a book on interfaith marriages. It turns out she's in one herself, which is also an interracial marriage.

So an alternative theory: while it is possible to find cranks in any political movement, perhaps at least some of the criticism against these 'studies' fields is justified.

A Violation of their Liberty Interests

Following up on the Nozick piece below, a politician descends into mockery. Just as income taxes represent a kind of forced labor, as taking an hour of your labor from you in compensation is not very different from forcing you to work for an hour for the good of the state, forcing you to take time to wash your hands if you work at a restaurant is also a kind of forced labor!

Perhaps he did it on purpose? Maybe not.

“I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,'" the senator said.

Tillis said his interlocutor was in disbelief, and asked whether he thought businesses should be allowed to "opt out" of requiring employees to wash their hands after using the restroom.

The senator said he'd be fine with it, so long as businesses made this clear in "advertising" and "employment literature."

“I said: ‘I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,” Tillis said.

Maybe Nozick recanted for good cause.

The Enemy Among Us

I wish I'd been able to have more children, myself, but not everyone feels that way.

Why are children so unwelcome at times? We all know the drill.

They are noisy. They are messy. They are naughty. They are expensive. They get in the way. They are inconvenient. But hey, guess what? They are a part of life. Without children, we have no adults, we have no future, we have no human race. Yet there seem to be some who, if they could, prefer to segregate out this entirely necessary segment of the population and put them all in neat little boxes where they won’t inconvenience anyone in the adults-only world.

Further, as we are reminded by the recent Roe v. Wade anniversary, there are those who believe that children are inconvenient to the point of being expendable at will. Remember when the pro-choice slogan was, “Keep abortion safe, legal, and rare?” Yeah, neither do I....

Forty-two years ago last month, the law of the land ruled that certain reproductive “rights” were of greater value than the lives of the tiny human beings we all once were. And rather than supporting the couples who choose to use their reproductive capabilities to bring life into the world, our culture tends to ridicule and shun them for causing public inconvenience[.]

She ends by quoting Mt. 19:14, which I suppose is so commonplace a sentiment as to be a cliché. Or, is it revolutionary again?

Don't Trust Generals

You know how a serving officer in the Marine Corps Reserve can write a critical piece about those who outrank him? If he is also a sitting Congressman, he can. Oh yes, he can.

Wrecking Balls

There's a lot to like in this piece's analysis, which is the product of the 'daughter of a lesbian raised in an LBGT household.'

The “marriage equality” arguments leverage children.... Not a single same-sex couple can reproduce together. It behooves us to analyze the ways that same-sex marriage demands other people’s children as a “civil right” and in so doing invariably denies both women their own children and children their right to a mother and a father.

That's amazingly strong language, but it's not wrong if we are talking about children who become available for adoption by being 'taken away' rather than 'given up.' It turns out, we are talking about children like that.

These children are never the result of same-sex couples’ accidental pregnancy. In this case, nobody forced them to “adopt” children, so it seems a tad manipulative to use these children to back an argument for marriage. Juxtaposed alongside the description of bad mothers stands the worthiness of the plaintiffs.... [The dissent presents] the birthmothers as horrific... We hear it loud and clear: these mothers did not deserve their own children....

Who could have ever envisioned that the Fourteenth Amendment would become a tool to strip poor and minority women and their children of human rights? A decision from the bench that ignores the questions surrounding children’s rights betrays society’s animus toward women and the poor. Who exactly is being denied “due process” and “equal protection”?

Certainly not the people who have managed to field legal teams to defend their agenda against laws in nearly every state of the union, I expect. Most likely they're much more equal than the sort of people who have to default to public defenders, and who in civil cases must do their best to defend themselves.

Maybe So, Buster...

...but it's only your state that has its own FARK tag.

Nothing Suspicious Here

Headline: "Draft of Arrest Warrant for Argentine President Found at Dead Prosecutor’s Home."

The new revelation that Mr. Nisman had drafted arrest warrants for the president and the foreign minister further illustrates the heightened tensions between the prosecutor and the government before he was found dead on Jan. 18 at his apartment with a gunshot wound to his head. He had been scheduled the next day to provide details before Congress about his accusations against Mrs. Kirchner.

Philosophy Jokes

AVI posted a link to some philosophy jokes, which indicates that at least one of you might be interested in such things. The jokes are usually only funny if you know the philosopher's work (and then they sometimes are too obvious to really be amusing, though the Descartes joke is great).

Also, try this comic strip. It has occasionally done some excellent work.

A Long Piece on Nozick

This piece was written by a left-leaning author who doesn't see the irony in hitting Hayek and Mises for pushing libertarian ideas while being employed by corporate interests, but considering employees of publicly funded universities "disinterested academics." It strikes me that the complaint, insofar as it is valid, is just as valid on either side of the field.

Robert Nozick, though, can't be dismissed on that ground.

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

...

To the liberal humanist, Nozick is saying: You don't take your finest hero, Kant, seriously, because if you did, you would never sacrifice Wilt's autonomy to the social planner's designs. To the socialist, he is saying: You don't take your own finest hero, Marx, seriously, because if you did, you would never expropriate his surplus value (via taxation) as blithely as the capitalist. And to his own fellow Harvard professors, he is saying: You don't take your own finest hero—yourself—seriously, because if you did, why would you ever curtail the prerogative of a superstar?

This is by way of taking his ideas seriously in order to criticize them. There's no surprise in learning that the author thinks that Nozick's ideas fail.

What is surprising is that, eventually, Nozick himself came to think so.

I should think so

The White House has made it plain how it feels about Israel, particularly on the subject of negotiations with Iran:

In the context of the anonymous White House threats, having a top Obama campaign official in Israel actively working to defeat Netanyahu is naturally perceived as interference.

The strategy isn't working all that well, though.

Netanyahu is not out of the woods, to be sure, but when it comes to campaigning against Barack Obama, this much is certain: He’s no Mitt Romney.

On Vaccinations

It's a fun day when two different Republican presidential candidates get themselves in trouble about science. We've all heard the stories, Rand. That's why there's an issue. The question is not whether there are stories, but what you would advise to parents.

So here's what I think.

1) As a gambling man, I notice that lots and lots of people get these vaccinations, and almost none of them are the source of scary stories. The diseases seem to have much worse outcomes on average. So, a smart gambler takes the vaccine.

2) As an anecdote, I myself have been vaccinated against just about everything, and I'm just fine. I've even had vaccines for anthrax, small pox, and third world diseases that won't come across your desk unless you travel widely.

3) Furthermore, all the medical professionals I know -- including my favorite cousin -- tell me that they are aware of no evidence that these things are dangerous, and strongly recommend administering vaccinations to your children.

4) Meanwhile, not only will you be protecting your child if the vaccination works successfully, you'll be doing a good deed for other parents of other children as well. These things work much better if we all do it.

Now the fun part.

5) As a philosopher, I can tell you that the strongest argument is the argument from gambling. There's a lot of empirical evidence about outcomes. You're placing a wager of a sort, with your child's life and health as the stakes. If you view this as a wager, it's pretty clear what the smart bet is.

All the other arguments are suspect. My anecdote is of no use to you, because anecdotes are not data and your child's body chemistry is not the same as mine. In fact, even if we get to data, you still get no promises. Cabbage is widely administered to the population. Almost no one has any problem with it. My wife happens to be allergic to it. Weird body chemistry things happen all the time.

The appeal to medical professionals and scientists is an appeal to authority, which is an informal fallacy. This is their area of expertise, which makes it less dangerous, but it's still no guarantee of truth. The fact is that the best they can tell you is that they have no evidence, yet, of any connection. That's an argument from ignorance, which is another informal fallacy.

The final argument is an appeal to ethics, but ethics doesn't have a lot of clear objective standards. The only place you find objective standards in ethics is virtue ethics. You can show that courage is objectively a virtue, because no matter what your goals are, being courageous will (always or for the most part, as Aristotle says) help you achieve them. Vaccination is a virtue on this account: always or for the most part, it will lead to the best outcomes for your child. Vaccination is the virtuous thing to do just because it passes the gambler's test.

The ethical argument that you should take the risk to help other peoples' children, however, is suspect. It's not clear that there's a virtue involved in risking your child to save other peoples' children. Any claim that there's any sort of duty to do it is not objective: now we've left virtue ethics for what is called "Deontology," and nobody really agrees about what roots duties. It is not clear to me how you would ground any duty that required a parent to risk their child's life or health for any reason.

So, what should you do? Vaccinate your children. It's virtuous, and it's the smart bet. Don't let anyone tell you that it's not a risk, though, or that you're stupid for worrying about it. There's still a lot we don't know.

UPDATE: Speaking of Republicans seeking the nomination, Dr. Carson is a pediatric surgeon by training and his opinion is to vaccinate.

Joltin' Joe Rides Again!

The US is behind the attempted coup in Venezuela – that is the accusation President Nicolas Maduro has leveled amid widespread protests back home. And it’s none other than Vice-president Joe Biden who’s behind the entire operation, Maduro alleges.

Masada Wins

For thousands of years, the date palm was a staple crop in the Kingdom of Judea, as it was a source of food, shelter and shade. Thick forests of the palms towering up to 80 feet and spreading for 7 miles covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south.

So valued was the tree that it became a recognized as a symbol of good fortune in Judea. It is chronicled in the Bible, Quran and ancient literature for its diverse powers, from an aphrodisiac to a contraceptive, and as a cure for a wide range of diseases including cancer, malaria and toothache.

However, its value was also the source of its demise and eventual extinction. The tree so defined the local economy that it became a prime resource for the invading Roman army to destroy. Once the Roman Empire took control of the kingdom in 70 AD, the date palms were destroyed in an attempt to cripple the Jewish economy. They eventually succeeded and by 500 AD the once plentiful palm had completely disappeared, driven to extinction for the sake of conquest.

But all was not lost, because in 1963, the late archeologist Yigael Yadin began excavating Masada, a mountaintop fortress built over 2,000 years ago on the shore of the Dead Sea where King Herod built a spectacular palace. Masada was the last stand of a small band of Jewish rebels who held out against three Roman legions for several years before committing mass suicide in A.D. 73.

Buried beneath the rubble, Yadin unearthed a small stockpile of seeds stowed in a clay jar dating back 2,000 years.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. The Roman Legions are long dust but today in a reborn Israel, Masada's seeds are growing again.

Audacity

Debaun was accused of not providing the information to a male sexual partner. But Debaun’s attorney persuaded a circuit judge to dismiss the charge, arguing that state law and courts have defined sexual intercourse as being between men and women — not between men.

I'm pretty sure that's not true, but even if it were it would take a lot of guts for the lawyer of gay man to make that argument before an American court these days!

Vagueness

Vagueness is an interesting problem in philosophy. It's a much less pleasant problem in the law.

Upon initial contact with the Texas Department of Public Safety, a spokesperson stated that the new law would “not be interpreted by just one agency; each agency may interpret it differently.”

Speaking of vagueness, is that 'may' as in might or 'may' as have full permission to do so at will?

On Class

Sarah Hoyt writes about the academic class' pretensions of superiority to the manual laborers of the world. She describes a cheap, working class playground she used to attend with her family, where she would ignore the rides and read books.

It was a safe and fun place for the kids and – remember I understand Spanish, too – not once did anyone say “Hey, look at the dork chick reading a book,” much less “let’s beat her up.”

In fact, it wasn’t till we could afford as a treat, to go to Waterworld, a playground for children in our own “class” in terms of parental education that we found people were rude and made horrible remarks. (Not unexpected in feral children raised mostly in daycares, but a shock, nonetheless.)

One of the things I think the educated class is blind about is how much they do the things they have developed theories to reject. I attended a conference once at which the question of veterans in the classroom came up. Mostly the academics there who were prone to think of war as something so outside the world they could imagine for themselves that anyone who had been must be changed beyond what they could imagine a human being to be. Two of them especially, both of them feminist academics, traded in bald stereotypes about how anyone who had been to war was a ticking time bomb of PTSD and hate. It was exactly the kind of refusal to empathize with and offensive stereotyping of the 'other' that they've doubtless published articles about when the 'other' is women or people of color. These are people who think of themselves as at the forefront of human morality, the leading edge that is pushing everyone else to moral advancement.

They were entirely blind to the fact that they were doing it. They were also shocked to realize that someone who had been to Iraq was in the room, and entirely put off by my suggestion that younger academics who really wanted to understand war could find a recruiting office down the street. You'd think I had suggested they join a cult or host an orgy... well, actually, both of those suggestions would probably have been more palatable to them.

Candlemas

This is one of the "-mas" days Malory mentions occasionally, and until today I didn't know when it was. Apparently it falls on 2 February, "exactly 40 days after Christmas." The date has to do with a Jewish ritual of purification for new mothers and the first presentation of their children at the Temple in Jerusalem. This was to happen forty days after the birth, so this would be the date if we are right about the date of Christmas.

So that's something I didn't know until this morning.

Small Pipes

On Plastic Surgery

This piece from the UK's Daily Mail shows that the left's "war on women" shtick isn't limited to the United States or to condemnations of the Republican party. The game is to suggest that conservatives in general just don't "get" women. Notice, though, how much of the effect is achieved by shifting from "can be" to "is." The headline says that plastic surgery "is" condemned, but the argument in the working paper is that it "can be" symptomatic of a problem.

In the Pontifical Council for Culture's working paper, cardinals noted that going under the knife for elective surgery has been linked to eating disorders and depression.

'Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the feminine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the 'season' that is being lived out,' it said.

Again failing to understand the difference between a government and a church, the suggestion is that women will be forbidden from doing what they want with their bodies. The actuality is that the council is trying to understand the ways in which the culture is creating or worsening problems for women in Catholic parishes. All they are going to do with this argument is offer it as a way of saying to older women, "It's OK to be who you are."

The failure to understand this is behind their attacks on the Vatican's advertisement, too, I think. There's no reason to make an issue of whether the woman in the ad is old or young. Painting her as "sexy" is out of line; it's not like she's wearing "sexy" attire. She's a Catholic, and a woman who wanted to talk to other women about these cultural issues. Somehow she's not allowed to do that because she's the wrong shape to be taken seriously.

St. Brigid's Day

The beginning of Spring comes in late March according to our calendar, but of old in Ireland it was the first of February that marked the beginning of the coming of Spring. It was a feast, Imbolc, before it became a Christian feast day. This hymn in Gaelic is from the 11th century, in honor of St. Brigid, one of those early saints who is possibly a historical abbess, and possibly a goddess.

Parliamentary Comity

That's how they do it in England.

Nice Essay

It begins:

Dear King,

It is sad that you died of natural causes.

It's got a pretty good last line, too.

The long battle

Also via ChicagoBoyz, a Veronique de Rugy plea for patience in fighting the battle for big ideas.

Viking revival

From ChicagoBoyz, news of a "Late Varangian/Kievan Rus/Viking" revival in the Ukraine.

 

Financial tracheotomy

"Operation Choke Point" is an FDIC program that identifies certain industries as "high risk" for banks. I'm not sure of the details, but the claim is that it has influenced a lot of banks to cut off customers in the gun or ammunition sale business.  The program is supposed to have something to do with fraud, but the customers complaining of being cut off don't appear to have been accused of fraud, only of being in the gun-and-ammo business.  They're losing access to things like credit-card processing and PayPal.

The first thing this makes me think of is the crying need for alternative banking providers to spring up, so I was pretty happy to read that new companies, such as one called Payment Alliance, are stepping into the breach.  That's why it's nice to have lots of private institutions competing with federal ones, or even ones that have drifted into accepting too much federal control in return for goodies like FDIC insurance.

In other good news, the new Congress may be taking steps to get the regulators under control, too.  So hurray for elections.

Peepboards

That appears to be the consensus word.

"I'm not your dad, but . . . ."

Great weather forecast.

C.S.S. Hunley

They've started to look at it after pulling it out of Charleston's harbor, for those interested in such things.

Apropos of Last

Also, it's Friday.



Drink deep, killers.

UPDATE: For those who like jokes more than drinks, or jokes with your drinks.

That's Harsh

Kevin Williamson, again.

Dr. Ron Chapman, director of the California Department of Public Health, says that vaping should be treated like “other important outbreaks or epidemics.”
But epidemics of what? Prole tastes?

Progressivism, especially in its well-heeled coastal expressions, is not a philosophy — it’s a lifestyle. Specifically, it is a brand of conspicuous consumption, which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: no gluten, no bleached flour, no Budweiser, no Walmart, no SUVs, no Toby Keith, etc.

One could say without offense that the philosophy entails a lifestyle. The claim here is that there's no coherent philosophy at all. True?

These Are Good Movies

I was moved especially by the first one, but perhaps you'll like the others better.



UPDATE: Based on the picture he put with it, though, I can see that Bill Whittle doesn't know any bikers.

Not going to have Mitt to kick around this time

NBC is reporting that Mitt Romney is about to announce he will not run.  They observed that this "clears the Republican field for Jeb Bush."  They never give up.

I Hate Public Transportation

Buses are always noiser, smellier, and disrupt traffic far more than guys in cars -- to say nothing of guys on motorcycles! But some want public transit to take over how you go anywhere, and they think it would be helpful if it were free.

Now, if you hate buses like I do, that doesn't seem like a good road. But I find it amusing that the first thing they did was to set up a free-market style insurance scheme, whereby you're indemnified against the cost of getting caught breaking the law by jumping turnstiles.

The group calls itself Planka.nu (rough translation: "dodge the fare now"), and they’ve banded together because getting caught free-riding comes with a steep $120 penalty. Here's how it works: Each member pays about $12 in monthly dues—which beats paying for a $35 weekly pass—and the resulting pool of cash more than covers any fines members incur.

So what if nobody pays for the buses? Don't they go away? No, of course, because the use fees aimed at the poor can never cover the cost of their operation. They always depend on taxes on people who never use the damn things.

So what about the other people? I've drunk beer in Zamboanga in daylight during Ramadan, and traveled in rural Tawi-Tawi and Sanga-Sanga, where gasoline is sold in little plastic baggies because a gallon is far too great a sum, and nobody can buy an underground tank's worth.

People still had motorcycles. Trucks, even, sometimes.

A Moment of Steinbeck

A thing going around right now is a John Steinbeck quote from The Grapes of Wrath:

If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor inside hisself, there aint no million acres gonna make him feel rich.

This goes with a second quote allegedly from Steinbeck.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

This is followed by a rant against the Koch brothers, etc.

But consider: if the American people think of themselves as 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires,' then they are a people who are on Steinbeck's terms rich inside.

How are you going to make them feel poor?

NASCAR: Where Everyone Gets A Trophy

"...as long as..."

Bringing the Hammer

The payoff comes two minutes, twenty-eight seconds in.



That guy might have been President, these last six years.

"Meanwhile, in Norway..."

About 27 tonnes of caramelised brown goat cheese - a delicacy known as Brunost - caught light as it was being driven through the Brattli Tunnel at Tysfjord, northern Norway, last week.

The fire raged for five days and smouldering toxic gases were slowing the recovery operation, officials said.

Overture in Slide

The Viking Guide to an Evening Out

Legitimate advice from the Havamal is made accessible for the current generation.

Wait, What?

Via Hot Air:

SESSIONS:
Let me ask you this: In the workplace of America today when we have a high number of unemployed, we’ve had declining wages for many years, we have the lowest of Americans working, who has more right to a job in this country? A lawful immigrant who’s here, a green-card holder or a citizen, or a person who entered the country unlawfully?

LYNCH:
Well, Senator, I believe that the right and the obligation to work is one that’s shared by everyone in this country regardless of how they came here. And certainly, if someone here, regardless of status, I would prefer that they be participating in the workplace than not participating in the workplace…

The part of that statement Allahpundit is interested in is the part where people who are illegally in this country have a "right" to work.

The part that I want to hear more about is how the obligation to work is shared by everyone.

Really? Where is that coming from? How is this obligation grounded? What should be done to those who don't meet this obligation?

Interesting Analogs

How about a former US Assistant Treasury Secretary and working economist who proposes we think of Iranian nuclear issue in the model of The Lord of the Rings? Picture that in your mind for a minute.

Did it look like this?

If we use J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a metaphor for the West, the West is Mordor and Washington is Sauron.

It is pointless for Iran to negotiate with the West in hopes of gaining acceptance. Iran is on the same list as Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Assad. The only way Iran can be accepted by the West is to consent to being an American puppet state. Suspicion about Iran’s nuclear energy program is a contrived issue. If it were not the nuclear issue, it would be some other contrived issue, such as weapons of mass destruction, use of chemical weapons, terrorism, and so forth. Iran’s leaders should understand that the real problem is Iran’s independence of Washington’s foreign and economic policies.

Now There's A Headline I Never Expected to See

"Chemists find a way to unboil eggs."

“This method … could transform industrial and research production of proteins,” the researchers write in ChemBioChem.

For example, pharmaceutical companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins. The ability to quickly and cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E. coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable. Industrial cheese makers, farmers and others who use recombinant proteins could also achieve more bang for their buck.

When everything you know is wrong.

The WSJ editorial board wants the President to have a Seinfeld moment:

Mr. Obama is now taking credit for 2014’s job gains that his policies inhibited, much as he is for the boom in oil and gas drilling that his Administration resisted. Thus comes the opportunity for a late-term “Seinfeld” economic epiphany. Imagine the possibilities if the President realized that everything he thought about economics is wrong.

A President Costanza would cut the tax rate on capital, not raise it; reduce the incentives to go on disability, not increase them; and reduce regulatory costs on business, not add to them. Whatever economic instincts you have, Mr. President, do the opposite.

"How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons"

The "we" in this sense is the folks who enjoyed playing Dungeons & Dragons back when there was a huge uproar against it. Apropos of Tex's posts about nerd culture. They may feel oppressed, but sometimes they win!

We used to play D&D when I was a teenager too, and I think it's very helpful for kids. That kind of role-playing is one way of working out who you really want to be, and what's important to you. You can't actually be a barbarian king or a wizard, but you can explore what it might be like to have the virtues of courage or knowledge, and decide where you want to focus your own efforts to develop those virtues in yourself.

Of course, at some point, it's time to 'put away childish things,' and get on with the business of developing real virtue (although you can probably get back to it, as with other childish things, once you get old enough). At a certain age, when you aren't sure yet who you are or what you want, the games are helpful things.

PC Nonsense

Jonathan Chait tries to take on the whole internet, at least according to the weaklings at Gawker.

I am white and male, a fact that is certainly worth bearing in mind. I was also a student at the University of Michigan during the Jacobsen incident, and was attacked for writing an article for the campus paper defending the exhibit. If you consider this background and demographic information the very essence of my point of view, then there’s not much point in reading any further. But this pointlessness is exactly the point: Political correctness makes debate irrelevant and frequently impossible.

I doubt Chait and I have agreed about ten things in ten years. That's why PC is nonsense. These categories are just analogies. I doubt we have ten things in common, including 'being white' and 'being male.' He's a New York writer from a Jewish family -- which is fine, and I in no way mean to suggest otherwise, but it's almost totally different from my own Scots-Irish heritage in Appalachia.

And as for what it means to be a man, I doubt he and I agree at all. He'll answer to God for his conscience, and I for mine, but don't think they're similar -- let alone the same.

Good for You, Lady

I checked the history, and most mentions of Michelle Obama here at the Hall are from Tex or Cassandra (who has posting privileges she may have forgotten). I think the American tendency to pay attention to the First Lady and families of Presidents is a mistake, probably JFK's fault, that only hurts their ability to carry on with family life during a difficult few years. Best to ignore them and what they do, almost all the time, for the sake of the President's mental health and the individual good of each family member.

However, I'll break tradition this once. It's not mandatory for women from outside Saudi Arabia to go veiled, but it's good for an American not to. She may not have felt she had much choice, given the constant rumors that her husband is a secret Muslim, but all the same it's a healthy signal of independence. It's good for us, and it's good for the women of Saudi Arabia.

Fascists Have The Best Uniforms

"The Front National now has the support of a quarter of Paris’s gay voters – and only 16 per cent of the straight ones."

The Front National now offers a welcoming home to gay people who feel judged by Muslims and share wider concerns about immigration and the loss of French identity... Marine has worked hard to expand the FN’s membership beyond obvious bigots, racists and skinheads. She has publicly condemned anti-Semitism and insists that, far from being racist, her party is the only one that defends secularity and democracy against Islamisation. A key part of this strategy is using the Islamist threat to court the sort of people that the far right has traditionally persecuted. It’s working.

That's not just 'working,' that's amazing. It sounds like a leading indicator.

"Control Your Thoughts."

Apropos of a story about a Christian blogress who decided to quit wearing Yoga pants in public so as to avoid tempting other men into violating the commandment against coveting another man's wife, some advice:

Meanwhile, others criticised the entry for feeding into the idea that what a women chooses to wear dictates how men behave. “How about you learn to control your thoughts?” said one commenter.

That's great advice! Let's try it. Don't think of a pink elephant.

Snow and School Cancellations

A visual guide, with commentary.

Structural oppression

Grim linked to two very interesting articles on the subject of the War Between Nerds and Feminists.  In the first, Scot Alexander expounds on a number of topics, such as how useless it is to define human relations in terms of relative oppression, so that every identification of unjust behavior becomes a competition to determine which of us has it the worst: "You couldn't go to college? Well, I had to be subject to the draft! Top that!" He calls it the "one-dimensional model of privilege." Then he really grabs me with this:

And this is why it’s distressing to see the same things people have always said about Jews get applied to nerds. They’re this weird separate group with their own culture who don’t join in the reindeer games of normal society. They dress weird and talk weird. They’re conventionally unattractive and have too much facial hair. But worst of all, they have the chutzpah to do all that and also be successful. Having been excluded from all of the popular jobs, they end up in the unpopular but lucrative jobs, for which they get called greedy parasites in the Jews’ case, and “the most useless and deficient individuals in society” in the case of the feminist article on nerds I referenced earlier.

. . .

I am saying that whatever structural oppression means, it should be about structure. And the structure society uses to marginalize and belittle nerds is very similar to a multi-purpose structure society has used to belittle weird groups in the past with catastrophic results.

Of course it's also true that, for instance, a group of guys with some terrible habits about treating women as sex dolls might simultaneously be the target of crippling society hatred and the beneficiaries of lavish societal rewards of a different sort. It's even true that their distressing sex-doll mentality might be rooted in an oppressive social gender structure, even though they continue to suffer from some gender-based social structures and to benefit from others. It's not always about who's getting the short end of the stick in every possible walk of life. Sometimes it's just about treating people as individual human beings rather than as either objects or rigid categories. I'd really just as soon never read another article explaining that the "real" oppression is the plight of guys who would like to have sex with someone who doesn't happen to agree with the program, and therefore it follows as the night the day that all talk of oppression in the form of treating women as something less than human is illegitimate. I'm also all done listening to how a particular behavior couldn't possible be unjust or reprehensible, because the perpetrator also feels genuine pain about his life.  That's just suffering one-up-man-ship, and it's not shedding light on how we can treat each other decently.

Alexander continues explaining how little help oppression-talk can be:

If we’ve learned anything from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that Anakin Skywalker is unbearably annoying. But if we’ve learned two things from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that the easiest way to marginalize the legitimate concerns of anyone who stands in your way is to declare them oppressors loud enough to scare everyone who listens.

And if the people in the Star Wars universe had seen the Star Wars movies, I have no doubt whatsoever that Chancellor Palpatine would have discredited his opponents by saying they were the Empire.

(seriously, you wanted to throw the gauntlet down to lonely male nerds, and the turf you chose was Star Wars metaphors? HOW COULD THAT POSSIBLY SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA?)

He really dismantles theories of how Silicon Valley cleverly excludes women from lucrative STEM jobs while allowing women so to swamp the medical field these days that people are starting to worry who'll see all the patients when they start taking pregnancy leave.

Then there's this spot-on summary of the social atmosphere in a STEM-dominated office:

Any space with a four-to-one male:female ratio is going to end up with some pretty desperate people and a whole lot of unwanted attention. Add into this mix the fact that nerds usually have poor social skills (explaining exactly why would take a literature review to put that last one to shame, but hopefully everyone can agree this is true), and you get people who are pretty sure they are supposed to do something but have no idea what. Err to one side and you get the overly-chivalrous people saying m’lady because it pattern matches to the most courtly and least sexual way of presenting themselves they can think of. Err to the other, and you get people hollowly imitating the behavior they see in famous seducers and playboys, which when done without the very finely-tuned social graces and body-language-reading-ability of famous seducers and playboys is pretty much just “being extremely creepy”.

The second article grabs me just as hard with a nerd woman's paean to perseveration:

What I’ve got, and what I wish the rest of the “women in tech” community who rage against the misogyny they see everywhere they look could also have, is a blazingly single-minded focus on whatever topic I happen to be perseverating on at the moment. It has kept me awake for days puzzling out novel algorithms and it has thwarted a wannabe PUA at a conference completely by accident. It is also apparently the most crashingly successful defense against attempts to make me feel inferior that has ever been devised. When I’m someplace that says on the label that it’s all about the tech, so am I. I may have come by it naturally, but it is a teachable skill. Not only that, it’s a skill that transforms the places where it’s exercised.

The fact that Shanley Kane dismisses experiences like mine as “denial,” and regards them as “colluding in my own oppression,” both saddens and baffles me.

The author is perfectly describing the dreadful "Uncle Tom" or "Oreo Cookie" criticism. She's found a home in the STEM world, she knows why it works for her, and she's not interested in apologizing because it doesn't work for people not like her, whether anyone thinks the necessary qualities sort themselves out along gender lines or not.

The more I read about this, the more it seems like a war between people on opposite ends of the autism spectrum.

When privileges collide

Who's more aggrieved, feminists or nerds?

“I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison,” Aaronson said.

....

The feminist response was swift and harsh, with controversial blogger Amanda Marcotte calling Aaronson’s mini-memoir “a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men.” His essay boils down to a belief that women are “a robot army put here for sexual service and housework,” she said.

I assume the article omitted the intervening comments that formed some kind of rational bridge between the nerd's cri de coeur and the feminist backlash.  These two groups don't seem to be communicating well.  I've always been fond of nerds, myself, especially since I are one.

Gandhi Takes a Yoga Class

UPDATE: The Onion on a similar topic.

Landings you can swim away from

I had no idea such a thing existed:

Speaking of the 1st Amendment

Sometimes when a seemingly disgraceful story hits the right-wing news outlets, I like to check to see whether any mainstream sources have picked it up.  For one thing, if the news needs to be spread, experience suggests that the message can be heard more widely and without so much static if it comes in a more soothing wrapper than the Fox News banner.  Also, the rightosphere has been known occasionally to push a story for political purposes, shocking as that may be.  (I understand the leftosphere and the MSM occasionally err in this fashion as well.)

Anyway, when I heard that Bowe Bergdahl is to be charged with desertion but the White House is trying furiously to bury the story, my first reaction was to un-bury it as vigorously as one puny individual can.  My second was to see whether I might get some confirmation.  Naturally, confirmation in a case like this is tricky; if the White House really is squelching the news, can I trust the New York Times to carry it?  The question answers itself.

The upshot is that I'm getting hits on all kinds of sites like the Daily Mail, with The Washington Times perhaps being the closest to a traditional news outlet, but nothing in any sources like Reuters or the AP. Duffleblog is on the job, though:

For his own personal safety Bergdahl has gone into hiding in Idaho, a rugged mountainous area far from civilization, where he is being guarded by several of the local hill tribes.

The Taliban have asked the U.S. to immediately extradite Bergdahl back to Afghanistan to face criminal charges. The U.S. Department of Justice has vowed to work overtime to fulfill their request.

Thank you, Mr. Moore, Mr. Rogen

When Michael Moore and Seth Rogen exercise their First Amendment right to criticize "American Sniper," it's a tribute to everyone who served in uniform.

Syllabi

Glen Reynolds today:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U.C. Berkeley Students Complain About Having To Read Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault. In course on classic social theory. And if that makes it hard for you to focus on the course material, cupcakes, you don’t belong in college.

I thought that sounded like a pretty good syllabus, really. You could quibble a bit -- I'm not sure Hegel's comments on social theory are at all useful except as a prelude to Marx, and I might substitute out Foucault for Rousseau (since allegedly this is about "classic" social theory). So what could be the problem?

Well, of course, I should have known.

...a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color. We have major concerns about social theory courses in which white men are the only authors assigned.

I am glad that the students didn't try to rope Plato and Aristotle into the category of "white men." That's a category that wouldn't have made sense to them, and which they would have rejected once it was explained to them. All those "white men" are from the category they would have referred to as "barbarians."

This reminds me of an attempt by Georgia State University, a couple of years back, to introduce a quota of 20% female authors in philosophy courses. If you're teaching a course on contemporary philosophy, that's not at all hard to do. If you're teaching a course on "classic social theory," it's pretty hard. You could grab something from Christine de Pizan, who had some social commentary. But it's more commentary than theory, as she was accepting a Christian framework and challenging members of society to live up to it better than they did.

So that's probably what you'd do here: grab works by contemporary women who are commenting on the classical authors. You could fold them in side-by-side with the original authors as a kind of running critique by contemporary female thinkers of what the classical tradition has to say. Maybe that would be interesting to do.

It would be done at the expense of at least some of the classical authors, though. That means students will be less prepared to do novel work of their own, as they will be less aware of and engaged in the great questions. That's where I finished when talking about the 20% experiment:

I would think the way to draw women into philosophy would be to engage them with the great problems, and get them excited about wrestling with them. (It might not hurt to suggest, which is actually true, that any university will be especially considerate of a female philosopher who wants a job -- you can be sure the academy is aware of the disparity, and will bend over backwards to help ensure their numbers reflect a devotion to doing something about it.) Engaging them is what will really qualify them to do the work, as it is only someone genuinely engaged with the questions who will perform at the level at which real contributions are made -- the kind of contributions that would justify your inclusion in a class reading list.

That's also the way you'd do best by your female students as students, which is the right way for you to relate to them if you are a professor or a teaching assistant. It is, perhaps, the only way you ought to engage them.

I wonder how that 20% experiment worked out? Looking around Google, I only find the fanfare that accompanied its beginning, and no further comment on whether it has been continued or what the results were.

UPDATE: In terms of "people of color," Charles Mills has a thoroughgoing criticism of this whole tradition. Of course, he's a man, so if you read him you'd have to also separately include female critiques. The more of these things you do, the less of the tradition itself you can read.

My Support for Walker Solidifies ...

Walker '16

Good Luck, Yankees

Sometimes making history isn't much fun.

Good Topic

A good reflection on how you can be wrong about the most important things. I like the comments section especially, because it shows people reflecting on the question in their own lives.

I think I was wrong about isolationism in the 1990s. I was really against intervening in Somalia, and then in Bosnia, Serbia, etc. I thought that was none of our affair, and that we should let these people kill each other if they wanted to do so. I agreed with Otto von Bismark's opinion that the "whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier." If you'd have suggested to me that, just a few years later, I would support an American invasion of Afghanistan I'd have laughed out loud.

"The Greeks defeated the Persians because of Aeschylus"

I completely agree with the claim about intelligence and strategy being made here, ably defended by Jakub Grygiel.

Unemployment benefits vs. unemployment

The National Review tries to make sense of data about unemployment rates in areas with greater and lesser unemployment benefits.  It's a notoriously difficult subject to examine, and would be so even if the trigger points about callousness toward the jobless weren't always being pulled.  Ends and means, intentions and results:  there's just no guarantee they'll match up.

The skills needed for unskilled work

Again via Maggie's Farm, the experience of a California employer with a business model built on unskilled labor.

I am not an economist, I am a business school grad. We don't worry about explaining structural imbalances so much as look for the profitable opportunities they might present. So a question we business folks might ask instead is: If there are so many under-employed unskilled workers rattling around in the economy, why aren't entrepreneurs crafting business models to exploit this fact?

. . . .

The reason for my despair comes from a single source: the government is making it increasingly difficult and costly to hire unskilled workers, while simultaneously creating a culture among new workers that short-circuits their ability to make progress.

It would be nice to say that the things "government" is doing along these lines are confined to California, and they're certainly at the absurd end of the spectrum there, but the rot has spread.

Neurotypicality and Tolstoy

Via Maggie's Farm:  Interesting findings about connectivity patterns between right and left brains in most people and in people on the autism spectrum:  people without autism symptoms generally share a typical left-right connection pattern, but autistic people show patterns that not only different from the ordinary, but each from all the others.

The King of Jordan and al-Sisi

The quest to deal with radicalism in Islam expands. The two regional leaders are going to hold a conference aimed at finding ways to "modernize" Islam in the hope of constraining groups like Daesh.

Although their voices may be stifled by tightened anti-terrorism laws, many of his subjects are dubious. In a country where some 90% of the population is Sunni Muslim, many wonder why their monarch has joined the American-led coalition against jihadists from Islamic State (IS). “We don’t understand why the king has joined the alliance against Syria’s Sunnis in IS and is helping to prop up Bashar al-Assad, who has far more blood on his hands,” says a Jordanian writer. After the capture by IS of a Jordanian pilot whose plane came down in Syria in December, a group of retired army officers issued statements arguing that Jordan should not be involved.

The king’s appearance at a march in Paris alongside world leaders after the attack on Charlie Hebdo caused further unhappiness. Shortly after the king returned home, a protest gathering against the magazine and its cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad drew thousands of people.

The Wisconsin way

Scott Walker's name is surprisingly unfamiliar to American voters, even Republican ones.  I hope they'll soon get a little more familiar with him.  A good link here to a recent 22-minute speech.

Wealth redistribution

Glenn Reynolds goes right to the Willie Sutton explanation, too:

The truth is, in our redistributionist system politicians make their careers mostly by taking money from one group of citizens that won't vote for them and giving it to another that will. If they run short of money from traditional sources, they'll look for new revenue wherever they can find it. And if that's the homes and savings of the middle class, then that's what they'll target.

For the moment, Americans are safe. With both houses of Congress controlled by the GOP, Obama's proposals are DOA. But over the long term, the appetite for government spending is effectively endless, while the sources of revenue are limited. Keep that in mind as you think about where to invest your money ... and your votes.

The life-cycle of a tariff

Suppose you're a virtuous person in California. You are troubled by the plight of egg-laying hens in large, crowded commercial farms. You go to D.C. and try to persuade Congress to require all American farmers to give their hens twice as much room, but you fail. You then try the same thing in the California legislature, and succeed.

But wait. California consumes more eggs than it produces, so it's a big importer from other states. What's more, requiring California farmers to give their hens twice as much room will put them at a competitive disadvantage with out-of-state egg producers. You could rely on the innate chicken-empathy of your fellow California citizens, but you worry that some of them lack ideological purity and will buy cheap, unenlightened out-of-state "conflict" eggs.

The obvious next step is to ban the transportation across the California state line of conflict eggs. This prevents your fellow Californians from making the incorrect ethical choice, and protects the local farms from unfair competition. It's arguably a violation of the Interstate Commerce Cause, but that will take a long time to work out in the courts. In the meantime, eggs were $1.18 in California a dozen a couple of years ago but have risen to between $3.16 and $5.00 now. Can price caps be far behind?

Over the holidays I noticed that our local grocery store was having trouble keeping eggs in stock--lots of empty shelves. I thought it was just an outbreak of holiday baking enthusiasm, but maybe not! It may be a ripple effect from the growers in the Midwest who want to maintain access to California markets, and had either to invest $40 a chicken in larger cages or to slaughter half their chickens to make room. In any case, my neighbors who sell fresh eggs may find that their free-range prices are starting to look pretty competitive.  Maybe the next law needs to prohibit all municipal anti-noise poultry-raising regulations and promote "victory" chicken gardens.