Ethics & Leadership

These questions are posed in a military context, but they have broader application. Indeed, most of them are drawn from the broader debate about human ethics -- only some of them have their origin in explicitly military concepts.

1. What are the ethical dimensions of power and authority in the military? This includes formal command authority, giving rewards and punishments, informal power/influence and personal power (friendship, loyalty, and expertise.) What is the ethical power or temptation of self-interest? Does power magnify moral characteristics that are already there? Or does it corrupt moral character?

2. Is the morality of the leader a matter of what they do in their public role or also their private life when not in that role? Is it possible for these to be separate or different, or must they be in harmony and alignment? Can a good leader have immoral or bad private morality? Is it important that the leader serve as an ethical role model?

3. What are the duties of the leader to her followers? Is it permissible to use followers merely as a means to another end, or must they always be viewed as ends in themselves? Are the duties of leaders and followers two sides of the same coin or are they fundamentally different? Do followers have ethical duties to the leader beyond obedience?

4. How should leaders think about the Big Picture (Mission) or the Greater Good? How does a leader decide what is best for the Greater Good (Mission)? What if some of their followers (or others) must suffer for this to be achieved? Is that ethically permissible? What are the leader's obligations to those who suffer? What happens if these actions lead to guilt and/or moral injury in leaders and followers?

5. How important is charisma or personal power (The Great Man/Woman) in contemporary military leadership? What are the ethical implications of charisma in leading? Do leaders need an emotional connection or appeal with followers to be effective? What kinds of connections make good, ethical leaders? Trust? Servant Leaders? Transformative Leaders? Relational Leadership?

6. How do cultural and moral differences (ethical relativism) impact the intersection of leadership and ethics? How ought a good leader navigate moral disagreements, tensions and conflicts? Ought the leader's view of what is 'right' prevail? Must one have ethical agreement to work together and achieve the mission?

Those are important questions.

UPDATE: Related: The Army Chief of Staff wants to remind junior officers that they are empowered to disobey direct orders, but they had better be "morally and ethically correct."

Milley then made news headlines by calling for “disciplined disobedience.” This idea undoubtedly caused jaws to drop among many Army leaders, but it actually echoes back to the idea of “selective disobedience” one of his predecessors endorsed in the late 1970s. In Milley’s formulation, disobeying orders can be justified to achieve the larger purpose of the mission. According to Milley,

[A] subordinate needs to understand that they have the freedom and they are empowered to disobey a specific order, a specified task, in order to accomplish a purpose. Now, that takes a lot of judgment … it can’t just be willy-nilly disobedience. This has got to be disciplined disobedience to achieve the higher purpose.

He added, “disobedience, when done, must be done with trust and integrity, and you must be morally and ethically correct.”

Being morally and ethically correct will often mean answering these questions "correctly." Are there correct answers to all of them? That would make it a lot simpler.

American Geography

Trump to a roomful of Israelis: "We just got back from the Middle East." Slate's correspondent is extremely dismissive.

In fairness to the President, though, American geography is really confused where Israel is concerned. Officially Israel is in EUCOM, not in CENTCOM with all the countries that surround it. That's so the CENTCOM commander never has to meet with any Jews, making it easier for him to work with Arab leaders. So officially, according to the US military, Israel is in Europe.

The State Department, meanwhile, considers Israel to be part of the "Near East." (Although Saudi Arabia also qualifies as "Near East" rather than "Middle East" on this model; and, even more confusingly, "Middle East Peace" is one of the things that the "Near Eastern Affairs" bureau is tasked with handling.)

And apparently nobody is sure if the Western Wall is in Israel, though it is definitely in Jerusalem, which may or may not be in Israel depending on which American you ask.

An Unlikely Charge

Donald Trump may be a lot of things, but a Crusader is not plausibly one of them.

That's not to say there aren't Crusaders on staff.

A Truly Oppressed Religious Community

On ex-Muslims, who must meet in secrecy even in Portland, Oregon.

Wolf Time

Mentioned in the comments to the "American Gods" post below, Lars Walker pointed out that he wrote another book featuring Odin as a character at about the same time. I picked up a copy yesterday. I'm only about a fifth of the way through it, but it's an interesting read that some of you might like to join me in discussing later. Mr. Walker accurately predicted some things back in 1999.

The book is called Wolf Time, and it is available in Kindle format for those of you who might like to join me.

The Cowboy Hávamál

(Thanks for noticing this, Douglas.)

Is It Time to Get Angry?

Spiked Online argues that the Manchester attack marks the right moment to "get angry."

After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. And so it has been after the barbarism in Manchester. In response to the deaths of more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande gig, in response to the massacre of children enjoying pop music, people effectively say: ‘All you need is love.’ The disparity between these horrors and our response to them, between what happened and what we say, is vast. This has to change.

Compare and contrast the response to the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal. Those also targeted young British girls; they were permitted to go on for a very long time, even though the authorities were repeatedly informed about them. Here, too, the perpetrator of this suicide bombing was well known to police authorities, as seems to be usually the case. Nothing was done.

Will this get a bigger response because, this time, the young girls were killed instead of repeatedly raped? Will it get a bigger response because, this time, the girls were the daughters of richer families who could afford expensive concert tickets, and not the daughters of the working class?

Or is it the case, instead, that nothing will change? The institutional inertia in Western governments is very great. We can't build a bridge anymore because of all the regulations that exist to govern the building of bridges. We know -- it seems we always know -- who is likely to conduct a mass murder like this, but we can't do anything to stop it. We aren't allowed. We won't allow ourselves.

I don't know that getting angry will fix that. What needs to change, whether to repair our infrastructure or to secure our nations, is to peel off whole layers of institutional regulation and control. These are simple problems in need of simple solutions.

MacLeod

"MacLeod," for your information, means "Son of Ugly."

It's a Small World After All

Not to make light of a tragedy, which will be devastating to the families who lost daughters tonight.  I just happen to notice that the artist canceled her "World Tour," which included "England, Belgium, Poland, Germany and Switzerland."

So, you know, a World Tour from Tennessee to Texas.

The World We Live in Now

Police: Denver man arrested after removing transgender woman's testicles

...A police affidavit says James Lowell Pennington, 57, removed the testicles and sutured the opening while the woman's wife witnessed the 90-minute procedure.

I could have explained this story to my grandparents, but not without using language that would today get me sued, arrested, or barred from productive employment.

How'd that Toby Keith Show Go?

In case you were wondering, there's some video -- as well as the usual sneering HuffPo commentary -- available here. It sounds like everyone had a good time. The Saudi performer was the big draw, and you can hear a bit of his stuff as well.

Female Infantrymen

America’s first female Army Infantrymen are here, but not all of them made it through.

In fact, only eighteen of the thirty-two female infantry recruits made it through the One Station Unit Training (OSUT) program at Fort Benning, Georgia.... the females needed only to meet the much-lower female standards for physical fitness that separate them from their previously all-male counterparts.

That said, there were some women who certainly gave their male colleagues a run for their money.

“There was even one female that did better than 90 percent of the males on the PT test,” said one 22-year-old male trainee, who reportedly had high PT scores.

An attrition rate from a training program that approaches fifty percent is pretty striking. Some of the special operations training/selection courses are higher than that, of course, but those are built around higher standards -- not lowered standards. Some percentage of the women (at least one of them, I gather from the article) might have met what was until yesterday "the standard." They would have been better served, though there would have been fewer of them, by being held to the same standard as the male infantrymen.

UPDATE: A related story in the Marine Corps Times: "New Concerns that Lower Fitness Standards Fuel Disrespect for Women." The creator of Terminal Lance is among those interviewed.

“Women, from Day One, do not have to do the same PFT as men,” said Maximilian Uriarte, a Marine veteran and the creator of the “Terminal Lance” comic strip. “

“To men, that’s immediately like: ‘Oh, they have not accomplished the same thing I have … Therefore, they do not rate the same respect that I do,’” he said.

One way to erase the gender gap, Uriarte said in an interview with Marine Corps Times, would be to have women meet the same standards as men on the PFT and CFT.

“I think you’d probably lose a lot of women, but the ones you’d keep would be really stellar, fighting, fit Marines that the men would respect on that level,” he said.

A Sense of History

Security removed a school principal from his campus after he was photographed at the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, near a Confederate flag.

However, Dean said the fact that he was shown standing next to monument supporters was pure coincidence.

"I didn't go to protest for either side. I went because I am a historian, educator and New Orleans resident who wanted to observe this monumental event," he said. "People who know me know that I am a crusader for children and I fight tirelessly on their behalf."

If he has a degree in history, of course he'd want to document a historic event. Whatever else these removals of Confederate memorials in New Orleans are, they are events that mark something important in the region's history. It can be hard to say just what that something is until time has passed; perhaps it's just that enough of the generations closer to the Civil War are now dead, and thus the balance of who cares about that war has shifted demographically. Perhaps the racist killings in Charleston, SC, moved many hearts. Perhaps it is something else.

Still, if the principal had been a fervent supporter of Robert E. Lee, could he be fired for it? Would an educator who was also a member of, say, the Sons of Confederate Veterans suddenly be a security risk who needed to be forcibly removed from campus? The law seems to suggest that even those with disapproved opinions have some rights under the law; that's why we have to let the Westboro Baptist Church protest the funerals of soldiers and Marines.

It seems that leeway does not apply to every disapproved opinion. I suppose we shall see if it still applies to historians who merely wanted to document the event.

The Murder of an American Soldier at the University of Maryland

The author of this piece thinks it was a racially motivated killing; perhaps it was. Of greater importance is that he was a lieutenant in the United States Army.

Collins, of Calvert County, was scheduled to graduate with a degree in business from Bowie State University Tuesday, and was commissioned May 18 to join the United States Army. He was involved with Bowie State's ROTC chapter, police said.

Darryl L. Godlock, a pastor who was serving as a spokesman for the Collins family, said the young man had obtained his airborne certification. Collins wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, a military veteran, Godlock said.

"He wanted to make his parents proud of him so he went into the military to serve his country," Godlock said.

We should avenge him as a soldier.

"A Communist Fanfic"

No kidding. His argument that the recent Mad Max movie fits this plotline is basically right, though. It just ends with the release of all the water that was being wrongfully hoarded to grow plants, rather than continuing to the point at which the now-held-in-common water is all gone and the plants have been swept over by the desert that surrounds them.

But hey: "Make sure to buy the t-shirt!"

Jerusalem

It is amazing to me that no US President has before visited the Old City. I had read and studied the conflict for years before I went, but only standing there did I understand the close scale and what was at stake. The "pre-1967 borders" of which you hear so much would require yielding up the Old City, including the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and -- of moment to Christians -- the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

For Christians, it may well be enough that the city is controlled by those who will protect the sites and permit access to pilgrims. We have seen the Taliban and others destroy heritage sites of other religions in order to establish the primacy of their own faith; but actual control may not be of special importance if protection is guaranteed. Muslims also care about the preservation of their shrines. The Iranians use the protection of special Shi'a shrines in Syria and Iraq as a major focus of their recruiting of local militias who will serve as reliable proxy forces. But the Muslims also assert a physical claim more boldly: the Old City's Muslim quarter is closed to non-Muslims lacking special permission. As a practical matter they do rely on the Israelis to protect their shrines, but it is clear that the Muslims of Jerusalem do not trust any outsider to do it: not even to pass nearby.

For Jews, though, Jerusalem has another importance. Go up on the Mount of Olives, within sight of Jerusalem's Old City and another place that would have to be surrendered. Gethsemane lies between the Old City and the Mount of Olives. The mount is chiefly a graveyard. Thousands of years of Jewish graves are there. For a people whose whole history has been marked by exile, Jerusalem is the one place that is truly home.

You can appreciate all that intellectually from afar, but it takes on a new clarity when you go and see it. All Presidents should go there, at least the ones who intend to meddle in this conflict.

Woah

Many Purple Hearts issued even today were manufactured in 1945, because the DOD expected so many casualties from the invasion of Japan.

As late as 1985, the Defense Logistics Agency still had about 120,000 refurbished Purple Heart sets dating back to World War II, said DLA spokeswoman Mimi Schirmacher.

“There could be a small number of WWII-era medal sets still in the hands of military service customers and it is possible that recent and current issues of medals were made from stock produced in previous time periods,” Schirmacher said in an e-mail.

The DLA has ordered about 34,000 Purple Hearts since 1976, of which 21,000 were ordered in 2008, she said.

But Giangreco, who wrote a book about the planned invasion of Japan, maintains that the bulk of Purple Hearts in stock date back to World War II. His research found that most of the refurbished Purple Hearts were sent to military depots, units and hospitals between 1985 and 1999.

Mr. Wednesday

I don't know the book or the TV show, but here's a video by a scholar on how well it fits the mythology. He was mostly impressed. There's some good lessons along the way on Old Norse versus Old English, the stories being drawn upon, and so forth.

Andrew C. McCarthy on Comey, Trump

Jim Comey is a patriot. That I have disagreed with him on some big things, does not change that. Disagreeing is what Americans do – that’s self-government by people who care passionately about how we are governed.

But let’s assume for argument’s sake that I am wrong. Let’s say that, as Sean Spicer says, Comey is a grandstander who has intentionally politicized an investigation in order to undermine the president. He’s still not the Russians. “America First,” remember? Comey is an American who believes in America; Lavrov and Kislyak are Putin operatives who oppose America at every turn. Comey believes in freedom and the rule of law; the Putin regime believes in Soviet tyranny and the rule of Putin.

Comey is one of us. Lavrov and Kislyak are two of them.

Treason Prospers

The word "treason" is getting thrown around a lot these days in very loose ways, and on very limited evidence. Let me say that by "treason" I mean the explicit Constitutional definition of aiding the enemy, and by "enemy" I mean an actual enemy that is trying to kill American soldiers using physical violence. By this standard, PFC Bradley Manning was clearly a traitor. He was saved from the charge only by the good fortune of having a chain of command that terminated in someone uncomfortable with the traditional definitions of "traitor," "treason," "enemy," and similar things.

Now it looks like the traitor, styled "Chelsea," is likely to be the focus of a documentary. Naturally, there will be a substantial payment to the principle.

On May 17th, Chelsea walks free and will reveal herself to the world. XY Chelsea is the journey of her fight for survival and dignity, and her transition from prisoner to a free woman.

Celebrate what you like, I suppose, but be clear on what the offense is. Manning betrayed the trust of fellow soldiers, and indeed of every American on the ground in Iraq, by recklessly trading secrets whose contents he hadn't bothered to learn himself to anyone who would broadcast those secrets to the enemy. In doing so, he endangered and doubtless cost the lives of fellow Americans who had deployed with him to war. He broke his oath and he broke his trust.

Fight as Manning will, there is no dignity now to be had. Not after that.

Jim Webb on Trump, Democrats

Loyalty & the Oath

I take this essay to be significant. Its subject matter is eternally so. Its timing is perhaps more so. Even eternal things have their special hour.

A Convincing Piece on Fraternities

I never even considered joining a fraternity at any point in my college life. This piece convinces me that I may have made a mistake.

Reform is not possible because the old-line, historically white social fraternities have been synonymous with risk-taking and defiance from their very inception. They are a brotherhood born in mutiny and forged in the fire of rebellion. These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood — right alongside secrecy and self-protection.

They cannot reform.

That sounds awesome. I thought they were just a bunch of loud-mouthed rich boys.

Fake News, Right and Left

Don't believe in fake news, says National Review's Kevin Williamson -- be suspicious of internet-sourced stories, he says, but then claims that traditional journalism is more or less reliable. There isn't really 'fake news.'

Oh, yes, there is, says Vox on the left. And -- they go on to add -- our side does it too.

An interesting pair of admissions against interest, both aimed at trying to restore some capacity for a reasoned debate between the factions.

UPDATE: In addition to genuinely fake news, there's also the more traditional problem of bias.

A major new study out of Harvard University has revealed the true extent of the mainstream media’s bias against Donald Trump... They found that the tone of some outlets was negative in as many as 98% of reports, significantly more hostile than the first 100 days of the three previous administrations.

That was a European outlet, though. The major American outlets were much closer to nine out of ten than ten out of ten.

UPDATE: The actual Harvard study is here.

ESP is Real and Science is Broken

So argues an article at Slate.

Having served for a time as an associate editor of JPSP, Bem knew his methods would be up to snuff. With about 100 subjects in each experiment, his sample sizes were large. He’d used only the most conventional statistical analyses. He’d double- and triple-checked to make sure there were no glitches in the randomization of his stimuli.

Even with all that extra care, Bem would not have dared to send in such a controversial finding had he not been able to replicate the results in his lab, and replicate them again, and then replicate them five more times. His finished paper lists nine separate ministudies of ESP. Eight of those returned the same effect.

Bem’s 10-year investigation, his nine experiments, his thousand subjects—all of it would have to be taken seriously. He’d shown, with more rigor than anyone ever had before, that it might be possible to see into the future. Bem knew his research would not convince the die-hard skeptics. But he also knew it couldn’t be ignored....

[F]or most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions—that ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk.

Confirmation bias check: I very much agree that most of what we think we understand about the mind is bunk.

UPDATE: This article later made Arts & Letters Daily, which makes me even happier to have mentioned it here first. It's really worth your time, no matter how devoted to science you are or are not. It raises significant questions about the state of our knowledge, and what it means to know what we think we know.

A White Horse is not a Horse

No, not that one. That one's really not a horse. I mean to refer to a philosophical argument from China's Warring States period. The author is somewhat like Socrates, in that he questions the basic uses of language and points out difficulties in how our concepts apply to the world. He is unlike Socrates, if the historians are right, in that he did this chiefly for fun. For Socrates, these philosophical problems were the most important thing in the world -- literally worth dying for, if Plato's treatment of Socrates' defense and death are accurate.

For Gongsun Long, they were a way of entertaining at court. He offered five proofs that 'white horse is not horse.' You can read them all, and a careful analysis of them, at the link above. Here are two of the proofs by themselves, for you to wrestle with before you click through to read the analysis.

Argument 2.
If someone seeks a horse, then it's admissible to deliver a brown or a black horse. If someone seeks a white horse, then it's inadmissible to deliver a brown or a black horse. Suppose white horse were indeed horse. In that case, what the person seeks in those two cases would be one and the same. What he seeks being one and the same is the white one not being different from horse. If what he seeks is not different, then how is it that the brown or black horse are in the one case admissible and in the other inadmissible? Admissible and inadmissible, that they contradict each other is clear. So brown and black horses are one and the same in being able to answer to “having horse” but not to “having white horse.” This confirms that white horse is not horse.

Argument 5.
“White” does not fix what is white.… As to “white horse,” saying it fixes what is white. What fixes what is white is not white. “Horse” selects or excludes none of the colors, so brown or black horses can all answer. “White horse” selects some color and excludes others; brown and black horses are all excluded on the basis of color, and so only white horse alone can answer. Excluding none is not excluding some. Therefore white horse is not horse.

The translation is a bit confusing here. When he says "'white' does not fix what is white," he means that asking for a "white" thing doesn't tell you what kind of thing is supposed to be white. You fix the issue of just what is white not when you specify white, but when you specify the kind of thing you want. This is the same issue that caused Aristotle to divide the world into substances (like horses) and attributes (like being white). So it's not an idle thing to notice; Aristotle hung his basic ontology on the same point.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

In fairness, this is exactly why people voted for Donald Trump.

Toby Keith is headed to the Middle East to join President Donald Trump on his trip to Saudi Arabia. The country singer will perform at a free, men-only concert Saturday in the capital city of Riyadh alongside Saudi singer Rabeh Saqer, The Associated Press reported.

Over/under on whether he'll perform this fan favorite?



Before you say there's no way, take a moment to watch this video as well. There's a kind of showmanship at work here.

Expel Turkey's Ambassador

So says Sen. McCain.

Yesterday's violence, against American citizens on US soil for engaging in their constitutional rights, is completely unacceptable.

Gonzo Second Amendment Advocacy

From Joe Bob Briggs:

Hunter S. Thompson used to mail me giant photos of objects being blown to smithereens with dynamite or flung from some kind of skeet contraption so they could be exploded midair, and in most cases he was both the photographer and the destroyer. He would scrawl the precise date and time of the explosion on the bottom of the photo and copy it to the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, who had repeatedly warned Thompson that he was in possession of illegal military ordnance, that he was in violation of pyrotechnic laws, and that he was in imminent danger of jail. As a Second Amendment radical, Thompson wanted to document exactly when, where, and how he had violated the law, then dare the law to do something about it. To me he would just write, “I’m on it.”

Taki's Magazine prefers that you read the rest there, in order to preserve their revenue stream. The rest is a book review of The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia.

How to Leak Documents: A Primer from the Patriots at the Washington Post

Just in case any of you were thinking of violating your oaths to keep the secrets you swore to protect, here are step by step instructions.

The Comey Memo

This one may really do it.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”…

It's only obstruction if he threatened to fire Comey to get him to drop the investigation, says Richard Painter, George W. Bush’s former chief ethics lawyer; but he went beyond threats and actually fired Comey.

And then he explained why he did: because of this Russia probe.

When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.... Look, I want to find out if there was a problem with an election having to do with Russia. Or, by the way, anybody else. Any other country. And I want that to be so strong and so good. And I want it to happen. I also want to have a really competent, capable director. He's not. He's a showboat.

He was competent enough to keep memos on his conversations with an unpredictable President, apparently. Or so we shall discover if the Congressional subpoena produces this alleged memo.

Rethinking Gays in the Military

It's been several years now since "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was replaced with openly gay service. At the time, those of us who were opposed to the repeal worried that introducing sexuality into line combat units would be disastrous for unit cohesion. Military service is rightly conditioned on the needs of the service, without disrespect to those who are excluded for having conditions -- whether blindness or any other condition -- that are not ideal for service.

Our opponents argued that, in fact, asking people to live a lie was too big an ask: they should either be allowed to serve, or not allowed to serve, and realistically with Obama in office that meant they should be allowed to serve.

Some political arguments are about morality, but many political arguments are about forecasting. Once a decision is made and some time has passed, it's possible to go back and examine whether the forecasts were good or not.

On reflection, I think that those of us who opposed the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" were right about the danger of introducing sexuality to line military units, but wrong to think that gays posed much danger here. There just aren't enough gays, as a percentage of humanity, to create that much change. It's not all that likely that a company of infantry will have one gay guy in it; if they have two, that's unusual. There is thus little reason to be afraid that they will pair up, and even if they do, it's really unlikely there will be a third gay in the unit who might become jealous. The argument that it could happen is not wrong, but as a practical matter it doesn't really happen in the kind of small, line units where unit cohesion is of such critical importance.

By contrast, the Marines United scandal shows that the real dangers come from introducing heterosexuality into line units. Even though there aren't that many more women than gays in line infantry units, nearly all the men are subject to feeling attractions and jealousies towards them. There is a serious threat to good order and discipline when the majority of the unit is involved in competing with each other for the sexual attentions of the rare woman; a male/female pair will become the focus of intense jealousy; and if a breakup occurs, you run into an increased risk of photo sharing of the sort that the Marines United scandal is all about.

Since there is apparently no possibility of asking people not to hook up with fellow servicemembers, nor to ask them not to share nude photos of themselves while in the military, we are left with a pretty damaging dynamic to unit cohesion. The military is trying to address it by cracking down on the photo sharing only, which strikes me as a half-measure that won't be effective because it doesn't begin to treat the emotional issues that are really at work. Young people have higher hormone levels and less experience, and they are easily swayed -- we all remember how easily from our own youth -- by longing and loneliness and jealousy.

Consider too that those high hormone levels, in the form of testosterone, are even helpful for the basic mission of the infantry. Yet insofar as these same high levels make one more likely to make bad love-related decisions that will now result in a mandatory separation review, it sounds as if the introduction of sex to the infantry really is proving disastrous. Not only are these units cracking up over the sexualization of fellow soldiers or Marines, the chosen solution is likely to expel chiefly those whose hormone mix best supports battlefield performance.

So, we were right about the sex. We were wrong about homosexuality, though. It's too uncommon to be the kind of problem we thought it might be. Rather, heterosexuality is the real danger to the military's unit cohesion.

Brief Thoughts on Constitutional Interpretation in a Common Law System

It occurred to me the other day that a lot of Tea Partiers and other sundry and assorted Conservative types tend to treat the US Constitution as if it were in a civil law system rather than a common law system.

In a civil law system, when a judge or court makes a decision, it does not set a precedent that binds future judges or courts. All a court has to look at are the statutes in question and the facts of the case. This is similar to the old "What part of 'shall not be infringed' do you not understand?" rhetoric I've heard many times in discussions of the 2nd Amendment.

Stare decisis, or precedent, is an essential feature of common law systems like ours, which we inherited from the English. You can't just look at the law and the facts in a common law system. You must also look at precedents set by previous courts. As a result, we can't just read the text of the Constitution itself to understand what is and is not constitutional.

Although I think the system we ended up with was brilliant, I personally think the Founders messed up when it came to the judiciary. They have become a rolling constitutional convention because of the role of precedent. I have thought quite a bit about how to solve that problem, but maybe a simple solution would be to strip USSC rulings on the Constitution of precedent.

Of course, I am not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV. My suggestion would probably wreck the whole system and bring about the Fimbulwinter and eventual Apocalypse. But if you ignore that, it's kind of an interesting idea.

An Amusing Error

In checking the spelling of "ghetto" for my previous post, I searched for "getto" (good thing I checked) and came up with this Urban Dictionary entry:

The more Getto verions [sic] of "Ghetto" for those who are too poor to afford the silent "H"

Rebecca Tuval and Philosophy's Existential Crisis

Oliver Traldi, a writer with an MA in philosophy, wrote about the Rebecca Tuval brouhaha in his article A Line in the Sand for Academic Philosophy. If you are interested, I thought the whole article was worthwhile.

He summarized the Tuvel affair thus:

Rebecca Tuvel is an assistant professor at Rhodes College ... Her essay “In Defense of Transracialism” (Hypatia 32.2 [Spring 2017], pp. 263-78) is, to be fair, not consistently scintillating, creative, or convincing. However, few philosophy papers have any of those qualities, and almost none have all three. What the paper does do is lay out relatively clearly the motivation for a fairly intuitive argument. I’ll give my version of it here:

1. We have compelling reasons to accept the identity claims of transgender individuals.
2. Transracial identification is relevantly similar or analogous to transgender identification.
3. The reasons commonly given for not accepting transracial identification are either not compelling or not relevant.
4. From 1, 2, and 3, the balance of reasons compels us to accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.
5. If the balance of reasons compels us to accept something, we should accept it.
6. From 4 and 5, we should accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.

...

Other philosophers wrote and signed an open letter calling for the paper’s retraction. ...

The letter’s most important point is hidden in the first complaint: that Tuvel “uses vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” In the Daily Nous comments, academics in these subfields struggled to identify precisely which arguments Tuvel failed to cite or address, or where her thinking might have gone wrong on a more than superficial level. Indeed, many philosophers of both gender and race have come out against retraction. But “the relevant subfields” are not really the academic studies of gender and race. They are the political interests and values associated with a certain conception of those topics. The real complaint is that anyone who publishes in a journal like Hypatia, itself a blatantly activist organ, ought to share those politics. In turn, the necessary politics are built in to the “vocabulary and frameworks” used by the academics. This is ideological alignment dressed up as intellectual expertise.

This is fairly well-known background for those who have been paying attention to this. What interests me more is his assessment of how the field of philosophy got to this point. He makes several points, but one of them is:

Another concerns the methodology of philosophical ethics. Much of ethics is quasi-scientific: it involves investigating our intuitions about particular cases and generalizing them into a broadly explanatory theory. However, different people have different intuitions. Norms about the nature of intuitive reasoning (e.g. “reflective equilibrium”) and about how much weight philosophers should give to other people’s intuitions have never quite taken hold, except in the “experimental philosophy” movement. In the modern academy, with its myriad specializations, it is easy to put together a “relevant subfield” of philosophical ethics not by linking together a set of situations, puzzles, or theories but by finding a group of people who share the same intuitions about cases. The actual difficult work of ethics is completely removed, because people with deep disagreements can, if they wish, simply read different journals, go to different conferences, and so on. I will leave a comparison to the state of American politics as an exercise for the reader.

That's exactly what I think has happened throughout the humanities, although it is not universal yet. It might provide us with part of an answer as well. Non-Progressive academics shouldn't just sequester themselves in little intellectual ghettos, but citation is life: making sure to include non-Progressive voices in the conversation could help. (If an academic publishes and no one cites the work, was the work really published?) Similarly, an academic community could form that replaces a certain subfield. At this point, I feel like that is actually a necessity. Race, ethnicity, and gender are far too important to leave to the loonies.

Traldi ends with a call to save the field from mob justice, from which I got the title for this post. I think the humanities are worth saving, but I'm not quite sure how it works out yet.

Church Attendants On the Rise in Nashville

Well, something's up, anyway.

I wonder if there isn't a 'free exercise' claim here?

IRS Execs Think Their Lives are at Risk in TEA Party Case

That's interesting. What are you afraid to tell us, I wonder?

"This documentation, as the court will see, makes very personal references and contains graphic, profane and disturbing language that would lead to unnecessary intrusion and embarrassment if made public," their attorneys argued in a recent court brief. "Public dissemination of their deposition testimony would put their lives in serious jeopardy."

This sounds like the rare case in which intrusion and embarrassment are wholly appropriate.

Plato and Cognitive Bias

One of the ways in which we hide how similar our ancestors are to ourselves, Bertrand Russel noted, is by inventing technical terms for things we knew all along.

[T]he richest precedent for behavioural economics is in the works of ancient Greek philosophers. Almost 2,500 years before the current vogue for behavioural economics, Plato was identifying and seeking to understand the predictable irrationalities of the human mind. He did not verify them with the techniques of modern experimental psychology, but many of his insights are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the cognitive biases found by Kahneman and Tversky. Seminal papers in behavioural economics are highly cited everywhere from business and medical schools to the social sciences and the corporate world. But the earlier explorations of the same phenomenon by Greek philosophy are rarely appreciated. Noticing this continuity is both an interesting point of intellectual history and a potentially useful resource: Plato not only identified various specific weaknesses in human cognition, he also offered powerful proposals for how to overcome these biases and improve our reasoning and behaviour.

Many of Plato’s dialogues dramatise the habits and processes that lead humans to false conclusions. He depicts people believing what they want or what they are predisposed to believe (confirmation bias); asserting whatever comes most readily to mind (availability bias); reversing their opinions about identical propositions based on the language in which the propositions are presented (framing); refusing to relinquish current opinions simply because these happen to be the opinions they currently possess (a cognitive version of loss aversion); making false inferences based on the size and representativeness of a sample of a broader population (representativeness heuristic); and judging new information based on salient current information (a version of anchoring). And this is only a partial inventory of the mental errors that he catalogues and dramatises.

Plato was also very good at math, a point that many contemporary readers miss. The Greeks didn't have algebra, but they did have a highly-advanced approach to geometry that allowed them to solve many complex mathematical problems. Thus, while you might not expect Plato to provide a criticism of contemporary statistical mathematics (since he did not have access to such systems), in fact he's aware of a number of the problems such systems will encounter because he has thought a great deal about the real nature of mathematical objects like numbers and shapes.

It may be hard for contemporary thinkers who are schooled in our advanced forms of mathematics to think there is much to be gained by learning the ancient forms as well. Yet a new way of thinking about the same problems offers unexpected benefits. The philosophical investigation into the nature of mathematicals offers additional benefits. What we often learn is how difficult it is to be sure of what we think we know. Thus:

Intellectual humility and overconfidence can stem from purely cognitive processes, but they are also correctly understood as moral achievements or failings. Someone who always thinks that he is right about everything... is making a moral as well as a mental mistake. Similarly, the cultivation of intellectual humility is, in part, the cultivation of an ethical virtue.

Nussbaum's Jefferson Lecture

It's appropriately ancient, and as always with Nussbaum, I wonder how much more she knows about her goals than she makes clear to her audience. We must transform anger with honor, she says -- or, at least, that Athena did. She does not go on to conclude that we can, and yet it is the clear and correct conclusion from her argument.

As the drama begins, the Furies are described as repulsive and horrifying. They are said to be black, disgusting; their eyes drip a hideous liquid. Apollo even says they vomit up clots of blood that they have ingested from their prey. They belong, he says, in some barbarian tyranny where cruelty reigns.

Nor, when they awaken, do the Furies give the lie to these grim descriptions. As Clytemnestra’s ghost calls them, they do not speak, but simply make animal noises, moaning and whining. When they do begin to speak, their only words are “get him get him get him get him,” as close to a predator’s hunting cry as the genre allows....

Unchanged, these Furies could not be at the foundation of a legal system in a society committed to the rule of law. You don’t put wild dogs in a cage and come out with justice. But the Furies do not make the transition to democracy unchanged. Until quite late in the drama, they are still their bestial selves, threatening to disgorge their venom on the land. Then, however, Athena persuades them to alter themselves so as to join her enterprise. “Lull to repose the bitter force of your black wave of anger,” she tells them. But of course that means a virtual change of identity, so bound up are they with anger’s obsessive force. She offers them incentives to join the democracy: a place of honor, reverence from the citizens—but only if they adopt a new range of sentiments, substituting future-directed benevolence for retribution. Perhaps most fundamental of all, they must listen to the voice of persuasion.

Nussbaum says they are offered "places of honor," but also "reverence" -- and reverence is a form of honor too. In return, what must they do? They must "listen to the voice of persuasion" -- and that, too, is a kind of honoring. First, it is a kind of honor because it is a show of special respect to listen to the voice while being open to being persuaded. We don't take advice from just anyone, nor lay aside long-established habits. Athena is demanding honor from them, and offering them honor in return.

The effect is transformative, not just of the Furies but for Athens as well. Honor must be given to be received, and when one is brought into the community that gives and shows honor, peace becomes possible.

Yet then Nussbaum, later in her address, invokes honor in a negative way that seems to undermine her entire argument. I wonder why she does, aside from the clear intent to insult Donald Trump.

Elaborate codes of honor and status led, indeed, to constant status-anxiety and to many duels responding to purported insults. What’s wrong with the obsession with status is that life is not all about reputation, it is about more substantial things: love, justice, work, family. We all know people today who are obsessed with what other people think of them, who constantly scan the Internet to see who has been insulting them.

Indeed it is the biggest problem with Donald Trump that he does not know how to give honor, only how to demand it for himself. Yet reputation (another sort of honor: you have a good reputation if people say good things about you, which is a way of honoring you) enables the 'substantial things' she mentions. Consider work, as Louis L'amour often reminded his readers when he writes about why people might have killed over an insult like being called a "liar." Who will work with someone who is called a liar in the streets? In a poorer time when reputations tended to be well-known among smaller communities, such a name could mean the end of your ability to participate in work at all.

Who would bind their lives with such a person, as in love or the marriage that could bring out a family? The fight for what she calls status is not insubstantial, but rather, in earlier societies it played a crucial role in establishing the conditions for attaining the 'substantial things.'

Of course, some might love a man with a bad reputation -- or a woman, like the one John Wayne's character comes to love in Stagecoach. They might because they come to know the individual, and not just the reputation. But their election to trust the person in spite of his bad reputation -- that, too, is a kind of honor. And this honor, as honor does, transforms.

Mike Pence is the Devil, Mother's Day Edition

Now that the 'ctrl-left' is pretty sure it's got Trump on the ropes -- no doubt he'll be impeached any day, since all the newspapers say he should be -- it's time to move on to demonizing Mike Pence. We got round one out of his horrible refusal to dine with women besides his wife; well, at least, fifteen years ago he felt that way and nobody bothered to check if he still did.

Round two: he sometimes calls his wife "Mother."

One unlucky legislator stuck next to Pence tried to make conversation, but found even at dinner she couldn't shift Pence off his talking points. Gov. Pence shouted to his wife, Karen, his closest adviser, at the other end of the table.

"Mother, Mother, who prepared our meal this evening?"

The legislators looked at one another, speaking with their eyes: He just called his wife "Mother."

Maybe it was a joke, the legislator reasoned. But a few minutes later, Pence shouted again.

"Mother, Mother, whose china are we eating on?"

Mother Pence went on a long discourse about where the china was from. A little later, the legislators stumbled out, wondering what was weirder: Pence's inability to make conversation, or calling his wife "Mother" in the second decade of the 21st century.

There's other stuff in this profile: he's a Christian, but not the kind of Christian who thinks that progressive social programs are the ideal tool for religious expression; there are unsubstantiated accusations from people who used to know him, or who like what he did but don't like how he did it; he's way too religious for the author's taste.

If there are so many reasons to dislike Pence, why include this strange tidbit about how he refers to his wife in their own home? They make it sound weird, which to me suggests that the author is childless. Pence and his wife have three children. In a house full of kids, everyone but you is calling her "Mother," and if you want to communicate effectively with those children you'll adopt their usage when speaking with them. So too with her, who is likely to tell the children information they need to know about "Daddy" or "Father." In their own house, eating off their own china, it's not strange that they'd fall into what must have become a common mode of speaking in that particular context over decades of child-rearing.

But of course that's the point, isn't it? Child-rearing is weird now, at least among the readership of Rolling Stone. Being a Christian is weird. Taking your wedding vows seriously is weird. What could be stranger than seeing yourself and your spouse, inside your own house, as related to the context of that household you built in the role of mother and father?

These things used to be ordinary. They almost defined ordinary. Now they're proof of moral wickedness: a failure, I suppose, to evolve.

But don't these same people tell us that evolution is random and without purpose or meaning? Motherhood, so necessary for the process of evolution, is not lacking in these things.

Why Are We Doing This?

Early moves by insurers suggest that another round of price hikes and limited choices will greet insurance shoppers around the country when they start searching for next year's coverage on the public markets established by the Affordable Care Act.

Before Obamacare, I had a policy I kept from 2003 until, years after it became a grandfathered plan I couldn't change in any way, I lost it because the company quit selling it. I was never in a position of having to go out each year and "search for next year's coverage." Now I am in exactly that position.

Before Obamacare, that plan that I had changed only in that the premiums went up slightly from year to year. After Obamacare, the cost tripled before the policy was discontinued.

Before Obamacare, that plan had a network I didn't even have to worry about because any doctor you happened upon would certainly be on it. If you got drug to the hospital for some reason, you didn't have to first check to see if everyone in that hospital (including the anesthesiologist) was on the plan. They would be on the plan. Now, you have to agree to pay charges without having any idea if your network includes anyone at that hospital.

Nor can you check, actually, as the ACA's website doesn't have fully updated information for this year. You can find out if they took the plan last year, but every year, networks narrow and prices increase.

Why are we doing this?

Dolly Parton Lights the Way

I just passed through Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The damage from last year's fires is still highly evident in that town and the surrounding country, and will be for some time. By coincidence one of my cousins is a civil engineer up that way, and he has his hands absolutely full trying to rebuild the hundreds and hundreds of structures that were destroyed -- indeed, I think he said it was a few thousand structures he had on his plate. There is a real shortage of engineers who are experienced working on mountainsides, and thus there isn't the flood of help from outside the Tennessee mountains that one would expect.

So it is with pleasure that I read about native daughter Dolly Parton's extraordinary generosity in helping her fellow folks. Having grown up in tremendous poverty, and then attained substantial wealth, she never forgets how hard life can be in those mountains.

"The Ctrl-Left"

Via Anarchyball, an amusing term for the Antifa aspects of the left wing. It's meant as a parallel to the "alt-right," of course.

A Genuine Problem with the System

Reportedly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is calling for his prosecutors to -- as a matter of course -- seek the harshest possible charges with the longest possible prison terms when prosecuting cases.

Well, actually, that's not quite what he said.

The policy memo says prosecutors should “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” — something more likely to trigger mandatory minimum sentences. Those rules limit a judge’s discretion and are typically dictated, for example, by the quantity of drugs involved in a crime. The memo concedes there will be cases in which “good judgment” will warrant a prosecutor to veer from that rule. But any exceptions will need to be approved by top supervisors, and the reasons must be documented, allowing the Justice Department to track the handling of such cases by its 94 U.S. attorney’s offices.

Mandatory minimums are a problem. Sessions, as a former lawmaker, bears some of the responsibility for that problem, but certainly not all of it. The heuristic that one should usually pursue the "most serious, readily provable" crime isn't even a bad standard: if a serious crime isn't readily provable don't pursue it, but if it is then of course it's your job to nail criminals for their serious crimes.

I would have left a lot more room for that "good judgment" exercise by lower-level officials, rather than requiring high-level officials to sign off on such uses of judgment. Still, it's not an unreasonable policy on its face.

What makes it a problem is, then, the mandatory minimums that exist in the law. That's a problem for legislators, not the Justice Department. I agree with the analysis that such minimums are not appropriate as a general principle. Nevertheless, it's not on the Justice Department to refuse to enforce the law when a crime is "readily provable" just because the law is badly written. It's on Congress to fix the law.

UPDATE:

My congressman, Doug Collins of Georgia's Mighty 9th, is working on trying to reform the laws in the way I'm discussing here. Specifically, he is focused on dealing with the mental health aspects of crimes. Collins is a former Air Force chaplain whose father was a state trooper.

"I've spent a lot of time with our sheriffs and going to our jails. One question I always ask is, 'How many in your jail would you classify as mental health or addiction issues?' The answer is that it ranges from about 35-40 percent of incarcerated individuals in some jails."...

"We're looking at the whole issue, at folks dealing with serious mental issues, but also from an economic perspective, the money perspective, making the best use of taxpayer dollars to not just incarcerate folks without getting them help," he added.

Mandatory minimums aren't the right answer to these issues. They might be to some issues -- I think I broadly approve of Project EXILE's moves to punish drug gangs who use guns with harsh penalties, as at least it pulls these kids off the street until they're too old to go around gunning each other down (as well as, being untrained thugs, often innocent people who were proximate to their targets). But there are many cases in which these mandatory minimums should be rethought by Congress.

Who Says Trump Wants a New FBI Director?

Democrats in Congress may be outsmarting themselves.

So, Democrats are hinting to President Donald Trump, want a new FBI director? Then agree to an independent investigation of your campaign’s possible ties to Russia.

Democrats control only 48 Senate seats, meaning they need to pull three Republicans over to their side. The bipartisan angst over the abrupt firing of James Comey on Tuesday could give them the leverage they badly need.

They want a special prosecutor, or perhaps a special panel, to investigate allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Republican leaders oppose an independent probe, but some GOP senators are sympathetic.

Say that one of Trump's goals is making the Russia probe go away. What's more effective in attaining that goal: agreeing to a semi-permanent institution like a special prosecutor, or allowing your opponents to make sure the FBI remains headless?

If you really think there's something to all this, as Democratic leaders claim to do (although even Chairman Grassley concedes that the President is right to say that he isn't personally under investigation), why would you offer this deal? If Trump turns it down, he can charge you with being the ones who are 'obstructing justice' by playing politics with a major police agency. You, by contrast, will be in the difficult position of claiming that (a) 'serious crimes have been committed!' but also that (b) 'Therefore, we must refuse to appoint a new head of the bureau that would investigate such crimes.'

All this chaos is good for somebody, but I'm not sure that somebody is any of us.

PR Grandmaster

Scott Adams argues that the average guy's main takeaway from President Trump's letter firing Comey is the odd sentence thanking him for informing him that he was not under investigation.  Adams credits Trump with getting his opponents in the media to intone "not under investigation" non-stop for several days, thus laying out one simple and comprehensible concept while thoroughly confusing the public on nearly other aspect of the firing.

Death to Trump(-supporting TV Show)

We don't do TV here at Grim's Hall, so I've never seen the show in question, but it apparently enjoyed high ratings. That's not a reason to avoid canceling it, in today's America; it's the reason to cancel it.

Every week, the half-hour comedy, one of the very few aimed to appeal to America's heartland, won its time-slot in the all-important demo, including 6.4 million overall same-day viewers. Deadline further adds that "[w]hile most returning shows were down year-to-year 20-30%, LMS was virtually flat, off just by 5% in total viewers and adults 18-49[.]"

Those are very impressive numbers for a show that has been around for six full seasons.

But that is not all!

Last Man Standing was ABC's Friday anchor, meaning a show that could not only be counted on to win the night but one that kept viewers tuned in to whatever shows came after. Anchors are also crucially important when it comes to launching new shows.

But that is not all!

The real money in the sitcom business comes from syndication rights, selling the reruns on a per episode basis to other networks. Last Man Standing is not only a syndication smash, a virtual cash cow, per Deadline it is the "rare off-network ratings success story these days."

When a show does this well in syndication, every episode becomes a bar of gold, a likely source of rolling revenue for years and years to come.

Doesn't matter. What's important is making sure there is absolutely no cultural affirmation for "America's heartland."

#2 AG Meeting with Senate Intel Committee

Given Sessions' recusal, this guy can approve a special prosecutor on his own -- and no one can stop him if he decides to do so, not the President and not the Senate. I wonder if he's decided to pull the trigger.

Sally Yates is from Georgia?

Apparently she is -- native born, even, and educated at the University of Georgia -- and some are pushing her to be our next governor.

Unconservative

Yuval Levin warns that the voters who won the 2016 election don't see much worth conserving:

I think of alienation as a sense of detachment from one’s own society. It’s looking out at the society you live in and thinking, “That’s not mine” and feeling no connection, no links—seeing it as distant, as hostile, even seeing it as boring. We should never underestimate the power of boredom in social life. That kind of alienation was very much on display in the last election and in some people’s—especially early on in the Republican primaries, in the most devoted Trump supporters—there was a sense that “This society isn’t ours. We have got to blow this up and try again.” I think that’s dangerous in general, but it’s particularly dangerous to conservatism because conservatism in a sense is a sense of attachment and ownership and defensiveness of one’s own society. It certainly can see problems and is inclined to be rather depressed about things most of the time. But that follows from a sense of loss, not from a sense of alienation. It can lead, therefore, in its most constructive forms to a determination to revive, revitalize, recapture institutions, rather than to this sense that “it’s all over” or “the only option we have left is a Hail Mary pass.”

I think that the sort of alienation that was evident in some of Trump’s supporters is very dangerous for the American right because it tends to make the right less conservative. And to make the right hostile to its own society. First of all, I think America doesn’t deserve that. We have a lot of problems, our institutions are in real trouble, but things are not nearly as bad as the way in which Trump described them. Just think about the convention speech and, in some respects, even the inaugural. This describes an America that is much darker than reality and when you do that, it doesn’t leave room for thinking about solutions. It doesn’t leave room for thinking about how to come back.

I didn't see the inaugural address that way. Despite my skepticism about Trump, I heard the message that we're tired of being told we're locked into policies that demonstrably don't work, just because someone has decided that the alternatives are unthinkable to the progressive chattering class. I certainly acknowledge a "burn it down, plow it under, salt the ground it stood on" vein in my politics, but not because I'm willing to replace the status quo with just anything. I want either to replace it with policies with a proven track record or, if necessary, to replace it with something new and experimental, but only if we're committed to observing its results and changing it if it doesn't work, either. I'm tired of the magical thinking, from climate science to free lunches.

Ruby Soho

It's a ska take on what I guess is now a punk rock classic, though I am old enough to think of it as a late comer.

Call it an Irish Pub

"I'll up & burst yer filthy mug,
If you draw one more shamrock in me beer!"

Nothing Says "Discrete" Like MOLLE Webbing

It's probably a great product, but I am deeply amused by the marketing.

Set up your discreet mobile field office with the Tactical Shit Snowden Computer Bag that is designed to hold a 17" laptop. The pack unzips to become a portable field desk with multiple pockets for all your gear, documents, pens, power cord, etc. The padded perimeter rim will not only protect your computer, it will also keep the sun off the screen during daylight operations.

What's the MOLLE for anyway? Rigging a holster and an ammo pouch to the outside of your computer bag?

German Police Do Not Appreciate Car Culture

Stars & Stripes has an article on how much the German police do not look kindly on American servicemembers' muscle cars. Near one military base, the police are establishing a special unit to crack down on American custom cars.

It's a basic clash of civilizations. It's the clash between this:

...and this:

Well, This Will Be Fun

Trump firing Comey is going to produce a political fireball, I'll wager.

Warpiper

Havok Journal has a piece by one such.

The first time I played a set of highland bagpipes, the feeling was immense and indescribable. The ability to command such a powerful instrument and convey a mood of elation or utter sorrow was incredible. The first time I fired a M2 .50 caliber machinegun, my brain was equally unprepared to wholly understand what my hands were wielding and what they were then capable of.

Not everyone likes the bagpipes, but then again not everybody loves Ma Deuce either!

Refugees and Terror

We've seen anecdotal evidence that the vetting refugees receive doesn't stop them from turning terrorist. We've also seen arguments that we shouldn't expect it to given the paucity of information actually available to vet people coming from failed states, war zones, or enemy states like Iran.

Now we have something like a statistic from James Comey, head of the FBI: refugees make up 15% of their active terrorism cases.

What we don't get from Comey is a sense of whether these refugee terrorists are motivated by, say, attachment to a drug cartel or to, say, some religious doctrine. The United States admitted 85,000 refugees in 2016 alone, meaning that the 300 cases Comey cites would remain a tiny fraction of the refugee population. Even if it were 85,000 total rather than 85,000 annually, that's just 0.0035%; in fact, it would be orders of magnitude lower when you consider the whole population.

Still, refugees as a whole are a tiny fraction of the American population, so it remains surprising to see them so prominently figuring in terrorism cases. Those refugees from 2016 represent 0.00024% of the American population, and treating the population as a whole would only move the decimal at most a few places: we're still going to be talking way less than one full percentage point, not 15 percent.

Beware Skotland

A Norse travel guide has been recovered recently, written on 800 year old sheets of vellum.

THE very rough guide to Scotland offered the would-be traveller the following warning. Be very careful there, it says – the natives are dangerous, the language incomprehensible and the weather is awful....

The chronicles have been interpreted by Gisli Sigurdsson, a historian at Reykjavik University... Sigurdsson said the sagas were a warning to travellers that they would encounter a general foggy area, dangerous landings, hostile natives and language problems. They wrote that the people would probably attack you immediately.

That sounds about right.

Fixing Health Care

So I'm trying to figure out what to say to my Senators. Here's one idea.

Suns Out, Guns Out

Georgia's governor, Nathan Deal, signed this year's campus carry bill into law. I'm surprised that he did so, after vetoing it last year, but the effect is to have produced a much more complicated law.

In related news, the NRA is trying to recruit a more diverse membership.

John Lewis on AHCA

Rep. John Lewis of the Great State of Georgia is not a fan, not at all.

Today we are facing a crossroads in the history of this nation. One day our children and our children’s children may turn to us and ask, 'Which side were you on?' In the aftermath of this vote, members of the House will have to look their constituents, their friends, their family and even their children in the eyes and tell them the painful truth.

The House Republican bill, H.R. 1628, does not rescue health care. It is an attack on the poor, the sick, the elderly and the disabled. It punishes hard-working women and men, and it uses their resources collected in the federal Treasury as a pipeline to line the pockets of big business and the wealthiest people in the world.

Never ever in my years in the U.S. House of Representatives have I seen such a betrayal of the public trust. Never have I seen legislative action that reveals such clear disdain for the human dignity of the most vulnerable among us. Never have I ever seen such a willingness to disregard what is right in favor of what is so wrong.

People from all around the country begged their elected representatives to vote against this despicable bill. Instead, my colleagues chose to serve themselves and their rich friends and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves. H.R. 1628 proves this White House ushered in a government of the rich, by the rich, for big business, and people will pay with their lives for it.

If this bill becomes law, at least 24 million Americans who can see their doctors today will be turned away tomorrow. Those who are sick will suffer, and some of them will die. People with pre-existing conditions will have premiums so high most will not be able to afford care, and any state can deny healthcare to their citizens at any time.

This is a shame and a disgrace. May God have mercy on us all.

This is a good example of the problem I was discussing below, where politics is more aggressive than ethics at dividing people. Lewis, whose skull was broken at Selma, is a man devoted to a particular politics in which the proper role of the Federal government is to do good things for people -- especially poor people and, as a remedy for historical unfairness, minority groups. He reads this bill as an attack on the poor and the sick.

It is possible to untangle opposition to this model of the proper role of the Federal government from opposition to the poor living good lives, or opposing respect for the poor and the sick in general. But there isn't any political advantage to making that leap; in fact it derails several very useful rhetorical tools. And it's emotionally attractive, too, to view your opponents as wicked and evil rather than as simply having different views.

Can we have a debate about the various ways in which Federal money chasing health care services actually raises the cost for everyone, just as increased demand always raises costs given a steady supply? Theoretically, sure. But practically, once you've equated morality with using government to provide goods, opponents to the provision of goods are immoral. Of course it's proper to treat the immoral with disdain. Isn't it?

AHCA Take II

I've spent part of the evening reading through the bill. It is not, in fact, either a repeal or a replacement of the ACA; its relative brevity depends on the fact that it is mostly a modification of that law. A true repeal could have been much briefer; a true replacement would have had to have been much longer.

There are some good things about it, although some of them are trivial. It is clear that the Congress has been listening to the states and taking advice on what works and what doesn't, which is good. Some of that advice has been silly, like the insistence on a provision allowing states to strip Medicaid from high-dollar lottery winners. That's one of those problems that may look bad in the papers, but it can't possibly come up often enough to really merit anyone's attention. Still, trivialities aside, clearly Congress consulted with the states about the problems they'd faced implementing the ACA, and incorporated those thoughts into the bill.

Bad things appear to be included as well, although it's hard to say how bad they really are. I'm seeing equally confident exclamations from left-leaning sites that the AHCA's costs cannot be known, because the CBO hasn't scored it and nor has anyone else reputable; and also that the cost of various "pre-existing conditions" will go up by this-or-that very precise figure. Probably the first of these is true, and the figures are all made-up.

That in turn suggests that the Republicans did not learn the most crucial lesson of the ACA, which is that you should never pass a major piece of legislation whose effects you haven't taken the time to fully understand. Bad consequences are almost certain, and any consequences -- or even accidents that can be painted as consequences -- will now belong to the Republicans, or anyway will if they manage to get this through the Senate and signed by President Trump.

On the first pass, I'm not really sure what to think about it. On the one hand, Obamacare has been terrible for rural America. Breaking the seal on making changes to it would be worth doing, even if the changes aren't great. Henceforth Democrats won't oppose any changes because they're trying to 'preserve the Obama legacy'; they can support changes in terms of 'replacing/repairing Trumpcare.' Thus, we would be freer as a nation to think and adjust to the bad aspects of this bill as well as the Obamacare legacy bill.

On the other hand, a lot of this looks like it's unlikely to reduce anybody's health care costs -- though it will cut taxes for some, and raise costs for others (especially the sick and the poor). I think the Feds should get out of the health care game more or less entirely, even turning the VA into quiet grants to veterans to let them pursue private medical services. This is not a step in that direction. It's also not a step in the direction of single-payer, though, and there's a chance it will at least open the game back up to easier future adjustments as necessary.

So I'm not sure what I think right now. What do you think?

Orkney!

In a collection of 12 maps of Scotland, the map of place names in the Orkney Islands is my favorite.

The One Ring

The feminist philosophers I know are of the rising generation, and they are very decent people whom I've not seen engage in poisonous rhetoric of any sort. Watching the destruction of the career of Prof. Rebecca Tuvel, however, I can't doubt that there is a problem of some sort at work in the field.

I wonder if it isn't a more general problem of American political philosophy, though. Typically, it is very human to respect those who live moral lives according to your sense of what "moral" means, and to respect people less if they don't. It's ordinary even to despise people who live lives that are immoral by one's own lights. The problem in political philosophy is that despising your opponents destroys the process of reasoning together. Yet we -- and not just feminists at all, but Americans in general, Democrats and Republicans and others as well -- seem to be locked into a cycle of despising as immoral those with whom we disagree politically.

Oddly enough there isn't a similar problem in ethics, at least not usually. There are several basic roads to ethics that are all thought acceptable even though they diverge. I tend to believe in virtue ethics, for example, and find utilitarianism to be fairly implausible. But I don't despise utilitarians. Nor do they despise virtue ethics, nor does either group despise deontologists. So it's possible to disagree on even the most basic questions of morality without falling into mutual disdain.

Probably it's just the question of power. In ethics, I decide for myself what is right and do that, and mostly that affects me and a few others who have chosen to associate with me (and are free to choose otherwise). In politics, decisions on moral questions are inevitably impositions. It's no longer a question of respecting a difference; it becomes a question of resenting being forced to accept things that you yourself find immoral.

I suspect that any attempt to redress this problem would also give rise to a complaint (again, from all sides) that it is ridiculous to ask them to respect people who want to impose immoral agendas upon them. Which means that their opponents must be driven from politics, somehow, since imposition is inevitable.

For 13 years now, I've been trying to convince people that the right way to resolve this is by finding a way for Americans of different moral views not to exert power over each other. Mostly I have argued for restoring the 10th Amendment and devolving powers from the Federal branches to the states. Then the power concerns fade, as there will be 50 different ways of living available to all.

Sometimes people can be convinced while they are out of power, but I have yet to observe many who remained true to the path should they gain power. It's a quandary: one must have power, and substantial power, to make a change like this. Having gained the power, though, why would you want to break up its very source?

Transiting Sex and Race

If someone can be 'transgender' or 'transsexual,' why not 'transracial'? A young feminist scholar made the mistake of asking. It's likely to destroy her career.

I hope that Prof. Tuvel consults a lawyer about this defamation; and while it looks to me like defamation per se (i.e., damages are presumed since the critics are impugning her competence in her profession), I would imagine showing damage would not be hard. How can Prof. Tuvel, for example, now use this repudiated but allegedly peer-reviewed article as part of her tenure process? Indeed, how can her department or college support her for tenure when she has been so vilified as a scholar and professional by people who work in her fields? I wonder did any of those professing solidarity with those who specialize in taking offense consider the very tangible harm they are doing to the author of this article?...

We have been living with an "atmosphere of reckless attack" in philosophy (as one correspondent put it to me in 2014) for awhile now. I hope this proves to be the final straw, and that the community will finally stand up and denounce this misconduct that should be anathema to a scholarly community. If Prof. Tuvel does decide to seek legal redress for what has happened to her, I will organize fundraising on her behalf. It really is time to stop this madness.

More here.

The thing is, as everyone knows, sex is a huge biological fact that impacts everything about us. Race is, at most, a heuristic way of talking about genetic differences in groups; more likely, it's a fiction largely created to sell early Modern Europeans on being OK with re-introducing slavery. It has a big social reality, but refers to nothing that is biologically real. Thus, if one can 'trans'it sex, one could surely 'trans'it race. To say otherwise is to hold that this social fiction has more impact on us than what is probably the single most important biological characteristic.

I suppose one could argue that this is in fact the case: that race, even without a real biological referent, is socially so important that it does indeed trump sex. Charles Mills, cited in the hated article, might make that argument; his latest book points in that direction. (I should note that I have met Charles Mills and heard him speak, and whatever you think of his subject matter, he is a consummate gentleman and unfailingly courteous.) I doubt that argument would pan out, but one could make it.

No one is bothering to try. The intent is simply to put this woman's head on a spike, as a warning to others. It has already worked with the board of the journal that, after double blind peer review, published her work. They are cowards, of course, but that is only to be expected of them. Only cowards survive in their field.

As said by Sir William Francis Butler: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." Well, there you go.

Corruption and Esteem

A scathing criticism of American liberalism, which ends by asserting that the corruption is completely understandable. Well, perhaps it is; but it is corruption, is it not?

Rights and Wrongs

I've heard this proposal before, but I think it was coming from a sophomore. In High School.

The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial. Therefore, using a firearm to defend oneself is not legal because if the attacker is killed, he or she is devoid of his or her rights.

Everyone has a right to walk down the public street without being robbed or killed, too. Any citizen has the right, and something of the duty, to try to stop such a violation when he or she encounters it in progress. Whether this is a case of "self-defense" or defense of a fellow citizen is immaterial.

A polity exists in part in order that its members might defend each other from just such violations, whether by criminals or by Vandals. It is the mark of a very strange set of priorities to suggest that citizens ought to prefer protecting the rights of the Vandals to protecting each other. The reason to protect rights even for Vandals, after all, is that such protections serve as a further fortification of the rights of the citizenry. To throw aside the citizens' rights in favor of the Vandals' is to miss the whole point of why Vandals' rights are protected at all.

Beltane Fire Festival

Out Edinburgh way, they had quite a night last night.

'Oss 'oss, wee 'oss!

The Padstow Day Song ("Unite and unite, oh, let us unite, for summer is a-coming today") and Night Song ("Oh, where is King George?  Where is he oh?") are the traditional May Day songs for Padstow in Cornwall.  The Hobby Horse (the "Old 'Oss") is a giant cylindrical black  creature that tries to capture young women under its skirts, meaning they'll be married within the year.





This is my favorite rendition of the songs.  'Oss 'oss, wee 'oss!  'Oss 'oss, wee 'oss! 'Oss 'oss, WEE 'OSS!

The Merry Month of May

The joy associated with May in the old tales may be associated with the more northern climes in which these songs were written; here, it was April in which everything broke into riotous flowers. Now, summer is here if you judge by the trees instead of the stars.

Still, May and October often have the best weather of the year even here.



The change of season provokes thoughts about the importance of using time well.



Here is a song about the first of May from a medieval troubadour and, later, knight.



I hope the day finds you well.

On Station

Well, this week wasn't as much fun as I had hoped, but it was eventful. I have learned, for example, that in addition to the two things that I knew could cause power steering to fail -- burst hydraulic lines, and a failure of the pump/reservoir -- a third thing that can happen is for a solid steel bracket to fail for no apparent reason and drop your alternator on the whole assembly.

Since the bracket may be attached to a major component of your engine, such as the timing chain cover, the cost of labor could make repairs prohibitively expensive. You would, after all, have to take apart a large part of the engine to install a replacement -- if you had a replacement.

Because the failure was due to a design flaw (you engineers should know better than to use a thin single point of cast rather than forged steel to hold an alternator, which is under tension from the belt driving it), you'd think there would be a recall. However, as Fight Club explains, AxBxC=X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, the company won't do one.



Just because the cost of a recall can involve repairs that are each individually prohibitively expensive, often times they aren't done. But the part you'd need to repair the vehicle, were you inclined to pay the prohibitive cost, will be discontinued. Thus, not only is it prohibitively expensive, it's nearly impossible.

So anyway, I bought a used truck this weekend. It's a Ford. The old one wasn't. That's all I'm going to say about it, but you can take that for what it's worth.

Bliss

I have no words to describe how wonderful was the Sacred Harp two-singing I attended this weekend.  These videos aren't from that event, though they are from the same location four years ago, and both feature songs we did.  This is very much the same sound:





There were 80 people present on both days, including at least 40 or 50 active singers. Even better, the active singers included a hard core of old-timers expert in their singing. Almost best, a dozen very young children got up to lead. Some were so young they couldn't quite remember that they were supposed to call the song by its number. Some stood up with an adult to support, but others got right out there on their own. I've been attending these singings for nearly 30 years; I see no sign at all of their decaying.

At certain points in the program people stand to announce singings in other locations, not only here in Texas but all over the country. (There were singers present from a dozen or more states this weekend.) One old fellow announced his Alabama church's upcoming annual singing as its 179th or some such wild number, then explained that the number for "consecutive" annual singings was a little less than that; there was a period of a couple of years when they weren't able to have one, during the 1860s.

Schlichter: I Am a Victim of Your Hateful Hate Crimes, You Hate Criminals

I've often thought that the right needs to turn the left's rhetoric against lefties, and Schlichter takes a good swing at it. He begins:

As a person of absolutely no color who embodies an intersectional reality that includes my utter lack of genderfluidity and my unemployment-questioning, differently-veteraned, and non-pagan experiences, I am totally oppressed by progressivism’s hegemonic power structure. I am also the victim of a systemic system of hostile paradigms that denies my truth regarding my phallo-possessory identity. 

Now, some may consider this a form of sarcastic reductio ad absurdum. I, however, see it as a new paradigm of discourse when talking to those on the left who have already reduced themselves to absurdity. When in Absurdistan, do as the Absurdis do, right?