Accountable to the Public

A law enforcement group called "Major County Sheriffs of America" wants you to learn from last weekend that militias shouldn't be trusted to keep the peace.

“Any group that considers themselves a public safety group other than law enforcement is of concern because that is not their job. It’s the law enforcement’s job,” said Sandra Hutchens, president of Major County Sheriffs of America, told Defense One. The group is an association of elected sheriffs “representing counties or parishes with 500,000 population or more.”

One reason the presence of heavily armed men patrolling during “alt-right” events adds a new level of danger is because no one is entirely sure why they are even there or to whom they are accountable, including the militia members themselves. Law enforcement officers, on the other hand, are “accountable to the public always; that’s a very important point in this,” said Hutchens, who also is the sheriff-coroner for Orange County, Calif. “If we’re not doing it appropriately, then we’re accountable to the people and the government.”

There are a few things to say about that argument.

First of all, the police didn't in fact do their job. How accountable do we expect that they are going to be for not doing so? The mayor and governor appear to have ordered them not to do it. Possibly the mayor and governor might be turned out at the next election, maybe, but the police? There is I think no possibility whatsoever that they will be held accountable. Nobody's going to lose his job, nobody's going to jail for nonfeasance, nobody's going to get a pay cut. They obeyed orders, and that will be enough.

Secondly, the lack of accountability for law enforcement officers is not unique to situations in which not doing their jobs appropriately is ordered. It also happens when they make mistakes, get scared, and sometimes even when they do wrong on purpose. If a militia member shoots somebody, I guarantee you they'll face the full array of legal accountability. Even if they were completely justified in the shooting -- in a situation of self defense or defense of an innocent, against an immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm -- they'll be arrested and subject to investigation. Most likely they will be charged, and the justification of their action tested in court before a judge and a jury of their peers. If they were not justified in any way, they will be convicted and go to jail. They are personally, immediately accountable to the public through criminal law in a way that law enforcement officers regularly prove not to be.

Thirdly, unlike law enforcement officers, they will be personally accountable to the public via civil law. They can be personally sued in civil court for any harm caused by the shooting. This will include both documented harm and also more subjective categories like 'pain and suffering,' 'estimated lost wages,' etc.

Lots of law enforcement officers do a good job of keeping the peace in their community. It may very well be that it would be better for everyone if the police stopped conflict between protest groups instead of having us rely on militias. However, when the police fail to do so appropriately they are certainly not more accountable to the public than private citizens who belong to militias. Police are much, much less so.

Pershing Is Worth Studying, But...

...the lesson you'll learn from him is uncertain.

It is not in fact the case that Pershing ended Islamic terrorism in the Philippines for 35 years. The story to which the President is alluding is almost certainly false.

(UPDATE: I stand corrected. According to Pershing's autobiography of the period, which was unpublished until the University of Kentucky Press put it out in 2015, he did in fact bury Moros with dead pigs:



So that's news to me -- when I studied the period, that was understood to be a falsehood.)

Pershing did have a fairly successful stint as military governor. He instituted a number of changes (including not 'shooting people with pigs blood,' but actually donating land for the construction of mosques) that helped bring people closer to the government. He did succeed in transitioning to a civilian government, although it still needed armed guards everywhere.

Partially this was because he decided to disarm the Moros, which led to a series of pretty punishing battles. Nor was he successful: I've been to these places, and the Moro's aren't disarmed yet.

What actually ended the Moro rebellions against Americans in the Philippines was the loss of the islands to the Japanese, though. Then the Moros fought the Japanese instead. Since the end of WWII, there have been regular resurgences of violence. Pretty much anybody who decides they're going to go down there and run the place ends up fighting the Moros. There have been successful counterinsurgencies, but they don't last because ultimately the Moros just don't want to be ruled by anyone else.

So maybe the lesson is, "Certain people should probably be left alone." I'd like it if that was the lesson government officials took from this, but I doubt that it will be.

UPDATE: A good longer piece from 2012 on Pershing in Mindanao, from Small Wars Journal.

A Story of American Unity

Those of you who are fans of old cowboy movies will of course know the closing scene from Rio Grande, in which General Philip Sheridan orders the band to play 'Dixie' in tribute to one of the ladies whose home he had burned during his Shenandoah Campaign. It's a romanticized Hollywood sequence; I have no idea if anything like it ever happened.

But here's a true story about Sherman, whose burning campaign through Georgia is even more famous than Sheridan's.

On 19 February, a funeral service was held at his home, followed by a military procession. General Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate officer who had commanded the resistance to Sherman's troops in Georgia and the Carolinas, served as a pallbearer in New York City. It was a bitterly cold day and a friend of Johnston, fearing that the general might become ill, asked him to put on his hat. Johnston famously replied: "If I were in [Sherman's] place, and he were standing in mine, he would not put on his hat." Johnston did catch a serious cold and died one month later of pneumonia.

Of course, like other figures, we have to remember the bad with the good. Sheridan went on to command an equally brutal series of wars against various Native American tribe-nations. Those campaigns were conducted under Sherman's higher authority, and with his blessing -- as well they might have been, since Sheridan's total warfare approach was based on Sherman's model.

I guess there are probably statues to them, too. For now.

UPDATE: A similar story of seeking unity from the funeral of Robert E. Lee.

Principles for Getting Things Right

Amid the controversy over who was to blame, whether it was 'one side' or 'both sides' (or if, indeed, there were more than two sides!), I thought it would be useful to say what we should be for rather than just what we ought to be against.

1) Upholding the Constitution

2) Opposing Racism

3) Opposing Violence Against Innocents

4) Defending a Public Space for all Americans

The scorecard on this list for C'ville:

White Nationalists / KKK / Nazis: Wrong on points 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Antifa / Communists: Wrong on points 1 and 4. (Communists also have a bad history on 3, but we're just talking about this weekend.)

Nonviolent Peaceful Counterprotesters: Not in violation of any points, but ineffective on 4.

Government/Police: Complete abdication of duty on 3 and 4 at all levels until it was too late. Democratic mayor/governor opposed 1st Amendment on allowing the rally to happen at all; Republican President seems weak on 2 at times, though at other times he says appropriate things. If our government is taken as a whole, it failed on all four principles.

III% Militias: The only ones who did the right thing at every level, opposed radicals committed to destroying the Constitution or effecting racism, stopped attacks in real time while the police stood aside, and did so without resorting to significant force.

That ought to be a significant finding. It's not just 'both sides' of the protesters who did at least some things wrong, it's both sides of the government, too. The only good citizens were the nonviolent protesters and the III%ers.

The Real Right

Well said.

These hypothetical fine people on the “Unite the Right” side [posited by Trump] still would not be conservatives, or even American patriots, because they’ve given up on America. They, like the left, reject the existence of an American people and equality of all before the law, and instead embrace identity politics and the ideology of government-enforced multiculturalism....

The Charlottesville crowd agrees with the left that there is no American people, only multiple, distinct peoples inhabiting the same space, whose interaction must be refereed by the state. In other words, they’re multiculturalists who merely want whites to grab their share of the spoils....

The proper response to this is not Romney’s and Rubio’s desperate pleas to be eaten last, but a forthright assertion that race and ethnicity have no place in American law. No quotas or set-asides. No Census Bureau tabulation of race or ethnicity. No ethnic or religious preferences in immigration law. We need a high wall of separation between ethnicity and state.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Tonight in my email, a letter from Democracy for America urging me to sign a petition to impeach the President over today's press conference.

Really. Here's the petition, if any of you want to sign it.

I'm trying to decide if they think his press conference constitutes a high crime, or a misdemeanor. High crime, I'm thinking.

UPDATE: MoveOn has added their call, in a fundraising email, to impeach the President over yesterday's press conference. "Begin the impeachment process. For months now, we've been demanding that Congress begin the process to remove Donald Trump from office. Yesterday's behavior was yet another example of just how unfit he is for the office of the presidency. And how urgently impeachment is needed."

The Roads are Built on Faerie Rings

An Irish MP has a theory for why the infrastructure is crumbling.

It's a possibility. The folk in Iceland have had some success by figuring out how to work around the elves.

That's the Spirit

Caesar Civitella, who killed more than a dozen Nazis in World War II and helped capture more than 3,800, has a message for the neo-Nazis who staged a deadly rally in Virginia over the weekend.

"I would tell them that we have no use for Hitler-type philosophy in the U.S. and that they can either stop being a Nazi or people will give them bodily injury," said Civitella, 93, of St. Petersburg.

Radicalizing Immigration

If you look at America's most strongly conservative states, they tend to be places with high diversity -- Texas borders Mexico, the Deep South has larger black populations than elsewhere, and so forth. If you look at the eras of large-scale immigration, you tend to find violence. Immigration plus assimilation works out well for America in the long run, but in the short run it tends to provoke upset and tends to drive conservative reactions.

The obvious exception is California, where a large surge in immigration has been coupled with a complete end to conservative politics. Republicans are simply not to be found in the state government or its Federal delegations. The alliance between minorities in the state's big cities and an elite of tech companies in Silicon Valley has settled all questions in the liberal direction. Republicans and conservatives still exist in the state, but they are voiceless and powerless in democratic government.

That's the model that the 'emerging Democratic majority' has been aiming at all these years. The problem is that it works to the degree that it does in California because the immigration surge happened quickly (Reagan was governor a generation ago) and the tech jobs keep a large part of the white population convinced not to pursue their own version of identity politics. It's easy to buy the argument from white privilege when you are, in fact, privileged. It's not as easy to sell that argument in Alabama or West Virginia -- or Michigan.

For the last eight years the Federal government acted as if it believed that this 'emerging Democratic majority' should be helped along. They banned states from enforcing Federal immigration laws to prevent them from being more vigorously enforced, while also winking at 'sanctuary cities' that refused to enforce Federal immigration laws at all. Whatever their intentions, it looked like they were trying to shift the population's demographics a little more quickly than the law allowed.

People on the left may be waking up to the fact that it may not be possible to get to a nation that looks like California. These policies may be making more parts of the country look like Texas or Mississippi.

For now, they're still looking at this as a strictly moral issue: prejudice is bad, so these people acting out of prejudice are bad people, and we want to be on the side of the good (meaning non-prejudice: these are of course white people writing at Vox, who are thinking about the issue from their own perspective, not about how identity politics actively encourages racial prejudice from minorities). I agree that there should be no racial prejudice, and that we should -- as a moral concern -- strive against it in our hearts. But there is also an environmental psychology issue. Raising the discomfort level people feel makes them more conservative, because conservatives are characterized by being sensitive to threats in their environment. If you increase the perceived number of threats, you are going to make more people functionally conservative.

That's true even of people who share the moral concern about prejudice. Even if people are striving against prejudice in their heart, if you disrupt their community economically or culturally in a way that feels threatening, you're going to find more total prejudice. A good person who is trying hard may be able to suppress prejudice in themselves 50% of the time, say; maybe it's 70%, or 90%. Whatever the figure is, if you increase the number of times a day that their environment provokes an opportunity for prejudice, you're going to increase the total amount of prejudice even if they continue to suppress it in their hearts at the same rate.

If you wanted to put the brakes on this, oddly enough, you'd do what Trump claims to be doing: you'd slow legal immigration, clamp down on illegal immigration, and work on improving the economy so that people felt less personally threatened by the immigration that there is. That would be the sensible policy for lowering the temperature so that we can assimilate the large wave of immigration we've had recently with the minimum of racism, prejudice, or violence.

But that's not the conversation we're having. Mark Lilla's getting close, though.

It works for them. It doesn't work for us. It's that simple. It's killing us. The task isn't to deliver a moral judgment on whether appealing to identity is a good or bad thing. We're talking about trying to seize power in this country....

The other thing is that Fox News and conservative radio have managed to take characteristics that we have, exaggerate them, and turn us into a kind of specter. This specter, for people who don't come from our classes, don't share our education, don't share all of our values, is something that leaves them with the impression that we have contempt for them, and they have developed contempt for us. We're unable just to make people feel culturally comfortable....

So yes, we have to emphasize certain things and not emphasize other things. We compromise. We try to remain silent on things that will be too contentious. It's not about being morally pure. It is about seizing power so you can help the people you care about. That's all that matters right now.

I would feel better about his theorizing if he were less interested in 'seizing power' as the end of his politics, and more interested in avoiding the violence and division that is coming out of this method. But maybe that's just a way of trying to be rhetorically persuasive to people who are committed to identity politics. In any case, I would rather that they listened to him for a bad reason than ignored him for a good one. The way out of this mess lies in the direction he's pointing, whatever their reasons for taking that path.

Conscience and Policing

Recently we were talking about how the Supreme Court-endorsed standard for military servicemembers defying an order was that the order should be so unlawful as to 'shock the conscience.' What about the police?

We're seeing reports out of Virginia that the police didn't intervene in street combat because they had been instructed not to do so absent orders. There is a lot of speculation about the motive behind that order; I'll leave that for now. The governor says he felt the orders were justified. My question is, how can this order not shock the conscience enough to justify violating it?

The National Guard was on hand too, and also did not intervene. But the National Guard is typically not used as the first line of defense in these cases, and may well have received a 'standby' order as an indication that the police had it under control. In fact, the police apparently weren't even trying to control the situation.

Last night, in North Carolina, the Sheriff decided that the best response to protesters destroying a monument was to film it but not interfere. "Collectively, we decided that restraint and public safety would be our priority," he explained. Leaving all other issues aside, how is 'public safety' coherent with people pulling down a giant bronze statue onto their heads? Nobody had hard hats or proper equipment. Even if you feel like they were completely justified in destroying this statute without lawful authority, their manner of doing so put lots of people at risk of injury. The police chose not to stop them. This is taking the side of public safety?

It may well be that the police have chosen sides in this drama; if so, likely they aren't all on the same side. Alternatively, they may have decided to absent themselves from the drama as it is safer for them to arrest single individuals later than to try to make arrests from a mob.

Donald Trump says he's going to bring law and order to bear on all this. So far, there's little sign of it. Absent that, you can't blame people for deciding they're going to have to protect themselves and their interests independently. Is that what leaders in government think that they want? Do police?

UPDATE: In related news, the Washington Post published this article by an associate professor calling for "direct action" -- which he specifies can look liked "armed self defense" -- as the only workable response to white nationalists. Maybe the professor is right; maybe nothing but vigilante justice will suppress a group like the Klan.

But the Klan are vigilantes too. That's really their whole thing: nightriding, lynching, fiery crosses in the dark. If you endorse vigilantism here, you have to figure it's going to go both ways.

UPDATE: Three Percenters reportedly did "more to break up altercations than the police." Which, good for them: they were acting as good citizens, which is what the movement is all about.

Yingling called both sides protesting in Charlottesville “jackasses” and said his group was there only to guard the First Amendment, which protects the right to free speech. He said that the response to his call to attend the rally was small, because other members feared being associated with white supremacists.

Another militia whose members were reportedly present in Charlottesville as well, the “Three Percenters,” issued a “stand down” order in response to the protests, and denounced any members that chose to attend a neo-Nazi or white supremacy demonstrations, The Trace reported....

Local law enforcement came under fire for its lackluster response to the violence. According to reporters from ProPublica, militia members from New York state played a more active role in breaking up altercations than the police.

So it's certainly possible to do this well, and I find the conduct of the militias to be praiseworthy. Still, my guess is that not every vigilante is going to be so well behaved, or so interested in protecting civic norms. The Klan certainly won't be. But maybe the III% response is the only valid one, as the government apparently intends to play no useful role.

UPDATE: ACLU accuses VA governor of intentionally provoking violence by police stand-down so he could void the permits that a Federal court forced him to issue on 1A grounds.

"Lions Ate Him"

Richard Fernandez:

The asymmetry in the strategic goals of Red and Blue derives from the importance of the state to each. For progressives, survival means retaining ascendance over the state. For the Red or Populist side, the goal is merely to keep the state from being ascendant over them. This asymmetry is the great weakness of the Progressives. If they don't win they lose. For Rebels, if they don't lose they win.... A progressive movement that has routinely regarded the pacification of Vietnam, Iraq or Cuba uneconomical must surely realize the suppression of half of America is infeasible. The raised tone and heightened warnings of cultural elites inspires little confidence. They are reminiscent of lion-tamers shouting to keep the beasts under control. It's strategic asymmetry at work. For progressives, the show means controlling the lions. For the lions all they have to do to end the performance is walk out of the ring. They don't even have to bite the tamers.

I'm all for that. Which is the way out of the ring?

Don't Need Any Nazis

We don't need the Klan back either, but we definitely don't need any Nazis down South. We don't need them, and I don't want them.

I really don't get the antisemitism at these so-called Southern rallies either. Jews have been in the South since before George Washington spoke to the Hebrew Congregation in Savannah on his trip down here. Jewish gentlemen fought duels in the South with everyone else, proving that in the old days they were considered the equals of everyone else. This antisemitism isn't Southern heritage, it's a foreign import. We are well-off without it.

As a matter of fact there are certain aspects of Southern heritage we are well-off without, and it's been hard work overcoming them. I mean the racist aspects, of course. The last thing I want to see is anyone trying to bring that poison back into a culture that has labored for generations to sweat it out.

UPDATE:

This is what I'm talking about.

All my life I've heard advocates of flying the Confederate flag say that it's a matter of "Heritage, not Hate." I think most of them I've heard saying that believed it. I see the Confederate flag flying all the time in rural Georgia, most often alongside (and subordinate to) the American flag. I think most of those people would have an explosive reaction to somebody bringing a Nazi swastika into their neighborhoods.

How do you make the argument that the Confederate flag is not the equivalent of the swastika, though, with these Klansmen and neo-Nazis marching them side-by-side? They portray themselves as defenders of the South, but they are the living symbol of the argument critics of the South love to make. I have no use for them, and would be glad if they did not feel welcome to show their faces again.

The Hárbarðsljóð

Racy stuff for a Friday night -- a thousand year old poem. As our favorite cowboy Old Norse expert points out, many of the sexually explicit verses were left out of the 19th century translations of this material. Our contemporaries have no similarly limiting sentiments.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Ezra Klein writes a piece titled: Behind the Google diversity memo furor is fear of Google’s vast, opaque power.

Good point. For example, another headline: Google accused of manipulating searches, burying negative stories about Hillary Clinton.

For example, when typing “Hillary Clinton cri,” Google’s auto-complete function brings up as its top choice “Hillary Clinton crime reform,” even though competing search engines Bing and Yahoo show the most popular search topics are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” and “Hillary Clinton crime.”

While that could reflect legitimate differences in the engines’ algorithms, Mr. Lieberman said that a search of “Hillary Clinton crime reform” on Google trends showed that “there weren’t even enough searches of term to build a graph on the site.”

“Which begs the question, why on Earth is it the first potential result?” he said, adding, “Apparently far more people are searching for ‘Hillary Clinton crimes’ than ‘Hillary Clinton crime reform.’ Google just doesn’t want you to know or ask.”

Is that a real problem? Maybe Google just knows that this particular author was really interested in crime reform in other contexts, and built that out of his personalized search history. Or maybe it's manipulation designed to hide negative stories about a favored candidate.

Concern about 'vast, opaque power' is very American, and very proper. The Constitution and the Federalist structure of the country were designed to limit vast, opaque and unaccountable power as much as possible. Corporations have at times been competing sources of such power: it was an alliance of private interests that compelled the United States government to adopt the Federal Reserve system, for example. (There's a Georgia connection to this story.) People remain concerned about the Fed to this day, and there are valid reasons for this buried among the wilder conspiracy theories about it. It's not properly accountable, and it exercises vast and opaque powers that affect all of us.

So the concern is not ridiculous, and in fact it is quite reasonable for Americans to be suspicious of such things. What to do?

UPDATE: "No one expects the Google inquisition."

UPDATE: Reason magazine:

The situation is compounded by the fact that Damore's text is not in any sense the screed or rant that detractors call it. In fact, it starts with the statement, "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don't endorse using stereotypes" and continues

People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document.

The result is a discussion of possible causes, including genetic and cultural influences, for why Google's attempt to hire more women and minorities is going so badly despite massive and ongoing efforts to change that. I suspect that the real problem with the essay's logic (as opposed to, say, Damore's personality and reputation within Google, of which I know nothing) is calling attention to the costs and effectiveness of diversity programs along with their benefits, which are simply taken for granted.

What to Make of This?

I'm just going to say it. #NRA & @DLoesch are quickly becoming domestic security threats under President Trump. We can't ignore that.

— Kathleen Rice (@RepKathleenRice) August 11, 2017

The NRA are allies of President Trump, so... just what are you saying, Congresswoman?

Can Ethics Require Future Knowledge?

Obviously this argument on abortion is not one I favor; you've all been around long enough to know what I think about abortion, and if not, you can work through the arguments given in the comments of this old post from Cassandra's place. Those of you who didn't hang out there often will recognize a number of your comrades from the Hall!

But I'm not here today to talk about my position on abortion, or even this professor's position on abortion. I'm here to talk about a weird feature of her metaphysical argument that seems to me to disable it as an ethical argument.



The first thing she asserts that an unconscious, unfeeling early stage fetus lacks moral standing (e.g., any right not to be killed for convenience). That's a familiar enough stance, and if you accept it as true the rest of her argument that nothing morally bad happens in early stage abortions follows:

1) This kind of being has no moral standing.
2) An action is morally bad only if it harms a being with moral standing.
∴
3) The action of killing this being is not morally bad.

Obviously the way to reject that argument is to reject either or both of the premises, 1 or 2. That's not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is the way that she then goes on to assert that all of us, when we were early stage fetuses did have moral standing. This is because each of us, in that stage, were early-stage persons. It's only the fetuses that don't have a future that lack moral standing.

As a metaphysical argument, I can grasp what that's supposed to mean. For illustrative purposes, imagine an all-knowing being sitting in judgment on the issue. This being can see, now, which of the many fetuses have a future or do not have one. A certain number will die in miscarriages, for example; those lack moral standing. Others will live to be fully-grown human beings, and these do have moral standing.

As an ethical argument, though, this approach surely fails. Ethics is practical philosophy: it's supposed to answer the question, "What ought I to do?" Since human beings cannot possibly have the knowledge of which fetuses have a future, this model can't provide us with any sort of ethical guidance except insofar as our actions determine that the fetus does not have a future.

Ordinarily it would be a big red flag to argue that another being is allowed to determine whether or not one has moral standing! But this leaves us in a very strange place, ethically: it seems to argue that early stage abortion is always a non-issue morally unless you fail at it. The one thing that you ethically must never do is to try and fail to kill a fetus, because then it might prove to be a person later -- meaning that it (he or she!) already had moral standing, and you attempted murder.

That seems impossibly weak ground for such a conclusion. It would also create the weird case in which your action was blameworthy because it was attempted murder, but if you had succeeded it would not have been a murder at all. So you attempted to do something that was not wrong (nor right, as an act against a being with no moral standing), but committed a crime because you failed to do the non-wrong, non-right thing.

That's just not going to work.

The Castle of Maidens

Edinburgh Castle is so old that its founding is shrouded in myths and legends. Some of these are Arthurian, although the site of the castle has apparently been defended since at least the Bronze Age.

Morgan Le Fay

Some historians claim that the first name of Castle Rock was Alauna, meaning “rock place”, found in the Ptolemy’s map of the 2nd century.

Since 1350, there have been many stories and legends about Castle Rock and Edinburgh Castle. There is a source in the Orygynale Cronykil by Andrew of Wyntoun, that the previous name of Edinburgh Castle was “Maiden’s Castle”, which was found by a legendary King of the Britons, Ebraucus. This name occurs frequently up until the 16th century.

In the 17th century, it was believed that the “maidens” were a group of nuns who were replaced with clerics after they’d been ejected from the castle, but this story has been ignored by historians since the 19th century. Other historians connect the name with the Arthurian legend “Cult of the Nine Maidens”, in which it is said that the site once held a shrine to one of the nine sisters, the powerful enchantress Morgain la Fee.

There is one general reference for Castle Rock and it goes back to the early Middle Ages. The reference was found in the epic Welsh poem I Gododdin where Castle Rock is called “the stronghold of Eidyn”. It consists of a series of elegies about the King Mynyddog Mwynfawr of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin and his warriors who died in a battle at Catraeth in 600 AD.

Iraqi Support for Israel

I remember reading years ago about how Saddam's support for the Palestinians was not shared by many Iraqis, who viewed them quite negatively. So I wasn't surprised by this article.

In Light of Terrorism, Support for Israel in Iraq Rises 

The Israeli Foreign Ministry is surprised to receive thousands of messages from Iraq in support of Israel in light of the crisis on the Temple Mount and recent terror attacks, with Iraqis saying they 'recognize the State of Israel,' and even calling Palestinians 'traitors and terrorists.'

Les Paul with Billy Gibbons and a Young John Lee Hooker

Mr Paul plays a mean deadpan when he's telling a joke.

Here's John Lee Hooker early on. I enjoy hearing him talk.

Jim Mattis on DPRK

The second paragraph is pretty clear and easy to understand.

UPDATE: Just in case that wasn't clear enough.

Google Should Talk To This Guy

What this guy just told me, and the rest of the world, is that two-bit managers at Google can read all the things that they pretend to provide 'private' spaces for on any of your platforms. Now, Google owns Blogger too, so whatever I put out here they can read. But I was always intending this to be published for the world's consumption; there's no presumption of privacy about the things you publish on Blogger. What I've learned from this guy is that the pretense of privacy they are using to market some of their products is a lie. They don't and won't respect it, and allow even the least important manager to use violations of presumed privacy to hurt people of whose opinions they don't approve.

Edward Abbey wrote that, "No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." To that you can add the petty tyrants who work for the electromechanical gadgets, I suppose. Nor do I forget that their plan, their hope, was to align that class of tyrants with the petty tyrants of government. One seamless technological experience of being told what to think and how to live, and being punished for any deviations.

More on the Memo

Some academics respond to the memo, for what it's worth:

#1: The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right.

#2: I think it’s really important to discuss this topic scientifically, keeping an open mind and using informed skepticism when evaluating claims about evidence. In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. For instance, sex differences in negative emotionality are universal across cultures; developmentally emerge across all cultures at exactly the same time; are linked to diagnosed (not just self-reported) mental health issues; appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, gene activation, and hormones; are larger in more gender egalitarian nations; and so forth (for a short review of this evidence, see here.)

But it is not clear to me how such sex differences are relevant to the Google workplace. And even if sex differences in negative emotionality were relevant to occupational performance (e.g., not being able to handle stressful assignments), the size of these negative emotion sex differences is not very large (typically, ranging between “small” to “moderate” in statistical effect size terminology; accounting for less than 10% of the variance).

#3: Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research.

#4: As a woman who’s worked in academia and within STEM, I didn’t find the memo offensive or sexist in the least. I found it to be a well thought out document, asking for greater tolerance for differences in opinion, and treating people as individuals instead of based on group membership.

Within the field of neuroscience, sex differences between women and men—when it comes to brain structure and function and associated differences in personality and occupational preferences—are understood to be true, because the evidence for them (thousands of studies) is strong. This is not information that’s considered controversial or up for debate; if you tried to argue otherwise, or for purely social influences, you’d be laughed at....

Some of these ideas have been published in neuroscientific journals—despite having faulty study methodology—because they’ve been deemed socially pleasing and “progressive.” As a result, there’s so much misinformation out there now that people genuinely don’t know what to believe.

I think the last one has an interesting point: some of the misconception about what the science says comes from the fact that even scientific journals filter for results that are "pleasing and progressive." That is naturally going to distort the debate downstream. That's how you get a guy like the former Google admin quoted below who argues, essentially, 'I'm sure the author was wrong on the science, though I am not qualified to discuss the science and must defer to experts.'

Markets Explain Cooperation in the Animal World

A biological theory suggests that the reason animals don't always kill each is economics.

Cooperation was common in nature—not just between animals of the same species but also between different species (for example, a plant and its pollinator). But the origins of cooperation were a mystery. How could two animals work together when Darwin’s theory of evolution taught about survival of the fittest? Shouldn’t natural selection always favor ruthless self-interest?

“It was one of the early questions in behavioral biology,” says Hammerstein. “Why do animals not always kill each other? Why is aggression limited?”...

In 1994, Noë and Hammerstein laid out their new theory of biological markets in the journal Behavioral Ecology & Socialbiology. The paper fused the biologists’ different styles: Hammerstein developed the mathematical models, while Noë dug through the scientific literature for evidence from the field. Examples turned up across the animal kingdom. Male scorpion flies offer females a “nuptial gift” of prey before mating. In some species of bird, such as the purple martin, a male will allow another male to occupy part of his territory in exchange for help raising his young. Lycaenid butterfly caterpillars produce a sweet “nectar” whose only purpose is to attract ants, which eat the nectar and protect the caterpillars from predators.

In each example the “exchange rate” is not fixed but rather contingent on the supply of available partners. “It is essentially a supply-demand theory,” says Frans de Waal, the eminent primatologist from Emory University and a former mentor of Noë. The more male scorpion flies available on the market, the larger the nuptial gift the female will demand. The male purple martin chooses the most juvenile-looking and least threatening tenant. And the caterpillars adjust the amount of nectar they produce to the number of ants in the vicinity.

Markets are the biological basis for altruism: Socialists hardest hit.

No One May Discuss This

One of the things discussed in the article cited immediately below was the firing of the Google employee who wrote a memo critical of diversity efforts at Google. Software engineers trending young, he may well have been too young to remember that it cost the President of Harvard his job to raise the same sort of issues even as a theoretical possibility he expressed that he hoped was not the case.

A recent alumnus of Google writes that this sort of thinking has no place in any organization except for purpose-defined hate groups.

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”...

Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.... Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.

If you feel isolated by this, that your views are basically unwelcome in tech and can’t be spoken about… well, that’s a fair point. These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up in, drive people out, and I can’t think of any organization not specifically dedicated to those views that they would be welcome in. I’m afraid that’s likely to remain a serious problem for you for a long time to come.

I notice that this last author opens by asserting that the views expressed are wrong, but declines to defend the proposition that they are: that belongs, he says, to someone with a different set of credentials than his own. What credentials would those be, I wonder? It sounds as if this proposition can only be studied from the perspective of disproving it, as it would be "fundamentally corrosive" to any organization to entertain them, such that any organization devoted to serious study would have to reject them outright. Certainly Harvard did.

The views expressed may well be wrong; perhaps it is even very likely that they are wrong. All the same, how much value should we put in the claim that 'all the studies' show X if not-X is a forbidden position that will cost you your career to entertain? Of course all the studies conducted by programs that refuse to consider the possibility of not-X support X. Of course all the people credentialed by programs that insist on X as a prerequisite for remaining in the program will assert X. That's not a significant finding in support of X being really true. Nor does the credential you get from this program, in which the hypothesis is required to be proven by the experiment, likely to inspire much confidence.

So there's a real problem.  Assume for a moment that he's right that you can't even entertain the question -- can't even float the question -- without creating a hostile work environment.  Maybe he is right about that:  certainly both here and in the Harvard case, the reaction to the question was explosive.  (NPR reports that female software engineers at Google skipped work today from upset.)  So it can't be done if it'll create a hostile work environment, not under current American law.  That's just it, then.  It would cause too many problems to ask, and that's the end of it.  We'll just have to assume the truth of the thing that we'd like to believe.

Haven't we tried that model before?  Indeed, isn't that the very model that Progressives like to mock as pre-modern, benighted, backwards, anti-science?

Bad Reputation

Though the original the goal of reputation systems was to issue access tokens to control entry into the groups, they are double edged. Donald Trump proved that the negative of a negative was positive and used his media disapproval ratings as an access token to Red State voters. There is nothing to prevent other candidates from doing the same or stopping groups from flipping the Chinese government reputation index by taking the inverse of the state metric.

A bad rep can be a good rep, depending on who's looking.

That's true about Trump, anyway. The more the media hated him in 2016, the more some people loved him for defying them. It was a kind of credential: you could trust him because the people who despised you hated him too. Maybe that's not the best credential, but it's also not nothing.

There's a Problem With This Metaphor

Hope is a Weapon.

Saw this today. Everybody reading this knows the story, but this is fascinatingly done. I have never seen my wife on the edge of her seat in a movie before. There is not a lot of speaking (despite the trailer). It works. But you must pay attention.



Curiously enough, the following below was shows as a trailer:

A lot more dialogue in any case.

53 Congressmen Call for Mutiny

This is alarming.

“As the respected leaders of our brave armed service members, you have no obligation to implement a hastily considered tweet designed to serve as a ‘wedge’ political issue; but rather you should honor your own independent duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the lawmakers wrote.

“We believe any serious or credible review of the law and the facts in the present case make it clear that the president’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces will weaken, not strengthen our military, and is blatantly unconstitutional.”

If it is blatantly unconstitutional, it is a blatantly unconstitutional policy that then-President Obama maintained for almost his whole tenure -- as did every single President before him. Of course, we have recently learned that the mere fact that a thing has been considered constitutional for the entire history of the nation is no proof against it being declared unconstitutional now.

Still, it's a thin reed to hang a mutiny on. Military orders are to be defied only if they are so obviously illegal as to "shock the conscience," a standard that 'restore the policy we had last year' would rarely satisfy.

There is one military leader on the record as intending to defy the order, which is now a formal policy that will soon be transmitted to DOD. The Commandant of the US Coast Guard says he will defy the order. The Coast Guard is usually a Homeland Security outfit but capable of being transferred to the DOD during war or at the pleasure of the President. The Coast Guard apparently has 13 members who are openly transgender, all of whom he apparently had contacted to express his support.

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that defiance is becoming more standard in nonmilitary Federal agencies.

The growing opposition in the executive branch comes as the White House’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress and Trump turns to his Cabinet agencies to change course in several policy areas. It also is emanating from career staffers or political holdovers whose resistance to Trump has, at times, been rooted in deep opposition to the president’s agenda.

The opposition can take benign forms, such as resigning in protest, which is obviously perfectly fine and even highly appropriate if you decide that you can't do the job for whatever reason. This opposition can also take other forms, such as the dangerous new culture of leaking American secrets to the press.

For members of Congress to openly call for a military mutiny, though, is... well, reckless at least. Insofar as they believe they are defending the Constitution, I suppose their oaths require them to do what they think is necessary. But they're asking for one hell of a crisis, and I hope they know it.

Biker War Movie Review

This week I had occasion to watch two movies that turn, in important ways, on bikers' relationship with the military. The first was 1971's The Hard Ride, a Vietnam-era story about a Marine who comes home with his best friend's body to try to arrange a funeral with his biker friends. The second was 1984's Tank!, where the military aspects are central, but bikers play a pivotal role in the final outcome.

Together with other movies of the era, these sketch an outline of a transformation in American culture. Spoilers below the break line.

What About Conscription?

What do you think conscription's for?

Europe is the continent with the fewest people willing to fight a war for their country. Globally, an average of 61% of respondents in 64 countries said they would. Morocco (94%), Fiji (94%), Pakistan (89%), Vietnam (89%) and Bangladesh (86%) had the highest percentage willing to fight.

The country with the fewest people willing to go to war was Japan, with just 11% of respondents saying they would fight.

Headline reference from this old movie:

Wow

From the NY Sun:

SAS soldiers are trying out “Star Wars”-style bulletproof helmets in the war against terror. The SAS is the UK’s answer to the Navy SEALs.

No, that is not accurate. The SAS has been around since 1941, and thus is not an "answer to" the SEALs because it predates them. Though the SEALs have predecessor units dating to WWII, they're all younger than the SAS. The SEALs themselves came to be during the Vietnam war, twenty years later than the SAS. The basic concept of the SAS isn't even similar, as it is an army-based commando unit conceived around airborne deployments, rather than sea-based naval commandos.

Cool mask, though.

Tattoo in Edinburgh

They're playing the Black Bear, transitioning to Scotland the Brave towards the end of the video. But you probably knew all that if you spend a lot of time around here.

That's from the end. If you want to see what the first rehersal of the massed bands looked like, here it is.

Happiness, German and American

The orchestral music identification video ended with an honorable mention by Robert Schumann called "The Happy Farmer."



Here's the American version of the same idea, "The Happy Camper." This is written and performed by the Reverend Horton Heat.



Happy Friday.

Democrats: Trump Doesn't Go Far Enough

So says Vox.

“Trade is at the core of our economic agenda,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement ahead of the formal launch. “We’re going to propose a better deal for American workers — one that puts their well-being at the center of our trade laws, not just the bottom line of huge corporations. Our trade laws have shortchanged American workers for far too long, and we Democrats are aiming to change that.”

The most striking proposal is a call for the creation of an “American Jobs Security Council,” a body that would review and potentially bar foreign purchases of American companies if they are deemed to be a major threat to American jobs.

That kind of scrutiny and interference with foreign investment would be unprecedented for the United States, says Edward Alden, a trade expert and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations.

I wonder what they'll do when they figure out that his immigration policy is even more popular among their blue-collar target voter demographic than his protectionist policies?

A Pleasant Exercise

This video includes evocative samples from one hundred of the great Western masterpieces of orchestral music. It's a great way to brush up on your recognition of famous pieces, and to rediscover ones you may not have thought of in a while that you'd like to listen to in full.



Enjoy!

Round the Mull of Kintyre

A retelling of the story of how the Kings of Norway lost the Hebrides to the Kings of Scotland.

Some appropriate music.

DB: "Trump taps decorated Army General for White House communications post"

My only regret is that I didn't think of this joke myself.

American Muslim Assimilation is Rapid

So reports Cato on its recent findings. The usual caveats about polling data apply, but they speak to some of them towards the end of the piece -- particularly the claim that these results come from lying to pollsters.

A Moment of Clarity

On the left:

A mere half-year ago... there was a shining moment where millions of Americans flooded the streets in cities across the country to register their rage that an unapologetic misogynist had just been made leader of the free world....

What wasn’t to like?

A lot, as it turns out. The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations.

On the right:

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure.... It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

On the left, about the right:

If conservatism emphasizes the importance of national security, how does one understand the indifference to Russian interference in our election process? If conservatism extols the virtues of family and religion, how does one understand the tolerance of — indeed, if polling is accurate, the still overwhelming Republican support for — a person whose moral failings could lead to his being fired from every job except the one he holds? If conservatism defends free speech, where is the outrage over the attacks on a free press?

Those who argue that students need more exposure to conservative thinking to understand our current political dynamic seem to be missing the fact that, when it matters most, conservatives have stopped being conservative.

Viewed dispassionately, the lesson that the most visible conservatives appear to be teaching our students is that power is more important than principle, that winning is more important than adhering to an ethical code, that compromise is failure, and maybe worst of all, that facts don’t matter.

I won't bother to cite something from the right about the left, since I'm sure you've all read plenty of such articles in the past.

From The Week in Pictures

A Female Imam from Denmark

This story is relentlessly negative about her, but there's some potential for progress here. She may be more hopeful than is warranted, and she may be refusing to look at the parts of her faith that are hard. But that's something most people do -- when was the last time you heard a sermon calling us to focus our faith on the Book of Joshua? Christianity doesn't celebrate it, but treats it as a problem to be explained (or, more likely, ignored). Islam could learn to do that too.

I've not heard of Sherin Khankan before, so I don't know if she's truly on the level. But I'll look into her. Her basic idea, that Islam could use a Martin Luther, is not wrong.

Freedom of Attire

A march in Turkey celebrates the right to choose what you wear -- bikini, hijab, whatever you want.

The crack against the hijab, rightly enough, is that it is often not a free choice. Often it isn't, and it's hard to know when it really is. But one reasonable proxy for when it really is comes when the women wearing it are marching in favor of other women having the right to wear bikinis.

Don't We Just?

Correlation and Causation

The one does not equal the other...

Even as activity inside the Beltway bogged down, the markets have been on an almost nonstop rally since the election.

...but sometimes you've got to suspect it.

Understatement

At least half of this statement is certainly true.

"I don't think Donald Trump has figured out that he chained himself to the Apostle Paul," Drollinger laughed.

This is a White House that could use a little more church.

The Universe Doesn't Care About Your "Purpose"

This is the title of an article in the NYT by a philosopher I've met. He's a Marxist, and the conclusion really follows from Marxism's scientific atheism.

Except maybe it doesn't. Perhaps entropy itself is a kind of purpose: one that gives rise to life and intelligence. So argues a new theory from physics on the origin of life. Metaphysically, the physical theory is like Neoplatonism. Instead of the One 'unfolding' or 'unraveling' through creation, there's a unified purpose (seeking entropy) that is spinning out through the whole universe, resulting in the creation of many forms of life to rush along the entropy. Entropy could be said to be a kind of unraveling, and there is a kind of One in the unified purpose. So a unified font of intelligence arising from this single purpose makes sense too.

Then the Universe really does care about your purpose: your purpose is a way of hastening along entropy, which is a part of the single purpose. Your intelligence is a way of hastening entropy. Your life, and all life, arises from and for the purpose of hastening entropy.

There are significant philosophical consequences from redefining the purpose of the universe from the Aristotelian "seeking to emulate the perfect order of the highest things" to "seeking entropy." That means there are significant practical consequences, too, since basic changes in philosophy work themselves out practically in a myriad of hidden ways.

But it's still better than Marxism, if you must be a scientific atheist. At least it offers a ground for a philosophy that values life, too, which so far the Marxist left hasn't managed to do. "It's kind of good because it feels good, but it isn't really important" is no way to go through life. Thus, why go through life at all, especially if it stops feeling good?

The Police Threat to the 2nd Amendment

David French at National Review.

One officer opened fire on the dog, the other officer fired on the man allegedly holding a gun in the doorway, pointing it at the men approaching his home. As the Washington Post reported on July 26, it was only after the smoke cleared that the officers made their “heart-dropping discovery: They were at the wrong home.”

Lopez died that night. Just like Andrew Scott died in his entrance hall, gun in hand, when the police pounded on the wrong door late one night, Scott opened it, saw shadowy figures outside, and started to retreat back into his house. Police opened fire, and he died in seconds.

Angel Mendez was more fortunate. He “only” lost his leg...

If past precedent holds, it’s likely that the officers who killed Ismael Lopez will be treated exactly like the officers in the Scott and Mendez cases. They won’t be prosecuted for crimes, and they’ll probably even be immune from civil suit, with the court following precedents holding that the officers didn’t violate Lopez’s “clearly established” constitutional rights when they approached the wrong house. After all, officers have their own rights of self-defense. What, exactly, are they supposed to do when a gun is pointed at their face?

In other words, the law typically allows officers to shoot innocent homeowners who are lawfully exercising their Second Amendment rights and then provides these same innocent victims with no compensation for the deaths and injuries that result. This is unacceptable, it’s unjust, and it undermines the Second Amendment.

He has some suggestions for repairs to both law and practice.

Racism and Thought Police

On the one hand, this guy has a great point -- and he's quite right about Twain's work.

On the other hand, just yesterday I saw a residence here in Georgia openly flying a Ku Klux Klan flag. You may not know what a Ku Klux Klan flag looks like, as it's been decades since anyone openly flew them except while wearing hoods to mask their identity. It looks like this.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the state should enforce laws against such display -- laws that would be unconstitutional, as well as a form of thought policing. I only want to say that I liked it better when Klansmen were ashamed to broadcast their affiliation. We don't need the Klan back. It has nothing to offer us that we're going to want in any conceivable future.

Logistics Testing, 2nd MARDIV Style

Health Care Hurts

Most people who aren’t in the individual market, which is the one most affected by ACA, have no idea what the plans look like. It is a market where the costs of the bill’s mandates are more visible, even when subsidized. When I cite exorbitant deductibles, folks tell me to suck it up and pay $3,000. I laugh at a $3,000 deductible. What in the old system was considered a very high deductible is now among the lower available, and premiums for any kind of deductible are high, even with subsidies. Many families have to hit $12,700, and they’re paying a mortgage-sized premium. For many, the purchase becomes hard to justify or supplants an actual mortgage or similar outlays…

My family may be the trade-off that was worth it for you to implement ACA. And I’m actually fine with you thinking that, as long as you don’t pretend we and the rest of the people like us don’t exist. We’re probably never going to stop arguing about this, but arguing responsibly and empathetically is better.

By coincidence, I just today worked out next year's health care insurance -- since I'm losing last year's plan again this year, and yet again need a new one. This one has premiums of only a thousand dollars a month more than my pre-ACA plan, for roughly similar coverage except that the out of pocket max is now around ten grand a year.

Good times, good times. I love to see these Democratic politicians cheering and celebrating on TV. It lets me know how much people like me matter to them.

Dreaming

John McCain, Statesman

Plato's vision of the statesman was of someone who knew better than the common rabble. He had the virtues to know what was best, such as the expertise to make judgments that the inexpert could never make rightly even though the inexpert might be the 'equal' of the expert before the law. The best thing possible would be for such men to be in the positions of power, Plato argued in the Laws:

The old saying, that "equality makes friendship," is happy and also true; but there is obscurity and confusion as to what sort of equality is meant. For there are two equalities which are called by the same name, but are in reality in many ways almost the opposite of one another; one of them may be introduced without difficulty, by any state or any legislator in the distribution of honours: this is the rule of measure, weight, and number, which regulates and apportions them. But there is another equality, of a better and higher kind, which is not so easily recognized. This is the judgment of Zeus; among men it avails but little; that little, however, is the source of the greatest good to individuals and states. For it gives to the greater more, and to the inferior less and in proportion to the nature of each; and, above all, greater honour always to the greater virtue, and to the less less; and to either in proportion to their respective measure of virtue and education. And this is justice, and is ever the true principle of states, at which we ought to aim....

The problem, of course, is that it can be quite difficult to know if you are an expert in political matters. Everyone knows whether or not he or she is an expert at fluid mechanics; but no one thinks they are inexpert at recognizing justice and injustice. Nevertheless, some are, and it is to be hoped that the experts are to be in positions of power to overrule the many.

That is, I suspect, the story that John McCain believes himself to be in right now. It may even be the true story, perhaps. The American people gave the whole Congress and the Presidency to the Republican Party on constant and many-times-repeated promises to unmake Obamacare. McCain stepped in and saved it, against the wishes of the majority, trusting his own judgment and expertise more than the will of the people. Alternatively, he could look as a member of a detached elite that is refusing to keep the very promises that raised it to power, betraying the people's trust.

I tend to differ with McCain where the Constitution is concerned. From my perspective he is prone to setting his own judgment above it, as in Campaign Finance Reform, and as now. The Constitution is silent on the Federal provision of health care; that being the case, under the 10th Amendment, it should be left to the states or to the people. We would be happier if we did not have to fight so hard about these matters where we Americans differ so greatly on what right looks like. Still, like others I can only make an assumption about my expertise on these matters. Certainly the vast majority of Americans do not care very much about the Constitution being upheld with any sort of exactness. They're happy to have some welfare, some Social Security, some Medicare, some Medicaid, some Federal regulations on what kind of crops you grow in your own yard within a single state, or... well, they have endured many things, and some minority of Americans are devoted to voting for ever more such things.

So did he do right or wrong? It depends on how good his judgment is, and what his virtues are. But if he is the statesman resisting the mob it is odd that the mob's judgment has been so steady. Mobs are supposed to be dangerous because they are swayed by passion, but Republican voters have wanted this law killed for seven full years. It may very well be that the considered and stable judgment of the many means that, in this case at least, the many is not merely a mob in need of correction by the wise.

All the same a man has to act on his judgment and live with his conscience, of course.

We Don't Task By Email

There is some misunderstanding of General Dunford's answers to questions about the transgender policy change. What he said was:

I know there are questions about yesterday’s announcement on the transgender policy by the president. There will be no modifications to the current policy until the president’s direction has been received by the secretary of defense and the secretary has issued implementation guidance.

What that means is that a Twitter announcement is not a formal military order, and so no military units will be taking action until a formal order has been issued.

Once in Iraq the Divison's commanding general had a Kuwaiti CULAD -- 'cultural advisor' -- who wanted to mandate that everyone from Brigade come up to be personally instructed by him in how to deal with Iraqi local leaders. Brigade was not buying it, as they already dealt with those leaders every day and had for months. So they just ignored the instructions to report, until finally the CULAD got the G-7 to call down to the Brigade XO and demand to know why they hadn't reported as instructed.

"I'm sorry," the XO said. "We must have missed that order. What FRAGO was it in?"

Er, um, that is, well... we just sent emails about it.

"You're going to have to put that in an order," the XO replied sweetly.

They never did, and so the "mandatory" cultural classes never happened. That was because they never had gotten the commanding general on board with the idea of pulling one of his subordinate units off the battlefield for touchy-feely training on something they were already doing every day. I expect there will be an order here, since the Commander in Chief has stated openly what he intends the policy to be.

Until then, though, this isn't a refusal to obey orders. It's just an acknowledgement that formal orders will be necessary in order to carry this out.

UPDATE: Apparently this is the day for confusion about whether and how the military follows orders.

Responding to a question on whether he would initiate a nuclear strike against China at President Donald Trump's orders “next week,” the admiral bluntly said: “The answer would be: Yes.”

Swift, who has led the Pacific Fleet since 2015, explained: “Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and to obey the officers and the president of the United States as commander and chief appointed over us.”

He then struck a conciliatory tone, saying: “This is core to the American democracy and any time you have a military that is moving away from a focus and an allegiance to civilian control, then we really have a significant problem.”

No Transgender Military

Another good decision on military matters today. The military's sole purpose is the defense of a space in the world for which America to be realized. Otherwise, all our rights are just ideas -- ideas in the mind of God, perhaps, but still ideas rather than actual rights.

That means that the military's mission has a kind of priority, which is why sometimes rights are curtailed for military necessity -- think of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus as an example. I don't oppose dignity for transgender individuals, but the President is right about the massive disruption and expense they would entail in the military service. The military's contribution to transgender dignity is that it enables a society to exist in which they can be treated well, as other societies do not always do. That's a very significant contribution, and all that can reasonably be asked.

UPDATE: It wasn't that long ago that I posted on "rethinking gays in the military," opposition to which made one of these two arguments -- the cultural one. Transgenders are similar to gays in that there aren't very many of them, which means that the military may be able to absorb them with a similarly small degree of shock.

Gays in the military didn't hit at the gender fault line, though. It's already a real issue that women in the service have much lower physical standards to meet than men, and are thus promoted more easily insofar as fitness is taken into account in promotions (which it is). Allowing an underperforming man to slide into that easier-to-pass class is not going to go over well at all. You can imagine a Bradley Manning deciding to get himself promoted ahead of his fellow soldiers by transitioning to a Chelsea Manning. The kind of hard-charging combat soldiers you need to actually win wars will be undercut by that, and they'd notice.

So it's not just women-with-penises in the female showers. It's not just the introduction of sexuality into a professional environment characterized by very little privacy and austere conditions.

Uncited by the President, but something Uncle Jimbo is talking about this morning, is that there is also a potential issue with hormone treatments and combat effectiveness. I'm not aware of the research on this, but I'll take his word pending research that it's a concern.

UPDATE: The Duffel Blog is on the case.

UPDATE: A former trans-woman speaks out in favor of this policy.

UPDATE: More DB.

Divisions in Islam

Syrian refugees in Germany don't much go to mosque, because the only Arabic-speaking mosques they can find are too affiliated with Wahhabi and Salafi traditions. Most of the mosques, though, are inaccessible because they only speak Turkish. The Turks don't speak Arabic at all, and would also be too hardline if they did.

It'd be interesting if the Syrian refugees turned out to be a part of the cure for the radical Islamic movements in Europe.

Old Ironsides

The United States's oldest commissioned warship is afloat again after two years of drydock repairs.

Classic Army Bulls***

This comes from a friend who is actually enlisted USAF, but you know how this stuff works.

I'm not sure if my favorite part is the bad punctuation, the GIANT FONT that presents the independent clause as if it were a clearly ridiculous statement of fact, the tiny font trying to hide the subordinate clause, or the fact that even with the subordinate clause this statement is obviously false. Nobody follows "the low risk guidelines" set forth in doctrine. They just handle their business so it doesn't end up on somebody else's desk. Everyone knows this, because everyone is a member of the community you're describing. You're not fooling anybody with this nonsense, but that doesn't stop the bureaucracy from saying it anyway.

Follow these links for more accurate pictures of drinking in the Army and Marine Corps. It's not that there isn't sometimes a problem. It's that you can't solve a problem like this with bulls***.

New Sheriff in Town

Iran plays its usual games with US Navy ships in what is variously called the Persian or the Arabian Gulf. This time, they are met with warning shots.

There are lots of things about Donald Trump I don't care for, but there are definitely some things I'm glad to see too.

Vice: Turkey's Islamic Feminist Cult

The guy is more normal than not, for a cultist.

I saw the video because I was reading this article on a German woman who joined ISIS, and now wants to come back.

Germany Has a New Capital

The decision on the new capital follows a century's debate.

A Moment of Clarity

A Heroic Philosopher

It's not impossible. Unfortunately, it didn't work out for her, but you have to respect her devotion to reasoned moral duty in the face of danger.

Anne Dufourmantelle entered the water at Pampelonne beach near St Tropez on 21 July after the children got into difficulty.

Witnesses say she immediately tried to reach them but was swept away by a strong current. Attempts to resusciate her after she was recovered failed, according to local media reports.

The children were later rescued by lifeguards, unharmed. It was unclear whether Dufourmantelle knew them.

She wrote several essays on the importance of risk-taking, as well as a book titled Praise of Risk, which was published in 2011.

Good for you, ma'am. It's not the worst thing to die for your principles.

Earning that Citizenship Merit Badge

President Donald Trump apparently feels at home among the Boy Scouts of America. But why not? They're future voters, and in an organization whose mandate takes both citizenship and America seriously.

CNN was not amused, but they rarely are where the President is concerned. I mean, he told an assembled crowd of 35-45,000 boys and their parents, "I said, who the hell wants to speak about politics when I'm in front of the Boy Scouts?" Can you imagine the fun the boys had when he said that? See mom??? You know they loved it.

And, along the way, they've got the opportunity to learn a thing.

Prager U on the Southern Strategy

I don't think she's wrong about anything she says, but I would add that 1994 was the turning point because of the Clinton health care grab. Bill Clinton won so many Southern states in 1992 by portraying himself as a new, centrist Democrat with semi-conservative values. He got no less than Zell Miller, the conservative Democrat and former Marine who would later destroy John Kerry's candidacy with a barn-burning speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, to give the keynote address at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. But then in 1993 and 1994, Clinton proved that he intended to govern as a leftist, especially with his (or his wife's) health care power grab.

The South had seen a lot that it liked in Ronald Reagan's vibrant patriotism and a lot they didn't like in Ted Kennedy's anti-patriotism, but they weren't solidly Republican as yet. The 1992 election proved that. They became solidly in support of the Republican Party only after they saw that the Democrats were committed to socialism and New Class values. Bill Clinton lost the South because he lied to them and betrayed their values, as much as for the reasons the good doctor cites in the video.

Dystopian Drama, Criticized by Joe Bob Briggs

Perhaps because they are the only conservatives doing it, and thus are the only ones criticizing the art community from a place of genuine opposition, Joe Bob Briggs and Mark Steyn are really worth reading when they turn their pens to drama and music respectively.

Here's a taste of Joe Bob's latest criticism of all the "dystopia!" drama that is wildly proliferating in the bluer regions of the nation. The whole is worth reading.

First of all, there’s already a concentration camp, and it’s called Guantanamo. Trump inherited it from two prior presidents, one of whom vowed to close it and then decided he kind of liked concentration camps. The only other president who opened concentration camps was the author of the New Deal. George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek, is writing a book about the one he grew up in....

[A]ll the censorship and surveillance stuff in 1984 sounds like Putin’s Russia and Central Asian countries like Turkmenistan where the secret police are likely to walk into the internet café and start handcuffing people. All the puritanical authoritarianism in The Handmaid’s Tale sounds a lot more like Iran, where women aren’t allowed to divorce their husbands, and Saudi Arabia, where you can get a prison sentence for wearing a miniskirt. There are several dozen countries where they should be staging 1984 and watching The Handmaid’s Tale, but this is not one of them. (Clitoridectomies, anyone? Wrong continent!)

That's an easy point, but a good one. There is some pretty sophisticated critical work as you get deeper.

No, No, Negative

The Johnsons were going to take custody of their grandson to keep him from going into foster care. When they went to pick up their grandson, William, a retired, disabled Marine with a Concealed Pistol License (CPL), was searched for a firearm. He was not carrying a firearm at the time. At that point, agency officials told the Johnsons that they would be required to provide all firearms’ serial numbers to the agency as part of a registry. When Johnson questioned agency workers, he was given a surprising response.

“If you want to care for your grandson you will have to give up some of your constitutional rights,” a MDHHS worker retorted.

When the Johnsons appeared before a Gogebic County Court judge, the judge reiterated the agency worker’s statement.

“We know we are violating numerous constitutional rights here, but if you do not comply, we will remove the boy from your home,” the judge said.

There's a judge who needs to be removed from his bench and placed in a prison instead. Those "Family Service" workers should go with him. Conspiracy to violate any constitutional rights, let alone numerous ones, should be a Federal offense with serious prison time for any government official.

"Nudity Isn't Sexual"

I'm willing to grant the equality claim, but "Nudity isn't sexual"? What exactly would qualify as sexual, then?

There seems to be a lot of basic denial of reality going on these days.

UPDATE:

It's fine.  It's just a professional environment, you know.



This video is actually about breast cancer in men, believe it or not. You have to watch it for a while to get that.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

The Simpsons on the Reformation