Plato's Parmenides Preface: Zeno II & Aristotle I

Sticking with the same two sources as yesterday, the Stanford article (by one John Palmer) and Aristotle's Physics 6, I'll now walk through how Aristotle treats Zeno's arguments. 

Note that the Stanford article doesn't seem to think Aristotle was fair to Zeno. He objects to Aristotle's "incomplete presentation," which doesn't offer any "indication of how these four arguments might have functioned within the kind of dialectical scheme indicated by Plato’s Parmenides." This is part of a general concern he raises about how these arguments are "reconstructed." A point I think is worth raising is that the "reconstruction" seems to have started immediately: 

Furthermore, Aristotle implies that people were reworking Zeno’s arguments soon after they were first propounded. In Physics 8.8, after giving a basic reconstruction of the so-called Stadium paradox (see below, sect. 2.2.1) recalling its presentation in Physics 6.9, Aristotle then notes that some propound the same argument in a different way; the alternative reconstruction he then describes (Arist. Ph. 8.8, 263a7–11) is in effect a new version of the original argument.

Now, plausibly the reason for this rapid "reconstruction" was the lack of reliable accounts of exactly what Zeno said, given the mostly oral and somewhat limited writing culture of ancient Greece. I reject this as likely, however; the best exploration of the oral culture of ancient Greece I know is Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales, which demonstrates inter alia that these oral approaches worked very well at preserving important details. They could widely alter stories in length, judging the importance of audience attention and interest, but even the abbreviated versions would be accurate to the heart of the story. 

Rather, I think it is likely that the original forms of Zeno's paradoxes were rapidly disposed of by the brilliant thinkers of Socrates' and Plato's generation. What most likely happened, and what I suspect Aristotle is noting, is that other thinkers were finding more plausible ways of arguing for the point that Zeno had made. "He who strives for the stars may stumble on a straw," and perhaps Zeno's striving at his highly original arguments missed a few things; but people who weren't satisfied with the easy out constructed sounder proofs of the same point. 

In any case, take it as read that we only have the one thing (from yesterday) that we think is what Zeno really said; but also that these arguments are interesting enough that even if you find a way to 'resolve' them you shouldn't set them aside. Maybe someone could find a way to resolve your resolution, too; maybe there's another approach that makes the argument better. It seems to me as if that was probably a big part of the program in what was one of the most interesting times and places for debate in human history. 

So, on to the first problem:

Aristotle begins this part of his Physics with a more basic approach to explaining how things function. He is going to need this furniture to reject some of Zeno's arguments, so it makes sense to lay it out. He begins the book with a discussion of the nature of a contiuum.

Now if the terms 'continuous', 'in contact', and 'in succession' are understood as defined above things being 'continuous' if their extremities are one, 'in contact' if their extremities are together, and 'in succession' if there is nothing of their own kind intermediate between them-nothing that is continuous can be composed 'of indivisibles': e.g. a line cannot be composed of points, the line being continuous and the point indivisible. For the extremities of two points can neither be one (since of an indivisible there can be no extremity as distinct from some other part) nor together (since that which has no parts can have no extremity, the extremity and the thing of which it is the extremity being distinct).

The number line is a standard contemporary example of a continuum, but again it can be conceptually distracting because it is different from the physical objects under discussion. For example, a number line has not got extremities; it is infinitely extensive in both directions. For Aristotle, the open air might constitute a continuum; a stretch of ground might be thought of that way (as indeed he shall use it in a moment). The stretch begins here and finishes there, but we can talk and think about it as one thing that stretches for however long it does, rather than a bunch of pieces of ground next to one another.

Nevertheless, Aristotle is definitely doing the thing I'm trying to be careful not to do, which is mixing mathematical and physical concepts A line cannot be composed of points, and a line drawn across the ground is a continuum that is composed of ground, not of the points on the line drawn across it. 

So the first paradox is the paradox of motion. I won't block-quote the Stanford discussion of this paradox because it is easily linked, but it may be helpful to read it first because it's a good summary of the problem. Here is what Aristotle says about it.

Hence Zeno's argument makes a false assumption in asserting that it is impossible for a thing to pass over or severally to come in contact with infinite things in a finite time. For there are two senses in which length and time and generally anything continuous are called 'infinite': they are called so either in respect of divisibility or in respect of their extremities. So while a thing in a finite time cannot come in contact with things quantitatively infinite, it can come in contact with things infinite in respect of divisibility: for in this sense the time itself is also infinite: and so we find that the time occupied by the passage over the infinite is not a finite but an infinite time, and the contact with the infinites is made by means of moments not finite but infinite in number.

The passage over the infinite, then, cannot occupy a finite time, and the passage over the finite cannot occupy an infinite time: if the time is infinite the magnitude must be infinite also, and if the magnitude is infinite, so also is the time. This may be shown as follows. Let AB be a finite magnitude, and let us suppose that it is traversed in infinite time G, and let a finite period GD of the time be taken. Now in this period the thing in motion will pass over a certain segment of the magnitude: let BE be the segment that it has thus passed over. (This will be either an exact measure of AB or less or greater than an exact measure: it makes no difference which it is.) Then, since a magnitude equal to BE will always be passed over in an equal time, and BE measures the whole magnitude, the whole time occupied in passing over AB will be finite: for it will be divisible into periods equal in number to the segments into which the magnitude is divisible. Moreover, if it is the case that infinite time is not occupied in passing over every magnitude, but it is possible to ass over some magnitude, say BE, in a finite time, and if this BE measures the whole of which it is a part, and if an equal magnitude is passed over in an equal time, then it follows that the time like the magnitude is finite. That infinite time will not be occupied in passing over BE is evident if the time be taken as limited in one direction: for as the part will be passed over in less time than the whole, the time occupied in traversing this part must be finite, the limit in one direction being given. The same reasoning will also show the falsity of the assumption that infinite length can be traversed in a finite time. It is evident, then, from what has been said that neither a line nor a surface nor in fact anything continuous can be indivisible.

This conclusion follows not only from the present argument but from the consideration that the opposite assumption implies the divisibility of the indivisible. For since the distinction of quicker and slower may apply to motions occupying any period of time and in an equal time the quicker passes over a greater length, it may happen that it will pass over a length twice, or one and a half times, as great as that passed over by the slower: for their respective velocities may stand to one another in this proportion. Suppose, then, that the quicker has in the same time been carried over a length one and a half times as great as that traversed by the slower, and that the respective magnitudes are divided, that of the quicker, the magnitude ABGD, into three indivisibles, and that of the slower into the two indivisibles EZ, ZH. Then the time may also be divided into three indivisibles, for an equal magnitude will be passed over in an equal time. Suppose then that it is thus divided into KL, Lm, MN. Again, since in the same time the slower has been carried over Ez, ZH, the time may also be similarly divided into two. Thus the indivisible will be divisible, and that which has no parts will be passed over not in an indivisible but in a greater time. It is evident, therefore, that nothing continuous is without parts.

The basic point that Aristotle is making here is that time and space are both divisible magnitudes, and that they are what I would call "geared together." That is, because motion in space also entails motion in time, you don't get a paradox of the sort Zeno is trying to set up. However long it takes to travel across the infinite divisions occupies enough of the equally infinitely divisible magnitude of time to allow for it. 

(Contemporary physics offers us "spacetime," which makes this point that time and space are geared together even more emphatically.)

The other point that Aristotle wants to clarify is that both of these 'infinitely divisible' magnitudes are not made up of indivisibles: "the line is not made up of points," and time is not made up of indivisible moments of 'now.' Properly a point doesn't belong to the same dimension as physical reality; it exists here only conceptually, as a one dimensional point on a two-dimensional line in what is actually three dimensional space (or four dimensional spacetime, perhaps). The error of assuming that the points are fundamental to the line drawn across the space is what gives rise to the error that Zeno is propounding. 

This turns out to be Aristotle's resolution of another of Zeno's paradoxes, which he disposes of very rapidly with the same furniture. 

Zeno's reasoning, however, is fallacious, when he says that if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless. This is false, for time is not composed of indivisible moments any more than any other magnitude is composed of indivisibles.

That paradox is 2.2.3 in the Stanford piece, which treats it more seriously than Aristotle does. His account of how the argument works is that, at any given moment of time, the arrow must occupy a space exactly equal to its length. Yet this means the arrow is resting, because it neither extends into space it does not occupy in this moment, nor does it leave space it does not occupy. If it is resting at any random point of time, given that all points of time are the same, at every point it is resting; and thus it cannot move, because there is no extension at any point in time that we could call motion. 

A more natural way of saying this might be that a flying arrow, at a frozen moment in time, is motionless; and since every length of time is composed of an infinite number of frozen moments, the arrow cannot be flying at all. Motion is impossible because at each of the divisions (a 'point in time' rather than a physical point) has no ability to sustain motion because the points are not extended objects. 

Aristotle's rejection is a rejection of the whole frame, as above. There are no unextended points, not actually in our three dimensional world (or four, etc). Zeno is wrong not merely mathematically, but metaphysically: he is wrong about the nature of reality, which cannot actually be divided into indivisible points. Neither space nor time can be, so says Aristotle.

Plato's Parmenides, Preface: Zeno I

As a preface to Tom's attempt on the Parmenides, let's look at an article about Zeno and then at Aristotle's Physics 6. The reason for this is that the Parmenides opens with Socrates talking with the famous Zeno, of 'Zeno's paradoxes of motion,' and Physics 6 is where Aristotle gives his account of how to solve some of them.

Now, as this Stanford article points out, we don't actually know what Zeno said in his own words for the most part. Only one of the paradoxes comes down to us in what seems like a verbatim form. Socrates was a young man when the discussion with Zeno happened; Plato was Socrates' student; Aristotle was Plato's. So it's possible that Zeno might have rejected Aristotle's settlement, or even Aristotle's reconstruction of what he was trying to say.

Zeno is tackling some of the hardest parts of philosophy, which are the parts that treat the most basic things. You might think the basic things would be the easiest parts, but it's the other way around. Everyone can carry off an opinion about politics, which is enwrapped in ethical concerns and practical concerns and emotions and reasons and all of that. Any two old men sitting on a bench outside the bait store can do it, and make themselves understood to each other and any listeners. We deal with these complex and composite objects all the time, and think we know how to do it -- certainly we know a way of talking about it that will make sense to everyone. Reading Plato's Laws was relatively easy, because it is a conversation like that -- three old men on the road, chewing the fat about how things ought to be.

It's really difficult to talk about the basic things. For example, here's the one Zeno antimony that we seem to have intact:

If there are many things, it is necessary that they be just so many as they are and neither greater than themselves nor fewer. But if they are just as many as they are, they will be limited. If there are many things, the things that are are unlimited; for there are always others between these entities, and again others between those. And thus the things that are are unlimited.

If that didn't make sense on the first pass, it's because the ideas are so basic and fundamental that they seem to lack context that helps you understand what is going on. So let's walk through it.

"If there are many things..." 

Possibly there aren't many things. That's actually what Zeno is going to be getting at, and Parmenides as well when we get there. 

It seems like there are obviously many things, though. You can look around you and see what appear to be many different things. In my vision right now are this computer, a coffee cup with a skull and crossbones on it, and a Gerber Applegate-Fairbairn combat knife. It seems like these are several separate things, not just because they don't appear to be touching, but because my mind knows what each of these artifacts is for and it's not the same thing. Since each artifact has a distinct purpose, it must have a distinct reason for having come into being; and thus, since each thing was made at a different time for a different reason, it follows that they must be different things. 

So Zeno is raising a problem for an idea that seems extremely plausible, and suggesting that it's impossible. 

"If there are many things, it is necessary that they be just so many as they are and neither greater than themselves nor fewer."

Say that there are many different things. Then, necessarily, there is a number of such things. We may not actually be able to count to it, but in principle the number of things could be known. This is true even if you move from counting knives and cups to counting atoms, or electrons, or whatever you decide qualifies as a thing -- that is itself a very important question in metaphysics. Whatever that number is, we shall call it a.

Now, all Zeno is saying is that a=a. Whatever a is, it must be equal to itself. It cannot be greater nor less than itself. 

But if they are just as many as they are, they will be limited.

Whatever a is, it isn't greater than a; for example it isn't equal to a+1. It is a limited number, too, not an infinite number, because each of the individual things is finite (specifically, each part is one thing). You can't get to the infinite by adding up a finite number of things, no matter how big that finite number might be.

If there are many things, the things that are are unlimited; for there are always others between these entities, and again others between those.

An aside that non-mathematicians might skip: some of you are mathematicians, and you probably recognize this move as the shift from countable to uncountable infinities. That's bringing in a lot of furniture from mathematical theory that doesn't quite belong here; it would be easy to get confused if you think of this as integers being 'things' and the infinitely divisible 'space' on the number line between the integers as being the uncountably infinite. One reason that may confuse you is that there really are an infinite number of integers, but there really aren't an infinite number of things in the world. If you make that analogy (all analogies always break) the breaking point will be there. Zeno is talking about the physical world, not about the conceptual number line. 

Aside over: is it reasonable to say that, in the physical world, the 'things' between objects are infinitely divisible? Well, yes, it is: and not just because we can't really say much about the levels of it that are too small to see with an electron microscope. Even if you can't divide a pea practically into much more than eighths, and that with a sharp knife, we know you could continue to divide it down to the level of atoms in theory; and even those can be split; and even there, there's a lot of 'empty space' that could be divided conceptually into parts. This is different from the purely conceptual division of the number line, because it is a conceptual division of a physical space; but it is, conceptually, just as infinite. (Indeed uncountably so, for those who followed the aside.)

But if they are just as many as they are, they will be limited.... [yet] thus the things that are are unlimited.

So here we have a paradox. Just because of the nature of there being 'many things,' those things must have a limited number. Yet because there will also be 'things' between them, and those things can be divided infinitely, a world of many things must have an unlimited number of things in it. 

If the world has many things in it, then, they must be both limited and unlimited in number. Since that appears to be a logical contradiction arising from consequences of the antecedent "if there are many things," we must reject the antecedent. Therefore: There are not many things. 

Thus, there are either no things at all, or only one thing. 

There are several ways to attack this paradox. I think they're fun, so mostly I'll leave it as an exercise for you to do in the comments if you want. My personal favorite is to attack the idea that a conceptual division (which gives rise to the infinity) actually gives rise to additional things. Probably a better method, but a harder one, is to be precise about the metaphysical stature required to constitute a thing at all. 

On the other hand, you could accept the argument. It's quite logical. If a material conditional leads to a contradiction in formal logic, we do indeed reject the antecedent in just the way Zeno proposes. 

Overtones

Here is a fun test in which you can learn about how some people hear differently from others.

Ethel

An estate is very dear to every man,
if he can enjoy there in his house
whatever is right and proper in constant prosperity.

So says the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem about the rune called in that language 'ethel,' which was the subject of some controversy at CPAC this weekend. There are several surviving rune poems, but that particular rune doesn't come up in every version of the runic languages. 

As the poem suggests the old rune was apparently associated with the homestead, wealth, peace, and prosperity. The controversy came from the fact that some SS units apparently used it as a unit insignia during the war. Germany is now wealthy, and peaceful, prosperous, and a stable home -- but not for them, who are gone from the world, unmissed and unmourned. 

There's a question about whether a symbol means just what you intend it to mean, or whether things like words carry a meaning that transcends what we want them to be. Tolkien used ancient word roots like warg and ent and orc, in something like their original intent. Was there a lingering power in the old symbol, the old sound, though living men had forgotten what it really meant for a very long time? I always wonder about that.

Plato’s Republic: Confer

The American Mind has a helpful summary of Plato’s ideas in the Republic on the present difficulty. Since we’ve just finished reading the Laws, it’s a good opportunity to compare and contrast the treatments. 

Non-instinctive thinking

 Some kinds of probability puzzles are particularly difficult:

1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

Over 80% of doctors get this wrong.  They tend to estimate that the woman with a positive mammogram has an 70-80% of really having cancer.  The real answer is about 7.8%: 

Out of 10,000 women, 100 have breast cancer; 80 of those 100 have positive mammographies. From the same 10,000 women, 9,900 will not have breast cancer and of those 9,900 women, 950 will also get positive mammographies. This makes the total number of women with positive mammographies 950+80 or 1,030. Of those 1,030 women with positive mammographies, 80 will have cancer. Expressed as a proportion, this is 80/1,030 or 0.07767 or 7.8%.

Sure, the fraction of women with false positives is much lower than those with true positives, but the percentage of women without cancer is so high that the raw numbers of cancer-free women to which we apply the 9.6% false-positive rate swamp the low rate.  Similarly the percentage of women with cancer is so low that the high 80% true-positive rate is undermined by the low raw numbers of cancer-suffering women.

H/t Slate Star Codex archives mentioned in an open thread this weekend at Astral Codex Ten.

Bingo

 They're probably never going to get that Trump and his enthusiasts aren't interested in preserving the GOPe.

Donald Trump is on a mission. Some Republicans devoutly hope that mission includes helping the party win back a majority in the House and Senate.

Other Republicans aren’t so sure. They believe Trump’s agenda leans much more toward seeking revenge against GOP incumbents who voted against him during the recent impeachment.

Other Republicans believe he can do both and that the two missions are not at odds at all.

Dr. Seuss Now?

The cancel culture came for the Muppets, so I suppose Dr. Seuss is not surprising. But he was always 'woke,' as AVI points out that the Muppets were too; he was pro-environmentalism, pro-get-along-with-everyone, pro-humanity, pro-eating-strange foods. I guess he was in favor of “killing Japs” after Pearl Harbor, but presumably that means he was anti-fascist too.

He was even anti-Nixon.

I guess the revolution always eats its own.

Campaign song

 Gives me the warm fuzzies.

Antifragility

I don't know how we're going to decide how much money to spend in Texas to protect against the next presumably rare extreme cold event, or how to share the cost of increasing the reliability of generating plants and ancillary equipment.  I have, however, learned several things about how we approach the reliability/cost quandary.  One is that Texas's grid operator, ERCOT, is free of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) jurisdiction only in the rate-making context, because our intrastate sales aren't considered interstate commerce.  We are still subject to FERC regulatory authority over grid reliability, through the auspices of the North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC), a continent-wide non-profit organization that derives its domestic authority from FERC.  There has been a lot of talk about how we in Texas should have learned our lesson from the 2011 winter storm that caused rolling outages, but we suffered polar vortex storms in 2014 and 2015, after which NERC issued a report on all of its dozens of members, showing ERCOT to be in good shape in terms of both energy reserves and winterization progress.  Clearly the 2021 storm blew everyone's weather assumptions out of the water.

The other thing I've gathered about reliability is that we need more attention to linked risks.  It is not anti-fragile to have backup systems that will fail from the same cause that resulted in failure of the primary systems.  Here is a slightly rewritten summary I posted to Facebook of what I learned from the operators of some of our exurban neighborhood infrastructure, which performed much better than infrastructure in the rest of the county or, frankly, the rest of the state.

There are  three different water suppliers on this peninsula, all of which use water wells and RO filtration.  For those of us not on septic tanks, sewage treatment for the whole peninsula is provided by a local municipal utility district (municipal in the statutory sense; we are an unincorporated area of the county).  The MUD also operates one of the three water supply services.  A second water company, ABU, is managed by the local volunteer fire chief as his day job.  A third water company supplies a somewhat detached nearby neighborhood managed by its own HOA, which relies primarily on septic tanks, but may also be connected to the MUD for sewer services to some degree.  So the peninsula has water from ABU, the MUD, and the HOA system, and we all have sewer service from the MUD.

The fire chief's wealthy boss at ABU water company also owns and operates an oil & gas company, which operates maybe half of the local gas wells that supply the county’s utility gas lines.  The fire chief is a talented mechanic who works on his boss's hobby race cars.

The report card:  Although the peninsula had power outages here and there, nevertheless, the MUD, which did not lose power, suffered no interruptions in supply of water or sewer.  The MUD had backup generators that were not used.  ABU lost power but suffered no interruption in supply of water, as its generator worked fine.  The HOA system did have some power outages, and I heard reports of water outages, but I lack details.

Because the MUD didn't lose power, all I really know so far is that it managed to keep operating despite an unusually hard freeze.  I have more information about how well ABU did and why.  For one thing, the fire chief did a lot of last-minute weather-proofing on the his lines and equipment, not all of which was successful, because some lines still broke. What was more important, though, was that although ABU lost grid power, it had a 300kW diesel-powered generator that ran for 4 days straight, using up maybe 2/3 of its 600-gallon diesel supply.

The fire chief chose diesel for this system because he’d been warned years ago that piped-in natural gas can’t always be relied on in a natural disaster. Sure enough, ABU's boss O&G company had to fight to keep its local gas wells operating. They managed it because their workers, and the boss too, got out in the field and weather-proofed equipment, and then when some equipment still froze, used heaters to get it unfrozen. If our county still had at least partial natural gas pressure, much of the credit goes to this boss and his organization. Many other local gas wells just shut in when it got too cold.  Sure enough, many generators in town failed, including the generator at the new ER, because the utility gas pressure fell too low. This reinforces the good sense of the fire chief's decision to run the ABU generator on a diesel tank.

ABU’s water pipe leaks posed a challenge, as did some frozen sensors. The fire chief thought at first that his water tank levels were adequate, until he eyeball-checked some of them and found that the frozen sensors were stuck on a false high reading. That warned him to keep the wells running and the tanks full. The leaks created pressure problems, but again keeping the wells on full blast made up for the struggling pressure. The only trouble was that the increased volume was too great for the RO filters to keep up, so the water supply temporarily bypassed them and converted to pure well water—potable and safe but not as tasty.

The water system in the rest of the county broke down completely, exposing people first to a shut off and then to a water-boil advisory.

What happened in the rest of the state?  It's still very murky, but the upshot is that the same freezing conditions that caused demand to spike also shut off about half of the state's power generating capacity.  Wind and solar primary equipment froze up and stopped operating.  You might think that thermal generating plants wouldn't freeze, but in some cases, not only did critical ancillary equipment freeze and fail, but their fuel suppliers froze and failed.  Gas wells froze and were shut in.  Gas that made it to pipelines couldn't maintain flow or pressure.  There are stories I haven't been able to confirm about power plants losing grid power; apparently they aren't set up to operate independently of the grid no matter how much power they generate internally, which amazes me almost as much as the idea that they don't get first priority from the grid, if that turns out to be true.

Even without spending a mint freeze-proofing equipment that freezes badly enough to cause a disaster only every century or so (because it's a huge problem only if the freeze is not only unusually deep but also state-wide and long-lasting), it seems there are changes we could make to unlink some of these risks.  Plants should be set up to use internal power not only for core functions, but to some extent to heat their ancillary equipment.  It can't be sensible to use unreliable grid power for the very facilities on which the grid is depending.

Gun Totin' Libtards

Update: I gave up swearing last year and had been doing well, until I was overcome by a confluence of unfortunate metaphysical circumstances this past week. I'll adjust the language in last night's post accordingly.

James McMurtry, who seems to be a very talented musical lefty bubble dweller, shoots up some Goya products. Funny enough. I do have to say, this is the Democratic Party in Oklahoma. No doubt.

Back when I used to be a Democrat from Oklahoma, I confused a number of poor souls in Massachusetts with this very same attitude. Those Yanks, bless their hearts, had no idea what to make of me. "Democrat? Guns!? What .... ? AAAAAAHHHHH!"

I kinda started my turn to the Dark Side when I realized the construction workers on campus with the USMC / Army / Sniper (what branch? does it matter?) bumper stickers on their trucks were much more "my people" than the ... um ... um ... a-Ka-DEM-ics with whom I was going to school.

Anyway. Okie Democrats. Massachusetts Democrats have to make apologies for us. That's OK with me. Maybe it'll be respectable to be an Okie Democrat again one day. (I should note, as part of this update, that I left the Democratic Party some years back, but I do hope they get their act together.)

Ukraine and Tags

I know we've had this here before, but without tags, it's hard to find stuff. So, here it is again, with tags. So we can find it next year. Cuz I'm like that.

Repeats and Other Stuff and So What?

I know, you've heard some of this before. So? Let's just drink it like we mean it.

More below the fold

Power grids

 It's pretty much spring in Texas now, but last week was a doozy.  It spurred my favorite kind of local debate, over how a community should react to an emergency.  Whine that government didn't take care of everything as unobtrusively as a well-tipped concierge?  Or roll up your sleeves and deal with some adversity with good grace?

Here on the coast I don't think we got below 17 or so at the worst.  That's pretty bad for us, and killed an awful lot of landscaping.  It also created icy road conditions of the sort that we never handle well.  Still, there's no reason to die in 17-degree temperatures if you're indoors and protected from rain and wind.  We had about 10 days notice that this thing would hit, so also little excuse not to have some basic food and water in the house.

Some of my neighbors are strongly invested in creating a narrative of Armageddon.  One claims to have witnessed an elderly lady die when her oxygen machine froze up.  The problem is that such a thing could barely happen here without making waves, if not in the local newspaper then at least in the EMT gossip mill.   There are only about 25,000 people in the county, for Pete's sake.  It seems a shame to have to say so, but I'm convinced he's a lying drama queen who enjoys having people commiserate with him for having had to witness such a shocking example of malfeasance by rich fat cats and/or nanny state representatives.

In my unincorporated area of the county, the volunteer fire department was available as a shelter, but only one or two people took advantage of the opportunity.  The local water company and sewage treatment plant muddled their way through without denying service to anyone, which is more than I can say for any other water company in the entire county.  A number of people in town found that their backup generators failed because the natural gas utility couldn't keep pressure up.  People in town keep suggesting darkly that we did well because we're fat cats.  They can't have driven through this area if they think so.  The people who kept things running aren't rich, they're just sensible and provident.

We're seeing spirited discussion over why the electrical grid couldn't maintain service for nursing homes and grocery stores.  The nursing homes are required by law to have backup generators.  The grocery stores aren't, but that's on them.  They got restocked within a few days.

Many people seem to assume that the electrical grid operators should be strung up for their failure to predict how many plants would shut down in the unusual cold.  I'm less convinced.  It seems to me that they planned for reasonably likely conditions.  This cold front was colder, longer-lasting, and of greater geographical extent than we've seen before.  There is an argument that Texas's independent grid is vulnerable because it insists on remaining independent of FERC regulation, but that exemption is limited almost entirely to ratemaking authority.  The Texas grid remains subject to North American grid regulatory authority, which gave us a clean bill of health after the 2011, 2014, and 2015 cold snaps in terms of our energy reserves and our winterization efforts.  The 2021 cold snap was greater than anyone planned for, but I can't reasonably blame either ERCOT or the plant operators, least of all for their "greed."  There are people still gathering information on why plants failed and what might have prevented the cascading failures.  Clearly we should be looking at linked risks like gas failures that cause electrical failures and vice versa.  Nevertheless, I'm unconvinced that this is an example of failure to plan for reasonable foreseeable events.  Sometimes things just get extreme, and you have to learn from developments that weren't predictable enough to invest a lot of resources in preventing.  I do think that an important lesson is that backup generators should be much more widespread than they are, and should be fueled by supplies you can genuinely count on, which is to say gas or diesel tanks rather than gas utility lines.

Waylon Jennings, 1976

America, when it was healthy and whole.

Insanity

Fine. We'll just have "sports" from now on, and if women can't hang, forget 'em. 

These trans* characters can't hang either. If they could they'd be men. I'm sorry, but it's true. Nah, that's not fair. I'm not sorry.

The Problem of Ancient Primary Sources

Having finished one philosophical discussion, Grim recently asked for suggestions for the next project. I suggested maybe a discussion of how to read these texts. How can someone today read and understand Plato, or Aristotle, or other ancient philosophical works?

Many years ago I took some courses in reading classical Chinese. The textbook gave us selections from primary sources like Confucius, Mencius, and Tang Dynasty poets, and also provided extensive glossaries, and we were expected to translate a selection before each class. In class, we would each read our translations, and then we would discuss where we had problems, or where noticeable differences between our translations had appeared.

At one point, I started feeling like I was getting it. Not like I was an expert, but the texts started making sense more naturally. I did what I thought was a good translation of a particular text and felt kinda proud of it, for a beginner.

When I read my translation to the class, the professor paused for a moment. "That's a very plausible translation," he said. "But I'm afraid it's wrong." And he proceeded to give the correct translation.

I understood where I had erred, but not why. Surely there must be some marker in the text that would have indicated the change he gave me, a marker I wasn't aware of. So I asked him, how could I know which way to translate this?

"Well," he replied, with a touch of reluctance, "you have to know the story before you begin."

So then much more recently we were discussing akratēs at the Hall, "the puzzle of someone who knows what is right but does the wrong thing anyway." In the comments, I was trying to work through a definition of virtue, and Grim made a suggestion. "You probably need to read Plato's Parmenides. Socrates was very young when that conversation is supposed to have happened; and it raises all these questions beyond the practical to the metaphysical."

The phrase "beyond the practical to the metaphysical" should have been put in flashing red lettering. In any case, I thought I was going to read more about virtue, but instead ... well, here. I'll put a selection from the beginning of it below the fold, with some discussion of difficulties I had reading it.

Two Days’ Riding

Winter’s almost over, kids. 

Bryson City, NC, motorcycle parking.

Chili burger and fries, Bryson City, as recommended by the local Harley dealer.

Pisgah National Forest

The Devil's Courthouse, as seen from NC 215

Charley's Creek

A Revolution from Above, to Empower the Already Powerful

This is an interesting argument. The opening frame is worth hearing; the rest is impossible given the structures of power, so you can stop whenever you want once he starts talking about the Ivy Leagues. Harvard and Yale and Duke may burn in a revolution, but they will never roll over in the way he discusses. 

If only I still traveled

I confess, I never liked to travel.  I liked being in faraway places, for a short while, at least, but getting there got to be less and less fun the more I had to do it, the deeper a disgust I developed for hotels, and the more nightmarish airports became.  I've traveled very little since 9/11 and none at all since COVID.  I like where I am.

Still, if I knew anyone still forced to submit to the indignities of airlines and airless hotel rooms, this would certainly be a tempting purchase:  a compact, hard-shell suitcase on wheels that pops up to become a closet full of shelves.  It's almost too bad I haven't any use for such a well-designed little product.  It reminds me of the "object" that Diana Villiers has made for Stephen Maturin in the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian.

What to do Next?

I'm done with the read-through of Plato's Laws. Perhaps I should now read secondary literature on it, and try to turn that into a publication of some sort; but on the other hand, this doesn't seem like the right time in history for a genuinely academic work. The reason to read things like this is to try to find a way forward; in more peaceful times, it might be better to write for an academic audience.

Is there any philosophical text that you have always wanted to read, but never gotten around to reading? Especially if it might be relevant to the presently brewing troubles?

On second thought

Isn't police defunding the real public health crisis confronting America today?  Why not divert COVID funding to fill the hole in Chicago?

Plato's Laws XII: The End

At the end of his last dialogue, Plato has his Athenian return to the subject of virtue, its divisions, and its central importance to good governance. These arguments should be familiar even if you have only read my summary of Plato; students of Plato will know them backwards and forwards. Yet it is worth looking at them one last time, as he chooses to do.

The Athenian closes his long miscellany by raising a worry that, although they have set up excellent laws, the state's longevity and security has not been assured. He likens this to the spinning of wool, which needs a knot at the end to prevent the work from all coming undone. What sort of knot could ensure that all this carefully-spun pattern of laws and institutions should continue to hold together across generations? 

The answer that he comes to is to empower the nocturnal council with the power of serving as a general committee on the virtue of the citizenry and the state, which to a reader living after the French Revolution and the various Communist movements is as terrifying an answer as it is easy to contemplate. Let us agree that pragmatism has proven this approach to be a false answer. It is still worth looking through the argument to see if we could identify where it goes wrong.

First: keeping the state from going astray from virtue is analogical to navigating a ship to its proper destination, or leading an army to victory rather than defeat. Thus, just as a ship needs a captain and an army needs a general, someone needs to be firmly in charge of making sure that the proper end (virtue, the right destination, victory) is kept always in view and adjustments are made as necessary to get there.

Second: the state is like an animal's body in that it has different organs that serve different purposes. Just as an animal needs sense organs like eyes to identify threats in the world, the state will need a sense organ (apparently the sort of thing we would call an intelligence service, the Athenian proposing elements to survey both domestic and foreign environments). Just as the animal needs a mind to make decisions about what to do with the information sensed by the sense organs, the state will need a decision-making body. Just as the animal's mind will only be successful if it has the right kind of understanding to make correct judgments about what its senses detect, the decision-making body needs to be composed of individuals with a very high level of practical understanding.

Third: we call the qualities they will need "virtues," but we also call them collectively "virtue." The Athenian had already divided them all the way back in Book I into four parts (courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice). Now we get a very Socratic move: the right people to be on this council will be the ones who can say exactly why it's acceptable to call them four, and in what way they are separate; and also who can say why it is right to call them one, and in what way they are the same.

Socrates at least as Plato presents him to us was very concerned with this proposition. Virtue is a kind of knowledge, and thus is rational. Rationally, things are either one thing or they are more than one thing. They are a unity, or they are not a unity. Courage is a kind of wisdom, because it is a practical wisdom about what to do in the face of danger. It is a 'practical' wisdom because it embraces both the knowledge of what to do, and the capacity to do it. But if you have courage, then, you should be able to say exactly what it is that you have -- you should be able to give a rational account of this rational quality.

Back in Book One, I said that the Athenian gave an account that doesn't seem to follow a rational order of priority. Wisdom is the chief virtue, but a precondition for justice. If that's the way we rank the virtues, then the priority of wisdom arises from the fact that you must have it in order to attain the others; it is thus prior in the literal sense. Yet courage is also a precondition for justice, and it is said to be lesser ranked. Here in Book XII, the Athenian says that courage is partly bestial, which seems like it is therefore not rational, at least not fully. 

Ath. There is no difficulty in seeing in what way the two [virtues] differ from one another, and have received two names, and so of the rest. But there is more difficulty in explaining why we call these two and the rest of them by the single name of virtue.

Cle. How do you mean?

Ath. I have no difficulty in explaining what I mean. Let us distribute the subject questions and answers.

Cle. Once more, what do you mean?

Ath. Ask me what is that one thing which call virtue, and then again speak of as two, one part being courage and the other wisdom. I will tell you how that occurs:-One of them has to do with fear; in this the beasts also participate, and quite young children-I mean courage; for a courageous temper is a gift of nature and not of reason. But without reason there never has been, or is, or will be a wise and understanding soul; it is of a different nature.

If courage is not (fully) rational, then you shouldn't necessarily be able to give an account of it of the type he is demanding. If it is a precondition for justice, then, justice itself has an irrational root. You shouldn't expect to be able to give a fully rational account of it if it is predicated on a partly irrational quality.

Plus, this deeply complicates the idea that courage and wisdom are two parts of a greater whole. Wisdom is said to be "a gift of nature and not of reason" and thus "of a different nature" from wisdom. (Hamilton gives this last as "the cases are utterly different.") Why should we expect to find a rational account of the unity of the virtues if they are neither fully rational in all cases, nor of the same nature?

The Athenian does not give us the answer, which would allow prospective council members to cheat by just repeating what he has to say, but he does give us a hint of how to proceed that students of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists will recognize. 

Ath. [W]e ought to proceed to some more exact training than any which has preceded.

Cle. Certainly.

Ath. And must not that of which we are in need be the one to which we were just now alluding?

Cle. Very true.

Ath. Did we not say that the workman or guardian, if he be perfect in every respect, ought not only to be able to see the many aims, but he should press onward to the one? this he should know, and knowing, order all things with a view to it.

Cle. True.

Ath. And can any one have a more exact way of considering or contemplating. anything, than the being able to look at one idea gathered from many different things?

Cle. Perhaps not.

Ath. Not "Perhaps not," but "Certainly not," my good sir, is the right answer. There never has been a truer method than this discovered by any man.

The answer is philosophical training with an eye towards appreciating the Forms. The Forms are supposed to be fully rational (Aristotle says that they are pure activities, and thus stripped of all mere potentiality -- and as such, you should be able to appreciate them intellectually). However, they have an interpenetrating quality. Because they are not material, they are capable of being 'all together in one place,' yet intellectually distinguishable from one another. Perhaps you have an idea of number, for example; and in a way, all the numbers you know are 'there.' But in another way, you can distinguish the numbers 1 and 4, or any other numbers, and say exactly why they are different, and exactly in what ways they are the same. 

This requires a type of philosophical training that the Athenian admits he has no idea how to perform, and in fact can't devise for students. They have to figure it out for themselves, by doing the work, where they need to go next. 

Ath. In the first place, a list would have to be made out of those who by their ages and studies and dispositions and habits are well fitted for the duty of a guardian. In the next place, it will not be easy for them to discover themselves what they ought to learn, or become the disciple of one who has already made the discovery. Furthermore, to write down the times at which, and during which, they ought to receive the several kinds of instruction, would be a vain thing; for the learners themselves do not know what is learned to advantage until the knowledge which is the result of learning has found a place in the soul of each. And so these details, although they could not be truly said to be secret, might be said to be incapable of being stated beforehand, because when stated they would have no meaning.

He is capable of saying a few things about what kinds of things they must learn, and the first one is that they must develop a fear of God. No one without a firm conviction on the proof of the divine, and the soul that orders the world, can be trusted with power. That part of the argument was actually given in the text, so potential Guardians on the council must show that they have understood and accepted the argument. The world is ensouled, and the soul that began all motions is deeply ordered and driven by a commitment to justice. 

The rest of it he likens to a game of dice, with three dice, where the winning throw will be only three aces or three sixes (e.g., 1 chance in 108, although I think here Mr. 5,040 is thinking more of the metaphor of very long odds than a specific mathematical number). It may be nearly impossible; but if it can be done, he says to Cleinias, "you will obtain the greatest glory; or at any rate you will be thought the most courageous of men in the estimation of posterity."

So: where did he go wrong? Was it a failure to wrestle with the irrational roots of what he wanted to be fully rational virtues? Was it the idea that godly men would rule fitly, which pragmatically seems to have been disproven by the long history of the Vatican and its council of Cardinals? Was it the analogy of the state to a body? The analogy of statesmanship to the captaincy of a ship or being general of an army? Was it the idea that human beings would benefit from being subject to the rulership of virtuous guardians? 

Or was it just that the philosophical training that was necessary but nearly impossible proved actually impossible to convey? If you did have guardians who fully understood the relationship of courage and wisdom and temperance to justice, could they guide the community justly? Or would they, too, fall into the human weaknesses that Aristotle warns against in the Rhetoric? 

First, to find one man, or a few men, who are sensible persons and capable of legislating and administering justice is easier than to find a large number.... The weightiest reason of all is that the decision of the lawgiver is not particular but prospective and general, whereas members of the assembly and the jury find it their duty to decide on definite cases brought before them. They will often have allowed themselves to be so much influenced by feelings of friendship or hatred or self-interest that they lose any clear vision of the truth and have their judgement obscured by considerations of personal pleasure or pain.

At the end of this reading, I hope you have questions, and that you feel inclined to voice them or to engage them. If you'd like to do so privately, rather than in public, feel free to email me. But one of the greatest goods of Plato is the invitation to all to join the field of philosophy. He doesn't end up having all the answers either, and is often aware that the things he wants to say sound incoherent. Don't be afraid to compete; even the masters of this game have given no perfect answers, and no sure way forward. The best the Athenian can say is that he wants to try, but admits that the odds are very much against him.

Diseducated

An essay and lecture. 

The devil you say

 When that that happen?

Worth Considering

It's not true that the 'Woke' are strictly Marxists, not most of them: I know some who are, strictly, but most of them are just adapting Marxist argument styles to issues of gender or race. This author argues that they aren't at all Marxists, however, because they've abandoned collectivism. 

I'm going to think about that for a bit before I respond to it. I feel like it's wrong, but I'm going to work through it for a while before I decide. The one thing I will say now is that a good friend of mine who actually is a self-declared Marxist is happily working on reparations programs around the black community in one town in Georgia. He's right that the community was abused, historically and not all that long ago, by the expansion of the local university. Some of his ideas for making that right are not terrible;  and ironically, sometimes it requires him to defend non-Marxist things like property rights. 

So maybe there's flexibility, and maybe there's cross-pollination; but it does seem to me like there's a lot of compatibility, at least. I'll think about it; in the meantime, read his argument.

BB: Man Asks You Use His Preferred Adjectives

“It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,” Becker later explained. “Like ‘creepy,’ ‘weird,’ or ‘off-putting.’ That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.” Many would call that statement ‘nutty,’ but that is not from Becker’s list of approved adjectives.

The Bee is tremendously good at this stuff, although really we're already there. You're not only supposed to use the preferred pronouns, but adjectives like "female" or "male" and nouns like "man" or "woman" as preferred, too. Otherwise it's, like, genocide.

And genocide is only ok if it's one of your cultural norms!

I Too Can Write From My Interpretation of My Own Experience

In fairness, the most famous practitioner of this genre went on to be President twice.

Nina Navajas Pertegás, assistant professor and researcher at the UV Department of Social Work and Social Services, has carried out a study on the consequences of fatphobia and the cultural imposition of thinness through her own experience, with a body itinerary that ranges from her childhood to adulthood. This scientific methodology, called autoethnography...

That doubly doesn't make sense. An intrinsically subjective method is not in any sense 'science.' Nor, by definition, can one be one's own 'ethnic group.' The whole concept of ethnicity is collective, not personal nor individual. 

Apparently you can get a tenure track job for this nonsense, though. 

Friday Night Action

Excess Deaths

Some CDC figures on overdose deaths, which are up 25%. 

He's a dreamer

 From Marty Makary in the WSJ:

Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.

A Proverb of William Wallace

Dico tibi verum, Libertas optima rerum; Nunquam servili, sub nexu vivito, fili.

His uncle, a priest, is supposed to have taught him this saying. It translates: 

'I tell you a truth: Liberty is the best of things, my son; never live under any slavish bond.'

Plato's Laws XII

The final book of the Laws has the feeling of a miscellany. To some degree that has been true of earlier books as well, but at this point the Athenian is bouncing around and returning to say more about topics already covered. There is more about crime here; also, more about military service and the general regimentation of the life of citizens. All citizens, we are told, are to have officers to whom they report. Male and female, young and old, they are to live all of their lives in a military discipline with superior officers ordering their lives.

It's a bit strange to me that the Athenian takes such care about military punishments, which are much less harsh than the ones suggested for other crimes. The military life is supposed to be the ordering principle of the citizenry, in order to defend the state; all of life and education is built around it. Yet while death is the regular punishment for almost any crime, military cowardice is to be punished with fines and dishonor. Even if you abandon your arms and your post, you are not executed.

Ath. If a person having arms is overtaken by the enemy and does not turn round and defend himself, but lets them go voluntarily or throws them away, choosing a base life and a swift escape rather than a courageous and noble and blessed death-in such a case of the throwing away of arms let justice be done, but the judge need take no note of the case just now mentioned; for the bad man ought always to be punished, in the hope that he may be improved, but not the unfortunate, for there is no advantage in that. And what shall be the punishment suited to him who has thrown away his weapons of defence? Tradition says that Caeneus, the Thessalian, was changed by a God from a woman into a man; but the converse miracle cannot now be wrought, or no punishment would be more proper than that the man who throws away his shield should be changed into a woman. This however is impossible, and therefore let us make a law as nearly like this as we can-that he who loves his life too well shall be in no danger for the remainder of his days, but shall live for ever under the stigma of cowardice. And let the law be in the following terms:-When a man is found guilty of disgracefully throwing away his arms in war, no general or military officer shall allow him to serve as a soldier, or give him any place at all in the ranks of soldiers; and the officer who gives the coward any place, shall suffer a penalty which the public examiner shall exact of him; and if he be of the highest dass, he shall pay a thousand drachmae; or if he be of the second class, five minae; or if he be of the third, three minae; or if he be of the fourth class, one mina. And he who is found guilty of cowardice, shall not only be dismissed from manly dangers, which is a disgrace appropriate to his nature, but he shall pay a thousand drachmae, if he be of the highest class, and five minae if he be of the second class, and three if he be of the third class, and a mina, like the preceding, if he be of the fourth class.

Now "death before dishonor" is something I've said myself, and Kant holds to it as well; but it's rare to see it put into practice in a legal code. When he suggested 'transforming a man into a woman' as a punishment, I thought he was going to propose castration or something like that; but no, it really is just stigma and fines. 

There is also a lot more care in the piece to making sure that no one suffers even this punishment unfairly. What if you fell off a cliff, and that's how you lost your arms? That's not the same thing! And what if you were overcome by a mass of enemies, and they stole away your shield and spear in spite of your best efforts? That's not the same thing either! And what if you fell into the sea? Etc. 

Along the way there are regulations for ambassadors, both outgoing and incoming; how long the dead shall be lain out before burying (three days, just to make sure they're really dead and not just in a trance); selecting magistrates; more about lawsuits; competitions for best citizens; and so forth. 

I won't have much to say about this book, but I am going to write one more thing about the discussion of virtue and its various kinds that comes at the end of it. That will be, I think, my final post on the Laws.

Not a Communist

Perseverance

 ...is on the ground and transmitting imagery.

Eric Hines

Plato's Laws XI, 3: Family Law and More Crimes

This will be the final post on Book XI. There is a lot covered here, but I've decided that mostly we don't need to delve into it because much of it is a set of technical discussions and distinctions we would never consider adopting. A lot of it turns on family law particular to the colony, which even the Athenian admits looks like nothing else anyone in Greece would do because of the basic law that there remain precisely 5,040 households. Thus, being dismissed from a household means exile; you can't just move across town, rent a house, and start earning a living working for the shopkeeper. You're forbidden to move, forbidden to rent, and forbidden to work at the trades. You have to leave the colony and go somewhere with quite different laws in order to make a life. 

One point of interest comes in the discussion of divorce and widowry. Because of the importance of maintaining the precise number of households, we've already seen that married couples who prove unproductive of children will be forcibly separated if necessary. Divorces for irreconcilable differences are also permitted, although there is a negotiation process meant to produce accord that is unlikely to succeed because it involves 20 advocates (ten male and ten female). That's too many people in the room for an agreement to result.

Yet the interesting point comes after divorce is agreed to be in the best interests, and a new partner needs to be selected; or, in the case of widowry, when death has brought about the end of the marriage. The Athenian acknowledges a view of marriage that separates the functions of it by age.

Ath. Those who have no children, or only a few, at the time of their separation, should choose their new partners with a view to the procreation of children; but those who have a sufficient number of children should separate and marry again in order that they may have some one to grow old with and that the pair may take care of one another in age. 

Now you may remember from the discussion we had in our own society of 'gay marriage' that the position of the Church, and many religious people in general, is that marriage is a sacrament and as such has one particular end. A 'sacrament' is a kind of blessing by which God gives people a way of overcoming sinful nature. In the case of marriage, the sin is the sin of lust: marriage regulates lust in such a way as one can live virtuously with one's sinful nature. Lust is brought within a system that allows its expression in a non-sinful way: there are in fact three goods of marital sex according to Aquinas, and all of them are perfectly attained in marriage. The principal end and primary good, reproduction, is perfectly attained only in this way because in this way are children brought into the world in the right position to be supported and loved by their parents, sustained and educated into adulthood, and brought into the community as a fully-formed member. 

For the Athenian, there is no sin, but only vice. It is vicious for citizens to have sex with slaves, for example; he talks about how notorious that is, and how it should be punished by exile of the guilty citizen as well as the slave and their children. Marriage is not a sacrament, since there is no sin; the regulatory function is to be performed by the personal virtue of temperance, rather than by an institution like marriage. One does not give into lust even with one's spouse, in other words; it is the sort of thing that Chesterton celebrated as an advantage of the Church over the virtuous pagans of old.

Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe -- that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one. Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one may be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy -- that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel"; and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger and there you can grovel" -- that was an emancipation.

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.

Yet here it is the pagans who have the advantage, because they have admitted a truth about human nature that the Church continues not to do. The institution of marriage is an institution of human nature; and its basic function changes as we age because we change as we age. There are old men who are still driven by lust, but not so many; and the function of marriage transforms, with time, from the care and raising of the youth to the sustaining and comfort of the old. Admitting this second end for marriage is more humane than trying to restrict it to the single end (as the Medieval priests did, having no wives and few children, but observing society from a place of detachment in which support for the elderly was provided by their Orders). 

The Athenian punishes disrespectful or inattentive children with heavy fines, and then returns -- through a frightening leap of logic -- to criminal matters via the need to punish poisoners. He has a careful division of poisoners into kinds that is Kantian in that all of the carefully constructed branches lead to the same conclusion: the sentence of death. One might have taken the reasonable short-cut that poisoning is particularly wicked and thus worthy of death whenever proven, however it was done; but philosophers often love these sort of precise and careful but ultimately practically inapplicable categories. 

There are also rules for lunatics, who are a private matter that the family is bound to control; and a discussion of the various kinds of lunacy, if anyone is interested in ancient Greek opinions on psychology. 

Finally, there is a general admonition against greed and its distorting effects on law and justice. 

Ath. There are many noble things in human life, but to most of them attach evils which are fated to corrupt and spoil them. Is not justice noble, which has been the civilizer of humanity? How then can the advocate of justice be other than noble? And yet upon this profession which is presented to us under the fair name of art has come an evil reputation. In the first place; we are told that by ingenious pleas and the help of an advocate the law enables a man to win a particular cause, whether just or unjust; and the power of speech which is thereby imparted, are at the service of him sho is willing to pay for them. Now in our state this so-called art, whether really an art or only an experience and practice destitute of any art, ought if possible never to come into existence, or if existing among us should litten to the request of the legislator and go away into another land, and not speak contrary to justice. If the offenders obey we say no more; but those who disobey, the voice of the law is as follows:-If anyone thinks that he will pervert the power of justice in the minds of the judges, and unseasonably litigate or advocate, let any one who likes indict him for malpractices of law and dishonest advocacy, and let him be judged in the court of select judges; and if he be convicted, let the court determine whether he may be supposed to act from a love of money or from contentiousness. And if he is supposed to act from contentiousness, the court shall fix a time during which he shall not be allowed to institute or plead a cause; and if he is supposed to act as be does from love of money, in case he be a stranger, he shall leave the country, and never return under penalty of death; but if he be a citizen, he shall die, because he is a lover of money, in whatever manner gained; and equally, if he be judged to have acted more than once from contentiousness, he shall die.

A firm hand to restrain the litigious nature of society! Overall, though I agree that lawsuits can be pernicious if brought for the wrong reasons, I prefer the old Icelandic system from the sagas to Plato's ruthless state.

Power mixes

 I'm already reading inanities about hotcoldwetdry (is there anything it can't do?) to explain why global warming results in arctic freezes.  My favorite from today is the notion that the polar air heated up so much that it became unstable and drifted down into the southern U.S.  I think it's also possible it was depressed by seeing so much white supremacy.  But as my husband asks, if objective reason is racist, can the science ever really be settled any more?

Anyway, at the risk of reinforcing white supremacy, here are some helpful graphics showing not only the drastic impacts on different power sources in the Texas deep-freeze, but also the contemporaneous mix of power sources in other grids around the nation.  In Texas, wind power fell off a cliff, so natural gas took up a lot of the slack.  However, even gas took a hit from the freeze (pipelines malfunctioned), and demand took off like a rocket.  Presto:  blackouts.

I'm trying to figure out why rolling blackouts became fixed patches of power that stayed on for days next to power that stayed off for days.  At first I read vague statements about how it was too hard to roll the outages when certain areas had been off too long.  Today I found a new statement about how it was too hard to roll the outages when the percentage of outage was too great across the system.  No explanations so far, and neither of those statements is obvious.  Is there a technical explanation that's too difficult to wheel out for the public?

Also, this morning there are renewed calls to force Texas to stop evading FERC jurisdiction by maintaining its own power grid, ERCOT.  I popped over to the FERC site to see what fresh ideas they had to offer, and found this.

Liberalism: the "alien machine" to prevent civil war

This Cathy Young contribution to the Slate Star Codex drama makes more sense to me than most, and one heck of a lot more than the incoherent, spiteful mess published by the execrable New York Times.

From Alexander himself:

People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell — the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable — until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.

A funny new idea: don't lie

Glenn Greenwald continues to buck the trend:

One can — and should — condemn the January 6 riot without inflating the threat it posed. And one can — and should — insist on both factual accuracy and sober restraint without standing accused of sympathy for the rioters.

Requiescat in Pace, Rush Limbaugh

I first heard of Rush Limbaugh from a left-wing teacher, who was animated about him even in the early 1990s. I started listening to his show just to see what had the guy so upset. What I found, as some of you may have as well, was the first real education I ever received in conservative political principles. I'd grown up around conservative Democrats in the Bible Belt of rural Georgia, but none of them expressed principles clearly. To some degree I think they'd just inherited their ideas, and knew what 'right looked like,' but not how to express just why it was right. I didn't always agree with those principles as he expressed them, but I found real value in understanding.

My father began listening to him after hearing me talk about him, and Dad developed a great affection for his show. Dad was politically very conservative as he got older; less so in his youth. He appreciated the way that Rush would lay things out in a way that was definitely not what you'd hear on the traditional news: a legitimate, alternative perspective from which to consider things. Over time I think Dad became convinced of much of it. 

Rush was widely hated all that time, and not only because people on the left often think people on the right are secret racists and monsters of one sort or another. They also hated him, I think, because he mocked them. He was an entertainer, and sometimes he switched from serious talk to humor of the sort of which it could be unpleasant to be on the receiving end. I understand that they didn't appreciate that, but conservatives of any sort are subject to much more regular and much more vicious humor from the society at large; late night television has turned into a festival of mockery for that part of America.

President Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh a medal at the State of the Union, an honor that he probably merited for his work in education alone. I wish his family peace, and his soul forgiveness and rest. 

Different Cultural Norms

Joe Biden gave an interview last night in which he was directly asked about the genocide against the Uighur being conducted by the People's Republic of China. He said there were "different cultural norms," which is true -- the PRC's culture is apparently perfectly OK with genocide -- but a shocking and awful thing to have said. 

Jack Posobiec points out that some of these cultural norms embrace kidnapping the children from their mothers, putting them in camps, and making them proclaim their love for Mother China.  A German study suggests forced sterilization is ongoing; the State Department has reported on systematic rape. Presumably this is the same idea as in Braveheart: "The problem with Scotland is that it's full of Scots... we'll breed them out." Except, of course, in the movie it was only for one night; on China's "New Frontier," it's every night, while you're held in a camp rather than allowed to go home. 

The Thirty Tyrants (sadly far more than thirty of them this time) are hard at work to praise their true friends and allies, the leadership of the People's Republic of China. For our own sake as well as that of the suffering Uighur, we must not let them get away with this. At least the truth about what is happening must be spoken. 

"Why No One Believes Anything"

An article at National Review today addresses the general collapse of trust in news reports.

Andrew Cuomo, the Emmy Award–winning governor that a swooning press held up as the enlightened standard for an effective pandemic response... may have covered up nursing-home fatalities....

The Lincoln Project, the great conquering super PAC of the 2020 election, hailed as the work of geniuses and lavished with attention on cable news, has imploded upon revelations that it is a sleazy scam.

And the widely circulated story of the death of Officer Brian Sicknick, a key element of Trump’s second impeachment, is at the very least murky and more complicated than first reported.

You could extend the list a lot longer than that, and I'm sure each of you has your own favorite example. 

When speaking of the wilder conspiracy theories like Qanon, I've lately been proposing that they're successful because they actually are more plausible than the official story. The official story is that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. 

The author says there are no ready solutions, but there are: there just aren't ready actors. The solutions are to speak the truth, to stop treating journalism as a front for cultural warfare, and to stop believing that 'your team' are the good guys. Not 'playing for the team' is apparently not an option, however; 'winning' or 'advancing the ball' seems to be what journalism has become. 

Costs exist, however. Credibility and attention are the currency, and if you become incredible people stop paying attention, too. Then what have you got? You've got people looking for alternative sources, and some of those sources believe in lizard people.

Nonpreppers

My little coastal county doesn't fare well in extreme cold. We do have Yankee transplants here, but there's no accounting for citizens who appear to think that "rare freezes" are the same as "impossible freezes." This was an unusual cold spell in that many people have lost power not just for a few hours but for days on end, so the simplest coldproofing steps suddenly proved inadequate. Pipes will freeze now that would have been OK if house heat had stayed on. Not many thought to empty the pipes when the heat went off, and a day or two later--when it became clear that the outages weren't "rolling"--it was too late.

To make matters worse, when everyone drips pipes, or when pipes burst, water pressure goes to nothing. When the municipal water system loses power it can't make the treatment plant work and can't maintain water pressure. Many are outraged to be told that they should boil water, which they can't do because they are helpless without electrical power to boil water with. Or a few have power to boil with, but now no water pressure and so no water to boil. Seems like they would join forces with the contingent on the next block and get some water boiled.

You wouldn't believe how many people haven't got the means even to light a cooking fire in a grill. This cold snap didn't exactly sneak up on us, but many lost water pressure last night without having filled a single container. The stores lack power and haven't been restocked this week--no bottled water! There is no gasoline for sale; too many pumps are still without power. And this is in a county that's not even five years past its last hurricane-related weeks-long power outage.

Communications are strangely stable. I assume people are using smartphones and charging in their cars.

As uncomfortable as this all is, our temperatures have not been what you would call dangerous: upper teens, at the worst. There's no reason for anyone to risk exposure as long as they have dry shelter out of the wind. I doubt there's anyone reading this post who hasn't camped outside in worse. A few large buildings, like churches, have generators, but most are simply larger versions of the cold, uncomfortable boxes that the homes have become, and so are useless as shelters. Better to pile on the blankets at home and wait it out, assuming you keep some food and water in the house.

The weirdest thing I've heard all week: it's barely risen above freezing for several days now, but people are letting food go bad in their unpowered refrigerators. I just read about someone in another town worried about the safety of her insulin supply. What do they think refrigerators do?

One thing I'm pleased about: we had very few wrecks on icy roads. I dreaded hearing that people would skid off the causeway into the bay.

A few look at this situation and think: I should plan right now for improved backup systems in case something like this happens again. The rest want to know the name and phone number of someone they can call and complain to about the lousy service at this hotel.

Six Days on the Road

All right, so after Aggie mentioned it in the comments on Friday night, I decided to extend this series long enough that we could do this song on the sixth day after "Six Decks to Darwin." 

So here you go: the great trucker classic.

Although in fairness you shouldn't wind up a trucker song series without "Convoy," so here it is too.

And, really, something from the late, great Jerry Reed. 

Chill Map

In case you want it for comparison, or just to see how cold it really is out there.

"The Models Work"

Some of you may have followed a long discussion at AVI's place on the validity of weather models. I learned quite a bit about what weather predictors think they are doing, and why their models are so bad. I'm not sure it's worth your time to read through it, but essentially they're confident enough in computer modeling in which they are only estimating the initial conditions that they think they can run computer models of weather that are as accurate as computer models of gambling games. The probability model they're using is simplistic and non-Bayesian. 

Because it's non-Bayesian, it's impossible to distinguish between 'the model worked, but the unlikely event occurred' and 'the model was full of crap.' If the event you predicted happened, the model was accurate. If the event you predicted wasn't likely to occur happened, the model was still right -- it predicted a chance of something else happening, after all. The models are never wrong.

A Dark Time in America

The calls for gun control were always expected, because disarming the American people has been at or near the top of the to-do list for the left forever. Yet there is no crisis to reference; gun violence is in fact way up, but not gun violence of the type they'd like to ban. Almost all of the spike in gun murders is committed with handguns that are already illegally possessed, and usually stolen. The left wants to ban civilian possession of semiautomatic rifles, among other things, but rifles of all kinds put together are used only in a tiny fraction of gun violence (about two-thirds of which 'violence' is suicide, causing gun control advocates to suddenly become anti-suicide advocates when the left normally embraces euthanasia as it does abortion).

So they're reaching back three years to a school shooting that happened -- the one where the police cowered outside instead of attacking the gunman. 

Yet what a strange thing to do: propose a law to address a problem that has completely ended. There are no school shootings in America anymore, because in-person instruction has largely ended. We've found a 100% effective solution to the problem, and it doesn't involve gun control. All we need to do is shift public education permanently to a virtual model, which the teacher's unions seem to want to do anyway.

So you can solve the problem, please the unions, and not create a massive affront among the citizenry who believes (accurately) that you're violating their most basic Constitutional rights. Win-win-win! Why not do that? 

You know why not. Solving the problem isn't the real issue; the real issue for them is disarming their victims, or at least turning them into criminals against whom state violence can be lawfully used.

Of course you can call your Congressfolk to ask them to oppose all this, but none of them can actually stop any of it. You're already effectively disenfranchised in America at the Federal level. Real resistance will have to be at the state and local level, there are already attempts to organize efforts to block enforcement of unconstitutional Federal laws, refuse to cooperate with the Federal law enforcement agencies (as the left was already refusing to cooperate with ICE), elect sheriffs who refuse to enforce such laws, or even arrest them for violating our constitutional rights. 

These mechanisms explain the push to purge "extremists" from both police agencies and the military. Note that this "there is no room in society for people to hold extremist views" rhetoric extends to all Americans:

“There is zero room, not only in society, but more so in professions of public trust and service, for people to have extremist views, regardless of ideology,” said Art Acevedo, the Houston police chief and president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association[,]

We are staging up for an ugly time, it appears: having 'fortified' the election, the new government has literally fortified the capital, and is now moving on to the part where they pass unconstitutional laws meant to disarm the populace. The suppression of speech is ongoing as well. This is no longer the America that I was born in; it's very rapidly turning into something else. 

More from Georgia's Fulton County

Fulton County just fired its election manager. 

Former President Donald Trump falsely alleged irregularities in Fulton County voting including the counting of ballots after a water line break at State Farm Arena and other unproven claims.

Falsely, you say? So why was the guy fired?

"Issues cited were his handling of the 2020 elections & firing of whistleblowers Bridget Thorne & Suzi Voyles, who testified in Georgia fraud hearings," http://VOTERGA.ORG's Garland Favorito said.

Georgia has competing investigations into election fraud, including one that alleges wrongdoing by newly-minted Senator Warnick (from an earlier election, however). The State Election Board just filed 35 cases for prosecution by local DAs or state officials; Fulton County's Democratically-elected DA is trying to prosecute, you guessed it, Donald Trump.

Monday Night Truckin'

 This one's originally by Claude Gray, but I default to the Outlaw Coe whenever he's got a version. 

Happy Barack Obama Day

It used to be "Presidents' Day," but at this point he's the only one you're really allowed to celebrate. You may be allowed to wink past Clinton's actions, but that's getting thinner and thinner each year. You are allowed to pretend that Joe Biden really won the election, though that will get thinner each year too.

Sunday Night Truckin'

 Gotta get the truck's perspective, to be fair to all parties involved.