From Your Lips to God's Ear

DOGE has built an automated/augmented intelligence bot with an astonishing goal.

The U.S. DOGE Service is using a new artificial intelligence tool to slash federal regulations, with the goal of eliminating half of Washington’s regulatory mandates by the first anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post and four government officials familiar with the plans.

The tool, called the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post that is dated July 1 and outlines DOGE’s plans. Roughly 100,000 of those rules would be deemed worthy of trimming, the PowerPoint estimates — mostly through the automated tool with some staff feedback. The PowerPoint also suggests the AI tool will save the United States trillions of dollars by reducing compliance requirements, slashing the federal budget and unlocking unspecified “external investment.”

That would be amazing. Since these are administrative regulations, too, they don't require Congressional action in most cases. 

A Brief Review

Jim Hanson would like to review best practices with close-quarter pistols.

Derrick Perry is a Sheepdog
He saved lives
& did what few are prepared or willing to do
America thanks you

Now let's talk gun handling so the next time anyone has to do this
They do it the best way possible https://t.co/g01pvzbe8v pic.twitter.com/3x2o611JwQ

— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) July 27, 2025

The story he is referencing is here.

Another Evil Buzzword

This time the word is "mankeeping," which is I gather women having to care about their partners. 

Much of the time, Mr. Lioi said, his straight male clients tell him that they rarely open up to anyone but their girlfriends or wives. Their partners have become their unofficial therapists, he said, “doing all the emotional labor.”

That particular role now has a name: “mankeeping.” The term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends.

I have frequently suggested that there is a significant downside to the intrusion of 'therapy' into every aspect of life; here is another aspect of it. Of course you should rely chiefly on your spouse for your emotional needs: in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, etc. That is the bargain, and of old it was understood that husband and wife were partners in all of life's highs and lows. It wasn't seen as "unofficial therapy," or any sort of therapy. It was marriage; it was life. 

Therapy is properly limited to those who are recovering from injuries. Treating ordinary life as an ongoing source of injury -- indeed, usually as a source of "trauma"! -- has numerous bad follow-on effects. The implication here is that you should be paying somebody to 'treat' you for whatever daily difficulties you encounter. Otherwise, you're unfairly imposing on your spouse. 

The strength of a marriage comes from learning that you can rely on each other. A marriage works because you become practiced in leaning on each other, and find a partner who will help you carry your weight. You, in turn, help them with their own. 

I do think it's good to have friends; we talked about that not long ago. I wonder how quickly, though, these same women who are complaining about having to care for their partners would find themselves jealous if that emotional bonding was swapped outside of the marriage to another person. 

US Concessions to EU

None, apparently. They will tax our goods at 0%, we'll tax theirs at 15%. $600BB in U.S. investments and $750BB in energy purchases, replacing Russia as the provider of Europe's liquefied natural gas. 

I guess he is good at this deal-making thing. He understood the leverage, and explained it well enough that the EU sounded grateful to get out of this without it being worse for them.

RIP Tom Lehrer

I admit that I had not realized he was still alive; his work is well-known to me, but all of his famous pieces are from before I was born. 

Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.... Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. 

Let's have a few of them in memoriam. 

There are a whole lot more, if you like the form. These are all national security oriented, which is how they originally came across my desk (as it were). There are plenty that are not. 

Nicomachean Ethics III.11

Of the appetites some seem to be common, others to be peculiar to individuals and acquired; e.g. the appetite for food is natural, since every one who is without it craves for food or drink, and sometimes for both, and for love also (as Homer says) if he is young and lusty; but not every one craves for this or that kind of nourishment or love, nor for the same things. Hence such craving appears to be our very own.

That is straightforward enough.  

Yet [this craving of one's own] has of course something natural about it; for different things are pleasant to different kinds of people, and some things are more pleasant to every one than chance objects. Now in the natural appetites few go wrong, and only in one direction, that of excess; for to eat or drink whatever offers itself till one is surfeited is to exceed the natural amount, since natural appetite is the replenishment of one's deficiency.

This isn't strictly true, as we see e.g. in cases of anorexia, but he is correct that almost everyone only goes wrong in being excessive.

Hence these people are called belly-gods, this implying that they fill their belly beyond what is right. It is people of entirely slavish character that become like this.

There is a term that we might usefully recover: belly-gods! 

Aristotle believes in natural slavery, by which he means that some people are fitted out by their natures only to be slaves. Here is an example of someone who might be that way, because they are incapable of controlling even their most basic impulses. 

However, I note that in Iraq I observed that the very few genuinely obese men I met were sheikhs of one sort or another. In many cultures the ability to become fat is a demonstration of power, and a proof of command rather than slavishness. I wonder if Aristotle is merely encultured to the Greek approach here. 

But with regard to the pleasures peculiar to individuals many people go wrong and in many ways.

Our age has filled books on this topic -- mostly autobiographies by people proud of their errors. 

For while the people who are 'fond of so and so' are so called because they delight either in the wrong things, or more than most people do, or in the wrong way, the self-indulgent exceed in all three ways; they both delight in some things that they ought not to delight in (since they are hateful), and if one ought to delight in some of the things they delight in, they do so more than one ought and than most men do.

So, that's important to enumerate. 

Ways to go wrong in desire for food/drink/sex: 

1) Delighting in the wrong things, which are hateful things.
2) Delighting too much in the right things.
3) Delighting in the right things, but in the wrong way.
4) Doing all three of these at once ("self-indulgence"). 

Note another partial ad populum appeal: "more than one ought to and than most men do." There is a logos, sometimes, that lets us know what one 'ought' to do; but we must in other cases appeal to what is normal. Our culture has rejected both of those approaches: it rejects a logos based on any sort of human telos, and also rejects the idea that what is normal -- say, not being transgender -- should be a standard that is in any way binding. That's a challenge, particularly on matters of temperance (which, again, include all sexual pleasures).

Plainly, then, excess with regard to pleasures is self-indulgence and is culpable; with regard to pains one is not, as in the case of courage, called temperate for facing them or self-indulgent for not doing so, but the self-indulgent man is so called because he is pained more than he ought at not getting pleasant things (even his pain being caused by pleasure), and the temperate man is so called because he is not pained at the absence of what is pleasant and at his abstinence from it.

The self-indulgent man, then, craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant, and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else; hence he is pained both when he fails to get them and when he is merely craving for them (for appetite involves pain); but it seems absurd to be pained for the sake of pleasure.

There's a sort of non-logical contradiction, which is an odd entity: contradictions really only belong to logic, not to ethics in which strict logic doesn't (because it cannot) apply. This absurdity is thus analogous to a contradiction rather than a true contradiction (pace Hegel, who built his entire moral philosophy around 'contradictions' of this sort). Aristotle seems to have synthesized the law of non-contradiction into a form that we still use today and in a way that was central to his metaphysics, so even an analogy to a contradiction strikes him as absurd and offensive. 

People who fall short with regard to pleasures and delight in them less than they should are hardly found; for such insensibility is not human. Even the other animals distinguish different kinds of food and enjoy some and not others; and if there is any one who finds nothing pleasant and nothing more attractive than anything else, he must be something quite different from a man; this sort of person has not received a name because he hardly occurs.

There are enough of them these days that they have a flag and several names for variants. There are a lot more people now, however, so even that which 'hardly occurs' will occur when there are eight billion instances. 

The temperate man occupies a middle position with regard to these objects. For he neither enjoys the things that the self-indulgent man enjoys most-but rather dislikes them-nor in general the things that he should not, nor anything of this sort to excess, nor does he feel pain or craving when they are absent, or does so only to a moderate degree, and not more than he should, nor when he should not, and so on; but the things that, being pleasant, make for health or for good condition, he will desire moderately and as he should, and also other pleasant things if they are not hindrances to these ends, or contrary to what is noble, or beyond his means. For he who neglects these conditions loves such pleasures more than they are worth, but the temperate man is not that sort of person, but the sort of person that the right rule prescribes.

This having become so foundational a standard of Judeo-Christian ethics, it hardly needs elaboration.

Tribute to Ozzy

From the album Black and Bluegrass: A Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne

 

And a little Metallica from the same band

Movement Toward a Post-Literate Society

I've gone on in comments a bit about how many teens and twenty-somethings have trouble reading more than a few paragraphs or maybe a couple of pages and so university professors have, in general, adapted by giving shorter and shorter readings for classes.

Now the College Board has followed suit with the SAT and it looks like the ACT is making similar changes.*

The College Board notes on page 13 of its Digital SAT Suite of Assessments technical framework that two of the primary goals in changing the exam were to make it shorter and to give students more time per question. To make this happen in the new “Reading and Writing” section of the test, they shortened reading passages from 500-750 words all the way down to 25-150 words, or the length of a social-media post, with one question per passage. Their explanation is that this model “operates more efficiently when choices about what test content to deliver are made in small rather than larger units.”

...

Finally, the optional essay was eliminated completely.

The math section has been made easier over the last 15 years as well.

*Although the author of the article is Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classic Learning Test (CLT), which is trying to compete with the SAT and ACT, the SAT published the changes and defends them.

Pāgānī

Public Accommodations

Having been born in Atlanta where the issue was important at the time, I grew up understanding that a 'public accommodation' can't discriminate in choosing whom it serves. You used to see signs in businesses asserting that 'We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason,' but in fact the government held that they had no such right to reserve. At issue was whether the future governor's restaurant could refuse to serve black customers. 

By the 1960s the Pickrick had expanded to feed 400 diners - all white. And that made Maddox a target for African-American protest. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it also brought him into conflict with the federal law. But it made him a hero to white working-class Georgians and small businessmen, who bitterly resented being told what to do by Washington.

Contrary to mythology, Maddox never beat any black people, though the day after the passage of the act, he did dent the roof of a black minister's car. He also waved a pistol and was put on trial on gun charges, but was acquitted by an all-white jury. In the summer of 1964, Maddox organised a rally in Atlanta for George Wallace and also for Calvin Craig, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

To liberals, Maddox became an ugly symbol of southern "redneck" racism. To himself, and to many of his customers, the issue was not about race but about freedom. He saw himself as a small businessman whose rights over his property were being taken from him. When he closed his restaurant, rather than allow blacks to eat there as ordered by a federal injunction, he said that "my president, my Congress and the communists have closed my business and ended a childhood dream".

Maddox lost that fight, even though he later did become governor. The principle was enshrined in the law, specifically Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

This all leads me to ask, is Uber a public accommodation? 

Uber is piloting a new option for its U.S. app that will allow female passengers to request women drivers, coming after the company has long grappled with preventing sexual assault on its platform.

The feature, called Women Preferences, will launch in a pilot stage in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit in the next few weeks, Uber said in a blog post on Wednesday. It marks the first time the popular rideshare app is bringing this option to its service in the United States after launching it in 40 other countries.

Uber joins Lyft and other taxi hailing apps, like HERide and Just Her Rideshare, that connect female passengers with women drivers.

Women drivers on Uber can also refuse to pick up men, or those who look like men. 

I don't really mind the notion because I agree that we should allow women reasonable steps to protect their safety. These don't have to turn on blanket sex discrimination. Uber, for example, already allows drivers to rate their passengers as well as the other way around, giving drivers information about the quality of the ride they might be asked to deliver. I don't often use Uber since there is no such thing way out here, but on the rare occasion that I have used it in cities I have maintained my 5.0 rating as a passenger by being courteous and tipping well. If you look at that rating you will have a reasonable confidence that picking me up will be a pleasant experience even though I am quite completely male. 

There is a broader social issue at work. Conservative women (mostly) have been fighting a pitched battle to defend female-only spaces. Although these are not themselves 'public accommodations' they often exist in the context of things that are: locker rooms in gymnasia or restrooms in hotel restaurants, for example. There seems to be some hedge for allowing sex discrimination as long as it is pointed always in the one direction of excluding males.

The Babylon Bee's got jokes (and about Ozzy and Hulk and Gaza too!), but I always wonder with our anti-discrimination laws if there is actually a real principle at work or not. Straight white males seem to be readily subject to discrimination in hiring, education, accommodation and now getting a ride back to the hotel from that meeting. LGBT folk face at least some discrimination, being formally unprotected. Even Black men are now subject to this ride discrimination thing in what seems like a 'public accommodation,' and they were the original class that Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 intended to protect. 

Does the law mean anything, or are we still just playing favorites? It's hard to discern anything remotely like 'equality' in the way these things keep playing out. 

Requiescant in Pace

It was not a surprise to learn that Ozzy Osbourne had died after his farewell concert, which was only seventeen days before his death. That was exactly how Lemmy Kilmister had finished his life, down to the number of days as I understand it. 

I was surprised to read that Hulk Hogan had died yesterday, however. Terry Gene Bollea, rather, the actor who played Hulk Hogan -- although it was doubtless the Hulk's character that brought about the steroid use and physical injuries that led to his many surgeries and heart condition. 

May they rest in peace. They were both important figures in my youth, and Ozzy long before that; he was making some of his best music before I was born, and much of the rest while I was too young to appreciate it yet. 

Hanging Journalists

You can read the article the poster wanted to hang him over here, if you are so inclined. I've never met nor spoken with Mr. Stephens, but he is fielding some of the same arguments that I have myself. I take them to be honest considerations, and would hate to see even a New York Times journalist hanged over speaking what they see as the truth. Others may oppose the truth by giving their own arguments; and in defense of the Times' honor on this point, I believe that they publish at least one view opposing that one every day. Here is today's; and here is a collection of letters on both sides in response to Stephen's piece. One of them points out that the US killed 200,000 people with one bomb in Japan to force a surrender; Richard Fernandez today raises a similar point about the use of starvation to force that surrender.

Of course, if you're trying to 'globalize the intifada,' I suppose killing anyone anywhere is all right if it advances the cause. Journalists and even bloggers like Fernandez or myself are no exceptions. Death comes for all; war sometimes does too. 

Nicomachean Ethics III.10

After courage let us speak of temperance; for these seem to be the virtues of the irrational parts. We have said that temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures (for it is less, and not in the same way, concerned with pains); self-indulgence also is manifested in the same sphere.

'The virtues of the irrational parts' of the soul, that is; but of course the virtues are not themselves part of the irrational part of the soul. They are the rational parts of the soul that control the irrational parts. Courage, as you have read several times now, is concerned with fear of pains to include wounds and death; temperance, principally with pleasures not to be over-indulged. 

Aquinas' promotion of temperance over courage makes sense even on Aristotle's own terms when you remember that Aquinas pointed out that most people are more motivated by pleasure than pain; recall the talk about Helen at the gates. 

Now, therefore, let us determine with what sort of pleasures they are concerned. We may assume the distinction between bodily pleasures and those of the soul, such as love of honour and love of learning; for the lover of each of these delights in that of which he is a lover, the body being in no way affected, but rather the mind; but men who are concerned with such pleasures are called neither temperate nor self-indulgent.

Indeed, the love of seeking that most worthy of honor is magnanimity, which is going to prove to be the capstone and crown of virtue. So: the high pleasures of the soul, especially to include living in a way that is most worthy of honor, should not be tempered but embraced.

There are other things people find pleasant that should not be, even though they are not bodily pleasures:

Nor, again, are those who are concerned with the other pleasures that are not bodily; for those who are fond of hearing and telling stories and who spend their days on anything that turns up are called gossips, but not self-indulgent, nor are those who are pained at the loss of money or of friends.

The Stoics might suggest that allowing yourself to be pained at the loss of money or friends is irrational, but grief over the loss of friends falls within Aristotle's quite large concession to friendship as part of the good life. Marcus Aurelias would remind you that you always knew your friends were mortal; but for Aristotle, life without friends is much impoverished because it degrades the life of one's own mind by removing another self in whose good you can also find happiness, which is the end of ethics.

Temperance must be concerned with bodily pleasures, but not all even of these; for those who delight in objects of vision, such as colours and shapes and painting, are called neither temperate nor self-indulgent; yet it would seem possible to delight even in these either as one should or to excess or to a deficient degree.

And so too is it with objects of hearing; no one calls those who delight extravagantly in music or acting self-indulgent, nor those who do so as they ought temperate.

Nor do we apply these names to those who delight in odour, unless it be incidentally; we do not call those self-indulgent who delight in the odour of apples or roses or incense, but rather those who delight in the odour of unguents or of dainty dishes; for self-indulgent people delight in these because these remind them of the objects of their appetite. And one may see even other people, when they are hungry, delighting in the smell of food; but to delight in this kind of thing is the mark of the self-indulgent man; for these are objects of appetite to him.

You may note the oddity of Aristotle referring so much to the common judgment: 'no one calls...' is argumentum ad populum. Aristotle was not concerned with what would later come to be called the informal fallacies; his considerations on logic generally point at formal logic, which isn't appropriate to ethics (EN I.3 again). He discusses the issue somewhat in the Rhetoric, especially in Book I, but there he is talking about enthymemes rather than strict logical arguments. "However, where the general premise of a syllogism is supposed to be true, making the subsequent deduction necessary, the general premise of an enthymeme is merely probable, which leads only to a tentative conclusion," thus making them proper for ethical/political arguments. 

Nor is there in animals other than man any pleasure connected with these senses, except incidentally. For dogs do not delight in the scent of hares, but in the eating of them, but the scent told them the hares were there; nor does the lion delight in the lowing of the ox, but in eating it; but he perceived by the lowing that it was near, and therefore appears to delight in the lowing; and similarly he does not delight because he sees 'a stag or a wild goat', but because he is going to make a meal of it.

This psychology of animals is entirely speculative; I personally think dogs seem to delight greatly in the scent of hares, even when the hare is long gone and there is no chance of eating one. I've known dogs who chased rabbits with great pleasure even if they wouldn't hurt it once they caught it, just because they loved to chase them.  

Temperance and self-indulgence, however, are concerned with the kind of pleasures that the other animals share in, which therefore appear slavish and brutish; these are touch and taste. But even of taste they appear to make little or no use; for the business of taste is the discriminating of flavours, which is done by winetasters and people who season dishes; but they hardly take pleasure in making these discriminations, or at least self-indulgent people do not, but in the actual enjoyment, which in all cases comes through touch, both in the case of food and in that of drink and in that of sexual intercourse. This is why a certain gourmand prayed that his throat might become longer than a crane's, implying that it was the contact that he took pleasure in.

So, food and drink and sex is what we're really interested in here. These do often tend to get people in trouble.  

Thus the sense with which self-indulgence is connected is the most widely shared of the senses; and self-indulgence would seem to be justly a matter of reproach, because it attaches to us not as men but as animals. To delight in such things, then, and to love them above all others, is brutish. For even of the pleasures of touch the most liberal have been eliminated, e.g. those produced in the gymnasium by rubbing and by the consequent heat; for the contact characteristic of the self-indulgent man does not affect the whole body but only certain parts.

We don't usually think of the self-indulgent as being especially inclined to the gymnasium, and Aristotle seems willing to grant that exception. I do think that there may be exceptions to this exception, however; but that is a topic for another time. 

Weary of Green Wine

Appropriate music for the prior post.

Nicomachean Ethics III.9, Courage III: Paradoxes about Courage

The final chapter on the virtue of courage is short, but it contains some paradoxes that are interesting to consider. 

Though courage is concerned with feelings of confidence and of fear, it is not concerned with both alike, but more with the things that inspire fear; for he who is undisturbed in face of these and bears himself as he should towards these is more truly brave than the man who does so towards the things that inspire confidence. It is for facing what is painful, then, as has been said, that men are called brave. Hence also courage involves pain, and is justly praised; for it is harder to face what is painful than to abstain from what is pleasant.

One thing Aristotle has already said is that which of the two extremes is more important to avoid can vary both by virtue and by individual. For those who incline to the Nameless Vice of the Celts (such as apparently myself), or for the sanguine, it is much more important to attend to the things that justly ought to be feared than to the things that inspire confidence. Confidence is the problem in such cases. The virtue of courage for such people lies in taking care to be appropriately fearful.

That conflict is mild, though, compared to those that follow. He starts with an easy example, boxing (which was a slightly different sport of extreme popularity in Ancient Greece):

Yet the end which courage sets before it would seem to be pleasant, but to be concealed by the attending circumstances, as happens also in athletic contests; for the end at which boxers aim is pleasant- the crown and the honours- but the blows they take are distressing to flesh and blood, and painful, and so is their whole exertion; and because the blows and the exertions are many the end, which is but small, appears to have nothing pleasant in it.

If you have done it, you know how little you even think of the small reward of glory during the moment of taking blows in a sport-fighting contest. Your mind does attune to the tactics of victory over the particular opponent, but doesn't even think of the 'end' of receiving a medal or belt. Thus, the pleasant end is not even the goal (telos) of the action any longer, yet it has to be said to still be the motivating end. The means-to-the-end becomes the immediate goal, with the final goal no longer a consideration for the moment. 

And so, if the case of courage is similar, death and wounds will be painful to the brave man and against his will, but he will face them because it is noble to do so or because it is base not to do so. And the more he is possessed of virtue in its entirety and the happier he is, the more he will be pained at the thought of death; for life is best worth living for such a man, and he is knowingly losing the greatest goods, and this is painful. But he is none the less brave, and perhaps all the more so, because he chooses noble deeds of war at that cost.

This is the great paradox: the braver the man, the more painful the pain of death and wounds becomes. He thus has to be even braver to face these even more painful losses, because he is sacrificing something -- the very best kind of human life -- that lesser men don't have to lose. Many of them may live lives that aren't very enjoyable or happy at all; they may be from that place where (as Chesterton puts it) 'the perverse in pleasure pine and men are weary of green wine, and sick of crimson seas.' For them death could even be a release, and an honorable death much to be chosen if it gave both release and honor. 

For the truly brave and virtuous man, the virtue ends up conveying much less good, and much more pain: and yet he is the best case for the perfection of the virtue. 

It is not the case, then, with all the virtues that the exercise of them is pleasant, except in so far as it reaches its end. But it is quite possible that the best soldiers may be not men of this sort but those who are less brave but have no other good; for these are ready to face danger, and they sell their life for trifling gains.

So much, then, for courage; it is not difficult to grasp its nature in outline, at any rate, from what has been said.

Next up is temperance, a virtue that the later Christian Aristotelians especially loved to discuss.

UPDATE: On the subject of that last remark, courage suffers a significant downgrade in Aquinas' adjustment of Aristotle's ethics. Whereas it is the exemplary virtue for Aristotle, Aquinas demotes it somewhat. He mentions it in Summa Theologica Prima Secundæ Partis, and really gets into to it in Secunda Secundæ Partis. Here courage is renamed 'fortitude,' from fortis or strength, and is associated with the capacity to attain martyrdom. It is named as one of the cardinal moral virtues, along with Temperance, Justice, and Prudence.

That said, once you've mastered Aristotle's ethics you will find that the basic structure survives into Aquinas and therefore into Catholic moral teaching. For example, compare Aquinas' remarks on the voluntary and the involuntary and with what you've read of Aristotle's, and you'll see a great deal of continuity. The basic structure survives, and thus all the groundwork required to understand Aristotle is immediately useful in understanding the High Medieval moral teachings. 

A Contemporary Herald

 

Republicans notice

The MSM has suddenly decided to cover the Obama treason story, but in the David Burge sense: covering it with a blanket until it stops moving. The first stories I've seen appeared last night and this morning in the WSJ and NYT, with the time-honored "without evidence" modifiers. Both are behind paywalls, so I won't attempt to link. The gist is that the GOP needs a distraction from Epstein and made up a story out of whole cloth for the purpose. I mean, who would do such a thing? Showing extra courage, the WSJ left off any comment link.

Travel

I am taking a short business trip today and tomorrow. Hopefully I will be back tomorrow night, but air travel in high summer is dodgy. Wish me luck. 

UPDATE (Wednesday evening): That went about as well as you could ask for a run to the Deep South at this time of year. Only one flight delay, out of the four legs, and I got in eventually. Good trip. 

Shin Godzilla and Japanese Political Sentiment

Due to the insistence of a young relative, I recently watched the 2016 movie Shin Godzilla. I started out watching just to do something with him, but it turns out the movie is a great reflection of Japanese sentiment about their own politics and Japanese-US relations, with some jabs at the international community thrown in. Godzilla was always a political comment, a kind of Japanese Frankenstein story about nuclear power, sometimes with an implied criticism of nuclear weapons and the US, but this movie throws it in the viewers' faces. It's a political rant with a monster in the background. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Maybe at some point I'll set aside some time to write about what's happening in Japanese politics right now with the rise of apparently Trump-inspired "far right" populist parties, but if you want an entertaining overview of what many Japanese are feeling, the movie is a really good start, I think.

Some quick notes: 

During the US occupation of Japan, we wrote their current constitution. Article 9 of that constitution bars Japan from having a military and the US promised to protect Japan. Nevertheless, the Japanese established Self-Defense Forces (SDF), which look very much like a military. Paradoxically, they did this partly at US insistence when we turned our attention to the Cold War and stopped worrying that Japan would re-arm and try to rebuild their lost empire.

After WWII, a very strong pacifist sentiment developed, so the creation of the SDF was challenged. It went to their supreme court with the final ruling being that Japan can have forces to defend itself from invasion, but nothing that could be used to project power. There are many legal restrictions on their use and capabilities. Japan cannot legally have aircraft carriers, for example, because they are tools for force projection and not considered purely defensive.

As for the movie, the ending didn't quite seem genuine to me and I wonder if establishment politics didn't get involved in this rather anti-establishment political statement. But I'll save that for a possible future post.

Meanwhile, here's the trailer and then the greatest song ever written about Godzilla.

A List that Don't Exist

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jesse Welles (@wellesmusic)

A Hopeful Note from the Grateful Dead

Jerry Garcia's politics were not all that political; as the article explains, he disdained politicians and avoided their campaigns for power and office. He had what strikes me as a hopeful vision of America:

Mr. Garcia lived among artists and built up a community around him that was, psychologically and in some ways practically, impervious to government power.... He admired those who also lived beyond the government’s authority — the Black Panthers and the Hells Angels, to name two groups — though Mr. Garcia did not so much confront the government as simply refuse to accept its authority over him.

The government’s power, he insisted, was “illusory,” a myth that took real form only because people accepted it. “The government,” Mr. Garcia said, “is not in a position of power in this country.”

I think there is something to that. The government is not entirely without power, but it extends much less far than the government itself wishes it did. We see little enough of them here in the mountains.

Nicomachean Ethics III.8: Courage II

Continuing from Friday, more of Aristotle's thoughts on courage. Today Aristotle wants to talk about things that are sometimes called courage, but that he doesn't think are the genuine article.

Courage, then, is something of this sort, but the name is also applied to five other kinds.

First comes the courage of the citizen-soldier; for this is most like true courage. Citizen-soldiers seem to face dangers because of the penalties imposed by the laws and the reproaches they would otherwise incur, and because of the honours they win by such action; and therefore those peoples seem to be bravest among whom cowards are held in dishonour and brave men in honour. This is the kind of courage that Homer depicts, e.g. in Diomede and in Hector:

First will Polydamas be to heap reproach on me then; and

For Hector one day 'mid the Trojans shall utter his vaulting

harangue:

Afraid was Tydeides, and fled from my face.

This kind of courage is most like to that which we described earlier, because it is due to virtue; for it is due to shame and to desire of a noble object (i.e. honour) and avoidance of disgrace, which is ignoble. One might rank in the same class even those who are compelled by their rulers; but they are inferior, inasmuch as they do what they do not from shame but from fear, and to avoid not what is disgraceful but what is painful; for their masters compel them, as Hector does:

But if I shall spy any dastard that cowers far from the fight,

Vainly will such an one hope to escape from the dogs.

And those who give them their posts, and beat them if they retreat, do the same, and so do those who draw them up with trenches or something of the sort behind them; all of these apply compulsion. But one ought to be brave not under compulsion but because it is noble to be so.

In our time and country, we tend to think of the citizen-soldier as the ideal exemplar of courage. Ours differ somewhat from the ancient Greek and Trojan cases in that we have an all-volunteer military; thus, our fighting men and women are in fact choosing military service freely rather than being compelled by laws to serve. This makes them better than the citizen-soldiers that Aristotle is talking about on his own terms. He would likely have admired those who elect to enlist in the United States Marine Corps, knowingly choosing an especially hard service; or those who choose the Army's combat arms. The portions of the service for which you must volunteer multiple times -- for example special operations or Airborne, where you have to volunteer first for the service and then again for the hard selection process -- would have drawn his admiration and approval, I think.

We do share his disdain for citizen-soldiers of nations that assign their NCOs or officers to kill any soldiers who don't press forward, as the Soviets were said to do in WWII. We generally agree, I think, that service under such compulsion is less noble and more based in fear than true courage. I also think that we tend to sneer at the indiscipline of such an army, or such a nation as cannot command loyalty from love instead of tyranny. 

Hector is usually considered a noble figure, but it is true that in the end he flees from Achilles. (Iliad XXII). Achilles is the favorite Greek example, but he had an unfair advantage that kept him from harm in almost all circumstances; I think of Odysseus as the best example of Greek courage because his courage was coupled with practical wisdom. This question is debated between Socrates and the Sophist Hippias in the Lesser Hippias or Hippias Minor, in which Socrates takes the position that Odysseus was the greater; philosophers usually treat that document as ironic or a reductio ad absurdum, but I think there is a serious point being made therein.

More after the jump; this is a longer chapter.

The NYT Validates MAGA

I'm beginning to suspect that there may be something to the President's charge that at least part of the Epstein story is a scam; and the reason I think so is that the whole of the media is piling onto it the way they have done with other Uniparty-backed scams. Today, for what I think is the first time ever, the New York Times published a piece asserting that MAGA has a valid complaint about something.

For those who don't want to read the whole thing, on the question we have been especially interested in -- whether there were intelligence ties, and if so to whose agency -- the reporter interviewed is agnostic. She says she is aware of the theories, but has no facts herself on which to base any reporting. They do mention Maxwell's father's ties to Israeli intelligence and Mossad, so they aren't trying to hide from that, but there just isn't enough information in public for reporting -- just for speculation of the sort we have been doing.

The No Banter Bill

Britain's House of Lords proposes banning pub banter. As The Free Press points out, this is on top of some pretty substantial existing bans on speech:

If the bill goes into law in its current form—and there is not much to stop it now—Britons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting. The law will apply to pubs, clubs, restaurants, soccer grounds, and all the other places where the country gathers and, all too frequently, ridicules one another....

[S]exual harassment and workplace harassment are already unlawful in Britain. So are “spreading malicious rumors,” “picking on or regularly undermining someone,” and “denying someone’s training or promotion opportunities” on grounds of age, sex, disability, gender reassignment, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion, or belief, or sexual orientation. The Equality Act of 2010 also makes employers primarily responsible for preventing the “bullying and harassment” of employees by other employees.

Where the Banter Bill strikes new ground is by making employers liable for employees’ feelings about their customers, too. It will allow employees to define “harassment” under the lowest of thresholds: taking offense.

Expect that in California soon, I guess. The new frontier for 'free speech' is not being allowed to say anything anyone finds offensive in public (or online). 

Immigration "reform"

As a nation, we scarcely have an immigration policy--certainly nothing that commands any widespread consensus. My own views on immigration have been all over the map over the decades. Congress makes noises about "comprehensive" reform, which seems to be a euphemism for legislating the border out of existence. Before the second Trump administration we routinely heard that the existing legislative structure was unsustainable, though conservatives argued that it was merely unenforced, a conclusion that seems to have been borne out by events of the last six months.

I used to be rather a fan of amnesty for anyone with a clean rap sheet and a credible work record. Later, I came to believe that there must be a third requirement, which was demonstrating that the illegal immigrant was not on the dole. I believe we cannot have both open borders and a welfare state. I concluded some time back that the welfare state can't be eliminated, at least for citizens, which left only sealing the border to all but immigrants we reasonably concluded were not here for the purpose of launching a criminal career and/or a lifetime habit of going on the dole.

In the background, there always were the arguments about the impact of cheap illegal immigrant labor on the wage scale for working citizens, especially on the low end of the scale. These arguments echoed the endless debate over the minimum wage. I've never favored a minimum wage, believing it only converts low-paying jobs into outright unemployment. As a result, I was never swayed much by complaints, coming from the progressive side of the debate in the past, that the real problem with open borders (legal or otherwise) was the downward pressure on wages, and my views didn't change when, to my surprise, the same argument was embraced by the newly populist GOP.

My views changed when it became obvious that the solution proposed for the downward pressure on wages was to blow the doors off the welfare state. Imagine my amazement when Congress began to inch toward legislation withholding welfare from illegal immigrants and beginning to deport them in serious numbers.

I read an article today accusing the GOP of misrepresenting its rationale for deporting illegal immigrants. The thinking goes: we can't deport immigrants because we can't get citizens to do their jobs at the prices employers want to pay. But hasn't that always been the argument for the minimum wage? Who says employers are entitled to a supply of laborers who are willing to work for an infinitely low wage? If the business can't be sustained without workers willing to work at that low wage, the business will not stay in business. Whatever Americans wanted offered at that price won't be available. That's always been true; it's why we can't afford house-servants of the sort that rich people used to think were necessary to a civilized life. Nor are we likely to solve the problem by making up the difference by paying lots more taxes so that impoverished workers can afford to work for us and still have a lot of basic but expensive needs met by welfare. We can't legislate a free lunch into existence; anything "free" is paid for somewhere, by someone. Not even confiscating all the wealth of Bill Gates or Elon Musk will change that more than temporarily.

What I'm left with is this: we'll find out what jobs free Americans will do at the price employers can afford to pay. If those jobs can't be done, we'll figure out how to adjust to new prices for goods and services that used to be available to us at the old price, which depended on a combination of crippling levels of taxes to support a welfare state and unfair employer leverage over a workforce required to live in the shadows. We'll alter our priorities about the goods and services we are and are not willing to forgo. Maybe we can't have as many avocados or houses as large as have become customary in recent decades. But also maybe a lot of teenagers and adults new to the workforce will be able to find work for a change. People don't tend to stay in entry-level jobs at entry-level wages forever, but they sure can stay in the unemployed welfare underclass forever.

The power of the eternal purse

I knew progressives would be unhappy with the rescission bill, but I didn't understand that they would consider it a reversal of the constitutional order:

Our Constitution gives Congress the ‘power of the purse’ for a reason. It ensures federal spending is controlled by people’s elected representatives, not an all-powerful executive. It’s a crucial check against the expansion of presidential power.

This rescissions bill fundamentally alters that balance.

Republicans, including President Trump, enacted a funding bill that included this money for foreign aid and public broadcasting only months ago. Then they reversed course and voted to cut those programs. By walking back those commitments, congressional Republicans showed, yet again, they will refuse to stand up to President Trump, even for things they support.

This seems off-base. If Congress can approve spending, why shouldn't it also be able to cancel it? The real rub seems to be that rescission operates like a delayed line-item veto, which undermines the ability to approve spending favored by only one party by holding hostage spending critical to the other party.

Now there is much wailing over the fact that Congressional factions can no longer count on spending "deals" to be binding. There is more talk than I can ever before remember hearing about Democrats' shutting down the government. I'm not sure how effective a strategy that is, since the party in power can designate essential spending to survive, which is not a power I'd want to give to the DOGE factions if I were leading the Dems in Congress.

Bad Habituation

As we rest over the weekend after considering Aristotle's remarks on bad habits and character, a song celebrating how they can tie us to who we used to be before the crazy years began. That too is an Aristotelian point: for better and for worse, our character is who we are. It hold us together.

MRI trauma

My husband got a routine MRI this week and reported considerable annoyance at the number of times he was forced to answer the same questions about whether he had any metal implants. I like this radiological imaging center, but they do indulge in some repetitive questioning. Before they even got a chance to pepper him with inquiries, they'd already made me answer the same questions at length when I called to make his appointment.

Then a story like this comes along and makes you imagine how obsessed they must get with checking and re-checking and practically guarding the doors to make sure no one wanders in unawares. Those magnets are unbelievably strong.

John Ringo wrote an entertaining novel called "Von Neuman's War" about a attack by alien bots bent on stripping metal out of people and machines. Earth's citizens had to get serious about tooth fillings, braces, and medical implants.

Friday Night Motivation

 

Son of a Gun

Playing around with a pistol with bad trigger discipline makes me very uncomfortable, but the song isn't awful. I was wondering if the title was performing blasphemy (as is common to the point of banality among musicians and artists), but no, he put out a fairly straightforward explanation of his intent:

Jesus wasn’t the only crucified son. There were 2 others with him. Some say there were 4. The soldiers gambled for the clothes of these so called thieves on the ground right in front of Jesus and then watched him up there a while. In the Third Servile War the Romans crucified Spartacus and 6,000 of his followers along the Appian Road. All because the empire feared a slave. It’s estimated as many as six hundred thousand were crucified during the Roman Empire alone. Some folks have let me know they don’ think my song is in good taste. Most recently I was accused of comparing myself to Jesus. Well I know a lot of people who bare the cross that never learned a thing from the trials of Jesus. Handing out scripture and verse like they wrote it themselves. The first time I ever got sold out it was by my own kin. Then I got in the music business. lol. If they crucified a man like Jesus just imagine what they’ll do to you.

Fair enough, I suppose. The point of the incarnation was to be like us, and as he points out, a whole lot of us were crucified too. Every time but one it was just some regular men doing it to another. 

Attempted Theft 2016

A very significant release by DNI Tulsi Gabbard. In a way it’s nothing we didn’t know; but in another way, it’s a whole set of new evidence for what we came to know a while back. 

Nicomachean Ethics III.6/7: Courage I

Courage is the model virtue, not because Aristotle thinks it is the most important but because it is a particularly clear example. He has a lot to say about it: chapters 6-9 are all on the subject. 6 and 7 are fairly short, and we've already talked about this virtue in sketch so you probably have a feel for it already. I'll run these together. 

Chapter seven contains my favorite line in the whole Nicomachean Ethics.

6

That [courage] is a mean with regard to feelings of fear and confidence has already been made evident; and plainly the things we fear are terrible things, and these are, to speak without qualification, evils; for which reason people even define fear as expectation of evil. Now we fear all evils, e.g. disgrace, poverty, disease, friendlessness, death, but the brave man is not thought to be concerned with all; for to fear some things is even right and noble, and it is base not to fear them- e.g. disgrace; he who fears this is good and modest, and he who does not is shameless. He is, however, by some people called brave, by a transference of the word to a new meaning; for he has in him something which is like the brave man, since the brave man also is a fearless person. 

Emphasis added. "Death before dishonor" was a concept known of Old.

Poverty and disease we perhaps ought not to fear, nor in general the things that do not proceed from vice and are not due to a man himself. But not even the man who is fearless of these is brave. Yet we apply the word to him also in virtue of a similarity; for some who in the dangers of war are cowards are liberal and are confident in face of the loss of money. Nor is a man a coward if he fears insult to his wife and children or envy or anything of the kind; nor brave if he is confident when he is about to be flogged. With what sort of terrible things, then, is the brave man concerned? Surely with the greatest; for no one is more likely than he to stand his ground against what is awe-inspiring. Now death is the most terrible of all things; for it is the end, and nothing is thought to be any longer either good or bad for the dead. But the brave man would not seem to be concerned even with death in all circumstances, e.g. at sea or in disease. In what circumstances, then? Surely in the noblest. Now such deaths are those in battle; for these take place in the greatest and noblest danger. And these are correspondingly honoured in city-states and at the courts of monarchs. Properly, then, he will be called brave who is fearless in face of a noble death, and of all emergencies that involve death; and the emergencies of war are in the highest degree of this kind. Yet at sea also, and in disease, the brave man is fearless, but not in the same way as the seaman; for he has given up hope of safety, and is disliking the thought of death in this shape, while they are hopeful because of their experience. At the same time, we show courage in situations where there is the opportunity of showing prowess or where death is noble; but in these forms of death neither of these conditions is fulfilled.

Emphasis added. Aristotle is restricting courage in its purest form to the Homeric courage that Greek heroes demonstrated in their wars (and not the Trojans, as we shall see). Other forms of bravery in the face of danger are analogs to this true courage; and even the courage of citizen-soldiers, again as we shall see, is not the very purest form. The purest is that of the nobles, like the Greek heroes of the Iliad. You can imagine how pleasing this model was to young Alexander of Macedon, later 'the Great,' as he studied at Aristotle's feet in his youth. (Really his whole life was youth; he was dead by 32.)

Now you might think that a soldier at war would be courageous in exactly the same way as a seaman in a storm, i.e., at least partly from confidence borne of experience. The brave, noble man should be bold in the face of a noble death even if it is his first battle: but how then can it be habituated? It is the proper upbringing, including the telling of heroic stories to the youth by their elders; practice at analogous things like horseback riding and combat sports; and martial training. This prepares the youth to be bold in the opportunity to earn a noble death, and not to care if it comes to them because it is the path of honor. The proof of that is how much those model heroes of the Iliad were, in fact, still honored across the Greek civilization of the day.

7

What is terrible is not the same for all men; but we say there are things terrible even beyond human strength. These, then, are terrible to every one- at least to every sensible man; but the terrible things that are not beyond human strength differ in magnitude and degree, and so too do the things that inspire confidence. Now the brave man is as dauntless as man may be. Therefore, while he will fear even the things that are not beyond human strength, he will face them as he ought and as the rule directs, for honour's sake; for this is the end of virtue. But it is possible to fear these more, or less, and again to fear things that are not terrible as if they were. Of the faults that are committed one consists in fearing what one should not, another in fearing as we should not, another in fearing when we should not, and so on; and so too with respect to the things that inspire confidence. The man, then, who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and from the right time, and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions, is brave; for the brave man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule directs. Now the end of every activity is conformity to the corresponding state of character. This is true, therefore, of the brave man as well as of others. But courage is noble. Therefore the end also is noble; for each thing is defined by its end. Therefore it is for a noble end that the brave man endures and acts as courage directs.

Emphasis added. Honor wasn't 'the end of virtue' in Book I: honors, at least, those awards of respect that were bestowed upon the many, were considered as a candidate for the end but determined to be unsuitable because they were not under our own control. To live for honor's sake is different from 'to receive honors,' though: it is an internal determination of our heart's, rather than a thing anyone else can bestow or take away. It is going to prove to be at the root of the capstone virtue of magnanimity. 

In any case, this is the standard for any virtue: 'to do the right thing, from the right motive, in the right way and from the right time' is what is going to universalize. Courage is particular in that it pertains to fear in battle, or analogously other sorts of fear. Yet there is an underlying unity of the virtues in having that rational quality of 'getting it right' vis a vis a particular challenge. This is why the trait is an 'excellence,' ἀρετή (aretḗ), the actual word that is being translated into English as 'virtue.' 

Socrates very frequently asked this question in Plato's dialogues, because he was bothered by the unity of the virtues. He wanted to determine if the unity was the really important thing, or if there was in fact a host of different virtues at work. What makes 'getting it right' in battle all that different from 'getting it right' with regard to overeating (our next virtue being temperance)? Isn't the universal thing the real virtue, and thus there is one virtue instead of many? 

Aristotle settles on the pragmatic acceptance that there are many even though they have an underlying quality. We can see that the brave man is the right man for battle, but he may not always be very temperate at table. Thus, it seems that the underlying unity is conceptual more than actual; frequently, we do find that some virtues are realized in a man, and others not. Aristotle's ethics is pragmatic, and this is one of the concessions to that pragmatism. 

Of those who go to excess he who exceeds in fearlessness has no name (we have said previously that many states of character have no names), but he would be a sort of madman or insensible person if he feared nothing, neither earthquakes nor the waves, as they say the Celts do not; while the man who exceeds in confidence about what really is terrible is rash. The rash man, however, is also thought to be boastful and only a pretender to courage; at all events, as the brave man is with regard to what is terrible, so the rash man wishes to appear; and so he imitates him in situations where he can. Hence also most of them are a mixture of rashness and cowardice; for, while in these situations they display confidence, they do not hold their ground against what is really terrible. The man who exceeds in fear is a coward; for he fears both what he ought not and as he ought not, and all the similar characterizations attach to him. He is lacking also in confidence; but he is more conspicuous for his excess of fear in painful situations. The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition. The coward, the rash man, and the brave man, then, are concerned with the same objects but are differently disposed towards them; for the first two exceed and fall short, while the third holds the middle, which is the right, position; and rash men are precipitate, and wish for dangers beforehand but draw back when they are in them, while brave men are keen in the moment of action, but quiet beforehand.

Emphasis added. I have written about the nameless vice of the Celts before. I suppose it is surely my own.  

As we have said, then, courage is a mean with respect to things that inspire confidence or fear, in the circumstances that have been stated; and it chooses or endures things because it is noble to do so, or because it is base not to do so. But to die to escape from poverty or love or anything painful is not the mark of a brave man, but rather of a coward; for it is softness to fly from what is troublesome, and such a man endures death not because it is noble but to fly from evil.

It is not noble, and therefore all the more tragic, to die of a broken heart.  

Recissions

It's a mark of how big the problem is that $9 Billion is a drop in the bucket, but it's at least one drop in the right direction. The first of the DOGE cuts were approved by Congress overnight.

"Jacksonian"

Foreign Policy argues that the current President is pursuing a "Jacksonian" foreign policy.

Jacksonians focus inward, taking a profoundly nationalist approach that prioritizes domestic over foreign policy. But they are also perfectly happy to spend on the military and entirely willing to fight over issues that they perceive to be central to U.S. interests. As the historian Hal Brands describes it, “their aim in fighting [is] American victory, not the salvation of the world.”

If Trump is indeed a Jacksonian, it marks a notably nationalist turn in U.S. foreign policy—perhaps, even, the end of the era of almost unchallenged Wilsonianism that saw the United States as the world’s “indispensable nation.” Presidents since George H.W. Bush have sometimes embraced Jacksonian policies but have in the main pushed some larger vision of a U.S.-led world order. 

Joel Leggett and I both advocated for this approach way back in the old days of blogging. I also used to remind people that "Jacksonian" should remember James Jackson as well as Andrew Jackson, both early American duelists and both veterans of her wars for liberty.

Liberal Time Traveler Mission to Kill Hitler

 

"Suicidal Empathy"

A late but worthy entry into our discussion of that subject.

Nicomachean Ethics III.5b

Continuing from yesterday, we are talking about the vices of the soul. Unlike Socrates' argument that no one does themselves harm voluntarily and knowingly, Aristotle has argued that people do form characters that are given over to vice. Thus, they did voluntarily assume these vices even if they find they are no longer in control of them.  

But not only are the vices of the soul voluntary, but those of the body also for some men, whom we accordingly blame; while no one blames those who are ugly by nature, we blame those who are so owing to want of exercise and care. So it is, too, with respect to weakness and infirmity; no one would reproach a man blind from birth or by disease or from a blow, but rather pity him, while every one would blame a man who was blind from drunkenness or some other form of self-indulgence. Of vices of the body, then, those in our own power are blamed, those not in our power are not. And if this be so, in the other cases also the vices that are blamed must be in our own power.

It is possible that we could be unfair, which Aristotle does not seem to consider here. Perhaps we blame someone for things sometimes that we would like to think are in his control, but which are not in fact. A lot of recent history has been caught up in the West with trying to identify things like that so that they can be removed from moral consideration; homosexuality, for example, is now said not to be a voluntary vice but that people are 'born that way.' This may or may not be strictly true, but the effect of convincing people that it is plausible or even likely has been to remove what was long considered a serious moral failing from the realm of moral condemnation.  

Now some one may say that all men desire the apparent good, but have no control over the appearance, but the end appears to each man in a form answering to his character. We reply that if each man is somehow responsible for his state of mind, he will also be himself somehow responsible for the appearance; but if not, no one is responsible for his own evildoing, but every one does evil acts through ignorance of the end, thinking that by these he will get what is best, and the aiming at the end is not self-chosen but one must be born with an eye, as it were, by which to judge rightly and choose what is truly good, and he is well endowed by nature who is well endowed with this. For it is what is greatest and most noble, and what we cannot get or learn from another, but must have just such as it was when given us at birth, and to be well and nobly endowed with this will be perfect and true excellence of natural endowment. If this is true, then, how will virtue be more voluntary than vice? To both men alike, the good and the bad, the end appears and is fixed by nature or however it may be, and it is by referring everything else to this that men do whatever they do.

This is initially presented as a material conditional dilemma that needs to be evaluated. However, at least one scholar I know of argues that we have generally underappreciated the role of "natural virtue" in Aristotle, meaning non-habituated virtue that some people just have more of by nature. I will leave that as an exercise for the reader to consider. 

Whether, then, it is not by nature that the end appears to each man such as it does appear, but something also depends on him, or the end is natural but because the good man adopts the means voluntarily virtue is voluntary, vice also will be none the less voluntary; for in the case of the bad man there is equally present that which depends on himself in his actions even if not in his end. If, then, as is asserted, the virtues are voluntary (for we are ourselves somehow partly responsible for our states of character, and it is by being persons of a certain kind that we assume the end to be so and so), the vices also will be voluntary; for the same is true of them.

Aristotle is resolving the dilemma by showing that virtue and vice end up as voluntary on either horn of that dilemma. That solves the problem of whether or not vice is voluntary; but it doesn't resolve the question of which of those horns is true. 

With regard to the virtues in general we have stated their genus in outline, viz. that they are means and that they are states of character, and that they tend, and by their own nature, to the doing of the acts by which they are produced, and that they are in our power and voluntary, and act as the right rule prescribes. But actions and states of character are not voluntary in the same way; for we are masters of our actions from the beginning right to the end, if we know the particular facts, but though we control the beginning of our states of character the gradual progress is not obvious any more than it is in illnesses; because it was in our power, however, to act in this way or not in this way, therefore the states are voluntary.

Let us take up the several virtues, however, and say which they are and what sort of things they are concerned with and how they are concerned with them; at the same time it will become plain how many they are. And first let us speak of courage.

So, after two and a half chapters of groundwork, we are finally ready to start speaking of the individual virtues. 

The 1939 Project

I have a really hard time taking Tucker Carlson seriously, to say nothing of Candace Owens. However, I've met Dr. Heinrichs professionally and I know she is a smart cookie. In addition to her work at the Hudson Institute, she is a contributing editor to Providence, a Christian national security journal. If she says it's a problem, it's at worth considering that it might be a problem.

Not all the claims she mentions are absurd.

Tucker Carlson suggested that the fact that the Trump DOJ found that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list misses the real question. “The real question is,” he said, “why was he doing this, on whose behalf, and where did the money come from?” Carlson then offered his own theory: The deceased convicted child sex trafficker was working for Israel’s Mossad. He said it is “extremely obvious” that Epstein “had direct connections to a foreign government.”

I don't think that it's 'extremely obvious,' but it is plausible; though I suspect that it is at least as likely that it was British Intelligence as Israeli. The fact that British royals were wrapped up in it indicates that they were a target, which is of more interest to the British civil service than it would be to the Israelis. (That there were Jews involved, which some seem to think points so clearly to Mossad, hasn't been surprising in the UK since Disraeli). Or, even more plausible to me, it may have been an international intelligence operation designed to rope in the rich and powerful everywhere. James pointed out that this may well be why they're 'trying to make the elephant disappear' -- allied governments may still be using these levers, and they don't want to grant permission to give them up.

Others are half-baked, but half.

In January, Carlson speculated openly to an aghast Piers Morgan whether modern Europe would have been better off under Nazi rule: “I’m not defending Nazis. I’m just saying, where is Western Civilization? What did [Churchill] preserve?”

Implicit here is the grotesque suggestion that defeating Hitler’s Germany directly led to Europe’s modern “woke” culture—in other words, that a Nazi victory might have preserved traditional, Christian civilization.

On the one hand, Carlson is definitely wrong about Churchill. Nor is it remotely plausible that the Nazis intended to preserve 'traditional, Christian civilization' even in Germany. At the end of the war, they were already beginning to expand their internal purge -- already grown from 'Jews' to people with one Jewish grandparent -- to actual Germans with unwanted eugenic traits. Like the French Revolution or the Khmer Rouge, they intended to overturn everything to establish their new order. 

On the other hand, it has long been suspected and argued academically that the CIA was behind the modern art 'abstract expressionism' movement. As we've seen in the USAID disassembly, support for 'woke' organizations -- especially transgender ones -- has been a US foreign policy tool, presumably because it allows them to establish networks in traditional societies of people who have a basic complaint with the whole project. The elite schools from which the CIA and State Department both recruit have been the nurseries of all of this critical theory; which is why we saw the absurdities of 'Pride marches' and festivals at US Embassy Baghdad or Kabul, and the pushing of a whole host of similar theories upon those traditional societies. The complaint that the US Federal Government -- and the British one, even more so -- has been a particular enemy of traditional society has weight. 

I think Dr. Heinrichs is right to say that these people have lost the President's ear, and as such I don't regard them as particularly dangerous. They may, at times, even raise critiques that are worth considering. That is a function of extending free speech even to the more radical thinkers and speakers. 

And indeed, she takes a moment to field a few critiques herself:

Policymakers from both parties assumed trade and diplomacy alone could soften adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Since the apex of American power at the end of the Cold War, policymakers turned their focus on the global war on terrorism, but rather than end its just post-9/11 military campaign in Afghanistan after destroying jihadist cells, the Bush administration grew its ambition and engaged in nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that proved foolish—and led to an emboldened Iran.

If the liberal idealist fantasy of building liberal democracies in the Middle East wasn’t bad enough, the United States failed to maintain a defense industrial base capable of maintaining the production capacity to produce weapons at the scale necessary to deter a major power war. Today, for the first time in the nation’s history, the United States must deter not just one peer nuclear adversary like it did during the Cold War, but two: China and Russia.

I suspect that she is right that the Global War on Terror, the War in Iraq, and the two-decade mission in Afghanistan cost America its leading stature. It soured the public, and demonstrably damaged its military officers corps: the officers who started that war would never have ended it as ham-handedly as the ones who did so. She's also right about the industrial base as an issue that will now be hard to fix, if it can be fixed at all.

Likewise, as I have said here before and will now reiterate, I don't think antisemitism is a good operating theory even pragmatically. It leads you to bad analysis. Critics of Israel rarely compare it fairly with its actual neighbors, instead comparing it (as AVI said) to places like Switzerland. Compare its campaign in Gaza with the recent civil war in Syria, and suddenly the campaign looks intensely discriminate and careful; compare it with the current slaughter of Druze and others by the new government in Syria; compare it, for that matter, with our war in Iraq as we fought in Fallujah, Ramadi, or Mosul. Speaking as one who's done it, they're keeping casualties remarkably low for an intensely-fought war in an urban environment against Islamists using guerrilla and terrorist tactics. We can't claim to have done it better ourselves, and we certainly tried to be discriminate and to avoid war crimes. (Most of us, at least; some units like the one at Abu Ghraib didn't hold up that general standard.)

Israel has its own interests sometimes, and they aren't always the same as ours. Well, so too France; Saudi Arabia; Qatar(!); NATO 'ally' Turkey(!!!); that whole business of 'entangling alliances' is fraught, as Washington himself said it would be. We can field specific criticisms fairly. 

So again, I don't know that I can take Carlson et al seriously enough to suit Dr. Heinrichs; but I take her seriously, so I'll try. 

The Fight to Come

Matt Bai, who wrote a book about the debates on reforming the Democratic Party during the early Obama era, has some thoughts on what needs to be done to bring the party back today. (This is another Washington Post link, so once again I'll blockquote the relevant part.)

The far left has been flat-out wrong on the two broadly most important issues of the day, which was a huge reason Democrats couldn’t get their nominee over the hump last year.

The party’s self-described progressives now proudly embrace the label of socialism as they champion expansive government and vast federal spending, despite the public’s plain distrust in government, and despite the obvious inflationary risks. And the most visible faction on the party’s far left has been obsessed, at least since 2020, with dividing up the electorate by race and ethnicity and gender identity, accompanied by a penchant for shouting down anyone who disagrees....

It would be nice to think you could “rebrand” the party without having a fight over the defense of capitalism and Americanism, but I don’t think you can.

That sounds plausible to me, but so far the party seems to be running in the other direction.