According to my morning's email, Tartanic has agreed to come down to play in Georgia for the first time. Who is Tartanic, you ask? They're not the band that likes to beat on cats.
They're the band that likes to beat on knights. (At least, those with a sense of humor.)
Should be a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, once the long winter is over and the spring has finally come. Ded Bob will be there, too.
What do we make of a case like this? (H/t: Arts & Letters Daily.)
[Children's book author Remi] chose to spend the war in his German-occupied homeland, where he continued to work unmolested, thanks to longtime links to right-wing figures. The help of powerful collaborators enabled him to publish new adventures in spite of a severe wartime paper shortage. Most damningly, he accepted work with a Belgian newspaper, Le Soir, which had been confiscated by the authorities to serve as a propaganda organ. The German-controlled paper published, among other things, defenses of fascism and anti-Semitic screeds. Hergé’s cartoons provided a great boost to the paper’s popularity in the face of a boycott of its pages by many well-known Belgian writers and artists. Indeed, his role led the resistance, on the eve of the liberation, to brand him one of the forty leading journalist collaborators....A citizen has a duty to defend his nation, but it's worth remembering how quickly the Belgian government collapsed. Indeed, the whole war gets one sentence in the Wikipedia article on Belgium: "The country was again invaded by Germany in 1940 during the Blitzkrieg offensive and occupied until its liberation in 1945 by the Allies." That's the whole war, right there, from the perspective of Belgium. Notice that the sentence is in the passive voice -- Belgium "was invaded... and occupied" until it 'was liberated.'
Even as a collaborator, Remi was relatively innocuous. His worst crime was going along where he ought to have resisted. He is a study not in the banality of evil but simply in the banality of the banal.
The Politico reports:
President Obama's back is against the wall, so he's getting in touch with his inner Agnew, hitting the neo-nattering nabobs of cable and the net.Why would this be so important to his agenda? Well, stories like this one.
“If we could just -- excuse the press -- turn off the cameras," he told Democratic Senators at their annual retreat. "Turn off your CNN, your FOX, your MSNBC, your blogs, turn off this echo chamber … where the topic is politics. … We’ve got to get out of the echo chamber.
With the developments in Illinois and Indiana over the past 24 hours, the Cook Political Report now carries 10 Democratic-held seats in their most competitive categories -- meaning, theoretically, that if Republicans ran the table (and lost none of their own toss up seats in Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire and Ohio) they could get to 51 seats and the Senate majority.Also this one, which demonstrates that a key myth that members of the Democratic Congress have been telling themselves is false: passing health care won't save them in November. That's got to be discouraging.
The Boston Globe has a story about how the brain handles difficulty. Short version: it's very suspicious of it.
A handful of scholars have already started to explore the ways that advertisers, educators, political campaigners, or anyone else in the business of persuasion can use these findings. And some of the implications are surprising. For example, to get people to think through a question, it may be best to present it less clearly. And to boost your self-confidence, you may want to set out to write a dauntingly long list of all the reasons why you’re a failure.This is part of why J. R. R. Tolkien has had such an outsized effect on culture versus, say, analytic philosophers like Williamson (below). Tolkien was no less intellectual. He knew deep things about the roots of languages, and the magic that underlies them.
Our sensitivity to - and affinity for - fluency is an adaptive shortcut. According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.
Most of the time, the shortcut works pretty well....
Our bias for the familiar, however, can be triggered in settings where there’s little purpose to it. In the 1960s, Zajonc did a series of experiments that uncovered what he dubbed the “mere exposure” effect: He found that, with stimuli ranging from nonsense words to abstract geometric patterns to images of faces to Chinese ideographs (the test subjects, being non-Chinese speakers, didn’t know what the ideographs meant), all it took to get people to say they liked certain ones more than others was to present them multiple times.
More recent work suggests that people assign all sorts of specific characteristics to things that feel familiar. Like beauty. Psychologists have identified what they call the “beauty-in-averageness” effect - when asked to identify the most attractive example of something, people tend to choose the most prototypical option. For example, when asked to identify the most appealing of a group of human faces, people choose the one that is a composite of all the others....
One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.
We've been discussing Williamson's epistemology in the comments to a post below. The book is actually available online, if any of you are interested in considering his ideas in a more in-depth way.
One of his examples reminds me of this whole spending/belt-tightening thing. Can you explain to me how it is that, having just said you were going to make hard choices and tighten the government belt, you've instead presented a budget of massively increased spending and debt?
"Putnam's example," captured on page 76, is just this sort of problem:
Professor X is found stark naked in the girls' dormitory at 12 midnight. Explanation: (?) He was stark naked in the girls' dormitory at midnight -ε, and he could neither leave the dormitory nor put on his clothes by midnight without exceeding the speed of light. But (covering law:) nothing (no professor, anyhow) can travel faster than light.So, how did you promise belt-tightening but deliver an orgy? 'Well, we wrote out the budgetary bill, and we made the required number of photocopies, and then it was sent down in a van along with an escort to ensure that it arrived in an undisturbed form before the proper Congressional officials.'
Didn't we just hear the President say that government needed to tighten it's belt?
Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.That was just a few days ago, right? I mean, not even a week.
Released to Congress Monday morning, the president’s spending plan anticipates $5.08 trillion in deficits over the next five years and seems almost a cry for help in the face of what he sees as intransigent Republican opposition.If it's a cry for help, it may be a cry for some other kind of help.
I have to admit, since this came from DL Sly, that I didn't look it at first in the assumption that it was a joke of some sort. That proves not to be the case; it is a method of lifesaving, which sounds reasonable on its face.
Something to consider, that you might better do your duty to be prepared to help those in great need.
Two things happen at the beginning of this section that are of special interest. The first is the letters that Ben gets while he is on his cattle drive. The second is his conversation with Henry Stratton, whose function in the story is to give an outside perspective on the town.
The letters move the plot substantially, but the conversation with Stratton is an interesting one. Stratton is a man of experience, a "watcher" who does not get involved in local affairs but who is capable of handling himself. He gives a verdict on the town: he does not think it will survive, or that it ought to survive.
Ben's reaction is to say, "A mistake is really only a mistake if you persist in it." Stratton avows that is a "rather profound remark."
In spite of this, at least for the moment Ben seems ready to double down on the town. He enters the election for Marshall, wins it, and begins to clean up the bad element that has entered his town. He buys a printing press, and obtains a contract to cut logs for the railroad. They settle in for a second winter.
The section ends with him being attacked by a mountain lion during a hunt for meat, and the aftermath of that attack. He is continuing to read everything he can find -- including newspapers, which give him a grounding in the greater world around him, to go with the deep historical perspective he has begun to gain from Great Books.
He begins to consider not just reading but writing: to add to the store of wisdom, now that he has a few things to say.
Questions for discussion:
1) Do you think that the town is a mistake? How long should he persist in it, if it is? How would you know when to cut loose?
2) This is an interesting account of writing. We teach children today to write fairly early, but Ben is only just about to start. He has an extraordinary experience of the world to inform his writing, though: rescuing children from a snowstorm, building houses, hunting elk, fighting mountain lions, a cattle drive, and being marshal of a small town. Louis L'amour himself was like this too. He read stories and lived stories for a long time before he began to tell stories.
How important is having something to say to being a good writer? In educating our children, should we focus less on teaching them to write, and more on making sure they have experiences that give them something to write about?
I thought this video had some good points. Especially about 'Our old pal, the sacred Earth.' Not that the earth isn't sacred.... just as much as we are.
Our last discussion on Chaucer took an emphatic, and unexpected, turn in the comments. For that reason I'd like to refer to this piece from the Nation on the subject of love.
It mentions feminism, but I'm not at all interested in what the author has to say about that subject. I am interested in the debate with C. S. Lewis.
Lewis considered Ovid to have written the Ars Amatoria as an "amusement," an "ironically didactic" poem that "presupposes an audience to whom love is one of the minor peccadilloes of life, and the joke consists in treating it seriously." Nehring describes Ovid's work as a "first-century self-help book" as well as "the first dating book ever written," though she recognizes that the "rambunctious" Ovid was "forever making fun." She points not to Lewis but unnamed "modern-day editors" who consider the work a "'tongue-in-cheek' parody." She asserts that "Ovid takes his subject seriously," and whether or not he did, it seems worth noting what Lewis sees as the distinction between Ovid's perspective and the troubadours'. According to Lewis, the "conduct which Ovid recommends is felt to be shameful and absurd," butThat love as we know it had been invented by these poets was important, Lewis argued, because that meant it was no product of human nature. What goes one way can go the other; and Lewis warned that love might not survive. There is reason to think we might be living at the end of its life even now.the very same conduct which Ovid ironically recommended could be recommended seriously by the courtly tradition. To leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady, or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth century or even of the seventeenth century[.]
"Real changes in human sentiment are very rare--there are perhaps three or four on record--but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them," Lewis ventures. Earlier he reminds us that "it seems to us natural that love should be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for 'nature' is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end."The author of the book being reviewed takes a substantial beating from her critic, and it seems she deserves much of it. Her ignorance of C. S. Lewis' argument, when she undertook to dress him down, is the sort of thing that merits an academic beating. (I read another such review recently, Francis Lee Utley's "Chaucer and Patristic Expressions," which reviews D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer. Utley remarks, "[O]ne is tempted to dismiss it simply as a strange hodgepodge of patristics and puzzle-solving, insulting to the community of scholars and, indeed, to the twentieth century itself." Well, and doubtless it was partly that; the question is whether the twentieth century merited the insult.)
Sixty years later, in The End of the Novel of Love (1997), the critic Vivian Gornick argued that what Lewis prophesied had finally come to pass. When Gornick was a girl, she recalls, the whole world believed in love. This was the Bronx, New York City, sometime around World War II. The mothers had various advice for their daughters about the nature of love and its embodiments of greater or lesser disappointment, but whatever their admonishments, "love" itself was the creed, a simple operating principle in an unpredictable world. "It's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man"; "Don't do like I did. Marry a man you love"; "You're smart, make something of yourself, but always remember, love is the most important thing in a woman's life."
When Gornick was a girl, love wasn't just meaningful--it was the quality that gave life meaning.
We should embrace love, she tells us, as ecstatic, risky, transgressive, unequal and perhaps violent. It is, she has said, a faith, a demon and a divine madness, but the suffering it induces may be the crucible in which we refine our souls.That vision is just the one I endorse. Tom asked if I might be mad to do so. Well, indeed I might be. A man who follows love may well go mad -- it is one of the most regularly repeated features of the tales. That may be part of the point.
Back when he was first running for Senator, I supported Jim Webb. I admired him for his career of service and for his book Born Fighting, which offers a remarkable account of the contribution of the Scots-Irish to the United States of America.
Since his election, I've taken a lot of heat from those of you who didn't support him, and probably rightly so. He hasn't exactly been what I had hoped to see him become, which was a second Zell Miller: we had every reason to hope that he might likewise stand up for Jacksonian principles and the dignity of the conservative Democrat, but instead we've seen some very odd behavior. I don't have a good explanation for how a man of distinguished service, and an insightful author, should prove to be so apparently unstable and unreliable. He has done some good things in Washington, too, like his work on his G. I. bill, but I can't say that I'm as happy with him as I had hoped to be when I supported his candidacy.
So now word comes that the Senator from Virginia is bedeviling President Obama, and that suggests he may be interested in a primary challenge. My thoughts on this are these:
1) Sen. Webb, in spite of his strange behavior, might still represent an improvement. His patriotism and love of country are undeniable, and he would clearly support the nation's interests in foreign policy.
However,
2) His actions over the last few years suggest a certain instability that makes me wonder if he is genuinely fit for the office. Since he would have a full two terms to serve, whereas a re-elected Obama would have only one, there is a concern that his primary challenge might actually succeed.
If I still thought he was the man that I thought he was in 2006, I would be enthusiastic about his candidacy. Now, I'm not even sure if I feel it is a good idea to support him in a primary run against President Obama. Most likely I would, but I have strong reservations about doing so.
What do you think?
Wasn't this story in the Onion a few months ago?
The Obama administration is considering several steps that would review the legality of the controversial Bowl Championship Series, the Justice Department said in a letter Friday[.]I thought this was a joke when I saw it. "Ha, ha! I get it! Obama thinks the government should be involved in everything! Sure seems that way, but..."
If I'm paying for something, I get to be in charge of how that thing is delivered. Right? Yes, if and only if I am in the market. Once government gets involved... no, they choose.
Consider the following clip, in which Reason's Nick Gillespie has a clash with a very energetic woman who is outraged that he doesn't want the government to step in between us and our kids.
Now, he makes a convincing argument that this is a very good reason to abolish socialized medicine as a concept, and find ways to phase out Medicare and Medicaid over time. Yet I'm not sure he's completely correct to say that the government will use control of the purse to force us to abandon unhealthy behaviors.
For example, what it came to our attention that someone drinks a lot of booze?
Maker's Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey's Irish Crème, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewars scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey … and Corona beer.Now, not every penny of that grand-a-week is booze, but there's quite a lot of expensive stuff on that list. Who's paying for it? The government.
But that single receipt makes up just part of the more than $101,000 taxpayers paid for "in-flight services" – including food and liquor, for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trips on Air Force jets over the last two years. That's almost $1,000 per week.
Nassim Taleb speaks of a kind of statistical modeling that cannot work. It is what he calls "the Fourth Quadrant." There are three others; they are arranged on a square grid. In the first and third quadrants, decisions are binary: yes or no. In the first and second quadrants, there is very little difference from the mean. That is to say, if you say 'yes' and you are wrong, or if you say 'no' and are wrong, the consequences are not that very different from if you were right.
So, in the third quadrant, there is a great difference between being right and being wrong: but you have a simple, binary decision. Yes, or no.
In the fourth quadrant, the decisions to be made are complex, and also the difference in being right or wrong is great. Mankind does not know how to build models that work in this place, Taleb says. There are two reasons why. The first is that we cannot imagine everything that might affect the model: if we are building a model of the economy, what if there are massive snows that year? How does the model compute the possibility, and account for the costs to production of having various roads closed? Did you even think to include that in your model at all?
The second is that we haven't lived long enough to have reasonable ideas about what probabilities are. If we say that something should happen 'once in a century,' how do we know? By looking at how often that thing has happened before, of course. But how many centuries have we had an industrial society? Less than two? Six, if you are very generous? We have nothing like the data set we'd need to build truly accurate models.
As a result, he says, when you are in the Fourth Quadrant you must stop making models. They don't work, and they can't work. We don't have adequate imaginations to work in every possibility; and even when we successfully imagine the possibilities, we don't have adequate experience to know how to compute the real odds of the thing occurring.
So, we must stop making models in this area: wherever there are complex decisions, and the range of possible outcomes is large.
Taleb has been writing about economics, but it works very well for climate change.
All those models of how the climate works? If Taleb is right, every single one of them is necessarily wrong. His theory, if correct, is a sufficient condition for discarding every single one of them.
People hate this. "All you're telling us is that our models are bad, but we still have to make decisions," they say. "Tell us how to make better models." But he can't do that; the thing to be learned is that no model can work at all here. Prophecy is not to be trusted.
At the least, we must say that we have absolutely no idea whether the models are correct -- nor even a capacity for guessing how likely it is that they are correct.
The whole environmentalist movement is based on Fourth Quadrant models. Rationality says that, unless someone can demonstrate that Taleb is wrong -- and I cannot see any way in which that could be demonstrated even in theory -- we must set every one of those models aside. They are necessarily unreliable, and cannot guide us.
May very great good cheer, and even greater good fortune, follow you and your newborn daughter. He writes:
And before I forget, let me fail to describe what I experienced when I first held her in my arms. Something happened. I cannot describe it, but it was like something reached up out of nothingness, grabbed my very existence and shook it awake.Now here, at least, is a man who fell in love at the first sight of a girl whose rightness is certain. Hail the young lady, and welcome!
Geoffrey Chaucer is one of the more interesting voices to survive to us from the Middle Ages. He wrote a great deal about women, who were of obvious interest to him; and well they might be! But he also wrote in the voice of members of many different social classes and stations, and he did so with remarkable clarity. It's easy to imagine that he was really able to see things as his characters might have seen them, and use their own words to describe them.
Here are two descriptions of two women, the first from "The Knight's Tale" and the second from "The Miller's Tale." The Knight is described as a true adventurer and a grim man:
A KNIGHT there was, and what a gentleman,The miller, by contrast, was a thief, a boor, and a drunkard.
Who, from the moment that he first began
To ride about the world, loved chivalry,
Truth, honour, freedom and all courtesy.
Full worthy was he in his sovereign's war...
His steeds were good, but he was not gaily dressed.
A tunic of simple cloth he possesed
Discoloured and stained by his habergeon;
For he had lately returned....
But first I make a protestation roundThis is a story about how a scholar made a cuckold by committing adultery with the wife of a carpenter. It's a ribald story, unlike the Knight's high and noble tale.
That I'm quite drunk, I know it by my sound:
And therefore, if I slander or mis-say,
Blame it on ale of Southwark, so I pray;
For I will tell a legend and a life
Both of a carpenter and of his wife,
And how a scholar set the good wright's cap."
In honour of the May, and so she rose.And here is the Miller's:
Clothed, she was sweeter than any flower that blows;
Her yellow hair was braided in one tress
Behind her back, a full yard long, I guess.
And in the garden, as the sun up-rose,
She sauntered back and forth and through each close,
Gathering many a flower, white and red,
To weave a delicate garland for her head;
And like a heavenly angel's was her song.
The tower tall, which was so thick and strong,
And of the castle was the great donjon,
(Wherein the two knights languished in prison,
Of whom I told and shall yet tell, withal),
Was joined, at base, unto the garden wall
Whereunder Emily went dallying.
Bright was the sun and clear that morn in spring,
And Palamon, the woeful prisoner,
As was his wont, by leave of his jailor,
Was up and pacing round that chamber high,
From which the noble city filled his eye,
And, too, the garden full of branches green,
Wherein bright Emily, fair and serene,
Went walking and went roving up and down.
This sorrowing prisoner, this Palamon,
Being in the chamber, pacing to and fro,
And to himself complaining of his woe,
Cursing his birth, he often cried "Alas!"
And so it was, by chance or other pass,
That through a window, closed by many a bar
Of iron, strong and square as any spar,
He cast his eyes upon Emilia,
And thereupon he blenched and cried out "Ah!"
As if he had been beaten to the heart.
Fair was this youthful wife, and therewithalIt's a fair bit of art, to capture the distance between those views so well. Here is one, who takes but little notice of the elements of beauty -- the long hair is mentioned, and not much else of the physical. It is "bright Emily," whose image burns a man's heart and strikes him down. In the next piece of the story, he goes on to declare to his companion that he is unsure if he has seen a woman, or a goddess walking the garden.
As weasel's was her body slim and small.
A girdle wore she, barred and striped, of silk.
An apron, too, as white as morning milk
About her loins, and full of many a gore;
White was her smock, embroidered all before
And even behind, her collar round about,
Of coal-black silk, on both sides, in and out;
The strings of the white cap upon her head
Were, like her collar, black silk worked with thread,
Her fillet was of wide silk worn full high:
And certainly she had a lickerish eye.
She'd thinned out carefully her eyebrows two,
And they were arched and black as any sloe.
She was a far more pleasant thing to see
Than is the newly budded young pear-tree;
And softer than the wool is on a wether.
Down from her girdle hung a purse of leather,
Tasselled with silk, with latten beading sown.
In all this world, searching it up and down,
So gay a little doll, I well believe,
Or such a wench, there's no man can conceive.
Far brighter was the brilliance of her hue
Than in the Tower the gold coins minted new.
And songs came shrilling from her pretty head
As from a swallow's sitting on a shed.
Therewith she'd dance too, and could play and sham
Like any kid or calf about its dam.
Her mouth was sweet as bragget or as mead
Or hoard of apples laid in hay or weed.
Skittish she was as is a pretty colt,
Tall as a staff and straight as cross-bow bolt.
A brooch she wore upon her collar low,
As broad as boss of buckler did it show;
Her shoes laced up to where a girl's legs thicken.
Oddly enough, I was just watching the original of that video a few minutes ago. As a service to any readers who haven't seen the original -- since it happens to be readily available in my internet history -- here it is:
UPDATE: Actually, since we have quite a few readers who won't have any idea what a Bushmaster ACR is, here's this too:
Exit question: Why would they keep the 5.56mm as standard, in a weapon that can readily switch between several calibers? NATO, of course. So how much is NATO worth these days, compared to having a better round?
