What's Up With That Incest Taboo?

So I always thought it was just because incest is obviously gross to almost everyone. Turns out, that's not true.

In the late '80s, the founder of a support group for adopted children who had recently reconnected with their biological relatives coined the term “Genetic Sexual Attraction” (GSA) to describe the intense romantic and sexual feelings that she observed occurring in many of these reunions. According to an article in The Guardian, experts estimate that these taboo feelings occur in about 50 percent of cases where estranged relatives are reunited as adults[.]

Emphasis added. Fifty percent is pretty substantial. It's apparently, we might say, normal.

So what's the basis for the ban? New Jersey is apparently over banning father/daughter incest. Do we have any standing, should we let go of our traditional moral standards per se, for banning it? Sure, it can lead to bad results if it happens over several generations, but in just one pairing it's of no special concern. She's obviously willing, as is he.

Did You People See "Unforgiven"?

"The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly"? "For a Few Dollars More?"

Headline: ‘American Sniper’ Complaints Grow in Hollywood: Should Clint Eastwood Be Celebrating a ‘Killer’?

Michael Moore, by the way, can stuff his head.

A Lesson from Dalton, Georgia

Reading a larger trend from the story of one little town, Reuters posts a story about the declining middle class:

The trend is in plain sight in Dalton, Georgia, a manufacturing hub 90 miles (145 km)north of Atlanta. Massive factories that made it "the carpet capital of the world," were slammed by the collapse of the housing bubble. During the recession, with machines idle, they began investing heavily in new technology and are now laying plans to restore some lost jobs.

But the new positions are more skewed to the high and low end, and there will be fewer of them per dollar of output than before the recession, said Brian Anderson, president of the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce.

"We can produce a whole lot of new carpet with not a lot more people," Anderson said. Companies have spent between $1.5 and $2 billion on retooling and innovation, reducing demand for labor, while higher than average regional unemployment continued to hold down wages, he said.

No reason to think this isn't the wave of the future. No reason to say that employers ought to be compelled to hire people instead of buying lower-cost capital improvements that automate the process. As the economy advances in automation and robotics, though, we just don't need as many people.

The effect is that families -- not poor, but solidly middle class families who were doing well a few years ago -- are rapidly falling towards bankruptcy.

Between 2010 and 2013, as recovery took hold and stock markets soared, the average net worth of families in the top 40 percent of income earners grew. For all others average net worth shrank, declining 19 percent for the middle fifth.

Similarly, the average earnings for families in the top 10 percent grew more than 9 percent from 2010 through 2013, while those at other levels stagnated or shrank. For the middle fifth, average earnings fell 4.6 percent.

Over the six years through 2013, the middle fifth's average annual family earnings fell to $47,243 from $53,008 while their average net worth dropped to $170,066 from $236,525.

I don't think that's going to turn around, not in the next two years and not even after. It's a structural problem, though government has certainly made it worse by forcing industries to shift to part-time work to avoid the impossible obligations of Obamacare. Work is no longer going to be a reliable way to wealth, because work isn't going to be available for everyone. Everybody will be working part-time, and nobody will be making a living, until globalization levels the playing field and American workers' living standards are on par with Bangladesh or China.

Even then, when their living standards are low enough that they can live on third-world pay, we may just not need them.

Rich man, poor man

From Maggie's Farm, a sociologist who suspects her colleagues don't live up to their ideals of listening to the people they study instead of imposing their own elite preconceptions. She quotes sociologist Annette Lareau, who contrasts elite-vs.-non-elite parenting styles and scarcely attempts to conceal her preference for the former:

The middle-class [parenting] style of cultivation entailed verbal reasoning and negotiation between parents and children; organizing out-of-school activities and transporting children to and from them; and intervening in schools to ensure that their children were treated well. The “natural growth” style [of working-class parents], on the other hand, entailed verbal directives issues to children without much questioning or negotiation; unorganized, free-flowing out-of-school time; and reluctance to confront and question authorities such as teachers. The result was that middle-class children developed an “emerging sense of entitlement” which we might view as encouraging independent acting and thinking—just the kinds of skills that can be used to obtain and succeed at a high-paying job.

First of all, of course, one wants to chuckle at the idea that the approved elite parenting style makes kids ready for success and high pay by inculcating a sense of entitlement.  (Just what those bosses are looking for.  "Send me some more kids with a strong sense of entitlement!") But the author's more serious objection is that Lareau lacks the self-knowledge to notice that she's trying to impose her elite mores on poor families who have their own way of doing things--ways that, frankly, have a lot to be said for them. I suspect kids raised in this non-elite way will have a decent shot at upward mobility; I'm not optimistic about the kids raised with a sense of entitlement while being shuttled from activity to activity and never allowed to play outside.  Come to think of it, my own parents must have been distinctly non-elite.  They managed to adopt a "natural growth" style that inculcated both self-sufficiency and ambition.  Bonus: I've managed to avoid a life of either crime or sociology!

I'm all for "encouraging independent acting and thinking," but I have great difficulty detecting the connection between this useful skill and the ideal elite upbringing described by Ms. Lareau.

Cleansing

Bookworm Room quotes a German journalist who embedded with ISIL and cannot come to grips with what he learned there:

Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers…. They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.

These were very difficult discussions, especially when they were talking about the number of people who they are willing to kill. They were talking about hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that.

Bookworm Room responds:

I don’t believe in any of that “peaceful solution” talk. I believe that, when people have imbibed with their mother’s milk a toxic ideology dedicated to murdering and enslaving all but a select few, they don’t just walk away from it or wear themselves out in a few months or years. Instead, if unchecked, they spread a wide swath of death and destruction. Look at how the Soviets managed to kill endlessly for seventy years while the Chinese communists kept the bodies piling up for forty years. Between the two of them, guesstimates as to the violent and vile deaths they cause[d] run between 70,000,000 and 100,000,000 children, women, and men.

The reason that the German Nazi and Japanese Bushido culture didn’t achieve the decades’-long “success” that the Soviets and ChiCom did (although not for want of trying) is because the Allies — inspired by Churchill and powered by America — destroyed them. We didn’t do targeted strikes. We didn’t engage in endless rounds of peace talks. We didn’t diddle away time with partially enforced sanctions. We didn’t back down when they threatened us.

Huffington Post mused on Japan:

Much of Japan lay in ruins after the war, devastated by air raids and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet the country’s economy grew so fast that by 1964, Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games. Japan adopted a new, progressive constitution, allied with the United States and enshrined limits on the use of military force.

In 50 years, what will ISIL's territory look like?

The passenger liner and the psychopath

From Maggie's Farm, an astounding account of a fire aboard a huge ship in 1934, which turns out to be almost a minor element in a much longer story.

It's Pretty Clear They Don't Keep Kosher

Do dogs go to heaven?

In teaching children that animals go to heaven, it only makes sense that we would want to given pets a good send-off when they die.... Of course, the burial of animals, like that of humans, raises another question: What if your dog is of a different faith than you? No word yet on whether Jewish cemeteries are allowing burial for Christian collies.

I mention this story mostly to tell another story, this one from William Buckley, Jr. It is from his book Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, page 14.

[Father Sharkey] had been approached some weeks earlier, he told us, by a devout elderly woman who asked him whether dogs would be admitted into Heaven. No, he had replied, there was no scriptural authority for animals getting into Heaven. "In that case," the lady had said to him, "I can never be happy in Heaven. I can only be happy if Brownie is also there."

"I told her" -- Fr. Sharkey spoke with mesmerizing authority -- "that if that were the case -- that she could not be happy without Brownie -- why then Brownie would in fact go to Heaven. Because what is absolutely certain is that, in Heaven, you will be happy."

That's pretty solid logic.

Fibonacci

"John Edmark designed the sculptures using the Fibonacci sequence — the same found in most spiral shapes in nature — and then synchronized their rotation speed with a camera's shutter."

An anthropologist on Mars

I can't add a word to this anthropologist's description of the difficulties in examining terrorism.

Using our words

There seems to be a bit of an outbreak of intemperate speech.

Physics humor

XKCD.

Dramatic tension

I think I've encountered some of these novels/movies.

Assimilation and free speech

Christopher Caldwell argues that squelching free speech is one of the things that has interfered in France's ability to assimilate immigrants from North and West Africa. Another, as usual, is welfare.

Just why Europe has had such trouble can be partially understood by contrasting it with the U.S. Europe’s welfare states are more developed and, until recently, more open to noncitizens, so illegal or “underground” immigration has been low. But employment rates have been low, too. If Americans have traditionally considered immigrants the hardest-working segment of their population, Europeans have had the opposite stereotype. In the early 1970s, 2 million of the 3 million foreigners in Germany were in the labor force; by the turn of this century, 2 million of 7.5 million were.

Europe was not just disoriented by the trauma of World War II. It was also demoralized and paralyzed by the memory of Nazism and the continuing dismantling of colonialism. Leaders felt that they lacked the moral standing to address problems that were as plain as the noses on their faces—just as U.S. leaders ducked certain racial issues in the wake of desegregation.

Europeans drew the wrong lessons from the American civil-rights movement. In the U.S., there was race and there was immigration. They were separate matters that could (at least until recently) be disentangled by people of good faith. In Europe, the two problems have long been inseparable. Voters who worried about immigration were widely accused of racism, or later of “Islamophobia.”

In France, antiracism set itself squarely against freedom of speech. The passage of the 1990 Gayssot Law, which punished denial of the Holocaust, was a watershed. Activist lobbies sought to expand such protections by limiting discussion of a variety of historical events—the slave trade, colonialism, foreign genocides. This was backed up by institutional muscle. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand’s Socialist party created a nongovernmental organization called SOS Racisme to rally minority voters and to hound those who worked against their interests.

Older bodies such as the communist-inspired Movement against Racism and for Friendship Among the Peoples made a specialty of threatening (and sometimes carrying out) lawsuits against European intellectuals for the slightest trespasses against political correctness: the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for her post-9/11 lament “The Rage and the Pride,” the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut for doubting that the 2005 riots in France’s suburban ghettos were due to unemployment, the Russia scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse for speculating about the role of polygamy in the problems of West African immigrants.

Speech codes have done little to facilitate entry into the workforce for immigrants and their children or to reduce crime. But they have intimidated European voting publics, insulated politicians from criticism and turned certain crucial matters into taboos. Immigrant and ethnic issues have become tightly bound to the issue of building the multinational European Union, which has removed vast areas of policy from voter accountability. “Anti-European” sentiments continue to rise.

So impressed were the Europeans with their own generosity that they failed to notice that the population of second- and third-generation immigrants was growing bigger, stronger, more unified and less inclined to take moral instruction. . . .

No más

A California high school basketball coach has been suspended for winning a game too decisively.

"The game just got away from me," Anderson told the San Bernardino Sun Friday. "I didn't play any starters in the second half. I didn't expect them to be that bad. I'm not trying to embarrass anybody."

Maybe some of the players should have switched sides at halftime?

Don't Know What You've Got Until It's (Almost) Gone

On a recent Sunday, my family and I only showed up 10 minutes early for Mass. That meant we had to sit in fold-out chairs in the spillover room, where the Mass is relayed on a large TV screen. During the service, my toddler had to go to the bathroom. To get there, we had to step over a dozen people sitting in hallways and corners. This is business as usual for my church in Paris, France.

I point this out because one of the most familiar tropes in social commentary today is the loss of Christian faith in Europe in general, and France in particular. The Wall Street Journal recently fretted about the sale of "Europe's empty churches."

Could it be, instead, that France is in the early stages of a Christian revival?

Magic 8 Ball says:

Cursed -1 Phillips Head

I've seen that one before.

On the upside, my motorcycle is currently running very nicely in spite of the cold and the rain. If you were curious.

Eric Holder, Hero of the Republic

I know. I'm stunned too.

State and local police in the United States will no longer be able to use federal laws to justify seizing property without evidence of a crime, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Friday.

Now if we can just repeal the state laws that justify the same thing, we'll have made a real stride forward in protecting the people from the predatory aspects of the state.

I'll come runnin'

Not to worry.  The State Department professionals have a firm grip on protocol, and this should smooth over any minor little hiccups.



As they say over at Ace, oh, sweet meteor of death, smite me now.  I'm begging you.  Also, I would like to buy you a Coke.

You think I'm making this part up?

Transphobia

This requires no comment, other than to wonder if the deliquescence of thought processes can proceed any further, or if we have reached the molecular stage.

An Alternative View of Knighthood

The history is bad, but the singing is good!