Folklorist, Heal Thyself

A fellow named John E. Price -- who describes himself as "a folklorist and doctoral candidate in American Studies," as well as "an award-winning lecturer in American Studies and Communications" -- has penned a contribution to the debate on the Confederate flag with the nuanced title "Yes, You're a Racist -- and a Traitor."

I don't really want to debate the merits of the Confederate flag right now. I think what's really important is showing brotherhood at a time when there have been multiple attacks, not just the infamous one, on black churches in the last week. I'm going to go through the exercise purely in the hope that it will help with that project, by giving reason to believe that most of the ordinary people who like the Confederate flag are not motivated by racism or hatred. That misperception may be alienating. If the proper work of the moment is brotherhood, it might be helpful to increase understanding.

Myself, I don't fly the Confederate flag. This is not because I personally view it as a symbol of racism, but out of respect for black Southerners I might meet for whom it is. I once turned down membership in a local motorcycle club -- a fun, family-oriented group that rides locally -- because their patch featured a Confederate flag (as well as an American flag and an eagle). None of them intended that to be threatening or off-putting to anyone. It was just part of a collection of patriotic symbols, an expression of regional as well as national patriotism. Patriotism, not treason.

It's silly to describe people flying the Confederate flag as "traitors" as if they themselves were waging war on the government. It's a serious question whether the battle flag is even a symbol of treason: the victors in the war prosecuted almost no one on that charge, and not people who fought under that flag but Northerners who took steps against their government without formally joining the rebellion. A thoughtful historian might question whether there's something about the American project itself, begun in rebellion against a sitting government to whose authority the authors had long submitted, that licenses revolution under certain circumstances. To be a traitor to the American project might sometimes better be done by submitting to authority than by resisting it. As historian William C. Davis explores at length, the founders of the Confederacy clearly saw themselves as the immediate heirs of Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers (many also slave-owners, who also wrote special protections for slavery into their constitution). One condemns them at some peril of condemning the American project itself, in which case it is hard to assert a ground on which loyalty to the American government is praiseworthy. This is especially true since the North did not undertake the war with the mission of destroying slavery, even if the South undertook the war to preserve it.

But those are questions for historians and philosophers. A folklorist should be interested in folklore, and what characterizes folklore is the way that symbols and meanings change over time. The original meaning of the symbol is beside the point. The fact that the generation that lost the Civil War rallied around it for honorable reasons after the war is beside the point. Those people have been dead for a hundred years. The question in folklore is: what do people mean by it today?

If you are a white Southerner of 60 or 70 years old, you came of age during the battles over segregation. For you, the flag's meaning is that it was about support for segregation, and you remember a South in which your parents' generation supported that policy so strongly that they drove every government official out of office who wasn't openly and vocally committed to it. But your generation was the first generation that questioned that policy. You went to schools that were being integrated. If you went into government, like the sheriff interviewed by VS Naipaul in his book A Turn in the South, you were the generation that turned things around. Unlike the sheriff at Selma, Sheriff Walraven used his deputies and volunteers to protect the civil rights marchers from the Klan -- and he did it while wearing the 1956 Georgia flag, Confederate battle flag and all, on his uniform's shoulder. That flag is his flag as much as it is anybody else's.

If instead you are 40 years old (and more than half of Americans are 40 or under), you were a child when one of the most popular television shows for children was The Dukes of Hazzard. That's probably your first association with the flag. The battles of segregation were already over before you ever became a schoolchild. If you were born in the South, you grew up with the flags adopted during the segregation battle long after that particular meaning had ceased to be important. The flags were just on the poles, without comment, except that they were the flags of home. So your basic associations as a child were a playful, cheerful television show without any trace of hate or racism, and home. As you grew up, if you grew up in the South, you learned about Lynyrd Skynyrd, who flew the flag as they sang "Sweet Home Alabama." There are references to the struggle over segregation in the song, but they are coded, and if you don't study the history you'll never know they are there.

If instead you are 20 years, even that stuff is ancient history. You might have seen The Dukes of Hazzard in syndication; otherwise, it is a not-very-great movie you probably didn't see. Classic rock stations are on the radio everywhere in America, so you probably know the Skynyrd song. Until you get old enough to encounter the stuff in history classes, you probably don't know anything else about the flag except that there was a war once, and this was the flag people from your home fought under. You see it around sometimes, and if you travel out of the South you don't see it.

What these people mean by the flag has nothing to do with racism, and certainly nothing to do with treason. Far from having waged war against their country, they're disproportionately likely to have fought war for the country: the South provides 40% of the volunteer military.

They're probably guilty of being insensitive. (But so is the guy who labels people 'traitors' on the basis of a protected act of free speech he hasn't bothered to understand.) They may instead be guilty of being ignorant, to the degree that they haven't studied the history and learned to consider the past associations of the symbol. There are a few who are guilty of racism, and who have sought out the flag to try to carry that meaning forward. Yet a committed racist like the Charleston killer could find no one to join him in his program: no skinheads, he wrote mournfully, and no Klan. I myself, living in rural Georgia, haven't seen anyone in a Klan uniform in decades. I assume you could search them out with effort, but they have vanished from the everyday texture of the South.

We haven't yet seen the outcome of the debate in South Carolina and Mississippi on the flag. In Georgia, our debate began with Democratic Governor Zell Miller trying (and failing) to remove the battle flag in the 1990s, and his Republican successor succeeding. The fact that we've elected political leadership that would attempt such a debate -- and conservative leaders, in the South -- ought to encourage even those for whom the flag has powerful and negative associations only. Racism is a very great evil, the worst evil brought by the Modern age, but it has lost a great deal of its strength. People for whom the flag has no negative associations, for whom it is nothing but a flag of home, are willing to consider setting it aside out of respect for the feelings of others. However the debate ends, that alone should be taken as a sign of increasing brotherhood between black and white Southerners. That is surely a good thing.

The Bandidos' Attorney Speaks

According to RUMINT, there were very few Bandidos at the shootout in Waco. They were the victims, strictly speaking, just because they were so few and were therefore set upon. Their attorney has put out a statement.

[T}he Bandidos demand that all video evidence and autopsy reports be released immediately to clear up the damaging misinformation that is running wild.

The following is true and correct:

1) The Bandidos were at the Twin Peaks restaurant to attend an organized political meeting and nothing else. A regional meeting for the Texas Confederation of Clubs and Independents (a bona fide political organization centered on Constitutional rights) was scheduled, and a prominent member of the Bandidos was the key-note speaker at the meeting. This Bandido key-note speaker was to report on the National Coalition of Motorcyclist event that occurred weeks earlier. Because COCI members from across the state were expected to attend this special meeting, it was purposefully scheduled in Waco, TX, a central city between Austin and Dallas.

2) The Bandidos have no knowledge of any other meeting. The Bandidos are aware that members of other motorcycle clubs are claiming that there were plans to meet with the Bandidos in Waco, TX on May 17, 2015. This claim is not true.

3) All weapons in possession of members the Bandidos were legally owned and carried.

4) Members of the Bandidos were not aggressors, did not start the altercation, did not strike first, were not the first to pull weapons, and were not the first to use weapons. The majority of the Bandidos took cover, and all involvement in the altercation by members of the Bandidos was in self-defense. Texas law allows people to defend themselves with the same amount of force that is exerted against them, and a few members of the Bandidos acted in accordance with these laws. In fact, members of the Bandidos involved in the incident did not even have time or opportunity to get off of their motorcycles before police came in.

This last bit counters RUMINT, which has suggested heretofore that the Cossacks fired some rounds, and the police fired the rest. The Bandidos seem to be confessing to firing at least some rounds, albeit in self-defense.

"Reality Seems Determined to Put the Onion out of Business"

So says Sarah Hoyt, also due a hat tip for the last post. She's right. It's been a very bad year for reality.

Don Qwhotie?

Never could get into the book myself. It's about mocking the best thing in the world, although I'm told that if you stick with it it gets better: the fools brought on board in the early part become increasingly attached to the thing worth upholding at any cost, though the Don who held it so high finally loses heart. Stories about losing heart in such men break mine, for they are so easy to believe. It is the worst danger of the world, that you might cease to believe in the things worth dying for.

Riding It Out

Randy Howard was the name of a country singer who sang about the glories of the "American Redneck."

Following a failure to appear before a court on charges of DUI, driving on a revoked license, and various other things, the court's bail bondsman sent a bounty hunter to track him down and bring him back. He opened fire on the bounty hunter, and that man killed him.



It's a very fitting end, all things considered.

James Horner, RIP

Remembered here mostly for his soundtrack for Braveheart, that least historically-faithful but nevertheless well-intentioned movie about Sir William Wallace: one of Scotland's greatest heroes, and the world's.

The soundtrack had strong moments.



The gentleman died piloting a single-engine aircraft, which is an honorable passtime just because of the danger and glory of flying on one's own.

Agents Provocateur

What if the former Secretary of State is working behind the scenes to destabilize Asia in order to provoke a crisis between the United States and China? So argues one China hand:

Now, of course, the DoD has a new boss—Secretary of Defense Ash Carter; and PACCOM has a new commander—Admiral Harry Harris, and the general consensus is that the muscular defense sector has wrestled China policy away from the milquetoastian White House. Interestingly, Admiral Harris was previously the Pentagon’s liaison to to the State Department under Hillary Clinton as well as John Kerry, which reinforces my impression that Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy advisors have pre-loaded China policy with her supporters, and I expect things to get ugly quickly so that the nasty and awkward business of starting the confrontation can be done under Obama before Clinton enters office.

As I put it elsewhere: Hillary wants to inherit her China crisis from Obama, not foment it herself.

Another One Down

A key Army commander in the U.S. war against the Islamic State has been reprimanded by the Pentagon for steering a defense contract to a firm run by two of his former classmates at West Point, becoming the latest high-ranking officer to land in trouble for personal misconduct. Maj. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, who as the Army’s deputy commander for operations in the Middle East oversaw the training of Iraqi forces, was formally reprimanded in February.... An Army review board is considering whether to strip him of his rank as a two-star general before he is allowed to retire this year.

One wonders how you maintain a standard of discipline when, say, the previous Secretary of State was running the shop as a vehicle for just this kind of 'steering.' The Army holds itself and its own to a higher, better standard. Yet officially, the State Department is in the lead: to head the State Department is to be in the position of greater honor.

I suppose we will learn how this works a fortiori if we elect that same Secretary of State to the Presidency.

How to choose a lawyer

From "Emotional Vampires" by Albert Bernstein, good advice about how to hire a lawyer, in this case, a divorce lawyer:

Good lawyers should:

* Return calls promptly. I'm surprised at how many lawyers don't. I'm talking about calls during office hours. Never accept an attorney who doesn't get back to you for days, unless someone from the office contacts you to explain why. Even then, be skeptical. How long does a phone call take?

* Be more decisive than you are. Good lawyers should be polite, but not necessarily nice. The last thing you want is a lawyer who is too conflict-avoidant to deal effectively with the [a-hole] that your ex will hire. You want your lawyer to be stronger and more decisive than you are, not less.

* Be proactive. You do not want a lawyer who counsels you to wait to see what someone else does. The battle goes to whoever gets there first with the most. This is particularly true is matters of custody and visitation. Always ask an attorney what the overall plan is. If there is no overall plan, you don't have an attorney.

"Interstate Commerce" doesn't mean "You're a Sharecropper"

Though Court-watchers were disappointed not to see a ruling on the two hottest pending cases this morning, they were pleased to receive one on a "takings clause" case that has gotten less attention. Small-government types scored a win with Horne v. Dept. of Agriculture, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the seizure of part of a farmer's raisin crop (nearly half in at least one year) constituted a "taking" that required due process as well as just compensation. In Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that they weren't really seizing the crop, because they permitted the farmer to retain a contingent interest in the proceeds of its later sale, at a time and price of the DOA's choosing. The Court sorted out that pretzel by observing that, once the crop is seized, any later payments come under the heading of "just compensation"--but the seizure itself still requires due process.

In further Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that the privilege of participating in interstate commerce is a benefit that the federal government may withhold unless the citizen waives constitutional rights. Of the nine Justices, only Sotomayor went for this one.

The ruling is interesting for the further reason that it clears up a controversy over whether "takings" jurisprudence is limited to real property; the Court held that it applies to personal property as well.

The raisin-confiscation program dated from the Depression and, like so many DOA plans, was intended to support prices. Justice Scalia noted, "Central planning was thought to work very well in 1937, and Russia tried it for a long time."

No Obamacare or same-sex marriage rulings today

Per Scotus blog a few minutes ago:

For those of you who have just logged in, there was no ruling today (and will not be any ruling today) on same-sex marriage or ACA subsidies. The Court has finished for the day.

So you can ignore all the teasers on the TV and the net. UPDATE: But more decisions will be announced on Thursday, June 25, and perhaps again on the 29th.

Solstice

Someday, I want to go to one of this guy's parties.

Thousands of people have congregated at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice....

Arthur Uther Pendragon, who claims to be a reincarnation of King Arthur, was there to knight new followers to his druidic order – the Loyal Arthurian Warband – which he described as the political wing of the religion.

"We're the ones who get into trees to stop roadbuilding and take on people like English Heritage over access to the stones. We're sworn to fight for truth, for honour and for justice," he told The Guardian.

He reminds me of a late friend of mine, greatly missed since he passed on a few years ago.

Is it terrorism?

That's not going to be an easy question to answer until we figure out what we mean by terrorism.  The term used to refer to violence perpetrated against non-combatants by groups not obviously associated with an identifiable army, for the purpose of persuading the populace that it will be too dangerous to give their political support to a particular regime.  Lately the definition has mushed into something more like "deplorable and scary public violence by relatively crazy people who may have had a somewhat coherent political or social axe to grind."

Kareem Abdul Jabbar stuck to a fairly workable definition in his Times oped today:

There’s a lot of debate about whether or not this was a terrorist act. Terrorism is a political tool that has a specific goal. Terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan want to drive Americans out of their countries. Terrorists in other countries do it for the same reason: to gain political power. After an hour at the prayer meeting, Dylann Roof stood up and proclaimed that he was there “to shoot black people.” His rambling manifesto during the shootings was: “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” In his mind he was a terrorist, but in reality this was nothing more than hate crime using terrorist tactics to enact his racist fantasy. Roof had no hope of driving African Americans out of the country, starting a race war or engendering any political or social change at all. We shouldn’t use it as an excuse to discuss terrorism because that diverts us from the actual problem.

Unfortunately he then returned to the useless "terrorism is whenever people do bad stuff" definition in urging us not to "allow this incident to be used as a political football by those who hope to leverage it to their gain, which is a more subtle form of terrorism: media terrorism." Granted that human beings often use incidents as political football for their own gain, calling such use terrorism is only silly. Jabbar was on a more promising track when he implied that the hallmark of terrorism was the hope of using violent tactics against ordinary (typically unarmed) citizens to engender a political or social change. Roof didn't look like a guy who hoped that the public murder of a number of black people would cause a mass exodus of black people from the United States, or even that fellow travelers would rise up and murder all the black people he couldn't get to personally. He was just a nut who thought the evils of the United States could be pinned on a particular ethnic group, who were therefore proper targets of his personal extermination program. Jabbar had another good point, I thought, in disparaging any attempt to view Roof's rampage as targeting Christians. If Roof had been completely silent, I might buy that as a plausible alternative, but his own words make it pretty clear that his problem with the prayer meeting wasn't the prayer but the race of the praying people.

Allahpundit analyzes the New York Times's take, which is that the dictionary definition of terrorism is "the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy." The "especially" leaves enough wiggle room to make this definition so all-inclusive as to be useless. When there is clear evidence of scary force as a political weapon or policy, I'm comfortable calling it terrorism; without that qualifier, we'd have to include a very large chunk of all violence, from domestic abuse to gang warfare to drug cartels to the Mafia. Those are all bad things, but why insist that they're all exactly the same bad thing? But then Allahpundit goes too far, I think, in differentiating the Charlie Hebdo murders from Dylan Roof's rampage on the ground that "When that jihadi animal killed four French Jews at a kosher deli in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo, no one thought that was a 'hate crime' because they were targeted first and foremost for their religion. It was terrorism." When you target people for their religion, I'm inclined to call it a hate crime, unless there's something else going on that makes it looks like organized political action. In the Charlie Hebdo case, the red flag wasn't the anti-semitism, it was the organization of the gang and its explicit ties to a political group. Not that it's necessarily any great linguistic advance to distinguish terrorism from hate crimes. The term "hate crimes" is nowhere near as useful as it's cracked up to be.

Strong Differences

Tex is having a historically low ebb in her trust of pollsters, so perhaps this is an artifact of bad methodology. Still...

All of these things are immoral according to traditional Christian theology. What I find interesting is that (with one exception within the margin of error) majorities of men agree that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral only where far larger majorities of women say they are moral. When minorities of men want to say that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral, women are less likely than men to agree.

I wonder if this means that the traditional authority on this issue has been sustained in spite of the changing attitudes. What our ancestors used to refer to as 'the civilizing influence of the fairer sex' seems to be intact, perhaps: but it turns out it can be a de-civilizing influence too, where women decide to abandon traditional moral standards for whatever reason.

The new Lysenkoism

Via Maggie's Farm, Matt Ridley:

The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.

What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).

But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.

Forgetting The Whole Thing

From 1965, a film about that wise advice. You should all watch it, especially if you have not seen it before. It so nicely ties together so many of our recent discussions.

English is a Difficult Language

It's really hard, I know.

The rules are simple. Every time a Republican who is a Catholic is asked for an opinion on the encyclical, place him into one of two categories: the Catholic Republicans or the Republican Catholics.

The difference between the categories depends on which term is doing the modifying. A Catholic Republican is a Republican whose Catholicism comes first, whose faith and devotion to the teaching authority of the Magisterium of the church takes precedence when a conflict or tension arises between it and loyalty to the party's ideology, policy platform, and electoral prospects. A Republican Catholic, on the other hand, is a Republican who puts his devotion to the party ahead of his faith...

You've got it exactly backwards. The "term doing the modifying" is the adjective, not the noun. So in "Republican Catholic," you're talking about a Catholic who happens to be Republican. They're the ones who will put their Catholicism first, and their Republicanism will only modify that essential Catholicism. Vice versa for your other category.

Don't feel bad. A similar error is behind a very common misreading of the Second Amendment.

Mirror neurons

From SlateStarCodex, a thoughtful article about trying to look at things from both sides, sometimes irritating but worth reading if only for the following:

Microagressions. Nanoagressions. Picoagressions. The Planck Hostility.

And perhaps for this conclusion: "If we can get to a point where we don’t feel like requests are part of a giant conspiracy to discredit and silence us, people are sometimes willing to listen." But if you take my advice you'll stay away from the comments.

Orders of Magnitude

Of course, 99 percent of southern whites will never go into a church, sit down with people and then massacre them. But that 99 percent is responsible for the one who does. We white southerners — those of us who left, the others who stayed, and even those millions who have migrated to the Sun Belt — are all Dylann Roof. We are all responsible. We cannot shirk it.

The white population of South Carolina in the last census was 3,253,700 (total population * 68.88 (percent white) / 100). If 99% of them never go into a church and massacre everyone, that means that 32,537 of them do -- for which massive wave of violence the culture is certainly responsible.

No? Well, perhaps it's 3,253 massacres.

No? 325?

32?

Three?

I'm prepared to turn the other cheek at the anti-Southern rhetoric today, because I understand people are angry and afraid. But come on. Just because you hate your homeland, and therefore part of yourself, don't try to put that on me or mine. We aren't the source of your problem. We're the kind of men who stand ready to kill or die to stop such things. You may hate us, but we aren't your enemy.

Confidence in Institutions

Gallup's annual "Confidence in Institutions" poll is out.

From a broad perspective, Americans' confidence in all institutions over the last two years has been the lowest since Gallup began systematic updates of a larger set of institutions in 1993. The average confidence rating of the 14 institutions asked about annually since 1993 -- excluding small business, asked annually since 2007 -- is 32% this year. This is one percentage point above the all-institution average of 31% last year. Americans were generally more confident in all institutions in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the country enjoyed a strong economy and a rally in support for U.S. institutions after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The biggest collapse in public confidence is with the police as an institution. The obvious reason why that might be true is heavy media coverage of controversial police shootings and militarized police responses to protests in Ferguson and elsewhere. But the media has been relentlessly positive about Pope Francis, and the Catholic Church remains at its historic low point in spite of the glowing attention. (Besides, confidence in the media is pretty low too!)

No Federal institution polls above a third of Americans being confident in it. Congress remains near its record low at 8%.