An Addendum on Star Wars from AVI

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent
instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way
into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten,
imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated
graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because
he who has received this true education of the inner being will most
shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with
a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into
his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame
and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is
able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognise
and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.

-Plato, Republic III

Commenting on Mike's recent post about Star Wars, AVI says: "At one level, I can't believe this needs explaining. The Rebels are the good guys. The Jedi are the good guys. The music and the costumes didn't give that away?"

He has a fuller examination of what's going on with the imperfections in the morality of Star Wars that is worth your time.

It occurs to me that his first take is the right one, though: it's the music of Star Wars that really carries the morality of the plot. You could dispose of perhaps every single line of dialogue, and still understand the movie perfectly just by hearing John Williams' soundtrack. The flaws come out of what was said in the screenplay. The real moral structure is musical, and perfect. It's only when someone -- Lucas, I suppose -- began to try to think and put it into words that the errors began to creep in.

Somehow we grasp the moral truth better through music. Plato's trust in the capacity of musicians to convey moral truths, provided that they were devoted to doing so, is perhaps if anything only understated. Trying to say the truth is very hard, as everyone who knew Socrates came to find out when he put them to the test when asked to define goodness or justice or piety. You can hear it expressed in music, though, and somehow understand exactly what is meant. For most people and most purposes, including to guide the soldiers of his model state in their moral decisions, Plato seems to have thought that this would do.

Republicans for Hillary

The apprehension among some party elites goes beyond electability, according to one Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the worries.

“We’re potentially careening down this road of nominating somebody who frankly isn’t fit to be president in terms of the basic ability and temperament to do the job,” this strategist said. “It’s not just that it could be somebody Hillary could destroy electorally, but what if Hillary hits a banana peel and this person becomes president?”

If you’re a grassroots conservative who suspects that establishment Republicans would rather see Hillary win than an outsider from their own party whom they might not be able to control, that last line should show you that … yep, you’re right to believe that.

Contrarian tools

A good career strategy:  find something to do that most people don't want to do.  If you enjoy it and are particularly good at it, even better.

A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that when it came to workplace distractions, most employees were actually happiest when performing rote tasks. Highly successful people, though, aren't most employees; they make it a habit to do work that others don’t want to do.

If the only things that make you happy are things that everyone else is willing to do for free, you're in trouble. If you're good at something that almost no one else can or will do well, the world is your oyster.

Nanodegrees

From Maggie's Farm, an article about increasing employer recognition of online degrees.  As MF comments, looks like homeschooling is bad only when conservatives do it.  On either end of the political spectrum, any school can prosper if people are highly motivated to study there, whether for intangible personal fulfillment or to increase earning power in an attractive job.  A company like Udacity doesn't need federal subsidies or student loans to keep its faculty in Priuses.

Closing the wage gap

H/t Bookworm Room.

Now For A Much More Pleasing Image

Headline: "Fried Chicken and the Skulls of ISIS Fighters."

It's Just A Banner Week for Missouri Education

Headline: "Missouri state senator aims to block student's dissertation on abortion."

Education Is Too Expensive

At least, I am totally convinced that this particular young woman has been badly overcharged for her education.

Why Not Both?

For some, the distinction between craftsmanship and deep thinking represents a false dichotomy (as a logician might say).

Matthew B. Crawford earned his Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago but failed to find a job as an academic and ultimately landed a position at a think tank. Unhappy with the work, he quit and became a mechanic in Virginia, using online tutorials to learn how to weld and make motorcycle parts.

He has also continued to write and has published books about his career transition. One of his books, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” is devoted to debunking the notion that manual trades are mindless. “The division between knowledge work and manual work is kind of dubious, because there is so much thinking that goes on in skilled trades,” Mr. Crawford said.

As for the payoff, Mr. Crawford rejects the idea that philosophers cannot figure out how to earn a living.

“It’s obviously kind of a reductive approach to think of your course of study in college as merely a means to a paycheck,” Mr. Crawford said, suggesting the study of things like happiness can be enriching in ways that are hard to measure. “And nobody goes into philosophy because they think it’s going to make them rich.”

More on Equality

Colorado Springs police are being sued to drop their physical fitness test.

Last Friday the Colorado Springs Police Department agreed to the demands of 12 female officers who filed a civil suit claiming the fitness tests are discriminatory. All the officers were over the age of 40.

The suit will now move to a federal court. Police Chief Pete Carey says he’s disappointed, but will abide by the judge’s decision.

‘I very firmly stand behind physical fitness tests for our officers. I think what I’m asking them to do is fair and my hope is a federal judge also agrees with this,’ Carey said.

The police test consists of two running exams. Officers also have to do 52 push-ups in 2 minutes, and 45 sit-ups, also in 2 minutes.

ACLU: This 'Hurtful Speech' Policing Is A Bit Much

In fairness, you guys helped to call down the thunder. Still, it's good to see you getting it right now.

The ACLU of Missouri is disappointed with the recent request by the University of Missouri Police to report ‘hurtful speech,’ which simultaneously does too much and too little.

Racial epithets addressed to a specific person in a threatening or intimidating manner can be illegal, and may require action by police and/or university administrators. But, no governmental entity has the authority to broadly prohibit ‘hurtful’ speech — or even undefined ‘hateful’ speech, or to discipline against it.

Conversely, institutional racism and a history of turning a blind-eye to systemic inequities does require action. But mistakenly addressing symptoms — instead of causes — and doing it in a way that runs counter to the First Amendment is not the wise or appropriate response.

Harvard on Yale: It's Fascism

Usually, we at Harvard are more than happy to see Yale students make fools of themselves on camera....

Not this time.

It's Important To Know Where To Draw The Line

Ahead of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s landmark European trip kicking off this weekend, French officials reportedly nixed plans for a formal meal in Paris with President François Hollande following a dispute over the menu. The Iranians, according to France’s RTL Radio, insisted on a wine-free meal with halal meat — a request based on Islamic codes that amounted to culinary sacrilege in France, a nation that puts the secular ideals of the Republic above all else.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with halal meat. It tastes fine. Ate a lot of it in Iraq when we'd go outside the wire, and I enjoyed every bite of it. No wine, though...

Slate Magazine: Any Way You Slice It, Rubio is Wrong About Welders

Apparently a lot of people emailed them, especially philosophers. They've looked at the data a lot more deeply now, and concluded that no matter how you look at it, the data don't support Rubio.

A Pox on Both Your Houses

I see a lot of banter back and forth across the internet about "who were the good guys in Star Wars", and some make decent cases for the less obvious choice of "the Empire, naturally".  But I think this is the first article I've read that I agree with wholeheartedly:

http://thefederalist.com/2015/11/10/star-wars-has-no-good-guys/

Some Humble Thoughts About America

A gentleman called Captain Clay Higgins, a peace officer from Louisiana, invites you to consider a few of his humble thoughts on Veteran's Day.

Not While The Second Lives

David Harsanyi: "The First Amendment Is Dying."

As noted two posts below, they're still only thinking about each other. They haven't begun to consider our perspectives, which will be quite shocking to them. Or they will be, if they can wrap their heads around them well enough to be shocked.

How do you explain that concept to someone who came from a background of looking for 'safe spaces'? The idea that we mean to defend their freedom as well as our own -- but only on the same terms -- will be as difficult to imagine as the complete rejection of safety as an ideal. I don't need to feel safe from you. I don't require your approval. I don't, in fact, even care about it.

Perhaps we should give some thought to trying to explain it, as in any conflict there are a certain number of conversions and we ought to be prepared to go fishing for men. Somehow their very fine educations have not given them the history or the philosophy they would need. What would you have to tell them, if you found a heart that was good soil for this mustard seed?

Waco Update

According to Breitbart news, the Waco DA charged 106 of the bikers under identical indictments all alleging the same facts in each 106 cases. All the charges are for life sentences, or between 15 to 99 years if a life sentence is not issued. Naturally, the grand jury accepted all 106 indictments, which will now go to trial.

Only 9 people died, so 106 people can't be guilty of the actual killings. In fact, the charges don't appear to charge any of the 106 with any particular killing. The charge is for a kind of collective responsibility for the deaths due to participating in 'organized criminal activity' that resulted in the 9 deaths.

As of yet we haven't seen any evidence showing who was responsible for any of the killings, so it's interesting to me that -- after months and months of investigation and interrogation -- no one has been charged with any particular act of violence. In fact, I'm not sure how you could hope to prove a collective responsibility if you can't first establish a personal responsibility. In order to say that every member of the Cossacks MC was collectively responsible for a death, shouldn't you have to show that some member of the Cossacks MC was responsible for it?

There are still 80 bikers who haven't been charged at all. Perhaps 'the real killers' are among them, and Waco just wanted to get the easy cases out of the way first.

Two Solid Pieces on Campus Free Speech

These are coming from quite different perspectives, too, which makes them even more valuable if you read them together.

One of the two -- which came recommended by Armed Liberal of Winds of Change fame, for those of you who have been around the blogosphere long enough to remember him -- is from the perspective of a serious scholar who has a nuanced view. The other is by a trans* activist who wants to yell and curse at feminists who won't support what trans* activists are doing, preferring to take their feminism, ah, "straight."

This activist, whose first piece is angry in places, went on to write a follow-up piece responding thoughtfully to critics. The original piece actually does have some interesting insights, though, so it's worth reading as well.

To distill the basic structure of the debate you get by reading the arguments together:

1) Serious Scholar and Trans* Activist both think they're talking to the left. They aren't really considering our perspectives at all. They aren't fighting against us, in other words, but for domination of what good leftists think.

2) Serious Scholar and Trans* Activist agree that this isn't really about free speech v. political correctness. There are some kinds of conduct they think should be beyond the pale -- blackface frat parties are one example, allowing a serious debate about stoning gays to death is another. This is a point on which I suspect we would disgree: blackface frat parties are the epitome of bad taste, but probably so obviously so that banning them would do less good than letting people suffer the humiliation of having proven to have associated with such a thing; whereas a debate between feminists and Islamists on the merits of radical Islam is something the colleges could very usefully be having right now.

3) Serious Scholar is interested in a much broader set of problems than the Trans* Activist. Serious Scholar points out that there is an important conversation to be had about 'cultural appropriation,' because it's a trap that its advocates are falling into: studies in British colonialism show how encouraging just such mechanisms was used as a method of control over unruly minorities.

4) Trans* Activist points out that many of the feminists fighting against trans* people used the same tactics in their own day, some thirty or so years ago. The tactics were not popular then, nor ten or twenty years before that when it was the most radical black activists using the tactics (and there were some quite radical ones, though today the Civil Rights Movement is almost always painted in glossy hues and the memory of Dr. King). This was true even on the left: Edward Abbey once wrote that the only two kinds of people he couldn't stand were racists and organized minorities. Trans* Activist takes this to be proof of a moral arc uniting the civil rights movement, third wave feminists, and trans* activism. It may instead be an illustration that these tactics are despicable no matter what cause they advance, a point lost only on those who immediately stand to benefit from them (and only until they are on the other side).

5) Serious Scholar points out in his second and third arguments that this is really not about creating 'safe spaces,' but establishing just who will rule and building the mechanisms to ensure their cultural domination. Trans* Activist is totally on board with that, committing to being on the forefront of 'pushing the line in the sand.'

As we see it in the press, this looks like a silly fight over what may be chiefly invented offenses. On reflective analysis, though, it proves to be a highly consequential struggle -- one that will ultimately have consequences for us, given these left-leaning thinkers' control over the elite universities from which our leadership is so often, and so unfortunately, drawn.

Veteran's Day: The Untold Story of the Iraq that is Flourishing

Michael Rubin writes from his travels in southern and Kurdish Iraq.

U.S. veterans should be proud about what they accomplished in Iraq. They planted the seeds but did not stick around to witness fully what they sowed. If they could visit Basra, Karbala, Najaf, Amarah, and Nasiriyah, they would be proud of what they would see — a society getting off the ground. Corniches, parks, and playgrounds; commerce; solar power to supplement the still-poor electric grid; and even electronic billboards advertising the latest wares. They would see Iraqis embrace religion, but still value independence from their neighbors (and, indeed, complain bitterly about Iranian arrogance and the corrosive effect of Tehran’s dumping of cheap goods). They would see children playing without fear, and learning without indoctrination. Iraq still faces massive problems (more on that in the coming days) but, most importantly, they would hear people express gratitude. It is well deserved.