A Philosophical Reading of Walls

I'm impressed with the thoughtfulness of this essay on wall-building as fortification technique. It contains at least two insights that are very much worth having:

1) Advances in weapons and advances in defense technology tend to mirror each other,

2) No matter what, defense in depth is necessary.

The relationship in (1) is a little more complex than the author suggests. It's not that advances in walls provoke advances in weapons, but rather that a two-way relationship exists between attack and defense. I drew up a slide to explain this for a conference once.

This was just a sketch of the issue for an academic audience; the more expert audience here will readily identify complexities I didn't bother to draw for them. The basic point is that swords got longer, and then they got shorter. Why? Well, armor got better and better for a while, meaning that it required more force to overcome. A sword is basically a lever, and the longer the lever, the greater the force at the end of the lever. Thus, longer swords.

After the advent of effective gunpowder weapons, however, armor was increasingly less effective and less present. Thus, swords got shorter again. Indeed, to a large degree they were abandoned in favor of the gunpowder weapons. They survive today as combat knives and bayonets, both normally considered last-ditch weapons whose use is preferably to be avoided in most circumstances. There is at least one example of an intentional bayonet charge from the Iraq War, as a way of attacking into an L-shaped ambush, but it isn't a go-to tactic anymore.

To return to the first article, I am impressed with the way the author treats the universals at play in defense. As he notes at the end, the question of the usefulness of walls remains up for debate. "Plato reckoned that walls encourage 'a soft habit of soul in the inhabitants, by inviting them to seek refuge within it instead of repelling the enemy.' Aristotle retorted, that not building walls was 'like desiring the country to be easy to invade.' It’s still an open argument."

If you don't use a gun, what's the bother about?

I'm gonna predict that the hoopla over the massacre now goes away, if this is true:

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The armed school resource officer assigned to protect students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took a defensive position outside the school and did not enter the building while the shooter was killing students and teachers inside with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Thursday.

That, I initially supposed, might have been protocol, but if this quote from the sheriff is correct, I guess not.

He said Peterson was armed, and was in uniform, and should have gone into the building during the 6-minute event, which left 17 people, most of them teenagers, dead. When asked what the deputy should have done, Israel said: “Went in and addressed the killer. Killed the killer.”

So what we have here, is a cascading failure of institutions. FBI, Sheriff's department, and likely the Federal government, due to the initiative to reduce minority teenage incarceration, the so called "school to prison pipeline" 39 visits from the cops, not a single arrest? I'm not even going to discuss the FBI, since that organization probably just needs to be disbanded at this point.

And Just Like That, The Story Changed

An officer was on the scene of last week's shooting. He hid.

But by all means, let's all disarm and trust the government to protect us and our children.

A Critique of Liberalism

This book review is encouraging that the book is worth reading; the review itself goes further than the book, into a criticism of liberalism (both classical and reform) as contrasted with Christianity. If you find the Christian account too strong, the book is probably more to your tastes. If you find the account compelling, the review will have pleased you and the book may still be of interest.

Appreciating Philosophy Degrees

An argument from Mark Cuban that such degrees will soon be worth more than computer science degrees. Advise your children accordingly.

Bee Stings

U.S.—Despite offering thousands of thoughts and prayers to the victims of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s latest flurry of moronic tweets, the nation’s religious people admitted at long last that their petitions were totally ineffective at preventing the pop astrophysicist from saying stupid things online. ... 

How Woke Are You? Take the Quiz!

For this last, the headline says about 90% of it, but I just couldn't leave it out:

Federal Government Launches GoFundMe Campaign To Pay Off $20 Trillion National Debt

Also Applies to Guns

A cartoon from xkcd implies a point that the author may or may not have intended to make.

Cross Picking

Jim Heath of the Reverend Horton Heat shows another way in which bluegrass techniques influenced rock and roll.

Graphs and Statistics

The opening graph is interesting, but it's quickly criticized in the comments for selection bias. So defenders produce other graphs -- quite a few of them -- with supporting stories.

What to believe? Well, this is one way of addressing the question.

This Law is Unjust

The law that the Special Counsel has been using to obtain guilty pleas needs to be changed. It is inhumane in the most literal sense: it is not a law that a human can be expected to obey no matter how hard that human being tries.

He lied when he said his last communication with Rick Gates was in August 2016, according to the government, when in fact in September 2016 'he spoke with both [Manafort deputy Rick] Gates and Person A' about a report and 'surreptitiously recorded the calls.'

Maybe this guy "lied" in the strict sense, intending to deceive the investigation. However, there is no possibility that I could accurately remember whether any conversation I had last fall was in August or September, let alone a conversation from a year before that. I could not expect to tell you accurately whether or not a particular conversation was the last time I had discussed it with the person I was talking to a year or more ago. The law treats any statement that turns out to be inaccurate as if it were a deliberate effort to deceive. But the human mind doesn't work that way. Every time you remember something, your brain alters the memory a bit. It is not a recording device like a video camera or a tape recorder; it is simply not reasonable to expect someone to remember details with perfect accuracy.

This law gives prosecutors incredible power, because simply by compelling testimony they can compel crimes. The only way to avoid being made into a criminal is to refuse to testify. Congress should alter this law at once to include an intent standard, so that the prosecution must prove that the intent of the accused was to deceive. If so, fine, prosecute him. An inhumane law is unjust, however, and unjust laws should be repealed or altered.

The fuel of rage

Empty private lives can make for inappropriately violent public ones.  I was struck by this comment from David Foster in a comment at his site, Chicago Boyz:

"I believe we have today in America a considerable number of people who expect to have . . . maybe not the *entire* content of their lives, but a significant and emotionally-intense portion . . . delivered by the public sphere. And it is these people who are most likely to commit political violence."

I won't quote the whole comment, which includes fascinating excerpts from Sebastian Haffner’s memoir of life in Germany between the wars.  In that period, when things began to improve, some parts of society seemed even more determined to find something wrong to be volcanically and violently opposed to--and they got their way before long.

Early voting starts tomorrow in my local county race. In trying to find out what my potential constituents want from their county government, I've been confused more than one by people who seem furious that no one is helping them, but even angrier if they are directed to volunteer aid groups, because "they don't want a handout." Others, or maybe the same people (it's slippery, what they're so angry about), are aggrieved because they're able to recover from the storm but the county won't crack down on those other guys, who leave their debris everywhere and didn't obey building codes in the first place.  Everyone wants the government to be more "accountable," but for some that seems to mean "make them cough up the recovery money we're sure they're hiding" while for others it means "punish them for being lax in law enforcement and wasting our tax money on handouts."

It makes me wonder if the key to the contradictions is the meaninglessness of private lives and the consequent need to gin up intense emotion in the public sphere. The people who got together with their neighbors to help the hardest hit and make the best of things seem to be recovering just fine, even though our local economy is still barely functioning and it remains hard to get insurance money or, if you can get the money, any contractors worth their salt who aren't too busy to start work.  The people who are still fuming with anger appear paralyzed and rootless.

The worst-struck neighborhoods have no obvious home-grown structure:  no churches, clubs, or community clean-up parties.  Part of it may be that these neighborhoods have too high a percentage of second homes and, even after six months, absentee owners.  Another part may be that over half of the homes in these areas were badly damaged, and that's too high a percentage for the rest to come together as a healing network.  When these people ask me what I'd do for them as a commissioner, I have no answer.  Can a government ever make up for a lack of local community?  I think governments do well simply to avoid the temptation to disrupt what local communities can do for themselves.

Geese and ganders

What would happen if we seriously tried to apply Robert Mueller's legal analysis to everyone who was active in the 2016 election?

Arthur the Centurion

An implausible theory, says the Spectator. But the border country hosting it certainly has an interesting history.

The debatable land in question is the thin wedge of territory between England and Scotland on the west coast which, for a period in the late Middle Ages, was officially declared as lawless by the parliaments of each country. The resulting piece of English legislation contains a quite magnificent disclaimer:

All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock… without any redress to be made for same.

As Robb comments dryly, ‘by all accounts they availed themselves of the privilege’.

It's these Border Country folk who later, following an adventure in the Stewart plantationing of Ulster, become the "Scots-Irish" so momentous in American history.

My husband's work

My husband, as I may have mentioned, spends much of his time working on Civil War games, the old-fashioned kind with paper maps and cardboard counters. I don't often understand a great deal of what goes into one of these things, so I enjoyed reading this interview with the fellow he works most closely with. As the article points out, the author tried to get an interview with Greg but was referred to his developer, Bill. Greg's clear message was, "I don't do interviews." Luckily Bill gives a great interview and understands the game design process inside and out. Bill is an interesting guy, who has come and stayed with us here twice. He and Greg stay in close contact by phone and email.


  

The Year of the Dog

My father was born in the Year of the Dog. He would have been 72. The Chinese cycle is 12 years long, so when it's your year, your age will be divisible by 12 that year.

I am a Tiger, myself.

Communist Spies in Western Governments

They're not always fake news.

Not Doing This "Debate" Today

I think we've all made up our mind about gun control, mass shootings, etc. I haven't got anything new to say on the subject, and there's no reason to repeat myself when 15 years of previous responses are available in the archives. Only tyrannies disarm their populations. Free men are the best defense of a free state. You get bad things sometimes in both free states and tyrannies, but the bad things in tyrannies are worse; and the freedom is worth defending for its own sake. I won't stop believing any of that.

Also, though, I realized as I saw this debate spiraling up again last night that the fight is really over. We won.

There are only 8 states that are not 'shall-issue' states for concealed carry permits. That means there are 42 states whose legislatures believe that the right to keep and bear arms must be respected, barring a clear and obvious disability such as a felony conviction or involuntary hospitalization for mental health reasons. It takes only 34 states to call a Constitutional Convention, and only 38 to ratify new Constitutional amendments proposed by such a convention.

They don't realize it who live in coastal enclaves, but they've lost this fight. Even if they should manage to pass a restrictive Federal law, there are enough state legislatures out there simply to remove the issue from Federal authority. "No law shall be passed by Congress respecting the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms; no Federal agency may regulate the possession of arms by citizens. All such authority is reserved to the states, or to the People."

The best presidential poll

Scott ("Dilbert") Adams argued last month that President Trump enjoys the highest presidential rating ever, using small-business optimism as a proxy: 

Big businesses can do fine with a president who promotes policies that favor big corporations, even if the rest of the country is suffering. But when small business owners are feeling good about the economy, that means the president is doing a more bottoms-up job of getting things right. President Trump has focused on bottoms-up economics from the start, meaning jobs and lessened regulations. Apparently that is working.

Louder for the people in the back

Stolen shamelessly from Ace:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2018/02/12/fisking-the-stop-telling-poor-people-to-cook-doofus-with-special-guest-my-mom/

In the article, Larry Correia (sci-fi author and pretty nice guy in person according to people I know) savagely fisks an idiot "social justice reporter" who sneers at the idea that poor people can save money and eat healthier by cooking rather than eating fast food.  Larry (quite correctly) points out that it is staggeringly obvious that this reporter has neither ever been truly poor, nor ever really had to shop in stores like Dollar General or Buy Lots (nor likely, in my opinion, would be caught dead doing so).

When I was a kid, my parents were wealthier by a good deal than my father's parents ever were, but never were sure they could afford to put shoes on all four of their children at the same time.  Fast food was a rare treat, and yet they still managed to cook meals every night of my life.  Why?  Because that was how you fed a family of six without much money.  Had they fed us fast food every night, I'm sure that they wouldn't have been able to afford shoes for us.

Personally, I'll admit, for many years I didn't want to come home after a long day's work and cook dinner, and I fully confess that it was a poor economic choice.  I have since mended my ways and my meager bank account shows the benefits of doing so.  And Larry is dead on, one doesn't need a full spice rack or vast array of utensils and pans in which to fix a good meal.  Most of my cooking is done out of my favorite skillet and using a single knife and cutting board.  And while I have a nice skillet, knife, and cutting board, I could go out to Walmart right now and purchase replacements for less than $20 (I just looked it up on the Walmart website).  That's the same cost as a two-four person dinner at most every fast food place.  So, as Larry suggested, skip a meal at KFC and have bologna sandwiches that night, and suddenly you can afford all to tools you need to cook (and yes, you can absolutely brown ground beef with no utensil other than a fork, I have done it myself).

A Good Interview

I endorse AVI's reading: this interview is worth your time.