I saw them live in Atlanta a few years ago now. They were great live.
Dropkick Murphys To Perform Free Concert
They did this on St. Patrick's Day -- the 17th of March, when all this was still somewhat new -- and they're going to do another free concert on the 29th.
I saw them live in Atlanta a few years ago now. They were great live.
I saw them live in Atlanta a few years ago now. They were great live.
Love in the time of COVID-19
From an Althouse commenter, exasperated by a particularly fatuous New York blog about ZOOM dating and the prospects for tentative post-lockdown romance:
It was a dark and stormy night. I opened the door and, at last, he was there. I had never seen him but I recognized him at once as if his heart wore some strange emblem on his sleeve. His dark eyes burned into mine and in voice strangely distant he said my name - "Mabel!" "No," I said, my voice choked in the same, strange distant way, "No, I'm Noemi, Mabel lives next door if you call it living when she can't get herself a bootleg haircut. She...." "It is you," he said in the same distant voice, "I have seen you from afar on the cameras and I can no longer wait." Strong figures tore at my mask and I heard it rip. "No," I screamed, "No, you may be infected, toxically masculine or a Trump supporter, which is worse, I don't know!" My mask fell to the floor. Fire seemed to run over him and he came closer. I heard him shout "You, it is you, at last." My senses swayed and yearned as avid lips sought mine to garner sweetness and the last thing I felt was a burning sensation spreading like fire through my loins of desire. When I came to, the pizza man was gone and the pizza was cold and crushed in its box where it had fallen between us as he grabbed for his money. He'd taken his money and gone. Took a hefty tip, too. I guess that little game of sending for pizza and claiming that I was Noemi, not Mabel, the girl next door and that the pizza guys were getting it wrong because of the masks, is over. Never mind.
Old Norse Poetics
I really enjoy listening to poetry in Old Norse or Old English; I have a copy of the Beowulf in the original. It's fun to see how much you can follow.
Here's an example with 'facing' English, so that you can more readily track which parts you followed.
Here's an example with 'facing' English, so that you can more readily track which parts you followed.
The Shopping Cart Theory
Do you return your shopping cart when you are done with it? I'll bet you do if you hang around here.
Motte-and-Bailey Feminism
Reason suggests that the retreat from the 'believe all women' position to 'believe women who accuse Republicans' is an example of an informal fallacy.
I'm not sure it's properly speaking a fallacy so much as an objectively dishonest rhetorical strategy. A fallacy is an error in logic; informal fallacies occur in ordinary rhetoric, which isn't usually amenable to the strict logic in which formal fallacies occur. You can get a formal fallacy in rhetoric, it just doesn't happen much: but if I make a claim that P -> Q, !P, therefore !Q, I've made a formally fallacious argument. If I argue that you're a bad person therefore you can't be right, that's informally fallacious. In both cases, I'm making a claim that doesn't follow from the premises.
The motte-and-bailey is only an error if you don't notice that you've shifted your goalposts substantially. Otherwise, it's a lie. Reason also uses the term 'gaslighting,' which I learned from Tex, and which is a form of intentional deception.
So the question is whether or not they notice their own shift. Maybe not; progressivism is based on fervently asserting beliefs in things that you probably have to know are not true, e.g., that all people are per se "equal" (rather than possessing one form of political equality). Maybe at some point you just don't notice that you've shifted from really saying 'believe all women!' to 'don't just dismiss women'; or from 'it is sexist not to build systems biased in favor of women' to 'feminism is just about equality!' (And which equality, again?)
Eric Hines accuses me of being too generous to my opponents. Perhaps I am; but I do see a lot of self-deception in humanity. I think many of these people really are in error rather than intentionally lying; I think they really can't see outside the lies on which they've founded their lives and their vision of justice. It's a big problem. It's hard to reason with someone who is lying to themselves all the time about the very questions you're treating, especially when (as here) they have gigantic social support systems to reinforce the lies and to protect them from having to grapple with the fact that they are engaged in a (self?) deceptive practice.
In truth, believe-victims activists have been making generous use of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. This is a form of argument in which a person makes a strong, unreasonable, and indefensible claim—the bailey—and then falls back on an uncontroversial claim—the motte—when challenged. With "believe victims," the bailey position was something like what Biden and Clinton said: Presume that each and every alleged victim is telling the truth. The motte position is closer to this: Respect and support alleged victims, and don't automatically discount what they say. In the wake of Reade's allegations against him, Biden has unsurprisingly retreated to the motte.This is a topic that Slate Star Codex has treated repeatedly over the years.
I'm not sure it's properly speaking a fallacy so much as an objectively dishonest rhetorical strategy. A fallacy is an error in logic; informal fallacies occur in ordinary rhetoric, which isn't usually amenable to the strict logic in which formal fallacies occur. You can get a formal fallacy in rhetoric, it just doesn't happen much: but if I make a claim that P -> Q, !P, therefore !Q, I've made a formally fallacious argument. If I argue that you're a bad person therefore you can't be right, that's informally fallacious. In both cases, I'm making a claim that doesn't follow from the premises.
The motte-and-bailey is only an error if you don't notice that you've shifted your goalposts substantially. Otherwise, it's a lie. Reason also uses the term 'gaslighting,' which I learned from Tex, and which is a form of intentional deception.
So the question is whether or not they notice their own shift. Maybe not; progressivism is based on fervently asserting beliefs in things that you probably have to know are not true, e.g., that all people are per se "equal" (rather than possessing one form of political equality). Maybe at some point you just don't notice that you've shifted from really saying 'believe all women!' to 'don't just dismiss women'; or from 'it is sexist not to build systems biased in favor of women' to 'feminism is just about equality!' (And which equality, again?)
Eric Hines accuses me of being too generous to my opponents. Perhaps I am; but I do see a lot of self-deception in humanity. I think many of these people really are in error rather than intentionally lying; I think they really can't see outside the lies on which they've founded their lives and their vision of justice. It's a big problem. It's hard to reason with someone who is lying to themselves all the time about the very questions you're treating, especially when (as here) they have gigantic social support systems to reinforce the lies and to protect them from having to grapple with the fact that they are engaged in a (self?) deceptive practice.
Home cooking
I made chicken and dumplings this week, loosely following a recipe from my late aunt's elderly East Texas housekeeper. The soup is simplicity itself: boil the chicken until the meat is barely done, then remove the pieces, debone whatever comes off easily, and set the bite-sized meat aside. Throw the bones back in and boil some more, adding salt and, if you like, mirepoix (diced carrots/onions/celery). This part takes an hour or two, depending on your patience and how intense you like your broth to get. Reserve the skimmed schmaltz, not worrying about snagging some broth with it. You'll want a cup or so of a roughly half-schmaltz/half-broth mixture for the dumplings.
The dumplings are the pie-dough sort, not the biscuit-ball sort. The old recipe called for flour, Crisco, and hot water, but I always use the skimmings from the boiled chicken instead. They're full of flavor now, so why waste them? The proportions aren’t critical: just add enough to make about two cups of flour squishy but just firm enough to roll out on a large floured board. Adding an egg is nice. This week’s improvement was to roll out the dough as thin as I could, then cut it into small squares and stretch each little square with my fingers before I tossed it in the soup to boil. Adding the egg may have helped with the stretching, which got them thin enough for the first time: nearly translucent. They sort of spring back in the boiling stage, but when they’re done they have a nice texture, not thick enough to be doughy in the middle.
While the dumplings are boiling, which doesn't take long when they're thin, maybe 10-15 minutes, add the cooked bite-size chicken back in, with a bit of vinegar to taste. Lacking vinegar, you can substitute anything sour you have handy, such as lemon juice. Just balance the salt and acidity until it tastes rounded. I didn't mention pepper because I don't care about it, but it wouldn't hurt to add some. Ditto herbs if you like them. Tarragon is good. Skim the soup again once the dumplings taste done, as they will have yielded up most of the schmaltz you mixed into them.
Some people like chicken and dumplings to be creamy, so you can add milk or cream. I don't, but I don't see how it could hurt.
The whole dish takes only chicken, water, flour, and salt, plus some kind of tartness from anything handy, an optional egg, and optional onions/carrots/celery or pepper and herbs. As a bonus, I can usually get a couple of bowlfuls of over-cooked chicken shred from the bones after their second boil, which the dogs love, or you could feed it to whatever foxes or raccoons may live nearby. The dogs like the schmaltz, too.
The dumplings are the pie-dough sort, not the biscuit-ball sort. The old recipe called for flour, Crisco, and hot water, but I always use the skimmings from the boiled chicken instead. They're full of flavor now, so why waste them? The proportions aren’t critical: just add enough to make about two cups of flour squishy but just firm enough to roll out on a large floured board. Adding an egg is nice. This week’s improvement was to roll out the dough as thin as I could, then cut it into small squares and stretch each little square with my fingers before I tossed it in the soup to boil. Adding the egg may have helped with the stretching, which got them thin enough for the first time: nearly translucent. They sort of spring back in the boiling stage, but when they’re done they have a nice texture, not thick enough to be doughy in the middle.
While the dumplings are boiling, which doesn't take long when they're thin, maybe 10-15 minutes, add the cooked bite-size chicken back in, with a bit of vinegar to taste. Lacking vinegar, you can substitute anything sour you have handy, such as lemon juice. Just balance the salt and acidity until it tastes rounded. I didn't mention pepper because I don't care about it, but it wouldn't hurt to add some. Ditto herbs if you like them. Tarragon is good. Skim the soup again once the dumplings taste done, as they will have yielded up most of the schmaltz you mixed into them.
Some people like chicken and dumplings to be creamy, so you can add milk or cream. I don't, but I don't see how it could hurt.
The whole dish takes only chicken, water, flour, and salt, plus some kind of tartness from anything handy, an optional egg, and optional onions/carrots/celery or pepper and herbs. As a bonus, I can usually get a couple of bowlfuls of over-cooked chicken shred from the bones after their second boil, which the dogs love, or you could feed it to whatever foxes or raccoons may live nearby. The dogs like the schmaltz, too.
A Gym in New Jersey
Opening in defiance of the governor's order, a gym is visited by the police.
Well done.
Well done.
‘Off the Books’ Spying at Treasury Dept
So reports The Ohio Star.
President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers....The whistleblower also claims the Justice Department didn’t go through the formal steps to authorize this.
Only two names are listed in the whistleblower’s official paperwork, so the others must remain sealed, she said. The second name is Paul J. Manafort Jr., the one-time chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The other names include: Members of Congress, the most senior staffers on the 2016 Trump campaign and members of Trump’s family...
Vulnerable hardest hit
It occurs to a Guardian pundit that, just as COVID-19 hurts the vulnerable the most, so does the lockdown. Duh. Everything harms the vulnerable the most; that's what "vulnerable" means.
It doesn't necessarily follow, as the writer argues, that "vulnerable" is best defined as his favorite SJW categories:
You can make a class argument out of the disparity in certain kinds of illnesses, especially those related to obesity (such as heart disease and diabetes), but the argument isn't as persuasive as a lot of people seem to think. When you have to blame "food deserts" for obesity among people who supposedly are too poor to eat, you're really reaching.
It doesn't necessarily follow, as the writer argues, that "vulnerable" is best defined as his favorite SJW categories:
This pandemic is an X-ray, exposing the racial and class inequalities of our society.It's fair enough to note that people without safety margins of all kinds are far more likely to be swallowed up in severe disruptions. COVID-19, however, is unusual in its extreme focus on the elderly, which, unfortunately for the Guardian, can't easily be shoehorned into the SJW worldview. No amount of Marxist thinking will solve the problem of a disease whose median age of case fatality is around 80, or whose deadly impact falls in over 99% of cases on a group comprise of the elderly and/or those with fairly severe medical challenges. At most, the carnage in nursing homes might make us want to re-think how we warehouse the elderly of all races and classes.
You can make a class argument out of the disparity in certain kinds of illnesses, especially those related to obesity (such as heart disease and diabetes), but the argument isn't as persuasive as a lot of people seem to think. When you have to blame "food deserts" for obesity among people who supposedly are too poor to eat, you're really reaching.
Turns out I'm a guy
I know, these studies are about averages and can't be expected to apply to every individual, as I'm always saying. But everything on the man list rings bells with me, while I can barely hear the siren song from the woman list--though most of the latter began to have more appeal to me after the age of about 60:
Vanderbilt University psychologists, studying middle-aged men and women who were high achievers in math, having an IQ of 140+, received quite different responses from males and females to statements about preferences: Men emphasized freedom of expression and ideas, merit pay, a full-time career, invention, taking risks, working with things, lots of money, stating facts in the face of resistance. Women emphasized part-time careers, for a limited time, working no more than 40 hours a week, flexibility in work schedule, friendships, community service, socializing, and community.
Beethoven on a 15 String Harp Guitar
We haven't had much music lately. Here are some lovely pieces on an unusual instrument.
Created Equal on PBS Tomorrow
The documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words will be showing and streaming on PBS May 18 at 9 EST / 8 CDT.
I saw this in the theater when it came out and really loved it. It is a biography of Thomas, but as the title implies, he does a lot of the talking himself.
Although the whole documentary was interesting, one of my favorite parts was seeing then-Senator Biden try to spar with Thomas during the confirmation hearings. It was comical.
I saw this in the theater when it came out and really loved it. It is a biography of Thomas, but as the title implies, he does a lot of the talking himself.
Although the whole documentary was interesting, one of my favorite parts was seeing then-Senator Biden try to spar with Thomas during the confirmation hearings. It was comical.
Reynard
A neighbor has been feeding a gray fox, or perhaps I should say a vixen. We saw her taking food from the neighbor's hand. She comes every evening.
Gray foxes can climb trees as readily as a cat. We have few if any red foxes here.
Gray foxes can climb trees as readily as a cat. We have few if any red foxes here.
Killed by Bureaucracy
They were taught all through their educations and careers that the most important thing was not to discriminate. So when the moment came when the most important thing of all was to discriminate....
Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski: Open Up & Forget the Whole Thing
A contrarian view from the 20-year head of the Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science. One might even say a curmudgeonly view.
"You're no friend of this court!"
I'm so old, I can remember when federal courts didn't think it was a good idea to troll for issue advocacy in the form of amicus briefs.
Some of you may recognize my title from a Heinlein novel. He had a good grasp of the law, and liked to set up vignettes in which an honest judge lost patience with conspiracies and courtroom shenanigans, especially when officious intermeddlers were shown the door. In the scene I'm remembering, an oily legal hanger-on type is asked to explain his presence at a trial, and answers, "Who, me? Amicus curiae, Your Honor."
Some of you may recognize my title from a Heinlein novel. He had a good grasp of the law, and liked to set up vignettes in which an honest judge lost patience with conspiracies and courtroom shenanigans, especially when officious intermeddlers were shown the door. In the scene I'm remembering, an oily legal hanger-on type is asked to explain his presence at a trial, and answers, "Who, me? Amicus curiae, Your Honor."
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