Grim's Hall

The Best the Government Can Do

The SBA proved incapable of running the 'paycheck protection program,' and Congress' massive spending didn't manage to adequately fund it; economic disaster 'loans' may or may not materialize; unemployment seems to be hard to come by if you can get the systems to work at all; the IRS is apparently unable to process tax returns in a timely manner even though they're getting far less of them than usual. The FDA and CDC screwed up their basic jobs nine ways to Sunday, and hampered private efforts to find ways to test.

The one thing that the government has done that has worked is suspending itself. Suspending regulations let truck drivers get where they needed to be faster, suspending liability laws (via things like the Defense Production Act's temporary nationalization of meat plants) allows businesses to continue to operate. The best the government can do is to stop doing.

Which makes this move the right thing to do. You want job creation and economic growth? Shut down the regulatory agencies as hard as you can.

Poll Watching = Voter Fraud

So says the NYT.

"Take Yourself to Work Day"

A Michigan entrepreneur is defying what may well be America's worst governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

In an interview with PJ Media, the business owner described Whitmer’s executive orders as “in a word, ludicrous.”

“Tell me how liquor, the lottery, and marijuana are essential while rakes, brooms, and paint aren’t,” Kiilunen said. “Tell me how it is safe to walk with a large crowd in Wal-Mart but not in a hometown business.”

The NY Post reports that Governor Whitmer is in talks with the Biden campaign about becoming the Vice Presidential nominee, which could easily make her President of the United States soon.

Weird Numbers

Americans seem prepared to walk into socialism, but approve of Trump's handling of the crisis? These are huge majorities for the most part for universal healthcare, universal basic income (at least for the duration of the crisis), and more help for those who may have become unemployed.

It's too bad for Democrats that Bernie didn't win. This could have been his year.

By the way, @AVI, one of my progressive friends just used the phrase "billionaires hoarding Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth" in a conversation about the American response.

Yes, But...

Alan Dershowitz on forced vaccination:

"Let me put it very clearly," Dershowitz said. "You have no constitutional right to endanger the public and spread the disease, even if you disagree. You have no right not to be vaccinated, you have no right not to wear a mask, you have no right to open up your business."

The famed law professor added that if the disease in question is not contagious — for example, cancer — a person can refuse treatment.

He continued, "[But] If you refuse to be vaccinated [for a contagious disease], the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor's office and plunge a needle into your arm."

"You have no right to refuse to be vaccinated against a contagious disease," Dershowitz added. "Public health, the police power of the Constitution, gives the state the power to compel that. And there are cases in the United States Supreme Court."

The 'but' is that I notice he didn't name the case. He's not wrong, but the precedents are not necessarily settled if they run deeply counter to the current sense of the American people. I think a lot of Americans would dissent from the Buck v. Bell SCOTUS ruling, from the Progressive era, that gave the state wide power to sterilize you against your will. For one thing it runs directly into the teeth of the reproductive rights movement. Although that is mostly about not reproducing, the logic of it is that reproduction is a kind of sacred and personal thing with which the state should never interfere.

So it may be that the smallpox era ruling would stand up today; but it also might be that it would not. People had a lot of faith in government's ability to do good in the early 1900s. That's not true today, and it's not true for reasons that are sometimes well-founded.

To See Ourselves as Others See Us

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

-Robert Burns, excerpt, "To a Louse"

Writer Jill Filipovic begins to wonder about possibly considering at least talking about reopening. This essay, from a progressive feminist to her audience, begins with a very large amount of throat-clearing to make sure she isn't misunderstood as one of those people.

This is common. In the comments to Tex's post below, I modified the article about 'what women are like' vs. 'what men are like' to replace the sexes with political labels. It turns out that the substitution very neatly fits the kind of descriptions you'll hear in Ms. Filipovic's piece.

"... progressives were found significantly more appreciative of art and beauty, were more open to inner feelings and emotions, more modest in playing down their achievements, and more reactive, affected by feelings, and easily upset. Progressives, on average, were more, outgoing, attentive to others, sensitive, aesthetic, sentimental, cooperative, accommodating, and deferential, warm toward others, showing selfless concern for others, sympathetic, enjoying company, and straightforward and undemanding. Conservatives, on average, were more reserved, utilitarian, unsentimental, dispassionate, and solitary.”

We do have the advantage that Robbie Burns wished 'some Power' might give us: we are able to see exactly how others see us. This is true for both men and conservative women. I'm sorry to say that you do not please them much. Perhaps you can free yourselves, as Burns thought, from airs of dress and gait, if any of you have any; but the big question is freeing yourself from devotion.

A Reasonable Point from Michelle Goldberg

I don't often encounter arguments from her that strike me as reasonable, but here is one:

...it’s a mistake to treat the growing ideological divide over when and how to reopen the country as a matter of class rather than partisanship. The push for a faster reopening, even in places where coronavirus cases are growing, has significant elite support. And many of those who face exposure as they’re ordered back to work are rightly angry and terrified.

Because here’s the thing about reopening: It’s liberation to some, but compulsion to others. If your employer reopens but you don’t feel safe going to work, you can’t continue to collect unemployment benefits.

I know of a case in which a woman whose mother was high-risk because of age and disease was called back to work, and she had to choose between quitting / losing her job / going on unpaid leave, or risking infecting her mother. Unemployment benefits end right away, so if she takes the former path she's joining the 25%* of America who are currently out of work. If she takes the latter path, she's getting paid but every day she's risking her mother's life. It's a tough situation.

That said there are definitely class issues at play. It's just that all the members of one class aren't on the same side. As always, I feel for the working class men and women whose interests are rarely fully considered. I don't object to raising this set of concerns for them at all. We probably should consider an exception for people who live with high risk candidates (defined, perhaps, as people over 65 who have a complicating illness). Perhaps we should consider lowering the retirement age to 55 for Social Security and pension purposes, so that people whose parents are in the high-risk age zone will be more likely to be able to retire if they want to do so. Their jobs can then provide room for some of that 25%* to find new employment. Perhaps people who came into this crisis in working class careers should be prioritized for extra help retiring if they want to do so.

I'm open to suggestions. There's no reason we can't make some adjustments to help ensure the worker who wants to work can get back to it, and the ones who have rational concerns are protected or at least have their concerns mitigated.

* See comments.

Please Do Not Shoot People for Not Wearing Masks

This means you, Kar... I mean Jennifer.

“As a concerned carry-permitted gun owner, if you refuse to wear a mask and try to come within 6 feet of me or my family, I will exercise the same constitutional rights to shoot you.”

[Later in her 'apology':]

“I am in a profession where the threat of someone approaching me not wearing a mask while in the midst of a pandemic is equivalent to the threat against my life. Just as it would be if they approached me with their gun drawn and pointed at me....

“Bioterrorism is, however, a real threat and refusal to prevent and/or the intentional release or dissemination of biological agents by not wearing a mask during a global pandemic is a clear example. I am sorry if my words were offensive or derogatory in any way. My concern and compassion for human life got the best of me.”

Yes, we are all overwhelmed by your concern and compassion for human life.

I notice that Hillary Clinton is also helpfully painting conservative protesters as "domestic terrorists." I'd wager any stakes that Dr. Jennifer was a Hillary supporter.

Welshmen Yield

A young man dressed up as a knight was accosted by armed police -- in Wales they aren't all armed -- because of his foam sword.

From this mythological lake the Lady gave Arthur his magical sword Excalibur, but this knight had his very own excalibur and it was this apparently deadly medieval weapon that caused local concern leading to three machine gun wielding cops swooping down on the curious knight.

It turned out that the medieval knight was not the ghost of King Arthur, but it was 20-year-old Lennon Thomas, a Dungeons and Dragons and history enthusiast who has since admitted he perhaps suffered a lapse in judgement bringing his sword out into the public domain, but in his defense he told the police that he was “simply enjoying a walk in his armor....”

As one would expect from a highly-trained knight versed in the ways of “war craft”, the righteous and good Sir Lennon Thomas exuded total fairness in the face of three really highly-trained warriors armed with truly-deadly machinery, by admitting that he “had a lapse in judgement on the sword part.” And looking back at his experience at the edge of the Welsh lake, Lennon added that “perhaps bringing the sword wasn’t such a good idea, as from a distance it does look realistic.”

Combined with the Canadian stormtrooper incident, the British part of the Anglosphere looks worse and worse. The fact that he "admits" that he was wrong is positively "I love Big Brother" territory.

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.

Antidepressant or Tolkien?

An amusing quiz.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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...

The whistleblower also claims the Justice Department didn’t go through the formal steps to authorize this.