Freedom and Protest
Asheville is reporting ongoing fatalities from the virus, but "chiefly concentrated in nursing homes" according to a print article I read earlier today. Meanwhile, the nation has emerged from lockdown to intensely populated, dense protests over issues that have been known issues for decades, and which by most available measures have been improving anyway.
I wonder how much of this nationwide protest movement is an expression of the desire to be free of lockdown? For months people languished at home, watching their lives fall away, longing for friends and companionship. Suddenly it's OK to get out and be with everyone you wanted to be with, provided only that you join one of these marches. All restrictions are lifted! Just join the throng.
People who had come to believe that enjoying any little liberty was tantamount to manslaughter are suddenly able to feel virtuous about going out and being with their friends. All it takes is a little submission: take a knee and pledge your loyalty to Wokeanda, Forever.
It's no wonder they're having such success. They opened a door to repressed desires, and made it a virtue to express them -- so long as you express them just this way.
I wonder how much of this nationwide protest movement is an expression of the desire to be free of lockdown? For months people languished at home, watching their lives fall away, longing for friends and companionship. Suddenly it's OK to get out and be with everyone you wanted to be with, provided only that you join one of these marches. All restrictions are lifted! Just join the throng.
People who had come to believe that enjoying any little liberty was tantamount to manslaughter are suddenly able to feel virtuous about going out and being with their friends. All it takes is a little submission: take a knee and pledge your loyalty to Wokeanda, Forever.
It's no wonder they're having such success. They opened a door to repressed desires, and made it a virtue to express them -- so long as you express them just this way.
By their Fruits
By coincidence, I was rereading the end of The Ballad of the White Horse the other day. After a book-length epic poem, Chesterton allows his King Alfred the Great to sum up the lessons he wants his contemporary readers to take.
In some far century, sad and slow,I suppose he thought that's where he was in 1903, or he wouldn't have written a book about it. It certainly sounds familiar today.
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.
"They shall not come with warships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands....
"They shall come mild as monkish clerks,
With many a scroll and pen;
And backward shall ye turn and gaze,
Desiring one of Alfred's days,
When pagans still were men....
"By this sign you shall know them,
The breaking of the sword,
And man no more a free knight,
That loves or hates his lord.
"Yea, this shall be the sign of them,
The sign of the dying fire;
And Man made like a half-wit,
That knows not of his sire.
"What though they come with scroll and pen,
And grave as a shaven clerk,
By this sign you shall know them,
That they ruin and make dark;
"By all men bond to Nothing,
Being slaves without a lord,
By one blind idiot world obeyed,
Too blind to be abhorred;
"By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin....
You Guys Like Music?
Check yourself vs. our current position. It's just a Terminator remake, from 1990, but it has a lot to say about where we are, and where they thought we'd be. The radio announcer says it'll be 110 downtown; and you know, it sometimes almost is, in July, in some towns even on the east coast. In 2016 when the DNC was in Philadelphia it was 108. I know because I was there. But we're not in anything like the constant dust-storms.
I guess there was an almost-hit song from the soundtrack.
Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?
D-Day was the biggest ANTIFA rally in history! Also, Winston Churchill was an intolerable racist who should receive no public honors.
UPDATE: Even Gandhi?
UPDATE: Even Gandhi?
Buildings and Things that Matter
The Philadelphia Inquirer has removed its top editor over a column he approved entitled "Buildings Matter, Too." You can still read the column, but it now has an eleven word headline.
She had a good point, the column's author, and the editor did his job by selecting the piece for publication and drawing attention to it with a punchy headline. In today's atmosphere, however, that's enough to have ended his career.
UPDATE: The Cultural Revolution continues, this time at NYT.
Does the destruction of buildings matter when black Americans are being brazenly murdered in cold blood by police and vigilantes?...Indeed the damage in multiple cities is evident already.
“People over property” is great as a rhetorical slogan. But as a practical matter, the destruction of downtown buildings in Philadelphia — and in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and a dozen other American cities — is devastating for the future of cities. We know from the civil rights uprisings of the 1960s that the damage will ultimately end up hurting the very people the protests are meant to uplift. Just look at the black neighborhoods surrounding Ridge Avenue in Sharswood or along the western end of Cecil B. Moore Avenue. An incredible 56 years have passed since the Columbia Avenue riots swept through North Philadelphia, and yet those former shopping streets are graveyards of abandoned buildings. Residents still can’t get a supermarket to take a chance on their neighborhood.
She had a good point, the column's author, and the editor did his job by selecting the piece for publication and drawing attention to it with a punchy headline. In today's atmosphere, however, that's enough to have ended his career.
UPDATE: The Cultural Revolution continues, this time at NYT.
Book Update
I received a proof today of the second attempt at getting a paperback version of Arms and White Samite. Thanks to Douglas' help, and the patience of the cover artist, most of the problems are fixed. There remain a few persistent issues that will require more work and another proof, but in a few weeks we might have a final version.
It is already much better, though. It's just not right.
It is already much better, though. It's just not right.
Right to Peaceful Protest
It’s too important to be limited by virus mitigation, but only if the cause is good enough. Don’t take my word for that; here are nearly thirteen hundred public health experts asserting it.
“Money quote: ‘This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.’”
“Money quote: ‘This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives.’”
"Define Racism"
It's a Socratic point, and one that brings us back around to the kinds of problems that Socrates tried to illustrate during his life. (That video in which the discussion was taking place, by the way, is a vivid warning of what kinds of genuinely terroristic tactics are available.)
In the Euthyphro, Socrates is after a definition of piety. Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father for murder; he claims that it is pious to do this because his relationship with his father should not blind him to the justice of the prosecution. Socrates suggests this is merely an example of something pious, not a definition of piety itself. Euthyphro decides that piety is doing what the gods love, and impiety doing what they dislike; Socrates presses him to explain whether the pious thing is pious because the gods love it, or whether -- and this is crucial -- they love it because it is pious.
There's a similar problem with racism. A lot of people accused of racism don't actually even believe in race. How can you be a racist if you reject that race represents something biologically real? The answer is that you take (or endorse) actions that disproportionately harm people of some races and not others. Yet this assumes the validity of race as a form of analysis; if race isn't real, why would you try to cash out its effects in terms of the harm 'to races' whose reality you have already rejected?
The best answer seems to be the one floated by Charles Mills and others, which is that race can be rejected biologically but not socially. Socially, race is real even if in fact there are not "races" in any meaningful biological sense. Then, rejecting race as a social phenomenon because you rejected it as a biological phenomenon is a category error, a serious philosophical mistake.
That still leaves us with problems. Given that the social phenomenon is based on an incorrect view of human nature and biology, we might wish to move to a more correct view. Yet because we have to continue to evaluate things in terms of the social account of race, we end up baking that view into our future. We can't leave it behind if we have to carry it with us, and constantly check ourselves against it. How do you build a society without race if you're judging progress by constantly referring to race? It's dead weight, but treated like a lodestone.
The second problem is that the social view is often incoherent, which makes it a poor lodestone anyway. In the discussion linked, the woman is charging racism based on the fact that a man suggested that this kind of violence was unsurprising in Mexico. There are two sets of problems with that.
The first is that Mexico includes people of many different genetic heritages, who are even less plausibly 'one race' than, say, denizens of Scotland (many of whom, these days, are from the Indian subcontinent). The fact is that the Mexican government has been involved in a decades-long fiction about 'La Raza' designed to paper that over. Yet if we can eliminate racism by constructing new races, well, why not start doing that here? Rather than continuing to recognize existing social definitions of race in America, might we not instead follow Mexico and institute a new 'American race' that ignores genetic heritage?
The second problem is that violence in Mexico is unsurprising for reasons that are severable from race, 'race,' or La Raza. If you're unsurprised by a violent assault in a country largely run by extraordinarily violent criminal cartels, well, why wouldn't you be? There's no reason to rope biological commentary into it. Mexico is violent because it is badly governed, especially in terms of the absence of a Second Amendment. The people endure the cartels and their violence not because they are genetically primed to do so, but because they are disarmed. The police are assassinated not because they are inferior or corrupt, but because the populace cannot provide them with effective support. They're too terrified to work with the police because they are kept defenseless.
The second problem, in other words, turns out to be that the incoherence of the definition ends up allowing it to be used in places where the concept is actively damaging to attempts to fix the problem. "It's all racism" suggests the problem is in people having a negative view of the chaos in Mexico, rather than the problem lying in the absence of positive steps to empower the citizens to defend themselves.
In the Euthyphro, Socrates is after a definition of piety. Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father for murder; he claims that it is pious to do this because his relationship with his father should not blind him to the justice of the prosecution. Socrates suggests this is merely an example of something pious, not a definition of piety itself. Euthyphro decides that piety is doing what the gods love, and impiety doing what they dislike; Socrates presses him to explain whether the pious thing is pious because the gods love it, or whether -- and this is crucial -- they love it because it is pious.
There's a similar problem with racism. A lot of people accused of racism don't actually even believe in race. How can you be a racist if you reject that race represents something biologically real? The answer is that you take (or endorse) actions that disproportionately harm people of some races and not others. Yet this assumes the validity of race as a form of analysis; if race isn't real, why would you try to cash out its effects in terms of the harm 'to races' whose reality you have already rejected?
The best answer seems to be the one floated by Charles Mills and others, which is that race can be rejected biologically but not socially. Socially, race is real even if in fact there are not "races" in any meaningful biological sense. Then, rejecting race as a social phenomenon because you rejected it as a biological phenomenon is a category error, a serious philosophical mistake.
That still leaves us with problems. Given that the social phenomenon is based on an incorrect view of human nature and biology, we might wish to move to a more correct view. Yet because we have to continue to evaluate things in terms of the social account of race, we end up baking that view into our future. We can't leave it behind if we have to carry it with us, and constantly check ourselves against it. How do you build a society without race if you're judging progress by constantly referring to race? It's dead weight, but treated like a lodestone.
The second problem is that the social view is often incoherent, which makes it a poor lodestone anyway. In the discussion linked, the woman is charging racism based on the fact that a man suggested that this kind of violence was unsurprising in Mexico. There are two sets of problems with that.
The first is that Mexico includes people of many different genetic heritages, who are even less plausibly 'one race' than, say, denizens of Scotland (many of whom, these days, are from the Indian subcontinent). The fact is that the Mexican government has been involved in a decades-long fiction about 'La Raza' designed to paper that over. Yet if we can eliminate racism by constructing new races, well, why not start doing that here? Rather than continuing to recognize existing social definitions of race in America, might we not instead follow Mexico and institute a new 'American race' that ignores genetic heritage?
The second problem is that violence in Mexico is unsurprising for reasons that are severable from race, 'race,' or La Raza. If you're unsurprised by a violent assault in a country largely run by extraordinarily violent criminal cartels, well, why wouldn't you be? There's no reason to rope biological commentary into it. Mexico is violent because it is badly governed, especially in terms of the absence of a Second Amendment. The people endure the cartels and their violence not because they are genetically primed to do so, but because they are disarmed. The police are assassinated not because they are inferior or corrupt, but because the populace cannot provide them with effective support. They're too terrified to work with the police because they are kept defenseless.
The second problem, in other words, turns out to be that the incoherence of the definition ends up allowing it to be used in places where the concept is actively damaging to attempts to fix the problem. "It's all racism" suggests the problem is in people having a negative view of the chaos in Mexico, rather than the problem lying in the absence of positive steps to empower the citizens to defend themselves.
Headlines from 2020
Slate: “Non-violence is an important tool for protests, but so is violence.”
That’s true, actually, but it does elide the moral question.
That’s true, actually, but it does elide the moral question.
"Rule of Law"
It's pretty much dead now, isn't it? First we had governors assuming emergency powers often in direct violation of the Constitution and their own state constitutions; now we've got widespread support for rioting. Bernie Sanders has an 8 point plan (some of which are very good and reasonable, like ending qualified immunity) that would replace many cops with social workers, and District Attorneys in blue cities won't prosecute rioters.
The other day Minneapolis police managed to ignore rioters but arrest a guy for defending his business from looting and arson. Why should a jury go along with that?
The other day Minneapolis police managed to ignore rioters but arrest a guy for defending his business from looting and arson. Why should a jury go along with that?
An Attempted Coup at NYT
Andrew Sullivan is right about this one.
It's worth noting that all of this chaos is happening in the blue cities and blue states. The target of Antifa and their ilk isn't you and me, it's blue institutions. The NYT is in danger for the same reason that the Minneapolis Police Department -- controlled by Democrats since 1978 -- is in danger. The Hard Left is trying to win control of the left-leaning powers, which in fact control most of America's cities and therefore much of America's wealth.
They might come for us later, or they might decide it's too much trouble especially since they'll have taught police, who might possibly have tried to carry out gun confiscations in red America, that their only friends are in red areas and red states. The hinterlands may be too hard a nut to crack if police won't enforce their laws here, and juries won't either.
It's worth noting that all of this chaos is happening in the blue cities and blue states. The target of Antifa and their ilk isn't you and me, it's blue institutions. The NYT is in danger for the same reason that the Minneapolis Police Department -- controlled by Democrats since 1978 -- is in danger. The Hard Left is trying to win control of the left-leaning powers, which in fact control most of America's cities and therefore much of America's wealth.
They might come for us later, or they might decide it's too much trouble especially since they'll have taught police, who might possibly have tried to carry out gun confiscations in red America, that their only friends are in red areas and red states. The hinterlands may be too hard a nut to crack if police won't enforce their laws here, and juries won't either.
Night-Fire Practice
I can hear my neighbors shooting tonight, a fairly impressive array of hardware. It's all too methodical and regular to be any sort of gunfight; they're just practicing and making sure everything is in good order.
They're going to be so disappointed when there's no reason to use all that stuff. These hub city ninjas aren't about to drive out shadowed dirt roads in the high mountains, where one human habitation can't be seen from the next. They'd be terrified by the sight of such an empty road, long before they ever got out to someone's trailer or cabin. Everyone knows what happens to people who go out beyond the Fields We Know into the Wilds Beyond.
It's even in the folk songs: "Once a stranger climbed old Rocky Top, looking for a moonshine still. Stranger ain't come down from Rocky Top, reckon he never will." "Well, I wonder where that Louisiana sheriff went to? You can sure get lost in the Louisiana bayou."
It is an irony that Mad Max (1979) treated the cities as a kind of safe place, with the wilderness controlled by violent motorcycle gangs. It turns out it's the other way around. Police protection doesn't protect. Every night our cities burn with fire, and every night our mountains linger through the long gloam to twilight, fearsome, lonesome, and at peace.
They're going to be so disappointed when there's no reason to use all that stuff. These hub city ninjas aren't about to drive out shadowed dirt roads in the high mountains, where one human habitation can't be seen from the next. They'd be terrified by the sight of such an empty road, long before they ever got out to someone's trailer or cabin. Everyone knows what happens to people who go out beyond the Fields We Know into the Wilds Beyond.
It's even in the folk songs: "Once a stranger climbed old Rocky Top, looking for a moonshine still. Stranger ain't come down from Rocky Top, reckon he never will." "Well, I wonder where that Louisiana sheriff went to? You can sure get lost in the Louisiana bayou."
It is an irony that Mad Max (1979) treated the cities as a kind of safe place, with the wilderness controlled by violent motorcycle gangs. It turns out it's the other way around. Police protection doesn't protect. Every night our cities burn with fire, and every night our mountains linger through the long gloam to twilight, fearsome, lonesome, and at peace.
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