I'm putting a contact email in the comments for anyone else who is interested in staying in touch. Just send me an email and I'll add you to the list.
Backup Contact Info
I'd like to have a way to stay in touch with the regulars if the blog ever goes away, or if we ever decide to have a reunion party (Can it be a "re" union if we've never met?) or whatnot.
Laboratories of democracy
My messy local government spat over tax policy, debt, and voters' rights is still evolving. To my amazement, the relatively non-functional county government managed to get its act together in time to put our proposed bond on the November ballot by the August 17 deadline, thus ensuring that (if we win voter approval) we can borrow our funds by early 2021 and not blow the construction schedule for our new courthouse or imperil our partial grant funding.
Meanwhile, the comparatively transparent and orderly city government simply didn't. They'd just witnessed a rapid and successful petition effort to force an election on the county's separate $20MM bond proposal to build a courthouse. The city was using the same negative-notice bond proposal statute to attempt to borrow its own $20MM for a city hall without an election. The petitioners moved off their county bond triumph to mount a petition drive on the city bond. It was obvious they would quickly succeed--it took only one weekend--but their deadline for presenting the petition was the day after the deadline for putting the city bond on the ballot. The city, which should have taken the same pre-emptive action the county took, simply missed its deadline to put the city bond on the November ballot. Denial? Fury? Distraction? Inability to escape the bubble of their like-minded friends? I really don't get it. They're usually pretty sober. Now the city has to wait until next May for an election to approve its bond, if they don't abandon the bond effort completely. This is disastrous for the city but not an overwhelming problem for the petitioners. It makes no sense.
Meanwhile, as we all gear up for a November election on the county bond, both the county and the city boosters seem to want to continue to spend time complaining about those deplorable voters who exercised their right to demand an election. Why, oh why, did they demand it at the last minute? Why didn't they get comfortable with the proposed bonds, as the government leaders vaguely hoped they would, though without troubling themselves to inform or convince anyone that $40 million in debt was a fine idea? I find myself having to say repeatedly that the city and the county had complete control over their own schedules for when to publish the twin 45-day notices of intent to borrow without an election, both of which were always and by statute subject to the right of voters to petition for an election. The voters could not force the city or county to publish the notices weeks or months earlier, but I cannot find any reason why the city or county couldn't have done so. The numbers may not have been crystal clear last spring, but they're not crystal clear now, either. You pick the best number you can and try to borrow that, explaining to the public as best you can why it's the right number. What is the difficulty here?
There is also continued grousing over the idea that 5% of voters can override the presumptive will of most voters to approve these wonderful bonds. My own view: the alternative is to let 5 people control the bond decision for the entire city full of voters, and another 5 people control the bond decision for the entire county full of voters. At least this way, all the voters will get a chance to decide how wonderful the bonds are.
Did either the county or the city leadership deliberately wait until the last minute? I can't think why they would, but I guess it's possible. They're not talking. They're just resentful it didn't work. I understand the resentment, in a way, but I'll be darned if I can understand why they think it's a good idea to keep talking about the resentment when what they really need is to win a vote on the bonds. They should be falling all over themselves to congratulate the voters on their franchise rights, and working hard to give them good facts and arguments in favor of the bonds. Instead, they're up to their usual strategies of fighting transparency with a bitter determination born of the conviction that it's simply wrong to distrust them and joggle their expert elbows. Monday's Commissioners Court meeting was practically a morality play entitled "what local government officials act like when you presume to ask questions and they despise you for it."
Not many people watched the Democratic National Convention
. . . and that's the good news, says Glenn Reynolds.
He also says he got an unusual amount of hate speech for this USA weekly article, which he attributes to people having moved from the denial to the anger stage of bereavement.
Choosing America
Cuban-American Maximo Alvarez warns us what his father warned him when they arrived in this county: Don't lose this place. If we let happen here what we let happen in Cuba, there is nowhere else to go.
How transmissible is COVID really?
A Chinese study (I know, I know) of 391 primary COVID cases did some good work sorting out the incidence of transmission to the patients' aggregate 3,410 close contacts--about 9 close contacts per index patient. It found that only 3.7% of those close contacts caught the disease. Of that 3.7%, 6.3% of cases were asymptomatic, 16.8% were mild, 73.1% were moderate, and 10.1% were severe or critical. That means less than half a percent of the close contacts of the original patients picked up a severe or critical disease as a result.
There was considerable difference in the kind of contact that encouraged transmission as well. The transmission rate to household members was 10.3%, much higher than the average 3.7% rate. The transmission rate to healthcare workers was 1.0%, much lower than the average rate. The transmission rate on public transportation was even lower: 0.1%.
It also makes a big difference whether the index case is mild or severe. For asymptomatic index cases, the transmission rate was only 0.3%. For mild index cases, it was 3.3%; for moderate cases, 5.6%; and for severe or critical cases, 6.2%. The highest transmission rate was for index cases "with expectoration," 13.6%. The overall transmission rate for all kinds of cases without expectoration was 3.0%.
The lesson here is that the transmission rate is surprisingly low, even for obviously ill index patients, and the biggest societal risk factor is the size of their group of "close contacts." If infected people managed to keep their close contacts under 9, they'd be spreading their illness even less on average. That might prove difficult for severely ill people who require intensive care, but it shouldn't be that hard for anyone with a moderate case. The spread rate for asymptomatic cases is so small--a tenth or twentieth of the spread rate for symptomatic cases--that it barely figures into public policy.
The bottom line is that the disease will bounce off of 86% even of people in close contact with an "expectorating" COVID patient. It will bounce off an astounding 99.7% of people whose only exposure is to a completely asymptomatic COVID patient.
What internet politics looks like to normal people
I'd embed the YouTube video directly, but that way it comes with an intro ad. This is a link to PowerLine, where you can watch it without that annoyance, and maybe enjoy other PowerLine articles while you're at it.
I sure hope this is how the independents are seeing it.
Why'dya believe me? It was just a debate
Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris seems to be confused about the difference between a lawyer taking a position she doesn't believe during a trial, on behalf of a client, and a candidate for president taking a position she doesn't believe during a debate.
"These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
"The Walls Are Closing In"
The first Durham indictment! Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith will plead guilty to
doctoring an email used as part of a process to secure court approval to renew surveillance on a onetime Trump campaign junior adviser, Carter Page. The Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, referred the matter for criminal review. . . . Despite the federal surveillance of Carter Page, he was never charged with any crime.NPR reports the Klinesmith indictment pretty straight, with nothing like my title's nostalgia for how this kind of thing was reported when the shoe was on the other foot a couple of years ago. Not to worry, most of the rest of the NLMSM are is accompanied by headlines and ledes suggesting that the investigation does not, repeat not, point to any higher-up conspiracy of any kind, quit saying it does, nothing to see here, move along. When they're done with that message, they turn to worries that the timing of further Durham indictments may be calculated to affect the election. They also spend some time explaining that there's no indication--really! none!--that Klinesmith has cut a deal and is singing like a canary.
Medical Politics
I don't claim to know much about how COVID treatments work, but I find this article pretty persuasive.
Hiatus
Thanks for all the commentary on the post below about closing the Hall. For now I will follow the advice some of you gave and leave the Hall open for archival use and for my co-bloggers to continue to use as they prefer. AVI's recommendation based on his own experience is what I'll follow: for now consider me on at least temporary hiatus, which may become permanent if I don't rediscover a desire to do this.
I might be around to comment on posts from time to time, but I will not be visiting or posting on a daily, weekly, or any regular basis.
Some posts from the archive will be deleted if I want to publish them elsewhere, or if in my review of the archives I decide to remove them.
You can contact me by email if you need me, but I won't necessarily be checking that regularly either. I need to focus on professional duties when I'm behind a keyboard; and I need to spend less time behind keyboards, too. More in the wind.
Truth and justice prevail in my hometown
My county's citizens prevailed in their move to force the Commissioners Court to set a proposed bond for election. The powers-that-be are glum. The bond is mostly to fund the construction of a new courthouse, a project I believe would have been more likely to win voter approval in November if we (1) made it smaller and cheaper and (2) not tried to pull it off without an election first. But we'll see what my neighbors think. The proposed new courthouse, though expensive, is pretty nice, and our post-storm temporary quarters really aren't a long-term fix.
One of the pleasures of the process has been a woman who spoke at yesterday's contentious Commissioners Court meeting. Oh, she was a star! The whole package: telegenic, good writing, good delivery, seemingly effortless ability to deflect bullying. She spoke simply and intelligently for about five minutes about the importance of preserving the right to vote in a time when our civil rights are under assault. I'm determined to get her to run for office.
Bats and madness
Powerline notes in The Week in Pictures that the Libertarian presidential candidate has been bitten by a possibly rabid bat, and adds
That’s no way to compete for Biden’s voting base.
Sanity
I am proofreading a book on William Blake by G. K. Chesterton. Addressing the question whether the passionate Blake was mad, Chesterton argues that the wild supernaturalism of the classical world was conquered by the coolly rational Romans, followed by a reversion to mysticism by Christianity, tempered but never strictly sane in the Roman sense:
it may be said in passing that thechief claim of Christianity is exactly this--thatit revived the pre-Roman madness, yet broughtinto it the Roman order. The gods had reallydied long before Christ was born. What hadtaken their place was simply the god ofgovernment--Divus Cæsar. The pagans ofthe real Roman Empire were nothing if notrespectable. It is said that when Christ wasborn the cry went through the world that Panwas dead. The truth is that when Christ wasborn Pan for the first time began to stir in hisgrave. The pagan gods had become purefables when Christianity gave them a new leaseof life as devils. . . . But it put upon this occultchaos the Roman idea of balance and sanity.Thus, marriage was a sacrament, but mere sexwas not a sacrament as it was in many of thefrenzies of the forest. Thus wine was a sacramentwith Christ; but drunkenness was not asacrament as with Dionysus. In short, Christianity(merely historically seen) can best beunderstood as an attempt to combine thereason of the market-place with the mysticismof the forest. It was an attempt to accept allthe superstitions that are necessary to man andto be philosophic at the end of them. PaganRome has sought to bring order or reasonamong men. Christian Rome sought to bringorder and reason among gods.
Always root for the underdog
After seven decades in power, the [Chinese] ruling party has faced potentially existential challenges over the past year, from pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and an economic slowdown to a devastating coronavirus and, most recently, once-in-a-generation floods that have wreaked destruction across central China.But far from diminishing its stature at home, as some in the Trump administration appear to believe, the party’s response to some of these crises has helped solidify the support of existing and aspiring members — or at least neutralized grumbling.That’s right: WaPo’s Anna Fifield actually wrote a puff-piece celebrating that scrappy little Chinese Communist Party for overcoming long odds in a difficult year.
Violence and Growth
So as promised, here are my reflections on the subject of violence and growth. We began the discussion in the comments of this post, and continued it briefly here. You can find links to the Classical readings at the second of those links.
The issue at stake is how violence creates capacities to excel -- a capacity for excellence is arete in the Greek, and virtus in Latin, "virtue" in English -- yet also can create serious damage. That it does both is obvious, as the comments note at the first link; practical experience shows it.
One might hope that the damage could be avoided, and the good still gained in another way. This is the subject of the discussion among the Greeks in Plato's Laches, which Socrates is invited to join as he is a man of proven military valor. All the participants in the discussion are. The question is whether having sons practice 'fighting in armor' with masters who travel around teaching fighting techniques -- the ancient Greek version of martial arts teachers -- will also teach their sons courage. The debate ends in aporia, that is, with the members of the discussion stating that they aren't sure about the answer after all the talk. Yet several things do emerge. One is that, while these men cannot say for certain exactly what courage is, they have all demonstrated it practically. Whether or not 'practicing in armor' can bring forth courage, war certainly can and does.
It seems as if the quality of war that does what practice may not is the exposure to the genuine possibility of harm. Some practice, then, looks better than others. This weekend the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit suffered a tragic loss at sea of eight Marines and a sailor. These men were literally 'practicing in armor,' and trying to develop an excellence of capacity through that practice: an excellence in amphibious warfare. Their deaths are not in vain, for their comrades will be more successful in developing courage as well as other virtues given the clear example of how perilous the training itself can be. If it felt safe -- worse even than if it was safe -- there would be no more benefit to one's courage than comes from 'fighting' in pads, with padded objects.
Likewise in the Middle Ages, knights engaged in tournaments that were very nearly as brutal as war. An essay whose author and title I cannot currently recall points out that one of the most marked features of knights in the chivalric literature is wounds: the experience of being wounded, and of recovering from wounds (or not recovering from them) suffuses the literature. Even Lancelot is occasionally bed-bound and near death, tended by another and dependent on their care. Sometimes this is a lady, but often it is a former knight who has become a religious hermit or brother -- and whose expertise with such wounds comes from experience. To be brave and skilled seems to require the practice of doing dangerous things, which sometimes entails getting hurt.
This is what we would expect from reading Aristotle. All virtues of character, he notes, arise from practice. This is because the thing exists in us already as a potential (here we have what AVI would point to in terms of genetic heritage). But a potential is only a 'first actuality'; at first one's courage is only that one has the ability to become courageous. One's character changes by actually doing the things, until such time as one does them without needing to work up to it very much. Eventually courage is so habitual that it requires no thought, yet this does not make it irrational, says Aristotle: because it was rationally chosen and inculcated, the courageous man will do immediately what the thinking man would choose if he had time to think it through. So with all the virtues.
Yet Aristotle only gives us the happy part of the picture. Indeed for Aristotle, courage entails success in war: the brave conquer, if they are brave enough. Practically we know this is not true. Often the bravest fall to superior numbers, but also -- like our bold Marines fallen this weekend -- to bad luck. This is what I think is absent from the Classical discussion: the role of moral luck.
In fact I have been extremely lucky, for which I am deeply grateful. I have been to war three times. I have been rocketed, mortared, machine-gunned and shot at with Kalashnikovs, and so many times that I long ago lost count. Yet I have experienced no serious harm from the wars. Another friend, whom I've written of before, experienced a mortar in a different way. A mortarman himself, one with extensive combat experience in OIF I, he was eventually badly concussed -- badly enough that he was forced to transfer out of the infantry. The damage to his brain is obvious and lingering, and he has trouble keeping it together; indeed, sometimes he doesn't manage to keep it together. He is still courageous, but now also dangerous in bad ways because of the loss of the virtue of self-control. The loss is not his fault; it was bad luck.
We have some limited control over this, but only insofar as we are the ones with the sword. We can learn to recognize the kinds of harms that cause trauma, and to avoid doing that kind of damage in preference to others. Sometimes this is impractical or unwise, as it would be unwise to risk your comrades clearing a room full of al Qaeda when a grenade would do it without similar risk (and anyway the hope is not to traumatize the foe, but to kill him, after which he will suffer no harm save from whatever judgment may befall his soul, the justice of which we have no ground to doubt). We can learn, though, not to inflict psychological harms on people in less warlike conflicts; we can choose to fight them fairly, preferring even physical wounds to psychic ones (though there is clear overlap with issues like traumatic brain injury).
Even this kind of control is limited, and it flows downstream from us to our foes. Hopefully they might respond in kind; probably they will not. This was the ideal of the knights, who praised chivalrous treatment of one's enemies very highly. In practice, even for them, it was rare. The practicality of ransom might save a knight or a nobleman who fell on the battlefield; but as likely as not, a wounded man would be knifed and his body looted. Practically in recent wars our foes would behead captives on film, or burn them alive; or enslave them, if they were women. In the next war our foes are likely to be Communists again, and the Communist treatment of prisoners has historically been built around psychological abuse -- or summary execution. So if we do it, at least at war, we do it because it is right and itself virtuous rather than because it is likely to return any benefit to us. The best we can hope for from it is that it might give us people to negotiate with at the end of the war, veterans of the conflict who will understand the hardships of war as we do and who have reasons not to hate us as much as others do.
It is more beneficial in the cases under discussion in the comments. We have strong practical reasons to oppose abuse of children, the elderly, and weaker parties in general. We know this causes harms that are not easily fixed, even into adulthood. The abused may develop a courageous capacity out of learning to survive abuse, but there are cleaner ways to develop their capacities. I suppose that is not controversial.
What Aristotle might suggest to those who have suffered abuses, or bad luck, is probably that they should continue to practice the virtues they need. Last year I attended a MARSOC-oriented charity dinner (called the Brothers in Arms Foundation, if you happen to be looking to donate to something). One of the speakers was a former member of MARSOC who, after years of what he described as the best possible life -- the life of suiting up in armor and killing America's enemies -- stepped on a pressure-plate IED and lost his ability to walk. He was learning again, and could at this point stand with a cane. His speech was impressive, and he received much genuine admiration from all present, but his case cannot be as happy as he bravely made out. His sacrifice was terrible, yet he is doing his best with it. That may be the best that can be done.
It may be necessary in less physical matters too. It might be necessary to practice being brave enough to confess (as happened here in the comments of the first post) that one cannot connect emotionally as some do. Perhaps this might give rise to some trusted relationships in which one can practice trying to do so, to nurture whatever potential for it remains. We can often only do our best with what we have; Fate sends what she does, and we must do what we can.
That is practical advice, but it is not great advice. It is a hard road. Some of us choose to dare it, and our injured Marine shows why: because it is the best possible life, to live boldly and free. It does not last forever, and it might end at any time. We may hope, as I do, that it ends in a quick and worthy death rather than in trauma, in painful labor without any hope of returning to the glories that went before. We should bear friendship and fellowship to those who have had that bad luck, though, because the bad luck came to them for reasons apart from their virtues. They may well be -- likely are -- better men than we are, in part just because they are having to practice harder with less hope.
As always, I leave the discussion open. These thoughts will be less valuable than your own.
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