"Why won't anyone listen to us?"

The scary thing about progressives wailing when people won't listen to their wisdom is how quickly they're willing to conclude that they'll just have to find ways to use more force than persuasion, for our own good.

In the Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber conducts a long-winded analysis of the "Obama-Springsteen" echo chamber.  I had to get to the very bottom to find his point:  his crowd always has hoped and believed, with good reason, that they can conduct stealth politics by controlling popular culture, but now he finds with dismay that people sense the stink of propaganda and tune out the culture.  People outside the Obama-Springsteen echo chamber may actually recoil and find both their entertainment and their political messages elsewhere--from those bad, bad people with a different message that we haven't managed to squelch yet.

Indeed, many of the people Obama wants to reach are the ones who systematically avoid him for reasons of culture, politics, or both. . . . Obama demonstrates the toxic effects of Fox News by recalling an anecdote from late in his White House tenure. He had gone to visit a community college in a red state, and the locals tuning in to his speech from a nearby bar asked, “Is this how Obama usually sounds?” to a reporter who was there with them. Clearly they had been getting their news from sources that rarely broadcast the commander in chief speaking uninterrupted.

“Now, keep in mind, at that point I had probably been president for the last five or six years,” Obama says to Springsteen. “The filter was so thick that I, as president of the United States, could not reach those guys unless I actually went to their town.”

Why, yes, you can inspire a target audience to recoil in horror and, even if they can't escape your deeply unpopular laws, to exercise their right not to soak up your condescending lectures. They aren't required to continue to listen.  They may even start listening to other people whose messages you deplore. This is what happens to people who don't genuinely believe in the power of persuasion, only the power of propaganda and, if that fails, censorship and force.

Kornhaber concludes that the peril of the echo chamber "only emphasizes the limits of politics-as-culture":

The Biden era has already provided a clinic in the seriousness of those limits: Here is a president, like Obama before him, backed by Hollywood and enjoying a popular-vote majority—yet still unable to pass his agenda due to intractable political obstacles. Would any amount of conscientious conversation nix the filibuster or sway Joe Manchin? Money, demographics, institutions, and pure power still rule, and many of the stories we tell lately in hopes of shifting that reality just end up distracting from it.

So the problem is money, demographics, institutions, and pure power, not that Biden can't get his way because too many people despise the policies he's now pushing, after running a campaign in which many understood him to be promising something completely different.  Kornhaber seems to labor under the delusion that Biden conscientiously conversed with voters, who inexplicably failed to listen.  Frankly, Biden didn't try, and if he had, the voters' rejection wouldn't have signaled a problem with their ears, but with the content of the message.  Thus Biden follows up with the notion that he's "running out of patience."  And the terrible voters don't like that either.

Numbing guilt

The Washington Examiner looks at a recent John McWhorter analysis of wokeness as a religion.  Part of McWhorter's approach is almost getting to be old-hat:  the equation of woke frenzy with other anti-intellectual fundamentalisms.  One part that caught my eye was his observation that wokeness appeals to our deep need to silence a nagging conscience.

My own view is:  beware any creed that soothes your conscience without changing your own behavior.  There's a reason the communion prayer includes the request to guard us from the temptation to seek solace only, and not strength, or pardon only, and not renewal.  In my experience most of us are in an almost ceaseless quest to find the magic elixir that numbs pain, whether it's drunkenness, rage, power, security, or the many distractions of hedonism.  Without ever having been much attracted to Eastern mysticism, I do appreciate the directive of Buddhism to pay attention and respect to what is actually happening here and now, no matter how distressing, not papering it over with fluff.  What can't be cured must be endured, but what can be cured should be.  If it needs to change, change it, stop wishing it away or hoping someone else will pay the price to alter it.  In short, spend your own treasure on whatever you claim is bothering you.

The flip-side of trust

 The flip-side of trust is self-government.

Control yourself, or others will control you.  Many will try, anyway, but we don't have to tempt them any more than necessary, or make it easier for them.

Trust

I sometimes find that I watch nearly all dramas through the filter of the "Prisoner's Dilemma": how will people behave so that they can trust each other? What rotten and avoidable things will happen when they don't? An article this morning about draconian enforcement of Title IX rules to punish college students who have casual sex with drunk partners reminded me how crazy human interactions can get if we persist in pretending we are invulnerable, autonomous, and amoral particles when engage with each other. That works reasonably well for routine, repetitive, predictable economic transactions with distant strangers. It's a ridiculous approach to neighbors, friends, and certainly sexual partners.

The linked article described two panicked college students who woke up after a one-night stand in which both were too drunk to have given effective consent. Knowing that either could ruin the life of the other by being the first to lodge a Title IX complaint, the young man decided to be the first to rat. Title IX prosecutions being the Kafkaesque joke they are, the slower-to-complain young woman found that defending against such accusations is futile. Both would have been fine if they'd each demonstrated a spine, but neither could be sure the other would. Or maybe the whole story is nothing but a dystopian fable, who knows. If so, it's not an implausible one.

The Prisoner's Dilemma poses a limited threat to people who have an unshakeable moral core and go to some trouble to become intimate only with others who clearly have the same. With casual neighbors, you can generally limit your exposure to self-defeating treachery by trusting each other provisionally on smaller, lower-stakes interactions. The worst that can happen is probably no more devastating than not getting your borrowed tool back, so you'll know better next time. With friends, well, if he habitually walks the check or spills your secrets or expects to be bailed out of jail without reciprocating, you'll learn. With lovers, you may have to forgo sex with someone you just met and about whom you know absolutely nothing--especially if you attend a university run by crazed ideologues.

How a young woman, or even a young man, could maintain any self-respect while whining about "non-consensual" sex in any other context than violence, I cannot imagine. It's as if people were begging to be subjected to a rigid system of chaperonage. They're practically shouting "I can't be trusted to exercise any judgment about how out-of-control and helpless I render myself among people whose trustiworthiness I haven't troubled to learn anything about." In other words, you can't trust me, I can't trust him, and we all need to live in tyranny in order to be even remotely safe.

When we've exhausted the protective strategies against betrayal and still get caught short, we still have a choice: not to be a jerk. Yes, we may be unfairly punished, but we don't have to be a jerk in a more comfortable cell.

Whiteside

That is the name of the mountain to the right, which is more obvious when the sun is on the rock face. The basin below is the headwaters of the Chatooga river, a tributary of the mighty Savannah. 

Maybe just a tad of projection?

 As Glenn Youngkin ties up Terry McAuliffe in the race for governor of Virginia, the forces of blue are getting a little wild-eyed.  First former Pres. Obama showed up to accuse the dreadful GOP of manufacturing fake outrage over petty incidents like girls being raped in public school bathrooms by boys in skirts.  Now McAuliffe has blurted out a classic line:

“Folks, we will not allow Glenn Youngkin to bring his hate and his chaos in our Virginia schools. And we will never let our children be used as political pawns.”

I imagine I'm not the only voter who sees more hate and chaos in nutty school policies that leave 15-year-old girls the pawns of woke-trans orthodoxy. The upcoming Virginia election returns may display some outrage that's not at all fake.

Riding through Panthertown

The Panthertown Wilderness borders Lake Toxaway, and US 64. 

A Tax on Unrealized Gains

For the last decade or so, I've been hearing about Modern Monetary Theory and how the government can just print money to buy whatever it wants. Now apparently it has decided it can also tax money that hasn't actually been made.

This idea could work -- badly, and with many negative economic effects, but it could work -- if you forced everyone to sell off all their investments every year, realize their gains, pay taxes on them, and then re-purchase whatever they could afford of their investments with the money they had left after you taxed them. 

The idea as presented is madness, confidently asserted by the very experts and elites who are supposed to know what they are doing.

Oh, a Fed

Suddenly the chief mystery of Jan 6 — to whit, why the more-than-ample security forces available to the Capitol were close to unemployed, the Capitol being instead defended by a smaller cohort than typical for a weekday— looks as if it might have a good answer. 

Dune (Part I) Review

It was far too beautiful an afternoon to spend in a movie theater, but I did spend it anyway because my wife has been longing to see this new movie for months. The novel at least is something that has meant a great deal to me; I read it each time before deploying to Iraq, because its intense politics of assassination was a great way to get into the mindset of the business at hand.

Many people have long desired a new Dune movie. The 1984 adaptation is a better movie than it often gets credited for being, and comparisons with this movie make that clear. This new movie, like the deplorable recent Hobbit adaptation, has decided to spin out into multiple movies what was done in just one in 1984. Perhaps because they thought all that extra time would give them time to spare, they edited with much less care. Every minute of the 1984 movie is spent telling the story; this one spends a lot of time playing out visual spectacles (even repetitive ones, like multiple landings of spacecraft when one would have done, or when it might have been omitted). 

Yet the 2021 movie ends up leaving out a lot of the story that the 1984 film conveyed in a shorter time frame. One now never sees the Emperor or hears of his court, nor meets his daughter -- the ultimate political object of the action of the film being her marriage to the protagonist and its subsequent conveyance of the throne onto him. One does not meet several other major characters. Exactly what the order of Bene Gesserit women is up to is spelled out in sketch rather than detail. It's quite surprising how deficient the storytelling is given that they had a lot more time. 

The characters, mostly, are not as well portrayed. The exception is the Harkonnens, who are definite improvements over the clownish 1984 villains. These are much more believably malicious, though again important details are left out, as are major characters.

In especial the film completely misunderstands the Lady Jessica, who is portrayed here as emotional, weak, and brittle. I cannot understand how anyone read the novel and came to the conclusion that this was the right way to portray her. Perhaps they meant to give her a longer character arc, but that was an error if so. Her character arc was long enough even starting as a master of politics and her arts, of extreme personal discipline that gave way only occasionally out of her capacity for deep love. This version of her is vastly less admirable, which diminishes the whole. 

Paul's arc always started weak, but this Paul is especially weak. Weak men seems to be the style of the era. The Duncan Idaho character (very well played by Jason Momoa, as was Duke Leto by his actor) even mocks his lack of muscle in lines the film added to enhance his pathetic stature. This is a model well-familiar to audiences of contemporary movies; it was the one used for Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon. It is not quite right for a story set in a world as harsh as Dune's. 

Thurfir Hawat is depicted as a fat clown in a swollen uniform who fails at everything. This is entirely a betrayal of the logician and mathematician who is also a deadly Master of Assassins. Hawat was one of the strongest characters in the novel, and is almost a nonentity here. 

There are the usual irritating submissions to the idol of diversity, including turning the planetary ecologist and Judge of the Change into a black female for no other reason. The Fremen, being the good guys, are depicted as a relatively diverse coalition of Africans and Arabs. This is an attempt to portray them as if they were contemporary Muslims -- who really are diverse -- rather than as the novel's intended aboriginal population of a desert planet, whose faith is not Islam but a future creation inspired in some ways by Islam and in some ways by Bene Gesserit manipulations (again, only hinted at in this film). 

So, for the most part, this was an inferior production even compared to the 1984 rendition that is often panned for its cartoonishness. Where it excelled, very much, was in its visuals and audibles. The Voice is conveyed well using improved audio technology; the visuals are often quite stunning. The shields used in the sword and knife fighting are much improved over the silly CGI of the 1984 edition, and the depiction of weapons technology also very much better. It definitely does not come off as cartoonish; it's just not good in many important ways.

The sandworms are, I think, a kind of draw. The new ones move more like living beings, and have their own plausibility; but the 1984 sandworms remain very strong characterizations. 

Worth watching to see the visuals; quite disappointing on substance. 

UPDATE: This guy liked it more than I did, but I think his article underlines the critique. If you just saw the movie, you wouldn't know any of the stuff he points out. What are the weird space nuns doing? Who are these guys with tattooed lips whose eyes roll back in their heads while they perform advanced calculations? (They should be stained lips, but whatever.) Why are there no computers anywhere? 

It only takes him a few hundred words to lay out the basics in his article, which means that you could have told the viewer all of the important parts in a two and a half hour movie -- let alone several of them. 

Viral Liberty

This is a good essay.

A Small Victory

It's only words, but at least they're retreating in rhetoric.

Seen Riding

I rode the Nantahala Gorge and down into Georgia, as far as cotton country. The cotton is looking good this year. I saw a lot of political flags, mostly Trump-related. But I saw one big billboard near Murphy, which read:

WE THE PEOPLE

are pissed off!

-------------------

Gun Store, 1 mile on right.

Beautiful weather, but a very late autumn for color. The trees have had a good year, my wife says: low stress, plenty of water, warmth late. 

Sose on Australia

I realize that only a few of you are motorcycle riders, and those of you in clubs or associations are not 1%ers but members of Veteran clubs and the like. Nevertheless I think this is one of those 'first they came for the...' situations, where we ought to stand up for the rights of free expression and free association for the outermost.

Likewise, I realize this is Australia, which is a sovereign nation and not a part of our business. However, these are natural rights violations in the Anglosphere -- a process already too far along in terms of the right to self defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to speak freely even when others call what you say 'hateful,' and now the right to wear clothes or tattoos the powers dislike, or to gather with those you choose as friends.

"We get closer and closer to Communism every day." 

Scroll to 9:30 for his set of solutions if you don't want to hear him discuss the problem at length.

Vikings in America by 1021

A new study radiocarbon-dates the tree rings cut by settlers at L’Anse aux Meadows.

Maoist Self-Criticism

Yalies are upset that people are using the term "Maoist" to describe their forays into self-criticism, declaring with four-letter emphasis that the terminology is "racist." 

These Ivy League places are apparently not very good schools. Mao was of course not a race, but an individual; Maoism was not limited to the practice of any race, but was an intense species of Marxism that became popular among more radical Communists worldwide. 

Meanwhile they are avoiding grappling with the merit of the analogy between their practices and Maoism. Like all analogies, this one only carries as far as it does; but there really is a similarity between Maoist self-criticism (a practice that belongs especially to Maoism as opposed to Communism generally) and their teachings on race. Particularly when they are doing 'white fragility' training, the idea is so close as to look like a straight borrowing from Maoist practice: to constantly examine yourself for ideological failings, to self-confess these publicly, and to seek to make further amends in the hope of becoming more perfectly ideologically aligned. 

All this is of course aimed at providing cover for their efforts to eliminate competing ideologies, in this case the Federalist Society. This too is characteristic of Maoism as well.

Lawyers are often told to bang the table when both the facts and the law are against them, but this is mere childish folderol. Yale should be ashamed to be producing such specimens. 

Boosters

We got booster Pfizer shots this week.  Sore arms, otherwise no big deal.  I'm increasingly concerned by the trend of growing per capita breakthrough deaths among populations who are farther and farther from their initial vaccination dates.  As a general rule, us older types may have immune systems that need more frequent reminders.  If I'm wrong, well, I made the best guess I could.

I'm thinking of getting caught up on other vaccinations, too:  tetanus, shingles, maybe even flu.  Never having had the flu, as far as I know, I've never been in the habit of giving it much thought.

I continue to spend some time on social media every day spreading what I think is the most reliable information about the relative risks of COVID and COVID vaccine.  Most people haven't a clue about probability or risk, it seems.  Someone almost invariably responds with an anecdote about a single person's counter-experience, an approach that makes sense only when one is presented with a claim that a particular result is 100% uniform, and can be falsified by a single negative result.  The idea of comparing two relatively small risks is quite foreign.  A lot of people complain, too, that they can't find absolute answers to questions like "how long will my natural or vaccinated immunity last exactly?"  It's like asking, "How many days until I get a particular kind of cancer, and then how many days will I live?"  Not that it's an excuse for medical experts (or bureaucrats) who offer paternalizing absolutist pap in the form of ironclad edicts, but sometimes you see what tempts them to snap "Stop arguing about it and just do what I say."

Nevertheless, I'm not an idiot, and I have no plans to enjoy being dictated to by people who have blown their own credibility too many times to count.

Lower Your Expectations

There's a quip going around that yesterday's Washington Post editorial summarizes the current administration's policy as nicely as Trump's slogan summarizes his.

Trump:  "Make America Great Again."

Biden: "Try Lowering Your Expectations."

There's an important distinction to be made between policy and individual life. As an individual, in fact many of these disruptions are going to be quite beyond your power to affect. You may be wiser to accept that, and lower your expectations about what your society is able to achieve -- at least for a while. You'll be happier if you focus on the things you can in fact affect.

Indeed, this is the core insight of both Stoicism and Zen/Ch'an Buddhist ethics. For example:

40. Being in the World Without Misery

Huitang said:

What has been long neglected cannot be restored immediately.

Ills that have been accumulating a long time cannot be cleared away overnight.

One cannot enjoy oneself forever.

Human emotions cannot be just right.

Calamity cannot be avoided by trying to run away from it.

Anyone... who has realized these five things can be in the world without misery. 

[Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston & London: Shambala Pocket Classics), 1993]

The Stoic knows that he cannot change very much at all about the world, and so focuses on the few things that are in his power. These chiefly include whether he becomes upset about things he cannot control, or accepts the world as he finds it and focuses his effort on behaving virtuously. This begins with accepting that death is certain, and he must live courageously in spite of its certainty. (Cf. 'calamity cannot be avoided by trying to run away from it.') It eventually embraces all things that cannot be changed: the bus is late, the supply chains are disrupted, the autumn is short and the cold winter is coming, beloved dogs do not live as long as we do, and neither do our fathers. 

So, as an individual ethic, this is excellent advice that lies at the core of wise ethical systems. 

It is less good as policy advice. There are more things that an organized community can do than that an individual can do, and merely accepting that things will get worse was not acceptable even to the Stoics or the Buddhists. Marcus Aurelius was both a Roman emperor and a Stoic philosopher. He did not neglect the affairs of the empire out of Stoic virtue, but rather used his Stoic virtue to focus on what he could change for the better at any moment in time. That Zen Lessons in Leadership book is chiefly intended to capture lessons about how monasteries and communities structured themselves and were led by wise men. The best course for anyone is always to do one's duty, and if one must have leaders their duties entail good leadership. 

While these problems cannot be cleared away overnight that does not mean they cannot be cleared away at all. Oil prices are high because of decisions about pipelines and drilling as much as because of other things. We could be building nuclear power plants near cities to pursue both power and clean energy. We could eliminate punitive government regulations that tie up truckers and ports -- indeed even the current administration waived the regulations on port operating hours as a part of its strategy for overcoming the problems. 

Part of the administration's problem is that it refuses another core Stoic lesson, which the Zen and Ch'an Buddhists also accept: living in accordance with nature. They keep wanting wind and solar power to be the answer, so they act as if the technology were as reliable as they want it to be rather than as reliable as it actually is. Germany is having power problems because they focused on wind, and the wind was light this year. China is having power problems because they relied on hydropower -- which works pretty well in some places -- and then this year there wasn't much rain. Solar power likewise has limits they don't want to accept.

It would be very nice for them if everyone would lower his expectations, or hers as the case may be. Then they might be better placed to act as if the world worked the way they wanted it to instead of the way it does. Somehow socialist economies always come around to "lower your expectations" because expectations at any level prove increasingly difficult to satisfy. Humans have a nature too, one that we have to accept rather than trying to change, and this is the core difficulty of their project.

So in a way the quip was right about the political matters, though quite wrong about the ethical ones. That would be an oddity if Plato had been right that the community should be ordered the same way as the soul; then politics would be an exact reflection of ethics, with the community ordered so as to be brave and moderate, wise and good but simply at a higher level of organization.

In fact Plato was wrong about that; that is the fallacy of composition. What is right at one level of organization is not always right at another. A good family operates on different principles than a good state, rather than the state simply being a higher order of the family. A good person is not merely a good member of his various communities, though the Stoics are correct that it is in communities that individuals flourish. The internal virtues remain important even when one is alone, and even when interacting with strangers with whom one shares no community -- as at war, when courage matters in facing an enemy, and magnanimity might lead one to victory or peace through the establishment of a new kind of community. 

Crusader Sword found off Israel

It hasn't been cleaned up yet, but it looks like a 900 year old sword probably lost at sea in battle.

How is this not Satire?

I had to double check because of course it must be; but no. 

"Dr. Rachel Levine becomes nation's first transgender four-star officer."