A Victory for the Republic

Sanity prevails, for the moment, and on a bipartisan basis. No Fraudulus bill this time; and a stalwart defense of minority rights on the filibuster. 

Enchiridion IX

IX

Sickness is an impediment to the body, but not to the will unless itself pleases. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find it to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself.

I think I have answered all your earlier comments that needed a response; if not, let me know. I am encouraged by your interest. I was beginning to wonder if you were just humoring me. 

I do think that the decision to start with the Enchiridion may have been a difficulty, since (as I was telling James) it contains only settled principles rather than the arguments for them. We might have more wisely started with the Discourses, but here we are. We can go back and do the Discourses another time if there is interest. You might find this short biography of Epictetus handy; the part it is calling 'the Handbook' is the Enchiridion, which is a word that means something like 'handbook' or 'manual' in Greek.

Murderer Undecided On Whether He'll Follow New Gun Laws

 

Songs from World War II

It's about 3 hours of 1930s and '40s music focused on WWII. Some of the song titles are great:

• The Washing On The Siegried Line
• Where Does Poor Pa Go In The Black-Out?
• They Can't Black Out The Moon
• The Deepest Shelter In Town
• Could You Please Oblige Us With A Bren Gun?
• Der Fuehrer's Face
• The Thing-Ummy-Bob (That's Going To Win The War)
• Don't Let's Be Beastly To The Germans
• I'm Gonna Get Lit Up

Enjoy!

As Mr. Kruiser says, "Everything isn't awful"

Glenn Reynolds links to a modern anti-"Lord of the Flies" story, in which a small group of shipwrecked boys survives on a seemingly uninhabitable island for 15 months before being rescued in good health and spirits.  Someone raised these kids up right, enabling them to bring their sane characters together in a sane community structure.  Glenn comments on the depressing view of Golding's famously dystopian novel and notes that Golding was a mess of a man, which could explain his conviction of the inevitable mess men must make of a culture.  And certainly the mess is inevitable if the men embrace vicious failure in themselves; it's hard enough to face disaster when we're all doing the best we can. The culture affects how the kids are raised, and then the kids affect the culture.

We got a lot of culture largely based on the “sad self-knowledge” of people who were psychological and moral outliers — social and moral losers, as I say — but who fancied themselves representative of humanity and who managed to sell that self-justifying delusion to the rest of society. The costs were significant.

Rutger Bregman wrote a book, "Humankind," about the six Tonganese boys who stole a fishing boat in 1966 to take a "three-hour tour" as a break from their strict Catholic boarding school. Mr. Bregman's book, not "Lord of the Flies," is in my Audiobooks queue for background listening while I paint or crochet this week.

Enchiridion VIII

VIII

Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.

This is another one of those sections that almost sounds like a Bible verse -- "Not my will, but Yours, Lord" -- but is that is coming out of a non-Christian tradition. To will that it be as it has been directed to be by the logos inherent in creation means, perhaps, aligning your free will with that of the divine. Perhaps; other wills may be at work in the world. 

A worthy project for an interested party would be to explore how this period of Hellenistic Roman society informed both traditions. We know that a certain amount of Greek philosophy made its way into John, at least; the spirit of the age may have shaped more than is apparent at first glance. 

El Camino

I always thought these things were ridiculous, but they're enjoying a retrospective moment. Lots of songs have recently been written about them. It struck me as a very strange thing to valorize until I heard the introduction to this piece. "...but it was a Chevelle, and you could get it with an SS package and up to like a 450 horsepower, 454 engine, four speed transmission, Positraction rear end, all kinds of sway bars..."

OK, I can see how that could be cool.

Apparently she was persuaded as well. 

Enchiridion VII

 VII

As in a voyage, when the ship is at anchor, if you go on shore to get water, you may amuse yourself with picking up a shellfish or a truffle in your way, but your thoughts ought [20]to be bent toward the ship, and perpetually attentive, lest the captain should call, and then you must leave all these things, that you may not have to be carried on board the vessel, bound like a sheep; thus likewise in life, if, instead of a truffle or shellfish, such a thing as a wife or a child be granted you, there is no objection; but if the captain calls, run to the ship, leave all these things, and never look behind. But if you are old, never go far from the ship, lest you should be missing when called for.

This sounds strongly Biblical, but it is not; it may well, however, be religious. 

Epictetus is typically considered the most religious of the Roman Stoics.... Here we see why the Stoic conception of Nature, derived from the study of physics and theology, is essential to understanding this holistic philosophical system. Both oikeiosis and theology fall under the topic of physics in Stoicism. Thus, whether the Stoics began with oikeiosis or theology, they grounded their ethical theory in physics—the study of nature.

...the Stoic divinity is immanent. As such, a fragment of the same logos that providentially orders the cosmos resides in us as our guiding principle (hegemonikon).

There is thus perhaps something similar in the imagery of the Captain calling you back to the ship as in Matthew's warning to always be ready for the call to judgment; there may even be something similar in the concept of being ready to leave your wife and child at call and Jesus' suggestion that you should be ready to abandon your father and family to follow him. The logos that orders the world is the touchstone of similarity here; the difference is in the conception of how that logos is expressed in the cosmos.

I think I would say that Epictetus' conception of the Captain is one of moral duty, which must be obeyed by the Stoic because it is his business. It is, indeed, his whole proper business to do the right thing, the virtuous thing, according to his rational understanding of what the right thing is. In this, too, he prefigures Kant's arguments. Perhaps, indeed, his version is better. 

On Aerosols

I wouldn’t link this if it was just another COVID piece, but it’s got a lot more going for it. There are lessons from scholars of the 1930s and 40s that were lost, from the beginning of germ warfare and the efforts to protect the lungs of miners. Much that we once knew might have helped, but some ideas become unpopular and are thus dismissed— even in hard scientific fields. 

Enchiridion VI

 VI

Be not elated at any excellence not your own. If a horse should be elated, and say, “I am handsome,” it might be endurable. But when you are elated and say, “I have a handsome horse,” know that you are elated only on the merit of the horse. What then is your own? The use of the phenomena of existence. So that when you are in harmony with nature in this respect, you will be elated with some reason; for you will be elated at some good of your own.

Eventually the first principle invoked there is going to encompass things like 'being hansdome' as well. It might be endurable for your horse to glory in being handsome because he is an irrational beast, but you ought not to do so:  you didn't earn it. 

Here the argument is that you should only be elated about internal accomplishments. For example, perhaps you successfully did a hard and virtuous thing instead of the pleasant thing you'd have rather done. That is something to feel good about, an honest accomplishment. Feeling good because you happen to have a pretty face -- which is only a semblance, after all -- is a mistake. That doesn't belong to you properly because it is not an accomplishment of your own.

Later we will find that this extends to not feeling bad about losing the things you didn't earn. Age robs many of beauty, and this is a source of great consternation to many. Epictetus is going to argue that they should not think it so; fate gave them beauty, not their own actions. Just as they have no cause to glory in what they did not earn neither should they mourn for having a thing they never earned taken away. 

Whereas no one can take away your proper pride in a just and virtuous action. This is a point that Aristotle also makes in his writings on the capstone virtue of magnanimity (called 'pride' in that translation, but it is properly the quality of having a 'great soul'). The magnanimous man does what is right because it is worthy of honor, but he does not care if people of little honor praise him or condemn him. Should they condemn him, he knows internally that he has done the honorable thing; their attempt to pile dishonor on him does not attach to his own sense of honor, as he knows it is unjust. "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on." 

The narrative drifts

It's the End Times: Even in the New Yorker, Americans are now permitted to express the former heresy that pandemic measures have both costs and benefits that must be weighed together, that panicked over-reaction itself has costs, and that data do not always yield simple answers.

Ninjas

HRT 1, mysterious figure 0.  We may never know what motivated this young man with a "British" accent that some might characterize as Middle Eastern to take four hostages during a Shabbat service and demand the release of a notorious Al Quaeda operative, but he has achieved stable ambient temperature.  No hostages or law enforcement officers were injured.

I was just listening to a thriller on tape last night about jihadists taking hostages in the White House.  It's nice to root for the rescuers in real life.

Enchiridion V

 V

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things. Thus death is nothing terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death, that it is terrible. When, therefore, we are hindered or disturbed, or grieved, let us never impute it to others, but to ourselves—that is, to our own views. It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself.

This is an excellent section, challenging and complex in just a few words. There is a great deal to wrestle with here.  

Snowfall

We're getting a bit of snow up here in the mountains overnight. I may or may not be around for a bit depending on how that goes. We've got chainsaws and chains on the truck, chains on the firetrucks, plenty of firewood and water. We're as ready as I know how to make us for it, so hopefully it will merely be a beautiful and pleasant interlude. 

Obamacare tactics so nice, we had to try them twice

I assume everyone's already heard about Schumer's legislative ploy to get around the Senate filibuster on the Federalize Voting Fraud bill. The Senate passed a benign bill addressing the need to renew some leasing powers of NASA, which then went to the House, which stripped out ever word and filled the empty vessel with an unholy mixture of two pending "Enable All the Election Fraud" bills that have been floating around for the last year without getting enough support to pass. The House plans to pass this Trojan Horse with its slim majority, which I take it is feasible, and send it back to the Senate for final approval. The idea is that the filibuster doesn't apply in this situation, perhaps because it's supposed to be done under reconciliation rules? Even though it's clearly not a spending bill?

I'm a little lost, but here's what Neo has to say about it, and she tends to get this stuff right: the NASA empty-suit-filled-with-election-fraud-goodness scam bypasses only the need for 60 votes to bring the bill to the floor for debate, not the 60 votes needed actually to pass it. Whether Manchin would vote against bringing it to the floor for a vote—thus denying it even the 51-vote majority I guess is required for that purpose—I don’t know. He might be willing to have it debated even if he would refuse to vote for it on the merits in the end.

As for Manchin's vote on the merits, the word is that he initially supported a bill to make it more difficult for state legislatures to block Electoral College certifications, a measure that enjoys some bipartisan support.  Nevertheless, he does not at all support the measures like outlawing voter i.d.'s, legalizing ballot-harvesting, etc., that Schumer deems necessary to preserve democracy as we know it. If Neo is correct that in the end Fraudulus could not pass without 60 votes, I'm relieved. I'd rather not worry so much about Mr. Manchin's principles.

Enchiridion: An Aside

In the comments to the last post, J. Melcher writes:

It's a challenge to resist the human -- even animalistic -- urge to punish offenses against our instinctive sense of proper behaviors. Chickens will leave off feeding to enforce their status in the local pecking order. Canines defend their fair share of a carcass brought down in a pack hunt -- and enforce their rights to a hunting territory. Social animals will form mobs to drive away individuals who seem crazy or sick or challenging to the existing order.

I trust there will be a recommendation coming up about how to find the balance between accepting the trivial and standing up for what seems important.

There are some considerations that need to be raised about this. Epictetus was a long-time slave, for one; much of his life was not the life of a free man. Second, even when he was free he was a Roman citizen in the era of Empire rather than in the old Republic. Marcus Auerilius has a lot of concern with the public sphere, being an Emperor of Rome. Epictetus has relatively little. 

Our society of free men -- empowered to defend themselves and conduct citizens' arrests in cases of violence against the common peace and lawful order -- draws heavily on Medieval liberties that had not come to be in the time of Rome. The right to bear arms was a Medieval liberty of knights and lords, which came to be extended to free men in England through the process historian Sidney Painter described. The right of self-defense -- the right to defend one's home, because 'every Englishman's home is his castle,' the root of our Castle Doctrine -- these things arose in a later time, in the face of a weaker state that needed to reach out to ordinary people to support it and keep it stable. Sometimes these rights were compelled by rebellion against a state that tried to deny them, and could not successfully oppose its people, its knights, or its lords. 

These rights have also not always flourished. In some generations they have waned, because even natural rights must be remade in every generation. Nature provides grapes, but we must in every generation make the wine ourselves.

If you read the introduction to the Enchiridion at the page we are using, they point out that the Stoics became of interest in the early Modern age precisely for this reason.

That there was a rebirth of Stoicism in the centuries of rebirth which marked the emergence of the modern age was not mere chance. Philosophical, moral, and social conditions of the time united to cause it. Roman Stoicism had been developed in times of despotism as a philosophy of lonely and courageous souls who had recognized the redeeming power of philosophical reason in all the moral and social purposes of life. Philosophy as a way of life makes men free. It is the last ditch stand of liberty in a world of servitude. Many elements in the new age led to thought which had structural affinity with Roman Stoicism. Modern times had created the independent thinker, the free intellectual in a secular civilization. Modern times had destroyed medieval liberties and had established the new despotism of the absolute state supported by ecclesiastical authority.

Emphasis added. It is worth noting that the 'ecclesiastical authority' enlisted to support the absolute monarchy often represented a fragmentation of the earlier Church: in Germany as in England, the Catholic Church's authority was rejected because it was a source of opposition to the throne. In France and Spain, king and bishop found ways to reinforce one another. The space for liberty arises when powers are opposed, as our Federal government and our states are in key cases opposed; as our Supreme Court is meant to oppose the Congress or the Executive, and so forth. In the early Modern era, those oppositions often failed. 

The free mind is a space of liberty even when all else is constrained. Even if you are not free to stand up for what is right practically, you may still think what you will. Even if speaking your opposition would destroy you and your family, your means of making a living or perhaps even you actual freedom to exist outside prison walls -- or to exist at all -- your mind can remain free. This was true even of a Roman slave, who managed to inspire generations after him who came up in bad times. 

It does not excuse us who are free from fighting for our practical freedom, nor does it excuse us from dying for it if necessary. Yet we should recognize Epictetus as a comrade in the fight for liberty, even if he never was as free as any of us have been.

I have another theory

 A NYT writer muses (link is to HotAir, not NYT) on why people are having public tantrums:

Being told you can’t have x, y, or z is no longer just a disappointment, it’s a challenge and a reminder that you’re not in control of anything. And I think that when you cram a bunch of people already feeling that way into a tight space like an airplane, it’s not surprising that a lot more fights are breaking out than usual.

Maybe something else to consider is why a lot of people failed to learn any life strategies for situations when they didn't get exactly what they want as soon as they demanded it.

Enchiridion IV

 IV

When you set about any action, remind yourself of what nature the action is. If you are going to bathe, represent to yourself the incidents usual in the bath—some persons pouring out, others pushing in, others scolding, others pilfering. And thus you will more safely go about this action if you say to yourself, “I will now go to bathe and keep my own will in harmony with nature.” And so with regard to every other action. For thus, if any impediment arises in bathing, you will be able to say, “It was not only to bathe that I desired, but to keep my will in harmony with nature; and I shall not keep it thus if I am out of humor at things that happen.”

Obviously the example turns on a public bath, a Roman tradition. This is very urbane advice: if you should see some pilfering going on in the city, forget it, Jake. ("It's Chinatown.") The nature of the thing -- the city -- means that there will be a certain number of thieves about. You'll see a certain number of homeless. Beggars will confront you. The poor will always be with you. It's just the way it is.

Accepting the world as it is, according to the nature of the thing, is another core insight. The nature of the city is of course human nature, and the city is the environment that is in a sense the most human of all: the environment reformed by human will in accord with human nature. It is human nature that produces the thieves.

Trusting the experts

It appears to amaze some of my acquaintances, particularly constituents who don't know me very well and evidently pay no attention to information about the usual origin of my opinions, that I don't universally despise experts. Uncritically believe them, no, of course not, but there is an initial step required to induce enough doubt to justify a personal investigation. That initial step, contrary to popular view, involves facts rather than feelz.

In recent weeks, my community has been roiled by a series of podcasts and letters to the editor suggesting that an old "red bed" on the edge of the county is going to destroy our local environment. Red beds are disposal pits for the residue of smelting aluminum from bauxite ore. Very little aluminum smelting gets done in the U.S. any more, the local manufacturers having been subjected to new environmental standards that drastically reduced the more troublesome trace products in the residue, while simultaneously making the process so much more expensive that recycling is now more cost-effective. Apparently the U.S. currently relies more on recycled aluminum than mined, though China, for instance, is still smelting like crazy. Nevertheless, decades of previous smelting have left a lot of red beds full of bauxite residue. 

Red beds don't take their lurid color from anything exotic, just a high proportion of iron oxide (rust) in the bauxite. The usual bad rap against aluminum smelting is not so much the chemical byproducts as the fact that it's an absolute electricity hog, because the smelting process is a kind of electrolysis, like a giant battery. In addition, however, red mud is extremely alkaline (pH 10 to 13), so you definitely do not want it to escape its confinement and flow into any waterways in high concentrations. In a few highly publicized disasters, such as one in Hungary, this has happened on a large enough scale to sterilize a waterway, at least temporarily. Dilution apparently clears the problem up eventually, but it's serious. What's more, although red beds that dispose of relatively new and cleaner smelting may be chemically fairly benign other than their alkalinity, the fact remains that residue from older or dirtier smelters may contain a variety of toxins such as mercury and various hydrocarbons, including flouride compounds. In the case of a smelter in the county to our north, the red beds were of a particularly vile sort that dumped enough mercury into the bay system to prompt a Superfund designation. The mercury levels have been reported to have dropped substantially in the years since the designation and remediation.

The red bed at issue in my own county today is on the other end, to the south, and is not a Superfund site. Until today, all I could find out from people with their hair on fire was that they feared this complex of red beds was like the red beds to the north, or like other worse examples elsewhere in the world. The state version of the EPA, called Texas Council on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) doesn't think so, but of course there is the usual suspicion that they're in league with industry flacks, as must be anyone who believes a word TCEQ says. Also, it's obvious that the red beds are deadly because the complex paid a lot of ad valorem taxes without ensuring that the locals participated somehow in their profits. I need more than the first argument to be excited into action, and the second argument I reject with contempt.

This morning, however, to my delight, someone forwarded me a genuinely helpful and informative document: a soil- and water-testing report, admittedly over 20 years old, attached to a TCEQ motion filed in 2016 in the federal bankruptcy proceedings of the former owner of the red beds. I can't tell offhand how serious are the problems it identified, but it did identify some, thus establishing that at least some of the red mud at this site came from some of the older and dirtier smelting sites, and some of the problems did make their way into some groundwater. With that lead, I can figure out what happened in the bankruptcy, including who is the current owner and what entities are still stuck with the clean-up liability, which was reported to have been estimated some years ago at $10MM minimum. Did TCEQ manage to find a solvent entity to undertake remediation, and was it effective? Have followup tests been done? The concerned citizens this time around allege that TCEQ is engaging in a "closure" rather than a remediation, which may be true; it may even be warranted. Evidently the most common strategy for red beds is to leave them alone and let them dry in place, while controlling red dust in dry and windy conditions. There's some effort to learn cost-effective ways to extract their more valuable trace elements, but I don't think anything like that is being attempted here.

In the meantime, people are posting podcasts showing the bright red ponds and letting that image work on the public's feelz. This is a state-law regulation issue, not a county one, but the concerned citizens believe, with some justification, that if TCEQ is dropping the ball then the county leadership should investigate and light a fire under them. I'm willing to do the investigation. I'd have been more willing sooner if I'd been approached with more light and less heat, and far less jumping to conclusions about the ulterior motives of anyone whose hair isn't equally on fire. Why do people think it's a winning strategy to appear at a public meeting to denounce motives? Even a skeptical governing body would be more likely to be brought on board if the concerned citizens concentrated on providing clear evidence of a problem instead of speculating about cover-ups for nefarious purposes. The defensive rage spurred by a question like "But what makes you conclude that TCEQ's remediation efforts have been ineffective to date?" is amazing. "Stop attacking me! You're part of the problem! You must think money is more important that preventing the poisoning of our bays!" There's also a serious difficulty in distinguishing between being attacked and not being believed uncritically--especially not being believed about things that even the concerned citizen hasn't investigated yet, let alone ones that I personally haven't investigated yet.

I'm not running for this office again, I'm done at the end of 2022. This has been enough service, I guess. I may paint and crochet for the rest of my life with a perfectly clear conscience.

Our Opponents are Psychopaths Part MCMLXIII

I suppose we should give some credit for willingness to declare that Trump-supporting was not the key metric. Still:

[W]e found that it’s not conservatives in general who tend to promote false information, but rather a smaller subset of them who also share two psychological traits: low levels of conscientiousness and an appetite for chaos. Importantly, we found that several other factors we tested for — including support for former President Donald Trump — did not reliably predict an inclination to share misinformation.

You can make of that what you want, I guess, but they claim that "in the early months of the pandemic, conservatives were more likely to believe Covid-19 was a hoax, and to downplay the virus’ severity." I seem to recall that, in the early months, it was the Nancy Pelosis of the world who declared that you should go join the Chinese New Year celebrations in your local town. Trump's ban on travel from China was painted as racist, and not by conservatives. His follow-on ban on travel from Europe was painted as wild-eyed.

Can LCCs be prevented from sharing falsities? One of the most common measures for combating misinformation is using accurate messaging or fact-checker interventions, which have been shown to reduce the sharing of misinformation. Unfortunately, in two studies, we found that fact-checking warnings were inadequate: LCCs continued to share fake news stories at a higher rate compared with liberals and high-conscientiousness conservatives, despite being told the news was inaccurate.

This would be more persuasive if the "fact-checkers" weren't so reliably pro-establishment propaganda. I can't recall one I've read recently that wasn't designed to short-circuit debate and reaffirm the position of the powerful. 

At the same time, our research overall suggests a path forward. First, those seeking to combat false information online can now target their interventions toward a smaller subset of the population: LCCs. More targeted approaches have been shown to be effective in influencing individual behavior in the past.

Second, our research makes clear that anyone trying to reach LCCs needs to experiment with interventions that go beyond fact-checking. We believe the onus falls primarily on social media companies. There is plenty of evidence that a user’s personality and political ideology can be inferred based on their social media activity. If these companies can identify LCCs, that means they can also be proactive in making sure LCCs are presented with reliable information, and not with falsities.

Misinformation is a serious threat to American democracy that deserves serious attention. 

This sounds like a desire to identify likely enemies and make sure they don't have access to any information that isn't approved by their betters. Thoughts must be controlled to protect democracy.

I have an alternative suggestion: why not have real debates in which people can put forward their views honestly as they understand them? I don't listen to podcasts, but Joe Rogan's apparently hosted an alternative viewpoint that embarrassed him -- and his response was to admit that his opponent was smart and well-informed, but then to cite his source for having believed otherwise.

Reasonable people are grappling with all this stuff as well as they can. If democracy is in fact the goal, you have to begin by accepting that ordinary people will be making decisions. While expert opinions may be helpful to them in areas where they are not themselves experts, they also don't know which experts are trustworthy and legitimate. The more the powerful seem to be trying to winnow the field to eliminate opposing views, the less trust they're going to have for the ones endorsed by the powerful.

Open and honest discussion is the only real way forward. Rogan is a mixed martial arts guy, not a scientist. But everyone is grappling with this, whatever their backgrounds. All of them have to come to individual decisions about what to do: that's real democracy. You've got to trust them to engage the discussion, and give them space to do it well. The more the powerful try to suppress and control, the more they end up delegitimizing their preferred speakers in the eyes of the ordinary person. They may not be expert enough to understand the science or to identify the true expert from the fake one, but they can definitely tell when pressure is being employed to try to keep them from reaching any but the approved conclusion.