We’ve had one call after another up here. Trees are falling left and right. Roofs punched through by trees. Flash floods, warnings of floods, watches for floods.
Supposedly it’ll stop tomorrow.
Aristotle on Storytelling
A new translation of the Poetics aims to show contemporary writers that Aristotle still has a lot to offer their craft.
Dragon of Death
It's a cool name, anyway. " Scientists have uncovered the remains of one of the largest pterosaurs on record, researchers announced in a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research."
Another Shooting
There's nothing new here, so there's nothing new to say. The shooter was, again, a crazy person known to police. This is true approximately 100% of the time. The obvious solution is to empower the police to go after unstable people, but the police work for a government that nobody trusts enough to do that. Neither engaged political faction, at least: the right correctly fears that red-flag laws would be applied politically, subjecting ordinary people to SWAT raids aimed at disarming them; the left is pushing for laws to remove police from schools because they don't trust the police either.
So we end up debating things that are obvious non-starters, like banning the most popular rifle in America -- clearly protected by the Heller interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (see section II) -- in order to 'make it harder' for crazy people to get guns by making it harder for everyone to get guns. There's no political support sufficient for that, and a Supreme Court majority that would reject it; and it would create far greater violence trying to effect it in the teeth of political resistance than could possibly be avoided by it.
In addition, even if it were successfully done it would subject Americans to the same kind of criminal violence as Mexicans or Brazilians from cartels and other organized crime. Brazil and Mexico, big multi-ethnic American states, are much better analogs for the USA than the European nations people like to cite. The same cartels operate here as there. They terrorize Mexico's citizens because they are disarmed, not because they are weaker people than Americans. They terrorize their police into accepting bribes in lieu of death because the police are isolated and alone, rather than being supported by a large armed populace. We're able to hold all this in check as well as we do because of our broad, deep capacity to resist organized criminal violence.
So we're not going to do the practical thing that nobody trusts the government nor the police to do; and we're not going to do the impossible thing that would be foolish anyway. Therefore, we have to accept that this kind of thing is going to happen once in a while. There's nothing to be done about it within the realm of the possible, and politics is the art of the possible.
Punching Down
The NYT has a job opening:
A recent Times job listing asks for applicants to cover “personalities,” news outlets, and “online communities” of the “right-wing media ecosystem that now serves many conservative Americans who no longer rely on the mainstream media to inform themselves.”Where a regular reporter might cover “subjects” or come prepared with a rolodex of “sources,” The Times notes in a telling choice of words that the ideal candidate for its new opening will already have a “robust list of reporting targets.”
'Corporate giants with deep political ties to our government's intelligence/surveillance community seek spy to infiltrate and report on suspicious fellow citizens.' Great.
Bison Born in Wanuskewin
In Saskatchewan, Canada, a bison has been born on Wanuskewin land for the first time since 1876. More are expect to follow as part of a reintroduction program.
"Xinjiang"
Chinese "re-education" facilities are overcrowded in what they are pleased to call their 'new frontier.'
450 Buses
Texas has been busing illegal immigrants to D.C. in an attempt to pressure the government to stop leaving the border wide open. The governor, Greg Abbot, has apparently decided to up his game.
‘And we’re up to our 45th bus now, when you add a zero to that, I think Washington D.C. is going to soon find out they’re dealing with the same consequences as we’re dealing with,’ Abbott proposed.
This is not actually working as intended, though perhaps the increased numbers will force the government to take a hand in it. So far, the government and the pro-immigration NGOs -- Catholic and other churches especially -- have largely ignored this effort, and left these people to be sorted out by small-scale activist groups on the ground. These activists have been housing and feeding the migrants long enough to find out where they have family already in the USA, and then buying them Greyhound bus tickets back to wherever they want to be. Their stay in DC is short, and they end up wherever they wanted to go.
Abbot is putting a lot of pressure on these "mutual aid" activist groups, however, both organizational and financial. An increase in scale of this sort is likely to break their capacity to handle the migrants in this way. Either the actual government or the bigger NGOs will have to start playing, which may begin to have the effect Abbot intends.
War and Taiwan
CDR Salamander says that war isn't necessarily inevitable, but the need to prepare for one is -- especially if we want to avoid one.
Feeling the fury of parents
The NASB has given itself a good scare. Not only has it watched mad wokiness drag down a stunning number of candidates over the last six or seven months, it lost about 40% of its members (and revenues, more to the point) in the furious reaction to its collaborating with the White House to sic the federal judicial system on uppity parents. Some of the NASB members, it seems, didn't appreciate the blowback from its characterizing parents as domestic terrorists for having the effrontery to speak up at school board meetings. Parents should be seen to drop off the bums on seats, not heard.The NASB official who seemed to have the chummiest relationship with White House staff was given the ax early. NASB then followed up with an outside audit that established two valuable points: the White House's fingerprints were all over this disgraceful episode, and the NASB board itself can make a case that it was cut out of the loop by a rogue official who's now been safely defenestrated. Whether or not the latter claim is true, the NASB certainly making some very different policy noices these days:
The organization said it was implementing several actions based on the review’s findings. These include amending its constitution to confine its advocacy to “a united, nonpartisan national movement.”
The NSBA also said it would adopt a resolution that opposes federal intrusion and expansion of executive authority by the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies in the absence of authorizing legislation.Soccer moms vote. I doubt this travesty contributed as much to President Biden's amazing slide in the polls as the Afghanistan debacle, inflation, or the empty shelves where infant formula should be, but any professional political advisor can read the tea leaves in the many elections that have swung against educrats on school boards and in state houses.
That's a good one
Apparently Lara Logan's fall from woke grace is complete. The NYT put together together one of those "should we have guess our neighbor was a terrorist? He always seemed so polite" pieces with this absolute howler:
More than half a dozen journalists and executives who worked with Ms. Logan at “60 Minutes,” most of whom spoke anonymously to discuss private interactions with her, said she sometimes revealed political leanings that made them question whether she could objectively cover the Obama administration’s military and foreign policy moves. She appeared increasingly conservative in her politics over the years, they said, and more outspoken about her suspicions of the White House’s motives and war strategy.The horror. The horror.
As ithers see us
Every day I read the oddest descriptions of people with political beliefs more or less like mine. The Guardian has posted a screed from "labor reporter" Hamilton Nolan decrying the signs that yet another evil billionaire is taking an interest in politics, in this case Jeff Bezos, who recently reacted irritably to the White House's theory that inflation can be tamed by increasing taxes on the rich. Nolan clearly agrees with the White House on this rather than with Bezos, since he casually proposes that "Bezos could mitigate inflation’s damage by giving his own employees a raise." There's no limit to the absurd pronouncements on inflation's causes and cures by people who think that largesse from the state or employers will be anti-inflationary. Nor is it surprising that Nolan instinctively concludes, from an observation that stimulus checks can lead to inflation that harms people most who have the least income, that anyone who notices and decries the inflation must have wanted people who needed stimulus checks to starve to death in their jobless lockdowns.So far, then, this is standard stuff--it's awful when rich guys espouse conservative or even moderate political views, because we want them all to act like George Soros--but I bring it up because of his caricature of the traditional parties, in which the Republicans are only slightly more insidious than the centrist Democrats. He refers to "the classic rich-guy belief that nobody poorer than himself should be in charge." Could he be aware at all that the classic rich-guy belief is probably that nobody other than himself, poorer or otherwise, should be in charge of his own wealth? Otherwise, classic rich guys these days throw their political influence solidly behind not only Democratic initiatives but solidly progressive ones.
"The big-picture impact" of a Bezos political sally, Nolan fears,
would be to add a huge weight to the neoliberal side of the party’s scale, a powerful force trying to tilt the party away from its recent tiptoes towards progressivism, and towards the vision of the Democrats as the sober new corporate-friendly counterweight to the psycho Maga capture of the Republicans.The mad dash toward a list of politically toxic positions within the Democratic party over the last few years appears to him in the guise of some timid tiptoes towards correct thinking. I assume this is because he focuses almost exclusively on "labor" issues instead of the pink-haired screaming agenda, but in the face of polls establishing that voters are riveted on inflation and the economy as the mid-terms approach, I'm not sure converting a tiptoe toward Marxism to a full-throated mob charge is the winning formula he hopes for. Again, though, my purpose here wasn't so much to ridicule his views as to highlight how odd are his views about his opponents.Union-busting, in Nolan's view,is
a great example of what could be the new vision of the Democrats: not the slick operators trying to arbitrage corporate campaign donations, but rather the party of labor, the party ready to take seriously its own rhetoric about the dangers of rising economic inequality. The Democratic response to the rise of crazies on the right does not need to be to simply try to woo Republican donors away; instead, the Democrats can become the actual populists, the ones who side with working people against the power of capital. (The Republican version of populism, which mostly means “being prepared to wear a John Deere ballcap while you say racist things”, pales in comparison.)In these phrases, along with the view of "the psycho Maga capture of the Republicans," should I see myself? I'm accustomed neither to John Deer ballcaps nor racist pronouncements. Who knows what the word Maga stirs up in hearts like these? Could it possibly have anything to do with what a real Trump supporter values about him? When I speak, can someone like Nolan hear anything but "racist, racist, racist," even when as far as I can tell I'm nowhere near anything of the sort? Nolan's problem, in part, is that working people aren't buying his line. Possibly they no longer react well to framing the struggle of working people against the elites in terms of labor vs. capital. Increasingly they see their elite opponents as pointy-headed Marxists in faculty lounges and supercilious newsrooms.In the meantime, though I'd love to see someone with Bezos's resources become an asset on the philosophical Right, it seems like a long shot.
Where does pressure to change come from?
In the Washington Examiner, Kimberley Ross argues that conservatives should not simply abandon public schools, because if they remove their voices, there will be no more pressure on public schools to improve. What she misses is the enormous pressure that naturally results from parents having a real choice--not just parents who can afford to pay school taxes and private tuition, too, but parents whose access to charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling depends as a practical matter on relief from the double tax burden in the form of vouchers.As things stand now, it's nice to think that parents can "have a voice" in the average public school system, but too often it's about as effective as the voice of prison inmates. The warden isn't all that worried about their views. Their dissatisfaction isn't threatening his livelihood. Nor is it threatening the pipeline of cash from the taxpayers to the teachers' unions to the pro-public-school-nonsense politicians.Things would change fast if parents could vote with their feet and the school tax dollars followed the students. We'd have a completely different discussion about how hard it was to achieve reasonable results in reading and arithmetic on a budget, and how difficult it is to ensure students' basic physical safety, not to mention an orderly classroom in which lessons are rarely disrupted by fistfights with the teacher. Most of us know perfectly well these basic standards are achievable in the real world; the only way for public-school champions to avoid knowing it is to eliminate all that inconvenient competition, with its unfair practices of solving the basic problems parents care about on a rational budget. Meanwhile, the public schools spend more and more every year to accomplish less and less because, as Lily Tomlin used to say, "We don't care. We don't have to."
Knee jerks
Elie Mystal is a nut, but I'll grant him that we can explain certain failures of the Constitution only by the benighted views society took of certain issues in the 18th century:
Democrats are being urged by their “thought leaders” to pump it up: recent headline in Politico: “Democrats Should Be Less Boring; To avoid a midterm wipeout, the party should focus less on dry policy issues and more on eliciting an emotional reaction.” And in the meantime, lefty activists are drinking ever higher-proof rum rations. For instance, The Nation magazine’s Elie Mystal took excess to new levels of wretchedness when he said on MSNBC:I wouldn't call the Founding Fathers racist misogynist jerkfaces, but I'd allow that their view of the humanity of women and black people needed work. Nonsense like the 1620 Project aside, you can't read 18th-century accounts of anything without receiving shocks: casual anti-Semitism, casual assumptions that black people were subhuman, casual assumptions that women were chattels. Okay, so it's not stunning that the original Constitution didn't reflect many modern changes to these views. On the other hand, the Constitution didn't leave us helpless to correct any flaws we might come to see in the couple of centuries after it was adopted. It contains within itself an orderly procedure for amendment, which we've used dozens of times successfully, usually even without a war for impetus. How much better off would we be if instead of relying on rogue Justices or defiant legislatures or deranged protesters, we simply got to work on amending the Constitution when we discover we have a national consensus in favor of the upgrade? A dilemma for pro-abortion zealots, however, is that they don't have the national consensus they pretend to have. At most they have a strong majority in favor of butting out of the abortion decision very, very early in gestation. They have only a small minority in support of abortion on demand through the last nanosecond before birth, if not after.The Founding Fathers didn’t recognize abortion as a fundamental right because the Founding Fathers were racist, misogynist jerkfaces who didn’t believe that women had any rights at all!
Something Interesting With Which We Can All Disagree
This essay begins and ends well; the middle is all about Covid, and should be skipped lest it rouse the passions we have so often discussed. Begin at the beginning, and when you reach "Our society’s response to Covid brought this anachronism,,," scroll to "It has been said that, in its formalism and insistence...."
You may certainly read the middle if you want, but I think it will provoke more than illuminate. The opening and closing are good and worth considering, however.
Reading Those With Whom You Disagree
In the comments to a post below AVI suggests "...the intellectual task of reading for six months people who disagree with you.... Grim, who is younger, probably has at least two [such exercises to perform], the poor bastard."
As I suggested in the comments, it might be more difficult for me to find people to read with whom I don't broadly disagree. My 'tribe' is attenuated and small, at this point, and though it exists it isn't much published. Even in the local papers you'll read few examples of the traditional Southern Democrat worldview of a Zell Miller or a Jim Webb. The local papers, like papers everywhere, trend left.
Even outlets where I've personally published -- to include National Review, Human Events, The Federalist and American Greatness -- are very much not bubbles of like-minded sentiment. We have points of agreement, and broad disagreements. Still, it's better than the New York Times, where even points of agreement are hard to find; but I read their daily newsletter every morning.
I've also had two turns in grad school, which means 9 full years of reading nothing but things and people with whom I disagree to a greater or lesser degree. This is why I have friends I can talk with who are Marxists and socialists. I also have many feminist friends, especially but not only from philosophy circles, which is why I have the ability to reach out and talk with a SCOTUS protest organizer on terms of trust and friendship. (By contrast, I don't know anyone who attended the January 6th protest/riot as a participant, though you might think they were more aligned with my political views.)
Even here, some of you (especially Mr. Hines) frequently tell me that I'm wide of the mark on issues we commonly discuss. That's fine; you're welcome.
More too, I find that my views are changing in recent years, and may have even fewer in alignment. The intense patriotism I felt as a younger man has been replaced by a horror at how corrupt and indecent our government has become. I once thought of America as a force for good in the world; I don't think I still believe it is a force for good even at home. I think it is past time to dissolve the bonds that unite our nation, and replace them -- as the Declaration of Independence says we have both the right and the duty to do under such circumstances -- with better bonds to guarantee our natural rights and liberties. Increasingly my idea about what 'better bonds' look like is perhaps Tolkien-style anarchist, certainly voluntaryist, in its rejection of concentration of power and its embrace of diffusion of power among the people.
I'm still working on formalizing the latter into something workable, but it's a project I take to be my own and not one where I have a large following. Certainly I know of no journal devoted to it; the journals of the day are all about retaining or recapturing the Powers that Be, to use them to drive the tribal will and suppress the other tribes. I want no part of that, and raise the black flag -- see sidebar -- as an alternative to that entire project.
But direct me, if you can.
AAPI
So last year we heard a lot about the "surge" in violence against Asian Americans. Turns out that, statistically, Asians in America are not only at the bottom of the violence-victim hierarchy, they're the only group whose numbers are trending down.
Partly that may well be because there are so few acts of violence against them anyway; statistics get weird and unreliable whenever numbers are small. And it's good news, to be clear: no decent person wants them to suffer more violence. It's just another example of how our news is so fake and manipulated. We were all sold a narrative based on a few anecdotes and some polling that turns out not to be grounded in the broader reality.
You'd better run to the city of refuge
I love these Sunday-school-lesson folk gospel songs.
God called Moses on the mountain top
And he placed the law in Moses' heart.
And then he stuck this commandment in Moses' mind,
Then said, "Moses, don't you leave my children behind."
You'd better run, etc.
Well people believe and they think they done right;
You can pick up your bible and read it tonight.
You can read in Genesis you'll understand
That Methuselah, he was the oldest man.
Well he lived nine hundred and sixty nine
And then died and gone to heaven in good due time.
Well Paul's command for the Pharisees:
Well old Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews,
He came to Jesus, he came by night,
He said, "I want to be born into the heavenly sight."
Then Christ spoke to Nicodemus as a friend,
Said, "If you want to go to heaven you must be born again."
Well old Nicodemus didn't understand:
How could a man be born when he was so old.
Well beautiful Sampson from his birth,
He was the strongest man that ever lived on earth.
One day Sampson was walking along;
Well Sampson's strength was never found out.
But Delilah came and sat on his knee,
Said, "Please tell me where your strength might be."
He told her, "My strength lies in my hair.
You just shave a my head just as clean as my hand,
And my strength will become as a natural man."
"Sir, that's a window"
In fairness, Feynman really was a genius, but the fun of this story is how he lucked into looking like one on a particular occasion at Oak Ridge, by keeping a straight face. The man could tell a story.
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