“We also learned of a debate that will be happening on campus in a few weeks over what I think is an utterly false binary of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ versus ‘merit, fairness, and equality.’ A number of people, including me, were invited to participate in this event last year. We declined based on the framing, but it fueled our thinking about how to set the right conditions for a discussion — avoiding simplified versions of issues and concentrating on a format that will broaden attendees’ perspectives rather than on having one side ‘win,'” Dozier said in a March 15 news release announcing his own set of conversations to be held on campus."False binary" is a terrific opening: smug, universal in its application, and announced with dignity and a profound disinclination to explain. Some of you troglodytes may have been thinking there's an inherent conflict between DEI (or as we now apparently call it, DIEB, for "belonging") and merit, fairness, and equality. Well, you're wrong, that's all, and by the way shut up. So much for framing: you did it wrong, now go away.Also, the format is problematic, an observation that is much deeper and more nuanced than taking a position on the issue to be argued. The whole point is to broaden the perspectives of you troglodytes, not to give you some kind of opportunity to, what do we call it, "win." Winning is very primitive and binary. Also, that other thing, the one that's not winning, is not something we particularly wish to think about, and the fact that you're willing to think about it--yes, we can see you salivaitng over there--only shows how narrow, false, and binary you are.We need to set the right conditions for a discussion. Actually, several of us make a living enforcing those conditions, for a generous and virtue-affirming fee that supports an enviable lifestyle. The goal is not to simplify issues but to compound them into multifarious enigmas spring-loaded with lots of rage, while preserving the flexibility to shift one's ground constantly, with lots of pained expressions. We call these interactions "conversations." We have ways of making you like them. Shall we have one now? Just nod, we'll tell you if and when it's your turn to speak.
Pitch perfect
MIT is trying to host a debate on DEI, but the DEI deans are boycotting. I admired their written response:
Sagan on Democracy
The introductory remarks are helpful, but the real point starts at 1:07. Sagan was wise enough to frame this as an anti-Republican argument, so it got on major network television even in the Clinton era. It is actually a very serious threat to a self-governing society.
1) Science and technology are increasingly a focal point of our society, but they are not generally understood by the public -- yet in a democracy, the public has to make decisions.
2) Since they cannot, actual power passes out of their hands into the hands of 'experts' appointed by the government -- yet the same problem applies to choosing who the experts are. The people cannot assess whether real experts, or mere partisan power-players, have been chosen; and the politicians, not being experts either, can't distinguish the genuine ones either.
3) Since the politicians have to choose, and can't distinguish between real experts and political allies who are claiming to be experts, they'll generally choose political allies -- there's something in it for them there, at least. Appoint some nobody just because he has a degree or something and that person might do anything once in power. At least the party functionary will do what you want.
4) Thus, the 'scientific and technological society' ends up not only destroying self-government in favor of government by experts, but actually fails to achieve government by experts in favor of government by factional loyalists regardless of their mental or technological capacities.
Then the second reason, which relates directly to Tex's post below:
5) Science is really about skeptical empiricism, a mode of inquiry rather than a body of knowledge.
6) A free society needs people who have both education and skepticism, and must be free to question ideas. This is the only way to have a self-governing people.
7) Failing that the people do not run the government, the government runs them.
We seem to have achieved both of these in the last few years. We are now "governed by experts" to a greater degree than ever before, yet these experts at places like the Department of Energy seem to have been chosen for ideological reasons primarily (and possibly solely). All of this power has passed to the Secretary of Health and the rest of the bureaucracy, and the people in charge of it look to ordinary eyes to be barking mad, interested in political domination rather than actual expertise.
Meanwhile, attempts to question the science put forward by these experts is increasingly forbidden. Indeed, it looks like the government is investing heavily in technologies and partnerships expressly intended to suppress free inquiry. This is being done in the name of protecting less-qualified ordinary people from drawing wrong conclusions by being exposed to 'bad' information; but what it's actually suppressing is the very spirit of science Sagan described. It is the spirit of skeptical empiricism that is being attacked, to make sure there aren't challenges to the appointed 'experts' who increasingly serve as the replacement for democratic self-government.
I guess they have a point
NPR may be onto something. I have to agree that there's "limited evidence" that men have an inherent advantage over women in sports, in the same sense that there's limited evidence for essentially every proposition I can imagine. The evidence that the sun rises in the east, for instance, is limited to the number of times any of us has personally witnessed the phenomenon, as well as to our ability to aggregate the testimony of humans throughout recorded history--so far. I applaud NPR's stunning and brave determination not to jump to conclusions.
If any NPR staffers survive the current spate of layoffs, I look forward to their application of the same intellectual humility to all of the truisms routinely spouted by earnest radio personalities. Anthropogenic climate change threatens humanity? Joe Biden is the president of the United States? Childhood genital mutilitation is health-affirming? "There's limited evidence of that."
Riding Weather
Today was, and tomorrow is reported to be, ideal riding weather. I spent the morning engaged in an adventure I shall not relate because it involves rescue service participation in a murder investigation, and such things are wisely not spoken of before the trial. That was expected to take the day and didn't, so I had taken a day off from work that I suddenly had free. I spent seven glorious hours riding in fine spring weather, with a good meal at a smokehouse in amongst the pleasures of the road.
We shall see if I am able to get free tomorrow; certainly not all day, as many things need my attention in addition to the motorcycle. Still, the warm parts of the year bring their pleasures.
A Curious Question
President Donald Trump is expected to be indicted and charged with a crime soon, and reports are that "he Manhattan District Attorney's office will reach out to Trump and his Secret Service detail to make arrangements for his surrender[.]"
I admit it had not occurred to me to think about him having a Secret Service detail, but of course he does as do all Presidents during and after their term of service. This raises a question I find interesting: what would the Secret Service do in the event of his arrest and/or conviction and sentencing? Presumably as law enforcement officers themselves, they would want to cooperate with the court and penal system; but they also can't simply allow him to be sent to Rikers Island and put in the general population.
Other nations that have imprisoned opposition political leaders have sometimes resorted to house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest over a 21-year period. Since the Secret Service will be providing police officers to literally stand over the top of him all the time, there's no reason why a similar arrangement couldn't work here too: you wouldn't have to put him in a New York state-owned facility.
Since a lot of the point of this exercise seems to be public humiliation, however, I expect that the Secret Service will be asked to somehow work with his enclosure in a New York prison or jail of some sort -- certainly if a conviction is obtained, as it may well be given the poisoned jury pool in NYC, and maybe even as he awaits trial. I would expect the Secret Service to demand control over a cordoned-off part of the jail under those circumstances, with NY officers allowed to access Trump but only under observation.
Commentators seem convinced the case is hopelessly weak, but I wouldn't put much hope in the law or the courts here. Trump is a designated object of hate, perhaps the foremost one extant in our country, and he is unlikely to receive a fair trial in Manhattan of all places (only DC might be worse in terms of jury bias). His ability to obtain a dispassionate and fair trial according to our usual aspirational standards anywhere in America must be close to Osama bin Laden's, except that there are areas where it would be unfair in his favor as well. The odds of us having a Political Prisoner in Chief soon are nonzero, no matter what one thinks of the legal strengths or weaknesses of the charge. If I were the Secret Service, I'd be planning now for how to handle this.
"Backlash" exception to the 1st Amendment
I take minor comfort from the fact that this is a decision issued by a 3-judge panel of the Second Circuit, not en banc, but it has some pretty horrifying Constitutional law in it. The court dismissed an NRA complaint alleging that the New York Department of Financial Services bullied financial institutions into blacklisting the NRA on the ground of "reputational risk." The court explained that "backlash" against Second Amendment supporters was a legitimate reason for a state banking regulator to use threats to induce banks to blacklist customers with controversial advocacy records.
As Powerline suggests, the only right thing to happen now is for the Supreme Court to accept certioriari and punt this awful decision into the sun. In the meantime, however, it sure would be nice to see people cease to use New York banks. The risk there is very high, even beyond the general concern over concentrating the nation's financial system in any particular location.
Arkansas, Affirmative Action, and Walmart
Gail Heriot posted this on Instapundit. The comment thread there so far is a shining example of sheer ignorance and bad faith attacks on Arkansas Republicans. I don't care to create a Disqus account to comment there, so I thought I might say something useful here, even if it is by no means a complete answer.
Walmart is headquartered in Bentonville, AR, and is a chunk of the state economy. Whenever the Republican dominated legislature takes up conservative legislation to which the woke rulers of the Walmart empire object, Walmart implicitly threatens to take their money somewhere else.
I'm not saying the Republican politicians are right or wrong to take this into account. I'm just saying it's part of the political calculus there.
Rafe Heydel-Mankoo on Reparations
It's a British argument, but a good quick listen at 12 minutes. The title on YouTube ("Woke Cambridge Students HATE Historian's Facts") is misleading, I think -- the Cambridge students sit quietly and let him finish speaking, and there is some applause at the end.
More Weird Numbers
56.3% of liberal women 18-29 have been formally diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared to 27.3% of conservative women and 16.3% of conservative men in the same age bracket.
There are several general trends visible here. Older people have fewer than younger; men have fewer than women; conservatives have fewer than liberals.
My sense about psychology is that you get diagnoses more or less because you ask for them, so these numbers may simply be explained as the willingness of these various groups to seek psychological counseling. You have to check however many boxes off for the current DSM, and then you get a diagnosis that will allow your insurance company to pay for the counseling you want. If someone doesn't believe in the value of such counseling, they won't go and they therefore won't get a diagnosis. I don't think this necessarily says anything about the actual mental health of these demographics.
Still, the delta is pretty big. There's an order of magnitude difference between the young liberal women and the oldest conservative men, and right at that big a difference between them and the oldest conservative women.
Shocking if True
NotTheBee has a summary of some propaganda being put out by a hockey team for some reason or other; of all the places to virtue signal, goalie-fighting hockey teams are a very strange choice. One of these things is actually shocking, though, assuming that the statistic is true.
Now that would be amazing. I'm in no way an expert on the demographics here, but assuming that there is a roughly equal distribution of these qualities across various ethnic groups, black LGBTQ should account for around 13% of the total; and this Gallup poll suggests that trans-* should account for only 10% of that, so 1.3% of the total. But that's all sorts of trans-*, of which transgender women are an additional subset, presumably on the order of half of it. (And that's accounting for the doubling of the rate in the youngest generation, which is an additional weirdness to the numbers we'll ignore for now.)
So that would give us approximately (and admittedly according to very back-of-the-envelope math) 0.8% of the total population being the subject of 50% of the violence. If that's true, it's stunning.
I'll Allow It
Wretchard asked Chat GPT-4 who he was, to see what it knows. It's a plausible thing to do; what it knows is the internet, and we've published a great deal of content on the internet.
I decided to try it too, since I was messing with GPT last week.
Close enough for government work.
UPDATE:
I decided to try again, clueing in the GPT bot that I was asking about a blog. It was under the impression that the blog had closed, when in fact its own database ceases. However, it characterized the philosophy of the blog in this way:
That's actually a pretty good summary.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
It's almost as if price controls led to supply crashes:
This regulatory environment explains why California insurers can’t charge rates that reflect their actual risks. It also shows why there’s so little competition in the state’s insurance industry. Over the long run, competition keeps rates low. Insurance commissioners can certainly hold premiums down by edict, but the result is a contracting market. Homeowners then have little choice but to buy inadequate policies in a government-run marketplace.Similarly, I made my living for years on the cleanup of the power grid crash in California, caused by regulators who were more interested in pretending that power doesn't cost what it costs than in ensuring that the grid produces power. Voters love the idea of putting bureacrats in charge of prices, until the goods disappear from the market. Then they always seem to like the idea of having the government step in to offer the product at a "fair" price. I call it the DMV-ization of the economy, my favorite examples being Obamacare and public schools. Source: Wall Street Journal, Insurance Companies Are Quietly Fleeing California (via DuckDuckGo search).
Cheap Delicacies
It's St. Patrick's Day, so I considered making a shepherd's pie. I ended up making jambalaya. Both of these dishes are alike in being cheap local to their point of origin, and rather expensive delicacies further afield. Shepherd's pie is made with lamb or mutton, which if you are a shepherd is the most readily available food; but if you are buying lamb in an American grocery store, it's not so very cheap at all.
Jambalaya meanwhile has shrimp in it (omitted in my version tonight), which is plucked free out of the bayou down where the stuff originated. Shrimp is a lot pricier in the mountains, and of dodgy quality if it isn't frozen.
Lots of famous foods are like this. You can't even make Scottish haggis in America unless you buy and butcher a sheep. Otherwise it's just not legal to sell you the heart, stomach, and lungs for food consumption. American haggis is mostly made with beef liver instead. You can't get the real thing at any price, but it too was meant to be a cheap food for the locals where it originated.
The jambalaya I made was all dry or frozen ingredients piled into a pressure cooker, except for the liquid chicken stock and some cayenne. It came out pretty great, and preserved the quality of being cheap that was the actual point of the original dish. Recommended.
Happy St. Patrick's Day
I always feel like I ought to include some religious content, it being a feast day, so here's a prayer called "the Deer's Cry," or "St. Patrick's Breastplate."
Here, after, is a Spotify playlist of St. Patrick's Day songs.
This is the way
"Universal school choice is growing in popularity across the United States, with Florida becoming the fourth in the nation to pass such legislation in the past year. A similar bill was passed in Iowa last month."
It's on the legislative agenda in this year's session in Texas. The state school monopoly may have pulled off one of the great boners in history in shutting down schools. If they had it to do over again, maybe they'd think of a way to avoid letting parents look over their kids' shoulders in ZOOM sessions.
Happy 20th Anniversary!
This afternoon Grim's Hall is 20 years old.
Looking back, the very first post was a call not to censor even a radical "jihadist" with proven ties to terrorists -- so we used to say in those days, still in the wake of the 9/11 and on the very eve of the Iraq War. It does call for the infiltration of the audience as a means of using the radical speaker as a kind of flypaper to attract the genuinely dangerous youth.
Both of those facets are still quite relevant twenty years on: free speech is under increasing attack as a way of counteracting radicals -- who turn out to be ourselves, and not the 'jihadists' we thought we would be concerned about. Meanwhile the government's shift of enemies from radical Islamists to old-fashioned Americans has caused the 'infiltration' strategy to shift to an actual construction of flypaper groups, organized and led by government informants. I do remember that Patriot Act opponents in those days warned us that these grand new powers would be turned against us; turns out they were right about every part of that.
A lot has changed since those days on the sunny slopes of long ago. Not all of the change was for the worse. Thank you for your company along the way.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)