That Eugenics Though

Richard Dawkins says it out loud. 

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

I would argue that the reason it wouldn’t work is ideology. People would want to make more people of the kind they like, which would lead to failures in the species. Consider how Dalmatians are selected for color, but that means they’re now mostly stupid.

Generally speaking whenever people who think they’re smarter or better than others try to organize things ‘for the common good / the betterment of humanity’ they end up making things objectively worse. Sometimes it’s because their class interests blind them; sometimes they just aren’t as smart as they thought they were. Sometimes they’re plain evil, like Mao, and all that talk of improvement was smoke. 

Pig Wrestling

This county fair doesn’t disappoint. What better entertainment on a Monday night in August than pig wrestling?

Teton Canyon

New homes

Our first, somewhat experimental dog adoption day went well yesterday, with over half the animals placed. The numbers, though small, were big for a community this size. We'll keep working on getting the shelter population down to a manageable size.

It's good to work out the logistical bugs on an event like this. I'm not particularly experienced an organizing a volunteer army to handle all the details. It was a little chaotic at times, but people did show up to lend a hand. I believe we'll hold a series of events now that the word is trickling out about the urgent need.

Here's one of the lucky dogs in her new home, absolutely relaxed. She's been stuck in a cage for a long time.

A County Fair

Teton County is having its 100th anniversary fair this week. I dropped in for the afternoon. 

The Grand Teton under a darkening sky. 

Motherly Love

My niece Clio, in the midst of a story about kids who were mean: "But my mom always says, if somebody does something mean to you, do it back."

Me: "Wait, what does your mother say?"

Clio: "Do it back to them."

Me: "Your momma taught you 'Get revenge'?"

Clio: "Yes."

"Are we the baddies?"

Periodically I watch this classic skit.



David Brooks is channeling the skit today in "What If We're the Bad Guys Here?" He gently chides his posh NYT readership with lots of chummy assumptions about "our" elite status, but points out that those smelly Trump supporters do have just a bit of a point about how the smug illuminati are making out like bandits at the expense of their pathetic protegees.

Not that he doesn't pull himself back from the brink; he knows he can't completely lose his audience. "Are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not." Heavens to Betsy, no, we're not that wrong.

To give him credit, though, he closes on a good thought:

“History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.”

Unearned caste privileges are a good way to get the guillotines to be rolled out.

That stuff that never happened was OK and we knew all about it anyway

Every day I have to ask myself whether there's a limit to how low this process can go. The new establishment spin on Hunter Biden is that he was a con man selling what only "appeared" to be access to his powerful father. I hope he vetted that approach with the shady guys who paid him, or they might be wondering about a refund. On the other hand, if they got their expected merchandise long ago, maybe they're fine with the new story.

Meanwhile, it's nice to know that Biden Sr. didn't mind helping create this harmless illusion of access. It's just a service that powerful men in public service naturally perform for the smart beloved sons they trust implicitly. Nothing to see here, certainly nothing to consider when casting a ballot in 2024.

Dreaming and thinking

From Maggie's Farm today:

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Rabindranath Tagore

Another way to say "dreaming and waking" is "gut and head," or feeling and discerning: the wise heart. Add action, and you have the will, or soul.

Way Out West

For the next three weeks I will be visiting my mother, sister, and niece on the border of Wyoming and Idaho. It’s a very different land than the one I usually frequent, with bigger skies and Rocky Mountains— indeed, the Grand Tetons— different weather, and different flora and fauna. 

Tonight, for example, I am making beer-braised moose for supper. It’s just like the venison braise I described on the sidebar, but with a different beast in the pot. 

Rescue

I haven't saved anyone from physical peril lately, unlike our host. What I have been, is involved in a local crisis with the animal shelter. To make a long story short, I was afraid we'd turned some kind of awful corner and would have to abandon our long-standing program that more or less prevented any need to kill animals to make space. I'm now thinking we hit more of a temporary blip and just need to scramble to take some emergency Dunkirk-like action to get the sudden population pressure off the shelter, and that we'll be able to get back on an even keel and still avoid killing animals for space.

More about that later. What I want to say today is that I come unspooled in the face of dogs under threat. Our new County Judge named a committee to step in and made me the chair. I'm scrambling and finding some useful concrete immediate things to do to get a grip on the problem. My committee has excellent members. There's all kinds of good news.

In the middle of all this, I had a shattering experience at my church on Sunday, making an impassioned plea for help that I felt fell on deaf ears. I was in tears in front of the lot of them, and I felt they ghosted me. Again, long story, there's more to it, I get that it wasn't all it seemed, and we'll deal with it.

No, here's the real point. I have a friend at church between whom and myself a terrible rift opened up years ago over how she had put her dogs in danger. I’ve been icy ever since, with my conscience upbraiding me. Yesterday, alone among all my co-parishioners, she showed up in Commissioners Court to support me and the dogs. I realized I had to make this right by finding her and confessing my fault in my part of the rift. Today she asked my forgiveness before I could even speak first. We buried the hatchet. It’s moments like that that make life worth living. (And on top of that, we've savings some dogs.)

I think God sees that there are things in me that can't be helped until other things are broken down. He puts me in a crisis where I have to crack open and become fully human, because I can't coast by in a state of cool control. If it takes dogs in peril, He'll put me in charge of saving some dogs in peril. Because it's not only dogs to whom I owe a duty of love, it's also my fellow human beings, especially the ones I haven't managed to forgive. I'm so solitary; I'm barely in contact with human beings at all most of the time. But that's not what I was put on Earth for.

Bad Christians

The lead story for two weeks running in The Smoky Mountain News has been about a dude* in a bikini. Nobody knows who this dude is, or what sex/gender the person is, or what pronouns are preferred (SMN is at pains to point that out, but then assumes 'she' is correct in their coverage). These were accompanied by an editorial against the "dangerous vigilante fantasies" of country music, which must "end."

Coverage by the local paper has been painfully sanctimonious. Now SMN is a good paper in spite of its clear liberal editorial bias; they produce well-researched journalism on the drug trafficking situation in the region, on local politics, on internal Cherokee Nation affairs, and also on arts and literature in the area (the latter being why I read it; I often find out about good bands and live shows through them). I've been genuinely impressed by their straight journalism work. Even here, they went to some trouble to get the facts straight and to file appropriate public records requests, etc. That's not the issue.

I'm also willing to give an argument against interest in opposing the sanctimony. The coverage demonstrates that people were passing rumors that are not supported by the video of the incident. That's dangerous, as they say; and we can reasonably agree that a hundred years ago a similar kind of rumor about possible sexual predation by a hated minority might have led to a lynching. The absence of lynchings marks real progress, and I am prepared to acknowledge that these sort of irritating liberal responses are presumably partly to be credited for that progress. (Certainly not wholly to be credited for it, but I can see the argument that they are assisting in providing a helpful social immunity to such mob violence).

All the same, I have a problem with the preaching. I do mean preaching literally:  two of the section headers in their first piece are unelaborated Biblical references, whose clear intention is to suggest that their social opponents are bad Christians as well as bad people (as well as wrong on the facts). 

This is not necessary, and in fact is very risky, for their preferred arrangement. Their basic argument is captured in their headline: "The mere existence of trans people is not a crime." (Again, whether or not the wholly anonymous dude in the bikini is in fact trans, or just a David Lee Roth impersonator, is not clear from the facts.) Now that's true as a matter of fact, but it's accidentally true: and if you put it to a clean vote, democratically speaking, I don't know that it would continue to be true. Still, the best argument is that there is official toleration of this violation of local mores that the population is legally bound to accept regardless of whatever they or their church think about it.

Shifting it to a religious ground opens the question of whether this kind of behavior is in fact something that ought to be tolerated as a matter of ethics and morals, and it turns out religion has a lot to say about that. St. Augustine and Aquinas have a lot to say, as does the official doctrine of many churches, as do many preachers and priests who might rise of a Sunday morning to speak to the matter if asked to do so.

The liberal project to a large degree depends on disallowing that entire line of argument. The liberal project no longer attempts -- as it did in the era of Immanuel Kant** -- to universalize religious philosophy as an exercise of practical reason. It has long since simply declared that religion belongs in the private sphere. Because freedom of religion is a basic right, anyone may accept or refuse to accept any religious doctrine. Thus, positive laws cannot enshrine religious doctrines without violating the right of people to reject the doctrines those rules are based upon. 

If you want to argue religion, you have to admit religion to the debate. If you want to exclude religion from public life, you don't get to preach either. 

As for country music, I haven't ever heard the song and thus don't know if I consider it actual country, which is a more vicious debate even than these already described.  The tradition of vigilante fantasies in music is very old and broad, though; it's not just Merle Haggard and Charlie Daniels but traditional Irish and Scottish music, and English, and, well, all such music. You're just going to have to learn to live with that one, SMN. Freedom of artistic expression is a basic right on the liberal model too. 

* Dude is a gender-neutral term, they say.

** Kant's universalized philosophy of practical reason was hotly against alternative sexualities, by the way.

A Less Glorious Outing

We had a call overnight that lasted 14 hours. A big storm left us pulling security for the electrical workers who were repairing the damage so two districts could get power back. It was necessary to completely close the only artery through this area for more than twelve hours, and that on a Saturday night when many people were traveling up or down the mountain while a little tipsy. 

On the upside, power has been restored and no electrical workers were hurt by crazy drivers crashing through their work zones after midnight. I had a chance to get to know one of the elders in the community, who had many interesting stories about his decades with the department of transportation, mountain foods he'd grown up with and recommended, and which creeks were good fishing. He kept coming back on foot all night because his family was trapped on the other side of the barricade, and he was worried about them. We had eyes on them, we just couldn't let anybody through all night.

I can't remember the last time I actually stayed up all night until dawn, which is an experience I remember more fondly from my youth. I think I might forgo it, as fate allows, for the future. 

“Thank you for saving our House”

The nice lady who lived by the place that burned Monday brought me a cobbler and a very sweet note. I’m glad I was out at the time she brought it by, as I’m not always felicitous with such emotions. Still, I very much appreciate knowing that it meant something to her. 

Apropos of the Last

A hero even in California.

Arming Victims Changes Things

Kerry Slone, who describes herself as a victim of domestic violence, has a suggestion for those like herself.

A firearm represents a much bigger change in a woman’s ability to defend herself. Men can readily hurt women without a gun, and if a woman is already in physical contact with the attacker so that he can take away their gun, they are already in trouble.

The peer-reviewed research shows that murder rates decline when people carry concealed handguns, whether men or women. But a woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to 4 times more than a man doing the same.

I have been asked to train women in the use of handguns, when they've separated from a partner and become afraid of him. I did so gladly, even though I might have liked the guy and doubted that he would in fact pursue any sort of harm towards her. If he did not, as I suspected he would not, no harm would befall him; and if he did, well, then he had it coming. 

It's strange, I reflect, to live in an era that turns every piece of once-jovial intellectual property into a complaint by women against men -- Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Marvel comic movies, apparently even Barbie dolls -- yet dodges this simple, practical remedy for the worst sort of actual harm that men do to women. We festoon the complaint rather than solving it.

Victims who are armed aren't victims anymore. They are, to use the language of the complaint, transformed into active agents rather than passive patients. They can assert their will, defend their interests, not be harmed against consent. I might suggest to them that their friends, the real allies, are those who help you get there rather than those who commiserate in the complaint. 

Awful Local News

Three junior Marines dead in North Carolina. 

This was unexpected

The Hunter Biden plea deal is not quite dead, but it's not looking good, either.

A Crisis of Masculinity

There's a bit of a fuss over Politico hosting a 'masculinity' issue without actually asking any men to participate in it. I agree that this is prima facie an odd thing to do, but if you reflect for a moment there are two ways in which it makes sense. First, as my friend Shireen Qudosi argues, men and women exist in (necessary) relationship to each other. (She has thoughts on that necessary connection, too.) It would make a kind of sense to ask women for their independent perspective on how the relationship was going. 

Unfortunately, that wasn't why Politico did it. They did it for the other reason, which is worse: there is a dearth of scholars of masculinity because you could never get tenure in 'male studies.' There are 'women's studies' and 'gender studies' (which apparently never includes one of the major genders, per se unhyphenated males). There are feminists in history departments and literature departments and art departments who are tenured to write feminine-perspective studies of those things. No university on earth has a "masculine studies" program, partly because men are likely to regard that sort of thing as navel-gazing nonsense, and  partly because the whole academic society is hotly against it. 

So we are getting a perspective on masculinity from those who are hostile to it. This is familiar. The New York Times did a similar thing with chivalry, asking a lot of people who weren't chivalrous and didn't really have a notion of what the concept meant whether or not it was important. The Times at least found one person who had some actual relationship to the topic to ask, which is better than this project; he was just not ready to talk about it because he hadn't been asked to think much about it before, only to do it. Politico hasn't even got that, which makes the quality of their work dubious. 

I wrote a response to the Times series, but I don't think I'll write one for Politico. They're allied questions, since chivalry happens to reliably produce the best sort of men. It's not the only way, though: here is a purely religious alternative approach recommended by my cousin the (female) physician. That sufficiently maps out the issue, which is that good men can do a lot of good, and bad men a lot of harm. It's really important to get this right, but our scholars aren't worried about it because they've decided that rising in their social class is more important -- and that requires talking up the hostile-to-the-alleged-patriarchy feminist perspective, and utterly dismissing alternative views (beginning with questioning whether this country in any sense constitutes a 'patriarchy'). 

As Texan99 once put it, since she's a woman anything she does must be feminine. Mutatis mutandis, anything I or any man does must be in some sense masculine. There may be special goods that only good fathers can provide, or good husbands, or good men; or it may only be that there are goods they are more likely to provide. It seems like the maleness is a given, though; the real issue is developing the virtues of masculinity, rather than the masculinity itself. Now that's something I've written a lot about already, and a question that continues to matter year after year.

A Quiet Afternoon

So today, after the weekend of intense rescue training, I intended to take a day off from firefighting and rest up.

As we were driving to the store, not even a half mile from home, I looked over and saw a big fire through the trees. I went running over after I jumped out of the truck and found a building that was so completely engulfed with rolling flames that I couldn't see any part of it. All I could see was the shape of a building, made out of fire.

I got back to my truck and a neighbor lady was saying that she was going to call 911, so instead of doing that I drove as fast as I could to the Fire Station and got my gear. I passed the fire engine on the way -- they'd just been paged off her call -- so I changed into my turnout gear and went back. I got there almost the same time as the truck, was handed one of the attack hoses, and fought the fire on the rear of the house.

We fought that fire for quite a while before any other stations arrived to back us up. After a while, though, there were enough of them that another crew could relieve us. By then we'd knocked down the worst of it.

I told you all of that to tell you this: after we were relieved, some EMTs who had responded were assigned to check the attack team's pulse, blood pressure, and other vitals. The lady who was trying to check mine couldn't get a blood pressure reading because my upper arm was too big. She then shifted to my lower arm. She still couldn't get a blood pressure reading because my lower arm was too big. 

She asked her partner if they had a bigger cuff, and he said no. I replied, "No worries, ma'am. After hearing you say that my arms are too big to get a blood pressure reading, I'll be just fine. I'll be walking on air all afternoon."

She just rolled her eyes and said, "Oh my God. Firefighters."