Grim's Hall

A Clockwork Orange

It seems like I have read this story.

Absolute chaos struck a quiet residential street in Elm Park last night as a gang of youths believed to be armed with knives entered a primary school and began to attack other youths....
Youths were seen running from the premises in fear as the gang arrived.
One local resident saw the youths leave the school and run down the streets of Maylands Avenue. He told the Havering Daily: “It was total chaos. We saw between 40-50 youths, running through the streets. We think they had knives as they were seen dropping weapons in people’s drive ways and running away. They were attacking the police and there were so many of them that the police had to just disperse them.

”Youths,” you say? No other distinguishing characteristics, neither for the attackers nor the victims? Codpieces and bowler hats, maybe?

Youth gangs with knives wouldn’t be a problem if a certain number of responsible adults had firearms. Disarming the citizens leaves them vulnerable.

These boys put on a great concert tonight. It was supposed to have been at the 50th anniversary Mountain Heritage Festival on September 29th of last year. That turned out to be two days after Hurricane Helene.

They came tonight instead, and played a great set. It included BobWills music, country music, and old Appalachian music. This included Cindy, a song they date to 1924 from here in Jackson County, North Carolina. I'm not sure about that attribution (and neither is Wikipedia); I didn't catch the name of the woman they claimed to have first recorded it, as a kind of proto-Dolly Parton. But here it is from 1959, with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson.

They also did Cocaine Habit, which I didn't think they would since it was on a college campus -- Western Carolina University. It's a song I like because it features in Hells Angels Forever, the great 1983 documentary about the motorcycle club, performed by Elephant's Memory.

They finished their main set with Wagon Wheel, written by one of their number; it's a very popular song locally as it mentions several local landmarks. The geography of it is dubious, though. A rider will recognize some problems with the lay of the land in the song.

But let's not dwell on that. It was a great show by a personable band who was very interested in the culture. They moved cheerfully from bluegrass to honky-tonk, adding in piano or swapping to accordion when necessary. At one point they had three fiddles going. They played Texas two-step music with equal ease. A grand evening, much appreciated.

Venison Adovada

Adovada is an ancient way of preserving meat with chilies. I found some that I’d made a while ago and then frozen after we’d eaten on it for a few days. It was made with pork, but I decided to cook venison in it instead. This was a fantastic decision: the spicy broth is an excellent companion to big game. I cooked it in the pressure cooker, ensuring great tenderness.

It’s a simple recipe. About two-three fistfuls of New Mexican red chilies, garlic (as much as you like), oregano and two diced onions. Add black pepper or hotter chilies as well if you want, or alternatively just increase the concentration of New Mexico peppers to make it stronger. Boil together and purée. If you’re not using a pressure cooker, that’s fine; pour the chili sauce over two or three pounds of the meat and let it marinate overnight in the fridge. Then chop up any additional vegetables you want— potatoes are traditional, yellow squash works well — and braise in the chili sauce (plus additional water/stock/beer if needed to cover the meat -- I used chicken stock this time) for two hours. After that, salt to taste.

It's good eaten as a stew if you break up the meat, or pulled out for tacos or burritos.

A Saturday Night Romance

Rollin’ On

Happy Birthday Jerry Reed

The late, great Snowman was born this day 1937.

A Brief Lesson in Logic

The SEP just updated their page on the concept of negation; this diagram is from the entry. While I was reviewing it I noticed that while most of it is straightforward, the concept of "subcontraries" is probably not well known.

Some notes on the symbols: ◻ and ◊ are modal operators, meaning "necessarily" and "possibly" respectively. ϕ is just a Greek letter, Phi, which is commonly used in logic to represent any given proposition. ¬ is the symbol for negation. Thus, in the top left corner, ◻ϕ means 'necessarily Phi,' and in the bottom right, ¬◻ϕ is 'not necessarily Phi,' whereas at the top right ◻¬ϕ is 'necessarily NOT Phi.' The triple bar equal sign is a logical biconditional, meaning that the two terms mean exactly the same thing. I imagine you can work out the rest from that.

Traditionally, the Aristotelian relations of contradiction, contrariety, and subalternation are supplemented with an additional relation of subcontrariety, so called because the subcontraries are located under the contraries. As the contradictories of the two contraries, the subcontraries (e.g., Some pleasure is good, Some pleasure is not good) can both be true, but cannot both be false. For Aristotle, this was therefore not a true opposition, since subcontraries are “merely verbally opposed” (Prior Analytics 63b21–30). Within pragmatic theory, the assertion of one subcontrary (Some men are bald) is not only compatible with, but actually conversationally implicates, the other (Some men are not bald), given Grice’s Maxim of Quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as is required”; see the entries on Paul Grice, pragmatics, and implicature).

The article on implicature is also interesting.

So the contraries are "necessarily Phi" and "necessarily NOT Phi," the latter of which is equivalent to "Not Possibly Phi." The subcontraries are "Possibly Phi" and "Not Necessarily Phi," which is equivalent to "Possibly NOT Phi."

I like the way they've graphed this relationship, because you can also see the entailments on the two vertical sides. If Phi is Necessary, it must also be possible; that one is obvious enough. And if Phi is necessarily not the case, then Phi isn't possible: that's a straight equivalence. What might not be immediately obvious to new students of logic is that "NOT Possibly" entails "Possibly not."

Clarity of thought is improved by clear logic. Plus, it's kind of fun.

Vernal Equinox

The Spring is welcome this year.

Sentimental & Homicidal II

I can imagine many a father taking a baseball bat to school administrators who forced their 13-year-old teenage daughter to disrobe in front of anyone who made them uncomfortable -- if only those administrators were also male. I cannot easily imagine a man who was an administrator doing what these women did, escorting young women into a changing room and making them disrobe when they were plainly uncomfortable doing so. This is probably partially because they realize that the fathers would come and kill them.

We have a longstanding cultural prohibition against men using violence on women. I strongly approve of that cultural prohibition. MMA star Ronda Rousey once refused to fight a man in her weight class because, as she rightly put it, “I don’t think it’s a great idea to have a man hitting a woman on television." There are very good reasons that we accept this limit on equality -- which is only informal and partial, since formally the law forbids men to hit other men, too, even though juries often make exceptions where it was clearly appropriate.

The formal structures seem to endorse, rather than brake, this kind of conduct from credentialed 'administrators.' That's a problem for which we have no good cultural solutions.

Up the Militia

From The Federalist:

You’d never know it from watching television, but civilians stop more active shooters than police and do so with fewer mistakes, according to new research from the Crime Prevention Research Center, where I serve as president. In non-gun-free zones, where civilians are legally able to carry guns, concealed carry permit holders stopped 51.5 percent of active shootings, compared to 44.6 percent stopped by police, CPRC found in a deep dive into active shooter scenarios between 2014 and 2023.

Not only do permit holders succeed in stopping active shooters at a higher rate, but law enforcement officers face significantly greater risks when intervening. Our research found police were nearly six times more likely to be killed and 17 percent more likely to be wounded than armed civilians.

They do it for free, too. Voluntarily.

The Sentimental and the Homicidal

This is from Commentary, so you won't be surprised by the pro-Israel language; but that's not what I want to talk about. I'm interested in the critique of sentimentalism, and how it dovetails with the embrace of homicidal impulses.

The poshlost* comes in the form of poetry, too. One Palestinian poet writes:

With clean hands,
he gently sifts the flour,
and adds a handful of yeast.
He pours the warm water
for the yeast particles to live,
then rolls and kneads and rolls
and kneads the dough.

He lets the soft mass rest.

With firm but gentle hands,
he rounds it into balls,
flattens them into shape,
and handles each one
delicately into the oven.

Soon, perhaps in half an hour,
the bread rolls are born fresh,
healthy and browned.
The newborn breads breathe,
yet dust chokes the air,
searing gases penetrate
their thin, fragile crusts.

On the day of their birth, a missile,
a bakery, a scattering
of zaatar, flesh, and blood.

The sentimentalism here portrays the baker as gentle and loving, nurturing: "He pours the warm water for the yeast particles to live," the poet says. He lets it rest. He is delicate in his handling. Well, yes; I make bread too. I also feed the yeast, usually with honey but sometimes with blackstrap molasses.

A poet is allowed license, but it strikes me -- as a frequent baker -- that it would be just as legitimate to describe the act as monstrous. The yeast's whole life is enslaved to the production of gases to make the bread rise; all the nurturing is just to get the yeast to eat and excrete so that the dough will be fluffy. Meanwhile, not the missile but the oven killed the yeast: the 'newborn breads' are actually newly killed, the yeast slaughtered in its millions in the bald service of the baker's naked interest in eating leavened bread.

Because the frame chosen is the loving, nurturing one, it masks the horror done by the same hands.

The novelist Milan Kundera, who well knew the horrors of totalitarian rule, has nicely skewered false sentimentality: “Two tears flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass.” Put another way, “sentimentality is that peculiarly human vice which consists in directing your emotions toward your own emotions, so as to be the subject of a story told by yourself,” as the English philosopher Roger Scruton noted in his autobiography.
The sentimentalists are playing a double game: They are dispensing, and attracting, warm feelings and approbation for themselves and their kind, while at the same time providing cover for totalitarians and terrorists.

That is correct, as far as it goes, and we see it again and again. I have grown sadly accustomed to seeing the endorsement of murder and assassination -- against that healthcare CEO by "Luigi," against Musk, against Trump or his supporters -- by the very people I know most inclined to sentimentalist broadcasts. They would never go so far as to say "I wish someone would kill him," but they will definitely go as far as to say that it would be just, that it would be deserved, that it would be understandable. After all, those men provoke such bad feelings in their sentimental hearts.

* Poshlost is explained in the article's beginning, and is an interesting Russian word. Zaatar is a spice/herb mix that is common in the Levant.

News from 1948

In a remarkable top-of-the-front-page article, the New York Times somehow cites an irrelevant 1967 case and ignores the actually-relevant 1948 Supreme Court Ruling.

The issue is the deportation of the Venezuelan gangbangers under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The Times quotes many people who are very upset that the district judge who issued an order wasn't obeyed. The Supreme Court, however, has already issued a ruling on this very subject. It begins:

1. The Alien Enemies Act precludes judicial review of the removal order.

So that's it.

I admit to not liking that the Salvadoran prison these people were sent to apparently exists to do things that would violate the Eighth Amendment. I don't think the US Government should ever be allowed to violate the Constitution by getting someone else to do it for them, neither a private company nor a foreign government. This holds especially for violations of the Bill of Rights. The Declaration of Independence states definitely, and correctly, that the sole justification for establishing this or any government is to protect the natural rights of the people. They should never be in the business of looking for work-arounds to that.

That said, these aren't members of 'the people,' weren't here in accord with our laws, and have no claim to belong here. They aren't refugees, but the people that refugees were fleeing who followed them here to continue to dominate and exploit them. Their claim to the protection of the laws is only as good as the Devil's in the famous quote from A Man for All Seasons: just because we have to set strong guards against the government getting out of hand.

In any case, the highest court in the land has already ruled on this issue. You can challenge whether there is a real state of war or invasion in court; you can't review the removal order.

Honor & The Quiet Man

A useful essay on the great and most worthy subject of honor, from The Art of Manliness.

We usually watch The Quiet Man on St. Patrick’s Day. This year we didn’t happen to do, but we did last year. I agree with the basic argument of the piece that the movie is about an American learning how to deal with the ancient sense of honor. There was quite a lot of that in Iraq, too.

There’s an advantage to the American honor: it’s closer to Aristotle’s virtue of magnanimity. Because it is true to its own sense of what conduct is most worthy of honor, it shapes a character that pursues the best things for themselves. That ends up earning quite a bit of respect, which is the honor in the ancient sense that the article discusses. American Magnanimity is ultimately what carries the day in the movie.