A Moment of Punk Rock

I don't know Gentleman Jesse, but I went to college with his wife so we know each other on Facebook. She's proud of him and wanted everyone to hear his new single, which is part of a larger recording to be released on Third Man Records. (I don't know of them either, but I get the reference.)

We don't do a lot of punk rock around here, but I like the genre. This has something of the CBGBs era sound, which is later than I usually like; but the subject matter is a little more mature than you often get. It's a song about how your life will turn out to be meaningless if you don't spend it protecting something or someone that matters, because then at the end you won't matter to anyone either.

It doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but if you click through the first link you can listen on SoundCloud or in your browser. [UPDATE: Soundcloud has an embed option, so you can hear it below as well.]

Third Man Records · Gentleman Jesse, Protecting Nothing

Fear of the WHO

Following James' suggestion at AVI's place, when this wild-eyed letter came across my desk today I looked up the actual treaty they're freaking out over. There really are some worrisome aspects to it, just not the one the out-freakers identified. Actually-worrisome things include Article V, Surveillance, which authorizes the WHO to engage in direct surveillance operations inside member countries if they determine that the member country isn't spying enough on its own. Surely the last thing we need is even more surveillance by spies on ordinary people.

Likewise Article VI, which demands the submission of "wherever possible, genetic sequence data" to the WHO. You can understand exactly why they'd want that information as, you know, the World Health Organization. Genetic sequencing is a highly useful technology for disease control. It's also excellent for developing advanced biological warfare weapons that can target populations based on genetic data. 

Yet the parts the letter says to worry about are anodyne. They call out by name Article XII, sections 2, 3, and 5. Article 3 has already been struck. Article 2 authorizes the WHO's Director-General to "notify," "seek the views of the Committee," and then, if a public health emergency is identified, "seek the views of the Emergency Committee." There's nothing stopping them from doing that now. Everyone has a right to talk to people, notify them and/or seek their views on things. 

All this ultimately refers to Article 49, which lays out a procedure for determining if there is a public health emergency or not. This procedure explicitly permits dissenting views, and requires that all such views -- majority and dissent -- be made available to member states. Then the procedure allows for the collection of even more views, this time from the member state governments. 

The only muscular part of this comes at the very end, where the member states are obligated to enact these regulations into their own domestic laws within five years. Unless they don't: "If a State is not able to adjust its domestic legislative and administrative arrangements fully with these Regulations or amendments thereto within the periods set out in paragraph 2 of this Article, as applicable, that State shall submit within the period specified in paragraph 1 of this Article a declaration to the Director-General regarding the outstanding adjustments and achieve them no later than 12 months after the entry into force of these Regulations or the amendments thereto for that State Party."

So if you don't comply, you are required to send a letter explaining why you won't.

The UN isn't the threat people sometimes imagine it to be. It is, and always will be, a completely useless organization made of of rent-seeking bureaucrats with no actual power. 

News to me

Did Steny Hoyer mean to blurt out that the U.S. is at war in Ukraine?

Sanity outbreak at MIT

Yikes. Did you know MIT students' mean math SAT score is 790? I guess if you can't hit a solid 800 there you're chopped liver. Now for the sanity outbreak: schools all over the country are engaging in the suicide pact of ceasing to require SAT scores in the admissions process. MIT tried it at the beginning of the pandemic, then noticed it was having an awful retention problem with students who had been admitted to a program beyond their reach, so it's reverted to requiring SAT scores. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but since the school isn't willing to water down its standards, it faced a choice between eliminating students before they arrived or after.

Regardless of how unfair anyone may think it is, SAT scores are a fantastic predictor of academic success, particularly in the elite STEM fields. MIT requires a solid core of STEM courses no matter the students' major, so there's basically no escape from the horsepower requirement. I suppose the next step is to argue that the core STEM curriculum is colonialist and patriarchal.

Choosing a college

This link looked like classic click-bait, but I hit the bait like an eager fish. It turns out to be a fairly interesting list of the "worst" college for your money in each of the 50 states.

On the one hand, the approach of ranking the schools according to average cost per year, average total student debt, average earnings several years after graduation, and default rate on student loans is a helpful organizational and analytical tool. The article largely avoided the subject of the quality of education by focusing instead on whether a student could expect to earn a living sufficient to pay off his student debt. The odd thing was the comments section for each school, which dwelt almost exclusively on students' complaints about how non-nurturing the staff was and how un-fun the extracurricular life was, with a minor emphasis on how dilapidated the buildings were.

I was also surprised by the statistics on admission and graduation. The commentary assumed that a high admission rate was a good thing but a low graduation rate was a bad one. Maybe, and it certainly would interest me to find that schools sucked students dry after a couple of years then kicked them out once they couldn't qualify for any more student debt. When it comes to turning a degree into a job, however, it seems that a low graduation rate might easily result from a school's unexpected adherence to standards for graduation, especially if the admission rate is very high: admit 'em all and let the failure rate sort 'em out. But graduation rates in the neighborhood of 16%? Yikes. That's really testing an approach that encourages everyone to give it a shot, no matter unpromising a match there might be between their backgrounds and the prospects for higher education.

In general, neither the article nor the students interviewed showed much interest in anything that would occupy my attention in evaluating a college. Besides wanting to understand how much academic excellence could be encountered, I'd want to know whether including the degree on a resume would be likely to increase my chances in landing a job in a particular field and whether, once I'd landed it, the content of the coursework would be likely to improve my chances of demonstrating excellence in my new position. There may have been career counselors at my university (no life coaches, I feel sure), but I don't recall meeting any. Our sports programs were barely detectable. Campus party life did exist, but few of us had a lot of leisure for it, and to the extent we did, I suppose we mostly made our own fun. Catapult-propelled water balloon wars between dorms were popular. Parties tended to be private and impromptu. There were some bars and restaurants near the campus, but the supply of students was too small, too cash-strapped, too car-less, and too frantically busy to support the kind of off-campus student scene you might find at, for instance, UT Austin.

We did mostly manage to become gainfully employed. Student debt was not such a thing back then. Only the most determined Peter Pans among us were likely to experience serious difficulty in avoiding a student loan default.

All this made me curious to see how my alma mater's statistics compared to the nation's "worst" schools. The admission rate today is 11%, below any on that list, I think. The on-time graduation rate is 83%, high for the list. The average graduating salary is much higher, especially if you take the easiest path to riches: computer science. (When I graduated in 1978, that was an exotic new choice.) The loan default rate is extremely low, about 1%. I notice that the male/female admissions split is now 50/50. In my time, men outnumbered women about 4 to 1. I'd be interested to see what that ratio looks like today in the STEM majors.

The Two Best Days of My Life

I've just had them, and I can't tell you about them. I didn't get rich, and I very pointedly didn't hurt anybody. There's a convicted felon up on fresh assault charges right now who'll never understand how happy it made me to protect him... from me.

I did the right thing, spoke the truth, hurt no one and I'm a better and happier man than I was two days ago. It's always the morning of the world; every day you can suddenly wake up in it.

No questions.

God Hears You, Boys

Lots of people think they aren’t religious. If you talk to God, you know you’re talking to someone. If you believe enough to pray, I think you believe enough. 

Why Jews are persecuted

Since I was a child and learned about the Holocaust, I've wondered what it is about Jews that makes so many cultures lose their minds. The best theory I ever came up with was something about their alien insularity, which triggers xenophobia and envy as long as they remain differentiated, cohesive, and successful. This canary-in-the-coalmine explanation rings more true for me, though, than anything I ever came up with:

“Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds.”

In other words, where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. But where liberty is under siege, Jews will inevitably be, too.

Beware any culture that celebrates antisemitism.

That's some deep bench

The darkest of dark horses just won the Kentucky Derby at 73-to-1 odds after filling in for a scratched horse just before the race.

The overhead video shows absolute nobody Rich Strike starting way back in the pack, then apparently deciding, "I don't like all these horses in front of me. Is this supposed to be a race or something? Is this the best the rest of you guys can do?"

Maybe Not Everybody

Joe Biden today, repeating his campaign misstep of praising the comity he had with segregationists: "Even back in the old days when we had real segregationists... at least we'd end up eating lunch together."

Not everybody would, since the lunch counters were segregated. I guess everyone who was important to him was there, though. 

Platonic versus Aristotelian Causality

Tom asked a question about how things are caused in the post about the philosophy of abortion. This is exactly the sort of question that most people will find impossibly irritating, dense, arcane, and useless to consider; it is also, therefore, exactly the sort of question I love to think about. Aristotle says that the highest things are of course useless: to be useful is to be good for something else, as a tool is good for being able to perform a repair, and the repair is good for being able to return to using the truck, and the truck is good for being able to fetch food for yourself and your family, and the food is good for feeding the people you love so that they won't die. The people you love, though, are good for their own sake: they may not be useful at all. Nevertheless they can become the focus of your whole life: especially a baby is not useful but readily becomes the focus of the parents' lives for quite some time.

So too philosophy, especially metaphysics: it may not be useful at all, but that is because it is the study of the very highest things.

So I'm going to answer this question at length. Out of courtesy for the rest of you, I'll put it beyond a jump break so that you can dodge the question if you want.

PR Firm: Keep Your Corporate Mouths Shut

A major PR firm that reps for Coca-Cola and others is advising its clients not to talk about abortion. They warn that this is a 50/50 issue, and the brands risk permanently alienating a large part of their customer base  no matter what they do. The journalist reporting on this is so unhappy about it that they cited, in parentheses, a poll that found that 72% of Americans object to overturning Roe. Yet the polling is all over the place on this subject; Gallup found that 70% of Americans favor abortion restrictions.

Long term, there have been very durable gains in pro-life sentiment. Gallup polls conducted in 1995 and 1996 indicated that less than 37 percent of Americans identified as “pro-life.” When the results from Gallup polls conducted between 1995 and 2009 are averaged, “pro-choice” outpolled “pro-life” by six points. However, over the past decade, the pro-life position has reached parity with the pro-choice position. The 14 polls Gallup has conducted on this issue since 2010 show that an average 47 percent of Americans identify as pro-life, and an average 47 percent identify as “pro-choice.”

As clearly as I can make out the numbers, there are less than a fifth of Americans in the "ban all abortions" or "ban no abortions" camp. The rest of the country is in the middle somewhere (including me, as you know from reading my philosophical account of it from the other day). How you phrase the question can lead to a 70% figure on either side of the issue, but that's illusory. For the most part Americans want to restrict abortion somewhat but not entirely, and differ about just where the line should be.

The Second Russo-Japanese War

 History rhymes, they say:

Although Russia suffered a number of defeats, Emperor Nicholas II remained convinced that Russia could still win if it fought on; he chose to remain engaged in the war and await the outcomes of key naval battles. As hope of victory dissipated, he continued the war to preserve the dignity of Russia by averting a "humiliating peace". Russia ignored Japan's willingness early on to agree to an armistice and rejected the idea of bringing the dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. The war was eventually concluded with the Treaty of Portsmouth (5 September [O.S. 23 August] 1905), mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt. The complete victory of the Japanese military surprised international observers and transformed the balance of power in both East Asia and Eastern Europe, resulting in Japan's emergence as a great power and a decline in the Russian Empire's prestige and influence in eastern Europe. Russia's incurrence of substantial casualties and losses for a cause that resulted in humiliating defeat contributed to a growing domestic unrest which culminated in the 1905 Russian Revolution, and severely damaged the prestige of the Russian autocracy.

The Russians have once again found themselves in a conflict with a power they assumed inferior that they can neither seem to win nor escape. In this case the sticky element is again that the supposedly inferior power proved to have military might much greater than expected: the Japanese because they'd carefully constructed Western-style technologies over the decades following the Meiji Restoration; Ukraine because NATO and especially the United States have found ways to support the conflict without being dragged into it (so far).

Russia is still making slow progress in the Donbas region, which was the main objective of their offensive, so they may avoid a 'humiliating peace.' Their reputation as a military power has been savaged, though, and the prestige of the Putin regime badly damaged. Whether that portents a future revolution in Russia remains to be seen.

A Revealing Press Conference

Jen Psaki says that the President supports no limits on abortion whatsoever, and refuses to condemn people who are posting maps to the homes of Supreme Court Justices.

The Supreme Court put up barricades today, making it now the case that all three constitutional branches of the Federal government feel the need for walls to protect themselves from their own citizens. 

With some justice:

Col. Kurt: Reject Freaks and Weirdos

Kurt Schlichter does have a way with words.

Have you noticed the absolute freakshow quality of the people who want to keep us in chains? Perhaps it’s one thing to be repressed by people who are at least nominally badass, like Romans or Mongols. But these geebos who make up the Democrat Party’s loudmouth wing? The sexually hopeless toads outraged because other people who might someday know the loving touch of another human can’t whack their babies? No. Not only does their tyranny fail the freedom test, it fails the aesthetic test....

[J]ust look at the antics of that fascist disinformation girl. She sings show tunes. She’s into Harry Potter – non-threatening sensitive and magical boys are sooooo dreamy. She’s also eager to shove you into a train car headed to a gulag, and as it pulls away from the station she’ll be shouting at you ruffians to use your inside voices.

That’s right – the mediocre girl who played the lead in your high school’s production of “Hello, Dolly!" – which you skipped to go pound Buds with your pals like normal people – is the harbinger of tyranny.

Young Arlo Guthrie described the crowd at Woodstock thus. Somehow they've taken over.

UPDATE: On reflection, COL Kurt is of course being too harsh here. That's his thing. Yet there is also an Aristotelian point about power and virtue. Power is the most dangerous human quality, and a wise society strictly limits its existence to only absolutely necessary cases, and then further limits its concentration. Where power is unavoidable, power should not be entrusted to people who are not virtuous; having the right virtues to exercise an office is in fact the major qualification for holding that office. These are the true virtues, the classical ones: wisdom, courage, moderation, self-discipline. 

We use the phrase "virtue signaling" to indicate what is actually a vicious behavior. People who engage in it are trying to exercise power that they haven't earned. The Biden administration is engaging in attempting to govern almost exclusively as a performance of virtue signaling, and these appointments are themselves signals of that sort. It's no wonder that everything is falling apart.

 

"Ultra MAGA"

Now MAGA stands for "Make America Great Again." Therefore, "Ultra MAGA" would imply an intense devotion to doing things that would make America great again. 

Old Uncle Joe Biden seems to think that is a bad thing. What's his alternative? Not making America great again? Making China or Iran great? CNN refers to this as him 'sharpening his midterm message,' but it had better get sharper than this if he wants to make any sense to voters -- who happen, ex officio, to be Americans.

Let Me Explain the Two Rules of Business

 

LAT: Roe Was Never That Great

I expect to learn that the draft we've seen is merely Alito's argument to the court, rather than a final decision; but it is interesting to see no less than the LA Times admitting that Roe was actually a badly reasoned decision. "Shaky legal foundation" means that we understand why we're going to lose this thing we really care about. 

Confer Mt. 7:24-27.

Philosophy on Abortion

I've written about this at length over the years, but I find this morning that search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo can't find anything I've written on the subject. So let's run through it one time quickly.

1) Abortion kills a living, individual, human being. 

1a) Living: Philosopher Hans Jonas points out that the activity that is life, what makes a living being different from a rock, is that the living being is taking resources from nature and putting it into its own order. Your body does this all the time. You eat, your body digests the food and breaks it into constituent elements or molecules, and then puts those things into the order of your muscles, bones, organs. That's life. That's what life means; that's what life is. A child is doing that from the moment of conception, dividing and ordering, taking resources from its mother to bring itself into the order that also is itself. 

Cf. Aristotle Physics II.1: "Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes." That's what he meant too: the baby in an important sense causes itself to come to be ('by nature'), whereas the rock came to be because of forces not its own. Heat created magma, uplift created cooling, weather broke it from the earth and made it a rock rather than a part of a mountain. Life entails having a nature, an order of your own, taking from the world and putting a part of the world into your own order.

So: abortion kills a living being.

1b) Individual: The order that the being is putting itself into is its own. It is not its mother's, nor its father's. Even in the case of twins, quickly the orders begin to diverge from each other and are subtly different. The child is a unique being. The child is not you: the child is himself or herself.

1c) Human: Nevertheless, all children have an order that is recognizably human. It is genetically distinct and different from other sorts of beings, e.g. dogs or bats.

Therefore: It is proven that abortion kills a living, individual, human being.

2) Aborted children are usually innocent in the strict sense of the word.

2a) Innocence implies absence of guilt. As a rule, guilt is a matter of the will. The child's will, before birth, is in a minimal state of activity: the child can move about the womb of its own free will in the later stages, but for the most part his or her actions are informed by instinct rather than will. Growing, for example, is an act of the child but not a chosen or willed action.

2b) Occasionally guilt can occur accidentally. When a child's body embeds itself in an intratubal manner, the child through no act of will is going to be guilty of killing his or her mother. Other times, children die in the womb and cannot be ordinarily expelled. These children, likewise, are accidentally guilty of killing their mother through sepsis and the like. This is not guilt in the strict sense, but by analogy; but it is nevertheless the sort of thing that might license violence in self defense (see 3, following). If someone is accidentally about to kill someone, and there is not time or space to reason with them about it, you might reasonably use violence to stop them from doing so.

3) Usually violence towards another individual human being is only justified by defense of self or another who is innocent.

3a) From 2b, I can see limited cases in which abortion is fully justified. If the mother would die and, therefore, the child will also die, it is sensible to save the one life that might be saved. If there's a legitimate choice between saving either life but not both, the mother might sensibly defend her own life if she chooses to do so. This is not the position of the Church, please note; it is a place where I dissent from the Church's teachings for what I take to be honest and honorable reasons. I trust in forgiveness if I am in error.

4) Thought experiment A: The Deer Hunter

4a) Though it is here proven that the child is a living, individual human being, it is sometimes argued that we cannot really know if the child is a 'person' or not. This strikes me as a fiction created for the purpose of creating an ambiguity that might allow for an immoral action, exactly like 'race' was invented as a concept in order to create a class of human beings whose interests might be ignored for convenience. 'Personhood' separate from 'the category of being a living individual human being' is almost nonsense; it could in principle extend to aliens or some such, but even then it would still embrace all living individual human beings.

4b) However, consider the case of a person who has a duty to feed his family. Times are hard and they are hungry. He takes his rifle and goes out into the woods to hunt for food. After a long time, he sees movement. At that distance, though, he cannot quite be sure if what he is seeing is another person or a deer. It could be a deer, but it also might be a neighbor who is walking in the woods in a deer-colored coat. May he morally shoot what might be another person, being uncertain? 

4c) He may not. If he fires and it turns out to be a deer, all is well; but if he fires, and it turns out to be his neighbor, he is guilty of manslaughter. Choosing not to fire, by contrast, is always guiltless. 

4d) The needs of his family for food might be considered a mitigating factor in determining just punishment, but not a sufficient justification for the manslaughter.

4e) Therefore, uncertainty about the personhood of the child is not a defense for killing it. The only certainly moral choice in cases of uncertainty about personhood is not to choose to kill.

5) Thought Experiment B: The Artificial Womb

5a) Another defense of abortion that is sometimes made is that women should not be forced to harbor a child to term if they do not wish to do so. Consider -- as is not hard -- a technology that would allow the child to be safely transferred to an artificial womb, so that the woman did not have to carry the child if she did not wish. Would she still have the right to kill the child, if there were an alternative?

5b) I submit that her bodily autonomy would be adequately preserved if she were free to remove the child to an artificial womb. However, notice that in such a case she would still have duties to her child. Just as a father has to pay child support even if he is not otherwise involved in the child's life, so too would she -- equal rights, equal duties -- have to pay for the support of a child she engendered even if she did not otherwise wish to be involved with the child.

5c) The current status allows a pernicious inequality of rights and duties between men and women, by allowing women to dispose of the child and/or their duties to the child (many states have surrender points where a living child can be abandoned without questions), but requires men to be responsible for 18 years regardless of their choice. This is a basic unfairness in our legal structure.

5d) More, it violates natural law as regards the woman and the child. The purpose of traditional institutions like marriage is the recognition that humanity naturally produces children, and children by nature need to be supported and educated to adulthood so that they can assume proper places in society. Children are due this from their parents by nature. That is true for both parents. It is a natural duty that our society has for decades attempted to relieve for women.

Conclusion: Except in rare cases as provided in (3a), abortion is morally wrong. It ought to be dealt with accordingly.