Here’s more on the Gosnell case, if you can bear it, from Conor Friedersdorf.
Here too is Andrew McCarthy on the too-familiar process by which dehumanization precedes atrocity.
And here’s Roger Simon on the mainstream media’s discomfort with this story.
Here’s a photo of the media area at the Philadelphia courthouse where the trial, of a man who may well be the most prolific murderer in United States history, is being held. Draw your own conclusions.
I’m very sad to report the death of comedic genius Jonathan Winters, quite possibly the funniest man who ever lived.
Here he was in 1964, with a stick.
Read John McCreary’s latest assessment of the North Korean adventure, here.
Investor’s Business Daily’s editorial board comments here on the mainstream media’s non-coverage of the trial of the monstrous Kermit Gosnell, who ran an “abortion” abattoir in Philadelphia in which living infants were routinely and gruesomely murdered.
A search just now on the New York Times website turned up exactly one article, from page 17 of the March 19th edition.
Having just got back from our trip, I’m still getting caught up on work, current events, email, and so on. It does seem that rather a lot has happened here in the States and around the world while we were gone, none of it particularly encouraging.
Meanwhile, here are three pictures from China (click on the pictures for the full-sized versions).
First, the view from the rear of a house we visited on the outskirts of Yangshuo:
The next is from the countryside between Moon Hill Village and Liugong, a hamlet on the Li River:
And here’s a shot from the top of Victoria Peak in Hong Kong:
We’ll get back to normal operations shortly.
We’ve made it home to New York, and are recovering. Things will get back to normal here again soon.
Having found a little free time and a stable Internet connection, I thought I’d give a little update:
I’m sitting on the rooftop of an inn at the foot of the famous Moon Hill, a limestone arch just a few kilometers from the town of Yangshuo, in Guangxi province, China. Here’s the view from our balcony, two floors below:
We arrived here last night, after spending three nights in Guangzhou, where our daughter lives and works. Yangshuo is famous for its spectacular ‘karst‘ landscape; you’ve seen it in countless images, and it is also featured on China’s 20-yuan bill.
Sadly, the weather has been awful ever since we arrived in China — it has rained every day, and Guangzhou, and now Yangshuo, have been shrouded in fog and mist. We have yet to see even the tiniest patch of blue sky. That didn’t bother us much in Guangzhou, which is just a vast and unbeautiful metropolis, but it’s a pity not to be able to see a little distance here in one of the world’s most scenic places. It’s supposed to be like this until the day after we leave.
Nevertheless, there is still much to see and do. We’ll be here for a few more days, then back to Guangzhou, off to Hong Kong for the weekend, then back to New York. I’ll have more pictures to post later.
Phil Ramone, arguably the greatest record producer of all time, died on Saturday. He was a towering presence in the recording industry, and his death is an enormous loss to us all. His work, and his influence, touched every aspect of recording. (He’s even the man responsible for putting that long-familiar pair of Shure SM-57s on the Presidential podium.)
I didn’t know Phil well, but I did do a couple of dozen sessions with him over the years. He was a lovable, genial guy, and one heck of a storyteller.
His New York Times obituary is here.
Lawrence Auster has died. There are things I would like to say about him, his influence on my own thinking, and the grace with which he faced his final ordeal, but I must say them later. He was a brilliant and difficult man.
For now, go and read Laura Wood’s entry at VFR. See also Henry McCulloch’s piece at VDare, and Bill Vallicella’s comments at Maverick Philosopher.
March 31st, Guangzhou — Having found a little time to write, I’ll add a few more remarks.
Mr. Auster was, as Bill Vallicella correctly observed, an extremist; his view of conservatism was a very narrow one, and he refused to make common cause with other self-styled conservatives whose opinions were not almost exactly congruent with his own. In this he could be almost pathologically stubborn; he picked a lot of fights with many people who broadly agreed with him, and fought them with a sudden and startling fierceness. Thus he alienated a great many people with whom it would surely have been more productive, in the long run, to have fought alongside. But in his view the great civilization of the Christian West was dying of a withering and degenerative disease, and there was no point in making alliances with those who brought any trace of the infection along with them. Being “the enemy of the enemy” was never sufficient to make anyone his friend.
Such factionalism is the cardinal weakness of the modern Right in its struggle against the comparatively monolithic Left. The branches of American conservatism exist in a multidimensional space defined by several orthogonal axes, such as religion, social tradition, immigration policy, ethnic identity, fiscal policy, Federalism, limited government, and foreign policy. Mr. Auster considered his own small region of this large ideological manifold — at the intersection of religious and social traditionalism, immigration restriction, and European ethnocentrism — to be the only hope of our civilization’s survival, and he defended his patch of ground with drawn sword and a wary eye.
He did so, however, with remarakable intellectual consistency and insight. As Henry McCulloch said, Auster refused to “bend the knee to the world’s fashions”, and he lived independently enough that he continued to write under his own name, even as his views became more and more heretical. (His views didn’t change; orthodoxy did.)
My first encounter with Lawrence Auster was to be on the receiving end of withering criticism for an item I had written about race and immigration. It was not pleasant; although Mr. Auster made several points I have since come to agree with, I thought I had not been understood correctly, and he quite obstinately ignored my subsequent attempts at clarification. (He did this sort of thing often.)
As time went by, though, and my own understanding of the West’s existential crisis deepened, I began to reject the neoconservative ideas that had attracted me in the early years of the last decade in favor of a more traditionalist view. Nobody articulated the traditional-conservative ideology better than Lawrence Auster. I continued to read VFR daily; I suspect that many others who had fallen out with him did so also.
Over time I mended fences with Larry, and in the last couple of years we took up an amiable email correspondence, and met a couple of times for lunch. Among other things, we shared an interest in the esoteric teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
Larry’s great gift was analysis and clarification. Every day, he dissected current events to show the consistent progress of the disease affecting the West. Much of what he said was forehead-smackingly obvious once he had said it; I hope, and rather doubt, that we will still see things quite as clearly now that he’s gone.
Larry faced his terminal cancer, and the terrible suffering he bore before he died, with almost saintly grace. Though I am not a believer myself (and so lacked a central qualification for Auster-approved conservatism), I’m glad to know that his deepening faith gave him strength and comfort at the end.
Lawrence Auster should have been with us for many years to come. His death is a very painful loss.
Things will be quiet around here for the next two weeks or so: the lovely Nina and I are off to fabled Cathay, where our brilliant and beautiful daughter is teaching science at an international high school in Guangzhou. We’ll all be spending a few days in scenic Yangshuo, and the memsahib and I will have a weekend in Hong Kong as well.
I’ll post when possible, but I have no idea how often that will be. Meanwhile, I hope things hang together while we’re gone – no nuclear strikes, general disorder, declarations of martial law, or ruptures of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which I still think is ready to rip.
You have the conn.
There’s grist for every ideological mill in this item, which came over the transom from a reader this morning. It lists the admissions this year, by race, to New York’s premier public high school, Stuyvesant.
Admission to Stuy is a pure meritocracy; do well enough on the entrance exam, and you’re in. Here are the numbers:
””Stuyvesant offered admission to 9 black students; 24 Latino students; 177 white students; and 620 students who identify as Asian.
Make of them what you will.
Today was gay-marriage day at the Supreme Court. Read the transcript here.
Key points, I think, were two lines of questioning directed from the bench to Ted Olson, one from Antonin Scalia (“You ”” you’ve led me right into a question I was going to ask…”), and one from Sonia Sotomayor (“Mr. Olson, the bottom line that you’re being asked…”).
I think Mr. Olson’s response to Justice Sotomayor was either an equivocation on the concept of “conduct” (I don’t see why marriage is “conduct” for some and not for others), or question-begging on the definition of marriage (which of course the matter being decided).
The respondents (that is, Mr. Olson and amicus curiae Donald Verrilli, who want to see California’s ban on SSM overturned) also found themselves in the curious position of arguing that a same-sex marriage ban would be unconstitutional in states that have already established civil unions with parallel benefits for gay couples, but would be constitutional in less-progressive states that haven’t! As Justice Breyer points out, this could cause states where there is scant support for gay marriage to be reluctant even to consider recognizing civil unions.
Anyway, go and have a look yourself, and see what you think. It’s important and instructive to read these things — legislation, arguments in the Court, executive orders, etc. This is where the rubber meets the road; this is all there is. This is where abstractions are transduced into realities that affect us all.
One of the intrinsic disadvantages conservatives have in the P.R. war with the Left is that we weren’t brought up to think that victimhood is an appropriate foundation for a well-built life. For traditional, conservative sorts, weaned on solid Christian pessimism, it is simply the plain truth that life will always dish out insults and injuries — and that, for the common good, and as a matter of personal virtue, adults are expected to stand it with dignity, do what they can about it, ask for assistance only when they absolutely must, and repay as promptly as possible the debts they incur as a result.
Others, who clearly were raised very differently, have set themselves up in a highly profitable line of work, jerking the nation’s heartstrings with one Queen for a Day story after another. Every slight, every disparaging remark, every little misfortune, every trifling asymmetry in the allotment of life’s blessings, and every instance of life’s natural vicissitudes, however transient or trivial, becomes a violation of “social justice” — an aggression against the helpless victim, and an occasion for the reorganization of society along more clement lines. (So gossamer-skinned have we become, so sensitive to the slightest abrasion, that we have in recent years trained powerful new instruments on these affronts, zooming in by several orders of magnitude, and are now tallying “microaggressions“.) The sought-after remedy is always some act of government: an entitlement or preference of some sort, or some new constraint upon the liberties of others.
There’s no limiting principle. And if you watch for a while, you begin to realize that “social injustice” is not only infinite, but fractal. It’s a Julia set of grievances. Zoom in all you like; new affronts will appear at every scale, world without end.
Well, two can play at that game. The blogger and Twitterer “Ace of Spades” informs us that Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has proposed a new program, aimed at giving succor to a newly demarcated class of sufferers: victims of government itself.
Learn more here.
Charles Cooke, who is a very sensible fellow for one so young, comments at length on Albany’s stupid, histrionic, opportunistic, and authoritarian reaction to Newtown.
Here’s Alfred Jay Nock, writing in 1936 about a little-sought-after but highly rewarding career path: prophet to the Remnant.
This one’s been making the rounds: the fish with “human teeth”.
The perfect should never be the enemy of the good, but we should always let the good be the enemy of the merely convenient.
This caught my eye:
US plan calls for more scanning of private Web traffic, email
Non-electronic communication will soon be a thing of the past. It’s interesting that the simplest of technologies — a packet of paper, a drop of wax — made possible, for thousands of years, something that for most people will soon be a thing of the past as well: to deliver a message with the assurance that it had not been read by others. Yes, it can still be done; you can still send mail in paper envelopes. But when the mail service finally becomes obsolete, and you’ll need to send such things by courier, who will bother?
On the other hand: sometimes such messages were read by people other than the intended recipients. A friend of mine just found in an attic a box of courtship letters sent by her grandparents to one another almost a century ago. That sort of thing won’t happen any more, either.
All of this has always just been information. But information always requires a physical substrate. We’re moving through a kind of phase transition: the world of books and letters, where information had to be carried from place to place on discrete and bulky objects, was, you might say, a cold world. Metaphorically, it was a solid state: things moved slowly, lasted a long time, and distant particles rarely interacted. It was an ice world — and if you can measure distance by the time it takes for two things to come together, it was a much bigger world. Things are now heating up very rapidly indeed.
Physical books will still be around for a while — certainly, those already printed aren’t going anywhere anytime soon — but I wonder how much longer it will be profitable to print new ones.
Keep in mind also that e-books can be silently updated through the reading device. Even history books.
When you abandon reason and due process, and act only upon hysteria, emotion and sensationalism, this is what you get.
That such people are in charge of our public affairs — and have the power to revise and abridge our cherished liberties at their whim — is horrifying.
Here is a sensible piece by George Will on why the Court should strike down the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’.
In brief: the definition and regulation of marriage is not among the Federal government’s enumerated and carefully limited powers. Students of history will recall that this actually used to mean something.
I’m working late again tonight, so all I have, I’m afraid, is this brief item from NRO, in which we learn that a Connecticut principal has canceled his school’s annual celebration of its honors students, in order not to bruise the emotions of those less successful.
Yes, readers, America is well on the way to a full recovery of its former vitality, and will soon be a strong and virile nation once again.
Should be a-a-a-a-any day now.
Today’s good news: it looks like Dianne Feinstein’s ban on so-called “assault weapons” is dying on the vine.
I was wondering when this was going to happen.
One Twitterer remarked:
If Silicon Valley is a meritocracy (or aspires to be) why not let everyone see company hiring stats for women and people of color.
Here’s a guess:
It’s because Silicon Valley (which is really just a proxy for companies that make their money on the basis of highly innovative engineering) is a meritocracy — you just can’t fake being good at writing code, solving complex engineering problems, or designing high-tech gadgetry — and to reveal their employment stats would call into question the assumption that in a genuine engineering meritocracy all of the world’s identity groups would be represented in exactly the ratios with which they exist in the general population.
To reject this assumption — which is simply a heartfelt wish — is a very serious offense these days. But as I pointed out above, technology is ruthless: your code, your smart-phone, your genome sequencer either works, or it doesn’t. If you’re developing a self-driving car, it had better stay on the road, and not crash into things.
I know some of the biggest of these companies from the inside, and let me tell you: they don’t give a damn what you look like. They want one thing, and one thing only: superior engineers. To get hired at any of these outfits you have to jump some very high hurdles. To work at Google, say, just to get a foot in the door you’ll need to know programming well enough that languages don’t even really matter. Then you’ll have to have to have elite mastery of the theoretical stuff: algorithms, data structures, and so on. Above all that, though, you have to be very, very intelligent: the kind of flexible, general intelligence that lets you take all that book-larnin’ and use it in entirely new ways, or throw it away altogether, to solve problems that nobody’s ever thought about before. You need to be able to see hidden isomorphisms between classes of problems. And that intelligence needs to be a motor that runs all the time, and that can run well even when under heavy stress for prolonged periods of time.
This happens to be the sort of intelligence that is very reliably quantifiable. You can talk all you want about cultural bias in IQ testing, but technology doesn’t care, and this sort of intelligence is what it takes.
We are not talking about intelligence at or near the mean, for any human group. We’re talking about intelligence that is way over on the right side of the bell-curve, where it starts getting a good deal closer to the x-axis, and the absolute numbers start thinning out fast. The assumption behind this political inquisition is that the intrinsic distribution of high intelligence of this kind is — no, must be — exactly equal in all human populations, and between the sexes, and so, absent some sort of malicious institutional racism or sexism, the representation of these groups in high-tech companies should match their share of the population.
“But is that actually true? What if it isn’t?”
“Sorry. It MUST be true.”
And so, you see, Silicon Valley is about to find itself in a bit of a pickle.
Think about this, too: the folks who run these companies want to win. They want brilliant engineers, period. If it were really the case that any of them were rejecting out of hand highly qualified candidates just because of their sex or race, those people would simply be snapped up elsewhere, to the competitive advantage of the second party. To imagine that the distribution of sex and race in these companies is based on pernicious bias, you’d have to assume that all of these companies value bigotry over competitive advantage. They just aren’t that stupid.
I’ve worked for some time now in the software industry, and I can tell you this: even in a place like New York City, it’s hard to find (and keep) good engineers. There just aren’t that many of them out there. Believe me, when you find ’em, you grab ’em.
This is a witch hunt, nothing more, nothing less.
Here is a very beautiful performance of Lachrimae Pavane, written by the English Renaissance composer and lutenist John Dowland. The player is the Swedish guitarist Per-Olov Kindgren.
It’s hard to describe the emotional effect of Dowland’s music; it’s terribly sad, but just to call it “melancholy” is too one-sided. There is also something deeply comforting in it.
On the elevation of the new Pope, we’ve seen a lot of sulking about the Catholic Church’s inexplicable reluctance to get itself properly aligned with the Left’s social-issues agenda.
It is, as Dennis Mangan points out here, perfectly understandable for socially ‘progressive’ sorts to consider the Church a political opponent, and to seek to reduce its influence in the nation’s affairs. But it’s a bit much to expect a 2000-year-old institution, whose mission has been for those two millennia to assist the salvation of souls by interpreting the moral will of God, suddenly to rewrite its core doctrines in order to bring itself into doxological alignment with the editorial staff of the New Yorker. (You might say it’s downright Ptolemaic; after all, we already know that the New Yorker considers itself to exist at the center of the Universe. At the very least, it’s certainly not very catholic.)
All this hoydenish self-centeredness prompted tart responses from James Taranto and Pat Buchanan (who are, respectively, lapsed and practicing Catholics). Here are some key excerpts.
Catholicism has evolved over 2,000 years and, whatever its adversities and shortcomings, has proved sustainable over that period. If you judge it by the standard of contemporary feminism and sexual liberationism, of course it will seem lacking. But these fashionable dogmas have yet to prove their worth, either for understanding human nature or sustaining a society over the long term. Their adherents fancy themselves sophisticated, but in fact they frequently are too simple-minded–or perhaps fearful–even to consider a different way of looking at the world.
To be Catholic is to be orthodox.
Indeed, let us presume the impossible ”” that the Church should suddenly allow the ordination of woman, and decree that abortions in the first month of pregnancy are now licit, and that homosexual unions, if for life, will henceforth be recognized and blessed.
This would require the Church to admit that for 2,000 years it had been in error on matters of faith and morals, and hence is not infallible. But if the Church could have been so wrong for so long, while the world was right, and many had suffered for centuries because the Church erred, what argument would be left for remaining Catholic?
If the Church were to admit it had been wrong since the time of Christ about how men must live their lives to attain eternal life, why should Catholics obey the commandments of such a fallible and erring Church? Why not follow our separated brethren of the Protestant faiths, and choose what doctrines we wish to believe and what commandments we wish to obey?
It’s disappointing that anyone has to explain all this. We’re all free, if we disagree with Catholic doctrine, not to be Catholics. But lambasting the Catholic Church for sticking to traditional principles is like criticizing the American Philatelic Society for being so preoccupied with stamps.
As usually happens, the middle of this week has meant long hours at work. So for the moment, just a few links:
— A fine rant, from across the pond, on the new subjectivity of justice, and the culture of victimhood.
— A necessary government expenditure that appears, so far, to have survived the sequester.
— Calvinism.
— A statistical resource I had hitherto been unaware of.
— Richard Dawkins on the relative value of pigs and human fetuses.
— Pop-psych.
— Zombie-fy yourself. (Haven’t tried it.)
— A layman’s overview of the Higgs particle, whose existence seems more likely confirmed.
Ah, I hear behind me the whistle and crack of the galley-master’s lash. Back to my oar for now.
I don’t drink Coke, but I certainly had a smile when I read that Michael Bloomberg’s infantilizing sugary-drink ban had been smacked down by the Supreme Court of the State of New York. (Smacked down by the very researchers he quoted in support of it, too, but that’s another story.)
From the Times:
In an unusually critical opinion, Justice Milton A. Tingling of State Supreme Court in Manhattan called the limits “arbitrary and capricious,’ echoing the complaints of city business owners and consumers who had deemed the rules unworkable and unenforceable, with confusing loopholes and voluminous exemptions.
“Arbitrary and capricious”. “Confusing loopholes and voluminous exemptions.”
These are the hallmarks of tyranny, friends, and they are all the rage these days: confining, demeaning restrictions of liberty imposed and enforced — or not enforced — at the whim of the sovereign.
“I’ve got to defend my children, and yours, and do what’s right to save lives,’ the mayor said. “Obesity kills. There’s no question it kills.’
Yes, and so does sloth, and fondness for drink, and wearing socks on the stairs. Are they next?
— But — my children!
He couldn’t make it any clearer: gazing down from Olympus, benevolent and omnisapient, Michael Bloomberg sees us all as his children, even those of us who are not children.
No, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Locking up hoodlums, plowing the streets when it snows, marching in parades, quelling riots, cutting ribbons, giving a proper New York welcome to visiting dignitaries, pushing back hard on greedy public-sector unions: these are the sort of thing we free citizens have hired a Mayor for. They should be more than enough to keep you busy.
Well, that’s a big job, but it can be done! You just have to work hard, and keep the goal in view.
As with all big jobs, the trick is to break it down into smaller parts. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson on how to take care of the economy. (Hat tip: Bill Keezer.)
Forgive me, readers, for linking two long articles in one day. There’s an even longer one on the way, I’m afraid.
Here’s an outstandingly clear and well-informed article addressing the commonest of the Left’s positions on gun-control.
It’s long, but well worth your time.
From Democracy In America, here’s Alexis de Tocqueville on the complexity of American law:
The French codes are often difficult of comprehension, but they can be read by every one; nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents. The indispensable want of legal assistance which is felt in England and in the United States, and the high opinion which is generally entertained of the ability of the legal profession, tend to separate it more and more from the people, and to place it in a distinct class. The French lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants of Egypt, for, like them, he is the sole interpreter of an occult science.
This was, of course, long before the scale and opacity of federal legislation had even begun to approach the dark vastness of, say, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. What, I wonder, would Tocqueville have made of this?
There is something very wrong about our nation’s laws being of such bulk and complexity that even the legislators who enact them cannot fully understand them (if they bother to read them at all). How can anyone know if he is in compliance with a body of law that is too labyrinthine, too immense, for any human mind to encompass it? How anyone actually be in compliance with such a body of law? It’s like something out of Borges.
After a round of too-long-put-off periodontal surgery today at the hands of the gifted healer Louis Franzetti, I am in a deep post-operative torpor. Back soon.
All right, I know what you’re thinking:
“Yeah, sure, all this ‘civilization’ stuff you’re always on about is probably kind of important, I guess…
…but what about knotted vortices?”
Right you are. And here you go.
Finally.
From ‘The Diplomad’, a brief and accurate summary. Excerpt:
In short, his was a bravura performance which has left Venezuela awash in debt, crime, and poverty–the signature achievement of leftism everywhere in the world.
Thanks to Bill Keezer for the link.
And here’s another.
With a hat tip to Bill Vallicella, we urge you to read an excellent article at The Jurist, by criminologist Don Kates, on the lack of empirical evidence for the Left’s position on gun bans.
The article includes links to public recantations by many former gun-ban advocates, including a 1995 paper by noted criminologist Marvin E. Wolfgang, entitled A Tribute To A View I Have Opposed.
Wolfgang’s paper begins:
I am as strong a gun-control advocate as can be found among the criminologists in this country. If I were Mustapha Mond of Brave New World, I would eliminate all guns from the civilian population and maybe even from the police. I hate guns–ugly, nasty instruments designed to kill people.
My reading of the articles in this Symposium has been enlightening even though I have been reading research on guns and violence for over a quarter of a century, ever since the Eisenhower Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, when I enlisted Franklin Zimring to be a Task Force director of Volume Seven, “Firearms and Violence in American Life.”
I have found Alfred Blumstein’s paper thoroughly useful in many ways. He has done us a service in bringing together the variables of youth, drugs and guns in a way no one else has provided. He deserves the applause of our community of scholars. I also commend Philip Cook, Stephanie Molliconi and Thomas Cole for a thorough study about regulating gun markets. Their policy claims are most realistic. As a gun-control advocate, I am pleased to add their research to my advocacy.
What troubles me is the article by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. The reason I am troubled is that they have provided an almost clear-cut case of methodologically sound research in support of something I have theoretically opposed for years, namely, the use of a gun in defense against a criminal perpetrator. Maybe Franklin Zimring and Philip Cook can help me find fault with the Kleck and Gertz research, but for now, I have to admit my admiration for the care and caution expressed in this article and this research.
Can it be true that about two million instances occur each year in which a gun was used as a defensive measure against crime? It is hard to believe. Yet, it is hard to challenge the data collected. We do not have contrary evidence.
(Note: the reference to “Kleck and Gertz” is to this scholarly paper, which found that in 1993 there were roughly 2.5 million uses of firearms for self-defense, versus something like half a million gun crimes.)
The article at The Jurist also cites the following, from a report by professors James Wright, Peter Rossi and Kathleen Daly, of the Social and Demographic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts:
The progressive’s indictment of American firearms policy is well known and is one that both the senior authors of this study once shared. This indictment includes the following particulars: (1) Guns are involved in an astonishing number of crimes in this country. (2) In other countries with stricter firearms laws and fewer guns in private hands, gun crime is rare … (4) Many families acquire a gun because they feel the need to protect themselves; eventually, they end up shooting one another. (5) If there were fewer guns around, there would obviously be less crime … The more deeply we explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become. (emphasis, parentheses added)
Read the rest here. (See also Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?, published by The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.) And go read Bill’s original post, which discusses the mistaken idea that the role of the police is interventional and defensive.
A final point: if restricting access to the kinds of weapons (handguns, mostly) that are actually used in most gun assaults has no positive effect (and likely has a strongly negative one), then it becomes even clearer that the Left’s obsession with “assault rifles” is nothing more than hysteria and stagecraft. (After all, rifles of all types kill fewer people each year than fists and clubs.)
This is a very important battle, one we must not lose.
Here’s yet another interesting item from Edge.org, this time an interview with a young psychologist named Adam Alter, whom I hadn’t heard of before now. The article’s accompanying biographical note says this about him:
ADAM ALTER is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Stern School of Business, NYU. He is the author of Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave.
Popping over to Amazon to have a look at Professor Alter’s book, I found this description:
An illuminating look at the way the thoughts we have and the decisions we make are influenced by forces that aren’t always in our control
Why are people named Kim, Kelly, and Ken more likely to donate to Hurricane Katrina victims than to Hurricane Rita victims? Are you really more likely to solve puzzles if you watch a light bulb illuminate? How did installing blue lights along a Japanese railway line halt rising crime and suicide rates? Can decorating your walls with the right artwork make you more honest? The human brain is fantastically complex, having engineered space travel and liberated nuclear energy, so it’s no wonder that we resist the idea that we’re deeply influenced by our surroundings. As profound as they are, these effects are almost impossible to detect both as they’re occurring and in hindsight. Drunk Tank Pink is the first detailed exploration of how our environment shapes what we think, how we feel, and the ways we behave.
The world is populated with words and images that prompt unexpected, unconscious decisions. We are so deeply attracted to our own initials that we give more willingly to the victims of hurricanes that match our initials: Kims and Kens donate more generously to Hurricane Katrina victims, whereas Rons and Rachels give more openly to Hurricane Rita victims. Meanwhile, an illuminated light bulb inspires creative thinking because it symbolizes insight.
Social interactions have similar effects, as professional cyclists pedal faster when people are watching. Teachers who took tea from the break room at Newcastle University contributed 300 percent more to a cash box when a picture of two eyes hung on the wall. We’re evolutionarily sensitive to human surveillance, so we behave more virtuously even if we’re only watched by a photograph. The physical environment, from locations to colors, also guides our hand in unseen ways. Dimly lit interiors metaphorically imply no one’s watching and encourage dishonesty and theft, while blue lights discourage violent activity because they’re associated with the police. Olympic taekwondo and judo athletes are more likely to win when they wear red rather than blue, because red makes them behave aggressively and referees see them as more dominant. Drunk Tank Pink is full of revelatory facts, riveting anecdotes, and cutting-edge experiments that collectively explain how the most unexpected factors lead us to think, feel, and behave the way we do.
It sounds as if Professor Alter is in rather the same line of work as people like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely. It’s depressing to see how irrational we are so much of the time, but there it is. The world that “designed” our cognitive apparatus us is not the world we’ve been living in for the past couple of centuries, and a lot of old buttons and levers are still exposed, waiting to be pushed and yanked by those who know. It’s good for us to know about these things, even if it’s a little dispiriting. (And of course, it’s the sort of knowledge that people will pay a lot of money for.)
In the Edge interview, Alter tells us that some thoughts are simply easier to have than others, and that this can affect, in unexpected ways, what we do with them. He calls this measure of difficulty disfluency.
The basic idea here is that when you have a thought, any thought, it falls along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. A fluent thought is one that feels subjectively easy to have. When you speak English and you come across a common English name, like John, or Tom, or Ted, it’s very, very easy to process that name. There’s no difficulty in reading the name and in making sense of the name.
At the other end of the spectrum you might come across a foreign name or a novel name that you’ve never seen before or perhaps a name that you’ve seen before, but spelled very differently. In that case it’s going to be much more difficult to process the name. Then it will be disfluent or subjectively difficult to process. It will feel more difficult to process. There’s not only the content, what the name happens to be, and what it’s like to store that information, but also what it’s like to have the thoughts of processing the name, of making sense of the name.
This is a topic that I’ve been very interested in, and I’ve been interested in the concept of fluency and how that might affect a whole lot of different judgments that we make, and the way we process the world. The most basic effects in fluency research are pretty straightforward, and the idea is that when something is fluent, you feel differently about it from how you would feel if it were more difficult to process. I’ll give you a few examples from my own research.
And so he does. We learn, for example, that people who have familiar and easily pronounceable names tend to rise farther and faster than those who don’t, and that stock-market offerings that have pronounceable acronyms as ticker symbols do better in the weeks after their IPOs than those with unsayable clusters of consonants.
Professor Alter tells us also that presenting information in an intentionally disfluent way can make us examine it more carefully. He gives this example:
There’s a famous task called the Cognitive Reflection Test, and this test has three different questions, and each of the questions lures you into giving the wrong response, because the intuitive response is actually incorrect. An example of this is, “When you add the cost of a bat and a ball together the sum of those two is worth $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?’ It’s a very simple question. Anyone with basic arithmetic skills can answer it.
What happens is, for some reason the first and intuitive response is that, I guess the bat must be $1, the ball must be 10 cents. That adds to $1.10. That seems about right. But, of course, the difference between $1 and 10 cents is 90 cents, not $1. The correct answer is that the bat is worth $1.05, the ball is worth 5 cents. They add to $1.10, and the difference between them is $1. And people generally struggle with these questions. They’re lured in. They give their intuitive response, and they’re incorrect.
But if you present the questions in a font that’s a little bit more difficult to read, we found that you can increase their accuracy pretty dramatically. They make fewer of those intuitive responses. They take the time to reconsider their initial responses. They assume that the task is more difficult. They have a bit less confidence in their initial response, and so they tend to do a little bit better at the task. The same is true when you ask them to complete syllogism questions, logical syllogisms, any questions that ask you to think more deeply about a particular topic, where thinking more deeply will lead you to the right answer more often. We’ve shown that with disfluency people are more likely to do that. We have even found the same effect in a number of other domains as well.
(From a Gurdjieffian point of view, this makes perfect sense: the disfluent presentation interferes with our ability to process the information mechanically; it forces us to bypass what Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called the “formatory apparatus”, and to bring to bear our intellectual center.)
The interview rambles on a bit; clearly this is not a mature field, and whenever anyone comes up with a new idea like this the tendency is to try it on everything in the world to see if it fits. But the idea itself is a very interesting one, and Professor Alter gives us a lot of provocative speculation.
The interview and video are here.
I guess we’re all feeling pretty low, now that the Sequester has gone into effect. I haven’t been paying much attention to the news since Friday (been busy arranging the canned goods down in the shelter), but if the predictions I’d been hearing have turned out to be correct, the entire nation is now unemployed, our daughters are selling their virtue on the street, airliners are falling from the sky, and Twitter posts have been reduced to seventy characters.
Well, let not your hearts be troubled, readers! Things may be really, really bad, but all is not lost. Sure, meat inspections may be a thing of the past, and criminals will now be asked to arrest themselves — but I’ve learned that Mr. John Kerry will manage, nevertheless, to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood.
What’s that? You say that the Ikhwan is our mortal enemy, committed, in its own words, to destroying Western civilization, sabotaging our “miserable house”, and making “God’s religion” victorious over all others?
Come on. Seriously? What do you think we are, a bunch of chumps? Well, let me clue you in: if you want to know who’s really getting the short end of this deal, it’s Mohammed Morsi and the rest of those jihadist bozos.
That’s right: we’re giving the Brotherhood your money in exchange for future reforms.
Are those guys suckers, or what?
Yes readers, it’s gotten this bad.
Back in January the New York State legislature rammed through a major gun-control bill, in the middle of the night, as a hysterical reaction to the Newtown shootings. The legislators were given just a few minutes to read the bill before a vote was called, in violation of a law that imposes a three-day review period. It was a shameful example of everything that responsible, transparent, and deliberative lawmaking is not, and a great many New Yorkers were plenty steamed about it.
Now the state’s Supreme Court is going to review the the process by which the law was enacted. Let’s hope they strike it down.
I’m working late tonight, so here’s a strange item for you to mull over: the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Read about it on Wikipedia, here, or for a more detailed account, have a look here.
Strangest of all: the missing tongue.
Here’s Maxine Waters, who is a walking one-woman argument for limiting the power of the Federal government, “explaining” sequestration. Apparently, more jobs will be lost — 170 million — than currently exist.
As Charles Cooke said on Twitter just now, “I wouldn’t trust this woman to explain how a fork works.”
If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a festschrift on Federal spending, from the Heritage Foundation. Browse.
And just for some perspective about the calamitous effects of the impending “sequestration” — upon which event, we are told, the sun will be folded up, the heavens flayed, the pregnant she-camels neglected, and Hell set ablaze — here’s one more picture:
I’ve written and deleted three posts already today, and am just going to lay off for a day or two. I’m cranky and fed up, and have a toothache besides, and nothing interesting, good or useful will come of writing under such circumstances. Back in a bit.
Writing at NRO, Jonah Goldberg comments on the sky-is-falling hysteria surrounding the impending “sequester” — which, were you just to listen to the news or to White House Press releases, you’d never imagine would still leave the federal government spending more money than last year.
Mr. Goldberg observes:
Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks he can convince the country to accept them if the choice is between what he calls reasonable revenue increases and catastrophic cuts that will let people die in the streets, leave children to go hungry and illiterate, and allow poisoned food to sit rancid on supermarket shelves.
And he’s not crazy for it. This strategy has worked time and time again. If an agency has a billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed to keep a bridge from collapsing on a grade school’s Thanksgiving parade.
It’s hard to capture in words the immorality of what we’ve done to generations yet unborn. Our childrens’ children will spit on our graves when they look at our criminal stewardship of the great nation they ought to have inherited, and find themselves stuck instead with the bill we’ve run up in their names to pay for our hedonism, our greed, and our selfish, childish belief that the world owes us a living. We’re no better than junkies who will do anything, no matter how fraudulent or felonious, just to keep the next fix coming.
I can’t, in general, blame our politicians for this, on either side of the aisle; they’re just doing what politicians do, and they couldn’t keep doing it in the way they are if we didn’t want them to. This lardaceous, otiose gundyguts, this indolent, Falstaffian swillbelly of a nation is simply what America has let itself become.
You can read the rest of Mr. Goldberg’s essay here.
The world’s tuna fishery is collapsing, with prime specimens selling for seven-digit prices. Yet tuna is everywhere, from supermarket shelves to delis to sushi bars, and the retail cost remains low. How is this possible?
According to this item, a majority of the “tuna” being sold in the U.S. isn’t tuna at all. A lot of it is a fish called “escolar”, the eating of which, we learn, has some seriously unpleasant side effects.
Proceed at your own risk.
Mencius Moldbug comments on the approaching death of Lawrence Auster, here.
Auster himself is puzzled, and I think his puzzlement illustrates rather well exactly the points Moldbug makes about him: Auster’s specialty is order and clarity, while Moldbug’s piece, as always, is long, discursive, and sesquipedalian.
But I thought it was quite a nice tribute, myself.
I’m really going to miss VFR.
Over at Mangan’s, our friend Dennis links to a post by Bruce Charlton about the cratering birthrates of the developed, Westernized world. That there is something maladaptive about secular modernity has been apparent for some time, and I’ve written about this myself; most of the discussion to date, however, has focused on social and cultural influences, with particular emphasis on religion.
Unsurprisingly, the penetrating intellect of Alexis de Tocqueville descried this hazard of secularism two centuries ago. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote:
Religions give men a general habit of conducting themselves with a view to futurity: in this respect they are not less useful to happiness in this life than to felicity hereafter; and this is one of their chief political characteristics.
But in proportion as the light of faith grows dim, the range of man’s sight is circumscribed, as if the end and aim of human actions appeared every day to be more within his reach. When men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity, which is but too conformable to some propensities of mankind. As soon as they have lost the habit of placing their chief hopes upon remote events, they naturally seek to gratify without delay their smallest desires; and no sooner do they despair of living forever, than they are disposed to act as if they were to exist but for a single day. In sceptical ages it is always therefore to be feared that men may perpetually give way to their daily casual desires; and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may establish nothing great, permanent, and calm.
If the social condition of a people, under these circumstances, becomes democratic, the danger which I here point out is thereby increased. When everyone is constantly striving to change his position – when an immense field for competition is thrown open to all – when wealth is amassed or dissipated in the shortest possible space of time amidst the turmoil of democracy, visions of sudden and easy fortunes – of great possessions easily won and lost – of chance, under all its forms – haunt the mind. The instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of man’s desires. In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than the morrow.
What Bruce Charlton is suggesting, though, is not a social, cultural, or psychological mechanism, but a biological one. He wonders if there may be some environmental cue, or combination of cues, that is causing humans to adopt a “slow-life-history-speed” breeding strategy.
From Dr. Charlton’s post:
Life history speed refers to the reproductive strategy on a scale from FASTER – with rapid maturation, focus on mating effort, and a priority of achieving earlier and more frequent reproduction with less individual care (resources) per child; to SLOWER – with delayed sexual maturation, a long-termist socio-economic plan taking priority over reproduction, fewer offspring, and each child provided with more parental resources.
*
The decision between faster or slower life history strategy is probably ‘set’ in childhood in response to environmental stimuli which (under ancestral conditions) have signaled what was likely to be the most adaptive reproductive strategy (that which is most likely to lead to the greatest number of viable offspring).Signals of instability (perhaps experiences of starvation or disease, absent father, chaotic environment) lead to a perceived risk of earlier death; and therefore more rapid sexual maturation and early mating efforts implicitly aimed at parenting a larger number of offspring – on the expectation that not children all will survive to adulthood.
*
In contrast, signals of a stable environment trigger a slower life history, because under stable conditions a slow maturing individual with higher parental care can build the ability to exploit specialized niches in a situation of high competition.
(For example, delaying reproductive effort and instead embarking on a long apprenticeship to become a high status and economically secure specialist craftsman; or delaying sexual maturation to ‘build’ a more beautiful and long-lastingly attractive face and body.)
*
It is possible that extreme prosperity/ comfort/ lack of hunger/ lack of disease stress/ unprecedented security and stability (or some other aspect of modernity) is acting as a supernormal stimulus to the ‘mechanism’ of life history calibration in early childhood.
So that an environmental signal (of a type unprecedented in human evolutionary history) may be triggering such a slow life history that (in the real world) it is incapable of replacing the current population – and is therefore maladaptive.
Humans, and large mammals generally, are what evolutionary theorists call “K-strategists” — they breed as though the selective environment is in a stable equilibrium, in which conditions are unlikely to change, and offspring are more likely to survive. This favors having few offspring, and investing heavily in each one. A relevant factor in K strategies, however, is age-related mortality, which affects how much time prospective parents will have to bear children and raise them to self-sufficient maturity. When average age at death is lower (which correlates with, and presumably is indicated to the organism by, various types of environmental stress), this time-span is compressed, so females should space their offspring more closely together (and vice versa).
Our unprecedented control of our habitat means that we’ve now got all sorts of “supernormal stimuli” yanking the behavioral levers that selection installed in us to optimize our survival in long-gone environments. (Examples abound: sweet/fatty foods, artificial lighting, mass communication, pornography, motion pictures, video games, high-speed travel, etc.) Dr. Charlton’s idea — that collapsing birth rates in modern societies may be a biological response to some as-yet-unidentified supernormal stimulus that tricks our bodies into thinking they have forever to reproduce — is very interesting. As Dennis said in the comment thread to Dr. Charlton’s post, I wish I’d thought of it myself.
Read the original post here, and Dennis’s remarks about it, over at his own place, here.
I’m just whipped tonight, having got home from work at 5 a.m. this morning, and having to get right back up for another long day.
A miscellany for tonight, then:
— Some Forteana, here and here.
— The world’s Tweets, in real time.
— From Russia, with love (you might have missed this one).
— A fine piece on gun control and the government (with hat tip to Bill Valicella).
— Last, I doubt you’ve ever seen the like of this terrifying amphibious behemoth. Tremble!
With a hat tip to reader Bill Keezer, here’s a blunt, crepuscular rant from noted gloominary Victor Davis Hanson.
