A Personality Test: Which Antagonist Do You Prefer?

1. Archangel Michael vs. Lucifer (good vs. evil)

2. David vs. Goliath (underdog vs. bully)

3. Alexander Hamilton vs. Aaron Burr (a slippery politician vs. a slippery politician-cum-traitor)

4. Richard Nixon vs. Alger Hiss (a slippery politician vs. a traitorous Soviet spy)

5. Sam Ervin vs. Richard Nixon (an upholder of the Constitution vs. a slippery politician)

6. Kenneth Starr vs. Bill Clinton (a straight arrow vs. a slippery politician)

7. Elmer Fudd vs. Bugs Bunny (a straight arrow with a speech impediment vs. a rascally rabbit)

8. Jerry vs. Tom (a clever mouse vs. a dumb but determined cat)

9. Tweety Bird vs. Sylvester the Cat (a devious bird vs. a predatory cat)

10. Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote (a devious bird vs. a stupid canine)

11. Rocky & Bullwinkle vs. Boris & Natasha (fun-loving good guys vs. funny bad guys)

12. Dudley Do-Right vs. Snidely Whiplash (a straight arrow vs. a stereotypical villain)

Summarize and explain your choices in the comments. Suggestions for other pairings are welcome.

The Midwest Is a State of Mind

I am a son of the Middle Border,* now known as the Midwest. I left the Midwest, in spirit, almost 60 years ago, when I matriculated at a decidedly cosmopolitan State university. It was in my home State, but not much of my home State.

Where is the Midwest? According to Wikipedia, the U.S. Census Bureau defines the Midwest as comprising the 12 States shaded in red:

They are, from north to south and west to east, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.

In my experience, the Midwest really begins on the west slope of the Appalachians and includes much of New York State and Pennsylvania. I have lived and traveled in that region, and found it, culturally, to be much like the part of “official” Midwest where I was born and raised.

I am now almost 60 years removed from the Midwest (except for a three-year sojourn in the western part of New York State, near the Pennsylvania border). Therefore, I can’t vouch for the currency of a description that appears in Michael Dirda’s review of Jon K. Lauck’s From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965 (Iowa and the Midwest Experience). Dirda writes:

[Lauck] surveys “the erosion of Midwestern literary and historical regionalism” between 1920 and 1965. This may sound dull as ditch water to those who believe that the “flyover” states are inhabited largely by clodhoppers, fundamentalist zealots and loudmouthed Babbitts. In fact, Lauck’s aim is to examine “how the Midwest as a region faded from our collective imagination” and “became an object of derision.” In particular, the heartland’s traditional values of hard work, personal dignity and loyalty, the centrality it grants to family, community and church, and even the Jeffersonian ideal of a democracy based on farms and small land-holdings — all these came to be deemed insufferably provincial by the metropolitan sophisticates of the Eastern Seaboard and the lotus-eaters of the West Coast.

That was the Midwest of my childhood and adolescence. I suspect that the Midwest of today is considerably different. American family life is generally less stable than it was 60 years ago; Americans generally are less church-going than they were 60 years ago; and social organizations are less robust than they were 60 years ago. The Midwest cannot have escaped two generations of social and cultural upheaval fomented by the explosion of mass communications, the debasement of mass culture, the rise of the drugs-and-rock culture, the erasure of social norms by government edicts, and the creation of a culture of dependency on government.

I nevertheless believe that there is a strong, residual longing for and adherence to the Midwestern culture of 60 years ago — though it’s not really unique to the Midwest. It’s a culture that persists throughout America, in rural areas, villages, towns, small cities, and even exurbs of large cities.

The results of last year’s presidential election bear me out. Hillary Clinton represented the “sophisticates” of the Eastern Seaboard and the lotus-eaters of the West Coast. She represented the supposed superiority of technocracy over the voluntary institutions of civil society. She represented a kind of smug pluralism and internationalism that smirks at traditional values and portrays as clodhoppers and fundamentalist zealots those who hold such values. Donald Trump, on the other hand (and despite his big-city roots and great wealth), came across as a man of the people who hold such values.

What about Clinton’s popular-vote “victory”? Nationally, she garnered 2.9 million more votes than Trump. But the manner of Clinton’s “victory” underscores the nation’s cultural divide and the persistence of a Midwestern state of mind. Clinton’s total margin of victory in California, New York, and the District of Columbia was 6.3 million votes. That left Trump ahead of Clinton by 3.4 million votes in the other 48 States, and even farther ahead in non-metropolitan areas. Clinton’s “appeal” (for want of a better word) was narrow; Trump’s was much broader (e.g., winning a higher percentage than Romney did of the two-party vote in 39 States). Arguably, it was broader than that of every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan won a second term in 1984.

The Midwestern state of mind, however much it has weakened in the last 60 years, remains geographically dominant. In the following graph, counties won by Clinton are shaded in blue; counties won by Trump are shaded in red:

Source: Wikipedia article about the 2016 presidential election.

* This is an allusion to Hamlin Garland‘s novel, A Son of the Middle Border. Garland, a native of Wisconsin, was himself a son of the Middle Border.

Equality

From the keyboard of Maverick Philosopher (“Is There a Defensible Sense in Which Human Beings Are Equal?“):

Empirical inequality cannot be denied: by the various empirical measures there is plenty of inequality among individuals and groups. (Trivial example: men on average are taller than women. Height is an example of an empirically measurable attribute.) So if human beings are taken solely in their empirical and material natures, or if human beings are nothing more than material beings, then talk of the equality of all human beings is either false or trivial. (That all human beings are equal in that they all have been born at or near the surface of the earth is empirically true, but trivially true.)….

Given the plain fact of empirical inequality, is there any defensible sense in which human beings could be said to be equal and in possession of equal rights?…

[A] person [in the descriptive sense] is a conscious and thus sentient individual, capable of self-consciousness, possessing feeling and will and memory and the capacity to reason and plan and seek the truth about itself and everything else…. A person in the normative sense is a rights-possessor which, in virtue of having rights, induces in other persons various duties. For example, my right to life induces in you the duty to refrain from taking my life, and your duty derives from my right. In this sense rights and duties are correlative….

My claim, then, is that we are all equal as persons in the descriptive sense, and therefore all equal in the normative sense. That is, if any one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person, then every one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person. And all of this regardless of sex, race, age, and any other empirical feature. We are equal as persons even if my will is stronger than yours and my intellect more penetrating. We are equal as persons even if you are more compassionate than me.

The point, then, is that equality is grounded in personhood, not in animal constitution….

The above definition of ‘person’ allows for persons that are not human beings and human beings (genetic humans) that are not persons, as well as persons that are human beings…. Examples of humans that are not persons, on my definition of ‘person,’ would be anencephalic human neonates. They would not be persons because of their lack of capacity to develop language and reasoning skills. (For more on the anencephalic business, see Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons, the comments to which were good.) But these anencephalic individuals are nonetheless genetically human as the offspring of human parents.

To repeat, our equality is grounded in our shared personhood despite our considerable empirical differences. Personhood cannot be understood in natural-scientific terms.

I will try to reduce this to a syllogism:

1. A person is a human being who is a conscious and thus sentient individual, capable of self-consciousness, possessing feeling and will and memory and the capacity to reason and plan and seek the truth about itself and everything else. (A human being who lacks the potential for becoming all of those things is not a person.)

2. All persons are equal, in the sense that they all possess or exhibit personhood, as defined in 1.

3. Given that all persons are equal, if any one of them is a rights-possessor, all of them possess the same rights by virtue of their inherent equality.

Observations:

I am bothered by the distinction made in point 1 between human persons and human non-persons. This opens the door to the kinds of distinctions that are used to justify abortion and involuntary euthanasia.

Point 2 merely says that a person is a person, as defined in point 1. This is a trivial definition of equality. Are Hitler, Stalin, and Mao “equal” to Francis of Assisi, John Paul II, and Mother Teresa? By asking such a question am I proposing the kind of arbitrary distinction that I object to in point 1? (Arbitrary because it emerges from an a priori analysis rather than experience.) The answer is no, as discussed below.

The rights in point 3 seem to be free-floating Platonic entities, independent of the existence and socialization of human beings. But rights are not like that. Nor are they unitary; an all-or-nothing set that is bestowed on every person. Rights are complex and socially constructed*, and they arise from distinctions of the kind that I make between a Hitler and a Mother Teresa. There are persons who are so despicable that they should have no rights; unlike unwitting fetuses and helpless old people, they should be erased from the face of the earth for the good of humankind.

Social intercourse is capable of generating innumerable gradations of rights, from a positive right to be cared for in one’s old age to a negative right to be allowed to die in peace without the intervention of “life saving” measures. In between are such rights as the right to resume living among free human beings, working at gainful employment, enjoying normal social pleasures, and so on, after having been imprisoned for committing socially defined harms.

Equality, then, is the enjoyment of the same socially bestowed rights as others who are similarly situated (e.g., not incarcerated, eligible for care).

Bonus observation:

One way of defining liberty is to say that it is the scope of action that is allowed by socially agreed upon rights. Negative rights define what one may not do to others; positive rights define what others must do for the beneficiaries of such rights.

* In the best case, the state would enforce socially constructed negative rights (e.g., the right not to be murdered), and would not be a tool for the fabrication and enforcement of so-called positive rights. Such rights do arise from social intercourse, but when the state enforces them it imposes burdens on persons who are not party to the creation of such rights (e.g., the duty of care for others may vary considerably from culture to culture, even within a nation-state). State and society are synonymous only in small, cohesive, and kinship groups.

Lincoln Was Wrong

Michael Stokes Paulsen and his son Luke opine:

[A]t the heart of the Civil War, the crisis that triggered it, and the changes that it brought were enormous constitutional issues. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the Civil War was fought over the meaning of the Constitution, and over who would have the ultimate power to decide that meaning. The Civil War decided—on the battlefields rather than in the courts—the most important constitutional questions in our nation’s history: the nature of the Union under the Constitution, the status and future of slavery, the powers of the national government versus the states, the supremacy of the Constitution, and the wartime powers of the president as commander in chief. It was the Civil War, not any subsequent judicial decision, that “overruled” the Supreme Court’s atrocious decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford creating a national constitutional right to own slaves….

The United States is the nation it is today because of Lincoln’s unwavering commitment to the Constitution as governing a single, permanent nation and forbidding secession. Lincoln’s vision of Union is so thoroughly accepted today that we forget how hotly disputed it was for the first seventy years of our nation’s history. The result was hardly inevitable. Lincoln’s vision and resolve saved the nation. Lincoln’s nationalist views have shaped every issue of federalism and sovereignty for the past one hundred fifty years. Compared with the constitutional issues over which the Civil War was fought, today’s disputes over federal- versus-state power are minor-league ball played out on a field framed by Lincoln’s prevailing constitutional vision of the United States as one nation, indivisible.

On the president’s constitutional duty: Lincoln understood his oath to impose an absolute personal moral and legal duty not to cave in to wrong, destructive views of the Constitution. He fought on the campaign trail for his understanding of Union and of the authority of the national government to limit the spread of slavery. Once in office, he understood his oath to impose on him an irreducible moral and legal duty of faithful execution of the laws, throughout the Union. It was a duty he could not abandon for any reason. [“The Great Interpreter”, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Research Paper No. 15-09, April 17, 2017]

Whence Lincoln’s view of the Union? This is from the Paulsens’ book, The Constitution: An Introduction:

Lincoln was firmly persuaded that secession was unconstitutional. Immediately upon taking office as President, in his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln— a careful constitutional lawyer— laid out in public his argument as to why secession was unconstitutional: The Constitution was the supreme law of the land, governing all the states. The Constitution did not provide that states could withdraw from the Union, and to infer such a right was contrary to the letter and spirit of the document. The Constitution’s Preamble announced the objective of forming a “more perfect Union” of the states than had existed under the Articles of Confederation, which themselves had said that the Union would be “perpetual.” Moreover, the Constitution created a true national government, not a mere “compact,” league, or confederacy— in fact, it explicitly forbade states from entering into alliances, confederacies, or treaties outside of national authority. The people of the United States, taken as a whole, were sovereign, not the states.

It followed from these views, Lincoln argued, that “no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.” Purported secession was simply an illegal— unconstitutional— rebellion against the Union.

Lincoln’s position, which the Paulsens seem to applaud, is flawed at its root. The Constitution did not incorporate the Articles of Confederation, it supplanted them. The “perpetual Union” of the Articles vanished into thin air upon the adoption of the Constitution. Moreover, the “more perfect Union” of the Constitution’s preamble is merely aspirational, as are the desiderata that follow it:

establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

“More perfect”, if it means anything, means that the Constitution created a central government where there was none before. The Constitution is silent about perpetuity. It is silent about secession. Therefore, one must turn elsewhere to find (or reject) a legal basis for secession, but not to the Civil War.

The Civil War “decided” the issue of secession in the same way that World War I “decided” the future of war. It was the “war to end all wars”, was it not? Therefore, tens of millions of deaths to the contrary notwithstanding, there have been no wars since the Armistice of 1918. By the same logic, the thief who steals your car or the vandal who defaces your home or the scam artist who takes your life savings has “decided” that you don’t own a car, or that your home should be ugly, or that your savings are really his. Thus does might make right, as the Paulsens would have it.

There is in fact a perfectly obvious and straightforward case for unilateral secession, which I have made elsewhere, including “A Resolution of Secession”. You should read all of it if you are a rabid secessionist — or a rabid anti-secessionist. Here are some key passages:

The Constitution is a contract — a compact in the language of the Framers. The parties to the compact are not only the States but also the central government….

Lest there be any question about the status of the Constitution as a compact, we turn to James Madison, who is often called the Father of the Constitution. Madison, in a letter to Daniel Webster dated March 15, 1833, addresses

the question whether the Constitution of the U.S. was formed by the people or by the States, now under a theoretic discussion by animated partizans.

Madison continues:

It is fortunate when disputed theories, can be decided by undisputed facts. And here the undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several states, who were parties to it and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity….

[I]n The Federalist No. 39, which informed the debates in the various States about ratification….

Madison leaves no doubt about the continued sovereignty of each State and its people. The remaining question is this: On what grounds, if any, may a State withdraw from the compact into which it entered voluntarily?

There is a judicial myth — articulated by a majority of the United States Supreme Court in Texas v. White (1869) — that States may not withdraw from the compact because the union of States is perpetual….

The Court’s reasoning is born of mysticism, not legality. Similar reasoning might have been used — and was used — to assert that the Colonies were inseparable from Great Britain. And yet, some of the people of the Colonies put an end to the union of the Colonies and Great Britain, on the moral principle that the Colonies were not obliged to remain in an abusive relationship. That moral principle is all the more compelling in the case of the union known as the United States, which — mysticism aside — is nothing more than the creature of the States, as authorized by the people thereof.

In fact, the Constitution supplanted the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, by the will of only nine of the thirteen States….

[I]n a letter to Alexander Rives dated January 1, 1833, Madison says that

[a] rightful secession requires the consent of the others [other States], or an abuse of the compact, absolving the seceding party from the obligations imposed by it.

An abuse of the compact most assuredly necessitates withdrawal from it, on the principle of the preservation of liberty, especially if that abuse has been persistent and shows no signs of abating. The abuse, in this instance, has been and is being committed by the central government.

The central government is both a creature of the Constitution and a de facto party to it, as co-sovereign with the States and supreme in its realm of enumerated and limited powers. One of those powers enables the Supreme Court of the United States to decide “cases and controversies” arising under the Constitution, which alone makes the central government a responsible party. More generally, the high officials of the central government acknowledge the central government’s role as a party to the compact — and the limited powers vested in them — when they take oaths of office requiring them to uphold the Constitution.

Many of those high officials have nevertheless have committed myriad abuses of the central government’s enumerated and limited powers. The abuses are far too numerous to list in their entirety. The following examples amply justify the withdrawal of the State of _______________ from the compact….

We, therefore, the representatives of the people of _______________ do solemnly publish and declare that this State ought to be free and independent; that it is absolved from all allegiance to the government of the United States; that all political connection between it and government of the United States is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a free and independent State it has full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

See “The Constitution: Myths and Realities“.

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Physicist Adam Frank, in “Minding Matter” (Aeon, March 13, 2017), visits subjects that I have approached from several angles in various posts. Frank addresses the manifestation of brain activity — more properly, the activity of the central nervous system (CNS) — which is known as consciousness. But there’s a lot more to CNS activity than that. What it all adds up to is generally called “mind”, which has conscious components (things we are aware of, including being aware of being aware) and subconscious components (things that go on in the background that we might or might not become aware of).

In the traditional (non-mystical) view, each person’s mind is separate from the minds of other persons. Mind (or the concepts, perceptions, feelings, memories, etc. that comprise it) therefore defines self. I am my self (i.e., not you) because my mind is a manifestation of my body’s CNS, which isn’t physically linked to yours.

With those definitional matters in hand, Frank’s essay can be summarized and interpreted as follows:

According to materialists, mind is nothing more than a manifestation of CNS activity.

The underlying physical properties of the CNS are unknown because the nature of matter is unknown.

Matter, whatever it is, doesn’t behave in billiard-ball fashion, where cause and effect are tightly linked.

Instead, according to quantum mechanics, matter has probabilistic properties that supposedly rule out strict cause-and-effect relationships. The act of measuring matter resolves the uncertainty, but in an unpredictable way.

Mind is therefore a mysterious manifestation of quantum-mechanical processes. One’s state of mind is affected by how one “samples” those processes, that is, by one’s deliberate, conscious attempt to use one’s CNS in formulating the mind’s output (e.g., thoughts and interpretations of the world around us).

Because of the ability of mind to affect mind (“mind over matter”), it is more than merely a passive manifestation of the physical state of one’s CNS. It is, rather, a meta-state — a physical state that is created by “mental” processes that are themselves physical.

In sum, mind really isn’t immaterial. It’s just a manifestation of poorly understood material processes that can be influenced by the possessor of a mind. It’s the ultimate self-referential system, a system that can monitor and change itself to some degree.

None of this means that human beings lack free will. In fact, the complexity of mind argues for free will. This is from a 12-year-old post of mine:

Suppose I think that I might want to eat some ice cream. I go to the freezer compartment and pull out an unopened half-gallon of vanilla ice cream and an unopened half-gallon of chocolate ice cream. I can’t decide between vanilla, chocolate, some of each, or none. I ask a friend to decide for me by using his random-number generator, according to rules of his creation. He chooses the following rules:

If the random number begins in an odd digit and ends in an odd digit, I will eat vanilla.

If the random number begins in an even digit and ends in an even digit, I will eat chocolate.

If the random number begins in an odd digit and ends in an even digit, I will eat some of each flavor.

If the random number begins in an even digit and ends in an odd digit, I will not eat ice cream.

Suppose that the number generated by my friend begins in an even digit and ends in an even digit: the choice is chocolate. I act accordingly.

I didn’t inevitably choose chocolate because of events that led to the present state of my body’s chemistry, which might otherwise have dictated my choice. That is, I broke any link between my past and my choice about a future action.I call that free will.

I suspect that our brains are constructed in such a way as to produce the same kind of result in many situations, though certainly not in all situations. That is, we have within us the equivalent of an impartial friend and an (informed) decision-making routine, which together enable us to exercise something we can call free will.

This rudimentary metaphor is consistent with the quantum nature of the material that underlies mind. But I don’t believe that free will depends on quantum mechanics. I believe that there is a part of mind — a part with a physical location — which makes independent judgments and arrives at decisions based on those judgments.

To extend the ice-cream metaphor, I would say that my brain’s executive function, having become aware of my craving for ice cream, taps my knowledge (memory) of snacks on hand, or directs the part of my brain that controls my movements to look in the cupboard and freezer. My executive function, having determined that my craving isn’t so urgent that I will drive to a grocery store, then compiles the available options and chooses the one that seems best suited to the satisfaction of my craving at that moment. It may be ice cream, or it may be something else. If it is ice cream, it will consult my “taste preferences” and choose between the flavors then available to me.

Given the ways in which people are seen to behave, it seems obvious that the executive function, like consciousness, is on a “different circuit” from other functions (memory, motor control, autonomic responses, etc.), just as the software programs that drive my computer’s operations are functionally separate from the data stored on the hard drive and in memory. The software programs would still be on my computer even if I erased all the data on my hard drive and in memory. So, too, would my executive function (and consciousness) remain even I lost all memory of everything that happened to me before I awoke this morning.

Given this separateness, there should be no question that a person has free will. That is why I can sometimes resist a craving for ice cream. That is why most people are often willing and able to overcome urges, from eating candy to smoking a cigarette to punching a jerk.

Conditioning, which leads to addiction, makes it hard to resist urges — sometimes nigh unto impossible. But the ability of human beings to overcome conditioning, even severe addictions, argues for the separateness of the executive function from other functions. In short, it argues for free will.

Too Quick to Pull the Trigger?

Perhaps. I once wrote off Trump’s candidacy, here. A few days ago I wrote off his presidency, here. I’m prepared to be wrong.

A Further Look at Simultaneity

I have added a section by that name to my page, “Einstein’s Errors“. If you haven’t yet read the preceding section, “A Fatal Flaw?“, I encourage you to read it first.

Punctuation within Quotation Marks: British vs. American Style

I’ve added this to my page “On Writing“:

I have reverted to the British style of punctuating in-line quotations, which I followed 40 years ago when I published a weekly newspaper. The British style is to enclose within quotation marks only (a) the punctuation that appears in quoted text or (b) the title of a work (e.g., a blog post) that is usually placed within quotation marks.

I have reverted because of the confusion and unsightliness caused by the American style. It calls for the placement of periods and commas within quotation marks, even if the periods and commas don’t occur in the quoted material or title. Also, if there is a question mark at the end of quoted material, it replaces the comma or period that might otherwise be placed there.

If I had continued to follow American style, I would have ended a sentence in a recent post with this:

… “A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?” “The Culture War,” “Polarization and De-facto Partition,” and “Civil War?“

What a hodge-podge. There’s no comma between the first two entries, and the sentence ends with an inappropriate question mark. With two titles ending in question marks, there was no way for me to avoid a series in which a comma is lacking. I could have avoided the sentence-ending question mark by recasting the list, but the items are listed chronologically, which is how they should be read.

I solved these problems easily by reverting to the British style:

… “A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?”, “The Culture War“, “Polarization and De-facto Partition“, and “Civil War?“.

This not only eliminates the hodge-podge, but is also more logical and accurate. All items are separated by commas, commas aren’t displaced by question marks, and the declarative sentence ends with a period instead of a question mark.

Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration

Civil War II

Solitude for the Masses

More about the Transgender Fad

The Academic Enemies of Liberty

The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration

Civil War II

Are Americans really in the midst of Civil War II or a Cold Civil War? It has seemed that way for many years. I have written about it in “A New (Cold) Civil War or Secession?”, “The Culture War“, “Polarization and De-facto Partition“, and “Civil War?“.* Andrew Sullivan, whom I quit following several years ago for reasons that are evident in the following quotation (my irrepressible comments are in boldface and bracketed), has some provocative things to say about the situation:

Certain truths about human beings have never changed. We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death. We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope. We can numb the pain with legal cannabis or opioids, but it is pain nonetheless.

If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species [but they are not “societies”], and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge. Globally, social trust is highest in the homogeneous Nordic countries, and in America, Pew has found it higher in rural areas than cities. The political scientist Robert Putnam has found that “people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down,’ that is, to pull in like a turtle.” Not very encouraging about human nature — but something we can’t wish away, either. In fact, the American elite’s dismissal of these truths, its reduction of all resistance to cultural and demographic change as crude “racism” or “xenophobia,” only deepens the sense of siege many other Americans feel….

… Within the space of 50 years, America has gone from segregation to dizzying multiculturalism; … from homosexuality as a sin [or dangerous aberration] to homophobia as a taboo; from Christianity being the common culture to a secularism no society has ever sustained before ours [but mainly within the confines of the internet-media-academic complex, except where they have successfully enlisted government in the task of destroying social norms]….

And how can you seriously regard our political system and culture as worse than ever before in history? How self-centered do you have to be to dismiss the unprecedented freedom for women, racial minorities, and homosexuals? [How self-centered to you have to be to dismiss the fact that much of that “unprecedented freedom” has been bought at the expense of freedom of speech, freedom of association, property rights, and advancement based on merit — things that are at the very heart of liberty?]….

If the neo-reactionaries were entirely right, the collapse of our society would surely have happened long before now [Strawman alert: How does Sullivan know when “society” would have collapsed?]. But somehow, an historically unprecedented mix of races and cultures hasn’t led to civil war in the United States. [Not a shooting war, but a kind of civil war nevertheless.] … America has assimilated so many before, its culture churning into new forms, without crashing into incoherence. [Strawman alert 2: “America”, note being a “society”, doesn’t have a “culture”. But some “cultures” (e.g., welfare-dependency, “hate whitey”, drugs, political correctness) are ascendant, for those with eyes to see.] [“The Reactionary Temptation“, New York, April 30, 2017]

All in all, I would say that Mr. Sullivan protests too much. He protests so much that he confirms my view that America is smack in the middle of a Cold Civil War. (Despite that, and the fatuousness of Mr. Sullivan’s commentary, I am grateful to him for a clear explanation of the political philosophy of Leo Strauss,** the theme of which had heretofore been obscure to me.)

For other, more realistic views of the current state of affairs, see the following (listed in chronological order):

David French, “A Blue State ‘Secession’ Model I Can Get Behind” (National Review, March 19, 2017)

Daniel Greenfield, “The Civil War Is Here” (Frontpage Magazine, March 27, 2017)

Daniel Greenfield, “Winning the Civil War of Two Americas” (Frontpage Magazine, April 4, 2017)

Rick Moran, “War Between U.S. Government and Sanctuary Cities Heating Up” (American Thinker, April 10, 2017)

Angelo M. Codevilla, “The Cold Civil War” (Claremont Review of Books, April 25, 2017)

Solitude for the Masses

Paul Kingsworth reviews Michael Harris’s Solitude in “The End of Solitude: In a Hyperconnected World, Are We Losing the Art of Being Alone?” (New Statesman, April 26, 2017):

Harris has an intuition that being alone with ourselves, paying attention to inner silence and being able to experience outer silence, is an essential part of being human….

What happens when that calm separateness is destroyed by the internet of everything, by big-city living, by the relentless compulsion to be with others, in touch, all the time? Plenty of people know the answer already, or would do if they were paying attention to the question. Nearly half of all Americans, Harris tells us, now sleep with their smartphones on their bedside table, and 80 per cent are on their phone within 15 minutes of waking up. Three-quarters of adults use social networking sites regularly. But this is peanuts compared to the galloping development of the so-called Internet of Things. Within the next few years, anything from 30 to 50 billion objects, from cars to shirts to bottles of shampoo, will be connected to the net. The internet will be all around you, whether you want it or not, and you will be caught in its mesh like a fly. It’s not called the web for nothing….

What is the problem here? Why does this bother me, and why does it bother Harris? The answer is that all of these things intrude upon, and threaten to destroy, something ancient and hard to define, which is also the source of much of our creativity and the essence of our humanity. “Solitude,” Harris writes, “is a resource.” He likens it to an ecological niche, within which grow new ideas, an understanding of the self and therefore an understanding of others.

The book is full of examples of the genius that springs from silent and solitary moments. Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Einstein, Newton – all developed their ideas and approach by withdrawing from the crowd….

Yet it is not only geniuses who have a problem: ordinary minds like yours and mine are threatened by the hypersocial nature of always-on urbanity….

So, what is to be done about all this? That’s the multibillion-dollar question, but it is one the book cannot answer. Harris spends many pages putting together a case for the importance of solitude and examining the forces that splinter it today….

Under the circumstances – and these are our circumstances – the only honest conclusion to draw is that the problem, which is caused primarily by the technological direction of our society, is going to get worse. There is no credible scenario in which we can continue in the same direction and not see the problem of solitude, or lack of it, continue to deepen….

… Short of a collapse so severe that the electricity goes off permanently, there is no escape from what the tech corporations and their tame hive mind have planned for us. The circle is closed, and the net is being hauled in. May as well play another round of Candy Crush while we wait to be dragged up on to the deck.

Well, the answer doesn’t lie in the kind of defeatism exemplified by Harris (whose book is evidently full of diagnosis and empty of remedy) or Kingsworth. It’s up to each person to decide whether or not to enlarge his scope of solitude or be defeated by the advance of technology and the breakdown of truly human connections.

But it’s not an all-or-nothing choice. Compromise is obviously necessary when it comes to making a living these days. That still leaves a lot of room for the practice of solitude, the practice and benefits of which I have addressed in “Flow“, “In Praise of Solitude“, “There’s Always Solitude“, and “The Glory of the Human Mind“.

More about the Transgender Fad

Is the transgender fad fading away, or is it just that I’m spending more time in solitude? Anyway, is was reminded of the fad by “Most Children Who Identify As Transgender Are Faking It, Says ‘Gender Clinic’ Psychiatrist” (The College Fix, April 17, 2017). It’s a brief post and the title tells the tale. So I’ll turn to my own post on the subject, “The Transgender Fad and Its Consequences“. Following a preamble and some long quotations from authoritative analysis of transgenderism, I continue with this:

Harm will come not only to those who fall prey to the transgender delusion, but also to those who oppose its inevitable manifestations:

mandatory sex mingling in bathrooms, locker rooms, and dorm rooms — an invitation to predators and a further weakening of the norms of propriety that help to instill respect toward other persons

quotas for hiring self-described transgender persons, and for admitting them to universities, and for putting them in the ranks of police and armed forces, etc.

government-imposed penalties for saying “hateful and discriminatory” things about gender, the purpose of which will be to stifle dissent about the preceding matters

government-imposed penalties for attempts to exercise freedom of association, which is an unenumerated right under the Constitution that, properly understood, includes the right to refuse business from anyone at any time and for any reason (including but far from limited to refusing to serve drug-addled drag queens whose presence will repel other customers)….

How did America get from the pre-Kinsey view of sex as a private matter, kept that way by long-standing social norms, to the let-it-all-hang-out (literally) mentality being pushed by elites in the media, academy, and government?

I attribute much of it to the capitalist paradox. Capitalism — a misnomer for an economic system that relies mainly on free markets and private-property rights — encourages innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. One result is that a “capitalist” economy eventually produces enough output to support large numbers of persons who don’t understand that living off the system and regulating it heavily will bring it down….

The social paradox is analogous to the capitalist paradox. Social relations are enriched and made more productive by the toleration of some new behaviors. But to ensure that a new behavior is enriching and productive, it must be tested in the acid of use.* Shortcuts — activism cloaked in academese, punditry, and political posturing — lead to the breakdown of the processes by which behaviors become accepted because they are enriching and productive.

In sum, the capitalist paradox breeds the very people who are responsible for the social paradox: those who are rich enough to be insulated from the vicissitudes of daily life, where living among and conversing with similar folk reinforces a distorted view of the real world.

It is the cossetted beneficiaries of capitalism who lead the way in forcing Americans to accept as “natural” and “of right” behavior that in saner times was rarely engaged in and even more rarely flaunted. That restraint wasn’t just a matter of prudery. It was a matter of two things: respect for others, and the preservation of norms that foster restraint.

How quaint. Avoiding offense to others, and teaching one’s children that normal behavior helps them to gain the acceptance and trust of others. Underlying those understood motivations was a deeper one: Children are susceptible creatures, easily gulled and led astray — led into making mistakes that will haunt them all their lives. There was, in those days, an understanding that “one thing leads to another.”…

… If the Kennedy Court of Social Upheaval continues to hold sway, its next “logical” steps will be to declare the illegality of sexual identifiers and the prima facie qualification of any person for any job regardless of “its” mental and physical fitness for the job….

… [T[he parents of yesteryear didn’t have to worry about the transgender fad, but they did have to worry about drinking, drug-taking, and sex. Not everyone who “experimented” with those things went on to live a life of dissolution, shame, and regret. But many did. And so, too, will the many young children, adolescents, and young adults who succumb to the fad of transgenderism….

When did it all begin to go wrong? See “1963: The Year Zero.”

Thank you for working your way through this very long quotation from my own blog. But it just has to be said again and again: Transgenderism is a fad, a destructive fad, and a fad that is being used by the enemies of liberty to destroy what little of it is left in America.

The Academic Enemies of Liberty

Kurt Schlichter quite rightly says that “Academia Is Our Enemy So We Should Help It Commit Suicide“:

If Animal House were to be rebooted today, Bluto – who would probably be updated into a differently–abled trans being of heft – might ask, “See if you can guess what am I now?” before expelling a whole mass of pus-like root vegetable on the WASPrivileged villains and announcing, “I’m a university – get it?”

At least popping a zit gets rid of the infection and promotes healing. But today, the higher education racket festers on the rear end of our culture, a painful, useless carbuncle of intellectual fraud, moral bankruptcy, and pernicious liberal fascism that impoverishes the young while it subsidizes a bunch of old pinkos who can’t hack it at Real World U….

If traditional colleges performed some meaningful function that only they could perform, then there might be a rationale for them in the 21^st Century. But there’s not. What do four-year colleges do today?

Well, they cater to weenies who feel “unsafe” that Mike Pence is speaking to their graduates. Seventy-some years ago, young people that age were feeling unsafe because the Wehrmacht was trying to kill them on Omaha Beach….

And in their quest to ensure their students’ perpetual unemployment, colleges are now teaching that punctuality is a social construct. Somewhere, a Starbucks manager is going to hear from Kaden the Barista that, “I like, totally couldn’t get here for my shift on time because, like intersectionality of my experience as a person of Scandinavianism and stuff. I feel unsafe because of your racist vikingaphobia and tardiness-shaming.”

Academia is pricing itself out of reach even as the antics of its inhabitants annoy and provoke those of us whose taxes already pick up a big chunk of the bill even without the “free college” okie-doke….

The quarter million dollar academic vacation model is economically unsustainable and poisonous to our culture. The world of Animal House was a lot more fun when it didn’t mean preemptive bankruptcy for its graduates and the fostering of a tyrannical training ground for future libfascists. It’s time to get all Bluto on the obsolete boil that is academia; time to give it a squeeze. [Townhall, April 13, 2017]

Cue my post, “Subsidizing the Enemies of Liberty“:

If there is a professional class that is almost solidly aligned against liberty it is the teachers and administrators who control the ideas that are pumped into the minds of students from kindergarten through graduate school. How are they aligned against liberty? Most of them are leftists, which means that they are statists who are dedicated to the suppression of liberty in favor of current left-wing orthodoxies. These almost always include the coddling of criminals, unrequited love for America’s enemies, redistribution of income and jobs toward less-productive (and non-productive) persons, restrictions on speech, and the destruction of civil society’s bulwarks: religion, marriage, and family.

In any event, spending on education in the United States amounted to $1.1 trillion in 2010, about 8 percent of GDP. Most of that $1.1 trillion — $900 billion, in fact — was spent on public elementary and secondary schools and public colleges and universities. In other words, your tax dollars support the leftists who teach your children and grandchildren to bow at the altar of the state, to placate the enemies of liberty at home and abroad, and to tear down the traditions that have bound people in mutual trust and respect….

And what do tax-paying Americans get for their money? A strong left-wing bias, which is inculcated at universities and spreads throughout public schools (and a lot of private schools). This has been going on, in earnest, since the end of World War II. And, yet, the populace is roughly divided between hard-headed conservatives and squishy-minded “liberals.” The persistence of the divide speaks well for the dominance of nature over nurture. But it does not change the fact that American taxpayers have been subsidizing the enemies of liberty who dominate the so-called education system in this country.

See also “Academic Bias“, “Politics, Sophistry, and the Academy“, “Academic Ignorance“, and John C. Goodman’s “Brownshirts, Subsidized with Your Tax Dollars” (Townhall, May 20, 2017).

The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration

The third entry in “Not-So-Random Thoughts (XVIII)” is about illegal immigration. It opens with this:

Ten years ago, I posted “An Immigration Roundup”, a collection of 13 posts dated March 29 through September 22, 2006. The bottom line: to encourage and allow rampant illegal immigration borders on social and economic suicide. I remain a hardliner because of the higher crime rate among Hispanics (“Immigration and Crime“), and because of Steven Camarota’s “So What Is the Fiscal and Economic Impact of Immigration?“ [National Review, September 22, 2016].

I suggest that you go to Camarota’s article, which I quote at length, to see the evidence that he has compiled. For more facts — as opposed to leftish magical thinking about immigration — see also “Welfare: Who’s on It, Who’s Not” (Truth Is Justice, April 16, 2017), which draws on

a report called “Welfare Use by Immigrant and Native Households.” The report’s principle finding is that fully 51 percent of immigrant households receive some form of welfare, compared to an already worrisomely high 30 percent of American native households. The study is based on the most accurate data available, the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). It also reports stark racial differences in the use of welfare programs.

I’ll throw in some excerpts:

Needless to say, the percentage of immigrants using some form of welfare varies enormously according to the part of the world from which they come. Rates are highest for households from Central America and Mexico (73 percent), the Caribbean (51 percent), and Africa (48 percent). Those from East Asia (32 percent), Europe (26 percent), and South Asia (17 percent) have the lowest rates….

A majority of native black and Hispanic households are on some form of means-tested welfare, compared to just 23 percent of native white households….

A striking 82 percent of black households with children receive welfare–double the white rate. Hispanic families are not far behind blacks….

Among natives, blacks receive cash handouts at more than three times the white rate; Hispanics at more than twice the white rate. Rates for black and Hispanic immigrants are relatively lower due to often-ignored restrictions on immigrant use of these programs….

Among all households, native blacks and Hispanics receive food handouts at three times the white rate; for Hispanic immigrants, the figure is four times the white rate. Among households with children, nearly all immigrant Hispanics–86 percent–get food aid. Native blacks and Hispanics aren’t far behind, with rates of 75 and 72 percent, respectively.

The takeaway: Tax-paying citizens already heavily subsidize native-born blacks and Hispanics. Adding welfare-dependent immigrants — especially from south of the border — adds injury to injury.

As long as the welfare state exists, immigration should be tightly controlled so that the United States admits only those persons (with their families) who have verifiable offers of employment from employers in the United States. Further, an immigrant’s income should be high enough to ensure that (a) he is unlikely to become dependent on any welfare program (federal, State, or local) and (b) he is likely to pay at least as much in taxes as he is likely to absorb in the way of schooling for his children, Social Security and Medicare benefits, etc.

(See also: Bob le Flambeur, “Against Open Borders“, Rightly Considered, February 8, 2017.)

* Sharp-eyed readers will notice that with this post I am adopting a “new” way of using quotation marks. The American convention is to enclose commas and periods within quotation marks, even where the commas and periods are not part of the quoted text or other material that belongs inside quotation marks (e.g., the title of a post). The American convention creates some ambiguity and awkwardness that is avoided by the British convention, which is to enclose inside quotation marks only that punctuation which is part of the quoted text or other material.

** This is from the article by Sullivan cited in the first section of this post:

[Leo] Strauss’s idiosyncratic genius defies easy characterization, but you could argue, as Mark Lilla did in his recent book The Shipwrecked Mind, that he was a reactionary in one specific sense: A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Strauss viewed modernity as collapsing into nihilism and relativism and barbarism all around him. His response was to go back to the distant past — to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides, among others — to see where the West went wrong, and how we could avoid the horrific crimes of the 20th century in the future.

One answer was America, where Strauss eventually found his home at the University of Chicago. Some of his disciples — in particular, the late professor Harry Jaffa — saw the American Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of the self-evident truth of the equality of human beings, as a civilizational high point in human self-understanding and political achievement. They believed it revived the ancient Greek and Roman conception of natural law. Yes, they saw the paradox of a testament to human freedom having been built on its opposite — slavery — but once the post–Civil War constitutional amendments were ratified, they believed that the American constitutional order was effectively set forever, and that the limited government that existed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries required no fundamental change.

Microsoft Edge: A Review

My version of Windows 10 was subjected recently to the Creators Update, whatever that is. Its marvelous effects are entirely invisible to me, which is good. But at the end of the update, I was urged to use a new version of the Microsoft Edge browser. Well, it was more than an urging. The thing popped onto my screen at the end of the update, as if I had ordered it. But I hadn’t, so I closed it.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I did a bit of research and found that the new Edge is supposed to be faster than other browsers. I tried it, and it does seem faster. But I quickly abandoned it and removed it from my taskbar.

What went wrong? Unlike Firefox, which I’m still able to customize to match my browsing preferences, Edge is simple-minded (like the software engineers who designed it):

Extensions are almost non-existent. Of the several Firefox extensions that I use, Edge offers only Adblock Plus.

Some functions that are handled by Firefox extensions (e.g., find in page) must be accessed in Edge by going to a drop-down menu. But the functions must be reactivated every time Edge is re-opened. There’s no session-to-session memory of chosen functions.

One of the great Firefox extensions is Classic Theme Restorer, which enables me to have a menu bar, which is a hell of a lot easier to use than clicking on Edge’s single drop-down menu and searching through it in vain for the functions that I want to perform. Edge’s idea of functionality is to require the user to memorize a long list of keyboard shortcuts.

Classic Theme Restorer also allows me to position tabs just above the image area for web pages, which is where they belong. (Try it, you’ll like it.)

Thanks to Classic Theme Restorer, I am also able to have icons for the following useful functions in my tool bar and menu bar: change zoom, open new window, open last closed tab, show history, open the download list, subscribe to a site’s RSS feed, and adjust Adblock Plus settings. Some of those are extension-based functions that Edge doesn’t offer. Some others are available to masochists who like to memorize and use keyboard shortcuts instead of simply clicking on icons.

Zoom, which Firefox offers in 10-percent increments, is available only in 25-percent increments with Edge. As a result, the type on most Edge pages is either uncomfortably small or uncomfortably large. How wonderful is that?

I could dredge up more examples if I wanted to waste more of my time, but I’ll close with this observation: Edge plays badly with WordPress. Examples:

It’s not possible to copy text from a web page and paste it into WordPress’s visual editor by using the standard right-click operations. How does one paste in Edge? Using a keyboard shortcut, of course.

Worse than that, pasting web-page material into WordPress’s visual editor creates a mess; all kinds of extraneous coding appears and a lot of punctuation (e.g., dashes, quotations marks, apostrophes) is displayed as garbage. It’s possible to paste copied text into the HTML editor, but that results in the loss of embedded links.

To top it off, Edge just can’t keep up with WordPress’s background operations; the visual editor often stalls or goes blank.

Edge is aptly named. It’s at the trailing edge of browser technology. Microsoft strikes (out), again.

Some Notes about Psychology and Intelligence

“More about Intelligence” summarizes research findings reported by Gregory Cochran (West Hunter), John Ray (Political Correctness Watch), and James Thompson (Unz Review: James Thompson Archive). This is an encore presentation, with notes from Cochran, Thompson, and two other sources. The scope of these notes is a bit broader than intelligence, as you will see.

Cochran leads off with comments about the transgender fad:

Progressives mostly think that “that gender is a matter of identity, not biology, and that refusing to recognize a person’s gender identity is an outrageous offense.” While Terfs [trans exclusionary radical feminists] believe that “women are a subordinate social class, oppressed due to their biology, and that there’s nothing innate about femininity. They think you can’t have a woman’s brain in a man’s body because there’s no such thing as a “woman’s brain….

Well, obviously it’s difficult for some ex-Navy Seal to have ‘always felt like a girl inside’ if there is no difference between male and female brains. So, will smoke now start coming out of progressive ears, as they endlessly say “does not compute”?

I doubt it. They’re perfectly capable of believing in incompatible theories – there’s no logical contradiction if you never logic in the first place. But if by some chance it does bother someone, here is the resolution:

Progressives and Terfs are both wrong: sex differences in behavior have biological roots – men and female brains are different. I mean, if male rhesus monkeys like toy trucks and females rhesus monkeys don’t, as they do, it’s hard to attribute to social pressure. Boys are much more likely to like rough-and-tumble play, blah blah blah. The stereotypes are true. Trans men aren’t little girls inside, anymore than someone with a Napoleonic complex is ‘really’ Corsican. They’re just crazy. Now that craziness probably has some biological origin, but we don’t understand it. Even if it does, it is likely that the form of that craziness is shaped by social influences, just as Malays run amok with a bloody kris rather than going postal with a Glock….

If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to make it so, with advanced biological engineering. [“Internal Contradictions,” December 12, 2015]

(For more in that vein by Cochran, see “Not Bad. Could Be Better“, April 17, 2017.)

James Thompson has more about sex differences:

It is a measure of the quality of British life that one of its longest running TV programs is “University Challenge”, a quiz show for university students. Yes, it has always been a minority interest, but it is a showcase of talent, an astounding example of what bright young people can get to know in roughly 25 years….

I have not checked these figures, but the final winning teams since inception number 184 contestants, of whom only 16 were women, so their representation is roughly 9%.

I am not writing for a national newspaper, but I take a more measured approach than to ask for quotas. What do we know about general knowledge and sex differences outside this particular TV format?…

Lynn and Irwing argue that men have always been better at the Information (general knowledge) subtest of the Wechsler test, an important finding because the of the care taken over the representativeness of the standardization sample. Furthermore, boys are better at girls on wider general knowledge in 26 European countries….

the observed male advantage in University Challenge is not an artefact of selection for a TV program, but an established aspect of sex differences in knowledge. Since men are better at general knowledge, and are usually more variable in ability (larger standard deviations) than women it would make sense that there would be fewer women selected for local university team membership, and progressively far fewer in winning teams. As you push out towards higher levels of general knowledge there are about 10 very knowledgeable men for every equally knowledgeable woman. [“Intelligence and General Knowledge: Your Starter for 10“, April 11, 2017]

And more:

Here is a very interesting paper on sex differences in brain size and intelligence, notable for linking people’s brain scans with their detailed intelligence test results….

Men’s brains are bigger than women’s, even when controlling for bigger body size, which means they should have higher intelligence, though the evidence for that is conflicting. Most researchers find no notable differences overall, saying that different strengths and weaknesses balance each other out, but Lynn and Irwing (2002, 2004) argued that adult males are almost 4 IQ points brighter than adult females. The authors of the present paper have found one of the largest MRI samples available, each scanned person having done 10 cognitive tests, which is what makes this study particularly interesting….

The tests were used to create an overall g score. Correlations with this overall g measure and brain measures are not large, but for both males and females the highest correlations are with gray matter volume….

Once again, I recommend that men pay close attention to the largest sex difference, which plays out in their favour: spatial orientation, in which they have a 6 IQ points advantage. I recommend that women play close attention to Episodic memory in which they have an advantage of 4 IQ points, giving women the upper hand when remembering male transgressions. Those particular findings hold up even when you control for g, so they are very real cognitive sex differences, and are mostly across the board of the abilities measured….

This study supports the minority position of Lynn and Irwing, that men are about 4 IQ points brighter than women, an across-the-board advantage, plus better spatial ability, and that part of this difference may be attributed to brain size….

As usual, a small difference in means has larger consequences at the extremes. If one assumes a 4 point difference straddling the mean, then women will be 98 to men’s 102. Keeping the standard deviations to 15 for both sexes, and setting the cutoff point at IQ 130 then 3.1% of men and 1.6% of women pass the threshold, meaning 65% of the brightest people will be men. [“Women’s Brains “, April 24, 2017]

Thompson followed up with this:

[A]s you may have read in my last post “Women’s brains”, when a large sample of people have their brains scanned, men are 3.75 IQ points brighter than the women, but there is no difference between the two on the standard deviations of intelligence, so that goes against the general pattern of the findings.

Richard Lynn (1994) argued that some of this confusion arises because so many tests of intelligence are carried out on school age children, and since girls mature faster than boys, so they lead in intelligence initially, but when boys finally mature at roughly 15 year of age, men end up a little brighter than women, by about 4 IQ points. This finding has been supported by various studies, though some find male advantage sooner in child development.

Now a new study has been published which shows a male advantage appearing by the age of 10 in Nigeria….

[M]ale advantage is evident by age 10 and increases with age. So, this is another finding which strengthens Lynn (1994) and in this sample puts the age of male advantage back to 10 years of age. This might suggest that Africans mature faster than Europeans, for which there is some evidence, but it seems to be part of a bigger picture of early male advantage in general intelligence. Measured at age 18-19 when students are entering the workforce, or higher education, this is a massive 7 IQ point male advantage. If one takes a broader view, and takes the almost 4000 strong sample of 15 to 19 year olds, the difference is still a 5 IQ point male advantage. [“Sex Differences in Intelligence in Nigeria“, May 9, 2017]

Elsewhere, F. Roger Devlin reviews a book by Roderick Kaine:

There are several well-established differences in cognitive functioning between men and women. First, adult men appear to have a three to five point advantage over women in average IQ. Second, and more important, there is a much wider range of variation in male intelligence, with more men at the highest and lowest levels, and with women tending to bunch in the middle. Third, women tend toward greater verbal ability, while men have greater mathematical ability and much greater visuospatial ability.

One consequence of these differences is that men greatly outnumber women among high achievers in engineering and the hard sciences, a circumstance which, in the author’s words, “engenders astonishing levels of envy among some women.” Elaborate but unconvincing theories revolving around discrimination and “stereotype threat” have been elaborated to account for these differences and justify preferential treatment of women in these fields.

Yet these differences in cognitive ability can easily be explained by studying the human brain. Male brains on the whole are 8 to 10 percent larger than female brains, and controlling for body size differences does not eliminate the difference. The correlation coefficient between brain size and IQ is about 0.35 or 0.4 when the most accurate measuring techniques are used. One area, the inferior parietal lobe, is 25 percent larger in males. The male brain also has about 15 to 16 percent more neurons than the female.

As a proportion of the brain, men have significantly more white matter than women and women have more grey matter than men. Unadjusted for overall volume differences, however, men have about the same amount of grey matter as women and the male advantage in white matter is even more profound….

An exception to the pattern of greater white matter in the male brain is the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the cerebrum. Females have proportionally more white matter in this particular region than males, making for better communication between hemispheres. Testosterone promotes interconnectivity between parts of the brain, but the lower connectivity between hemispheres in the male brain means that the effects of testosterone are largely limited to promoting interconnectivity within each hemisphere separately. So the overall pattern is more connectivity between hemispheres in women, and more within hemispheres in men.

Together, asymmetry between hemispheres and differences in connectivity patterns probably explain why men excel at visuospatial reasoning and women at verbal reasoning as well as why these two abilities are found to be inversely correlated once the influence of general intelligence is factored out (as components of g they are directly correlated)….

[O]f course, not everyone is able to appraise the facts rationally. In particular, as Kaine puts it, “the male advantages in technical ability and IQ . . . often engenders astonishing levels of envy among some women.” And these women wield so much power in the contemporary West that even standardized test designers live in fear of them. What might be termed “resentful woman theory” holds that boys and girls are born with equal ability in all domains, but that systematic bias from schools, parents and society at large puts girls at a disadvantage.

As the author shows, there is a good deal of evidence to contradict such claims. Among takers of the SAT test, girls outnumber boys by 27 percent. The girls also have higher Grade Point Averages, with 44 percent more of them earning a perfect 4.0. The girls have enjoyed more years of coursework in all subject areas surveyed, including math and science, and have taken more AP courses, again including math and science. There is even some evidence of teacher bias in favor of girls, which Kaine speculates may be due to girls’ advantages in a number of behavioral traits unrelated to raw intelligence, including organization, dependability, self-discipline, and submissiveness to authority figures. [“Why Most High-Achievers Are Men [& Why We Cannot Afford Sexual Egalitarianism]“, Truth Is Justice, November 6, 2016]

(See also: Gregory Cochran, “Old T-Rex“, West Hunter, March 20, 2017.)

What about women in the workplace? The author of this post notes a Bloomberg piece

warning that economists are “worried” about the economic implications of women’s decisions about how to balance work and family. Women’s workforce participation has dipped since its peak two decades ago, and encouraging more women to work outside the home could boost our economy. Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank, has some advice for the U.S.:

“To keep women and men productive in the labor market, it is a good idea to have supporting institutions that can ease some of the burdens of both single parents and married couples with children.”

That’s certainly sound advice [or maybe not: TEA]….

[The proponents of such policies really] want America to embrace the European approach and have the government provide or require businesses to provide extensive paid leave and other benefits.

Devlin puts it this way:

The feminists whose demands created our present employment regime want, in effect, for the cost of women’s behavior and decisions to be externalized to employers, customers, fellow employees and tax payers. Indeed, once all these hidden costs are factored out, it is unclear just how many “working” women are actually engaged in any sort of productive labor; the author suggests that the numbers may be as low as 30 percent….

I turn from the war between the sexes (or between radical feminism/political correctness and the facts) to the intelligence of East Asians. This is by Ryan Faulk (“IQs of East Asians“, Truth Is Justice, May 10, 2017):

One of the major arguments against heredetarianism is the claim that East Asians’ higher IQs than Europeans is merely a result of effort, and are in fact an example of effort raising the IQ of an entire group by about 4 points relative to 100, which is presumably what they would score if they were as “lazy” as Europeans.

There are 3 reasons to be highly skeptical of this claim:
1. The results of East Asian adoption studies
2. The global patterns of East Asian IQ scores and low verbal IQ relative to their other scores
3. Facts strongly suggestive of genetic causation of the White-Asian differences – such as myopia, the scores of mixed-race East Asians and specific gene variants East Asians have compared to Europeans….

After presenting statistics that support each claim, Faulk concludes:

For any of these things in isolation, you can come up with an environment-only explanation.

The problem is that so many lines of evidence point to genetics, and an environmental explanation would have to explain the pattern of intelligence in East Asians (relatively lower verbal) and higher IQs – all around the world and for decades.

It would have to explain the intermediate scores of mixed European-Asians, the coincidences of higher rates of myopia and East Asians having certain alleles that predict higher IQs.

Not only can a genetic explanation explain this data – all of these things positively bolster a genetic explanation, while an environmentalist orientation would at best just have to cope with all of this.

Affirmative action has done much harm in the United States, but it’s not going away anytime soon. As long as it’s still around, let’s have some affirmative action for males and East Asians. It’s their turn.

Recommended reading:

Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending, “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence“, Journal of Biosciences, Vol. 38, No. 5, 659-93 (September 2006)

Elan Miller, “The Cherry Picked Science in Vox’s Charles Murray Article“, Medium, May 18, 2017

Shivali Best, “‘Smart genes’ Account for 20% of Our Intelligence“, Mail Online, May 22, 2017

Rich Harridy, “52 Genes Associated with Intelligence Discovered“, New Atlas, May 22, 2017

Suzanne Sniekers, et al., “Genome-wide Association Meta-analysis of 78,308 Individuals Identifies New Loci and Genes Influencing Human Intelligence”, Nature, May 22, 2017 (abstract)

The Impeachment Trap?

Old adage: Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it.

Here’s the recipe for Impeachment à la Mode 2017:

Take a massive, vocal, determined, and politically experienced resistance — spearheaded (symbolically, at least) by a former president and a defeated presidential candidate, and funded by leftists with deep pockets (e.g., George Soros).

Add one unwitting president — a political neophyte who isn’t used to having his every word and deed challenged and psychoanalyzed, and who arms his enemies and hands them the ammunition they need for a political assassination.

Add a pinch of intramural hate, discontent, and demoralization.

Combine with anti-Trump conservatives whose opposition has survived Trump’s many early successes.

Stir with senior GOP leaders in Congress who don’t want their majorities to go down with Trump, and who will desert him to avoid that fate.

Bake in the oven of leftist-dominated media for a few months, and Bob’s your uncle.

I chose the epigram for this post before I came across “The Impeachment Trap: Be Careful What You Wish For,” by a blogger (Jeff Alson, In These Times) whom I would characterize as a member of the “resistance.” In fact, he has anticipated much of what I planned to say here, so I will now quote him at some length:

I believe it would be a major strategic blunder for the Democratic Party to fall for what I call the Impeachment Trap—the powerful temptation to lead the charge for impeachment without considering the strategic implications….

The simple majority necessary to impeach in the House of Representatives, as well as the two-thirds majority that is required to convict in the Senate, can be achieved with the support of most or all Democrats and a minority of Republicans. Unfortunately, this scenario would offer enormous political benefits to the Republicans.

If Trump were impeached and convicted, Vice President Mike Pence, a right-wing, evangelical ideologue, would be a much more reliable and competent rubber stamp for the conservative policy agenda. Trump, for all his failings, cannot be counted on to support conservative Republican orthodoxy. While his cabinet picks and early policy proposals have largely catered to right-wing ideology, his policy flip-flops and incompetence make him a very unreliable partner for congressional Republicans…. Pence, on the other hand, who was given a 99 percent rating from the American Conservative Union, would be much more likely to cut Social Security, push National Right to Work, and try to restrict gay marriage, and would probably treat immigrants and refugees just as badly, in order to court the Trump base.

Impeachment would also help restore the damaged Republican brand. Trump lost the popular vote by the largest margin of any incoming president in history. His administration is mired in incompetence, chaos, and suspicion, and has already sparked a massive public resistance. His public approval rating hovers around 40 percent, by far a record low for a new president. If these trends continue, his presidency will be a massive albatross around the GOP’s neck in future elections.

By contrast, the robot-like Pence—despite his extreme right-wing views—would be packaged as a comforting return to normalcy. The relief at no longer having an egotistical lunatic at the helm could provide Pence with a long and generous public opinion honeymoon. Republicans could claim that Trump was “never one of theirs,” and approach the 2020 campaign with the benefit of incumbency and without Trump’s liabilities.

Democratic ownership of impeachment would also cement the loyalty of working-class Trump voters to the Republican Party….

Of course, Republicans may well decide that impeachment is in their best interests and lead the charge. This is a slightly better scenario for Democrats.

… With Republicans owning impeachment, Trump supporters would be livid with the Republican Party, some withdrawing from politics altogether or splintering off to support minor parties, others perhaps willing to reconsider a Democratic Party refocused on economic justice. The combination of Republicans losing core Trump supporters and ongoing demographic trends would put Democrats in a very favorable position for 2018 and 2020 and beyond….

Paradoxical as it may seem, however, the best scenario for Democrats is one in which they resist the impeachment trap, the Republicans stand by their president, and Trump, odious as he may be, remains in office…. From a policy perspective, a paralyzed Trump administration would be far better than a more competent and reliably right-wing Pence presidency. Politically, Trump would become a black eye for the GOP, and the Democratic opposition would remain energized, all of which would favor the Democrats in both 2018 and 2020….

It won’t be easy to resist the temptation to humiliate the worst president in modern history, but Democrats must muster the discipline to resist the Impeachment Trap, insist that Republicans be the ones to take responsibility for their shameful president, and mobilize to build real grassroots democratic power for 2018, 2020 and beyond.

A key issue, for Republicans, is whether Trump Democrats would go “home” to the Democrat Party. I am less convinced of that than Alson is. The sooner Trump is removed the more time Pence has to do things that will keep Trump Democrats in the Republican fold. Further, it seems unlikely that more than a small fraction of Trump Democrats would revert to a party whose next presidential candidate is likely to be Elizabeth Warren.

Most important, from the GOP’s point of view, is Pence’s image as sedate and “presidential” compared with Trump. This would go down well with a lot of voters in the center and center-right. It was their abandonment of Trump, I believe, that caused him to win several reliably Red States by smaller margins than Romney did in 2012.

Where does this leave me? All signs point to a completely ineffective Trump presidency from here on out. I doubt that he could now replace a retiring or deceased Supreme Court justice, for example. There’s much in Trump’s agenda worth pursuing (and some that isn’t). But if the agenda is to be rescued, Republicans should act quickly, replace Trump with Pence, and get on with moving the federal government’s policies rightward in an orderly way.

The early “chaos” bruited by the left-wing media has become real chaos, and it’s hurting the conservative cause. That’s what I care about, not Donald J. Trump.

Impeachment may be a trap for Democrats, but it may be Republicans’ only way out of a trap.

Related reading: Rod Dreher, “Shut Your Mouth, Do Your Job,” The American Conservative, May 19, 2017

Another Thought or Two about Class

My recent post, “Class in America,” offers a straightforward taxonomy of the socioeconomic pecking order in the United States. The post doesn’t address the dynamics of movement between classes, so I want to say something about dynamics. And I want to address the inevitability of class-like distinctions, despite the avowed (but hypocritical) goals of leftists to erase such distinctions.

With respect to dynamics, I begin with these observations from “Class in America”:

Class in America isn’t a simple thing. It has something to do with one’s inheritance, which is not only (or mainly) wealth. It has mainly to do with one’s intelligence (which is largely of genetic origin) and behavior (which also has a genetic component). Class also has a lot to do with what one does with one’s genetic inheritance, however rich or sparse it is. Class still depends a lot on acquired skills, drive, and actual achievements — even dubious ones like opining, acting, and playing games — and the income and wealth generated by them.

Class distinctions depend on the objective facts (whether observable or not) about genetic inheritance and one’s use (or not) thereof. Class distinctions also depend on broadly shared views about the relative prestige of various combinations of wealth, income (which isn’t the same as wealth), power, influence, and achievement. Those broadly shared views shift over time.

For example, my taxonomy includes three “suspect” classes whose denizens are athletes and entertainers. There were relatively few highly paid entertainers and almost no highly paid athletes in the late 1800s, when some members of today’s old-wealth aristocracy (e.g., Rockefeller and Ford) had yet to rise to that pinnacle. Even those few athletes and entertainers, unless they had acquired a patina of “culture,” would have been considered beyond the pale of class distinctions — oddities to be applauded (or not) and rewarded for the exercise of their talents, but not to be emulated by socially striving youngsters.

How the world has changed. Now that sports and entertainment have become much more visible and higher-paying than they were in the Gilded Age, there are far more Americans who accord high status to the practitioners in those fields. This is not only a matter of income, but also a matter of taste. If the American Dream of the late 19th century was dominated by visions of rising to the New-Wealth Aristocracy, the American Dream of the early 21st century gives a place of prominence to visions of becoming the next LaBron James or Lady Gaga.

I should qualify the preceding analysis by noting that it applies mainly to whites of European descent and those blacks who are American-born or more than a generation removed from foreign shores. I believe that the old American Dream still prevails among Americans of Asian descent and blacks who are less than two generations removed from Africa or the Caribbean. The Dream prevails to a lesser extent among Latinos — who have enjoyed great success in baseball — but probably more than it does among the aforementioned whites and blacks. As a result, the next generations of upper classes (aside from the Old-Wealth Aristocracy) will become increasingly Asian and Latino in complexion.

Yes, there are millions of white and black Americans (of non-recent vintage) who still share The Dream, though millions more have abandoned it. Their places will be taken by Americans of Asian descent, Latinos, and African-Americans of recent vintage. (I should add that, in any competition based on intellectual merit, Asians generally have the advantage of above-average-to-high intelligence.)

Which brings me to my brief and unduly dismissive rant about the predominantly white and

growing mob of whiny, left-wing fascists[.] For now, they’re sprinkled among the various classes depicted in the table, even classes at or near the top. In their vision of a “classless” society, they would all be at the top, of course, flogging conservatives, plutocrats, malefactors of great wealth, and straight, white (non-Muslim, non-Hispanic), heterosexual males — other than those of their whiny, fascist ilk.

The whiny left is not only predominantly white but also predominantly college-educated, and therefore probably of above-average intelligence. Though there is a great deal of practiced glibness at work among the left-wingers who dominate the professoriate and punditocracy, the generally high intelligence of the whiny class can’t be denied. But the indisputable fact of its class-ness testifies to an inconvenient truth: It is natural for people to align themselves in classes.

Class distinctions are status distinctions. But they can also connote the solidarity of an in-group that is united by a worldview of some kind. The worldview is usually of a religious character, where “religious” means a cult-like devotion to certain beliefs that are taken on faith. Contemporary leftists signal their solidarity — and class superiority — in several ways:

They proclaim themselves on the side of science, though most of them aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know real science if it bit them in the proverbial hindquarters.

There are certain kinds of “scientific” dangers and catastrophes that attract leftists because they provide a pretext for shaping people’s lives in puritanical ways: catastrophic anthropogenic global warming; extreme environmentalism, which stretches to the regulation of mud puddles; second-hand smoking as a health hazard; the “evident” threat posed by the mere depiction or mention of guns; “overpopulation” (despite two centuries of it); obesity (a result, God forbid, of market forces that result in the greater nourishment of poor people); many claims about the ill effects of alcohol, salt, butter, fats, etc., that have been debunked; any number of regulated risks that people would otherwise treat as IQ tests thrown up by life and opportunities to weed out the gene pool; and on and on.

They are in constant search of victims to free from oppression, whether it is the legal oppression of the Jim Crow South or simply the “oppression” of hurt feelings inflicted on the left itself by those who dare to hold different views. (The left isn’t always wrong about the victims it claims to behold, but it has been right only when its tender sensibilities have been confirmed by something like popular consensus.)

Their victim-olatry holds no place, however, for the white working class, whose degree of “white privilege” is approximately zero. To earn one’s daily bread by sweating seems to be honorable only for those whose skin isn’t white or whose religion isn’t Christian.

They are astute practitioners of moral relativism. The inferior status of women in Islam is evidently of little or no account to them. Many of them were even heard to say, in the wake of 9/11, that “we had it coming,” though they were not among the “we.” And “we had it coming” for what, the audacity of protecting access to a vital resource (oil) that helps to drive an economy whose riches subsidize their juvenile worldview? It didn’t occur to those terrorists manqué that it was Osama bin Laden who had it coming. (And he finally “got” it, but Obama — one of their own beneath his smooth veneer — was too sensitive to the feelings of our Muslim enemies to show the proof that justice was done. This was also done to spite Americans who, rightly, wanted more than a staged photo of Obama and his stooges watching the kill operation unfold.)

To their way of thinking, justice — criminal and “social” — consists of outcomes that favor certain groups. For example, it is prima facie wrong that blacks are disproportionately convicted of criminal offenses, especially violent crimes, because … well, just because. It is right (“socially just”) that blacks and other “protected” groups get jobs, promotions, and university admissions for which they are less-qualified than whites and Asians because slavery happened more than 160 years ago and blacks still haven’t recovered from it. (It is, of course, futile and “racist” to mention that blacks are generally less intelligent than whites and Asians.)

Their economic principles (e.g., “helping” the poor through minimum wage and “living wage” laws, buying local because … whatever, promoting the use of bicycles to reduce traffic congestion, favoring strict zoning laws while bemoaning a lack of “affordable” housing) are anti-scientific but virtuous. With leftists, the appearance of virtuousness always trumps science.

All of this mindless posturing has only two purposes, as far as I can tell. The first is to make leftists feel good about themselves, which is important because most of them are white and therefore beneficiaries of “white privilege.” (They are on a monumental guilt-trip, in other words.) The second, as I have said, is to signal their membership in a special class that is bound by attitudes rather than wealth, income, tastes, and other signals that have deep roots in social evolution.

I now therefore conclude that the harsh, outspoken, virulent, violence-prone left is a new class unto itself, though some of its members may retain the outward appearance of belonging to other classes.

A Word of Warning to Leftists (and Everyone Else)

It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditure on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.

Marshall of the Royal Air Force Sir John Cotesworth Slessor,
Strategy for the West

I am not a pessimist by nature, but I do consider myself a realist. Despite Trump, the U.S. is rapidly moving in the direction of the British Isles and continental Europe: welfare-dependent, nannied in the nth degree, and politically correct to the point of feminization.

This “ambiance” will dominate the military-diplomatic sphere under the next Obama — who will arrive four or eight years from now, given the fickleness of the American electorate. The U.S. will then be open to military blackmail by a determined and strong regime in search of economic gains (e.g., de facto control of oil-rich regions) and political dominance over vast regions if not the globe. Inasmuch as the U.S. is properly and profitably engaged in the world (for the ultimate benefit of American consumers), the result will be vast harm to Americans’ interests.

Military blackmail by a state (or states acting in opportunistic coordination) might be accompanied by or follow in the wake of a major terrorist attack by an emboldened non-state actor. (I remember reading of evidence that bin Laden was emboldened to order the 9/11 strikes because previous U.S. responses to terrorism suggested softness.)

But such developments will come as a surprise to most Americans, whose solipsism blinds them to the realities of a world (out there) that hasn’t been — and won’t be — turned into a kindergarten by left-wing university administrators and faculty, generations of indoctrinated public-school teachers, tens of millions of their indoctrinees, politicians and otherwise hard-headed businessmen eager to signal their virtue by favoring political correctness over actual ability and accomplishment, and the media chorus that eagerly encourages and sustains all of with its skillfully slanted reportage.

When the surprise occurs, it probably will be too late to do anything about it, despite the sudden mugging by reality that will convert many leftists into conservatives.

Recommended reading and viewing:

Simon Sinek, “Millennials in the Workplace,” Inside Quest, October 29, 2016

Chenchen Zhang, “The Curious Rise of the ‘White Left’ as a Chinese Internet Insult,” openDemocracy, May 11, 2017

Mark Steyn, “Tomorrow By the Numbers,” Steyn Posts, May 10, 2017

Katie Kieffer, “Tick, Tock: EMP War Looms,” Townhall, May 15, 2017

Bruce Schneier, “Who Is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why?” Schneier on Security, May 15, 2017

Special Relativity

I have removed my four posts about special relativity and incorporated them in a new page, “Einstein’s Errors.” I will update that page occasionally rather than post about special relativity, which is rather “off the subject” for this blog.

The JFK Standard

I believe that the media’s treatment of a president has more to do with his party affiliation and various “cosmetic” factors than with his policies or executive competence. To test this hypothesis (unscientifically), I constructed a table listing six factors, and gave JFK a 10 for each of them. (He was the last president to enjoy an extended honeymoon with the media, and it had to have been based more on “cosmetic” factors than anything else.) I then quickly assigned relative scores to each of JFK’s successors — and didn’t go back to change any scores. I didn’t add the scores until I had assigned every president a score for all six factors. Here’s the result:

Given the media’s long-standing bias toward Democrats, I arbitrarily gave each Democrat 10 points for party affiliation, as against zero for the Republicans. “Looks,” “wit,” and “elegance” (as seen through the eyes of the media) should be self-explanatory. “Wife” and “children” refer to contemporaneous media perceptions of each president’s wife and child or children. Jackie was the perfect First Lady, from the standpoint of looks, poise, and “culture.” And Caroline and John Jr. epitomized “adorable,” unlike the older and often unattractive (or notorious) offspring of later presidents.

I’d say that the total scores are a good indication of the relative treatment — favorable, middling, and unfavorable — given each president by the media.

Class in America

I often refer to class — or socioeconomic status (SES) — as do many other writers. SES is said to be a function of “a person’s work experience and of an individual’s or family’s economic and social position in relation to others, based on income, education, and occupation.” Wealth counts, too. As do race and ethnicity, to be candid.

Attempts to quantify SES are psuedo-scientific, so I won’t play that game. It’s obvious that class distinctions are subtle and idiosyncratic. Class is in the eye of the beholder.

I am a beholder, and what I behold is parsed in the table below. There I have sorted Americans into broad, fuzzy, and overlapping classes, in roughly descending order of prestige. The indented entries pertain to a certain “type” of person who doesn’t fit neatly into the usual taxonomy of class. What is the type? You’ll see as you read the table.

(To enlarge the image, open it in a new tab and use your browser’s “magnifying glass.”)

What about retirees? If their financial status or behavioral traits don’t change much after retirement, they generally stay in the class to which they belonged at retirement.

Where are the “rednecks”? Most of them are probably in the bottom six rungs, but so are huge numbers of other Americans who (mostly) escape opprobrium for being there. Many “rednecks” have risen to higher classes, especially but not exclusively the indented ones.

What about the growing mob of whiny, left-wing fascists? For now, they’re sprinkled among the various classes depicted in the table, even classes at or near the top. In their vision of a “classless” society, they would all be at the top, of course, flogging conservatives, plutocrats, malefactors of great wealth, and straight, white (non-Muslim, non-Hispanic), heterosexual males — other than those of their whiny, fascist ilk.

Here’s what I make of all this. Class in America isn’t a simple thing. It has something to do with one’s inheritance, which is not only (or mainly) wealth. It has mainly to do with one’s intelligence (which is largely of genetic origin) and behavior (which also has a genetic component). Class also has a lot to do with what one does with one’s genetic inheritance, however rich or sparse it is. Class still depends a lot on acquired skills, drive, and actual achievements — even dubious ones like opining, acting, and playing games — and the income and wealth generated by them. Some would call that quintessentially American.

My family background, on both sides, is blue-collar. I wound up on the senior manager-highly educated rung. That’s quintessentially American.

There’s a lot here to quibble with. Have at it.

If comments are closed by the time you read this post, you may send them to me by e-mail at the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the last name of the great Austrian economist and Nobel laureate whose first name is Friedrich followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by the domain and extension for Google’s e-mail service — all run together.

Where There’s Smoke

The wrothful Gersh Kuntzman has more than two things to say about Hillary Clinton’s latest p.r. push:

I voted for Clinton on Nov. 8 and thought she’d be a good president.

But she lost. And she still wants us to feel bad about that. And, worse, she’s still blaming everyone else.

On Tuesday at the Women for Women conference, she reminded us again what a flawed candidate she was last year — and what a flawed person she has always been….

She … said she would discuss the mistakes she made during the campaign — then declined to mention even one. Instead, she fell back on the usual suspects: The Russians and FBI Director James Comey, who indeed meddled in the election at the last minute.

“If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your President,” she said.

Boo hoo.

Sorry, Simon & Schuster may want Hillary Clinton to write the history, but I’m not about to let her re-write it. No one deserves more blame for the election debacle than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Let us count the ways:

1. She was, indeed, untrustworthy: Remember her fainting spell at the 9/11 ceremony? Remember how long it took for her to tell the truth? Remember how that reminded every voter in America that Hillary Clinton’s first instinct is to lie? Just like she did when she claimed she had taken sniper fire during a First Lady trip to Bosnia. Just as she did when she said she never sent classified documents over her private email server.

Beyond that, she was too close to the Clinton Foundation, and didn’t have a good answer when the Associated Press reported that donors to the Foundation got an open channel to then-Secretary of State Clinton.

2. She ran a very poor campaign….

[W]hen she called half the country the “basket of deplorables,” it was pretty much over. As Mitt Romney learned four years earlier when he said 47% of the country was “freeloaders,” you’re not the smartest guy in the room if you make a gaffe as dumb as that.

3. She set up a private email server: It’s basic. The only reason to set up a private email server — and delete some of the emails on it — is because you want to hide something from the public. Clinton never provided a good answer to the simple question, “Why would you do that?”

4. Those Goldman-Sachs speeches. You can’t be a prostitute on Wall Street and then go to church on Main Street….

I don’t understand why a publishing firm would give Hillary Clinton millions of dollars to not even admit her mistakes. (Full disclosure: I have three far-more-interesting books that Simon and Schuster can have for a fraction of Clinton’s advance, including “Bad Seeds” (an unpublished novel), “Hitler Would Have Double-Parked” (an unpublished novel) and “Publish My Unpublished Novel” (an unpublished novel). So I don’t see why we can’t make a deal.)…

She got what she deserved: She lost.

Now she needs to shut up and go home. [“Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Be Writing a Book — She Should Be Drafting a Long Apology to America,” New York Daily News, May 2, 2017]

And as he makes clear elsewhere in the piece, he hates Trump.

Kuntzman omits a great deal. He could have mentioned Madame Rodham Clinton’s

internship at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a firm was well known for its support of radical causes (two of its four partners were current or former Communist Party members)

conduct as a defense attorney in a child-rape case

mysteriously prescient ability to trade cattle futures

participation in the fraudulent Whitewater land-flipping scheme

involvement in trumped-up, politically based firing of White House travel-office employees (“Travelgate“)

involvement in the illegal procuring of background-check files on persons who had been White House employees during previous GOP administrations (“Filegate“)

enabling of Bill’s sexual predation, and attempt to deflect blame from him by concocting a “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” when the real problem was the truth about Bill

appropriation of gifts that had been made to the White House, not to her personally

solicitation of gifts while running for the Senate

dereliction of duty regarding the protection of the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all I can think of at the moment.

It is a depressing commentary on the state of politics in America that such a venal, mendacious, corrupt, destructively ambitious person could have risen as far as Hillary Rodham Clinton rose. I often give thanks to the Framers for inserting the Electoral College between the voters and the presidency.

Language Peeves

Maverick Philosopher has many language peeves, as do I. Our peeves overlap considerably. Here are some of mine:

Anniversary

Today is the ~~ten-year~~ tenth anniversary of our wedding.

Anniversary means the annually recurring date of a past event. To write or say “x-year anniversary” is redundant as well as graceless. A person who says or writes “x-month” anniversary is probably a person whose every sentence includes “like.”

Data

The data is are conclusive.

“Data” is a plural noun. A person who writes or says “data is” is at best an ignoramus and at worst a Philistine.

Guy/guys

Would ~~you guys~~ you like to order now?

Regarding this egregious usage, I admit to occasionally slipping from my high horse — an event that is followed immediately by self-censure. (Bonus observation: “Now” is often superfluous, as in the present example.)

Hopefully

Hopefully, I expect the shipment ~~will~~ to arrive today.

~~Hopefully,~~ I hope that the shipment will arrive today.

I say a lot about “hopefully” and other floating modifiers (e.g., sadly, regrettably, thanfkfully) under the heading “Hopefully and Its Brethren” at “On Writing.”

Literally

My head ~~literally~~ figuratively exploded when I read Pope Francis’s recent statement about economic policy.

See “Literally” at “On Writing.”

No problem

Me: Thank you.

Waiter: ~~No problem.~~ You’re welcome.

“No problem” suggests that the person saying it might have been inconvenienced by doing what was expected of him, such as placing a diner’s food on the table.

Reach out/reached out

We ~~reached out to him for comment~~ asked him to comment/called him and asked him to comment/sent him a message asking for a comment.

“Reach out” sometimes properly refers to the act of reaching for a physical object, though “out” is usually redundant.

Share/shared

I ~~shared a story~~ told ~~with~~ her a story.

To share is to allow someone to partake of or temporarily use something of one’s own, not to impart information to someone.

That (for who)

Josh Hamilton was the last player ~~that~~ who hit four home runs in a game.

Better: Josh Hamilton was the last player to hit four home runs in a game.

Their (for “his” or “hers”), etc.

An employee forfeits ~~their~~ his/her accrued vacation time if ~~they are~~ he is/she is fired for cause.

Better: An employee who is fired for cause forfeits accrued vacation time.

Where the context calls for a singular pronoun, “he” and its variants are time-honored, gender-neutral choices. There is no need to add “or her” (or a variant), unless the context demands it. “Her” (or a variant) will be the obvious and correct choice in some cases.

Malapropisms and solecisms peeve me as well. Here are some corrected examples:

I will try ~~and~~ to find it.

He took it for ~~granite~~ granted.

She comes here once ~~and~~ in a while.

At “On Writing” you will also find my reasoned commentary about filler words (e.g., like), punctuation, the corruptions wrought by political correctness and the euphemisms which serve it, and the splitting of infinitives.

Red-Diaper Babies and Enemies Within

Here’s a definition of red-diaper baby:

Children of CPUSA members, children of former CPUSA members, and children whose parents never became members of the CPUSA but were involved in political, cultural, or educational activities led or supported by the Party.

I knew one. She died last year. An obituary says that she was “born in Manhattan” (unsurprisingly), her mother “was a high school history teacher,” and her father “was an upper middle class accountant who subscribed to the Daily Worker. Politics was at the dinner table from the start.”

Actually, as I recall, her father was an accountant for the mob. In any event, there was plenty of money. The home that she shared with her husband was adorned with valuable works of art given by her parents. She and her husband, an otherwise sensible economist, were long-time stalwarts of the local Democrat Party organization, where they vigorously promoted the local brand of big government.

She was a kind, generous, and intelligent woman. But — like everyone — she had a blind spot. Her blind spot, which defines the left, is what Daniel Klein calls The People’s Romance. This is from his essay, “The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (as Much as They Do)“:

Government creates common, effectively permanent institutions, such as the streets and roads, utility grids, the postal service, and the school system. In doing so, it determines and enforces the setting for an encompassing shared experience—or at least the myth of such experience. The business of politics creates an unfolding series of battles and dramas whose outcomes few can dismiss as unimportant. National and international news media invite citizens to envision themselves as part of an encompassing coordination of sentiments—whether the focal point is election-day results, the latest effort in the war on drugs, or emergency relief to hurricane victims — and encourage a corresponding regard for the state as a romantic force. I call the yearning for encompassing coordination of sentiment The People’s Romance (henceforth TPR)….

TPR helps us to understand how authoritarians and totalitarians think. If TPR is a principal value, with each person’s well-being thought to depend on everyone else’s proper participation, then it authorizes a kind of joint, though not necessarily absolute, ownership of everyone by everyone, which means, of course, by the government. One person’s conspicuous opting out of the romance really does damage the others’ interests….

TPR lives off coercion—which not only serves as a means of clamping down on discoordination, but also gives context for the sentiment coordination to be achieved….

[N]ested within the conventional view that government is not a mammoth apparatus of coercion is the tenet that society is an organization to which we belong. Either on the view that we constitute and control the government (“we are the government”) or on the view that by deciding to live in the polity we choose voluntarily to abide by the government’s rules (“no one is forcing you to stay here”), the social democrat holds that taxation and interventions such as a minimum wage law are not coercive. The government-rule structure, as they see it, is a matter of “social contract” persisting through time and binding on the complete collection of citizens. The implication is that the whole of society is a club, a collectively owned property, administered by the government.

I was reminded of my late, former friend and Klein’s essay by an egregious encomium to American Communists by Vivian Gornick, “When Communism Inspired Americans” (The New York Times, April 29. 2017). It is a clever piece of propaganda — it even acknowledges a tiny bit of the Soviet Union’s brutality — but in the end, Gornick resorts to tawdry sentimentality:

The effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin, and even imprisonment.

As if belonging to an organization dedicated to the subversion of the Constitution was somehow excusable. [UPDATE 05/03/17: Bruce Bawer adduces more evidence of Gornick’s rose-colored view of Communism.]

Those hundreds of thousands helped to advance TPR. And their sheer numbers lent an aura of undeserved respectability to the subversive aims of the Communist Party. Among the many subversives:

Judith Coplon, NKGB counter-intelligence operative in the U.S. Department of Justice; two convictions overturned on technicalities
Theodore Hall, physicist who supplied information from Los Alamos during World War II, a NYC walk-in, never prosecuted
Martin Kamen, Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Manhattan Project
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory
Carl Marzani, Deputy Chief Photographic Presentation Branch Office of Strategic Services; United States Department of State
Alan Nunn May, physicist who supplied information about the British and American atomic bomb research to the Soviet Union
Victor Perlo, was the Chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board during World War II; head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce; Division of Monetary Research Department of the Treasury; and later the Brookings Institution
Harold Glasser, Director, Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; War Production Board; Adviser on North African Affairs Committee; United States Treasury Representative to the Allied High Commission in Italy
Alger Hiss, Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs United States Department of State
Charles Kramer, Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Price Administration; National Labor Relations Board; Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education; Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee; Democratic National Committee
Harry Magdoff, Statistical Division of War Production Board and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, United States Department of Commerce
George Perazich, Foreign Economic Administration; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
Allen Rosenberg, Board of Economic Warfare; Chief of the Economic Institution Staff, Foreign Economic Administration; Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Railroad Retirement Board; Counsel to the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board
Donald Wheeler, Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis division
David Greenglass, draftsman at Los Alamos in World War II, gave atomic bomb drawings to his sister Ethel Rosenberg, and eventually the Soviets; sentenced to 15 years
Ruth Greenglass, escaped prosecution in exchange for her husband’s testimony against his sister and brother-in-law, the Rosenbergs
Ethel Rosenberg, executed at Sing Sing prison near her native New York City for conspiracy to commit espionage
Julius Rosenberg, executed at Sing Sing prison near his native New York City for conspiracy to commit espionage
Al Sarant, stole radar secrets at Army Signal Corps lab in New Jersey, then he and his mistress abandoned their families for the protection of his Soviet masters in 1950
Andrew Roth, Office of Naval Intelligence liaison officer with United States Department of State
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Chief Planning Technician, Procurement Division, United States Department of the Treasury; Chief Economist, War Assets Administration; Director of the Labor Division, Farm Security Administration; Board of Economic Warfare; Reconstruction Finance Corporation Department of Commerce
Schlomer Adler, United States Department of the Treasury
Frank Coe, Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, Treasury Department; Special Assistant to the United States Ambassador in London; Assistant to the Executive Director, Board of Economic Warfare; Assistant Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration
Lauchlin Currie, Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt; Deputy Administrator of Foreign Economic Administration; Special Representative to China
Bela Gold, Assistant Head of Program Surveys, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Agriculture Department; Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Economic Programs in Foreign Economic Administration
Sonia Steinman Gold, Division of Monetary Research U.S. Treasury Department; U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Interstate Migration; U.S. Bureau of Employment Security
Irving Kaplan, Foreign Funds Control and Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury Foreign Economic Administration; chief advisor to the Military Government of Germany
George Silverman, civilian Chief Production Specialist, Material Division, United States Army Air Forces Air Staff, War Department, Pentagon
William Henry Taylor, Assistant Director of the Middle East Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of Treasury
Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Head of the International Monetary Fund
Henry Collins, National Recovery Administration; Department of Agriculture
Alger Hiss, Department of State, sentenced to 5 years for perjury
Donald Hiss, Department of State, younger brother of Alger Hiss

And that’s just a sample of a long list of known Soviet agents. Did you notice the presence on the list of the Rosenbergs, as well as a large number of government officials (Alger Hiss among them)? Protestations and “proof” of the innocence of the Rosenbergs, Hiss, and others were and are key components of the Big anti-anti-Communist Lie.

I’ll close with some of Daniel Greenfield’s commentary about Gornick’s article:

It’s inconceivable that the New York Times or any paper would run a glowing piece titled, “When Nazis Inspired Americans”. No fond recollections from participants in the Madison Square Garden rally. No fond memories of Bund camps. No sugar-coated recollections of how the Thousand Year Reich would create a better world… only to then learn that Hitler wasn’t a very nice man.

But the New York Times will run “When Communism Inspired Americans”. It will run it because while Communism didn’t inspire Americans, it did inspire the left to try and turn America into a totalitarian state. It still does. This is the dirty little secret that leaks out of the left….

Nazis don’t get a forum to pour out their romantic nostalgia for attending Hitler rallies. Communists do because the left sympathizes with them. It must offers occasional apologies and disavowals, but the love for a horrifying ideology that was totalitarian all the way down, whose mass murder of millions was not an accident of fate, but was always an integral part of it, tells the truth about the left.

The rest is tiresome. The same recitations of “We knew nothing”. As if the crimes of Communism had been some sort of mystery until Khrushchev admitted them….

After all the mass murders and crimes have been admitted, the left always returns to this nostalgia. Yes, maybe Stalin was bad. But his followers were principled. Maybe the USSR was bad, but the American Communists, quite a few of whom were willing to kill and commit treason in its name, were fine people. Just like the Founding Fathers.

History is in them.

This is the left. It returns, like a dog to its vomit, to the dream of the true radicalism of a totalitarian leftist state. It occasionally deals with uncomfortable truths. Circles around them. And then it lapses back into an opium dream of Marxists sitting around a kitchen table and debating whom to shoot first. [“New York Times: When Communism Inspired Americans,” FrontPage Magazine, May 1, 2017]

Amen.

Month: May 2017

A Personality Test: Which Antagonist Do You Prefer?

The Midwest Is a State of Mind

Equality

Lincoln Was Wrong

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Too Quick to Pull the Trigger?

A Further Look at Simultaneity

Punctuation within Quotation Marks: British vs. American Style

Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration

CONTENTS

Civil War II

Solitude for the Masses

More about the Transgender Fad

The Academic Enemies of Liberty

The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration

Microsoft Edge: A Review

Some Notes about Psychology and Intelligence

The Impeachment Trap?

Another Thought or Two about Class

A Word of Warning to Leftists (and Everyone Else)

Special Relativity

The JFK Standard

Class in America

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Where There’s Smoke

Red-Diaper Babies and Enemies Within

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CONTENTS

Civil War II

Solitude for the Masses

More about the Transgender Fad

The Academic Enemies of Liberty

The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration

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