I had never been on Putney Heath or Wimbledon Common – they run seamlessly together – and they were splendid. They were not at all like the manicured parks I had grown used to in London, but were untended and rather wild, and all the more agreeable for that. I walked for some time over heath and through woods, never very sure where I was despite having an Ordnance Survey map. The further I walked, the more isolated things felt.
At one point it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen anybody for about half an hour, couldn’t hear traffic, had no idea where I would be when I next saw civilization. I had set off with the vague thought of walking past the site of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s home during the Second World War, which I had by chance recently discovered lay more or less along the route I was taking today. I had read at the library about Eisenhower’s domestic arrangements during the war. He could have had a stately home like Syon House or Cliveden, but instead he chose to live alone without servants in a simple dwelling called Telegraph Cottage on the edge of Wimbledon Common. The house was up a long driveway, the entrance guarded by a single soldier standing beside a pole barrier. That was all the security the Supreme Allied Commander enjoyed. German assassins could have parachuted on to Wimbledon Common, entered Eisenhower’s property from the rear and killed him in his bed. I think that’s rather wonderful – not that Germans could have done that, but that they didn’t.
Although the Germans missed their chance to assassinate Eisenhower, they might easily have bombed him. Unbeknownst to Eisenhower or evidently anyone else on the Allied side, civil defence forces had erected a dummy anti-aircraft gun in a clearing just the other side of a hedge from Eisenhower’s cottage. Dummy guns were put up all around London in an effort to fool German reconnaissance and trick their planes into wasting bombs. Fortunately for Eisenhower, the Luftwaffe seem to have overlooked this one.
Bearing in mind that I was largely lost, you may imagine my delight when I emerged from the common through the grounds of a rugby club, and discovered that I had more or less blundered on to the site of Eisenhower’s cottage, though there is no telling the exact spot any more. Telegraph Cottage burned down some years ago, and today the site is covered with houses, but I had a good stroll around and was satisfied that I had more or less hit my target, which is more than the Germans managed to do, thank goodness.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Fortunately for Eisenhower, the Luftwaffe seem to have overlooked this one
From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 60.
The gift of an inquiring mind
From The Jefferson Lecture by David McCullough, delivered in 2003.
The Revolution was another of the darkest, most uncertain of times and the longest war in American history, until the Vietnam War. It lasted eight and a half years, and Adams, because of his unstinting service to his country, was separated from his family nearly all that time, much to his and their distress. In a letter from France he tried to explain to them the reason for such commitment.
I must study politics and war [he wrote] that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.That was the upward climb envisioned for the good society in the burgeoning new American republic. And Adams was himself vivid proof of the transforming miracle of education. His father was a farmer, his mother almost certainly illiterate. But with the help of a scholarship, he was able to attend Harvard, where, as he said, he discovered books and "read forever."
His Harvard studies over, Adams began teaching school at Worcester, then virtually the frontier. One crystal night, twenty years before the Declaration of independence, he stood beneath a sky full of stars, "thrown into a kind of transport." He knew such wonders of the heavens to be the gifts of God, he wrote, but greatest of all was the gift of an inquiring mind.
But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses ... are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision, that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our existence.He had decided to study law. "It will be hard work," he told a friend. "But the point is now determined, and I shall have the liberty to think for myself."
You understand, of course, this contract is just a formality by Herb Green
You understand, of course, this contract is just a formality by Herb Green from The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1959.
Click to enlarge.
Memory by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Memory
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
My mind lets go a thousand things
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour--
'T was noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May--
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.
Uniformity of opinions is sterile
From On the Benefits of Promoting Diversity of Ideas by Abraham Loeb. The field is astronomy but the principle is universal.
These examples and many more like them (starting with the ancient view that the Earth is at the center of the Universe and the Sun revolves around it), demonstrate that progress in astronomy can be delayed by the erroneous proposition that we know the truth even without experimental feedback. Lapses of this type can be avoided by a honest and open-minded approach to scientific exploration, which I label as having a “non-informative prior” (so called “Jeffreys prior” in Bayesian statistics). This unbiased approach, which is common among successful crime detectives, gives priority to evidence over imagination, and allows nature itself to guide us to the correct answer. Its basic premise is humility, the recognition that nature is much richer than our imagination is able to anticipate.
Uniformity of opinions is sterile; the co-existence of multiple ideas cultivates competition and progress. Of course, it is difficult to know in advance which exploratory path will bear fruit, and the back yard of astronomy is full of novel ideas that were proven wrong.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
I stared at him for a long moment as I adjusted to this new intelligence.
From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 57.
Sometimes during this happy fortnight I just went about my business. I was walking down Kensington High Street one day when I remembered that my wife had instructed me to get some grocery items, so I popped into Marks and Spencer’s. It had evidently undergone a big refurbishment since I was last there. In the middle of the main floor, where there used to be an escalator, there was now a staircase, which I thought odd – why replace an escalator with stairs? – but the really big surprise was when I went down to the basement and discovered that the food hall was gone. I walked all over, but there was nothing for sale down there but clothes.
I went up to a young sales assistant who was folding T-shirts and asked him where the food hall was.
‘Don’t have a food hall,’ he said without looking up.
‘You got rid of the food hall?’ I said in astonishment.
‘Never had one.’
Now I have to say right here that I didn’t like this young man already because he had a vaguely insolent air. Also, he had a lot of gel in his hair. My family tell me that you can’t dislike people just because they have gel in their hair, but I think it is as good a reason as any.
‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘There’s always been a food hall here.’
‘Never been one here,’ he responded blandly. ‘There’s no food halls in any of our stores.’
“Well, pardon me for saying so, but you’re an idiot,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘I have been coming here since the early 1970s, and there’s always been a food hall. Every Marks and Spencer’s in the country has a food hall.’
He looked at me for the first time, with a kind of unfolding interest. ‘This isn’t a Marks and Spencer’s,’ he said with something like real pleasure. ‘This is H&M.’
I stared at him for a long moment as I adjusted to this new intelligence.
‘Marks and Spencer’s is next door,’ he added.
I was quiet for about fifteen seconds. ‘Well, you’re still an idiot,’ I said quietly and turned on my heel, but I don’t think it had the devastating effect I was hoping for.
He was against the statehood idea from the very beginning by Al Johns
He was against the statehood idea from the very beginning by Al Johns from The Saturday Evening Post, January 3, 1959.
Click to enlarge.
Teaching as an inherent instinct
I am sympathetic to the underlying proposition. From The Teaching Instinct by Cecilia I. Calero, A. P. Goldin, and M. Sigman. From the Abstract:
That proposition dovetails with numerous books out lately emphasizing the heritable element of behaviors as well as books about the self-evolution inherent in culture as an exogenous factor driving evolutionary change, especially since the Neolithic Revolution 10-15,000 years ago. (See On The Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd, Darwin's Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N. Laland, and The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich for three books exploring the connection between culture and evolution.)
We are so desperate for tactical educational improvements that most research is on a wide and ever shifting portfolio of education fads, all within the constraints of the political systems and the variety of professional guilds related to education. The respect for and desire for good education is huge; the respect for our current educational institutions and practices, markedly less so.
The inherent and symbiotic relationship of mutual teaching/learning might be an interesting and revealing angle to explore.
Teaching allows human culture to exist and to develop. Despite its significance, it has not been studied in depth by the cognitive neurosciences. Here we propose two hypotheses to boost the claim that teaching is a human instinct, and to expand our understanding of how teaching occurs as a dynamic bi-directional relation within the teacher-learner dyad. First, we explore how children naturally use ostensive communication when teaching; allowing them to be set in the emitter side of natural pedagogy. Then, we hypothesize that the capacity to teach may precede to even have a mature metacognition and, we argue that a teacher will benefit from the interaction with her student, improving her understanding on both contents of knowledge: her own and her student’s. Thus, we propose that teaching may be the driving force of metacognitive development and may be occurring as an instinct from very early ages.I don't have access to the gated paper so I do not have a full picture of the entire context of their argument but I think the implied proposition is well worth investigating. I take the proposition to be that there is a sociobiological imperative to teach, that teaching is mutually beneficial (both teacher and student), and that teaching is more than a skill.
That proposition dovetails with numerous books out lately emphasizing the heritable element of behaviors as well as books about the self-evolution inherent in culture as an exogenous factor driving evolutionary change, especially since the Neolithic Revolution 10-15,000 years ago. (See On The Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd, Darwin's Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N. Laland, and The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich for three books exploring the connection between culture and evolution.)
We are so desperate for tactical educational improvements that most research is on a wide and ever shifting portfolio of education fads, all within the constraints of the political systems and the variety of professional guilds related to education. The respect for and desire for good education is huge; the respect for our current educational institutions and practices, markedly less so.
The inherent and symbiotic relationship of mutual teaching/learning might be an interesting and revealing angle to explore.
This study found no evidence for an increased prevalence of anxiety disorders or MDD
From Challenging the Myth of an "Epidemic" of Common Mental Disorders: Trends in the Global Prevalence of Anxiety and Depression Between 1990 and 2010. by Amanda J. Baxter, et al
Why is there such a strong sense that anxiety is increasing even though we cannot see such an increase when measure objectively?
I think it is still an open question. I suspect that the researchers are correct but I also suspect that there is a rise in amorphous anxiety that is not subject to diagnostics. People are fretful.
I suspect that there are some other factors that influence this perception of increasingly anxious times (despite all socioeconomic measures being dramatically better than they were even thirty years ago.
Several hypotheses. All speculation.
ResultsAnother summary indicates that there is perceived increase in levels of anxiety but that the more rigorous the application of standard definitions of the various conditions, the more the effect disappears. In other words, there is an increase in self-reported mental disorders but not in mental disorders when using rigorous definitions and diagnostics.
This study found no evidence for an increased prevalence of anxiety disorders or MDD. While the crude number of cases increased by 36%, this was explained by population growth and changing age structures. Point prevalence of anxiety disorders was estimated at 3.8% (3.6–4.1%) in 1990 and 4.0% (3.7–4.2%) in 2010. The prevalence of MDD was unchanged at 4.4% in 1990 (4.2–4.7%) and 2010 (4.1–4.7%). However, 8 of the 11 GHQ studies found a significant increase in psychological distress over time.
Conclusions
The perceived “epidemic” of common mental disorders is most likely explained by the increasing numbers of affected patients driven by increasing population sizes. Additional factors that may explain this perception include the higher rates of psychological distress as measured using symptom checklists, greater public awareness, and the use of terms such as anxiety and depression in a context where they do not represent clinical disorders.
Why is there such a strong sense that anxiety is increasing even though we cannot see such an increase when measure objectively?
I think it is still an open question. I suspect that the researchers are correct but I also suspect that there is a rise in amorphous anxiety that is not subject to diagnostics. People are fretful.
I suspect that there are some other factors that influence this perception of increasingly anxious times (despite all socioeconomic measures being dramatically better than they were even thirty years ago.
Several hypotheses. All speculation.
A more connected world, especially a more socially connected world, probably facilitates more rapid and more extensive contagions of mood affiliative beliefs. Anorexia, tattoos, social justice beliefs, etc. all probably have some social transmission element.That is not to discount the reality of some of those conditions. Simply to acknowledge that there are systemic pressures in place to call forth self-identification of a condition not otherwise diagnosable.
The dominance in some parts of academia and elsewhere of the social justice victimhood hierarchy also likely creates an incentive towards self-indulgence of behavioral/psychological disorders. If my status depends on my victimhood and I am otherwise healthy, it creates an incentive to boost status through professed disorders.
There are commercial incentives to call into existence an otherwise unrecognized, undiagnosed market.
To the extent that the regulatory arena dispenses aid (money and services) based on degree of victimhood, there is a further incentive to self-diagnose anxiety.
Perhaps it is a variant of Freud's theory of the narcissism of small differences. As society becomes increasingly prosperous, it becomes increasingly difficult to establish clear hierarchies based on consumption. In most social environments it is unclear who is really rich and who merely appears rich (but is deeply in debt). If the range for signaling status is constrained, perhaps anxiety is the means to differentiate ("I am working under such stresses")
Possibly there is some form of Munchausen syndrome at play (AKA Factitious disorder imposed on self).
How Doth the Little Crocodile by Lewis Carroll
How Doth the Little Crocodile
by Lewis Carroll
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale
How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
A spectacle, I suppose, but not an entirely edifying one
The disgust of citizens for their chattering classes is a global phenomenon. Lions led by donkeys indeed. More pedestrian: fundamentally moral but occasionally flawed people are generally being led by fundamentally flawed but occasionally moral people.
The choice between Tories & Labour, @alexmassie suggests, is "akin to wagering on one of those Victorian cricket matches in which a team of one-armed men took on a team of one-legged cricketers. A spectacle, I suppose, but not an entirely edifying one." https://t.co/dMmFw6q168
— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) February 27, 2018
Innocuousness masking philosophical fissures
Fascinating. There are so many wrongs on all sides of this argument that is exceptionally hard to disentangle them, much less then balance them all out against one another.
Click to see the thread.
Cooke's comment seems absolutely reasonable. And it is reasonable from one narrow perspective. But as soon as you begin system thinking about the principles behind the proposed actions (Cooke's or Cagle's) then you start seeing how everything about this seems wrong. The tweet exchange is a catalyst to reexamine fundamental principles which we have become sloppily accustomed to ignoring.
Seems to me that these are among the fundamental underlying questions, some of which get teased out in the tweet's thread of comments.
This is a bad idea. Delta and the NRA are both private organizations; the state should not be taking sides on the basis of elected officials’ opinions about their private arrangements. This is viewpoint discrimination. https://t.co/iyjhcWQ4SD
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) February 26, 2018
Click to see the thread.
Cooke's comment seems absolutely reasonable. And it is reasonable from one narrow perspective. But as soon as you begin system thinking about the principles behind the proposed actions (Cooke's or Cagle's) then you start seeing how everything about this seems wrong. The tweet exchange is a catalyst to reexamine fundamental principles which we have become sloppily accustomed to ignoring.
Seems to me that these are among the fundamental underlying questions, some of which get teased out in the tweet's thread of comments.
Should mob action drive public policy? No. Gun control advocates should be waging their battle in the legislature not through through mob action. Their actions contravene the idea of rule of law.Fascinating to me that such an innocuous tweet exchange should be so evocative a catalyst to reflection on the underlying principles.
Should government determine private corporation profitability through the dispensation of tax breaks? No. But it is virtually impossible not to do so in the modern complex economy and federal, state, and local governments do it all the time despite it being morally questionable.
Should government use tax breaks to sway private decision-making. Ideally, no. But it is none-the-less a pervasive lever of non-legislative influence.
When Group A (gun control advocates) coerce Group B (Delta) to differentially discriminate against Group C (NRA), is that a civil rights matter? Sure seems like the answer is Yes.
Should government intervene to ensure private sector adherence to public sector civil rights? Deep history answer is No. Recent history (since the 1950s) is Yes. Originally, the constitution protects citizens from the government, much less so from other citizens (and that protection occurs through criminal law rather than constitutional law). What this incident highlights is that government has been selectively intervening to enforce public sector civil rights in private matters. It is the selectivity that is the problem. Either enforce all, enforce none, or establish clear parameters for selecting. That seems to be missing. Absent clear guidelines government authority is being used to selectively abuse individual citizens at the discretion of the powerful or the mob (or both).
Should Delta be discriminating between customer groups, none of whom are doing anything illegal? You would think the answer should be No.
Was NRA instrumental in the Parkland shooting? No. The tragedy was a function of local government failures not federal law or, even more remotely, the NRA.
Is gun ownership a civil right? Yes, it is a freedom currently guaranteed in the Constitution and thirty years of Supreme Court decisions has rolled back regulatory restrictions on those rights. For the government to ban guns (or effectively do so through regulation), gun control advocates need to amend the Constitution.
Because gun control advocates do not have the public support to amend the Constitution, do their mob actions constitute a conspiracy to deprive citizens of their civil rights? Yes, it seems that that is a mighty thin hair to split.
Should corporations be allowed to treat individual customers differently from one another? No. It is bedrock principle in current regulatory law that corporations may not do so. They can treat categories of customers differently from one another (companies from general public or big companies from small companies for example) but they cannot discriminate within a group without unique cause.)
Monday, February 26, 2018
Too many people, not enough surnames
From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 197.
I like Norfolk. I lived there for ten years until 2013 and have grown convinced that there is nothing wrong with it that a few hills and a little genetic variability wouldn’t fix. As my son Sam used to say: 'Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames.' I am not for a moment suggesting that the rumors are entirely true, but I will say that when the police do DNA checks after crimes they sometimes have to arrest as many as twelve thousand people.
But he certainly enjoyed painting her without clothes on
From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 54.
And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It, 1892 by Lord Frederick Leighton (1830-1896)
Click to enlarge.
I decided, impulsively, to start with a trip to Leighton House, home of the Victorian artist Frederic Leighton, on Holland Park Road in west Kensington. I didn’t know a thing about Leighton, and I wasn’t at all sure if that was my fault or his. It turns out he was the most famous artist of his age. Who’d have thought? I had walked past the house several times and always thought it looked intriguing – it’s big and has an air of solemn importance, as if this is a house and a person you really ought to know about – so I had put it on my Things to Get Around to Eventually (But Probably Won’t) list. It isn’t often I knock something off this list, so I was rather pleased with myself just for thinking to go there. Besides, it was a rainy day: a good day for a museum.
I liked Leighton House immediately, not least because my ticket price was reduced from £10 to £6 on account of my great age. The house is gloomy and grand, but interestingly eccentric; it has, for instance, just one bedroom. In terms of decor it feels a little like a cross “etween a pasha’s den and a New Orleans bordello. It is full of Arabic tiles, silk wallpapers, colourful ceramics and lots of art, much of it involving bare-breasted young women, which I am always up for.
Leighton isn’t terribly well remembered now, in part because many of his pictures ended up in odd places like the Baroda Museum in Gujarat, India, and Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where not many of us go to look at pictures, and in part because his paintings are in any case a little overwrought for modern tastes. Most involve a lot of upstretched arms and pleading faces, and have titles like ‘And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It’ and ‘Perseus, on Pegasus, Hastening to the Rescue of Andromeda’.
But Leighton was hugely esteemed in his own lifetime. He was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1878, and in the New Year’s honours list of 1896 he became the first – and so far still only – artist to be ennobled. He didn’t get to enjoy the privilege long. He died less than a month later, and was interred in St Paul’s Cathedral as a national treasure, with great pomp. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, always eager to be at least fifty years out of touch, gives him 8,200 words, a thousand more than it gives almost any of his contemporaries.
Leighton lived alone in Leighton House for thirty years. His sexuality was always something of a mystery to those who were interested enough to think about it. After decades of apparent celibacy, he seems to have stirred to frisky life after he discovered a young beauty from the East End named Ada Pullen (who subsequently, for reasons unknown to me, changed her name to Dorothy Dene). Leighton scrubbed her up, bought her a fine wardrobe, schooled her in elocution and other cultural refinements, and introduced her into high society. If all that brings to mind Prof Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, it is no accident. George Bernard Shaw is said to have modelled Pygmalion on their relationship. Whether Leighton knew Ms Dene in the full, biblical sense isn’t known, but he certainly enjoyed painting her without clothes on, as the Leighton House collection enthusiastically attests.
Leighton’s possessions were auctioned off straight after his death and the house itself was knocked about by subsequent owners and then wrecked by a German bomb during the war, so that almost nothing worth seeing was left by the early post-war years, but little by little over a period of decades the house has been put back together so that it is now much as it was in Leighton’s day, and it is quite splendid. I can’t say that a great deal of the artwork was entirely to my taste, but I did enjoy the experience very much and when I stepped outside the rain.
And the Sea Gave Up the Dead Which Were in It, 1892 by Lord Frederick Leighton (1830-1896)
Interior of a Subaltern's Tent during a Shikar Party, 1840 by James Farquharson Fotheringham
Interior of a Subaltern's Tent during a Shikar Party, 1840 by James Farquharson Fotheringham
Click to enlarge.
Emotions over facts by a factor of 200
I see this tweet.
Is that true? Do insurers increase your premiums for gun ownership? I have never heard of that. Thirty seconds of googling, which I do not claim to be unassailable, merely indicative, seems to suggest that it is not true other than to the extent that guns have value. Your premiums for a $100,000 antique gun collection will obviously be higher than for one gun or no gun.
It appears that for most insurance companies, gun ownership is a non-issue. Apparently in the past decade some insurance companies have expressed interest to their state regulators in investigating whether the data supports a differential in risk based on gun ownership. One argument is that home gun ownership is associated with a small decrease in property theft and therefore insurance perhaps should be lower. Another argument is that home gun ownership is associated with a small increase in accidental injuries and therefore insurance rates should be higher.
As far as I can tell, some states have preemptively outlawed varying rates by gun ownership status. Other states have expressed skepticism but left it in the hands of the insurers to do the research and substantiate such an approach. As best I can discern, there is no robust real world analysis on the risk premiums (pro and con) and the relative off-sets of gun ownership. There is some academic research of varying quality but I am not seeing any insurer research on real world information. Some states preclude rate variance by gun ownership. In those states where it is permitted, it seems as if the overwhelming majority do not base rates on gun ownership.
So the broad claim that if you purchase a gun, your insurance rates will increase is factually wrong. Possibly in some few places under some specific circumstances but the overwhelming majority of insurance buyers will not see any insurance rate variance based on gun ownership.
This tweet appears to be one more piece of cognitive pollution being peddled out of ignorance or ideological fervor.
But look at the "Likes" in the thread of tweets. The originating tweet which falsely claims that gun ownership increases insurance premium rates attracts more than 200,000 "likes" as I write this. In two days.
In the long thread of responses I see a handful refuting the claim, some linking to reports that document the refutation. Not one of these responses attracts more than a thousand "likes." Indeed, most fail to attract more than double digit likes. Let's assume that there are a total one thousand "likes" as an aggregation of all the refuting tweets.
The implication would seem that in a discussion of a factually testable hypothesis (gun ownership increases insurance rates) for the general public there is a 200:1 ratio between emotionalism/ignorance/ideological fervor/mood affiliation versus dispassionate, objective empiricism.
That would support the observation that rhetoric is by far the stronger mode of argument over simple recitation of the actual facts.
If owning a gun was an effective means of self-defense, your insurance rates would go down when you bought one. But they go up, because actuaries have proven that you’re far, far more likely to shoot yourself or a family member than someone attacking you.
— Faith Consultant (@jndevereux) February 24, 2018
Is that true? Do insurers increase your premiums for gun ownership? I have never heard of that. Thirty seconds of googling, which I do not claim to be unassailable, merely indicative, seems to suggest that it is not true other than to the extent that guns have value. Your premiums for a $100,000 antique gun collection will obviously be higher than for one gun or no gun.
It appears that for most insurance companies, gun ownership is a non-issue. Apparently in the past decade some insurance companies have expressed interest to their state regulators in investigating whether the data supports a differential in risk based on gun ownership. One argument is that home gun ownership is associated with a small decrease in property theft and therefore insurance perhaps should be lower. Another argument is that home gun ownership is associated with a small increase in accidental injuries and therefore insurance rates should be higher.
As far as I can tell, some states have preemptively outlawed varying rates by gun ownership status. Other states have expressed skepticism but left it in the hands of the insurers to do the research and substantiate such an approach. As best I can discern, there is no robust real world analysis on the risk premiums (pro and con) and the relative off-sets of gun ownership. There is some academic research of varying quality but I am not seeing any insurer research on real world information. Some states preclude rate variance by gun ownership. In those states where it is permitted, it seems as if the overwhelming majority do not base rates on gun ownership.
So the broad claim that if you purchase a gun, your insurance rates will increase is factually wrong. Possibly in some few places under some specific circumstances but the overwhelming majority of insurance buyers will not see any insurance rate variance based on gun ownership.
This tweet appears to be one more piece of cognitive pollution being peddled out of ignorance or ideological fervor.
But look at the "Likes" in the thread of tweets. The originating tweet which falsely claims that gun ownership increases insurance premium rates attracts more than 200,000 "likes" as I write this. In two days.
In the long thread of responses I see a handful refuting the claim, some linking to reports that document the refutation. Not one of these responses attracts more than a thousand "likes." Indeed, most fail to attract more than double digit likes. Let's assume that there are a total one thousand "likes" as an aggregation of all the refuting tweets.
The implication would seem that in a discussion of a factually testable hypothesis (gun ownership increases insurance rates) for the general public there is a 200:1 ratio between emotionalism/ignorance/ideological fervor/mood affiliation versus dispassionate, objective empiricism.
That would support the observation that rhetoric is by far the stronger mode of argument over simple recitation of the actual facts.
I Never Saw a Moor by Emily Dinckinson
I Never Saw a Moor
by Emily Dinckinson
I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
The science is much more clear and the emotional/ideological revulsion is strong as ever.
From The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin, published in 1871. Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 was only the opening shot of the long discussion of evolution, a discussion which continues today. The Descent of Man explored many issues through the lens of the idea of evolution.
It is fascinating to see these brilliant minds arguing the point nearly a century before we had even the beginning of a comprehension of the mechanisms by which these outcomes might be achieved (genes and DNA).
I believe The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker to be a good summary of our current state of knowledge. Yes, physical attributes, IQ, personality traits, and behavioral dispositions are all heritable to a greater or lesser degree. Genes are not destiny but they establish parameters within which we have to work.
These conclusions are viscerally rejected by philosophical utopianists (primarily the various offspring of Marx: neo-marixsts, postmodernists, critical theorists, Frankfurt School, Maoism, Leninism, social justice theorists, deconstructionists, etc.) All utopias depend on the predictable perfectibility of man. They have no place in their imagined world for the variance and fallibility that comes with man as an instrument of evolution and man as a product of inherited dispositions.
We are approaching the sesquicentennial of Darwin's words in the paragraph above. The science is much more clear and the emotional/ideological revulsion is as strong as ever.
As an aside, I do love the gentle discourse represented by "It is with hesitation that I venture to differ at all from so profound a thinker, . . . " The passions were as strong then as now but it seems there was perhaps a greater margin of occasional graciousness.
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts (5. Sir B. Brodie, after observing that man is a social animal ('Psychological Enquiries,' 1854, p. 192), asks the pregnant question, "ought not this to settle the disputed question as to the existence of a moral sense?" Similar ideas have probably occurred to many persons, as they did long ago to Marcus Aurelius. Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, 'Utilitarianism,' (1864, pp. 45, 46), of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality." Again he says, "Like the other acquired capacities above referred to, the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural out-growth from it; capable, like them, in a certain small degree of springing up spontaneously." But in opposition to all this, he also remarks, "if, as in my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ at all from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? Mr. Bain (see, for instance, 'The Emotions and the Will,' 1865, p. 481) and others believe that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during his lifetime. On the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable. The ignoring of all transmitted mental qualities will, as it seems to me, be hereafter judged as a most serious blemish in the works of Mr. Mill.), the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, FIRSTLY, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. The services may be of a definite and evidently instinctive nature; or there may be only a wish and readiness, as with most of the higher social animals, to aid their fellows in certain general ways. But these feelings and services are by no means extended to all the individuals of the same species, only to those of the same association. SECONDLY, as soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual: and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results, as we shall hereafter see, from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise, as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature, nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are in their nature of short duration; and after being satisfied, are not readily or vividly recalled. THIRDLY, after the power of language had been acquired, and the wishes of the community could be expressed, the common opinion how each member ought to act for the public good, would naturally become in a paramount degree the guide to action. But it should be borne in mind that however great weight we may attribute to public opinion, our regard for the approbation and disapprobation of our fellows depends on sympathy, which, as we shall see, forms an essential part of the social instinct, and is indeed its foundation-stone. LASTLY, habit in the individual would ultimately play a very important part in guiding the conduct of each member; for the social instinct, together with sympathy, is, like any other instinct, greatly strengthened by habit, and so consequently would be obedience to the wishes and judgment of the community. These several subordinate propositions must now be discussed, and some of them at considerable length.While discursive, this paragraph articulates a still central and unsettled issue. Is man, in terms of moral and social development, born a blank slate to be written upon and developed as needed? Or is man subject to inherited and heritable dispositions? Mills argues for the blank slate and Darwin is proposing that moral and social instincts are heritable and a key element in the long cycle of evolution.
It is fascinating to see these brilliant minds arguing the point nearly a century before we had even the beginning of a comprehension of the mechanisms by which these outcomes might be achieved (genes and DNA).
I believe The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker to be a good summary of our current state of knowledge. Yes, physical attributes, IQ, personality traits, and behavioral dispositions are all heritable to a greater or lesser degree. Genes are not destiny but they establish parameters within which we have to work.
These conclusions are viscerally rejected by philosophical utopianists (primarily the various offspring of Marx: neo-marixsts, postmodernists, critical theorists, Frankfurt School, Maoism, Leninism, social justice theorists, deconstructionists, etc.) All utopias depend on the predictable perfectibility of man. They have no place in their imagined world for the variance and fallibility that comes with man as an instrument of evolution and man as a product of inherited dispositions.
We are approaching the sesquicentennial of Darwin's words in the paragraph above. The science is much more clear and the emotional/ideological revulsion is as strong as ever.
As an aside, I do love the gentle discourse represented by "It is with hesitation that I venture to differ at all from so profound a thinker, . . . " The passions were as strong then as now but it seems there was perhaps a greater margin of occasional graciousness.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
Your Britain - Fight for it Now
From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 36.
Your Britain - Fight for it Now by Frank Newbould
Click to enlarge.
Not long after Birling Gap, the path arrives at a sweeping prospect across the downs that strikes nearly everyone as familiar whether they have ever walked this way or not. It is a view that was immortalized in a Second World War poster by an artist named Frank Newbould. The poster shows a shepherd guiding a flock of sheep across the downs. Below, in the middle distance, is an attractive farmhouse. At the top of a facing hill is the iconic Belle Tout lighthouse. The sea is just visible as a line across a distant valley. The caption says: ‘Your Britain – fight for it now.’ I have always thought it interesting that of all the possible things worth dying for in 1939, it was the countryside that was selected. I wonder how many people would feel that way now. Newbould took a few small liberties in the work – he improved the shape of the hills, tidied up the farmstead, altered the course of the path slightly – but not so much as to render the view fictitious. It is a testament to the British nation that more than seventy years after Newbould painted this expansive prospect, it is as fine now as it was then.
Your Britain - Fight for it Now by Frank Newbould
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket
From The Jefferson Lecture by David McCullough, delivered in 2003.
But it is in their ideas about happiness, I believe, that we come close to the heart of their being, and to their large view of the possibilities in their Glorious Cause.
In general, happiness was understood to mean being at peace with the world in the biblical sense, under one's own "vine and fig tree." But what did they, the Founders, mean by the expression, "pursuit of happiness"?
It didn't mean long vacations or material possessions or ease. As much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit. It meant education and the love of learning, the freedom to think for oneself.
Jefferson defined happiness as "tranquility and occupation." For Jefferson, as we know, occupation meant mainly his intellectual pursuits.
Washington, though less inclined to speculate on such matters, considered education of surpassing value, in part because he had had so little. Once, when a friend came to say he hadn't money enough to send his son to college, Washington agreed to help -- providing a hundred pounds in all, a sizable sum then -- and with the hope, as he wrote, that the boy's education would "not only promote his own happiness, but the future welfare of others …." For Washington, happiness derived both from learning and employing the benefits of learning to further the welfare of others.
John Adams, in a letter to his son John Quincy when the boy was a student at the University of Leiden, stressed that he should carry a book with him wherever he went. And that while a knowledge of Greek and Latin were essential, he must never neglect the great works of literature in his own language, and particularly those of the English poets. It was his happiness that mattered, Adams told him. "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket."
Ode on Solitude by Alexander Pope
Ode on Solitude
by Alexander Pope
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Saturday, February 24, 2018
How weaponizing viewpoint diversity as psychological harm creates actual harm for real sufferers
An interesting observation I had not considered. From Stop Politicizing Mental Health on Campus by Clay Routledge.
I have argued (railed?) against the Orwellian misuse of language and the psychpathologizing of victimhood on campuses susceptible to the siren song of postmodern Social Justice. In particular, it angers me that voicing opinions and exposing facts inimicable to a person's worldview is conflated with danger and harm. Speech is not dangerous or violent or harmful. By equating information and ideas incompatible with yours to harm, postmodernists are on the slippery slope ending in the extinction of freedom of speech.
Likewise, the insistence that any psychological aversion to a difference of opinion evokes PTSD is absurd. PTSD is real but the pretense that hearing an idea you don't like causes a PTSD reaction is absurd. These people are seeking a heckler's veto in order to privilege their own world view over everyone elses.
Routledge is making a different, and I think important, point. By repurposing psychological harm as a means to suppress free speech, social justice postmodernists are obscuring the fact that there are real people with real psychological issues that need addressing. By making it necessary to sort the sheep from the goats, such assistance is delayed, misapplied or even abandoned.
I have argued (railed?) against the Orwellian misuse of language and the psychpathologizing of victimhood on campuses susceptible to the siren song of postmodern Social Justice. In particular, it angers me that voicing opinions and exposing facts inimicable to a person's worldview is conflated with danger and harm. Speech is not dangerous or violent or harmful. By equating information and ideas incompatible with yours to harm, postmodernists are on the slippery slope ending in the extinction of freedom of speech.
Likewise, the insistence that any psychological aversion to a difference of opinion evokes PTSD is absurd. PTSD is real but the pretense that hearing an idea you don't like causes a PTSD reaction is absurd. These people are seeking a heckler's veto in order to privilege their own world view over everyone elses.
Routledge is making a different, and I think important, point. By repurposing psychological harm as a means to suppress free speech, social justice postmodernists are obscuring the fact that there are real people with real psychological issues that need addressing. By making it necessary to sort the sheep from the goats, such assistance is delayed, misapplied or even abandoned.
Go to the self-help section of any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore and you will be overwhelmed by the wide range of books that have little or no basis in psychological science. Non-scientific self-help psychology is often relatively harmless, as much of it is focused more on casual self-improvement than on real mental-health vulnerabilities. But it isn’t just the popular-psychology world that advances an empirically unsupported psychology. It turns out that many of the therapies people receive for conditions such as depression, panic attacks, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are based more on tradition than evidence, even though evidence-based treatments are available. As psychology professor Scott Lilienfeld wrote in an academic article on this problem, “In some domains of clinical practice, there is an indifference to scientific research, in others an outright antipathy.”And anyone of us who grew up in the shadow of the Soviet Union or comparable regime recollects how often psychology was a preferred instrument for suppressing human rights. Easier and often more convenient to diagnose and commit an opponent as psychologically unstable than to actually convict them of a non-crime. It was especially convenient when applied to former regime supporters who had strayed from ideological purity. The history of psychology as a tool against freedom is too common, too recent, and too extensive to ignore.
Academics in the field of clinical psychology, the discipline focused on mental-illness diagnosis and treatment, are responding by advocating for more mental-health professionals to learn and properly use evidence-based treatments. This is good news for those in need of mental-health services. And it isn’t just clinical psychologists. There is a growing movement across subfields of psychology to both improve the quality of research and speak out against popular but scientifically unsupported psychological interventions and applications.
There is, however, an abuse of psychology going on that many within the field seem unwilling to challenge: Psychology is being inappropriately used for ideological purposes on college campuses.
Consider the recent example of the chief diversity officer at the University of Connecticut sending out a campus-wide email regarding a potential upcoming speaking event by Ben Shapiro, a well-known conservative commentator. The email stated,
We understand that even the thought of an individual coming to campus with the views that Mr. Shapiro expresses can be concerning and even hurtful and that’s why we wanted to make you aware as soon as we were informed. In the meantime, please utilize the many campus resources available to you should you want to talk through your feelings about this issue, including my office, the Cultural Centers, the Dean of Students Office, and CMHS, if necessary. [“CMHS” stands for Counseling and Mental Health Services.The UConn chief diversity officer doesn’t even get credit for originality, as this was not the first time a university administrator resorted to this tactic in response to a Ben Shapiro event. Last fall, the executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California–Berkeley sent out a similar campus-wide announcement in which he not only advertised counseling services because Shapiro was speaking, but encouraged students, faculty, and staff to utilize them, the implication being that members of the campus community should feel mentally destabilized by a conservative giving a talk that no one was even required to attend. Ponder that for a moment.
The misuse of psychology for ideological purposes is part of a broader campaign to purge campuses of ideas and speech that do not conform to a progressive worldview.
Go to the self-help section of any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore and you will be overwhelmed by the wide range of books that have little or no basis in psychological science. Non-scientific self-help psychology is often relatively harmless, as much of it is focused more on casual self-improvement than on real mental-health vulnerabilities. But it isn’t just the popular-psychology world that advances an empirically unsupported psychology. It turns out that many of the therapies people receive for conditions such as depression, panic attacks, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are based more on tradition than evidence, even though evidence-based treatments are available. As psychology professor Scott Lilienfeld wrote in an academic article on this problem, “In some domains of clinical practice, there is an indifference to scientific research, in others an outright antipathy.”
Academics in the field of clinical psychology, the discipline focused on mental-illness diagnosis and treatment, are responding by advocating for more mental-health professionals to learn and properly use evidence-based treatments. This is good news for those in need of mental-health services. And it isn’t just clinical psychologists. There is a growing movement across subfields of psychology to both improve the quality of research and speak out against popular but scientifically unsupported psychological interventions and applications.
There is, however, an abuse of psychology going on that many within the field seem unwilling to challenge: Psychology is being inappropriately used for ideological purposes on college campuses.
Consider the recent example of the chief diversity officer at the University of Connecticut sending out a campus-wide email regarding a potential upcoming speaking event by Ben Shapiro, a well-known conservative commentator. The email stated,
We understand that even the thought of an individual coming to campus with the views that Mr. Shapiro expresses can be concerning and even hurtful and that’s why we wanted to make you aware as soon as we were informed. In the meantime, please utilize the many campus resources available to you should you want to talk through your feelings about this issue, including my office, the Cultural Centers, the Dean of Students Office, and CMHS, if necessary. [“CMHS” stands for Counseling and Mental Health Services.]
The UConn chief diversity officer doesn’t even get credit for originality, as this was not the first time a university administrator resorted to this tactic in response to a Ben Shapiro event. Last fall, the executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California–Berkeley sent out a similar campus-wide announcement in which he not only advertised counseling services because Shapiro was speaking, but encouraged students, faculty, and staff to utilize them, the implication being that members of the campus community should feel mentally destabilized by a conservative giving a talk that no one was even required to attend. Ponder that for a moment.
The problem goes beyond the promotion of counseling and related interventions and services in response to specific campus events. Ideologically motivated faculty, administrators, and activists have been declaring ideas or speech they disagree with as threats to the mental health of students. The ideological nature of this misuse of psychology is demonstrated by its asymmetry. Typically, only conservative ideas or those that challenge popular liberal views are treated as mental-health threats. University life is full of classes, campus talks, art exhibits, activist campaigns, and social events that favor a liberal worldview and challenge or even explicitly derogate beliefs held by other groups such as religious conservatives. Curiously, Berkeley doesn’t send out announcements advocating counseling services in response to progressive campus speakers. It is worth noting that it isn’t just white conservative Christians, but also racial- and ethnic-minority Christians, Muslims, and member of other religious groups who are likely to find the progressive ideas and social causes that dominate campus culture to be in opposition to their deeply held traditions and beliefs. Thus, the common claim that colleges are simply trying to protect minority students is not only patronizing, it is often inaccurate. Much of the time, colleges are protecting certain beliefs more than they are protecting certain people.
[snip]
The students who are truly struggling with psychopathology don’t need protection from different viewpoints. They need mental illness to be treated as the serious and nonpartisan issue that it is. Academic psychologists are doing a good job of speaking out about all the bad psychology happening outside of the college campus. They need to direct their attention closer to home and demand a more scientifically guided, less ideologically motivated use of psychology on campus. It’s time to stop playing political games with mental health.
We are presently as bad at backcasting as people were in the past about forecasting
An excellent point. From Billy Graham's Record on Race Was Both Ahead and Of His Time by Stephen L. Carter.
Decision-making (personal, communal, commercial, public policy), is always a function of achievable trade-offs which in turn are a function of the real and perceived constraints in effect at the time of the decision. You cannot wish attainment of a goal into existence, you have to plot a path to its attainment according to the constraints. Sometimes the journey to goal attainment is long and sometimes it can be achieved quickly.
As an example, once the US entered World War II at the end of 1941, there was an array of strategies. Focus on Europe first and then, sequentially, Japan. Japan first, then Europe. Europe primary and simultaneously secondarily Japan.
Beyond that question, there were other debates. In Europe, focus on Germany as the primary target or all the Axis powers simultaneously? Focus on an invasion of Germany or approach Germany via North Africa and then Italy?
Each of these alternatives had some merit. The practical constraint was that the U.S. effectively had no significant military in 1941, certainly no military of a match to what needed to be accomplished. Total US military forces at the beginning of WWII in 1939 were only 334,000 men. By the time war was declared on us in December 1941, we were at 1.8 million. We eventually needed a force of more than 12 million to defeat the Axis powers.
If you are George Marshall, you are looking at increasing the military forty-fold in three years. Not only training all those millions of men in all branches of the military but clothing them, feeding them, equipping them. Virtually all and every type of arm or equipment in 1941 had been replaced more than once including weapons, and even generations of weapons, invented and deployed in the space of three and a half years.
These are the types of constraints which the US faced and which dictated that we would focus on Europe first with the Pacific as a simultaneous but secondary theater. It also dictated our invasion of North Africa rather than straight to an invasion of Germany. Men, officers, equipment, and leaders were all inexperienced and untested.
And ever since there has been second-guessing of all those decisions. This second guessing is unavoidably gifted by the knowledge of what did turn out and what the resolution to uncertainties actually yielded. We are generally sensitive to the unfairness of this sort of second-guessing. But even when we are sensitive to it, we do it anyway.
Carter is getting at a somewhat deeper issue. Hard as it is to recall how decisions were made at the time, it is even harder to recall what were understood to be the viable alternatives and the associated trade-offs. Relying on the WWII examples again, at the end of the Philippines Campaign, there were three broad alternatives - invade Formosa (destroy some major Japanese military assets), invade Okinawa (last stepping stone to Japan) or invade Iwo Jima for its airbases and then invade Okinawa. Each alternative had a variety of benefits, costs and trade-offs. In hindsight, it is nigh impossible to recapture the reality of the perceived limits and trade-offs.
Carter accords Graham the respect of his having to make hard trade-off decisions under circumstances which are truly difficult to comprehend and recapture. If you are Graham, do you take a hard and unvarying principled stand on race from the beginning even if it might subvert your longer term effectiveness? Or do you push as far as you can, pause, let the world catch-up, and then push forward again? Changing the terrain of acceptability as you go in order to win the objective.
Armchair purists always argue for purity. Armchair purists are also usually exceptionally ineffective in their own lives. And while they are usually wrong, they are not always wrong. The very impossibility of attaining a goal directly sometimes is so inspiring that it mobilizes talent and energy to make the impossible, possible. In the commercial arena, Steve Jobs was infamous for asking the impossible of his designers and engineers. Aksing, and then receiving. This phenomenon was coined the Steve Jobs reality distortion field.
But when you go back to the press accounts of the time, to the Federalist Papers, to the letters among leading citizens, it is astonishing to see the limits, constraints, and trade-offs with which they were working. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Age of Enlightenment ideals embodied in the Constitution saw the light of day at all despite the missteps of the Articles of Confederation, the extreme differences in economies and population size among the original thirteen states, the fact that slavery was a worldwide institution sanctioned by law and religion virtually everywhere.
Consensual compromise in the US led to a government that evolved itself beyond its original constraints and towards a better realization of its professed ideals. Similar Age of Enlightenment revolutions in the same period were more ideal and consequently tragically brief and bloody - The French Revolution quickly spiraling into the Reign of Terror followed by a totalitarian dictatorship that waged global war around the world resulting in the deaths of millions and the Haitian Revolution ending in genocide.
All this to acknowledge that Carter is communicating a very sophisticated graciousness which is rare - that we ought to take into account the circumstances, constraints, and trade-offs people understood themselves to be facing when we make judgments of the past. It is not a plea for excuses for those historical decisions; it is a recognition that we are presently as bad at backcasting as people were in the past about forecasting.
There’s a nice story about Billy Graham’s reaction when he arrived to preach at a revival meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1953. Upon reaching the site, he found ropes marking off a separate section for black congregants. He removed them. “Either these ropes stay down,” Graham told his hosts, “or you can go on and have the revival without me.”Carter goes on, his article is a good read. It is a well-written, sophisticated, sympathetic, knowledgeable, nuanced article. Wish we had more journalists writing like this.
The great evangelist, who died this week at the age of 99, fully deserves the accolades he has received from across the political spectrum. Yet mixed in with the praise of Graham has been a tone of reservation, because -- it is said -- the man who preached to over 200 million people in his career did not speak enough about race when his words would have made a difference. There is limited merit to this contention. The actual history is complicated, a tale of growth and retrenchment and further growth. Given the era in which Graham came of age, what he accomplished is admirable.
Let’s begin with the obvious: Graham grew up when he grew up. In college, he was influenced by “Up From the Ape” by the Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton. The book is not mainly about race -- it’s about evolution -- but the pages nevertheless abound in racial stereotypes. Yet Hooton is also quite clear that there is no basis for the conclusion that any race is more intelligent on average than any other. For the era, this was an enormous advance.
Graham’s ministry as a public phenomenon is usually dated from 1949, when he was preaching in Los Angeles in what amounted to a large canvas tent. Some 350,000 congregants of several races passed through its entrance. Whether or not William Randolph Hearst really gave the command “Puff Graham!” the Hearst newspapers were fascinated by this phenomenon, and the national magazines swiftly joined the coverage. Within a year or two, the news that Graham was coming to town with his crusade often meant that businesses and even schools would limit their hours or close down to allow people to attend.
Early in his ministry, Graham was careful to avoid talk of race. In 1951, he even stayed at the home of Strom Thurmond, at that time the segregationist governor of South Carolina. But by the early 1950s, the issue could hardly be avoided, and in a 1952 interview in Mississippi, Graham was forthright. “There is no scriptural basis for segregation,” he said. He added: “It touches my heart when I see white stand shoulder in shoulder with black at the cross.” But in the face of sharp public criticism, Graham softened his stance: “We follow the existing social customs in whatever part of the country in which we minister.”
Scant months later, however, Graham was calling on all Baptist colleges and universities to admit black students. By the following year, he was taking down those ropes at the crusade in Chattanooga. Soon after, in the teeth of Southern opposition, Graham’s organization adopted a rule that its audiences must not be segregated. This was no small step in a Southern world in which Jim Crow was a way of life. But it was also very much the step of what was known at the time as a racial moderate: trying to live a different model without trying to force social change. This form of moderation was also consistent with the theology behind Graham’s ministry, which emphasized personal salvation rather than activism in the world.
Decision-making (personal, communal, commercial, public policy), is always a function of achievable trade-offs which in turn are a function of the real and perceived constraints in effect at the time of the decision. You cannot wish attainment of a goal into existence, you have to plot a path to its attainment according to the constraints. Sometimes the journey to goal attainment is long and sometimes it can be achieved quickly.
As an example, once the US entered World War II at the end of 1941, there was an array of strategies. Focus on Europe first and then, sequentially, Japan. Japan first, then Europe. Europe primary and simultaneously secondarily Japan.
Beyond that question, there were other debates. In Europe, focus on Germany as the primary target or all the Axis powers simultaneously? Focus on an invasion of Germany or approach Germany via North Africa and then Italy?
Each of these alternatives had some merit. The practical constraint was that the U.S. effectively had no significant military in 1941, certainly no military of a match to what needed to be accomplished. Total US military forces at the beginning of WWII in 1939 were only 334,000 men. By the time war was declared on us in December 1941, we were at 1.8 million. We eventually needed a force of more than 12 million to defeat the Axis powers.
If you are George Marshall, you are looking at increasing the military forty-fold in three years. Not only training all those millions of men in all branches of the military but clothing them, feeding them, equipping them. Virtually all and every type of arm or equipment in 1941 had been replaced more than once including weapons, and even generations of weapons, invented and deployed in the space of three and a half years.
These are the types of constraints which the US faced and which dictated that we would focus on Europe first with the Pacific as a simultaneous but secondary theater. It also dictated our invasion of North Africa rather than straight to an invasion of Germany. Men, officers, equipment, and leaders were all inexperienced and untested.
And ever since there has been second-guessing of all those decisions. This second guessing is unavoidably gifted by the knowledge of what did turn out and what the resolution to uncertainties actually yielded. We are generally sensitive to the unfairness of this sort of second-guessing. But even when we are sensitive to it, we do it anyway.
Carter is getting at a somewhat deeper issue. Hard as it is to recall how decisions were made at the time, it is even harder to recall what were understood to be the viable alternatives and the associated trade-offs. Relying on the WWII examples again, at the end of the Philippines Campaign, there were three broad alternatives - invade Formosa (destroy some major Japanese military assets), invade Okinawa (last stepping stone to Japan) or invade Iwo Jima for its airbases and then invade Okinawa. Each alternative had a variety of benefits, costs and trade-offs. In hindsight, it is nigh impossible to recapture the reality of the perceived limits and trade-offs.
Carter accords Graham the respect of his having to make hard trade-off decisions under circumstances which are truly difficult to comprehend and recapture. If you are Graham, do you take a hard and unvarying principled stand on race from the beginning even if it might subvert your longer term effectiveness? Or do you push as far as you can, pause, let the world catch-up, and then push forward again? Changing the terrain of acceptability as you go in order to win the objective.
Armchair purists always argue for purity. Armchair purists are also usually exceptionally ineffective in their own lives. And while they are usually wrong, they are not always wrong. The very impossibility of attaining a goal directly sometimes is so inspiring that it mobilizes talent and energy to make the impossible, possible. In the commercial arena, Steve Jobs was infamous for asking the impossible of his designers and engineers. Aksing, and then receiving. This phenomenon was coined the Steve Jobs reality distortion field.
The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs's ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible.This debate of purity versus pragmatism comes up all the time. One frequent debate among such armchair moralists (virtue signaling up a storm) has to do with people who are morally affronted by the fact that the Founding Fathers punted on slavery in the Constitution with the 3/5ths compromise.
But when you go back to the press accounts of the time, to the Federalist Papers, to the letters among leading citizens, it is astonishing to see the limits, constraints, and trade-offs with which they were working. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Age of Enlightenment ideals embodied in the Constitution saw the light of day at all despite the missteps of the Articles of Confederation, the extreme differences in economies and population size among the original thirteen states, the fact that slavery was a worldwide institution sanctioned by law and religion virtually everywhere.
Consensual compromise in the US led to a government that evolved itself beyond its original constraints and towards a better realization of its professed ideals. Similar Age of Enlightenment revolutions in the same period were more ideal and consequently tragically brief and bloody - The French Revolution quickly spiraling into the Reign of Terror followed by a totalitarian dictatorship that waged global war around the world resulting in the deaths of millions and the Haitian Revolution ending in genocide.
All this to acknowledge that Carter is communicating a very sophisticated graciousness which is rare - that we ought to take into account the circumstances, constraints, and trade-offs people understood themselves to be facing when we make judgments of the past. It is not a plea for excuses for those historical decisions; it is a recognition that we are presently as bad at backcasting as people were in the past about forecasting.
Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms by Thomas Moore
Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms
by Thomas Moore
Believe me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,
Were to change by to-morrow, and fleet in my arms,
Like fairy-gifts, fading away!
Thou wouldst still be ador'd as this moment thou art,
Let thy loveliness fade as it will;
And, around the dear ruin, each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still!
II.
It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,
And thy cheeks unprofan'd by a tear,
That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known,
To which time will but make thee more dear!
Oh! the heart, that has truly lov'd, never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close;
As the sun-flower turns on her god, when he sets,
The same look which she turn'd when he rose!
The alternative is to remain a shriveled pseudo-science
From Conscientious Objections by Neil Postman. Page 17.
And so, the answer to the first question is that by resisting the attractions of pseudo-science, and embracing the role of creators and narrators of social myth, media ecologists can enrich our field of study immeasurably. Of course, this cannot be done without risk. It means that most of us will generate piles of junk — unconvincing stories without credible documentation, sound logic, or persuasive argument. After all, how many Lewis Mumfords or Walter Ongs or Lynn Whites or Jacques Elluls are there? But then, how many Franz Kafkas, D. H. Lawrences, or James Joyces are there? It is a risk that must be borne. The alternative is to remain a shriveled pseudo-science, useless for everything except the assembly line production of Ph.D.s.
As for my second question — What is the purpose of such research? — the answer is not, obviously, to contribute to our field, but to contribute to human understanding and decency. For the most part, novelists do not write to enrich the field of novel-writing. The good ones write because they are angry or curious or cynical or enchanted. The Scarlet Letter was not written by a man who wanted to improve the art of the novel, but by a man who wanted to improve the art of living together. Similarly, The Myth of the Machine, Understanding Media, The Technological Society, Computer Power and Human Reason, Stigma, Anger, Public Opinion, and, if you will pardon an attempt to gilt myself by association, Amusing Ourselves to Death — all these books were written by men and women who were concerned not to improve scholarship but to improve social life. Thus, the purpose of doing this kind of work is essentially didactic and moralistic. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories. To put it plainly, the so-called social sciences are subdivisions of moral theology. It is true, of course, that social researchers rarely base their claims to knowledge on the indisputability of sacred texts, and even less so on revelation. But you must not be dazzled or deluded by differences in method between preachers and scholars. Without meaning to be blasphemous, I would say that Jesus was as keen a sociologist as Veblen. Indeed, Jesus' remark about rich men, camels, and the eye of a needle is as good a summary of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class as it is possible to make. As social researchers, Jesus and Veblen differed in that Veblen was more garrulous.
Friday, February 23, 2018
Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors
From Conscientious Objections by Neil Postman. Page 14.
Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors. Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and fat, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed bourgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomaniac redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B. F. Skinner gives us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology.
I think it justifiable to say that in the nineteenth century, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture. In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have largely come from the pens of social historians and researchers. Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists. I do not mean, incidentally, that I think the metaphors of social research are created in the same way as those of novels and plays. The writer of fiction creates metaphors by an elaborate and concrete detailing of the actions and feelings of particular human beings. Sociology is background; individual psychology is the focus. The researcher tends to do it the other way around. His focus is on a wider field, and the individual life is seen in silhouette, by inference and suggestion. Also, the novelists proceed by showing. The researchers, using abstract social facts, proceed by reason, by logic, by argument. That is why fiction is apt to be more entertaining. Whereas Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh shows us the idle and conspicuously consuming rich, Thorstein Veblen argues them into existence. In the character of Sammy Glick, Budd Schulberg showed us the narcissist whose origins Christopher Lasch has recently tried to explain through sociological analysis. So there are differences among storytellers, and most of the time our novelists are more pleasurable to read. But the stories told by our social researchers are at least as compelling and, in our own times, apparently more credible.
Jenny Kissed Me by Leigh Hunt
Jenny Kissed Me
by Leigh Hunt
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
Outrage combined with ignorance and a dash of bigotry is not a good look
From the annals of proactive outrage. From Seattle Residents Complained About A 'Confederate Flag.' It Was Actually The Flag Of Norway. by Emily Znotti.
Over the weekend the Seattle Times jumped at a news tip: there was a Confederate flag flying beneath the American flag in the city's Greenwood neighborhood, and residents were very concerned.Sigh. Seattle.
Only, it turns out, it wasn't the Confederate flag at all. It was the state flag of Norway, and a group of friendly Norwegians were just trying to show their patriotism and support for their Olympic Team when their very concerned neighbors contacted local media.
“Hi. Suddenly there is a Confederate flag flying in front of a house in my Greenwood neighborhood. It is at the north-east corner of 92nd and Palatine, just a block west of 92nd and Greenwood Ave N.," the tipster wrote, according to the Times. "I would love to know what this ‘means’ … but of course don’t want to knock on their door. Maybe others in the area are flying the flag? Maybe it’s a story? Thank you."
Eager to get the scoop, reporters for the Seattle Times hopped into a car and hightailed it to view the offending flag for themselves. Only, it turned out, they weren't in for quite the controversial sighting they'd anticipated.
“That’s a Norwegian flag,” said the Norwegian owner of the flagpole in question. “It’s been up there since the start of the Olympics."
“I’m a proud Norwegian-American. My parents emigrated here in the mid-1950s. He skippered tugboats," the man continued.
Indeed, Norwegians have something to be proud of. The country leads the Winter Olympics medal count with a staggering 35 medals, 13 of which are gold (they're currently tied for the most gold medals with Germany). The Norwegians are on track to breaking the Olympic record for most medals won by a single country in a single Olympic games.
Irresponsible media
There's an odd disconnect between the mainstream media focus and the emerging facts of the Parkland shooting.
The mainstream media appears to be attempting to orchestrate a national campaign to address gun control issues. In response the NRA and others are focusing on mental health issues and FBI performance. This is not atypical after any mass shooting. Nobody has clear policy recommendations which are grounded in consensus evidence and for which there is high probability of success. That is part of the tragedy. Everyone wants to make it better but there are no policies which make a compelling case.
After most mass shootings, the standard gun control proposals of banning, tightened background checks, etc. don't fit the circumstances of that shooting. The shooter stole the guns (Sandy Hook). The shooter had zero red-flags attached to them (Nevada). The shooter used semi-automatic weapons, not automatic weapons (virtually all shootings). In prior shootings, the proposals would not have addressed the facts of the case.
Partly this disconnect between problem and probable solutions is a function of everyone recommending single point solutions to a problem which is highly variant and the outcome of numerous complex interdependent systems. Instead of one single policy, we'll eventually probably end up with small slices of lots of different solutions. Maybe. In the meantime we have shouting and tears.
What has struck me though is the mainstream media theme which is entirely focused at federal policies and legislation and yet the emerging evidence over the past 72 hours seems to increasingly making the case that the tragedy would never have occurred had local policies been executed as intended. In other words, this seems increasingly a local tragedy rather than a federal one.
And that is not too surprising. With multiple complex interdependent dynamic systems that produce rare outcomes (mass shootings) every tragedy is unique. The best minds in the mental health field say that our state of knowledge precludes any reliable forecast of who might become a killer. The data on gun policy is exceptionally equivocal as well. We have states with astonishingly high gun ownership and no massacres. We have states with exceptionally strict gun control with excessive gun deaths. Civil libertarians are concerned about the suggested degrees of monitoring of individuals being proposed. How we weave between all this to find a single solution that fits all circumstances seems chimerical.
Perhaps the solution is not a federal one-size-fits-all policy but multiple local policies fit for purpose.
And here is where the emerging evidence is so striking. Even without a national policy there was so much that could have been done locally, and should have been done locally. It is still within a week of the tragedy and new information will surface and old information will get reinterpreted, but it appears that:
Clearly the MSM want this, just as with the Sandy Hook School shooting, to be a catalyst for federal gun control reform.
But if your objective is prevention of shootings rather than pursuing an ideological gun policy, the possible solutions that might have prevented this tragedy look far more state and local rather than federal. They are much more tactical than strategic.
They involve better management of personnel so that they reliably perform the job they already know they need to do. They involve better inter-agency communication and coordination. In the Parkland shooting, all the pieces appear to have been in place. Local managers failed to ensure that their processes functioned as intentioned. Local individuals failed to perform their jobs as they should have. These are easy, cheap, local solutions.
Yet the mainstream media wishes to focus on federal policies. They appear much more interested in ideology than they do in preventing such tragedies from re-occurring. Indeed, in a world of limited attention, they appear to be malevolently redirecting scarce national attention away from local lessons learned and leading practices which might cheaply and easily be transferred across states and instead are focusing on federal policies of dubious efficacy and low probability of passage.
At the federal level, clearly the FBI dropped the ball. They were the ones perhaps best positioned to have a three dimensional view of the situation and could have pulled together multiple institutional information and views that might have led to more significant action.
At the state level, it is hard to understand how Florida Department of Children and Families missed the warning signs. After the FBI, they seem the next institution best positioned to integrate multiple sources of information. Perhaps they are understaffed. Perhaps they cannot afford the quality of employees they need. Perhaps they have high employee churn. Perhaps there is an institutional bias towards individual freedom such that interventions only occur in the most obvious cases. I don't know and no one in the MSM seems interested in pursuing those questions.
All the other failures occurred at the local level. Local law enforcement, the local mental health programs, the school district, the leadership of the individual schools, individual teachers. Each individually had what would seem more than sufficient individual evidence of a grave danger.
It is especially galling to see the County sheriff abetting CNN in a nationally televised scripted "townhall" to focus on gun control when he was the institutional leader best positioned to have prevented this tragedy. He had a deputy on site as the shooting began whose immediate intervention could have substantially contained the tragedy. That single failure would, through better personnel selection and training, most easily have made averted this massacre.
It appears with the information that has emerged so far, as if this was nearly entirely a state and local issue. It also appears that the problem is not that State and County were negligent in not having programs. There was a state agency tasked with child welfare that did act. There was a sheriffs office with deployed resources. There was more than one agency available to address mental health. The school system was actively trying to address the shooter's conditions.
This isn't an issue of negligence in that sense. It appears to be an issue of state and local tactical ineffectiveness. All the safety nets appear to have been in place but somehow they didn't work.
If we want to prevent such tragedies, making the existing systems effective would appear to be the first step.
Instead, the mainstream media, through ignorance or ideological fervor seem to be reveling in Rahm Emanuel's counsel, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Instead of seeking to understand the circumstances of the massacre, identify the points of failure and advocating to implement policies which would fix those failures, they are orchestrating a national campaign for an ideological position of doubtful legislative prospects and even less certain efficacy. No wonder we can't progress towards solution with such irresponsible media.
UPDATE: sounds like there is even more to the local failure aspect of this story. From Twitter there is this reporting.
UPDATE 2: When you think it can't get worse. . . Four further developments. Comprehensive Dereliction, Astonishing Incompetence, Surprising Omission, and Clear Conflict of Interest.
We knew the Sheriff's Department had a deputy on site at the school before the shooting began, a deputy who elected not to engage the shooter and who has now resigned. It now appears that three additional deputies arrived during the shooting and also took shelter outside the school and did not enter. It was only after the municipal police arrived and entered the school that the deputies followed. By which time the shooter had fled. Four Sheriffs Deputies Hid During Florida School Shooting by Ruth Brown.
The transcript of the call from a friend of the shooter's family to the FBI is now public. The caller's information was detailed, explicit and extensive. The caller first tried to contact the Broward County Sheriff's Department but could only leave a message. Receiving no call back she contacted the FBI with her detailed warning. The FBI failed to pass that warning on to the school or to local law enforcement.
Then there is this, further exacerbating the media's dereliction of professional conduct. The New York Times covers the released transcript, but it takes the New York Daily News to highlight what one would have thought to be an exceptional red flag.
I understand that the NYT has shown a pattern of being excessively alarmed by the potential for popular backlashes after Islamic terrorist attacks (backlashes which never eventuate) and they probably are erring on the side of excessive caution; there is nothing otherwise in the news so far that links the shooting to ISIS affiliation. Indeed, all the news, so far, supports a tragedy of mental illness compounded by repeated and extensive failures by local agencies to address the situation.
But by trying to "manage" the news narrative, it seems to me that the NYT is deepening the distrust in the media.
Finally, there are multiple reports calling into question the CNN "townhall" in which it now appears that the event was entirely or substantially scripted to focus on gun control policy with reports by individuals of CNN programmers suggesting questions, providing scripted questions to be asked, disinviting individuals who had different questions than those sanctioned, etc. Fringe media are also pointing out that the CNN moderator was previously employed by a gun control advocacy group. Reports which appear to be accurate.
This is just a mess. If only we had local agency competence this tragedy might have been avoided. If we only had a mainstream media that would report all the facts and not just those which support their preferred narratives we might not have such distrust of the media.
The mainstream media appears to be attempting to orchestrate a national campaign to address gun control issues. In response the NRA and others are focusing on mental health issues and FBI performance. This is not atypical after any mass shooting. Nobody has clear policy recommendations which are grounded in consensus evidence and for which there is high probability of success. That is part of the tragedy. Everyone wants to make it better but there are no policies which make a compelling case.
After most mass shootings, the standard gun control proposals of banning, tightened background checks, etc. don't fit the circumstances of that shooting. The shooter stole the guns (Sandy Hook). The shooter had zero red-flags attached to them (Nevada). The shooter used semi-automatic weapons, not automatic weapons (virtually all shootings). In prior shootings, the proposals would not have addressed the facts of the case.
Partly this disconnect between problem and probable solutions is a function of everyone recommending single point solutions to a problem which is highly variant and the outcome of numerous complex interdependent systems. Instead of one single policy, we'll eventually probably end up with small slices of lots of different solutions. Maybe. In the meantime we have shouting and tears.
What has struck me though is the mainstream media theme which is entirely focused at federal policies and legislation and yet the emerging evidence over the past 72 hours seems to increasingly making the case that the tragedy would never have occurred had local policies been executed as intended. In other words, this seems increasingly a local tragedy rather than a federal one.
And that is not too surprising. With multiple complex interdependent dynamic systems that produce rare outcomes (mass shootings) every tragedy is unique. The best minds in the mental health field say that our state of knowledge precludes any reliable forecast of who might become a killer. The data on gun policy is exceptionally equivocal as well. We have states with astonishingly high gun ownership and no massacres. We have states with exceptionally strict gun control with excessive gun deaths. Civil libertarians are concerned about the suggested degrees of monitoring of individuals being proposed. How we weave between all this to find a single solution that fits all circumstances seems chimerical.
Perhaps the solution is not a federal one-size-fits-all policy but multiple local policies fit for purpose.
And here is where the emerging evidence is so striking. Even without a national policy there was so much that could have been done locally, and should have been done locally. It is still within a week of the tragedy and new information will surface and old information will get reinterpreted, but it appears that:
The FBI was alerted to explicitly dangerous and threatening social media messages by the shooter by a citizen in September. Even though the shooter used his own name as his handle, the FBI was not able to locate him.This shooting, as with all such shootings is a tragedy. What might have been a solution that could have prevented it?
The FBI was alerted in January by someone who knew the shooter well of the shooter's dangerous threats and behavior. This call was never apparently followed up on.
The shooter had dozens of interactions with local law enforcement in recent years in an escalating fashion over violent threats and behavior. 39 visits over seven years, averaging about one visit every couple of months.
The shooter had a history of mental health issues from middle school onwards which were recognized but never effectively addressed (despite many efforts).
A year and a half ago the Florida Department of Children and Families was alerted to Snapchat posts of Mr. Cruz cutting his arms and expressing interest in buying a gun but after investigation found that they had little confidence in his posing a threat to others.
The shooter had extensive documentation with the school district of violent, threatening, disruptive behavior including brawls.
The shooter was transferred six times in three years between different schools in the Broward District, including four special programs designed to address behavioral and mental health issues.
The Broward County Sheriff's office has confirmed that there was a deputy sheriff present at the school as the massacre occurred and did not enter the building to confront the shooter.
Clearly the MSM want this, just as with the Sandy Hook School shooting, to be a catalyst for federal gun control reform.
But if your objective is prevention of shootings rather than pursuing an ideological gun policy, the possible solutions that might have prevented this tragedy look far more state and local rather than federal. They are much more tactical than strategic.
They involve better management of personnel so that they reliably perform the job they already know they need to do. They involve better inter-agency communication and coordination. In the Parkland shooting, all the pieces appear to have been in place. Local managers failed to ensure that their processes functioned as intentioned. Local individuals failed to perform their jobs as they should have. These are easy, cheap, local solutions.
Yet the mainstream media wishes to focus on federal policies. They appear much more interested in ideology than they do in preventing such tragedies from re-occurring. Indeed, in a world of limited attention, they appear to be malevolently redirecting scarce national attention away from local lessons learned and leading practices which might cheaply and easily be transferred across states and instead are focusing on federal policies of dubious efficacy and low probability of passage.
At the federal level, clearly the FBI dropped the ball. They were the ones perhaps best positioned to have a three dimensional view of the situation and could have pulled together multiple institutional information and views that might have led to more significant action.
At the state level, it is hard to understand how Florida Department of Children and Families missed the warning signs. After the FBI, they seem the next institution best positioned to integrate multiple sources of information. Perhaps they are understaffed. Perhaps they cannot afford the quality of employees they need. Perhaps they have high employee churn. Perhaps there is an institutional bias towards individual freedom such that interventions only occur in the most obvious cases. I don't know and no one in the MSM seems interested in pursuing those questions.
All the other failures occurred at the local level. Local law enforcement, the local mental health programs, the school district, the leadership of the individual schools, individual teachers. Each individually had what would seem more than sufficient individual evidence of a grave danger.
It is especially galling to see the County sheriff abetting CNN in a nationally televised scripted "townhall" to focus on gun control when he was the institutional leader best positioned to have prevented this tragedy. He had a deputy on site as the shooting began whose immediate intervention could have substantially contained the tragedy. That single failure would, through better personnel selection and training, most easily have made averted this massacre.
It appears with the information that has emerged so far, as if this was nearly entirely a state and local issue. It also appears that the problem is not that State and County were negligent in not having programs. There was a state agency tasked with child welfare that did act. There was a sheriffs office with deployed resources. There was more than one agency available to address mental health. The school system was actively trying to address the shooter's conditions.
This isn't an issue of negligence in that sense. It appears to be an issue of state and local tactical ineffectiveness. All the safety nets appear to have been in place but somehow they didn't work.
If we want to prevent such tragedies, making the existing systems effective would appear to be the first step.
Instead, the mainstream media, through ignorance or ideological fervor seem to be reveling in Rahm Emanuel's counsel, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." Instead of seeking to understand the circumstances of the massacre, identify the points of failure and advocating to implement policies which would fix those failures, they are orchestrating a national campaign for an ideological position of doubtful legislative prospects and even less certain efficacy. No wonder we can't progress towards solution with such irresponsible media.
UPDATE: sounds like there is even more to the local failure aspect of this story. From Twitter there is this reporting.
1. Watch this video. People don't understand how Broward County School Sheriff Officers operate. I'll explain. https://t.co/SF4LDv1amf
— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) February 23, 2018
UPDATE 2: When you think it can't get worse. . . Four further developments. Comprehensive Dereliction, Astonishing Incompetence, Surprising Omission, and Clear Conflict of Interest.
We knew the Sheriff's Department had a deputy on site at the school before the shooting began, a deputy who elected not to engage the shooter and who has now resigned. It now appears that three additional deputies arrived during the shooting and also took shelter outside the school and did not enter. It was only after the municipal police arrived and entered the school that the deputies followed. By which time the shooter had fled. Four Sheriffs Deputies Hid During Florida School Shooting by Ruth Brown.
The transcript of the call from a friend of the shooter's family to the FBI is now public. The caller's information was detailed, explicit and extensive. The caller first tried to contact the Broward County Sheriff's Department but could only leave a message. Receiving no call back she contacted the FBI with her detailed warning. The FBI failed to pass that warning on to the school or to local law enforcement.
Then there is this, further exacerbating the media's dereliction of professional conduct. The New York Times covers the released transcript, but it takes the New York Daily News to highlight what one would have thought to be an exceptional red flag.
Another of the woman's stunning revelations: Cruz was obsessed with ISIS.Why did the NYT omit the claim about ISIS? I would have thought if there were a flag redder than a school shooting, it would be admiration for ISIS.
"He's so into ISIS and, um, I'm afraid this is so something's gonna happen," she said, describing how Cruz would post pictures of himself dressed up as an Islamic terrorist.
I understand that the NYT has shown a pattern of being excessively alarmed by the potential for popular backlashes after Islamic terrorist attacks (backlashes which never eventuate) and they probably are erring on the side of excessive caution; there is nothing otherwise in the news so far that links the shooting to ISIS affiliation. Indeed, all the news, so far, supports a tragedy of mental illness compounded by repeated and extensive failures by local agencies to address the situation.
But by trying to "manage" the news narrative, it seems to me that the NYT is deepening the distrust in the media.
Finally, there are multiple reports calling into question the CNN "townhall" in which it now appears that the event was entirely or substantially scripted to focus on gun control policy with reports by individuals of CNN programmers suggesting questions, providing scripted questions to be asked, disinviting individuals who had different questions than those sanctioned, etc. Fringe media are also pointing out that the CNN moderator was previously employed by a gun control advocacy group. Reports which appear to be accurate.
This is just a mess. If only we had local agency competence this tragedy might have been avoided. If we only had a mainstream media that would report all the facts and not just those which support their preferred narratives we might not have such distrust of the media.