The Art Nouveau "Château de la lune" from 1896 in Épernay, France.
— ArtNouveauDeco (@NouveauDeco) June 1, 2024
Photo: artnouveaukathi pic.twitter.com/BQV9nONTkU
Tuesday, July 2, 2024
History
An Insight
Matt is being dishonest here. Fraudulent falsification of business records is common. But it's usually an employee covering up embezzlement, or an owner cooking books to get investors; there's a clear party defrauded who had a right to accuracy.
— Bernard Stanford ✡︎ (@stanfordNYC) May 31, 2024
In this case, the defrauded party… pic.twitter.com/Jj3Ao6SIQY
I see wonderful things
The extraordinary 'Optical illusion' of the marble mosaic tiles of the 17th Century AD, Florence Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, Italy.
— Archaeo - Histories (@archeohistories) May 31, 2024
The mosaic optical illusion of the Cathedral, seen from above, this intricate geometry creates the illusion of a giant abyss into which people… pic.twitter.com/qe0OmJzeuw
Saturday Night Live does Ecclesiastes
A serendipitous encounter with two Saturday Night Live skits from the past eight years highlighting the incestuous barren insularity of the institutional left and the dysfunctional absence of any sort of bench strength.
I have commented a number of times on how disastrous the Obama administration was for the Democratic Party. His singular focus on his personal political career ill-served the party. At the end of his second term, the Democratic Party was down more than a thousand national elected roles (Governors, Senators, Representatives, State Attorney Generals, etc.) which constitute any party's bench of future talent for other elected positions.
That decimation was greater than the numbers indicate because many of the casualties were mid-career, i.e. they lost the strongest part of their future bench of talent.
The first SNL skit is on the epistemic and cultural insularity of the modern Democratic Left which they encountered in the 2016 election. Funny because it is true and chilling because it is dysfunctional.
Double click to enlarge.
The second clip is from 2022 when the Democratic Party began to recognize the consequences of how empty their bench was of talent. And it is even worse now. Not only is it politically and legally difficult to replace Biden at this late date, even if that were feasible, there is still the horrifying question, "Replace with whom?"
Two old videos reflecting the current reality. I would be tempted to quote Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Except that they are unsympathetic to religious belief.
Offbeat Humor
Every European City Map pic.twitter.com/nXVUA3pMMx
— Epic Maps 🗺️ (@Locati0ns) May 31, 2024
Still living in Brooklyn-With-a-Bubble-On-It with Pauline Kael
From Democrats Should Acknowledge Reality And Abandon Their Utterly Failed Anti-Trump Strategy (If You Can Even Call It That) by Jesse Singal. The subheading is “Orange Man Bad” might be accurate, but it doesn’t work as a campaign slogan in 2024.
Singal is a dyed-in-the-wool establishment Democrat. I read him, not for the validity of his arguments but as a bellwether of the fashionable left. In this column he is making a clear argument.
For about a decade now, the Democratic Party has put a referendum to the American public: “Donald Trump is a racist, fascist, misogynistic strongman and alleged serial sexual assaulter who doesn’t care about democratic norms and who will seek, whenever possible, to demolish them if it benefits him. Do you really want someone like this to be president?” Over time, the party has been able to add ever-more damning, fully accurate details, like “felon,” “adjudicated rapist,” and “attack on the Capitol instigator” to this description of the now-former president.The American people have answered the same way, over and over: “Sure, maybe.”
And it hasn't worked. The Establishment narrative just doesn't have traction.
Look, you took a crack at the “Trump is racist and fascist” line — many cracks, in fact — and you got all the already-liberal folks on board, plus some moderate (mostly suburban) educated Republican types, at least for an election or two. But clearly, clearly, clearly, this is a failing strategy when it comes to consistently beating Trump at the national level.The most damning evidence against the orthodox Democratic strategy for fighting Trump and Trumpism is the trajectory of black and Latino opinion toward Trump. This graph from Bloomberg shows what those lines look like during seven years of blanket dissemination of the message that Trump is a dangerous and bigoted madman who is perhaps one or two steps removed from bona fide white nationalists:
It. . .didn’t seem to work. At all. This shouldn’t necessarily surprise anyone familiar with the heterogeneous nature of these voting blocs, and with the fact that both includetens ofmillions of moderate-to-conservative voters, but at the end of the day, if you’re a Democrat who thought Trump was beatable if only the racist/fascist drum was beaten hard and loudly enough, how can you come to any other conclusion that you’ve failed spectacularly? The very groups you are claiming to want to protect from Trump have warmed to him over time.
I agree. Their tactic was flawed from the beginning both because it was a negative message and because it was at best only weakly and even then only occasionally linked to reality.
Singal has a striking statement interposed in the opening paragraphs. Perhaps it is only a declaration of tribal fealty to avoid being cancelled. Perhaps. But if taken literally, he is the very thing he is objecting to.
I am intentionally setting aside my own feelings about Trump for the purpose of this post, but I’ve made them clear over and over and over. Suffice it to say, I cannot wrap my head around the fact that Trump is so popular, relatively speaking, and I know most of my friends can’t either.
He doesn't understand and nobody in his network of friends understands either. If that isn't a declaration of blind insularity, I don't know what is. Calls to mind the SNL skit, Brooklyn with a bubble on it.
Double click to enlarge.
He is supposed to be a public intellectual commenting on the times and yet is declaring he does not understand those times at all. In that opening paragraph he affirms all the fevered beliefs that the institutional Left have about Trump and for which there is no or only ambiguous evidence. It is all supposition and projection.
And we have been down this path before. Staunch Democratic party stalwart Pauline Kael, theater critic for The New Yorker, had a very similar take as Singal back fifty-two years ago in 1972 when McGovern lost to Nixon.
How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him.
Another variant being, and the version most resonant of Singal's confession:
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.
Singal's basic argument is true. The Democratic Party effort to demonize Trump has failed. The Democratic Party needs to persuade voters that they have the better alternative. After last week's debate performance, that is a much harder task, but it is the task that needs to be accomplished.
But to persuade, you have to understand the counterargument and Singal (and Democrats) appear to no understand at all. Singal.
I hate Trump.
I don't understand how anyone can like him.
Nobody I know understands why Trump is popular.
He is a demon.
OK. All that is already apparent. But if that is the case, as you acknowledge, then how can you understand enough to be credible trying to persuade?
This part of the argument simply does not compute.
Data Talks
By an enormous coincidence, every aspect of culture peaked when you were a teenager: music, movies, fashion, you name it. And the amazing thing is that this applies no matter how old you are! https://t.co/2iRScuGojW pic.twitter.com/TdEi7RMCJ7
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) June 1, 2024
Monday, July 1, 2024
History
The Berlin Green Head - a masterpiece dating to the Late or Ptolemaic period (350-30 BC), named after the colour of its stone. The head of a bald man made from greenschist is believed to be a representation of an #Egyptian priest
— Nina Willburger (@DrNWillburger) June 1, 2024
On display at Neues Museum,Berlin
📷 taken by me pic.twitter.com/aVncDek1lx
Moral judgments are used to exercise power. That makes their truth status suspect.
From Links to Consider, 6/23 by Arnold Kling. Referencing Martin Gurri.
I read him as saying that moral judgments are used to exercise power. That makes their truth status suspect.
I see wonderful things
Thatching is the ancient craft of building roofs using dry vegetation. In England, over 250 roofs still have base coats of thatch applied over 500 years ago. Nearly all of these roofs are thatched with wheat, rye, or both.
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) May 31, 2024
📹 Shane Stevens
pic.twitter.com/bruxQe7jvq
Data Talks
“Part of the reason people worry about misinformation is that they think other people are gullible and easily misled - unlike them. Meanwhile, the other people think exactly the same thing in reverse.” https://t.co/2iRScuGojW pic.twitter.com/4yYRGeFf2y
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) June 1, 2024
Elite misinformation is just another term for Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
From The case against municipal fragmentation by Matthew Yglesias. He includes a readers comment to an earlier column, Elite misinformation is an underrated problem.
In elite misinformation, Yglesias argues
People have a lot of erroneous beliefs about the policy status quo in the United States, and that seems to matter. These beliefs are normally not formed via exposure to some kind of social media misinformation; they’re just about things that aren’t in the news very much and that people misunderstand. Which is to say that “people having information that is not correct” is absolutely a huge deal in politics… it’s just not necessarily “misinformation” in the sense that the misinformation police intend. In Dylan Matthews’ profile of the State Department’s small but very successful intelligence bureau, for example, one thing that comes through is that the bulk of American intelligence agencies genuinely believed that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program. This erroneous information had a huge impact on the media, on the mass public understanding of political debates 2002-2003, in decision-making in Washington, and on the broad trajectory of American politics.And I think erroneous ideas that are perpetrated by mainstream institutions — what I’m going to call “elite misinformation” — are a really big deal in an underrated way.
The whole column is worth a read. Yglesias is focusing on elite misinformation but I think we already have a term for this - Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. And have had since it was first described in 1841.
The reader's response Yglesias calls out in municipal fragmentation column is:
I wrote a book adjacent to this topic, Radiation Evangelists, about the early development years of radiation therapy in medicine, and I have an add-on to this column: a lot of times people doing this kind of misinformation have functionally managed to talk themselves into believing what they are pitching.Most of the early radiation innovators that I wrote about ended up dying of cancer or other radiation-induced maladies. I expected the story to be one where people who didn't know better died of something they didn't understand. But what I found in the research is that users recognized--and documented!--the risks more or less immediately. It's just that they then proceeded to talk themselves into alternate explanations. A lot of patients were harmed as a result, but the therapists bore the worst of it; more or less an entire generation of men and women who were enthusiastic early adopters ended up dead in a pretty painful and awful way.All of which is simply to say that I think "elite misinformation" is an even harder problem than this column suggests, because motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug. Even well-meaning humans armed with reasonable information are highly prone to talk themselves into believing wrong stuff, and they will do that EVEN WITH the counter information right there in on the table. And someone who has lied to themself first is hard to disabuse of a notion, because 1) they do not "know" that they are lying, and 2) admitting that they are wrong now carries a component of shame and disappointment to go along with the embarrassment.It's just a really hard problem.
The book is Radiation Evangelists: Technology, Therapy, and Uncertainty at the Turn of the Century by Jefferey Womack.
The obsession with misinformation, disinformation, deep fakes, cheap fakes, etc. all appear to be mere manifestations of totalitarians obsessed with the consequences of free speech, i.e. that free speech allows challenges to their centralized power in ways they do not understand nor wish to tolerate.
But the phenomenon of fanatical obsession with empirically unreliable beliefs is longstanding and well described. Among the literature:
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKayNineteen Eighty-four by George OrwellThe True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric HofferThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
Mistaken medical beliefs in the face of clear evidence is a well populated sub-genre in itself.
All mass movements, whether cultural, popular, political, intellectual, etc. are driven by motivated reasoning touched by fanaticism. The short term antidote is never more information. That is necessary in the long run but is ineffective in the face of short term fanatical conviction. The only antidote is behavioral and cultural - the cultivation of humility and openness.
The problem is not the factual underpinnings of the belief, it is the fanaticism of the belief. A fanatical belief that is also incorrect will eventually founder on harsh reality. It might take days, weeks, months, years, decades, occasionally centuries, but reality always wins. The more fanatically the belief is held, the longer it takes.
Humility and openness are the antidotes to fanaticism. And not often seen together.
DEI, Critical Race Theory, Communism, Treatment of scurvy with citric acid, Occupy Wall Street, Anthropogenic Global Warming, Radiation Therapy, every investment craze - all divorced from empirical reality (or unsupported by it) and yet all having their cadre of fierce believers and their periods where they dominated the public discourse despite the empirical reality.
But getting public intellectuals and those who control the levers of power and influence to cultivate openness and humility, not to say respect for their fellow man, is not something we can readily anticipate. But it is always the only alternative to harsh encounters with reality when fanatically held beliefs are founded on beliefs not consistent with empirical reality.
UPDATE: In the tide of today's news, there is a further example of fervid conviction overwhelming empirical data. From What If the Most Notorious Murder of a Gay Man Wasn’t a Hate Crime? by Ben Kawaller. The subheading is A generation ago, Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in what appeared to be a homophobic attack. This month, Ben Kawaller traveled to the scene of the crime. He heard a different story…
And it isn't a new story. The book revealing that the murder was due to a drug deal gone wrong was published in 2013, eleven years ago. But the conviction that it was a hate crime based on homophobia remains the dominant interpretation in may circles. Not because of an absence of knowledge and information but due to a belief system which does not permit any different interpretation. A belief system reinforced by financial inducements.
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