Testify!

Heh.

Biggest misconception in philosophy:
1. Nietzsche was a nihilist
2. Kuhn was anti-science
3. Derrida was worth reading

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) October 18, 2016

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.

From James Truslow Adams, To "Be" or to "DO", Forum, Jun 1929; VOL. LXXXI, NO. 6

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living...In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings.

New Alert! TV shows not representative of reality.

I've wondered about this for a long time. How big a mismatch is there between the demographics of criminals and the demographics of victims in TV shows and those in the real world?

My impression has been that white women are disproportionately represented as victims of crime in TV shows. That whites in general are overrepresented as perpetrators of crime. That men are generally underreperesented and that black men are especially underrepresented as both victims and perpetrators. In addition, there seems to be a bias in TV against smart people/upper class people. A disproportionate number of crimes on TV are committed by relatively intelligent people with a great deal of planning and intent compared to the reality.

The Face of Crime in Prime Time: Evidence from Law and Order by Gaurav Sood and Daniel Trielli looked into it. From the abstract:

Race, gender, and crime are inextricably linked in people's minds. And television programming is thought to strongly influence how they are linked. We investigate the extent to which popular television programming perpetuates stereotypical linkages by tallying the race and gender of criminals and victims in three popular series of the most successful criminal procedural franchise on television --- Law & Order. Using data from a census of the shows from aired seasons of Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent series, and data from seven seasons of the Original series, we find that whites and women are overrepresented (and blacks and men underrepresented), both as victims and as criminals. In particular, blacks are dramatically underrepresented both as criminals and as victims, with actual arrest rate and violent victimization rate of blacks nearly 300% and 200% respectively of the commensurate numbers for the show.

My gut sense appears to have been directionally correct. It is great that the authors provide an effect size for the measured phenomenon.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

Sound like our universities, social justice warriors, "diversity" advocates, "sustainability" advocates, and other totalitarian centers of unthought?

From George Orwell's 1984.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.‘s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in “The Times” occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

‘Except ——’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’ but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.

‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

A cacophony of words and sounds follow us wherever we go

From Thucydides Roundtable, Book I: An introduction by T. Greer.

On a summer night, nearly three thousand years ago, three hundred men of Thebes, wet and mud soaked, snuck into the town of Plataea with murder on their minds. Their attempt to launch revolution in Plataea was futile: most would die before the night was over. If their aim was political change, they failed, and failed utterly. But if their aim was undying fame, they succeeded. Perhaps they did not know that their deeds would echo through time, but they have. These were the men who began the Peloponnesian War. What they did is still read and written about thousands of years later.

Why is this?

Why is this war so well remembered?

[snip]

Above all, it is to wonder what classics these events might have produced if these peoples and places had a Thucydides to write about them. Alas! They had no Thucydides. There has been only one of him. That is all that truly sets the Peloponnesian War apart from the other wars of human history: this was the war witnessed by Thucydides.

It is difficult to peg this Thucydides. Political scientists, historians, and military theorists all claim him as the father of their craft. Whenever one of these disciplines is infected with a new “path breaking” paradigm, a blizzard of articles are written to graft the latest fashion onto his work. This literature is enormous. Forgive me for quoting none of it. So many of yesteryear’s intellectual fads have died. They are forgotten. Thucydides and his history live with us still. He will outlast them all.

[snip]

We all live in the moment. A cacophony of words and sounds follow us wherever we go, broadcast into our cars, our workplaces, our homes, and our pockets. We live in an unescapable echo chamber—an echo chamber relentlessly focused on the now.

Not so with Thucydides! His history is about many things, but 2016 is not one of them. Here then is a chance to put the present to the side. Cast away that dreadful election! Muffle the droning of the news reports. Close the Twitter stream. Before us is a world that has never heard of the twenty-first century nor imagined its problems. Your guide to this world will be a man from an alien past; his values and assumptions will be starkly different than your own. Wrestle with him—let your beliefs and assumptions be tested. What better chance to assay the building blocks of your politics than by exploring the politics of a different age, removed from the passions of the moment? Thucydides does not spell out his lessons for you. Instead he invites you to follow along with him and find what lessons history allows by yourself.

A sort of internal council you can consult at any time

From Reading Old Books by Joseph Sobran.

There are no particular classics, not even Shakespeare, that you “must” read. But you should find a few meritorious old writers you find absorbing and not only read them, but live with them, until they become voices in your mind — a sort of internal council you can consult at any time.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us remain fad-proof.

The modern world is like a perpetual Nuremburg rally: everything that was wrong with Nazi Germany is more or less typical of other modern states, even those states that imagine they are the opposite of Nazi Germany. Political enemies usually turn out to be cousins, whose most violent differences are essentially superficial, masking deeper agreements in principle. Stalin, Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill were closer to each other than they realized; so are Bill Clinton and Slobodan Milosevic.

When confronted with a new topic or political issue, I often ask myself what Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, or James Madison — or, among more recent authors, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, or Michael Oakeshott — would have thought of it. Not that these men were always right: that would be impossible, since they often disagree with each other. The great authors have no specific “message.”

But at least they had minds of their own. They weren’t mere products of the thought-factory we call public opinion, which might be defined as what everyone thinks everyone else thinks. They provide independent, poll-proof standards of judgment, when the government, its schools, and the media, using all the modern techniques of manipulation, try to breed mass uniformity in order to make us more manageable.

I can make it clearer; I can't make it simpler.

Robert Oppenheimer, as quoted by Wendell Furry in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, p. 84. From Oppenheimer's class at Berkeley during the period 1932-1934.

I can make it clearer; I can't make it simpler.

He simply wanted to know about everything on earth

From Of Time and The River by Thomas Wolfe.

Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be. Within a period of ten years he read at least 20,000 volumes — deliberately the number is set low — and opened the pages and looked through many times that number. This may seem unbelievable, but it happened. Dryden said this about Ben Jonson: “Other men read books, but he read libraries”— and so now was it with this boy. Yet this terrific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, his fury and despair increased from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with the food it ate.


He read insanely, by the hundreds, the thousands, the ten thousands, yet he had no desire to be bookish; no one could describe this mad assault upon print as scholarly: a ravening appetite to him demanded that he read everything that had ever been written about human experience. He read no more from pleasure — the thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart for ever. He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl. At first, hovering over bookstalls, or walking at night among the vast piled shelves of the library, he would read, watch in hand, muttering to himself in triumph or anger at the timing of each page: “Fifty seconds to do that one. Damn you, we’ll see! You will, will you?”— and he would tear through the next page in twenty seconds.

This fury which drove him on to read so many books had nothing to do with scholarship, nothing to do with academic honours, nothing to do with formal learning. He was not in any way a scholar and did not want to be one. He simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this. And it was the same with everything he did. In the midst of a furious burst of reading in the enormous library, the thought of the streets outside and the great city all around him would drive through his body like a sword. It would now seem to him that every second that he passed among the books was being wasted — that at this moment something priceless, irrecoverable was happening in the streets, and that if he could only get to it in time and see it, he would somehow get the knowledge of the whole thing in him — the source, the well, the spring from which all men and words and actions, and every design upon this earth proceeds.

Americans, not an identity Borg

This is one of the more repellent arguments I have seen in a long time though I understand the logical basis from which the author starts: What If All The Poor People Were Gone? by Jeffrey Carter.

I think it is indefensible from on an evidentiary basis as well as logically unsound, particularly the non sequitur

How do we change it? We know increasing government programs and government spending doesn’t work. The way to change it is the free enterprise system. It’s the only way.

I don't disagree that the free enterprise system is the best way forward.

What I disagree with is Carter's adoption in his article of identity politics, the language of Reform Marxists. There is no such thing as The Poor. There is no such static group of people with a singular mass characteristic. There are people who are poor temporarily. There are people who are chronically poor. There are people who are poor through their own actions and decisions. There are people who are victims of circumstance.

What there isn't, is The Poor.

Reform Marxists have all sorts of foolish ideas which have to be rebutted or addressed. But we don't need to adopt the dehumanizing identity language of the Left. These are, after all, fellow citizens, fellow Americans. Deracinating them of their individualism serves no useful purpose.

It’s just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson

There is an embarrassing article in the Washington Post, How angry does Donald Trump make me? Angry enough to steal 40 Trump signs. by Betta Stothart.

The substance is that a privileged woman got angry at the idea that her neighbors supported Donald Trump and went on a rampage stealing their yard signs. She was caught and cited and is now complaining and self-justifying in what I imagine she anticipated would be a sympathetic forum.

Stothart essentially describes herself as a crazy woman and that is the reason for her actions.

But this election, a particular candidate’s boasts about women pushed me over the edge.

[snip]

Which is how three middle-aged moms came to be running down the road, tearing up the Donald Trump signs along our version of Main Street.

[snip]

We were angry.

[snip]

We felt assaulted by the number of signs.

[snip]

The officer was kind, informing us that we had stolen someone else’s personal property, which had not really entered into my mind while I was doing it.

[snip]

Reflecting back, I realize that I momentarily snapped.

[snip]

I became unhinged.

[snip]

This is the source of my rage against Donald Trump. It’s why I committed a crime.

I have little sympathy for BLM and SJW and their accusations of privilege but it is the Stotharts of the world which lend their accusations credence.

Rich, educated, white writer commits a series of crimes in order to suppress the free speech of her fellow citizens and cause financial damage and then is allowed to write an article explaining her behavior because she just snapped. What privilege indeed.

I came across this via Ann Althouse who does a thorough fisking.

I am confident it was not her intent but Stothart comes across as having the same mindset as that of the abusive boyfriend in Forrest Gump, explaining his abuse:

Wesley: Jenny? Things got a little out of hand. It’s just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson and…I would never hurt you. You know that.

As for a sympathetic audience, the comments seem to indicate that there is little patience for people taking the law into their own hands in order to suppress speech.