Offbeat Humor

All dogs act differently to any given situation. 😂🤣🤣😂 pic.twitter.com/v6Bmj4evTB

— Cageyeff (Kev) (@cageyeff1) February 10, 2022

 

What has distressed the American critics of the free economy is not private property but the private property of others.

 From Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands by Roger Scuton.  Emphasis added.

The triumph of the United States Constitution was to make private property, individual liberty and the rule of law immovable features, not only of the political landscape in America but also of American political science. Almost all left-leaning American philosophy in recent times has been founded in those classical liberal preconceptions, and very little of it has challenged the fundamental institutions of ‘bourgeois’ society, as the Marxists conceive this. Instead it has directed attention to the pathology of the free society – to ‘consumerism’, ‘conspicuous consumption’, the world of ‘mass society’ and mass advertisement. From Veblen to Galbraith what has distressed the American critics of the free economy is not private property – which is the cornerstone of their own independence – but the private property of others. In recent times it is the spectacle of property in the hands of ordinary, gross, uneducated people that has troubled the domestic critics of American capitalism.

Far from seeing this ‘consumerism’ as the necessary result of democracy, the left has tried to show that consumerism is not democracy but a pathological form of it. Property is, in America, too palpable, too physical a fact, and while one may deceive oneself about the hearts and minds of the common people it is impossible to remain deceived about the trash that they scatter about their yards. To the visitor from the East Coast cities, the suburban sprawl of Texas is an appalling affront to civilization: through property, advertising and the media the ordinary American puts himself on display, and thereby undermines the illusion of equality. He is plainly of another species from the liberal who stands up for him, and this is a hard truth that must nevertheless be swallowed.

Academia, Deep State, and mainstream media are having a harder and harder time hiding their class condescension towards ordinary Americans.  They espouse a left-leaning world view but it is their condescension that bring them low.  What passes as a race problem or a polarization problem in the US always boils down to a class problem.   Academia, Deep State, and mainstream media dislike the success ordinary Americans can and do achieve through the Classical Liberal model.  

Leftist philosophies (Socialism, Marxism, Social Justice Theory, Post Modernism, Critical Race Theory) are not adopted by the chattering classes due to their empirical reality or logical integrity.  They are adopted, usually unconsciously, as a weapon against ordinary Americans.  As a means of protecting a class status quo.

As Scuton points out, what distresses the American the chattering class is not private property but the private property of others.  It is not free speech, it is the free speech of others.  It is not equality but the equality of others.  

Authoritarian and totalitarian is the alternative to the Classical Liberal model. And it always fails.

From The strongest case for urban density isn’t aesthetics, it’s math by Alan Cole.  He takes a regrettably totalitarian, authoritarian and deterministic view on an issue far more complex than is acknowledged.  

It's not just the math.  It's the whole system and in particular, it is the keeping of long term commitments, it is the respect for private property, it is the acknowledgement of complex interdependencies between multiple stakeholders with evolving interests, and finally, it is the acceptance that all stakeholders need to be involved whenever there is a changing of the long term rules.  

Instead, urban planners usually default to their own preferred (often ideological) goals and objectives, arrogate to themselves the power to decide, and willy-nilly ignore the implied inter-generational commitments over time.  Cole is not alone in this, it is a common Statist mindset and shows up among people who might not otherwise be statists.  

His opening is a bit of a red herring.  He creates a straw man which is easy to knock down. While the debate is frequently cast in terms of aesthetics, that is not the core issue.  The core issues are incentives, commitments, and goal determination.  

Conversation about land use and building in cities often turns to questions of aesthetics or personal preferences. You find impassioned advocates of various kinds of architecture or lifestyle.

Opponents of density insist on the merits of big yards, or claim that multifamily buildings are eyesores, or get into minutia about how certain types of buildings spur gentrification.

Some folks on the pro-density side are equally aesthetic-minded. They paint a picture of biking in dedicated lanes past cute row houses along narrow, lively streets filled with people and not cars.

My sympathies are with the pro-density side of this argument. But I see the aesthetics as beside the point. To me, it’s just math. The biggest virtues of denser cities flow from ironclad principles of geometry and arithmetic—along with some basic economic concepts.

It's not just the math and it's not just "ironclad principles of geometry and arithmetic".  The math is downstream from the goals and objectives.  If your goals and objectives are centrally determined and focus on centrally determined conditions (number of square feet of living space, amount of energy consumed, commuting times, water consumption, amount of individual and community productivity to be achieved, etc.) then the math follows.  

But that totalitarian central planning cannot exist in a free world.  Consent of the governed and equality before the law and property rights are all incompatible with such a model.  

Independently from the philosophical underpinnings is the reality that no central planning system has created a system of high satisfaction high productivity living environment; ever; anywhere.  Certainly not anywhere that lasts for more than a generation or so.

Cole walks through the mechanics of his one dimensional argument, focusing on prioritizing brevity of commute times, (with a preference for bicycling).  If, with a totalitarian mindset, you only value short commute times, then he is correct that the maths dictates high density.

But that is not the problem we are solving.

The problem we are solving is the reconciliation of multiple heterogenous and dynamic priorities which evolve over time and which encounter different constraints in different time periods.  Simply insisting that everyone should not care about aesthetics and that everyone should only be concerned about commute times is a simplistic non-answer to a complex problem.

First we have to acknowledge the other things which people value in their living conditions which likely include concerns about such factors as:

Safety

Security

Quality Education

Health 

 

Cost of Living  

 

Economic opportunities and growth

Political engagement and access

Environment (cleanliness and access)

Risk management

Commute times

Quality of life considerations (noise, litter, light pollution, fractious interactions, etc.) 

 

Aesthetics  

 

Clean and transparent government

Variety of experiences

Accessibility of experiences

 

Security of investment

Congestion

Respect for civil liberties and constitutional norms

There are many more particular values and objectives which might be acknowledged.  

But even with these, we have moved from a single variable totalitarian equation (how to minimize commute times) to a eighteen variable equation with different trade-offs between and among the variables based on the different priorities between and among residents.  And all these variables exist on a continuum.  

The first challenge is to 1) identify what are the valued outcomes among the residents, 2) what is the average ordinal ranking of those desired outcomes (e.g. do I value quality education higher or lower than, say, economic opportunities), and 3) what are the  acceptable trade-offs between these different variables (e.g. even though I might value education over economic opportunity, just how much opportunity am I willing to sacrifice to achieve how much improved education, i.e. the elasticities of demand?)

An eighteen variable equation with variant ordinal rankings and disparate demand elasticities in a dynamic, evolving and loosely coupled set of systems is not just "maths".  The glib dismissal of the complexity of the problem is what separates failed totalitarians from more successful incentive based systems which are self-correcting and adaptive (i.e. the Classical Liberal world order).  

And that is by no means the entire weakness of Coles' position.  He has also dismissed out of hand the reality that regulatory systems (such as zoning) represent an intergenerational and multi-interest contract.  In any sort of participatory democracy, there are ground rules applicable to everyone.  They obviously need to change over time as circumstances change.  But those ground rules represent something enduring.  They may change but they do not change frequently and they do not change without participation and without consideration.

Whatever the rules might be, they represent a framework within which people can make investment decisions that have lasting duration.  Decisions about what to build, where to build it, how to build it (durable or disposable), why to build it, etc.  The longer the duration of the rules, the more confident people can be in making long term investment decisions (whether home ownership or business investment).  When circumstances change requiring changes in the rules, people similarly need to be confident that they can be a part of the process around changing those rules so that their interests can be protected or at least considered.

Without acknowledging that the rules need to be stable, predictable, and accessible nor recognizing that stability of rules drives investment decisions, the totalitarian approach of "let the center decide and pack everyone in to achieve short commute times" is guaranteed to kill the goose which lays the golden egg.

Dismissing people's participation in rule setting, prioritizing single objectives over all others, ignoring the fact that settled rules are advantageous to economic development, denigrating people's protection of their investment and property decisions as NIMBYs are all critical failures in the authoritarian and totalitarian approach.  It is why it always fails. 

Data Talks

The real unbreachable divide here.

I know about 10 of these American "words", several of which only through watching The Sopranos. pic.twitter.com/yNi9jxCEyx

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) February 10, 2022

 

The Dream of Joachim, 1305 by Giotto Di Bondone

The Dream of Joachim, 1305 by Giotto Di Bondone

Click to enlarge.

Inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their local and national security

From The coming bloodbath of the Democrats by Joel Kotkin.  

Given the probability of a significant loss in this November’s Midterms, we should expect – and hope for – a full-scale brawl over the party’s trajectory. There needs to be something equivalent to the New Democrats who, under Bill Clinton, revived the party after the devastating defeats of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis in the 1970s and 80s by moving the party to the centre and connecting it to the country’s diverse regions. ‘Too many Americans’, wrote New Democrats Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in 1989, ‘have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security’.

It is a useful reminder that we have been down this path before.  I had been thinking primarily of the Democrat wipeouts in 2010 and 2014 leading to a loss of some 1,000 elected positions across the nation and the obliteration of a full generation of Democratic political talent.  Which is partly why the party is so geriatric today. 

But Kotkin is right.  However, it wasn't only Obama with those kind of wipeouts.  Certainly at the national presidential level, the McGovern and Dukakis campaigns were embarrassing defeats.  But the health of national parties are not measured in presidential campaigns alone.  They are measured in the aggregation of political seats at the federal, state and even local levels.

While Clinton was a pragmatist in many ways, it is worth recalling that his best years were in his second term with a Republican Congress.  In his first term, after his first two years, Democrats lost 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate, historic losses in what became known as the Republican Revolution.  This historic reversal was later consolidated and amplified with the large midterm defeats during the Obama years.

That is a great money quote though, revealing in 1989 and still pertinent in 2020.

Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security.

The ineffectiveness has now extended to local security as well.

It is striking that the same diagnosis that was true in 1989 is still true thirty-three years later.  One would have thought the survival instinct to have been stronger.  

History

Who she is and the skilled artist that painted her is unknown. She was living in Egypt during the #Roman period & her hairstyle dates her to cAD160-170. She is shown with a beautiful necklace (painted in gold leaf) and earrings - Fayum portrait, @britishmuseum collection. pic.twitter.com/5ZBZ0kdUjd

— Trimontium Trust (@TrimontiumTrust) February 8, 2022

 

An Insight

I believe 80% of the 'problems' in the Western world are intentionally manufactured to distract you from the 20% that actually matter.

— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) February 11, 2022

 

Reformation passions resurrected in the twenty-first century

Reading history, it is sometimes difficult to recapture the fervor and convictions which led to so many tragic outcomes.  An example would be the Massacre at Matanzas Inlet.  

The Massacre at Matanzas Inlet was the killing of French troops by Spanish troops near the Matanzas Inlet in 1565, at the order of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, adelantado of Spanish Florida (La Florida).

The Spanish Crown in the 16th century laid claim to a vast area that included what is now the state of Florida, along with much of what is now the southeastern United States, on the strength of several Spanish expeditions made in the first half of the 1500s, including those of Ponce de Leon and Hernando de Soto. However, Spanish attempts to establish a lasting presence in La Florida failed until September 1565, when Menéndez founded St. Augustine about 30 miles south of the newly established French settlement at Fort Caroline on the St. Johns River. Menéndez had not known that the French had already arrived in the area, and upon discovering the existence of Fort Caroline, he aggressively moved to expel those whom he considered heretics and intruders.

When the French Huguenot leader, Jean Ribault, learned of the Spanish presence nearby, he also decided on a swift assault and sailed south from Fort Caroline with most of his troops to search for the Spanish settlement. His ships were struck by a storm (probably a tropical storm) and most of the French force was lost at sea, leaving Ribault and several hundred survivors in two groups shipwrecked with limited food and supplies: one group about 15 miles south of the Spanish colony, and Ribault's group much farther southward at Cape Canaveral. Meanwhile, Menéndez marched north, overwhelmed the remaining defenders of Fort Caroline, massacred most of the French Protestants in the town, and left an occupying force in the rechristened Fort Mateo. Upon returning to St. Augustine, he received news that Ribault and his troops were stranded to the south. Menéndez quickly moved to attack and massacred the French force of two separate parties on the shore of what became known as the Matanzas River, sparing only the Catholics and a few skilled workmen among the French.

It would be easy to dismiss this as merely a territorial dispute but the actual accounts make clear that these few hundred Europeans, perched a mere thirty miles apart on the littoral of a dangerous and unknown shore, thousands of miles from home, were committed to wiping out one another entirely owing to doctrinal differences. 

All through Reformation history and the Thirty Years' War, there are similar instances of astonishingly immoral inhumanity as well as people willingly going to their deaths for their religious beliefs based on seemingly thin doctrinal differences.

One such was the issue of baptism; whether it can be done to children (who cannot understand the commitment being invoked) or only for adults who have the agency to knowingly make the commitment.  See Anabaptists as one group who suffered persecution and massacres for their conviction that only adults should be baptized.  

You can work your way into the mindset of the time but it is difficult to simulate the convictions which were so powerful.  As a consequence, you are left with the horrified sense of "How could they have done that?"

But jaded and secularized as we are, we still have some of the same cleavages in belief systems today.  You just have to see them for what they are.

The passions being invoked around transgenderism is an example.  Especially the zealotry in some corners which lead to imposing chemical and surgical transitions upon unsuspecting children at the behest of the Munchausen by proxy adults around them.

For those of us who regard ourselves as sane and rational, these procedures are clearly and inescapably a particularly cruel form of child abuse.  There is no way for an adult to divine a child's future desires and character in such a compelling way as to warrant drastic and irreversible actions.  

For those ideological zealots committed to childhood transitions, they similarly see anyone standing in the way of such operations as hopeless barbarians.

I think the sane adults are clearly the betters of the ideological zealots and that there really is no common ground on which to reach any sort of "compromise."  For the first time, I begin to understand the passion of those fifteenth and sixteenth century perpetrators and victims.  

“The Constitution is trash,” he said.

From Things Worth Fighting For by Bari Weiss.  

The other day on The View, I watched as a man with a Harvard law degree and a denizen of the most exclusive institutions in America, stumbled on the real problem facing the world: “The Constitution is trash,” he said.

If you are looking for the definition of the privilege of living in America, of living in a country with the First Amendment, it is the ability to say something so foolish on daytime television.  

Yes.  But his argument betrays either profound ignorance or ideological zealotry, neither of which are admirable traits.  We have a whole intelligentsia committed to praising such ignorance and/or zealotry.  

Who needs fifth columns when you have eager idiot intellectuals?