Month: May 2019

Repost-Toxic Feminity, Identity Medicine & Facebook-Some Links

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Via a reader: Heather Heying, evolutionary biologist, and wife of Bret Weinstein, offers reasonable insight.

The sexes obviously can work together collaboratively, but I’m guessing neither a vast majority of women, nor some plurality of men, desire a return to previous traditional and religiously conservative sex roles, especially in the workplace.

One key will be continuing to identify, satirize and freeze-out radicals and narrow, rigid ideologues pursuing conformity and true-belief. Such resistance requires the labor and firmness of the knowledgable and reasonable before this process becomes even more personal and political.

Many people are still getting passes for their questionable knowledge claims, agressive behavior and totalizing movements to contemporize all towards their utopia/dystopia. These ideological maps tend not to line-up well with human nature (as a good humanities education can reveal), and furthermore, cloud the moral imagination.

Please let’s not politicize medicine. Our very lives may depend on it.

Theodore Dalrymple here;

‘Two items in the British Medical Journal last week caught my eye. The first was an editorial titled “Tackling Female Genital Mutilation in the UK,” and the second was an article titled “Diversifying the Medical Curriculum.”

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Speech and thought are intimately intertwined, and the crude stuff you might say at the bar may not entirely be true, nor is it necessarily what you ought to say to your boss, amongst neighbors, or at the town hall meeting.

Personally, I don’t trust any one institution, neither public nor private, to manage all my data.

Why do I keep harping the folks posing the clearest and most immediate dangers to liberty?

Because they pose the clearest and most immediate dangers to liberty…

Facebook Has A Right To Block ‘Hate Speech’ But Here’s Why It Shouldn’t

‘By the time the 2016 U.S. election craze began (particularly after Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination), however, things had changed. The combination of Facebook’s corporate encouragement to “bring your authentic self to work” along with the overwhelmingly left-leaning political demographics of my former colleagues meant that left-leaning politics had arrived on campus’

 

Some Links On Trump’s Foreign Policy, Twitter Enforcement & the El Reno Tornado

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Walter Russell Mead, via the Hudson Institute, summarizes what seems to be an emerging foreign policy platform for the Trump administration (behind a paywall).

‘Against this background, Secretary Pompeo delivered his most comprehensive attempt yet to expound the core themes informing the Trump administration’s foreign policy. His speech—delivered Saturday to the Claremont Institute in Southern California—deserves careful study. Whether or not President Trump’s foreign policy is successful, the ideas laid out by Mr. Pompeo are likely to shape the Republican Party’s approach to statecraft for years to come.’

Here’s the speech.

What say you? (presented without current comment):

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A slightly longer Twitter take of mine can be found here, but all I’d really like is relatively clear rules and transparent enforcement.  I might even argue the continued existence of Twitter depends on rule design and enforcement as much as platform design, but this could be a stretch.

Perusing the Twitter Trust and Safety Council page illuminates how global their reach is, how intractable some of the problems (from ISIS to child predators), but, also, how the loud voices, moralists and busybodies always seem to nominate themselves.

This is something of a racket, I’m afraid, which is often better for the vision of each group rather than all groups, especially as such groups cozy-up to institutions with real power:

‘It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.’

–Edmund Burke

Readers will know I strongly favor freer and open speech, so like the choices being made in many a university social sciences department (hard science, data vs more questionable epistemologies and self-selecting true-believers), a similar phenomenon is likely occuring at Twitter:

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From the Weather Service video below: A small percentage of the world’s surface supports the kinds of extreme clashing air masses found on the U.S. plains.  Very few thunderstorms become supercells, and very few of those supercells form tornadoes.  Even fewer tornadoes become violent F4 and F5 monsters which spawn sub-vortices and anti-cyclones.

The El Reno, Oklahoma tornado from 2013 took the lives of eight people, including experienced stormchasers known for their judgment and contributions to the rest of us.

A sad day.

Of Course My Side Has All The Knowledge-A Few Links On Closing The CEU In Budapest

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Franklin Foer at The Atlantic seems quick to blame the shuttering of the CEU, the George Soros funded graduate university in Budapest, Hungary, on Trump’s ambassador (a business imperative at The Atlantic), and by appealing, perhaps, to the sentiments of his readership.

Hey, I’m generally for openness, but while this could be pretty important for some people, it’s also pretty maudlin:

I’d met the student earlier in the day; he had told me that he was gay, and that CEU was one of the few places in his native country where he could hold hands with a partner without fear of violent recrimination. He pointed in the direction of a nearby bathroom: “The only gender-neutral toilet facility in eastern Europe.”

What does seem clear is that Hungary’s president, Viktor Orban, achieved this move politically, tactically, legally, and by degrees.  It’s not entirely clear that such a move will be wise, long-term.  A reasonable conservative position might be having another center of learning to replace the departing CEU once such steps are taken, perhaps to try and bridge the gap of the Hungarian country farmer and the city cosmopolitan with greater openness.  This, given the history of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the problems with the Nazis and then the Communists.

But, what the hell do I know? Please feel free to highlight my ignorance (it’s deep).

It’s this blog’s opinion that if you’ve taken up a more unthinking liberal American position, you’ll be more likely to agree with Foer’s framing of the issue.  You’ll be more likely to see your political opposition as not only mistaken, but morally supect, and perhaps fascistic and evil.  The-troops-are-gathering-upon-the-horizon kind of view rather than the-merry-go-round-making-another-turn kind of view.

Roger Scruton spent a lot of time in Poland and Czechslovakia helping the ‘catacomb culture’ of learning that had to operate in secret against Communist rule.

Now, it seems, some old fault-lines may be re-emerging.  Let’s hope it’s balanced.

Foer again:

‘Michael Ignatieff had barely unpacked his books when he first heard rumors about CEU’s endangered future, surreptitiously passed to his staff by a sympathetic source in the government. The source whispered about the possibility of an imminent attack encapsulating everything that made Orbán such a vexing opponent. Having studied law at Bibó, Orbán implemented his agenda with legalistic aplomb. He constantly revised statutes to serve his own purposes.’

Here’s Michael Ignatieff introducing Roger Scruton at CEU a few years back, having to explain to many CEU campus radicals why they should even allow Scruton to speak.

You know, maybe that’s part of the problem:

Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry On Eliminative Materialism…

Bryan Magee Via Youtube: ‘Miles Burnyeat On Plato’…Repost: From the Cambridge Companion To Plato-T.H. Irwin’s “Plato: The intellectual Background’

Via A Reader-‘Locke’s Empiricism, Berkeley’s Idealism’

Some Sunday Quotations: (On) Kant, Locke, and Pierce

 

‘Urban Anthropology’-A Tweet And Some Links

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It’s hard to get everything right, in fact, humility and wisdom recognize you must already have some things wrong.  So, which things?

Better to spend more time thinking such thoughts, though what gets one’s blood up enough to write, even, alas, blog posts, is pettier stuff.

Meanwhile, in the Valley of Self, onward ride the avant-garde, merging the arts with rather naked political ideology:

The other day, on the subway, I observed an American male in contemporary business-casual costume. The color of his trousers was richly nondescript.

Urban anthropology and woke cultural criticism is a burgeoning field.  All you have to do is start putting people into identity categories, good and evil, oppressed and oppressor, and you too can get published in the New Yorker.

Better be in a favored identity category, regardless of your talents.

Zoe Satchel is searching for Self through ideological and group membership, environmental awareness, and inward-looking re-affirmation within communities of identity.  She is a leading popularizer, writer and communicator.

She can take these games up to 11 (this is very serious business, and she is very real):

Ralph Lauren logo here.

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Just as many old-guard institutional members of the liberal arts and humanities were overrun by the radical, righteous ideologues of their day, many companies and regular citizens, sooner or later, deal with the consequences.

Politics, ‘culture,’ the arts, and the social sciences are attracting many people who already have a core set of beliefs, ideas and assumptions, and the totalizing true-believers often have undue influence amongst them.

Maybe the popular ‘narrative’ of the 60’s being about personal freedom and individual Self-expression has helped lead to many of the current political and institutional failures, though many rates of change have increased dramatically, often much faster than our insitutions, traditions and laws.

It’s often seemed to me like we were living off the grain in the storehouse.  But that may or may not be true.

As posted, here is an interesting piece of a larger puzzle:

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Subject: ‘Is England Still Influencing America?’ on Hitchens’ book ‘Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies‘ when Hitchens’ was pushing the idea that ’empire’ was the primary transmission, apparently due to his ideological commitments at the time. America must have seemed a classless paradise with institutions well-functioning and ripe to achieve justice and equality for the whole world…for some folks in the Generation of ’68.

*Includes the Firing Line opening theme of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (those damned Germans influencing us) followed by a Michael Kinsley introduction (founding editor of Slate, which has since gone more progressive under current management).

Thursday Quotation-Ken Minogue

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‘Greek political science studied constitutions and generalized the relation between human nature and political associations.  Perhaps the most powerful instrument was the theory of recurrent cycles.  Monarchies tend to degenerate into tyranny, tyrannies are overthrown by aristocracies, which degenerate into oligarchies exploiting the population, which are overthrown by democracies, which in turn degenerate into the intolerable instability of mob rule, whereupon some powerful leader establishes himself as a monarch and the cycle begins all over again.  This is the version of political science we find influentially expounded by a later Greek called Polybius whose main concern was to explain the character of Roman politics to his fellow Greeks; other versions of a political cycle are to be found in Plato and Aristotle.’

Minogue, Kenneth.  Politics.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1995. (Pg 16).

William F. Buckley And Kenneth Minogue Discuss Ideology…Kenneth Minogue At The New Criterion: ‘The Self-Interested Society’

Alas, The New Yorker These Days-A Few Links

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Maybe some deeper currents from Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism are worth thinking about. As I see things, many people who care deeply about the avant-garde also can bind themselves to ever narrower political and ideological commitments.

The journey of The Western Self bears proper care.

According to some folks at The New Yorker magazine, the only answer to injustice is radical and revolutionary equality.  The below tweet exhibits an ideology that really advocates getting unhappy people into the streets, and into people’s homes, with revenge in mind.

To be fair, the logic embedded within much radical chic usually reveals itself to be cool at first, the same old murderously bad doctrinaire utopianism a little later on:

 

Under A Green Moon-Ira Stoll At The New York Sun: ‘Comma in the New Yorker Opens Up Quite a Vista Of Liberal Parochialism’

From The New Yorker: ‘Writing Powered By Amtrak’

Thanks, reader:

Related On This Site:Appeasement Won’t Do-Via A Reader, ‘Michael Ignatieff Interview With Isaiah Berlin’

A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

See Protein Wisdom for a discussion about language and intentionalism, and how it gets deployed.

-Daniel Dennett: ‘Postmodernism And Truth’

Related On This Site:  Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’ Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-’Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’

Repost-Simon Blackburn Reviews Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature” Via the University Of Cambridge Philosophy Department

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Full review here.

The 1st and last paragraphs of Blackburn’s review:

‘When the hoary old question of nature versus nurture comes around, sides form quickly. And as Leavis once remarked, whenever this is so, we can suspect that the differences have little to do with thinking. Still, the question certainly obsesses thinkers, and crops up in various terminologies and under various rubrics:  human essence versus historical accident, intrinsic nature versus social construction, nativism versus empiricism. In the ancient world the nativist Plato held that we come into the world equipped with knowledge obtained in a previous life, while the empiricist Aristotle denied it. In our own time Chomsky has revived the nativist doctrine that our capacity for language is innate, and some ultras have even held that our whole conceptual repertoire is innate. We did not ever have to learn anything. We had only to let loose what we already have.

and:

‘Once we get past the demonizing and the rhetoric, take proper notice of the space between overt psychology and evolutionary rationale for it, and lose any phobia of cultural phenomena, what is left? There are plenty of sensible and plausible observations about human beings in Pinker’s book. But it is not clear that any of them are particularly new: Hobbes and Adam Smith give us more than anybody else. And at least their insights have stood the test of time, unlike that of some more recent work. Consider again the example of media violence. Here it seems that psychologists cannot speak with one voice about its effects. But worse than that, much worse, they cannot even speak with one voice about what psychological studies find about its effects. That is, the meta-studies that Pinker cites flatly disagree with the meta-studies that I mentioned earlier. If this is the state of play, we do well to plead the privilege of skepticism. We also do well too not to jettison other cultural resources too quickly. The depressing thing about “The Blank Slate” is that behind the rhetoric and the salesmanship, I suspect that Pinker knows this as well as anyone else.’

Quite readable.

Related On This Site: Does evo psy have aspirations in creating a sort of secular morality…or non-religious moral and philosophical structure?:  Steven Pinker From The New Republic: The Stupidity Of Dignity…Also, what might the cognitive sciences have against transcedental morality?  Another Note On Jesse Prinz’s“Constructive Sentimentalism”

Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge

Franz De Waal At The NY Times 10/17/10: ‘Morals Without God?’…Repost-Steven Weinberg’s Essay ‘On God’ In The NY Times Review Of Books…Simon Blackburn ReviewsAlan Sokal’s ‘Beyond The Hoax’ In The New Republic…Repost-From Virtual Philosophy: A Brief Interview With Simon Blackburn

Pronouns, Belt Roads & Political Oppression-Some Links

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Theodore Dalrymple At The City Journal: ‘Every Pronoun Must Go‘

Two types of people desire to impose politically correct locutions on the rest of us: those who possess unlimited power and fear to lose it and those who aspire to unlimited power and need a means to attain it.’

Via Marginal Revolution-Andrew Baston:

‘The Belt and Road is really the expansion of a specific part of China’s domestic political economy to the rest of the world. That is the nexus between state-owned contractors and state-owned banks, which formed in the domestic infrastructure building spree construction that began after the 2008 global financial crisis (and has not yet ended).’

From AEI, on the regime in Cuba and regime in Venezuela’s connections.  They’re certainly not helping most people who want food and electricity, aside from political and economic liberty:

‘When Chavez succumbed to cancer under Cuban care, they micromanaged Maduro’s rise to power. Cuban advisors engineered his unlawful presidential campaign and unlikely victory in 2013.’

 

 

Repost-Michael Moynihan At The Daily Beast: ‘The Death Of Stalin’s Songbird’

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In honor of this recent NPR tweet:

I’d like to kindly point readers back to the following:

Michael Moynihan on Pete Seeger:

‘Seeger never really did abandon the dream of communism, despite the inconvenient fact that it had long since (starting around 1918) transformed into a pitiful nightmare. So it was unsurprising that in 1995 he would provide an effusive blurb for a book of poetry written by Tomas Borge, the brutal secret police chief and interior minister of Sandinista Nicaragua (“An extraordinary collection of poems and prose”).’

I was hoping for a piece that would note Pete Seeger’s songwriting talents and decency in dealing with people, but push back against the  hagiography and highlight, you know, the communism.

All together now, 1, 2, and a 1 2, 3, 4…

Wait a minute, wasn’t Bill de Blasio sympathetic to the Sandinistas?

You know, I remember reading a piece at the NY Times about Trotsky’s great-grandaughter, the neuroscientist Nora Volkow:

Free will is a tricky concept:

‘Dr. Volkow generally forswears any interest in politics per se, but midway through a long day of meetings last month she sighed and acknowledged, “science and politics are intertwined.” We think we have free will, she continued, but we are foiled at every turn. First our biology conspires against us with brains that are hard-wired to increase pleasure and decrease pain. Meanwhile, we are so gregarious that social systems — whether you call them peer pressure or politics — reliably dwarf us as individuals. “There is no way you can escape.”

This brought me back to Frenchman of The Left Bernhard Henri-Levy’s piece before the 2008 election:

“And one of the reasons I am so much in favor of [Senator Barack] Obama is that his election might be, will be—because I think he will be elected—a real end to this tide of competition of victimhood, and especially on the specific ground of the two communities, Jews and African Americans, who were so close in the 1960s”

…”The Obama election would reconstitute the grand alliance.”

Hail the grand alliance!

Samuel Bronkowitz may have gotten there first to celebrate the black-Jewish Leftist alliance in Hollywood.

It seems to me you’ve got a few options once you’ve become a member of a favored identity group, as like pretty much all of life, the clock is ticking.

  1. Game the identity system by using it to full personal advantage to try and escape its orbit (understandable, but maybe not the most honorable because of the bad people and the bad in people which come to lead, even if you just want a leg-up because you actually are poor and oppressed).
  2. Play the identity game and pursue your ambition within its orbit.  After all, there’s meaning and purpose in treating enemies as evil in a War and the game of politics as rigged.  Retreat to the ideological purity of your group when attacked and advance upon the enemy positions whenever possible.  Until larger failures and/or the money runs out, rinse and repeat.
  3. Wait around long enough until the same underlying logic is used against you and/or your group, religion and/or ethnicity (Jewish folks seem to be on the outs lately, Muslims in—Asians being disfavored at elite schools). The identity politics game marches onwards towards utopia, against the oppressor.  Being forced to choose between model failures or seeing the world anew outside your model, generally choose to project your personal and group failure onto your enemies, because after all, you’re Human, all too Human.

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It’s not race, it’s class. It’s not ideology, it’s settled science. Look at all this equality!

What do you mean by equality, exactly?  How will you achieve that?

See Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny’s… for a rich account of the times

Related On This Site: What about black people held in bondage by the laws..the liberation theology of Rev Wright…the progressive vision and the folks over at the Nation gathered piously around John Brown’s body?: Milton Friedman Via Youtube: ‘Responsibility To The Poor’……Robert George And Cornel West At Bloggingheads: “The Scandal Of The Cross”…

A Few Thoughts On NPR And Current Liberal Establishment Thinking Under Obama

From FIRE.org-’Federal Government Mandates Unconstitutional Speech Codes At Colleges And Universities Nationwide’

Greg Lukianoff At FIRE.Org: ‘Emily Bazelon And The Danger Of Bringing “Anti-Bullying” Laws To Campus’