Assistant Village Idiot

Rob Henderson recommended Oliver Traldi's essay at City Journal Cea Weaver's Comments Were Shocking.  They Used to be Normal.  He detects a change from even a few years ago what is not allowed to be said about white people.  I guess that is true, but I wouldn't trust it. He notes some ironies, that even anti-wokeness attacks whites now, especially if they are liberal women. Left antisemitism is associated with anti-whiteness; right antisemitism is associated with anti South Asians and East Asians.

He advocates that we should feel pity for this sorry lot instead.  I think my mother used to say this when I was a boy, that I should feel sorry for people who were mean to me. I think that is an obstacle to actual forgiveness, because it makes excuses for them, and breeds condescension in us. The poor dears just can't help it. Not like us.

Many Bible teachers of all stripes will tell you "It's as easy as A,B,C"  while hitting a few texts hard to prove a point.  I am not entirely unsympathetic. Some things about the Bible actually are simple, but people try to evade them with complications. You may run with a crowd like that, as Lewis did.

But generally, people who try to shut you down with A, B, C don't like it when you bring up D, E, and F, never mind the rest of the alphabet. There are puzzling things like Ecclesiastes and Job, which are sort of the Q and X of the biblical alphabet.

Come to think of it, A, B, and C are not simple letters themselves.  A comes in long and short forms, sounds different before R, is silent in some words, and is frequently a schwa. B looks simple at first but is deeply related to P, Bh, and even V. Let's not get too deep in the weeds with C. It can be sounded as "s," "k," "ch," or "sh," and the history of the letter teaches you lots of other history.  A highschooler could wow an English teacher with a paper on the letter C. "As easy as A,B,C" indeed. We would do better to say that the Bible is as complicated as A, B, C. The road goes ever on.

Fangorn is Tolkien's representative for Owen Barfield's theory of the preservation of historical meaning, found in Poetic Diction. "My name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language."

 Word as Sacrament  I had said versions of this before, but my readers thought I may have gotten out over my skis on this one. Good comments

Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong   The second internal link does not work, so I include a different one for What Is It Like to be a Bat?

Tallis Canon

One of the Higher Spiritual Gifts  

And so...

Reminder 

More Guitars 

Don Lemon's excuse for the disruption of worship services in Minneapolis is that Jesus flipped over tables in the Temple - the anti-ICE protestors are just following Jesus.

It's an inaccurate analogy. Jesus flipping the tables of the moneychangers would be more like ripping out the card scanners for a private valet service in the church parking lot. It is part of a larger poor analogy that Jesus was disruptive/protested the culture/opposed the authorities, therefore whenever we do those things we are being like Jesus. Jesus's example in these things is no more than a declaration that such protest techniques are permissible, not that they confer blanket permission.  This is obvious enough that I have to suspect people of bad faith and deceptiveness.  However, we all have such remarkable abilities to deceive ourselves, and they may not be attempting deceit. 

I used to have paranoid patients who claimed to be prophets or the Second Coming who would point out that Jesus was persecuted and disbelieved, they are persecuted and disbelieved, therefore their message is validated*. 

There are competing sets of subtle manipulations in the discussions about whether people are being called Minnesotans** or Americans, whether they are being called Moms/Dads vs Parents, and a host of tricks of video perspective and what is left out of stories.  I'm not happy with much of anyone on this and am not entering that discussion at present. There are manipulations that bother me more than others, but I have not done an Examen on that and better not get ahead of myself.

*Their "message" was nearly always the same, that they were a prophet.  If pressed, the manics would say that "people should love each other," schizophrenics would say that "judgement is coming." That would be about it. 

**Walz, Frey, Smith, Omar, Ellison, Good - none are Minnesotans, BTW. 

Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire had a profound effect on me, the only non-Christian book I can think of that I would say that about. Even after learning that Night is fiction, and known to be so when it was first published, I was still fascinated by what Wiesel had to say about the Hasidic masters. I have given the book as a gift several times, but I don't think it has affected any I gave it to very much.

One episode in particular has reoccurred to me many times, the year that Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev went silent. He had been sociable, humorous, and a great advocate on behalf of the Jewish people to God Himself. He argued on behalf of both individuals and Jews as a whole without rest, imploring God to forgive, because they also had many fair accusations against Him!

The rabbi returned to his previous personality overnight, and the incident is not mentioned anywhere else I can find. Wiesel states in his text it is barely mentioned since, as if no one could bear to think that R. Levi-Yitzchak could be downcast, even for a moment. Today we would simply call it endogenous Depression that remitted on its own and not look too hard for deeper explanations if none presented themselves. The Hasidim are not like that. Still, there are no stories.  Did Wiesel make this up as well? I would be on the far end of the continuum that says that such things should not be done. When we are speaking of the encounters between God and Man even small details might be critical and should not be played with. Yet with the stories of the Hasidic masters there are already porous boundaries between this world and any others. Time, distance, causality, motive - all of these are flexible.

I have always taken comfort in that unexplained year of the rabbi's. Silence strikes, but it ends.  It may have twenty explanations or no explanation. Day follows night. 

Be at peace whatever your lot. This too has been noticed. 

It is not only romantic loves that are unrequited

 

 Why America Needs Fewer Bus Stops at Works in Progress.

Bus stop balancing involves strategically increasing the distance between stops from 700–800 feet (roughly 210–240 meters; there are 3.2 feet in a meter), common in older American cities or in London, to 1,300 feet, closer to the typical spacing in Western Europe, such as in Hanover, Germany. Unlike many transit improvements, stop balancing can be implemented quickly, cheaply, and independently by transit agencies. By removing signs and updating schedules, transit agencies can deliver faster service, better reliability, and more service with the same resources.

In Northeastern cities especially, most people can get to a bus stop within a hundred meters, because different routes can take you to similar destinations. Four blocks feels like a mile to a tourist, but to a resident it's a comfortable distance that does not involve going up and down flights of stair and escalators for a subway.

Relatedly, the desire for walkability in neighborhoods is up against more friction that it used to be.  Houses and properties are larger but have fewer people in them, reducing the density that a retail store might need to stay operative. "Corner stores," similar to what we would call convenience stores now were ubiquitous in small cities when I was young, as were barber shops, churches, schools, music teachers, tenement apartments, and postal dropboxes. It was all walkable not only because we expected to walk more, but because the density allowed it. This remained true even in suburbs built around small-town centers, as many up here were. Not many in the neighborhood I lived in until 2020 walked the mile into town for milk or to have a beer, but I did. Online ordering means fewer customers on foot as well. We want contradictory things in our lives.

I read Sally Satel's PC/MD over 20 years ago, during the height of political controversies affecting me professionally, and found her to be a breath of fresh air. She has a new piece at the American Enterprise Institute's publication Medicine in  the Age of Social Justice.

 One effort to dismantle racism was undertaken in late 2020 by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). As you remember, at first, we had to ration the vaccine. It was clear that people over 65 were undeniably the highest-risk group for getting COVID morbidity and mortality. Almost every country gave them high priority. Yet ACIP told the CDC that it should not prioritize age. Why? Because, the 65-and-over cohort in America was whiter than the general population...

ACIP’s decision was anomalous. Racial politics is not an accepted method of rationing scarce treatment resources. Public health has used various other options, such as basing distribution on who has the best prognosis—that’s classic battlefield triage—or who is the sickest, or on a first-come, first-served basis. (That’s how kidneys are allocated when you need a transplant.)

Remarkably, ACIP did its own calculation and found that overall, more Americans would die, between 0.5 percent and 6.5 percent, if the equity approach were implemented. Older Black people would be among them.

Most of us would call "more people dying" a big deal in medicine.  From personal experience I will tell you that doctors know a lot of bad sociology and believe it. It does influence some decisions.

Cognitive Evolution in Western Europe, by Peter Frost at Aporia 

As average cognitive ability increased, so did the numbers of the highly intelligent. They were becoming a class of their own... Progress is driven not only by individuals but also by communities that can fully appreciate new ideas and put them to good use. Otherwise, new ideas are left to rot on the vine. For example, the printing press wasn’t really invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 — this was when it became commercially viable. 

He places the inflection point around 1350, which naturally suggests a change in culture and thus selection at the time of the Black Death. If you think you would have just killed it as a thinker before then, likely not. Unless you found one of the few niches you could exploit, your knowledge of the solar system, germ theory, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics would not help you much. The larger monasteries in strong networks would be about the only place you would find people who could follow your reasoning after a few minutes, and those would um, at least reduce your chances of passing on your superior genetics. Hanging out with Jews for knowledge of medicine and accounting might have helped, but you would have acquired extra physical risks for that.

Tangent: He quotes a now-standard estimate of 30-60% of Europe's population dying from plague at that timed.  When I was in school "as much as one-third" was the usual phrasing, which crept up gradually to 40 and 50%. The numbers stopped rising about fifteen years ago, when I would read occasional 60 or 70% estimates. I had a brief conversation then with an historical researcher while we were on vacation who lowered his voice and said in not only towns but small regions the numbers reached 80% death, according to cemetery studies. At that point the towns simply folded, no further bodies were buried there, and the survivors moved to functioning communities, disguising the population decreases there. That is getting into the range of New World death from European (and in western South America, Oriental*) diseases.

Extra controversies are dropped in along the way because well, Peter Frost . 

*Pacific silver trade, similar diseases to Atlantic seaboard 

 

Someone said this morning WRT a particular question (not truth in general) "There are no wrong answers." It was meant as an encouragement to not be afraid to speak. I took the point, but that was not what he quite wanted to say.

Because sure there are.  I was reminded of a related line "There may not be True Truth, but there is certainly arrant nonsense." Truth may be hard for mortal man to find, and confidence that we have it quite right may forever elude us, but wrongness often leaps out at us.

Similarly, Meaning may be hard for mortal man to find and confidence that we have it quite right may forever elude us, but pettiness often moves in and takes up all the available space.  I know people who are smart and well-read, but are increasingly posting politically insulting silliness. No, silliness isn't the word I want here.  Silliness has a purpose of refreshment, of giving perspective and even joy. Stupid insults make us ever more stupid ourselves and slowly drain wisdom from those around us.

Reminiscent of my general rule that organisations that brand themselves with the word truth are usually selling opinion that they'd like you to believe is truth (Truthout, Truth*, and of course the Ministry of Truth in 1984) we have Ethical Capital Partners.

*Notable for its campaign to reduce nicotine use by telling teens that their pets might all die because of secondhand smoke. 

 Were Old Norse and Old English the same language? Colin Gurrie at Dead Language Society. 

Naturally, these kinds of claims invite a healthy suspicion. Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper have a great video where they test it out, and reenact a hypothetical conversation between a speaker of Old Norse and Old English as a kind of “experimental linguistic archaeology.”

...But for us the important thing is what they concluded from this experiment, namely that two people trying to make themselves understood to each other across this linguistic divide would indeed have succeeded.

The video is an hour long, but the conversation in one dialect of Old Norse and one of Old English is only a few minutes at the beginning. Gurrie mostly gives them credit that mutual intelligibility is likely, as they claim, but qualifies it that this would depend on context and situation.

This is an area of psychology I mostly know only secondhand. I have had patients both male and female who would weaponise their own children to get back at a spouse, especially around custody issues. I never stopped to tot up which there were more of. When you are working with live people, the specific case looms so large that generalising about the sex, seems inefficient. The Dark Tetrad In Women puts forth the claim that men start in the position of having to prove their safety and innocence while women enjoy an immediate advantage of the societal assumption that mothers are centered on the good of the child. Worse, during evaluations the same behaviors can be interpreted oppositely in the two sexes. 

This results in the same behaviours being described differently depending on sex. Male boundaries are “controlling”; female manipulation is “coping.” Male retaliation is “aggressive”; female retaliation is “defensive.” Male alienation is “abusive”; female alienation is “protective concern.” Her narrative is taken seriously by default, even when behaviour and outcome don’t match. The same actions acquire entirely different meanings depending on who performs them.

For me the problem is that I have heard too many accusations from people who clearly unreliable themselves. In acute psych, one learns too quickly and easily to be suspicious of or even disbelieve everyone.  It is interesting, and I think wise, that Dr. Hannah Spier advocates that we look at evaluating the behavior of women not in terms of what they feel but of what they have to gain.  We should train clinicians for it.

In the sermon on the Psalms the pastor made a distinction between those who do things wrong, those who do wrong things for so long that they have seared conscience and no longer recognise the wrong, and those who are so far gone that they make fun of the righteous.  If you think that first group doesn't sound so bad in comparison - which I guess is true - notice that they are called the wicked, which doesn't sound like an especially neutral term. The sinners and the mockers are the two further categories.  This tracks with what I have observed, though I'm not sure how we measure it. 

 Women in the supermarket ask their teenage daughters their opinion and then argue with them about it.

"Should we get more tacos?"

"No, we still have one and we're not making them this week."

"But I like to have some on hand." (Daughter then blankly silent.)

I have to wonder why she even asked.  

Do they even ask their sons? Come to think of it, I think I have heard women do this to husbands as well.  It must mean something.

 

There is an exquisite joy for me in this harmony.

Imagine, if you will, two bread trucks backed up to each other so the two vertically-opening doors can be lifted so that goods can be transferred from one to the other. They do not quite meet, so that there is about a 20" gap between the two, and one truck bed is about 5" higher than the other. One bread truck belongs to a charity that cannot afford luxuries like maintenance, nor can the warehouse bread truck, which is used instead of the actual warehouse because a largish rat showed up in the bread about 9 months ago and the charity doesn't take the risk - even for the immigrants being given the bread tomorrow who are used to working around rats since childhood.

Moving bread from Truck A to Truck B is one of my three stops every Friday. Six months ago I seriously banged my head on the poorly-maintained warehouse truck's rolling vertical door, bleeding all over the wrapped bread and my own clothes. I banged it again today, because it doesn't quite go all the way up to where it should and I didn't notice. I never do.  It was much gentler this time, and my scalp didn't bleed. But I did shy away from it, lost my balance slightly, which turned into "quite a bit, actually," and somehow bumped against both trucks on my way down.  I did not fall into the 20" gap, but impossibly fell outside the two trucks onto the pavement from about 3 feet above the ground. I landed on my shoulder and elbow and lay there, mentally surveying whether I was lightheaded, which parts of me hurt, etc. (See link.) I resolved not to try and stand or even sit up until I had figured out what was up. It sucks getting old and losing your balance gradually, so that you realise even on your way down that a year ago you could have gotten a foot under yourself and stayed roughly vertical, but now are headed for a very unforgiving place. 

I just barely protected my head with my flannel shirt-sweater-winter coat sleeve! I am very proud of that.

Long story not really short, I ended up in Emergency Services, answering the same questions repeatedly. I was able to try out my wise-ass lines on different audiences as I went. I had it down to a routine by the time I got to the final Physician's Assistant, and the harried staff pretty much loved me and had a brief moment of joy.  My favorite was answering "When did you first notice symptoms?"

"Right about the time I hit the pavement, actually." (While thinking "I can't wait to tell this to someone.")

"Who is the president?" 

"Is this a trick question?" (That got a laugh both times.)

When you were Al Wyman's son, everything that happens might possibly turn into a vaudeville routine. Life is richer.  

 

 The Alaska Wymans left Orlando at 74 degrees.  They arrived in Nome at -22 degrees. With the slight breeze, it was 30 below. 104 degree difference.  I don't even like to hear the words "30 below."  I shiver from that alone.