“… it may be said that a rain-maker may neither have, nor profess to have, any skill outside of his own profession of rain-making. A medicine-man is generally one who uses the pointing-stick or the pointing-bone, the wirrie, the crystal, or the thumie, or the ngathungi. He professes to point the stick or bone at a person and to cause it to enter the body; and it is he who takes it or extracts it from the body, sometimes with the help of Puckowe [footnote: Known as the Grandmother Spirit. She is supposed to inhabit the dark spot, the Coal-sack, in the Milky Way.] …”
The author has very little respect for the rain making profession, which he believes is trickery practiced on the gullible:
“On some clear morning there may be no cloud in the sky, … But the rain-maker notes indications that a thunderstorm is coming, and that it will arrive, say, in three hours. He begins his incantation, and his wife advises all present that to warn their children that a storm is coming. … After a while black clouds appear in the distance, followed by a flash of lightning. … the storm is all around them. The rain-maker leaps out of his wurley, chanting his song of invocation to the spirits of the lightning, the thunder, the rain, and the wind, … ‘You have heard my call… you have come at my bidding.’ The children and youths and maidens are astounded at what they consider a wonderful performance.”
“The Neilyeri … If, for instance, the Frilled Lizard totem tribe is desirous of doing an injury to the Carpet-snake totem tribe, one of its members would seek the aid of another person, say, a member of the Opossum totem tribe. The Frilled Lizard man would instruct the Opossum man to make the acquaintance of a Carpet-snake man. This he would do by asking a Tortoise totem tribe man to effect a meeting.”
The Opossum man goes and hangs out with the Carpet-snake guy for a week.
“… one night the Opossum man would whisper into the ear of the Carpet-snake man a word of warning, saying that the Frilled Lizard man was in possession of a great number of neilyeries, and was preparing them for use. Furthermore, he would say that he had heard that one of the neilyeries was to be used on a member of the Carpet-snake totem family…”
At that point, the Carpet-snake man looks across the fire and sees a Frilled Lizard man making weird hand motions with a pointing-bone, which causes the Carpet-snake man to become anxious and worried and have bad dreams, and the Opossum man keeps saying things to make him more paranoid.
“So the Carpet-snake man decides to consult the doctor, but the cunning Lizard man has already seen the doctor, and has retained his services with bribes.”
A big show is made, and the medicine-man says he has partially healed the man but cannot do it completely, because the spirits are hanging onto his sickness because they want him to die.
“The medicine-man … begins to cry softly, the tears flowing down his cheeks, and then he bid his patient good-bye. After his departure the relatives and friends congregate at the sick man’s wurley, and the latter tells them that the medicine-man is unable to cure him, and that he must submit to the wishes of his loved ones, who are standing beside him ready to welcome him to the Spirit World. So he turns his face toward the west, that mysterious land, and allows his spirit to take flight… Thus the soul passes away through the power of suggestion.”
I know that the “power of suggestion” is suspected to be the mechanism behind which many curses are supposed to work, but I still find the whole scenario rather over-complicated and far too prone to the intended victim deciding not to go along with it, especially compared with the rather fool-proof method of punching the guy you’re mad at.
“The wirrie is a charm stick of wood or bone … It is placed inside a dead human body, and is allowed to remain there until the corpse is decomposed. It is then removed and wrapped in emu-feathers, and surrounded by kangaroo or wallaby skin. Thus prepared, it is regarded as the most dangerous instrument of death. It requires very careful handling, as a prick from the point of it is capable of causing blood-poisoning and death. It may be, and usually is, thrust completely into the body of the victim while he is fast asleep.”
It’s amazing how many people think hunter-gatherers were all non-violent pacifists who never killed anyone or had any wars and, of course, were all nature-loving feminists.
The other amazing thing is that doctors in the 1800s couldn’t figure out that inadequate hand washing was behind the correlation between dissecting corpses in one’s spare time and one’s patients dying. Surely “dead things magically spread death” is just some dumb superstition.
Argh I a am still mad about that.
“The thumie is another death-dealing instrument. It consists of a rope or string made from human hair that has been taken from hundreds of people, alive or dead. It is believed that the minds of these people and their desires, loves, and hatreds are contained in the hair. …
“When one of the elders of the tribe is sick unto death the maker of this thumie asks a brother or a son of the sick one if he will take it to the sick man’s bed and place it under his body, and let him lie on it until he passes from this life into the Spirit Land. Thus his spirit will be absorbed by it. … he gives consent… the rope is wound about him, first at the hips, then round the trunk several times, and up under the arms, then loosely over the back of the neck and the head. One end is placed in the dying man’s hand, and the other is given to a person standing outside the wurley. …”
Australian Aborigines posing in front of their wurley.
“The rope is left for several weeks twined about the corpse, and by this time the body is putrefied or decomposed. Meantime the thumie has absorbed into itself the strength of the spirit of the departed. The thumie is considered to be sensitive to a wish or a desire on the part of the person who makes use of it… ”
“When many persons communicate to the hair rope a wish that some one shall give himself up as a victim to the ceremony that will cause death the sacrifice is willingly made without any effort to resist the demand. So it is thought that not only does the spirit assist in capturing a victim, but that in the pursuit it guides the operators through the forest of scrub, over mountain-tops, into fern-covered valleys, and across rivers, until they reach their destination. They say they walk on air, and that the spits have made or caused the air for a foot above the earth to become solid and soft. The air is moving, and they are being carried along with it in a direct line toward there victim.”
Then there is also dancing around and ritual chanting and drawing of effigies and declarations that the guy to be murdered must die. There follows a very long and much more mundane description of the murderers tracking down their victim on foot, taking lots of care to be extremely quiet and sneaky.
“At about three or four o-clock in the morning all the others arrive separately, one after another, until the whole twelve are assembled. Then the medicine-man unrolls the hair-rope, and places it upon a null-nulla, and the person holding the nulla-nulla wind the hair several time round it, and then creeps along toward the victim in the wurley, who, of course, is sound asleep. They wind the hair rope round his arms and neck in such a manner that they themselves shall not be exposed to the danger of allowing the sleeper to hold the rope with his hand. … Those holding the rope are unanimous in their thought-suggestion. [The victim] arises from his bed as if awake, and comes toward the men who are sitting upon the ground. he walks forward of his own accord, and lays himself upon their knees, with his face turned toward the sky, as if about to rest upon his bed. He remains in this position, and the medicine-nan comes forward, holding in his hand a flint knife made expressly for an occasion like this. He draws the skin of the victim from the hip toward the small rib. He makes a small hole in the body, and thrusts his little finger through it, and scoops out a small portion of the kidney-fat. Then the skin is allowed to return to its original position. The wound is pressed with smooth pieces of wood made for the purpose of keeping the edges together. …”
Nulla-nulla
“Puckowe comes and heals the wound so that o one might be able to see the cut, and she takes from the man all consciousness of what has happened a few hours before
“Puckowe also goes to the place whee the ceremony was performed and removes all signs of the enemy and blood, and make the grass or broken twigs appear undisturbed. Then she returns to her home int he dark spot in the Milky Way. The medicine0man and the other men return to their homes, happy that they have secured their revenge and taken a life for a life.”
Meanwhile, the victim feels awful, and his tribe decides that clearly he has been bewitched with a thumie and had a piece of his kidney removed, so they call upon their medicine man to get their thumie and go take revenge on whichever tribe did it to them.
A great deal of fiction–possibly the majority–is dedicated to the fantasy of having some control over your life. Superman and Batman are strong enough that they can beat up (or otherwise stop) the bad guys, and don’t get sued or put in prison for their vigilante activities. Luke Skywalker gets in a little plane and shoots a laser beam into a hole and thereby brings down an entire Death Star. Voldemort gets pissed off at everyone for treating him shittily and so becomes the world’s most powerful wizard and sets out to make the world burn; Harry Potter uses his own magic power to defeat evil.
One of the most horrible villains in the Harry Potter series isn’t over-the top, sad-backstory Voldemort, but Dolores Umbridge–a plump Hogwartz teacher who dresses in pink, decorates with fluffy pink curtains and china plates with pictures of kittens on them, and makes Harry Potter write apologies in his own blood for, IIRC, having honestly states that Voldemort was back. She is the image of sweetness and propriety while torturing students and helping Voldemort, and there’s nothing Harry and his friends can do to stop her from using the official wizarding world bureaucracy to take over his school, at least until they lure her into the forest and trick her into getting abducted by centaurs.
In real life there are many Doloreses, but no centaurs.
In real life, it is quite illegal to get in a fight (of any kind) with anyone. Even cursing at someone can be “verbal assault.” The desire for revenge against those who’ve wronged you may be a basic human instinct (I am quite certain it is,) but revenge is illegal. Oh, yes, the state can take revenge–the state can lock people up or even put them to death–but ordinary citizens are not allowed to track down miscreants and beat the shit out of them. It is very, very illegal.
What do you do when someone wrongs you?
Here, fill out this form; talk to these people. If your case matches our criteria, something may be done–in months, or years. Here’s some more paperwork.
Nope, sorry, you don’t meet the criteria. There is nothing you can do.
The sheer amount of paperwork to keep track of in American society is overwhelming. I have friends who’ve lived in both America and China; the Chinese do not suffer under half the paperwork burden we do.
“Reducing overhead” remains one of my #1 political agenda items.
Paperwork, bureaucracy, and red tape are crushing our economy. They are probably worse than military spending, welfare, and everything else people hate that the government does combined. And they destroy people’s lives by forcing them to spend their time doing fucking paperwork instead of living.
And we do paperwork because we aren’t allowed to punch each other anymore.
If a mining company destroys a community by dumping poison waste into the local drinking water, the natural consequence is that the affected locals find the CEO, tie him to a chair, and drop him in the river. Today you file a class-action lawsuit and petition the local city officials to switch drinking water sources and groan in frustration as nothing happens for three decades straight.
Living in cities (as most of us do) means coming into constant contact with other people. Some of those people are nice, some are mean, and most are just irrelevant. You pass them on your way to work (or they pass you), ignore them at lunch and try not to make eye contact with them on the street.
Don’t make too much noise; the neighbors might hear you.
I was just talking to someone who was vociferously complaining that their neighbors “slam their car doors” at 2 am. And what will they do? Ask their neighbors to close their doors more softly? Or call the police to report a noise complaint? Probably the latter.
Everyone has to dial down their personalities, close up, avoid the people around themselves to avoid conflicts with the hundreds (or thousands) of people they pass by every day, otherwise lawsuits or police officers get involved.
Cities are intolerable.
There is no power in real life; no one (except maybe lawyers, police officers, and some politicians,) has any power.
For all my disagreement with them, I understand where the BLM crowd and their ilk are coming from: they feel powerless. The system is against them (it’s against everyone.)
Pretty much the only easy way to get power in modern society is to assemble a Twitter mob and attack someone. Maybe you can get them uninvited to a con, or kicked out of a university. Maybe you can just make them cry: power.
It’s the closest we come to bloodying a bully’s nose.
You might say the Twitter mob is the bully.
Yes, that’s the entire point. The bully is the one with the power.
A friend of mine was abused as a child. It’s powerless enough just being a child; everyone else is bigger than you. You must constantly obey others–teachers, parents, even older siblings and bigger kids on the playground. But to be beaten by your parents is another level entirely. And no one saved my friend. They grew up, broken, and devoted their life to becoming the biggest, baddest, meanest person around so they wouldn’t be hurt again.
Of course, then the police got them.
Even when something doesn’t involve conflict–just a simple change that would benefit everyone involved–it’s virtually impossible to get anything done. Take milk. Pediatricians overwhelmingly agree that children should drink regular–4%, full-fat, whole–milk, not low-fat or fat-free milk. The low fat milks are specialty diet products for people who are on a diet, and pediatricians don’t advise putting your kid on a diet unless they truly need to be on one, because calorie restriction can be really unhealthy when your body is supposed to be growing. Despite this, my kids’ school only serves low-fat and fat free milk, and since no one who has the actual power to make purchasing decisions gives a shit that this is actually unhealthy for kids, only an insane amount of protesting on my part (say, convincing a few hundred parents to sign a petition to change the milk) could get them to change the milk to the variety it is supposed to be.
And this is accompanied by the infuriating feeling that people are only pretending to listen, because they never actually change anything.
So the best we can do is put on a movie or pic up a book and read about someone else–the girl who wins the super handsome hunk, the hero who defeats the evil bad guy–who gets to be powerful and control their life.
Ruined church at Freneystown (credit Kevin Higgins)
I noticed something funny while attempting to weed the garden this morning: the most difficult part to weed is right next to (or inside!) the walls. The middle of the garden I can just mow. Two swipes with a fancy cutting machine and the grass and weeds are all under control. In between the carrots and tomatoes I can easily trim, hoe, stomp down the weeds, or just spread ground-cover cloth and top it with mulch.
But getting right up to the wall is tricky. Often the weeds are growing flush against it, if not into it. The mower can’t get in there. You have to pull each weed away from the wall–sometimes through the wall–before you can cut it. Vines love the wall and slowly beak down the physical structure of its surface.
Like the Irish, I have piled up my plowed up rocks into a wall; grass grows between the stones and by the end of the season, the wall has half-disappeared. At that point, just pulling up the weeds disturbs the wall, because their roots are growing under the wall. It’s often faster to just move the wall and then put it back, crushing the weeds. (Or, of course, not letting them grow there to start with.
Without maintenance, the rocks would shelter the very plants that split them apart and pull them down.
Say what you will, the IRA, ETA, and PLO had clear, coherent goals. Goals they were willing to kill babies to achieve, but still goals. You knew what they wanted and could at least hypothetically negotiate with them about it.
Since 9-11, the attacks have been increasingly incoherent. Why would Pakistani-American citizens attack the US in support of one side or the other in a civil war going on in Syria? Why would the children of Chechen refugees attack the country that took them in? Why would a guy living in Afghanistan believe it is anti-Muslim for the US to protect the interests of Muslims in Kuwait? Why move to the EU and then violently object to the laws or foreign policy? For that matter, why the hell would anyone support ISIS?
We may infer a kind of pan-Islamic tribalism which regards the US (and other Western nations) as acting against Islamic interests, but even this is incoherent. Why would Osama bin Ladin feel the need to stand up for Saudi Arabia when the Saudis could do it perfectly well themselves?
In reality, the US prior to 9-11 was pretty agnostic on Muslims. Palestinians were unpopular, due to terrorist attacks against Israel, but countries like Egypt and Jordan attracted the average person’s interest only because of their pyramids and long history. Most US actions in the Middle East over the past 55 years had been motivated by Cold War or “peace keeping” concerns.
The US supported Egypt in the Suez Crisis, keeping the Suez Canal under Egyptian control, an obvious economic boon to Egypt. We have supported, at various times, the Shah of Iran, the King of Jordan, Iraq against Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan against Soviet invasion. We intervened militarily on behalf of Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia.
The US gives a substantial amount in foreign aid to other countries every year; in 2013 (the Wikipedia only lists our foreign aid for 2013 and 2012,) we gave 42.829 billion dollars–or $134 from every American citizen–to Muslim countries from Afghanistan to Yemen. (See bottom of post for my list of aid dollars per country.)
It has only been since 9-11 that Americans really become aware of the “Muslim world” as a coherent entity (if such exists) with which “we” are supposedly in conflict.
Before then, as mentioned before, our concerns were largely leftovers from the Cold War era. The “modernizers,” like Kemal Ataturk, King Hussein of Jordan, the Shah of Iran, and Saddam Hussein were “the good guys,” capitalists intent on modernizing their countries and promoting free market economic opportunities.
I recall a conversation I had with a high-ranking US government official in the weeks before 9-11. He pointed out a picture of the King of Jordan he had hanging in his office, and referred to the king as “a good guy” and “one of our friends.”
The “bad guys” were the Communists. If you’ve read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, then you know that the Iranian Revolution was a communist revolution. The triumph of “radical Islam” in Iran was a Communist revolution against Western Capitalism.
Saddam was our guy against the Ayatollah, until he invaded Kuwait (which may be partially our fault due to our ambassador inadequately conveying the idea that we would invade if he did.)
The Palestinians are supported by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Cultural Marxists, and regular Marxists.
Anti-capitalism is anti-colonialism is anti-modernism is anti-Westernism is radical religious fundamentalism.
The Muslim world is split between two factions, modernizers who want capitalism and are happy to work with the West, and radical internationalist who oppose Western influence and want to return to religious fundamentalism through out the Islamic world.
This is why the invasion of Iraq failed and could not help but fail: we took out our own guy, the modernizer, the capitalist. Who would replace him? Another capitalist? No, we got the opposition party, the fundamentalist, the communist, ISIS.
We took out the capitalist and put the communists in power.
We fucked ourselves, to the tun of 3 trillion dollars and thousands of dead soldiers. (And Iraqis.)
Table of 2013 US Aid to Muslim countries in millions of dollars (I picked Bosnia, on behalf of whose Muslim population the US intervened following the breakup of Yugoslavia, as my “minimum Muslim %” cut-off for inclusion in this list.) My apologies if I’ve missed any.
Afghanistan 5265.95
Albania 298.38
Algeria 207.96
Azerbaijan -63.13
Bangladesh 2669.1
Bosnia 550.04
Burkina Faso 1040.11
Chad 399.33
Comoros 81.9
Djibouti 152.95
Egypt 5505
Eritrea 83.69
Gambia 110.8
Guinea 499.5
Guinea Bissau 103.6
Indonesia 53.3
Iran 131.3
Iraq 1,541.4
Jordan 1,407.9
Kazakhstan 91.3
Kyrgyzstan 536.6
Lebanon 626.4
Libya 129.4
Malaysia -119.4
Maldives 22.9
Mali 1,391.3
Mauritania 291.2
Morocco 1,966.1
Niger 773.1
Nigeria 2,529.4
Pakistan 2174.1
Senegal 982.8
Sierra Leone 443.7
Somalia 991.9
Sudan 1,163.1
Syria 3,626.7
Tajikistan 382.2
Tunisia 713.6
Turkey 2,740.5
Turkmenistan 37.3
Uzbekistan 292.5
Yemen 1,003.5
Today we are continuing with excerpts from Smith’s Aborigine Myths and Legends. As usual, I am using “” instead of block quotes for readability.
In the chapter on religion, Smith tries to claim that Aborigine religion resembles Christianity. “Notwithstanding this lack of ceremonial religion, the believe in a Great Spirit, and the son of this Great Spirit.”
I believe Smith is overstating the resemblance.
Here is the chapter’s next section:
“The Land of Perfection
“On the Plain of Nullarbor [ed. note: probably Latin for “no tree”] there existed a wonderful and beautiful country. From legendary accounts it had the appearance of a city surrounded by four white walls, which varied in height from five hundred to a thousand feet. … Along the top of each wall there were domes and spires. The outside of the walls was composed of white quartz stone, and the inside was formed of a sky-blue stone resembling slate. …
“Thus in the land of perfection there was no need for one creature to prey upon another to live. … So all things lived in harmony. The most remarkable thing about this country was that n one had knowledge of it, or was conscious of its existence until he became ill or diseased in body, mind, or soul. … But before a soul could find entrance into that perfect land of bliss it must pass along a narrow ledge of rock. On one side of this ledge was a perpendicular wall, one thousand feet high, with a perfectly smooth surface. … On the other side of the ledge was a chasm–deep, dark, and unfathomable. …
“Beyond the ledge, upon the boundary line of the Perfect Land, were two cone-shaped crystals, that stood about two hundred feet high and measured about six hundred feet round the base. Round thee two crystals were coiled two snakes … Biggarroo is the good snake, and Goonnear the evil snake. …
Not a picture of Biggaroo or Goonnear, but of a Rainbow Serpent, along with Uncle Larry Kelly, Gumbaynggirr elder
“A sick man journeyed along the road. … At last he reached the place where the two crystals stood. … Biggarroo and Goonnear called softly in their musical voices to the sick man, “This way, my friend. To me you may come. We were once of the same totem as you. Our mothers are one. You are my brother, and I am your brother.” …
“Biggarroo and Goonnear both proclaimed the same message. Biggarroo told the truth, but Goonnear lied. The sick man could not decide which one was the physician. … He took three strides toward the wicked Goonnear. Then his inner soul gave vision to the mental eye and perfect sight to the physical eye… He saw deceitfulness in the wicked, cruel eyes of Goonnear. Straightway he turned and walked into the open jaws of Biggarroo, the physician.
“After he had walked sixty pace or more along the monster’s throat … he decided that he would chose a quiet spot where the grass grew like a green carpet and flowers blossomed upon a bush, and that there he would lie down and rest. …
“He pressed on eagerly until he came to the middle of the snake. There he saw others of the human race. Some belonged to his tribe, and others ti tribes that were strange to him in the outer world. But in this inner world they all spoke one language; each held intercourse as a friend with friend, all being in sympathy. The thoughts of all were pure and free, but the people differed in their endowments. The more intelligent guided those of less understanding. All round in the interior of the snake there was abundant evidence that the human race passes from on from stage to stage until it is made perfect. …
“He awoke and rose up slowly, and walked to the open mouth of Biggarroo. He stepped to the summit of the cone and stood upright, with both hands clasped behind his back, with the dignity of some monarch beholding his kingdom. Suddenly there appeared a third eye on his face. … It was a wonderful eye, a magical eye, and it gave him wide vision and the power of looking through the veil of time. …
“The pilgrim’s soul desired to see the past once more… His single eye, the mirror of the soul, with keen vision traced the course of the sunbeams as they penetrated into the earth. First the frozen water, like a pavement of solid crystal covering portions of the earth, began to melt and flow in liquid state. Then the earth staggered and rolled and trembled as if in dreadful agony. Rocks rose and formed mountains, hills, and valleys, and the silvery liquid rolled between as rivers, streams, and lakes. When this work was completed, the Goddess of Light drew her mantle around her comely form, and retired into the darkness of everlasting night.
“Then the pilgrim’s soul led him again to the open jaws of Biggarroo. … [Biggarroo said,] ‘My child, it is the will of the Father Spirit that you, and all of the human race who resemble you, shall be like unto the Mother Goddess. The only way to attain eternal youth is to dwell within me for a season…’
“The pilgrim slept soundly, and a century passed before he regained his self-consciousness. He stepped forth out of the snake, and once more he walked to the summit of the crystal cone. … He looked, and was amazed to see that the barren earth had changed, that it was covered with vegetation that was very beautiful to behold. … Generation after generation of forest life forms came, grew, decayed, and passed on, and were buried and changed into other forms of matter far below the surface of the earth.
“He stood motionless, it seemed for only a day; in reality centuries came and went, passing the boundary line of the evermore. … The earth revolved, and time went on. The great monsters of the Reptile Age died out. Centuries again passed. Then came a pageant most wonderful to behold–the Bird Age…
“After the pilgrim beheld this wonderful sight, Biggarroo said to him, ‘ Go now, my child; enter the Land of Perfection.” … Then there came a time when a great and mighty storm arose in the south. It raised the water of the ocean with tremendous force, and drove it through the wall of the land of perfection. Then the Father Spirit… transferred the Land of Perfection to the Sacred Land, now known as the Milky Way.”
Hey, everybody, EvolutionistX is now one year old. *Clinks glasses* Here’s to another year!
While you celebrate, please nominate your favorite posts for inclusion in the “favorite posts” section, or suggest a topic for future posts!
Carrying on with our monthly Cathedral Roundup:
Even a critic as skeptical as Edward Said succumbs to the temptation of university, academic employment: the university’s self-legitimations stand unchallenged. … This synthesis of internal and external factors is such that university-based intellectuals are guaranteed autonomy (“specific context”) in the name of the intellectual reduced to a social agent who agrees with Enlightenment–“investigation” becomes social improvement (“promoting human community.” –Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital
I have obtained a copy of the Harvard U. Board of Overseers 2016 election pamphlet. In case you haven’t been following Ivy League politics, Ron Unz of Unz Review fame and some other folks have gotten themselves onto the ballot via petition. Somewhat amusingly, theirs is the “free stuff and ethnic animosity” campaign, banking on Asians being pissed that Harvard (and other schools) discriminates against them for doing too well on the SAT. This position is controversial because not-discriminating against Asians might mean taking fewer blacks and Hispanics who are currently being accepted on “soft” criteria rather than top SAT scores.
You have until May 20 to get your vote in (if you’re a Harvard alum and believe in voting,) so let’s see who’s running.
Eight of the candidates have been proposed by the Harvard Alumni Association Nominating Committee. Five candidates were nominated by petition, and are so identified. … The order of the candidates in each category is determined by lot.
The slate of candidates nominated by the Harvard Alumni Association is half male and half female; ethnically it is 3/4s white, with one black and one Asian candidate (based on black and white headshots). The nominated by petition slate is all male, 2/5s Asian and 3/5s white. (I’m not totally sure about Unz’s ethnicity, but I’m guessing white.)
We’ll start with the Alumni Association nominees.
Kent Walker:
… believes that the breadth of Harvard’s academic excellence uniquely positions it to have an influence far beyond its gates. … “I hope the University will continue its great tradition of integrating discoveries in science and technology, advances in the social sciences, and insights from the humanities to inspire change around the world.” … He has a special interest in global humanitarian and refugee programs. He is active with the International Rescue Committee and Save the Children, and he advises the Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund.”
Ketanji Jackson:
… is a federal judge who serves on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She was nominated for this lifetime position by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2013. As a judge, she has a particular interest in criminal justice and sentencing policy, having served a a vice chair and commissioner of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and as an assistant federal public defender in D.C.
Helena Foulkes:
“I would be honored to contribute whatever I can to Harvard’s immensely important role in improving the health and well-being of people around the world. And I’d value the chance to help encourage students, whatever their career paths, to focus on not just doing well but doing good.”
One of the side effects of spending much of your spare time trying to refine your writing abilities is that you become hyper-sensitive to minor glitches in other peoples’ writing that normal folks probably don’t even notice–like the 11 unnecessary words in Mrs. Foulkes’s two sentences.
John Moon:
…whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Korea, experienced firsthand the benefits of education, and he views educational access as a key to opportunity for others.
(As opposed to everyone else in the country, who didn’t get educations?)
“I would like to help ensure that Harvard remain a world-class educational and research institution that continues to lead globally. Equally important, Harvard should not only remain open to but actively seek out a diverse student body at the College and its graduate schools.”
Harvard is… already doing this. But I like to imagine he’s a stealth Free Harvard, Fair Harvard candidate.
Alejandro Magana:
“I hope to bring a continued international approach to the Board of Overseers, building on Havard’s status as a genuinely international institution, mindful that we continue to attract the most promising students and scholars from around the world and that we continue to encourage truly responsible global citizens.”
Damian Woetzel:
… former principal dancer with NYC Ballet, has combined his creative passion with his master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School to become a leader, public advocate, and activist for the arts.
“The arts are an essential element in education at every level. At a time when universities face pressures to focus on specialized job skill, Harvard is committed to the full range of liberal arts education. As an Overseer, I would relish the opportunity to draw on my national work engaging the arts in society, to focus on Harvard as a leader and model for the value of arts in the university environment.”
He is the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival.
Karen Green:
“My experiences at Harvard literally transformed me.”
I hope she became a butterfly.
“Learning experiences inside and outside the classroom caused me to adopt a much larger worldview and fostered in me a love–not only for lifelong learning, but also for Harvard.”
Darn.
At least her goals are unobjectionable:
“I wold like to work to ensure that Harvard continues to attract the very best students, regardless of their economic circumstances, and remain accessible and affordable to students of modest means.”
P. Lansdale:
… has dedicated her social science career to enhancing the lives of children through teaching and mentoring, research, and translating research into policy and practice. Much of her work addresses family strengths that lead to children’s positive social and educational outcomes in the context of economic hardship. …
“I believe strongly in addressing equity and inclusion, and in building diverse communities that thrive while simultaneously exploring new knowledge and debating various perspectives.”
“simultaneously exploring new knowledge and debating various perspectives.”
Wow. For writing a sentence that terrible, she gets to be my least favorite.
On to the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard petition slate!
First we have Ralph Nader, who was a surprise to me:
“Even with restrictions on portions of its $38 billion endowment, Harvard is easily capable of ending net tuition at the undergraduate level and setting an example for other well-endowed Universities.” …
As an advocate, author and organizer, he has been responsible for starting many enduring civic groups, including Public Citizen, Center for Study of Responsive Law, Center for Auto Safety and the student public interest groups in many states.
He has been instrumental in the passage of numerous health, safety, water pollution, air pollution and product safety laws and agencies, along with the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970 and the historic Freedom of Information act of 1974.
(So how did Nader get involved in all of this?)
Stephen Hsu:
His research areas include quantum field theory, cosmology, and computational genomics. … “As a scientist, university administrator, and technology entrepreneur, I believe I have unique insight into the challenges facing modern research universities.”
Ron Unz:
“Its 38 BILLION endowment has transformed Harvard into one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with tax-exempt annual income twenty-five times greater than net college tuition revenue. Forcing families to pay tuition to a giant hedge fund is unconscionable.”
Unz is trying to play the moral highground card, but does it work? Sure, it seems wrong for Harvard to charge tuition from students who are much poorer than it is, but on the other hand, Harvard is a private institution, not a charity, and can do what it wants. Harvard’s house, Harvard’s rules.
Stuart Taylor:
“My recent work has explored the unnecessary secrecy and unfairness of the higher education admissions process, as well as the decline of of ideological diversity on faculties.” …
Taylor has coauthored two books… Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Fraud. [and] … Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.
Lee Cheng:
“…I support affirmative action, but oppose discrimination. I believe that the University can only become truly diverse, and truly inclusive, by becoming completely transparent about admissions criteria and practices. More transparency has always improved and increased access for the underprivileged.”
… He is known for wiping out “patent trolls.” …
He is married and has 3 children… who will all be identified as ethnically Asian when they apply to college.
The pamphlet also gives us a breakdown of the occupations of the current Board of Overseers: 1 writer (NY Times); 1 lawyer; 4 government (mostly judges); 7 educators (mostly professors); 10 in business and finance; and 7 in non-profits that look a lot like the B&F positions.
Ethnic breakdown of current set based on b&w pictures: 20 white, 10 non-white–4 black, 1 Hispanic?, 3 east Asian, and 2 Indian. 14 men, 16 women.
To be honest, I don’t know how much power the Board of Overseers has to do anything, but the petition is an interesting attempt at a power grab, especially as it rides on the complaint, felt by at least some Asians, that one ethnic minority is being mistreated in order to favor other ethnic minorities.
I think the Republicans had been hoping (before Trump entered the primary race) to capture the Hispanic vote (which is why two of their primary candidates were Hispanics and a third is prominently married to a Hispanic,) in much the same way that the Democrats have captured the black vote. The problem with this strategy, obviously, is that not only is the Republican establishment having a really hard time out-competing the Democrats on “being welcome to Mexican immigrants,” but the rest of the Republican voters want nothing to do with such an agenda.
This leaves me to wonder if there is yet an opportunity for Republicans to ally with Asians (and Indians) who could be convinced that the Democrats are favoring blacks and Hispanics at their expense. Or will that, too, fall flat?
One of the more amusing responses to my post on the recent Moldbug/Lambdaconf affair was Orthosphere‘s objection that conservatives cannot make an anti-homosexuality argument that appeals to atheists because, “if God doesn’t oppose homosexuality then there’s ultimately nothing wrong with it.” In other words, the only argument against homosexuality is religious, ergo, atheists will always be pro (or at least neutral) on the subject.
Yes, I recognize that this does not actually have anything directly to do with the Moldbug/Lambdaconf affair. Don’t worry; it doesn’t matter. My relevant bit was:
Take the most common argument against homosexuality: “God says it is a sin.” Young people are fairly atheist, believe in separation of church and state, and think a god who doesn’t like gay people is a jerk. This argument doesn’t just fail at convincing young people that gay marriage is bad; it also convinces them that God is bad.
By contrast, a simple graph showing STD rates among gay people makes a pretty persuasive argument that the “gay lifestyle” isn’t terribly healthy.
A further argument (made elsewhere, I believe, but on the same subject,) is that atheists simply do not believe in moral absolutes, because only god can command belief in moral absolutes, and since the argument against homosexuality is a moral absolute, therefore, atheists cannot be convinced.
So I thought this would make for an interesting bit of rumination: do there exist any arguments that can convince atheists that homosexuality is bad? And if not, why have Republicans harped on a guaranteed losing issue?
(Since my original post was only using the arguments for and against homosexuality as a means of illustrating a broader point germane to the Moldbug/Lambdaconf topic, I attempted to treat the matter quickly and without much depth. The version of those paragraphs I hashed out originally went on for much longer, but little of that could fit in the post without overtaking it and distracting from the actual point.)
First, can atheists hold absolute moral values?
As a practical matter, we do. We might not be able to justify why we believe something, but that doesn’t stop us from believing it.
For example, I believe that child abuse/neglect/rape/murder is absolutely, 100% morally wrong. I am normally a peaceful, tree-hugging person who feels guilty about eating animals, but harm a child, and I want to see you drawn and quartered.
I feel no compelling need to justify to myself why I believe that. It is obviously true, in the same sense that scraping my knee on the sidewalk is obviously painful.
I also believe other things in a fairly absolutest way, like “don’t torture puppies” and “don’t poop on the sidewalk.”
But to use a source with possibly a little more authority than me, the Spring 2006 volume of Religious Humanism, published by the Unitarian Universalists contains an article titled, “Theistic Moral Intuitions in a Secular Context: A Plea for Ficionalism in Moral Philosophy,” by Loobuyck, which essentially proposes that atheists should “fake it till they make it”:
Some essential ideas about the nature of morality are survivals of Judaic-Christian ideas, and function now outside the framework of thought that made them intelligible. Our ideas of the moral self, human dignity, and the Kantian summum bonum also survive from an earlier conception of theistic ethics. All these ideas became “self-evident” and essential elements of our secular moral discourse, but they belong to theistic metaphysics and do not easily fit into secular metaphysical naturalism.
Secular moral philosophers are confronted with the following dilemma: since the moral discourse is useful and confirms our deepest moral intuitions, doing away with it incurs a cost; a price is also paid for keeping a flawed discourse, for “truth” is a very valuable commodity. … the stance of moral fictionalism makes it possible to keep a discourse while knowing it is inherently flawed. …
Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that the acceptance of the death of God will involve the ending of all our accepted standards of morality, but if we look around, this has not proved correct. As for losing our European morality, the opposite is true. We still think about morality as theists did: as a system of objective prescriptive laws with special authority, and many of the so-called universal secular values are values we can find in the Judaic-Christian tradition. We did not reject the slave-morality, and most people will not see the Nietzschean superman as a paragon of moral excellence. We still believe in the intrinsic and equal value of human being, and moreover, we build a whole construction of human rights on these fundamental but religious ideas. …
some intuitions can be so successful that they can persist as self-evident even when the philosophical context that gives meaning to those intuitions vanished. … Secular ethics is modeled upon theological ethics and talks abut a moral agent in such terms that it structurally parallels the notion of God… someone who argues that morality is a “myth” is seen frequently as maintaining not merely a counter-intuitive position, but also a pernicious or dangerous position. …
we can suggest the stance of “fictionalism”: the possibility of maintaining the discourse but taking an attitude other than belief towards it (disbelieving acceptance.) … atheistic Darwinists live as if their life has and ultimate meaning, we look at our child as if it is the most wonderful baby in the wold, and we think as if there is a real difference instead of a gradual difference between animals and human beings. … We could say that we must live and think as if there are absolute prohibitions, intrinsic values, human dignity and act as if morality is not a Sartrian passion inutile. … fictionalism… helps to save morality in our age of secularization, science, and deconstruction.
Now, I understand that religious folks might not be comfortable with the philosophy of “If we’re all going to act like we have a coherent theoretical basis for our moral intuitions, then let’s just go ahead and pretend we have one,” but as a practical matter, I think that’s what most atheists are basically doing.
Consider that about 20% of Americans are pretty openly atheists, (and about half of the “religious” people seem like they’re just going through the motions.) And yet, these 20-50% of Americans don’t have higher than average rates of murder, theft, abuse, or public defecation than the rest of the country. We also don’t have higher than average rates of sins like gluttony, premarital sex, drug use, or divorce.*
When you encounter an atheist, do you feel a sudden surge of fear that here is someone who might randomly stab you in a fit of Nietzschean ubermenschen glory? Or are you generally pretty confident that this person will act a lot like a normal person who believes in the principles laid down in the Ten Commandments?
To turn this around, to many atheists, the Christian reliance on an outside source for their morality makes their morality seem less absolute. Atheists see, “Do not sacrifice your children to Moloch,” as obvious, not something that needs to be spelled out multiple times. Suppose those verses had not made it into the Bible: would it then be acceptable to sacrifice one’s children to Moloch?
Consider the story of Abraham, Isaac, and the ram. When God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham obeyed. God stopped him, not Abraham’s own moral conscience.
To an atheist, this story is horrifying. You do not murder your children. It does not matter if human sacrifice is common in your neighborhood; it does not matter if god told you to. Murdering your children is always immoral.
I can hear your objection: I’ve misunderstood the story; the point is not that sacrificing your kid is good, but human sacrifice was common in Abraham’s time and God changed this by showing Abraham a new, better way. Yahweh was not like those other gods; Yahweh’s morality is superior to those other gods’.
But this is at odds with the text, in which “the Angel of the Lord” praises Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son:
“Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son. … I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son,17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies,18 and through your offspring[b] all nations on earth will be blessed,[c] because you have obeyed me.” (Genesis 22)
Further, there is that whole affair with Jephthah sacrificing his daughter and not even getting smited for it, but becoming a Judge of Israel.
I don’t think moral absolutes are supposed to have exceptions.
Nevertheless, every religious person I’ve ever met treats “don’t sacrifice children” as a moral absolute; I certainly don’t feel any fear upon meeting a Christian that they might sacrifice me as a result of an awkwardly worded and poorly thought-out vow.
As far as daily life interactions are concerned, Christians and atheists perform remarkably similar moral actions.
We ascribe, however, different origins to our beliefs. Atheists attribute theirs to “common sense,” Christians to “God.” Perhaps common sense is actually God or was created by God, allowing atheists and theists alike to act like moral beings, or perhaps religious people have just as much common sense as everyone else.
Personally, I think morality is basically instinctual.
First, most people–atheist or theist–tend not to think too much about philosophical issues like, “What if we had a 2-ton Hitler on rollerskates to push in front of the trolley? Then would it be moral?” We all use mental shortcuts that make dealing with 99.99% of everyday life easier rather than spend time thinking about the 0.01% exceptions. Likewise, I am content to proclaim that it absolutely morally wrong to torture babies without wasting my time trying to think up extremely rare exceptions.
Second, people who murder their own children have historically probably been evolutionary failures, while people who have a strong urge to nurture and protect their children have had better luck at actually passing on their genes to the next generation. As a result, any genes that lead to murdering one’s own children probably get selected against, while genes that lead to caring for one’s children are selected for.
The result is an instinctive desire to protect and care for your children. This desire to care for your children is so strong that it can even be triggered by baby animals, cute toys, and other people’s unborn fetuses.
Obviously there is some cultural variation on this; some groups today still practice ritual child sacrifice, though typically apparently not of their own children, but of other people’s children whom they’ve kidnapped. But I don’t live in one of these societies; I live in a society where human (and animal) sacrifice has never been practiced. So for me, at least, child sacrifice is a giant NO.
We can extend this argument to all sorts of behaviors, like not stealing from your neighbors, that have lead to evolutionary success over the generations. In short: if your morals lead to you dying out without descendants, then your morals die with you. If your morals lead to you leaving lots of descendants, then lots of people end up believing in your morals. We don’t even need a genetic mechanism to cause this, but there is plenty of evidence in favor of one.
“Evolutionary morality” (and “game theoretic morality”) are the keys Loobuyck needs to unlock why atheists still have moral intuitions.
Second: Having established that atheists do basically act like they believe in moral absolutes, do there exist any arguments against homosexuality that would actually work on atheists?
Now, obviously, the argument, “God says so,” does not work with atheists. (It doesn’t always work on Christians, either, given that the New Testament forbids women from braiding their hair or wearing pearls, and commands them to keep their hair covered.) When atheists do engage in moral reasoning, they tend toward utilitarian arguments–X makes people happy, Y makes people sad, therefore X is good and Y is bad.
There are many critiques of utilitarianism, especially when it comes to experiences outside of people’s normal, everyday lives, but it’s not a bad way of articulating why you shouldn’t hit your brother. Therefore:
Potential Argument A: “Homosexual Happiness”
If you can demonstrate that homosexuality causes harm/suffering and that somehow convincing people not to be gay prevents this harm/suffering, then you have a good chance of convincing the atheists.
So far, people have not convincingly made this argument. Yes, gay folks have high suicide rates, but no one has convincingly argued that being gay causes this and that, say, outlawing gay marriage or convincing gay people that homosexuality is wrong lowers their suicide rate. By contrast, the other side argues pretty loudly that gay people are less happy when you tell them they’re immoral, and more happy when you say they aren’t.
Of course, you do not actually have to prove a point so much as argue it loudly and effectively. Most people are not strict utilitarians who check the statistical validity of other people’s arguments–they just react to the funny pictures they see on TV and process things in a fairly instinctual way. If they are surrounded by the narrative that gay people are happy being gay and that only meanie pantses who make them sad are opposed to them, then they will be fine with gay people. If they are surrounded by the narrative that gay people are miserable, rape children, and die of AIDS or suicide unless convinced to reject homosexuality, then they will (probably) view homosexuality as a weird aberration.
Outside of San Francisco and a few scattered neighborhoods across the US, most people encounter very few gay people in real life, just because gay people are a relatively small % of the population that is highly concentrated in a few places. (The 10% statistic turns out to be false.) Perhaps you know 2 or 3 gay people–of those, maybe one reasonably well. What do you know, genuinely, about them? How happy are they? How productive? How much do they give back to their community or civic organizations? By contrast, how many gay people have you encountered in books, TV shows, movies, or newspapers?
I’ll go ahead and admit it: far more of my “knowledge” of gay people comes from fiction of various sorts than from real life. The random vagaries of life simply have not led to me knowing that many gay people.
(Which means that that my entire conception of “what gay people are like” could be wrong.)
You will point out that there are practical issues with influencing the media narrative. So there are. No one ever said convincing people was easy. But conservatives do get enough opportunities to share their point of view that people are amply familiar with their arguments on the subject of homosexuality–so I don’t see this as a good reason to use arguments that don’t work.
Potential Argument B: “Disease Rates”
Whether you are concerned for gay people themselves or just concerned about diseases, gay people do catch STDS at a higher rate than straight people. Personally, I happen to really dislike being sick, so anti-disease arguments work pretty well on me.
An anti-disease argument doesn’t have to be rational. My fear of Ebola may not be rational, because I worry about it even though no one in my entire continent, to my knowledge, has the disease. I just think Ebola is really scary. Likewise, put some disease statistics and quotes from “bug chasing” forums on TV or in the papers every so often, and you’ll completely disgust and horrify people. Even atheists will want to hear about “gay rights” about as much as the average person wants to hear about poop.
Yes, a libertarian would argue that it’s gay people’s business if they want to engage in high-risk activities, but it does not follow that lots of people would therefore go out of their way to advocate in favor of gay peoples’ rights to do risky things. I believe that people have the right to bathe in pudding if they feel like it, but I don’t spend much time advocating it.
Further, most people are not libertarians, which is why the libertarian candidate never gets to be president.
Someone partial to gay people would point out that bug chasers are not representative of the gay population as a whole and that non-promiscuous gay people who use condoms don’t get a bunch of diseases, but since this is an argument based on triggering peoples’ instinctual disgust mechanisms, they’re probably not going to hear anything over their brains going “EW EW EW.”
Most people act on instinct, and one important instinct that’s pretty solidly embedded in most people is to avoid disease vectors. This is why poop and rotting corpses are icky–so icky, you might actually throw up from being near them.
So, even though someone could make all kinds of reasonable counter-arguments about personal liberty, medical advances, safe sex, monogamy, etc., you can may be able to hijack people’s instinctual fear of disease to make them completely unwilling to even listen to counter-arguments.
Potential Argument C: “So Few Homosexuals”
Americans vastly overestimate the number of gay people–when Gallop asked people to estimate the % of people who are gay, 33% of responders estimated that more than 25% of people are gay; 20% of responders estimated that 20-25% of people are gay. Only 9% of people got the correct answer, “Less than 5%.” (Actually, about 3.8% of people are gay.) Of these, about 60% say they would like to get married–or 2.3% of Americans.
Let’s step back for a moment and wonder at the fact that liberals and conservatives alike have devoted untold hours and dollars to fighting over the legal marriage status of 2.3% of Americans while 8% of people are unemployed; in 2013, 2.5 million American children were homeless, and 15% of Americans live in poverty and face “food insecurity.” 52% of Americans will be victims of multiple violent crimes in their lives; 1 in 30 black men will be murdered. About 50% of marriages end in divorce; the Iraq war cost between 2 and 6 trillion dollars (not to mention the continuing cost of fighting ISIS). And if you are the kind of person who cares about people in other countries, there are a few billion poor people in the third world who would appreciate some help.
In other words, there are a lot of problems in this world that a reasonable person might consider higher priority than whether or not gay people should be allowed to “get married” or have “civil unions.”
Why let the other side take the moral high ground? Whenever the subject comes up, just divert to something else that affects far more people and claim that your opponent is trying to use an obscure, tiny issue to distract from the real problems facing America.
Potential Argument D: “Functional Purpose”
This is very close to an argument that conservatives do make, which is that the purpose of marriage is to produce children. This, of course, sounds like total nonsense to young people, who don’t think marriage has a function other than to serve as a means of saying “we like each other.”
Skipping over the potential misunderstanding, let’s talk about things like insurance benefits. Why does one spouse working entitle the other spouse to health insurance?
So that one spouse can work while the other takes care of the children. “Taking care of children” and “making socks” are both activities that someone has to do for society to keep functioning, but we recognize that factories produce better socks and parents produce better children, so we try to keep sock-making in factories and child-rearing at home.
Sometimes people get confused on this point, so I’m going to spell it out in more detail: not all valuable work is paid. You could pay someone to wash your dishes, sweep your floors, cook your meals, and take care of your children, or you could do all of these jobs yourself and get the exact same benefits. These are all things that have to get done; sweeping the floor does not become “legitimate work” just because you pay someone to do it and stop being “legitimate work” the moment you do it yourself.
100 years ago, most people lived on farms and did almost all of their work themselves–they planted their own crops, built their own houses, installed their own plumbing (or outhouses), sewed their own clothes, cooked their own food, and raised their own children. Few people were formally employed. The vast majority of economic production occurred–and was consumed–within families or small communities.
But this does not mean the economic production did not occur.
Today, the locus of employment has shifted outside the home–to factories, offices, shops, etc.–and we have decided to route many valuable social functions–like health insurance–through paid employers.
This runs into a problem, because some people (mainly women) are still engaged in the valuable economic work of raising children and running households. Moms get sick, too, so the health insurance men get through work extends to cover their non-working spouses.
The same is true of various other legal/inheritance benefits accorded by marriage–they basically exist to protect the non-working spouse who is raising children instead of engaging in paid employment.
Health insurance is not some special perk society decided to give people just because they’re in love. You’re not supposed to marry someone just to get health insurance benefits. That is an abuse of the system. If you have no intention of having children (or cannot have children,) then there is no reason for you to stay home while your spouse works: you can get your own job and qualify for your own health insurance.
Of course, some gay people do have children, whether biologically or through adoption, and I see no reason to deny these children health insurance, inheritance, etc. But even fewer gay people want children than want to get married–only about 16% of gay people have children.
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The point of this post has not been give any of my own, personal opinions on the morality of homosexuality or gay marriage, but to explore potential arguments on the subject besides “God doesn’t like it.”
Some of these arguments are appeals to emotion or otherwise dishonest, but they still exist; people could have used them. Instead, Republicans have chosen for the past 20 years to focus primarily on an argument that comes across to young people as violating the establishment clause of the Bill of Rights, which I suspect has done more to alienate young people than convince them.
No “open borders;” decrease low-IQ immigration in favor of high-IQ immigration
Decrease paperwork/bureaucracy/over-legalization/unnecessary government (or civil) intrusions into people’s lives
1 & 3 have been priorities for approximately forever; on point 2, I’ve changed over the past decade from favoring the libertarian position of fully open borders to favoring the “Hive Mind” hypothesis that the nation’s well-being depends on our % of smart people.
Number 3 may require explanation–there is just a tremendous amount of overhead gumming up everything. I think small business owners get this–every new regulation ends up being yet another hour they devote to paperwork instead of business. The net result is that regulations are, effectively, a form of taxation–a tax on time and ability to act.
I don’t think the general impression that it is nigh-impossible to get stuff done these days is just an illusion.
Imagine, for a moment, running a small business in the late 1800s. There were no payroll taxes, no insurance requirements, no pensions to keep track of, no deductions, no environmental impact surveys, no chance of getting sued over the ethnic/gender composition of your workforce, far fewer licensing requirements, etc.
Not that I want to die in a fire or from drinking polluted, feces-laden water, but there is a cost-benefit tradeoff to every regulation.
The Empire State Building, for example, was built in little more than a year, between January 22, 1930 and April 11, 1931. Wikipedia does not tell how much time–if any–was spent getting building permits prior to construction, but does note that the architectural plans were drawn up in two weeks.
By contrast, after the 9-11 attacks, folks began drawing up architectural plans for the new WTC building in 2002 and finally finished their plans, 3 years later, in 2005. Construction began a year later, in 2006, and finished in 2013. Tenants were finally allowed to move in yet another year later, in 2014–a mere 12 years after the project began.
The WTC cost an estimated 3.9 billion, or about $1,500 per square foot (in 2007). The Empire State Building cost $637,172,100 in 2016 dollars, or $283 per square foot. (Assuming square footage is calculated the same way for both buildings.)
On the plus side, it looks like no one died in the construction of the new WTC, whereas 5 people died building the ESB (though it looks like two people almost died and had to be rescued by the fire department.)
In a more mundane example, we frequent a local park with a new playground and a lovely, unoccupied restaurant building. It has stood unoccupied for several years, ever since the park opened. Every day hundreds of children and their parents play here; all summer thirsty children and their parents would love to buy lemonade and hot dogs and snow cones, but no one sells them.
Finally an enterprising Mexican appeared with a cart, selling corn on the cob and lemonade. Why corn? I don’t know, but it was good corn. Did he have a license? Was he legally allowed to have his cart there? Probably not; he disappeared after a couple of months.
Now there is no one selling lemonade; the restaurant is still empty.
The legal/judicial system is horribly inefficient. Consider the time, expense, and stress endured by a person falsely accused of wrongdoing in attempting to establish their innocence. False accusations should not destroy innocent people’s lives, but they do.
A female acquaintance of mine was accused of domestic violence and arrested by the police. The whole matter was bogus and the police dropped the case without even going to trial, but in the meanwhile she lost her job, was evicted from her apartment, lost numerous friends, had to spend a tremendous amount of money (and time) dealing with the case, and faced the possibility of actually going to prison. Basically, it ruined her life.
A friend who had started a small tech company was sued by a much larger company for patent infringement. The friend won the case, because none of the tech they used had anything to do with the patents in question, but the expense (and time they had to spend on it,) nearly destroyed the company.
The average person has neither the skills nor the expertise to defend themselves in a patent case; they must hire a lawyer, and lawyers aren’t cheap. Larger corporations can afford to throw bogus IP infringement cases at smaller companies until the cows come home or the smaller companies are driven out of business–obviously not how we want free-market economic competition to work.
As for #1: I don’t want to die in Syria. I don’t want my friends or relatives to die in Syria. I don’t want other Americans to die in Syria.
I suspect the chance of war is, from lowest to highest:
Sanders < Clinton < Trump < other Republicans
Trump has a belligerent personality, which makes me worry that he’d start or get involved in a war, but from what I’ve seen so far of the debates, he is ironically less inclined to get into a war than the other Republican candidates.
My impression of Open Borders sentiment:
Trump < other Republicans < Sanders < Clinton
Trump’s plan to build a wall seems a bit 30 years too late if you’re worried about Mexican immigration, (and enforcement might cost more than the migrants, anyway,) but Clinton and Sanders seem likely to greatly expand low-IQ immigration.
Nobody campaigns on an anti-paperwork platform, but Trump seems like the kind of guy who’d hate regulations on businesses.
The Democrats have the good luck to have two candidates they can feel truly enthusiastic about–Hillary as the first serious female presidential candidate; Sanders as the first Socialist. After all, when’s the last time you heard someone say, “I’m a Democrat, but I don’t believe in female empowerment/expanding social programs to help the poor”?
Republicans, by contrast, are amusingly divided over Trump. Sure, he’s the front-runner (as of when I wrote this,) with a fairly sizeable lead over the other candidates. And Trump’s supporters tend to be very enthusiastic, which is a good thing for getting your votes to actually make it to the polls come election day.
But the Republican leadership appears to be losing its shit over the matter.
If the Trump contingent should succeed in this endeavor, the party would not emerge refreshed or improved; it would be summarily returned to where it was languishing back in early 2009. And if that should happen? Well, suffice it to say that it would be an unmitigated, unalloyed, potentially unsalvageable disaster. For the first time in years, the Right’s defenses would be completely destroyed, perhaps never to be rebuilt. …
Now is the time to throw everything at Trump, and to stop this disaster in its tracks. Will our children wonder why we were so reluctant?
Incidentally, when I say “everything,” I really do mean everything. Tomorrow night, as they stand on either side of Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz must find their resolve and all-but-machine-gun the man to the floor.
I feel like the author needs a reassuring pat on the head. Don’t worry, your children really won’t care who you voted for in the primaries when they were five.
A group of Republicans is moving quickly to research ballot-access requirements for independent candidates in case Trump wraps up the GOP nomination next month.
Sure, Trump is loud and rude and disreputable, but more importantly, he came out of nowhere to upset the Republican front-runners simply by loudly opposing illegal immigration from Mexico.
Speaking naively, the odd thing is not that Trump opposes illegal immigration, (which is, after all, illegal because people oppose it,) but that no one else was making it a prominent part of their platforms. But in retrospect, in a field where the establishment darlings were Cruz, Rubio, and Jeb–two Hispanics and one guy married to an Hispanic–it seems clear that the Republican elites had decided on a strategy of courting Hispanics.
After all, if Dems have black voters, why shouldn’t Repubs have Hispanics? Hispanics are 17% of the population (compared to Blacks at 12 or 13%)–nothing to sneeze at, demographically.
The problem with this strategy is that while liberal whites may get excited about the prospect of voting for a suitable black or female president, conservative whites aren’t excited about the prospect of voting for the nation’s first Hispanic. The Hispanic Vote might “save” the Republican party by helping it to victory in future elections, but conservative whites care more about their own self-interest than the continued existence of a particular political organization. Let it go the way of the Whigs; life will go on regardless.
The Republican field before Trump entered the race was almost shockingly dull and uninteresting–not good for winning. While I have nothing against (or for) Jeb as a person, who in their right mind would consider him for president? Is the party so lacking in leadership and foresight that the best they can come up with is literally the little brother of the previous Republican president and son of the Repub. before that? No, a good leader should go to waste just because other members of his family were also talented, but there are a great many positions besides president in which a truly talented person can serve his country–Secretary of State, Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice, governor, etc.
That people find the Trump’s success at all surprising is, well, strange. What, Republican voters aren’t keen on illegal immigration? I am shocked, absolutely shocked! It is like discovering that Democrats think that Black Lives Matter. What else shall we learn, that Libertarians favor individual freedom?
The Republican leadership is in direct opposition to its own base. The leaders want to promote their pro-Hispanic strategy; the base is anti-immigration. Hypothetically, Hispanic voters who are legally in the country might resent people who break the law to do what they jumped through hoops and worked to do legally, but as a practical matter:
People who oppose illegal immigration often oppose legal immigration;
People who oppose illegal immigration are often opposed to Hispanic migrants in general;
Hispanics immigrants may simply desire more Hispanic immigration, without caring about the legal details.
All of which makes the Trump campaign potentially problematic for the Republican elites.
As a means of memetic conservation, religions are amazing.
The Catholics still release all of their official documents in Latin, a language that disappeared in its natural habitat about 1,500 years ago (and conducted all of their rituals around the world in Latin until 1964).
Many Protestants, while not quite as archaic, prefer the now fancy sounding language of the King James Bible, with its “Thou”s and “art”s. (And many other Christian denominations preserve other archaic languages, like Koine Greek in the Greek Orthodox Church, Coptic in Coptic churches and Church Slavonic in, I guess, Slavic churches, and German among the Amish.)
Islam preserves the 7th century Arabic of the Qu’ran (apparently “written” Arabic and “spoken” Arabic are quite distinct, somewhat like if everyone in Italy spoke “Italian” but wrote in 7th century church Latin.)
Diasporic Judaism preserved Hebrew for almost 2,000 years after the destruction of the Temple, and managed to do a good enough job that it has been revived and is now the official language of Israel. (I think Arabic is, too.)
Sanskrit plays the same role for Hinduism, Jainism, and some Buddhist sects. The oldest known work in Sanskrit, the Rigveda, was composed a bit over 3,000 years ago, though I do not know if modern Sanskrit speakers find the Rigveda any more intelligible than I find Beowulf. [note: see the comments for a better explanation of the origins of the Rigveda.]
Theravada Buddhism uses Pali as its main liturgical language, and prefers its scriptures to be studied in the original Pali. In Thailand, Pali is written using the Thai alphabet, resulting in a Thai pronunciation of the Pali language.
… In some Japanese rituals, Chinese texts are read out or recited with the Japanese pronunciations of their constituent characters, resulting in something unintelligible in both languages.[1]
(Apparently the Tamil language is also important in Hinduism.)
If you want to preserve a language, write some religious texts in it and then insist that everyone has to learn your language in order to participate in your worship services and go to Heaven.
On top of this, the Christian Bible preserves the Jewish scriptures that predate it. You’re probably so used to this that you don’t even really notice it, but it’s actually pretty weird. So you’re going along in your Christian Bible study, learning about Jesus and whatnot, and then there are these obscure bits of Judean political history from 1,000 BC or something. Like that time King Ahab wanted to buy a field but the farmer wouldn’t sell it to him, so the queen had the farmer executed and then he took it. Or that time in Judges when Ehud assassinated King Eglon.
The Bible also preserves the Jewish Law, which, of course, Christians don’t actually follow. EG:
When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Deuteronomy 25:11-12
Okay, so if your wife tried to physically drag you out of a fight by your testicles you would probably be in horrible pain as a result, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of situation that comes up very often. But remember, the law also bans pork. I can understand why the Jews think it’s important that their religious book still have all of the notes about not eating bacon or boiling goats in milk or wearing mixed fibers, because The Law is still really important to them. But why on Earth do Christians?
Then take a festival like Purim. Purim is kind of like the Jewish Halloween, but with more Bible and no devils. Kids dress up in costumes, eat a bunch of sweets, go to synagogue, listen to the story of Queen Esther, and everyone makes a bunch of noise to “blot out the name” of some Persian court official who tried to massacre the Jews about 2,500 years ago.
Of course, if there weren’t a holiday devoted to the subject, no one would remember the guy’s name at all; at this point, we’re not even sure if the story is true.
The fact that Judaism is considered a “major world religion” at all is because a chunk of it is inside Christianity; there actually aren’t that many Jews. More people practice some form of Voodoo/Vodun than Judaism, but when’s the last time you saw Voodoo listed as a major world religion?
I got laughed at in school for listing Voodoo as one of the 5 major world religions.
The Christmas rituals (gifts, tree,) also date back thousands of years to ancient Roman and German pre-Christian practices.
And, of course, there’s morality. Obviously many liberal branches of religion toss out moral precepts and adopt new ones as they see fit, but the presence of a line in the text explicitly banning (or encouraging) something seems to have a long-term effect. (Take snake-handling Christian sects, which take the line in the Bible about Christians being able to drink poison and handle snakes without getting killed very seriously.)
Personally, I think the Gospels have a very socialist feel to them. Of course, I am applying a completely anachronistic political label to something that predates “socialism” by nearly two millennia, but I think you know what I mean. All of that business about “give away allof your earthly goods to the poor and come follow me,” or “it is easier for a rich man to fit through the eye of a needle than to enter Heaven,” or the disciples holding all of their property in common in the Book of Acts.
As a result, Christianity has created many charitable or even socialist movements over the past two thousand years, and will probably keep doing so. The “Christian Communists” of the 1800s, like the Shakers, are one set of examples.
Secular “religions” can be memetically conservative, too. Take the American “Thanksgiving”–every year, people get together with their families to eat turkey (the ritual feast) and watch football because approximately 400 years ago, some Pilgrims had a good harvest and so didn’t all die in the winter. Most of us probably aren’t even related to the Pilgrims, but we do it anyway.
Much of the time, the explicit justification for religious rituals has little to do with why people actually observe them. Most Americans don’t really care about the Pilgrims one way or another; I bet most Jews don’t care about Haman anymore, either. Most Catholics probably think it’d be fine if the church just started publishing official documents in Italian, and even atheists give each other gifts on Christmas. The function of these rituals is often very different from their form–Thanksgiving is really about family togetherness, not Pilgrims. Likewise, the current push to get rid of Columbus day and replace it with Indigenous Culture Day isn’t really a statement that indigenous peoples were better than Columbus (after all, the Aztecs were cannibals.)
The functions of religion are myriad, but marking important life transitions, assuaging fears of death, teaching morality, and binding the community together are all obviously significant. Perhaps religion functions better when the memes are older than when they are newer. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether or not you can understand the liturgy, but a liturgy that gives you the impression of being connected to your ancient ancestors may function better than one that doesn’t; a generic “Thanksgiving is a time to be with our families,” may not work as well as a “Thanksgiving is a celebration of the feast between the Pilgrims and the Indians.”
Do you have any other good examples of this phenomenon?
Basically: Everyone outside of Africa has some Neanderthal DNA. It looks like the ancestors of the Melanesians interbred once with Neanderthals; the ancestors of Europeans interbred twice; the ancestors of Asians interbred three times.
Small amounts of Neanderthal DNA also show up in Africa, probably due to back-migration of people from Eurasia.
Denisovan DNA shows up mainly in Melanesians, but I think there is also a very small amount that shows up in south east Asia, some (or something similar) in Tibetans, and possibly a small amount in the Brazilian rainforest.
Now some kind of other archaic DNA has been detected in the Hazda, Sandawe, and Pygmies of Africa.
