Quotulatiousness

August 27, 2021

Updating Rahm Emanuel’s notion about not “wasting” a crisis — don’t let a crisis end

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, John Tierney considers how political leaders and public health officials across the western world are going Rahm Emanual one better by continuously extending the Wuhan Coronavirus crisis:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But the nation’s crisismongers aren’t about to relinquish their hold over the public, so they’ve set new goals that are as unachievable as they are unnecessary and harmful. Making vaccines available to every American adult is no longer sufficient; now the crisis cannot end until the entire population has been vaccinated. Instead of focusing efforts on vaccinating the vulnerable, officials obsess on compelling universal obedience, even if that means squandering vaccines on people who already have acquired natural immunity or are at minimal risk of serious illness.

The same progressives who regularly denounce “systemic racism” and “Western imperialism” are now enforcing policies that disproportionately punish minorities and the poor, both in the United States (the majority of black teenagers and young adults in New York have been banished from much of public life by the city’s new vaccine-passport policy) and in the rest of the world. The hypocrisy was deftly captured in a tweet by Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist: “If you favor university vaccine mandates for low-risk American and European students, when there is not enough vaccine for older high-risk people in Asia, Africa and Latin America, please remove your #BLM tags from your Twitter/Facebook profiles.”

Children are being sentenced to another round of unnecessary mask mandates and probably more school closures based on evidence-free warnings from Anthony Fauci and others that the Delta variant will be more deadly to them than the original virus. While the variant is more infectious, the evidence does not show it to be any more lethal. In fact, the current mortality rate among American children with Covid is lower than it was last year — and last year many more children died of the flu than of Covid. One of the most thorough studies, in England, shows that the survival rate for those under 18 with Covid is 99.995 percent. But instead of emphasizing these reassuring statistics, public-health officials like Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general, keep looking for new ways to scare parents and children.

August 19, 2021

How much formal school time can kids miss before it impacts their long-term prospects?

Filed under: Education — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Many years ago, when my son went to Kindergarten, I discovered that a lot of other parents were concerned that if their child missed much — if any — time in class, it would utterly destroy their chances of whatever hopes and dreams they may cherish for a fruitful and productive life in the working world. And by “concerned” I man “bat-shit insanely worried” that even a day or two would be enough to blight the child’s life forevermore. And remember, these were the parents of Kindergarten or Grade 1-3 children. In the time since then, I doubt very much that parents have become more relaxed in this regard, so the re-assurances from Scott Alexander are well-timed, but may still not reach the people who most need to hear them:

Illustration from Harvard Magazine via Twitter.

Back when the public schools were closed or online, someone I know burned themselves out working overtime to get the money to send their kid to a private school. They figured that all the other parents would do it, their kid would fall hopelessly behind, and then they’d be doomed to whatever sort of horrible fate awaits people who don’t get into the right colleges.

I hear this is happening again now, with more school closures, more frantic parents, and more people asking awful questions like “should I accept the risk of sending my immunocompromised kid to school, or should I accept him falling behind and never amounting to anything?”

(see also this story)

You can probably predict what side I’m on here. Like everyone else, I took a year of Spanish in middle school; like everyone else who did that, the sum total of what I remember is “no hablo Espanol” — and even there I’m pretty sure I forgot a curly thing over at least one of the letters. Like everyone else, I learned advanced math in high school; like everyone else, I can do up to basic algebra, the specific math I need for my job, and nothing else (my entire memory of Algebra II is that there is a thing called “Gaussian Elimination”, and even there, I’m not sure this wasn’t just the name of a video game). Like everyone else, I once knew the names and dates of many important Civil War battles; like everyone else — okay, fine, I remember all of these, but only because the Civil War is objectively fascinating.

And I think that’s the whole point. We learn lots of things in school. Then we forget everything except the things that our interests, jobs, and society give us constant exposure/practice to. If I lived in Spain, I would remember Spanish; if I worked in math, I would remember what Gaussian Elimination was. I think a lot of the stuff you’re exposed to and interested in, a sufficiently curious child would learn anyway; the stuff you’re not goes in one ear and out the other, hopefully spending just enough time in between to let you pass the standardized test.

Even beyond this, school is repetitive. I learned the same Civil War facts in fifth, eighth, and eleventh grade. I think I read The Giver in multiple English classes. And this is just the stuff it’s embarrassing to have repeated. The actually important skills — how to write essays, how to cite sources — get deliberately repeated year after year.

(I still have no idea how to cite a source properly, except a vague memory that something called “MLA Format” was very important, and that there might have been another thing called “Chicago Style” unless I am confusing it with pizza. When I actually need to cite something, I hit the “Cite” button on the top right of PubMed and do whatever it says.)

So my prediction is that an average student could miss a year or two of school without major long-term effects. Their standardized test score would be lower at the end of the two years they missed than some other student who had been in school the whole time. But after a short period they would equalize again. I don’t think you need to burn yourself out working overtime to send your kid to a private school, I don’t think you need to risk your immunocompromised kid’s health to send her to the classroom, I think you can just chill.

Parents who are concerned that the schools are spending too much time indoctrinating rather than teaching their students have a totally different set of concerns, which are outside the scope of this particular discussion.

August 16, 2021

L. Neil Smith – “Take your children out of school!”

Filed under: Education, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith offers a useful bit of advice to parents concerned about their children being indoctrinated in state-run schools:

“Abandoned Schoolhouse and Wheat Field 3443 B” by jim.choate59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For quite a while now, the boob-tube has been filled with coverage of various Board of Education meetings around the country attended by parents murderously angry that their kids are being forcibly indoctrinated with utter claptrap like CRT, which apparently stands for Communist Racist Toxin, a new and poisonous religion where the color of your skin is an Original Sin for which you will be made to suffer no matter what you think, do, or say. My wife Cathy, passing by the TV set half a dozen times a day, invariably shouts, “Take your children out of school!” This essay is admiringly dedicated to her.

I suppose the Public Schools got started out of some sense of specialization. “You chip the flint, Og, Ogla cooks the mammoth, and we’ll teach the kids.” Evolution would have it the other way. The young have been learning from their parents for thousands of generations and it worked out pretty well until sinister figures like Horace Mann and John Dewey, equipped with the limitless power of the State, decided to use it to steal our children from us.

Take your children out of school!

It was perhaps, the stupidest thing that a people have ever done, and I’m pretty sure that Thomas Jefferson would have recognized it as the stupid thing it was, so it had to wait until he and those like him were safely dead. It isn’t brain science. It isn’t rocket surgery. Hand your offspring over to the State, and they will be taught every self-destructive thing the State wants them to be taught — and by now it should be clear, as it surely was to Jefferson, that the State is the enemy of everything decent and productive. Public education was probably responsible for both world wars.

Take your children out of school!

And if it was such a self-evidently good idea, then why did it have to be compulsory? The rows of desks in public schools are populated by conscription — no matter how many pleasant memories we may have of our school days. Public schools are financed by extortion and theft, two of the reasons we fought a revolution in the first place.

Take your children out of school!

It might be cynically observed that public schools are cheaper than paying for baby-sitting, but, given property taxes and the damage it does to the most important people in our lives, is it really? Idiots have whimpered for the last year that having your kids at home is inconvenient.

Public Schools are convenient for the State. They give government two incomes to tax, instead of only one. Take your children out of school!

August 14, 2021

QotD: Modern parenting

Filed under: Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I took an informal poll of parents I know. At what age or stage of development can Mom or Dad go ahead and sit down, reasonably assured their little darlings will survive a solo whirl on the jungle gym? Instead of a hard-and-fast answer, what I got was the sense that we hover for numerous and complicated reasons. We fear school buses, babysitters, and sometimes even Grandma and Grandpa, who may not know any better than to let the baby cry a little on her way to sleep. We’re scared adversity will scar our kids or, conversely, that they’ll be bored — a condition that, left untreated, might turn them into school shooters.

But we also fear their independence. We’re up there in the climber because we can’t afford to miss a minute of face time, you see. We believe our physical presence is the linchpin to the children’s emotional well-being and, although we never say so out loud, we want it that way — because it’s central to our well-being. We’re scared the kids will grow up to resent the fact that Mommy works, or — the biggest golem on the list — they just plain won’t like us. And in an age of high divorce rates and transient communities, kids who don’t like us suggest the possibility that we might really end up alone.

Beth Hawkins, “Safe Child Syndrome: Protecting kids to death”, City Pages, Volume 26 – Issue 1267 (posted to the old blog, 2005-04-01).

August 12, 2021

The Canadian Historical Association’s “consensus” on genocide in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Health, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Christopher Dummitt reports on last month’s declaration by the Canadian Historical Association that not only were past Canadian governments complicit in deliberate genocide against First Nations, but that such mass extermination efforts are current and ongoing:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Last month, the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) issued a public “Canada Day Statement” — described as having been “unanimously approved” by the group’s governing council — declaring that “existing historical scholarship” makes it “abundantly clear” that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples amounts to “genocide”. The authors also claimed that there is a “broad consensus” among historians on the existence of Canadian “genocidal intent” (also described elsewhere in the statement as “genocidal policies” and “genocidal systems”) — an alleged consensus that is “evidenced by the unanimous vote of our governing Council to make this Canada Day Statement”.

The authors went further by arguing that both federal and provincial governments in Canada “have worked, and arguably still work, towards the elimination of Indigenous peoples as both a distinct culture and physical group” (my emphasis); thereby suggesting that there is “arguably” an ongoing genocide going on, to this day, on Canadian soil.

The idea that Canada is currently waging a campaign of mass extermination against Indigenous people may sound like something emitted by Russian social-media bots or Chinese state media. But no, this is an official statement from the CHA, a body that describes itself as “the only organization representing the interests of all historians in Canada” — presumably including me.

In fact, there is no “broad consensus” for the proposition that Canadian authorities committed genocide, let alone for the completely bizarre idea that a genocide is unfolding on Canadian soil even as you read these words. And while many of us have become used to such plainly dilatory claims being circulated by individual Canadian academics in recent years, the CHA’s use of its institutional stature in this way was so shocking that it caused dozens of historians to affix their names to a letter of protest.

Notwithstanding what this (or any other) official body claims, the question of whether Canada committed genocide is not a settled issue among scholars. Canada is a relatively small country, home to only a small number of professional historians. And so even this modest-seeming collection of names suffices to disprove the CHA’s claim that it speaks for the entire profession. Moreover, many of those who have signed the letter are senior scholars giving voice to younger colleagues who (rightly) fear that speaking out publicly will hurt their careers.

I am not writing here to defend the actions of Canadian governments toward Indigenous populations. As most Canadians have known for decades, the policy of forcing Indigenous children to attend residential schools led to horrendous cases of sexual and physical abuse. There was also a long history in many schools of refusing to let children speak their native languages or continue their cultural traditions. These were assimilatory, underfunded institutions created and run by people who typically believed that they were doing Indigenous people a favour by “civilizing” them.

What I am addressing, rather, is (a) the question of whether these actions are correctly described with the word “genocide”, and (b) the CHA’s false claim that there is “broad consensus” on the answer to that question. As the letter of protest states:

    The recent discovery of graves near former Indigenous residential schools is tragic evidence of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) documented in Volume 4 of its final report — a report that we encourage all Canadians to read. We also encourage further research into gravesites across Canada and support the completion of a register of children who died at these schools. Our commitment to interrogate the historical and ongoing legacies of residential schools and other forms of attempted assimilation is unshaken. However, the CHA exists to represent professional historians and, as such, has a duty to represent the ethics and values of historical scholarship. In making an announcement in support of a particular interpretation of history, and in insisting that there is only one valid interpretation, the CHA’s current leadership has fundamentally broken the norms and expectations of professional scholarship. With this coercive tactic, the CHA Council is acting as an activist organization and not as a professional body of scholars. This turn is unacceptable to us.

Historians are taught to approach their study of the past with humility, on the understanding that the emergence of new documents and perspectives may require us to revise our assessments. Moreover, even if an individual scholar might have strong opinions about a particular historical subject — having become certain that his or her interpretation represents the truth — the community of historians exists in a state of debate and disagreement. We are always aware that two historians sifting through the same archival box of documents can develop very different theories about what those documents mean.

It is true that there are some areas of history that might be fairly labelled as definitively “settled”. But these are few. And even in these cases, consensus typically arises organically, through the accumulated weight of scholarship — not, as in the case of the CHA’s Canada Day stunt, through ideologically charged public statements that seek to intimidate dissenting academics into silence.

July 14, 2021

QotD: The unlikely hermaphrodites in The Left Hand of Darkness

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m strange only in that I was very young and that the book that caused this reaction was a classic of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Let me start by saying that I LIKED the book. Loved it even. Mostly because it was different and it made me think. (Like other books of the time, it didn’t age well, mostly on language, but also structure, which I guess was innovative and daring at the time, but strikes me as “too early seventies” for words. Now this might be JUST ME but there’s a whole batch of books — one Heinlein — I can’t stand to re-read. I came of age in the seventies and eventually grew to loathe that false-craft feel of art at that time. No one else is forced to agree with me.)

But part of what made me think — because my relaxing reads are books on evolution and animals and their biology and behavior (guys, I read Konrad Lorenz for fun) is that the left (and at the time anyone with even vague intellectual pretensions was at the very least soft left, because the zeitgeist was) was very funny about humans.

They often opened their books on humans by gesticulating broadly at imaginary religious fanatics and rubbing said fanatics’ noses in the fact that “we are animals. No, we’re really animals.” And then proceeded to go a little bananas, sometimes in supposed non-fiction, like Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape, which assured us only humans killed their own species, or something equally ridiculous (I read it at around 14 or 15, I just remember his thesis that humans were uniquely vile made me snort-giggle at the time. Because, you know, you can sustain that if you’re religious, and say humans should aspire to the divine image, but if we’re really just animals, there is NO vile. We do what instinct and nature tell us, no judgement, right?)

But mostly this dysfunction showed in science fiction, particularly at the time. “We’re just animals. If we just changed/removed/tweaked x y z we’d be communitarian, sharing, no war animals.”

The way hermaphrodites behave in TLHOD made me snort/giggle too for various reasons, the first being that hermaphrodite species on Earth (granted mostly very small) have some of the most violent mating behaviors in the world. Makes sense since at least in live-bearing, or for that matter those who care for eggs, species, the cost falls on the one who carries young or sits on eggs. The other one just goes off, whistling his merry way and lives to mate another day. So in a species where either of the couple can bear, there would be a “war” (There are several books on war of the sexes in various species, which has led to things like praying mantises and duck penises.) to determine who bears. And yes, she did get right that in an intelligent species, value would have to be put on children-of-the-body or no one would want to do it. (Or most children would be conceived by rape. Which to be fair, is most hermaphrodite species on Earth.)

What she got wrong, related to that, is then having the kids raised in some sort of hippie dippie commune.

In fact, the whole setup makes perfect sense as a professional woman’s fantasy. “I want to have kids, but someone else raises them, and it will be the perfect communitarian family and no one will think it’s bad if I’m not there, or take no more interest in them than in any of the family kids.”

In point of fact, from evolutionary POV, an hermaphrodite species would have a hell of an attachment to their own biological “of the body” kids, for the simple reason that otherwise, being intelligent and able to circumvent instinct, no one would have kids “of the body” and those born of rape would be abandoned to die. World’s shortest species/race/breed.

Yes, I’m sure that some human (and these were supposed to be modified humans) tribes have done the communitarian child raising, but it’s not the norm, it’s not usually as communitarian as it looks and … oh, heck, even extended family raising the kids, which it sort of is, is nowhere nearly what US leftists think it is. There’s squabbles, politics, and the mothers very much care and “pull” for their own kid.

Anyway, it amused me because it was nowhere near the only. There was this trend back then for hermaphrodite modified humans that somehow made them more cooperative/better at not warring, etc, which I found absolutely mind bogglingly bizarre and made me wonder why people thought injecting the fierce young-protecting instinct of the female into a species at large would make it more sharing and caring, not the other way around. (And lord, study any society with multiple concubines and wives. Women protect THEIR children, there is no sisterhood or love all babies, when yours is in the mix. Some of the most horrific tales of mankind are the vengeance wrought by a woman on rival women AND THEIR BABIES.)

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Remaking People”, According to Hoyt, 2018-11-19.

June 21, 2021

“… the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing”

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s most recent Weekly Dish looks at the burgeoning fight over the use of Critical Race Theory in public schools:

The stories in the mainstream media this past week about the broadening campaign to ban critical race theory in public schools have been fascinating — and particularly in how they describe what CRT is. Here’s the Atlantic‘s benign summary of CRT: “recent reexaminations of the role that slavery and segregation have played in American history and the attempts to redress those historical offenses.” NBC News calls it the “academic study of racism’s pervasive impact.” NPR calls CRT: “teaching about the effects of racism.” The New York Times calls it, with a straight face, “classroom discussion of race, racism” and goes on to describe it as a “framework used to look at how racism is woven into seemingly neutral laws and institutions.”

How on earth could merely teaching students about the history of racism and its pervasiveness in the United States provoke such a fuss? No wonder Charles Blow is mystified. But don’t worry. The MSM have a ready explanation: the GOP needs an inflammatory issue to rile their racist base, and so this entire foofaraw is really just an astro-turfed, ginned-up partisan gambit about nothing. The MSM get particular pleasure in ridiculing parents who use the term “critical race theory” as shorthand for things that just, well, make them uncomfortable — when the parents obviously have no idea what CRT really is.

When pushed to describe it themselves, elite journalists refer to the legal theories Derrick Bell came up with, in the 1970s — obscure, esoteric and nothing really to do with high-school teaching. “If your kid is learning CRT, your kid is in law/grad school,” snarked one. Marc Lamont Hill even tried to pull off some strained references to Gramsci to prove his Marxian intellectual cred, and to condescend to his opponents.

This rubric achieves several things at once. It denies that there is anything really radical or new about CRT; it flatters the half-educated; it blames the controversy entirely on Republican opportunism; and it urges all fair-minded people to defend intellectual freedom and racial sensitivity against these ugly white supremacists.

What could be more convenient? NBC News “reporter”, Brandy Zadrozny, even decried parents’ attempts to discover through FOIA requests just what their children are being taught — and argued this week that, “for longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime.” CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It’s “just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman.” She goes on: “it harnesses pushback against 2020’s racial justice movement, covid denialism, and depends on a base still energized by Trump and misinformation, looking for political power.”

I’m sure the MSM will continue to push this narrative indefinitely. They are still insisting, after all, that “white supremacy” is behind hateful attacks on Asian-Americans, and that soaring murder rates are purely a function of Covid19. And you can see why: this dismissive take is extremely helpful in avoiding what is actually happening. It diverts attention from the stories and leaks and documents that keep popping up all over the place about extraordinary indoctrination sessions that have become mandatory for children as early as kindergarten.

June 20, 2021

QotD: Cargo cult thinking in education

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are a lot of things that set the groundwork for this, and I am not an expert on post-modernism and critical race theory. But one factor that is not often credited is a cargo cult mentality. Folks look at successful white people and observe they all went to college, and then infer that if we just get all the black kids into college, they will be successful too. Their resulting plan is to reduce or eliminate standards that are perceived to be keeping black kids out of college.

The problem of course is that college is not the cause of prosperity, but a marker (with prosperity) of other traits — focus on long-term goals, discipline, hard work, and yes knowing 2+2=4. This sort of woke BS just makes it worse, because it attacks the real roots of prosperity. There are real barriers to poor blacks achieving prosperity — eg how do you focus on long-term goals when you don’t know where you are sleeping tonight or when you have no role models who do so — but the purity and objectivity of math is not among these.

This sort of cargo cult thinking can be seen all the time in Progressive economic proscriptions. The government push for home ownership is another — middle class people own homes so if low income people owned homes they would become middle class. Now, this has a bit of accuracy in that, like the stock market, the elite have goosed the housing market to always go up. But leaving that aside for a moment, owning a home vs renting is a terrible decision for many people — it piles on a lot of financial risk but perhaps more importantly it limits geographic mobility which used to be critical to lower-income people improving their lot.

Warren Meyer, “Are the Woke a False Flag Operation of White Supremacists?”, Coyote Blog, 2021-02-16.

June 16, 2021

“One nation, indivisible”?

Filed under: History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a child in England and then in Canada, I was used to the relatively low-key acknowledgements of the Crown and the nation which may be why I was quite befuddled watching American TV portrayal of the in-your-face patriotic displays of the United States, especially the Pledge of Allegiance required of schoolchildren. It seemed oddly statist and even collectivist (although I didn’t know those terms at the time) for a country that constantly seemed to be patting itself on the back as the “home of the free”. I later learned that the Pledge hadn’t even been invented until nearly a century after the nation had been established (and the current version was devised and popularized by a noted utopian socialist, then adopted by Congress in 1942). Tom Mullen explores how the Pledge came about and considers the idea that it is time to drop it:

“American Flag” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

An Atlanta, Georgia, charter school announced last week its intention to discontinue the practice of having students stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance during its schoolwide morning meetings at the beginning of each school day, opting to allow students to recite the pledge in their classrooms instead. Predictably, conservatives were immediately triggered by this “anti-American” decision, prompting the school to reverse its decision shortly after.

The uproar over periodic resistance to reciting the pledge typically originates with Constitution-waving, Tea Party conservatives. Ironically, the pledge itself is not only un-American but antithetical to the most important principle underpinning the Constitution as originally ratified.

[…]

Then, there’s “indivisible”. One would think a federation born by its constituent states seceding from the nation to which they formerly belonged would make the point obvious enough. But the Declaration makes it explicit:

    That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It would be impossible to exercise that right — that duty, as the Declaration later calls it — if the republic were indivisible. The strictest constructionists of the time didn’t consider the nation indivisible. Thomas Jefferson didn’t threaten to send troops to New England when some of its states considered seceding upon his election. Quite the opposite. And in an 1804 letter to Joseph Priestly, he deemed a potential split in the union between “Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies” not only possible but “not very important to the happiness of either part.”

The people advocating “one nation, indivisible” in those days were big government Federalists like Hamilton, whose proposals to remake the United States into precisely that were flatly rejected in 1787.

Proponents of absolute, national rule like to quip this question was “settled” by the American Civil War. That’s like saying Polish independence was “settled” by Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.

In fact, it is precisely the trend towards “one nation” that has caused American politics to become so rancorous, to the point of boiling over into violence, over the course of the last several decades. This continent is inhabited by a multitude of very different cultures, which can coexist peacefully if left to govern themselves. But as the “federal” government increasingly seeks to impose a one-size-fits-all legal framework over people who never agreed to give it that power, the resistance is going to get more and more strident. If there is any chance to achieve peace among America’s warring factions, a return to a more truly federal system is likely the only way.

Getting rid of the un-American pledge to the imaginary nation would be a good, symbolic start.

June 9, 2021

QotD: Failing to account for mere “women’s work”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Oh, certainly, you could produce quantities of infants­ although it would take enormous resources to do so. Highly trained techs, as well as equipment and supplies. But don’t you see, that’s just the beginning. It’s nothing, compared to what it takes to raise a child. Why, on Athos it absorbs most of the planet’s economic resources. Food of course ­housing, ­education, clothing, medical care­ it takes nearly all our efforts just to maintain population replacement, let alone to increase. No government could possibly afford to raise such a specialized, non-productive army.”

Elli Quinn quirked an eyebrow. “How odd. On other worlds, people seem to come in floods, and they’re not necessarily impoverished, either.”

Ethan, diverted, said, “Really? I don’t see how that can be. Why, the labor costs alone of bringing a child to maturity are astronomical. There must be something wrong with your accounting.”

Her eyes screwed up in an expression of sudden ironic insight. “Ah, but on other worlds the labor costs aren’t added in. They’re counted as free.”

Ethan stared. “What an absurd bit of double thinking! Athosians would never sit still for such a hidden labor tax! Don’t the primary nurturers even get social duty credits?”

“I believe,” her voice was edged with a peculiar dryness, “they call it women’s work.”

Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos, 1986.

June 7, 2021

Why is the belated discovery of (potentially hundreds of) unmarked graves at a former residential school surprising?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, History, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The weekly wrap-up post at The Line considers the recent revelation of possibly hundreds of unmarked graves of First Nations children at the site of a former Catholic-run residential school in BC. Despite being Canadian, my interest in Canadian history centres mostly on economic, naval, and military aspects, but I was certainly aware that the residential school system was a black mark on Canada’s historical dealings with First Nations and that the general outline of events — if not the gruesome details — had been known for many years. The first time I found out about it was in middle school, through what we’d now call a “Young Adult” novel about a young First Nations boy escaping from the residential school he’d been sent to and his attempts to travel hundreds of miles to get home. I read it in the early 70s and it may have been published up to a decade before then (I no longer remember the author’s name or the title of the book, unfortunately).

If I, as a schoolchild, knew something of this fifty years ago, why have people younger than me been shocked and appalled to be hearing about this widespread tragedy for the first time now?

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

We like to start our dispatches with something pithy or casual, but it’s been a heavy week. The discovery of what appears to be a burial site containing the bodies of more than 200 children at the site of a former residential school in B.C. has shaken Canadians. Of course it has. There are two outrages here — the outrageous reality of the generations of combined abuses inflicted on Indigenous Canadians, of which the residential school system was but a part. Also, the outrage that most Canadians are only learning about this now.

Your Line editors are not experts on Indigenous affairs or history, but we dare say we’re better read than most on Canadian history in a general sense. We do not say this in any way with snark or derision, but to our fellow Canadians — this should not be surprising to you. The Catholics who ran most of these schools under the sanction of the state had a long history of trying to save souls at the expense of the bodies in which they inhabited. Religious institutions were slow to recognize and stop the spread of disease in their own institutions. Most disturbingly, their ideology glorified, even sanctified, physical suffering. It still does.

Mass graves have been uncovered in Ireland, at the site of Catholic-run homes once devoted to the care of unwed mothers and children. “Saint” Mother Teresa’s hospitals in India were altars to the needless suffering of impoverished people who could not afford to die in peace and dignity. Her hospitals were dirty, poorly run facilities where children were reportedly tied to beds, and terminal patients were given little more than aspirin.

One of the great lessons of history that we consistently fail to accept is that many of our most evil actions are rooted not in self-evidently evil impulses, but rather in our desire to “save” others. Hubris and paternalism, these are the sins we cannot seem to shake. Residential schools, Catholic or otherwise, were the disastrous result of marrying a poisonous and righteous ideology with the authority and resources of a centralized state.

The Truth and Reconciliation report laid out much of this in detail in its final report in 2015, which also spelled out that graves like the ones we’re now mourning in Kamloops are likely to be far more prevalent and common than we now understand. Everyone here deserves the truth.

Update: I’m delighted to see that David Warren continues to improve from his recent health issues and he has rather a different view on Canada’s residential school system and its place in the lives of the First Nations children who attended the schools:

Ryerson was also a figure in the development of Canada’s “residential schools”, which took Indians from (mostly) dysfunctional homes and gave them an education with priests, nuns, and respectable Protestants. Not all denizens of an orphanage are happy, and by attaching the word “colonialism”, and giving simplified accounts, full of libels, “progressive” Canadian politicians have made this period of Canadian history into a scandal. Those who know better have been silenced.

Some years ago I tried to defend the “residential schools”, more or less alone in the Canadian “meejah”. I received many, many letters from former students of them, who said their memories were happy. They had been inspired by teachers of real Christian faith and conviction, and had been equipped with the rudiments of sound learning. “They saved my life,” was a frequent comment.

I could understand the residential schools because I am familiar with Canadian education before it was taken over by barbaric hordes; and also because I am myself partly a product of “British colonial” private schools in Asia, decades ago. They were brutal towards their boys, sometimes. I was myself beaten, and their teachers were sometimes tyrannical.

As a young man I thought this was the way of the world. Now that I am old, I look back on the teaching I received with great pride. It was vastly better than what I would receive in a Canadian high school; and that was much better than what we get today.

QotD: Toronto in summertime

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I notice from an article in the Toronto Scar, that a problem with walking in the city parks and ravines is now publicly acknowledged. This is caused by redwing blackbirds, who resumed breeding recently, in honour of the spring. There is a population explosion of them, and they are extremely aggressive towards anyone who passes within fifty yards or so of any one of their innumerable nests. Brave, too, considering their size. I call them “hairdresser birds,” for the delight they take in rearranging hair styles. I noticed in scanning 63 comments on this and related local media articles that all were on the side of the birds, and inclined to condemn people like me for failing to avoid their quickly expanding ranges. This would be a good example of Canadian environmental liberalism. My countrymen are trained from birth always to take the side of another species. (I missed this brainwashing, somehow.)

On the other hand, the raccoon population appears to be dwindling. It would seem that the skunks are driving them away. Perhaps they will turn on the coyotes, next.

The geese and swans along the Lakefront are also acting unionized, having long nursed a powerful dislike for the city’s other inhabitants. They are large, and forceful in expressing their opinions. Ditto, the trolley drivers. And the schoolchildren are about to be released from their cages, in time for what is now called “Canada Day.” Monstrous little creatures in the main, especially after they have shot up their drugs. (The older-looking ones are their teachers.)

David Warren, “Sumer is icumen in”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-06-16.

June 3, 2021

John McWhorter on Affirmative Action

Filed under: Education, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest post at It Bears Mentioning, John McWhorter outlines the history of Affirmative Action in American schooling and explains why it’s no longer doing anything useful and should be re-oriented to actually help disadvantaged students of all races:

John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image

I do not oppose Affirmative Action. I simply think it should be based on disadvantage, not melanin. It made sense – logical as well as moral – to adjust standards in the wake of the implacable oppression of black people until the mid-1960s.

When Affirmative Action began in the 1960s, largely with black people in mind, the overlap between blackness and disadvantage was so large that the racialized intent of the policy made sense. Most black people lived at or below the poverty line. Being black and middle class was, as one used to term it, “fortunate”. Plus, black people suffered open discrimination regardless of socioeconomic status, in ways for more concrete than microaggressions and things only identifiable via Implicit Association Testing and the like. In a sense, black people were all in the same boat.

Luckily, Affirmative Action worked. By the 1980s, it was no longer unusual or “fortunate” to be black and middle class. I would argue that by that time, it was time to reevaluate the idea that anyone black should be admitted to schools with lowered standards. I think Affirmative Action today should be robustly practiced — but on the basis of socioeconomics.

A common objection is that this would help too many poor whites (as if that’s a bad thing?). But actually, brilliant and non-partisan persons have argued that basing preferences on socioeconomics would actually bring numbers of black people into the net that almost anyone would be satisfied with.

I’m no odd duck on my sense that Affirmative Action being about race had passed its sell-by date after about a generation. At this very time, it had become clear, to anyone really looking, that the black people benefitting from Affirmative Action were no longer mostly poor – as well as that simply plopping truly poor black people into college who had gone to awful schools had tended not to work out anyway. It was no accident that in 1978 came the Bakke decision, where Justice Lewis Powell inaugurated the new idea that Affirmative Action would serve to foster “diversity”, the idea being that diversity in the classroom made for better learning.

I highly suspect that most people have always had to make a slight mental adjustment to get comfortable with this idea, as standard as it now is in enlightened discussion. Do students in classes with a certain mixture of races learn better? Really? Not that there might not be benefits to students of different races being together for other reasons. But does diversity make for better learning? Has that been proven?

As you might expect, it has not – and in fact the idea has been disproven, again and again. No one will tell you this when the next round of opining on racial preferences comes about. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

June 2, 2021

QotD: The evolution of theory-of-mind

Filed under: History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Theory-of-mind is our intuitive model of how the mind works. It has no relation to intellectual theories about how the mind is made of cognitive algorithms or instantiated on neurons in the brain. Every schoolchild has a theory-of-mind. It usually goes like this: the mind is an imaginary space containing things like thoughts, emotions, and desires. I have mine and you have yours. I can see what’s inside my mind, but not what’s inside your mind, and vice versa. I mostly choose the things that are in my mind at any given time: I will thoughts to happen, and they happen; I will myself to make a decision, and it gets made. This needs a resource called willpower; if I don’t have enough willpower, sometimes the things that happen in my mind aren’t the ones I want. When important things happen, sometimes my mind gets strong emotions; this is natural, but I need to use lots of willpower to make sure I don’t get overwhelmed by them and make bad decisions.

All this seems so obvious to most people that it sounds like common sense rather than theory. It isn’t; it has to be learned. Very young children don’t start out with theory of mind. They can’t separate themselves from their emotions; it’s not natural for them to say “I’m really angry now, but that’s just a thing I’m feeling, I don’t actually hate you”. It’s not even clear to them that people’s minds contain different things; children are famously unable to figure out that a playmate who has different evidence than they do may draw different conclusions.

And the learning isn’t just a process of passively sitting back observing your own mind until you figure out how it works. You learn it from your parents. Parents are always telling their kids that “I think this” and “What do you think?” and “You look sad” and “It makes me feel sad when you do that”. Eventually it all sinks in. Kids learn their parent’s theory-of-mind the same way they learn their parents’ language or religion.

When in human history did theory-of-mind first arise? It couldn’t have been a single invention – more like a gradual process of refinement. “The unconscious” only really entered our theory-of-mind with Freud. Statements like “my abuse gave me a lot of baggage that I’m still working through” involves a theory-of-mind that would have been incomprehensible a few centuries ago. It’s like “I’m clicking on an icon with my mouse” – every individual word would have made sense, but the gestalt would be nonsensical.

Still, everyone always assumes that the absolute basics – mind as a metaphorical space containing beliefs and emotions, people having thoughts and making decisions – must go back so far that their origins are lost in the mists of time, attributable only to nameless ape-men.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-06-01.

May 24, 2021

QotD: The internet is rewiring our brains

Filed under: Education, Health, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… there’s a reason 99.998% of the Internet is porn, and that reason is: The Internet, itself, has rewired our brains.

Yeah, I’m a history guy, not a biologist, and no, I can’t show you the specific spots on the fMRI that prove it, but look, you can test this yourself. Ever been around kids? It’s easiest to see in the early grades, so go to a daycare or afterschool program. Trust me, you can pick out right away, with 100% accuracy, the kids who spend more than 3 hours a day at daycare. This is not a knock on daycare providers, lots of whom are good, dedicated people doing hard work. Rather, it’s a knock on the situation, because if a kid’s in daycare that long, it means the parents both work long-hour, high-stress jobs. How do you think the kid’s home life is, under those conditions?

You know as well as I do that when the kid gets home from day care, he gets plunked in front of a tv, a video game, an iPad, a smartphone, some kind of glowing box. That’s what’s rewiring their brains. That’s not “ADHD,” which doesn’t really exist. “ADHD” is a cope, a bit of shorthand, to describe what’s actually going on, which is: These kids’ heads have been rewired. They need constant stimulation. Everything needs to be in five-minute chunks for them, because they’ve never known anything different. Asking them to sit down and pay attention for any length of time – say, in a 60 minute lecture, like our old Prussian (from the 18th century!) system requires – is like asking one of us to suddenly run a marathon, or bench press 300 lbs. It can’t be done; we don’t have the equipment.

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

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