… our immune system evolved to hum along at peak capacity when we’re happy but to slow down dramatically when we’re not. This is why long-term unhappiness can literally kill you through its immune-suppressing effects, and why loneliness in late adulthood is deadlier than smoking. Indeed, once you’re over sixty-five you’re better off smoking, drinking, or overating with your friends than you are sitting at home alone.
With this background in mind, Trivers hypothesized that older adults evolved a strategy of turning this relationship on its head, becoming more focused on the positive things in life in an effort to enhance their immune functioning. Such a strategy would be more sensible for older than younger adults for two reasons. First, older adults have a weaker immune system than younger adults, and face greater threats from tumors and pathogens. Second, older adults know much more about the world than younger adults do, so they don’t need to pay as much attention to what’s going on around them. For example, when older adults interact with a surly bank employee or a harried flight attendant, they have a library of related experiences to draw upon and can respond to the situation effectively without giving it much thought. As a result, they can afford to gloss over some of the unpleasant things in life.
William von Hippel, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy, 2018.
August 24, 2021
QotD: Happiness and aging
August 14, 2021
QotD: Modern parenting
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 13, 2021
Millennial maternalism
In The Critic, Kittie Helmick considers the Millennial generation and their pronounced maternalistic worldview:
“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The popular conception of millennials paints the generation as immature, living an extended adolescence: late to marry, late to have children, late to buy houses. Even the retort — that society hasn’t delivered on its promises; that an unfavourable job market has prevented them from living the lives expected of adults — reads as a refusal to accept responsibility.
The response to Simone Biles’s withdrawal from the Olympics demonstrates that the opposite is true. Millennials are not behaving like teenagers — they are responding like mothers. The breakdown in family life combined with quantum leaps in telecommunication technology has sent the 90s generation to their computer screens for meaningful connections. Instead of growing out of video games and chat rooms, millennials have grown with them. Online communities have not stunted young people’s growth, but absorbed it.
Millennials — now aged in their late 20s and early 30s, some with families of their own — have directed all the maternal instincts of adulthood towards online media. Rather than collect family albums, they amass Instagram and Tumblr accounts with thousands of images of their favourite characters and celebrities. Notifications act as little appeals for attention akin to the tug of a child’s hand. This otherwise unrealised yearning to nurture underpins much of the affective response to news stories about the latest victim of injustice.
There are many strands entangled in the knot of American leftism, but the maternalism of millennials manifests in the self-righteous defensiveness of Biles’s supporters and the emotional outrage they direct at anyone who criticizes the gymnast. Stripped of patriotic sentiments and religious traditions, millennials have nowhere to direct their human instincts of loyalty and affection but at the figures (fictional or fabled) who occupy so many of their hours.
The language of critical theory cloaks these sentiments in intellectual rigor, lending some dignity not only to the mouthpieces of these ideas, but also to the intended objects of their affections. Millennials don’t have to worry about infantilising Biles if they call her an “exceptional Black woman”, even while they simultaneously invoke the moral standards of a kindergarten classroom in asking, “How do we make it our responsibility to love and protect each other?”
Witness these impulses play out in the more thinly veiled account of a father who wonders if he has turned “soft” because his parental cares now eclipse his admiration of Kerri Strug’s feat during the 1996 Olympics: performing a “one-legged vault” on an injured ankle. The father implies that only a monster could cheer when a teenage girl sacrifices her health for victory. He makes no secret of the reason behind his change of heart: “Now that I have two young daughters in gymnastics, I expect their safety to be the coach’s number one priority.”
There is nothing amiss in his love for his daughters, or the extension of that concern to other children, but this father has lost sight of other principles that might compete for priority in the spotlit, split second decisions of athletes and trainers in Olympic competitions. Loyalty to something greater than oneself — to Strug’s teammates, to the country she represented — has fallen out of the picture, leaving behind only the petty incentive of winning. This perspective permits no higher motive to the coach responsible for urging Strug on, than greed for a gold medal.
Millennial parents run to the opposite extreme of the Spartan mother: instead of inculcating self-sacrifice for the good of the community, they insist, “Not my child.” They see their role as shielding children from the dangers of the outside world, rather than preparing them to face it.
August 11, 2021
“What war is for a soldier, global pandemic is for a health professional – most might never wish for it, but it is what they have been preparing for their whole lives”
I spent most of my life avoiding the healthcare profession … not from antipathy but from the awareness that others almost always needed access far more than I did. That changed for me at the end of 2015, although I still avoid bothering any of “my” healthcare professionals for anything that isn’t fairly clearly urgent and I’d like to maintain as low a level of contact with doctors, clinics, hospitals, and other outposts of the profession as much as I can. That said, most of the doctors, nurses, and other professionals in that line of work I’ve dealt with have been professional, competent, and (within normal limits) friendly. This doesn’t mean I don’t take Arthur Chrenkoff‘s concerns quite seriously:
Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.
If it’s up to our health experts – doctors, scientists and researchers, administrators and bureaucrats – we will never return to the “old normal”. If it’s up to our health professionals, COVID restrictions – border closures, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, etc. – will go on and on in the foreseeable future. The advent of COVID and its never ending mutations and strains might, in fact, mark the end of our life as we knew it and herald the “new normal”, ever under the shadow of a rolling pandemic.
Why? Because our health experts and professionals are enjoying it too much.Before you get outraged at my imputation, let me assure you I don’t mean the medical-industrial complex out there is hooting with joy and cracking up bottles of champagne to celebrate every new variant. By and large – and not being able to peer inside the souls of men and women I prefer to give them benefit of the doubt, though you, my reader, might have a different opinion about just how large in “by and large” is – they are honourable people with best intentions at heart. They want to save lives, prevent needless pain and suffering, minimise risks and banish sickness, save the grandmas from being killed and save the young from unforeseen long term consequences of what for them is generally a mild infection. These people take their Hippocratic Oath seriously, even those who are not medical practitioners and so not explicitly bound by it.
No, by enjoyment I really mean the satisfaction of what ancient Greeks called thymos, and which can be broadly translated into contemporary realities as the the desire to be valued and the desire for recognition.
What war is for a soldier, global pandemic is for a health professional – most might never wish for it, but it is what they have been preparing for their whole lives. It’s their time. It can be frustrating being a health expert during ordinary times; you are just one of many different voices competing to be heard about your priorities, opinions and your vision for a better life for all. Now, you are centre stage. You are important and respected. People, from a next door neighbour to the Prime Minister or the President, seek your guidance, listen to you, act on your input, appreciate your expertise. You finally have influence, real influence, if not actually a degree of control. What you say goes. The media hang on your every word, punters out there are your captive audience, leaders feel more or less strongly obliged to follow – after all, you’re the expert, you know what you’re talking about, you have the answers. Finally, you count, you really count, big time. Years of hard study and years of hard work have come to fruition, previous frustrations fall away. Millions of people appreciate your contribution and are grateful for your public service. You are a hero who is trying to keep the dragons at bay, save people from harm and death. This is not your everyday toil, patient by patient or a demographic by demographic; hell, this is the entire population, the whole humanity. There can’t be anything bigger or more important than that. Professional and public rewards are nice, but it’s not even about that – it’s the satisfaction of job well done, of having made a difference, of having made an impact, having done good.
Once you have tasted and experienced this God-like power to order entire societies according to your best designs, once you acquire this unparalleled position, with its influence and its quasi-saintly public status, do you really want to give it back and retreat again into the previous obscurity when hardly anyone listens to you?
August 5, 2021
Sarah Hoyt on “scientific government”
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise (which came out a few days ago, but I’ve been very busy), Sarah Hoyt outlines the genesis of the push for “scientific government” to save us all from ourselves and set right all the ills of the world:
Look, guys, since the middle of the 19th century, the idea of “scientific government” has been running around with pants on its head screaming insults at passerbys.
I like to say we’re still suffering from the consequences of WWI, but things were if not terminal very ill before then. Kings and emperors and Lord knows what else had got the idea of “science” and “permanent progress” stuck in their pin-like heads, which frankly couldn’t retain much more than the correct fork. And there were pet “scientists” and philosophers (the distinction was sometimes arguable. I mean, after all while doing experiments on electricity the 18th century was also fascinated with astral projection and other such things, and made no distinction. And the 19th was not much better.)
By the 20th century with mechanics and the Industrial Revolution paying a dividend in lives saved and prosperity created, these men of “science” were sure that it was only a matter of time till humanity and its reactions, thoughts and governance were similarly under control. And in the twentieth they expected us to become like unto angels.
Now, is there science that saved lives and created the wealthiest society every in the 20th century. DUH. Who the hell is arguing it. Oh, wait, there’s an entire cohort of people denying it. Not so many in the US — I think it’s hard to tell the real thing from foreign idiots posing. But in any case a minuscule contingent — but in France I know there’s a ton of them. They’re running with the bit in their teeth against rationality (I swear to bog) and thought and science. And trying to rebuild the religion of the middle ages. I read them and shake my head.
You see, you have to separate rationality and science from what the government and experts TELL you is rationality and science.
Yes, I know that France built a “Temple to Reason” and you know what? That by itself tells you their revolution was self-copulating and not right in the head. But you don’t need to go that far. Anyone who says they’re “for science” and want equality of results among disparate humans is not reasonable. Or reasoning. Or rational. They are however for sure completely and frackingly insane.
But I do understand the temptation, because so much of what’s being sold as “science” in the schools is not science but the worn out dogmas of people too stupid to know science if it bit them in the fleshy part of the buttocks.
I mean, never mind 2020. Which … you know? Remember how the flu vanished? Turns out the rat bastards were using a test that diagnosed flu as COVID. No, seriously. Malice or stupidity? I don’t know. And neither do you. Probably yes in most cases, though a lot of people have a ton of “learned stupidity”.
Even before 2020 a lot of our ideas on how things worked were lies, particularly those that hinged on or supported the leftist ideas of human kind. Things like Zimbardo’s (Is he dead yet? I need to know when to mark myself safe from being kidnapped by Zimbardo for crazy experiments. No, he really did that.) prisoner experiments; or the rat habitat experiments that supposedly showed that overpopulation had all sorts of bad effects, and therefore we should stop having kids. Turns out those effects are from the loss of social role. Which honestly, anyone who has looked at a conquered country could tell them. Of course, anyone who had looked at mice would also know they’re not humans, but never mind that. […] In fact, practically everything we think we know about psychology or sociology is likely to be a load of crap, if not outright faked.
And history, which is not really a science. Oh. Dear. Lord. Like, you know, the early form of internationalism, with international supply chains and empires caused WWI and … nationalism was blamed for it. Makes perfect sense … in hell.
In fact all this “science” stuff needs to be judged on one thing only: Does it make human lives better/save them? Or is it the astral projection of economics, sociology and psychology? By their fruits, etc.
July 30, 2021
The British government reaches deep into the bag of “nudge” tricks yet again
Britain’s public health boffins have got the government agitated enough to try major incentives to encourage British shoppers to buy healthier, lower-calorie foods. Tim Worstall explains that, because those shoppers are human beings, this suite of incentives won’t do at all what Nanny expects them to do:
Now consider how it has to work. You go shopping, you present your DimbleCard and gain points for the healthiness of that shopping basket. Lettuce and carrots galore, super, free ticket to London on the choo choo.
So, where are the chocco biccies? If you buy them when presenting your card then no choo choo for you. What happens?
The lettuce and the carrots are bought on the card, the chocco biccies are not. Everyone simply does two transactions, with DimbleCard and sans. Lots of free choo choo and no change, whatsoever, in diet.
Yes, of course people will do this. For that’s what people do. Survey the landscape of incentives in front of them then maximise their utility, the outcome, in the face of them. It’s a restricted rationality, restricted by knowledge, but it is there. Everyone will fiddle the system because that’s what it is to be human. Collecting the fire from the lightning strike is fiddling the universe, that’s just what we do.
This being why so many clever schemes to encourage or deter this or that just don’t work. This being why those detailed plans for men, if not mice, gang aft into idiocy. Because we out here, hom sap, will play whatever system there is to our benefit.
No, this will not work out like supermarket loyalty cards. Yes, it’s true, most of us do use them. But the incentive is for us to do so. The more we do use them then the more discounts we gain, the better off we are, even at the cost of that data. How does this new government one work? The less we buy of certain things the better off we are. So, less of those things will be bought using the cards.
It is not possible to insist that people must use the card to buy things. Well, not unless we’re about to descend into the dystopia desired by Caroline Lucas it’s not. There might be a card reader at the point of purchase but the supermarkets will not demand that a sale can only happen when a card is read.
Therefore there will be those sales which gain points which make prizes. There will also be those DimbleCardless sales which do not gain points, or even demerits, and are done without their being registered in the system.
July 19, 2021
QotD: Antifa
They destroy and burn and intimidate, and beat people senseless, because they enjoy it. It’s something they wish to do, and choose to do, repeatedly. It makes them feel powerful. Everything else is a pretext, a rationalisation, a lie:
This is us taking the high road. This is us trying to create a world filled with love.
David Thompson, commenting on “Files of the Severely Educated”, DavidThompson, 2021-04-18.
July 18, 2021
A different kind of “tone policing”
John McWhorter on a recent study on interactions between the police and the general population:
“Police stop” by San Diego Shooter is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
A fascinating, and depressing, new study will be celebrated as revealing the subtle but powerful operations of racism. It also reveals, however, the pitfalls in the way we are taught to address that racism these days.
The study shows that police officers tend to talk in a less friendly way to black people they stop than white ones. People were played slivers of body-cam audio of the officers talking to citizens, with the content of the exchange disguised. People could tell with dismaying regularity what color person the officer was speaking to simply by the tone of voice. It wasn’t that officers outright sneer at black people. Rather, their tone with whites tends to be more pleasant, to have a hint of cheer, whereas with black people it is more impersonal, flat, unwarm.
The study also shows how these things fashion a vicious cycle. People tested who had negative experiences with cops and/or less trust in them processed even the exchanges the cops had with white citizens as less positive than other people tested did. That is, their life experience has implanted in them a distrust of the cops, that can anticipate actual interactions with them – and certainly, of course, unintentionally pollute them.
* * *
This study reminds me of something else that goes in the other direction. To whites, subtle things about black communication, including vocal tone, can come off as threatening when no threat is intended.
I once happened to hear two 30-something black men talking about a misunderstanding one of them had had at work. They were just unwinding, but there was what many might process as a tinge of impending battle in their voices, inflections and gestures. “Man, I wanted to ‘Mmmph!’ [jab of the arm, click of the tongue] Gimme a break! An’ I was like … [putting on a challenging glare] don’t even start.”
No black listener would assume these guys actually meant the hints at violence literally. However, outside listeners can hear this way of talking as edgy. Kelefa Sanneh’s term for this twenty years ago, writing about rap and its lyrics, was perfect: a certain “confrontational cadence”.
Yes, all people trash-talk. But this particular way of talking has a special place in black American culture. No, that’s not stereotyping: sympathetic black academics have documented it. CUNY’s Arthur Spears, today one of the deans of the academic study of black American speech, has written about what he calls “directness”. Speech “that may appear to outsiders to be abusive or insulting is not necessarily intended to be nor is it taken that way by audiences and addressees,” Spears noted. He then quoted a father-child exchange: Father: “Go to bed!” Little boy: “Aw, Daddy, we’re playing dominoes.” Father: “I’m gonna domino your ass if you don’t go to bed now.” Notice how awkwardly this, or Eddie Murphy’s routine about the mother throwing the shoe in Delirious, would translate into the world of Modern Family.
This “confrontational cadence” can inflect even casual exchanges between black and white people. Aspects of black intonation, steeped in a lifetime’s experience in a language culture that values performative aggression as a kind of communal élan, can sound cranky, disrepectful, and even aggressive to a white person. It is all but impossible that this does not color encounters between black people and white cops; I highly suspect a study like the first one I mentioned would reveal it.
July 10, 2021
The early growth of “Dianetics”, later known as Scientology
In Quillette, David S. Wills outlines the early years of L. Ron Hubbard’s quasi-religion that eventually turned into a full-fledged cult:
In the 21st century, Scientology has become a synonym for “cult”. Thanks to an array of investigative exposés and testimony from former members, few people in the Western world are unaware of at least some of the Church’s fantastical beliefs and more alarming behaviours. Sixty years ago, however, it was viewed quite differently. Scientology — or dianetics, as it was originally known — was an appealing idea to many intellectuals and creatives at a time when the world was rapidly changing and notions that had once been taken for granted were suddenly being tossed out of the window. In science, art, and philosophy, accepted norms were being turned on their heads, and in the 1950s and ’60s, L. Ron Hubbard’s ideas — peddled as an alternative to psychiatry — fit quite nicely among the emerging doctrines dreamed up by his contemporary thinkers.
Indeed, the original concepts that launched Hubbard’s movement were not as outrageous as those that define it today. Among these, the idea of “engrams” and the “reactive mind” were perhaps the most appealing. Hubbard theorised that humans are marked by unconscious traumas that essentially pre-determine “aberrant” behaviour. Naturally, he claimed that his organisation held the key to removing these traumas and freeing people from a great deal of suffering. Stripped down to its fundamentals, dianetics seemed to be no more implausible than the strange new ideas espoused by Freud and Jung, or even those previously espoused by Nietzsche.
Of course, there were always oddball beliefs bundled in as well, and as the years went by, these became more prominent. Hubbard — a science fiction author prior to his metamorphosis into quasi-religious guru — enjoyed adding new elements of fantasy to his central theories, layering sci-fi storylines on top of one another until his movement had become an extravagant sort of space opera. The more obvious cult-like elements would emerge in due course: charging adherents for advancement in the organisation; trapping them with manipulation and blackmail; the development of esoteric jargon known as “Scientologese” that made it almost impossible for real communication to take place between members and outsiders; and shocking campaigns of harassment against critics and apostates.
In the early days, however, none of this was particularly obvious. Hard as it is to believe now, many intelligent people were once drawn to Scientology out of an overabundance of curiosity, and its absurdities were generally perceived as harmless, affable eccentricities. Among those lured into the fold of this mysterious new organisation were two of the most important authors of the 20th century: Aldous Huxley and William S. Burroughs. Although Hubbard’s own novels elicit little more than derision from critics, his ideas wormed their way into some very influential books and left an indelible mark on American literature.
When people first hear about Huxley’s and Burroughs’s interest in Scientology, they typically express some degree of shock and/or scepticism. These men were highly intelligent thinkers famous for their insightful criticisms of the dominant culture. And both wrote extensively on the topic of coercion — Huxley was keenly aware of how humans could be manipulated into subservience by technodictators, and Burroughs was fascinated by the idea that language could be employed for the purposes of mind control. How then could they have fallen for the very thing they critiqued?
July 8, 2021
QotD: Psychopaths
- Psychopaths show a disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.
- They fail to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours.
- They are always deceitful … They are nasty, aggressive con artists.
- They are massively impulsive and fail to plan ahead.
- They show irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights and assaults.
- They manifest a reckless disregard for the physical and psychological safety of others.
- They are consistently irresponsible. Repeated failure to sustain consistent work behaviour … are their hallmark.
- They show lack of remorse. They are indifferent to, or rationalize, having hurt, mistreated or stolen from another … It can seem that labelling them as anti-social is a serious understatement.
From Furnham, Adrian. 50 Psychology Ideas You Really Need to Know. London: Quercus Publishing, p. 25. The heading of the chapter is “Seem Sane”. This is the statement at the start of the discussion:
Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt or loyalty to anyone but themselves.
Anyway, I just thought I would mention it.
Steve Kates, “Psychopath ‘diagnostic criteria'”, Catallaxy Files, 2021-04-07.
July 6, 2021
QotD: Generational dislocation
Grant McCracken, “Gender Watch”, This Blog Sits at the, 2005-03-24.
Update: Link had rotted since I first posted this on the old blog. The link has been updated to the current location. H/T to WarEagle82 for calling this to my attention.
July 1, 2021
QotD: Life at “Flyover State” in the 1990s
“Blandly utilitarian” was about the best that one could say about the least offensive campus architecture; “brutalist monstrosities” was closer to the truth for most of it. And as with the campus, so with the town — the off-campus housing was beautiful old Victorian houses ripped up and made into “efficiency” apartments, crammed cheek by jowl with poured-concrete boxes that looked like barracks for low-ranking Party members in the Pyongyang suburbs. The public parks were nicely landscaped, but each featured some publicly-subsidized “art” that made you want to gouge your eyeballs out. Every single space had wheelchair ramps, and was festooned with enough signs to give M. Night Shyamalan wood. It was hideous.
As with the built environment, so with human behavior. Everyone on the faculty looked like a refugee from 1968, but instead of toking righteous bud, they’d been taking sriracha enemas. The shopkeepers who catered to them were seemingly locked in a contest to out-obnoxious each other over their leftwing politics, and as for the few tradesmen who provided vital services, they had the warm and welcoming vibe of a DMV supervisor. Not that I blame them for this — I ended up hanging out with a lot of those guys at a townie bar, and trust me, being called out to work at a professor’s home is exactly the kind of experience you think it is. Hurry up and fix the leaky pipe, bigot, while I lecture you about your privilege … then try to stiff you on the bill. (Same thing in reverse for the students). So they came off like cops, assuming that everyone they met was a dyed-in-the-wool asshole until proven otherwise.
Life in a college town, then, is soulless, instrumentalist, transactionalist — everything’s for sale, but everything had best be spelled out, in writing, in triplicate. Nobody’s from there, nobody stays there, so everything is always on the arm. No one and nothing is ever on the level; everyone is always looking to chisel everyone else. And, ironically, the longer someone stays there, the more likely xzhey are to push this attitude to near-platonic perfection — eggheads all believe, with all their hearts and souls, that they deserve to be at Harvard, so when Harvard doesn’t come calling, the days and months and years become an intolerable insult. How dare they expect me to live like this, in a place designed to cater to my every whim, making only 100 large per year! It’s an outrage!!
Looking back on it, I see now why I hated the 1990s so much. Eggheads are incredibly conservative about everything but their politics, but in this one case, they really were as “progressive” as they fancy themselves. Before just about anyone else, they embraced the globohomo ethos of rootless piracy. Then as now, they all claimed to hate “sportsball” (if you’ll forgive an anachronism for clarity’s sake) with the heat of a thousand suns, but they could’ve given LeBron James lessons on how to be a backstabbing, glory-hogging, money-chasing, utterly mercenary douchebag. As early as the late 1980s, they found the idea of remaining loyally in one institution, building it up as a service to the community, as laughable as modern sportsballers find sticking in one city in order to be a role model. Fuck that, give me mine!!!
Severian, “Everything Is Ugly New”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-02-15.
June 26, 2021
QotD: Surfing the waves of resentment as a political career
This is to the great advantage of political entrepreneurs who surf resentment as surfers ride waves in Hawaii; and such resentment, the most damaging of all emotions, can easily become a self-reinforcing loop. It is not that past oppression or crime should be forgotten, much less denied, but that past achievements and change for the better must also be recognised, lest oppression and crime come to occupy minds entirely and distort decisions.
It is the same with injustice. It is important to oppose injustice, but just as important not to see it everywhere. To ascribe everything that you think undesirable to injustice may blind you to its real causes.
Theodore Dalrymple, “History and Self-Perpetuating Resentment”, The Iconoclast, 2021-03-20.
June 21, 2021
QotD: The young Richard Nixon
The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team’s tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon’s unceasing grit and team spirit — nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called “a rather quiet chap about campus,” dour and brooding, who couldn’t even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, “the man least likely to succeed in politics.” They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, 2008.
June 20, 2021
Is racism a bigger problem than terrorism?
With Americans being urged to report on “radicalized” friends and family by the government and white supremacy being called the greatest threat, have we reached the point that being seen as racist is worse than allowing a terrorist to kill many people? The inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing shows that’s exactly the state most of the western world is in:
“Manchester Arena Bomb (22 May 2017) – Daily Mirror – 19 dead in pop concert ‘suicide bomb'” by Bradford Timeline is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
The independent inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017, in which 22 pop fans were killed by an Islamist extremist, has published the first volume of its report. It makes for chilling reading. The inquiry has found there were numerous “missed opportunities” to confront Salman Abedi, the bomber, and potentially stop him from detonating the device in his rucksack. Most chilling of all is the reason given by one of the key security guards on patrol that evening as to why he failed to question Abedi. He was worried, he said, that asking a brown-skinned man why he was hanging around the arena might be construed as racist.
Take that in. There was a very shifty-looking young man around the foyer and mezzanine of the Manchester Arena towards the end of an Ariana Grande concert, carrying a “bulging” rucksack so large he “struggled” under the weight of it, and a security guard was reluctant to confront him lest he be accused of racism. In the words of the report, this was a significant “missed opportunity”. The “inadequacy” of the security guard’s response to the presence of a highly suspicious individual was one of the many misjudgements made on that black, fateful night, the report says. Is it possible that the fear of being thought of as racist is screwing up everyday life, and even hindering sensible action in threatening situations?
To be clear, the security guard who was cagey about questioning Abedi is not responsible for the failure to stop Abedi from detonating his device. The first volume of the inquiry’s report – which covers security at and around the arena on the night of 22 May 2017 – criticises certain individuals, including the security guard, for not doing their jobs diligently enough. But it says that it was the organisations responsible for security at the arena – the arena’s own security firm and also the British Transport Police – that were “principally” to blame for the “missed opportunities”. It also makes the reasonable point that it is impossible to know what would have happened if Abedi had been confronted. It proposes that there may still have been loss of life – if, for example, he had detonated his device while being questioned – but that it would have been less severe than the horrors that shortly unfolded.
It is disturbing to read the list of “missed opportunities”. Abedi was in the arena for more than an hour and a half before he detonated his bomb. He arrived at 20.51 and blew himself up at 22.31, as the concert attendees started to leave. In that time, this young man with a massive rucksack was seen by numerous people. He was described by some of them as “nervous” and “fidgety”. He looked out of place – his age “meant that he did not fit the demographic of a parent waiting for a child”, as the inquiry says. And yet as a result of individual and organisational failure – including, the inquiry says, insufficient training of the security guards on duty that night – the message didn’t get through that there was a fidgeting, agitated man with a bulging rucksack hanging around for 90 minutes at the exit area of a venue that was largely packed with children and teenagers.
Remarkably, some people at the arena who saw Abedi thought to themselves that he was a suicide bomber. Christopher Wild and his partner, Julie Whitley, who were picking up Whitley’s daughter, discussed the possibility that Abedi had a bomb in his rucksack. Wild actually did confront Abedi and asked him what was in his bag. Abedi nervously brushed him off. Wild reported his concerns to security guards at 22.15 – 16 minutes before the explosion – but he was “fobbed off”. Another parent said the security guards were “really quite dismissive” of Wild’s concerns. It is deeply disturbing that parents at the arena rightly suspected Abedi was a bomber and yet nothing was done to challenge or remove him.
